Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  He was trying to shout something, and so was I, but I never had any idea what it was. He tagged me again and again in the stomach, up under the ribs on my left side, close-up work I couldn’t seem to turn away from and I knew I couldn’t take for much longer. He started trying to drag me down, to drop me around his leg so he could get to the footwork, the real business, from which I knew I’d never get up.

  I wrenched away and took a lurching step back, saw him coming after me again. I ducked low and to the side and drove up under him, turning and pulling his shoulder down at the same time, sending him barreling past awkwardly enough for me to drive my knee into his chest as he fell past. He tried to recover his balance but his right leg went out from underneath as he slipped on a piece of glass and his head went smack into the bottom of the staircase.

  I was over him immediately, foot drawn back, but after he’d crashed to the ground he didn’t move.

  I stayed there, panting, and waited.

  He was out.

  I rolled him onto his back and made sure he could breathe, then hauled myself up the stairs. It was less tidy up here, though still far from bad. Men living on their own make at least as good a job as women do of holding back the chaos.

  There were four sections to the closets in the bedroom. Two were full of suits and shirts. One was empty, the other held a couple of dresses on hangers.

  I went back down to the kitchen. Quickly washed my face with cold water from the tap, and dried it with a hand towel that smelled of mildew.

  And then, before I sat down and was unable to get back up again, I left.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I was sitting in the window of the Mountain View, turned away from the rest of the bar. It wasn’t very full, but though I knew from the bathroom mirror that the bruising hadn’t really taken color yet, I didn’t much want to look at people anyhow. The only reason I was here was I was freezing cold and my hands and ribs hurt, and being inside anywhere seemed like a good idea.

  On the opposite side of the street I saw the Write Sisters now had a piece of hardboard up over the broken window. Quick work.

  Kristina set down the beer she’d brought without my asking for it. “Your face have anything to do with the Robertsons? Or Ellen?”

  “No,” I said.

  She left me alone, coming back twenty minutes later with another beer. I thanked her and turned pointedly back to the window. The boarding over the Write Sisters looked wrong to me, as if it had been nailed up over something that was still broken, as if beyond it a body still lay.

  Kristina didn’t leave, however, and eventually I looked back at her. “What?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m good,” I said breezily. “Just a trying day.”

  She shook her head. “I was concerned before you even arrived tonight. You . . . I’ve been hearing things.”

  I saw the other bartender, a young guy in a black T-shirt, looking our way. “From who?”

  “I just don’t think this is a good place for you to be.”

  “Why? The beer’s great and the service is friendly, sometimes,” I said, trying to make a joke.

  She didn’t go for it. I was jittery, finding it hard to look at anything, but my eyes found her face and stayed there. Her gray-green eyes, pale skin, and black hair. She looked like the opposite of every woman I’d ever known.

  “So what did you hear? On the barkeep grapevine?”

  I was trying to be offensive. I don’t know why. Either side of her nose there were a couple of faint things that must have been freckles. I felt uncomfortable under her gaze.

  I lit a cigarette, and focused on that, trying to hide the trembling in my fingers.

  “You need to give up,” she said.

  “Yeah. But not tonight.”

  “Not that. Smoke yourself to death, be my guest. I mean give up, get away from here.”

  She handed me my check.

  I stood on the sidewalk outside, not knowing what to do. I still didn’t want to go back to my motel room. Those places are like a living death when you’re in a certain state of mind.

  In the end I crossed the street and went into the pizza place, where the a/c was up unnecessarily high and the music plumbed the forgotten depths of the 1980s as if in a deliberate attempt to keep the clientele moving through. If so, it was working. The place was virtually empty and the waitress had no problem with me ordering coffee and sitting at a booth in the window, out of everyone’s way.

  As I sat I realized first that one member of the family of three in the far corner was watching me, and then that it was Deputy Greene.

  He was seated with a woman of around his own age and easily his own weight, her ass crammed into a pair of blue velour pants and threatening to seep off either side of her chair. Sitting opposite them was someone I also recognized—Courtney, the waiflike teenager who cleaned the rooms at my motel.

  Greene and his wife ate in silence, methodically pushing slices of pizza into their faces as if engaged in a competition where fortune favored the steady and consistent performer. The girl who I assumed must be their daughter had either finished already or was not hungry.

  I worked through my coffee and accepted a refill when the waitress silently reappeared. It was a reassuringly old-school brew, without froth, syrup, or environmental attitude. Just a big cup of something hot and wet, and I sat there with my hands around it for warmth and comfort, watching nothing happen in the street outside, wondering if my head was actually going to burst. I was not hungry, could not imagine being so, but the pizza smelled good. Perhaps just because it reminded me of a time, very few days ago, when life had seemed simpler.

  Eventually Greene and his companions left, still in silence. As they walked by the window Courtney’s eyes passed vaguely across over mine, but not in a way which suggested she had any idea what she was looking at, or that she recognized me at all.

  At some point after that my phone buzzed in my pocket but I couldn’t imagine anyone I might want to talk to. I assumed Becki had given Kyle my message, in which case not being able to contact me might work even better than hearing my voice.

  I didn’t notice anyone coming into the restaurant until I heard the sound of cloth swishing as she slipped into the seat opposite me.

  I looked up to see Kristina, sitting very upright, with her arms folded.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  CHAPTER 29

  There was a stage in Scott’s development when he’d begun to understand that making coherent sounds with his mouth was regarded as a good and clever thing, and he was keen to show he was getting with the program. In addition to his more straightforward declarations, he’d sometimes regale us with monologues in which he’d announce something about an object or situation, say the word because, add another clause, then another because—and keep going until he’d delivered a (somewhat surreal) sentence about two minutes long. He didn’t yet understand what because meant, but he’d got that it could be used to connect things, to form a bridge between states of affairs.

  After he was dead I came to believe this insight had not concerned merely language. He would have forgotten it in time, as we do, but back then he knew everything there was to know.

  I had an affair, basically.

  There was this woman and something happened and by and by it became a situation, by which time it was too late. I tried to do the Right Thing. The Right Thing came for long walks with me, but was just too evenhanded in his approach. I wanted the Right Thing to be tough as nails, a track coach crazy to win and willing to kick ass. I wanted him to be Jesus, arms out in front of me, obscuring the road to wrongheadedness and shining with the pure golden light of everything that was good and sensible and true.

  Instead he came on like an old drinking buddy who’d seen too much of life to take a hard line on anything.

  “Well, yeah,” he’d say. “I hear you. I am what you should be doing. But, you don’t want
to, do you?”

  And I’d remind him of his duties, pointing out that what was in my head was dumb and dangerous and made no sense. That Carol deserved better. That I had a family. That I was being that cartoon asshole, the married man having an affair, and the correct thing to do was sever contact, be grateful I hadn’t yet fucked up the important things—and think about something else until the whole thing faded into something mildly interesting and long ago, like the first moon landing.

  And he’d shrug again, and say: “Sure, I get all that. You make a good case. But . . . we’re still having the same conversation, right? And you still can’t forget the smell of the skin on her neck where her jaw curves up toward her ear. That’s something I can’t touch. With the neck thing, you’re on your own.”

  In the end I stopped inviting the Right Thing to come on walks with me. He was no help at all.

  In the meantime I became distant and strange. I was prone to lapses of concentration and a cramp in my stomach that made food uninteresting and my temper shorter than it should have been.

  I knew how much I loved my wife, my family, how lucky I was. I didn’t perhaps understand, didn’t get it in the way I did after it was all gone, but I knew well enough. You realize what makes sense is to consign your emotions to a moment in time with no forward momentum.

  You may even fantasize about having this conversation with the other party, both accepting—with sadness, but a straight-backed sense of what’s right—a course of action that would have God nodding in approval, picking you up in His big warm hand and moving you back to a more acceptable part of the moral landscape.

  But you never get to the closing sentence of this discussion, because what this fantasy is really about, if you only had the sense left to know, is conjuring a situation in which the two of you are together again.

  We did the right thing, several times.

  We said, in words or via e-mail or text, that it was over—and behaved that way. But it’s hard. After years in which your life has melded with that of your partner, suddenly you’ve spent a period as an individual again. An affair is such an active circumstance. You make choices about how/when to be in contact, whether/how to lie, what words to say and how much to expose; searching reality for interstices in which you can pursue this thing. Dealing with someone new makes you new again, too, shaken awake by trivial differences. Carol seldom wore perfume, for example. This other person did. Carol almost never wore jewelry, whereas the other woman even made a few pieces of her own from time to time (including a silver bracelet which she gave to me, and which I lost track of, toward the end).

  To be drunk on adrenaline and then dropped back into the daze is to die before your time. Suddenly the charge of the future is switched off, and life feels like the rusty skeleton of an abandoned amusement park. No longer does it echo with the sounds of glee and chatter, no more is it filled with the smell of sun lotion and ice cream and lit by neon and cotton candy so pink it hurts your eyes. Now it is empty and silent. You keep trying to find your way out, to locate the parking lot where you know there remains only one vehicle now—your own. As you search, you keep your head down, trying not to glimpse the swooping rides that only a few days before were making your heart dip and soar, and which are now dark and dead and creaking in the wind. You don’t want to leave—you never wanted the place closed down, however much money it was losing, however dangerous it had become. You want this place to still be vibrant and alive, you want to climb back on the ride—and you do not want to be here to watch the whole edifice crumble to dust. When you finally find your car, lonely under a single lamppost in the vast and empty lot, you want to drive away into the night leaving something to which you can return in your dreams and in the wistful watches of long afternoons. You want to be able to hear the echo of your own heart, when it last laughed and shouted on the roller coaster of a summer afternoon.

  You want to think that maybe, if you were to run back here on the right night, and at the right time, you might find that person still standing waiting after all, smiling that smile and holding two tickets for one last ride—one that might last forever this time.

  You get through those times, trying to take contentment from the fact the experience was had. But that’s a poor kind of reward and speaks from a soul growing older and less vital, more inclined to settle for retrospective comfort than risk a future that seems too uncertain, too hard, or simply too short. It seems this way especially when you’re old enough to realize the memories you’re cherishing will degrade, fading from the intensity of a just-woken dream into a dusty book of old photographs; to finally become little more than words—nothing remaining vibrant except, perhaps, a split-second memory of someone looking at you with greedy glee, the bottomless gaze of someone who, just for that instant, wants to be nowhere else in the world.

  Which is why, however firmly it had been finished—and episodes of noncontact went on for weeks and even months—sooner or later one of us would be unable to resist adding some coda that wasn’t really a coda. There would be a coda to the coda. Finally another meeting would take place. It would be somewhere public, where two adults could legitimately encounter each other under the auspices of friendship: but after a few drinks we’d catch each other’s eye and know that, just for this evening, neither of us cared if we caused the universe to crack in half.

  I tried not to be an asshole. A lot of the time it worked. Some of the time it did not.

  We saw each other, on and off, for thirteen months. It started, in other words, when Carol was five months pregnant with Tyler. You can ask how I’d let myself get into that situation, but I have no answer for you. It would be like asking a ghost why they stepped in front of the car. Because they didn’t see it coming. Because they didn’t know what would happen until it was happening, and then they couldn’t stop.

  Just because.

  Something happens, and other things happen as a result. If you believe heaven and hell have more complex roots than this, then you’re either a more subtle man than me, which is entirely plausible, or you have a lot to learn.

  Here’s the bottom line. I could have been out on the deck of the house Carol and I shared, drinking that beer and spotting that my son wasn’t in vision, twenty minutes earlier. I could perhaps have got to him before he reached the end of the jetty, before whatever happened had gone too far.

  I wasn’t and didn’t because I spent those twenty minutes in my study, enjoying a phone conversation with Jenny Raines. Bill was out, she was bored, so she called. It was the first time we’d spoken in weeks, and we lingered over it, and my boy died.

  Things happen because.

  Scott knew that, and he was only four years old.

  Kristina listened while I told her these things, or a heavily truncated version of them. It took maybe ten minutes. It is instructive to discover how compact your history becomes when you verbalize it to someone else, how small your big deals can seem.

  She sipped her own coffee for a while after I’d finished, her eyes elsewhere. “What exactly happened to your son?” she asked eventually. I had alluded to Scott only once. “He died.”

  “How?”

  I gave her the bones of that, realizing that she was the first person I had ever told about this, too, except for my father. She closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  She had ignored or seen past everything I had said about my behavior, and gone straight to what was real about my life now, things I had spent the last three years dealing with alone. While I wasn’t sure I deserved that kind of consideration, I was grateful for it.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She shook her head, as if I had missed her point. Her hands were laid out on the glass covering the tabletop, and I noticed the long, pale fingers were trembling slightly.

  Knowing what I was doing, but not why, I placed one of my hands on top of one of hers.

  She opened her eyes and looked down at it, but did not move. I felt I ought to say something, but knew
the placing of my hand already had. My mind hadn’t caught up with what my body was trying to communicate. I was aware that my heart was thudding, hard, as if each beat stood alone.

  “No,” she said, and moved her hand.

  I smiled crookedly, not very hurt, or not yet. “After everything I just told you, I’m not surprised.”

  “Nothing to do with that,” she said. “I’m not hearing that this woman means anything to you now.”

  “No. I guess I’d like to hear she’s still alive, but other than that . . . I haven’t spoken to her since the day Scott died. I look back and it’s as if a crazy person did what I did. Or it’s a story I heard about someone else. Someone really dumb.”

  “You’re not the only human who’s been an asshole. Get over it.”

  I laughed. “You cut right to it, don’t you?”

  “It’s been said.”

  I looked her in the eyes. “So?”

  A curt shake of her head. “You just don’t want to get involved, chum.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I realized that this was not true, and that she hadn’t actually moved her hand very far: but also that the one I’d put on hers had grazes from the fight with Bill, and that if there was ever going to be a time for this conversation, it probably wasn’t now. “You want another coffee?”

  “No,” she said. Then, more gently, “I should get back to the bar.”

  “Didn’t seem too busy in there.”

  “No,” she said, and smiled, a little. “But—”

  She stopped talking because she saw I was staring out of the window. “What?”

  I stood. A car had just driven past, not fast. I thought I recognized it. “Wait here a second.”

  I headed quickly out onto the street. The car was still moving toward the intersection, but losing momentum, as if the person in charge had taken their foot off the gas. It took me a moment to be sure, because I’d always seen the vehicle with the roof up and music pumping out of it, but yes—I knew this car. I ran along the sidewalk and caught up with it just as it finally came to a halt.