by John Updike
Standing in the center of the floor, fully master now, disdaining to steady the barrel with anything but his arm, he killed two more that way. Out of the shadowy ragged infinity of the vast barn roof these impudent things dared to thrust their heads, presumed to dirty its starred silence with their filthy timorous life, and he cut them off, tucked them back neatly into the silence. He felt like a creator; these little smudges and flickers that he was clever to see and even cleverer to hit in the dim recesses of the rafters—out of each of them he was making a full bird. A tiny peek, probe, dab of life, when he hit it blossomed into a dead enemy, falling with good, final weight.
The imperfection of the second pigeon he had shot, who was still lifting his wing now and then up in the round hole, nagged him. He put a new clip into the stock. Hugging the gun against his body, he climbed the ladder. The barrel sight scratched his ear; he had a sharp, garish vision, like a color slide, of shooting himself and being found tumbled on the barn floor among his prey. He locked his arm around the top rung—a fragile, gnawed rod braced between uprights—and shot into the bird’s body from a flat angle. The wing folded, but the impact did not, as he had hoped, push the bird out of the hole. He fired again, and again, and still the little body, lighter than air when alive, was too heavy to budge from its high grave. From up here he could see green trees and a brown corner of the house through the hole. Clammy with the cobwebs that gathered between the rungs, he pumped a full clip of eight bullets into the stubborn shadow, with no success. He climbed down, and was struck by the silence in the barn. The remaining pigeons must have escaped out the other hole. That was all right; he was tired of it.
He stepped with his rifle into the light. His mother was coming to meet him, and it tickled him to see her shy away from the carelessly held gun. “You took a chip out of the house,” she said. “What were those last shots about?”
“One of them died up in that little round hole and I was trying to shoot it down.”
“Copper’s hiding behind the piano and won’t come out. I had to leave him.”
“Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t want to shoot the poor devils.”
“Don’t smirk. You look like your father. How many did you get?”
“Six.”
She went into the barn, and he followed. She listened to the silence. Her hair was scraggly, perhaps from tussling with the dog. “I don’t suppose the others will be back,” she said wearily. “Indeed, I don’t know why I let Mother talk me into it. Their cooing was such a comforting noise.” She began to gather up the dead pigeons. Though he didn’t want to touch them, David went into the mow and picked up by its tepid, horny, coral-colored feet the first bird he had killed. Its wings unfolded disconcertingly, as if the creature had been held together by threads that now were slit. It did not weigh much. He retrieved the one on the other side of the barn; his mother got the three in the middle and led the way across the road to the little south-facing slope of land that went down toward the foundations of the vanished tobacco shed. The ground was too steep to plant and mow; wild strawberries grew in the tangled grass. She put her burden down and said, “We’ll have to bury them. The dog will go wild.”
He put his two down on her three; the slick feathers let the bodies slide liquidly on one another. David asked, “Shall I get you the shovel?”
“Get it for yourself; you bury them. They’re your kill. And be sure to make the hole deep enough so Copper won’t dig them up.” While he went to the tool shed for the shovel, she went into the house. Unlike his usual mother, she did not look up, either at the orchard to the right of her or at the meadow on her left, but instead held her head rigidly, tilted a little, as if listening to the ground.
He dug the hole, in a spot where there were no strawberry plants, before he studied the pigeons. He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.
Friends from Philadelphia
In the moment before the door was opened to him, he glimpsed her thigh below the half-drawn shade. Thelma was home, then. She was wearing the Camp Winniwoho T-shirt and her quite short shorts.
“Why, my goodness: Janny!” she cried. She always pronounced his name, John, to rhyme with “Ann.” Earlier that summer, she had visited New York City, and tried to talk the way she thought they talked there. “What on earth ever brings you to me at this odd hour?”
“Hello, Thel,” he said. “I hope—I guess this is a pretty bad time.” She had been plucking her eyebrows again. He wished she wouldn’t do that.
Thelma extended her arm and touched her fingers to the base of John’s neck. It wasn’t a fond gesture, just a hostesslike one. “Now, Janny. You know that I—my mother and I—are always happy to be seeing you. Mother, who do you ever guess is here at this odd hour?”
“Don’t keep John Nordholm standing there,” Mrs. Lutz said. Thelma’s mother was settled in the deep-red settee watching television and smoking. A coffee cup being used as an ashtray lay in her lap, and her dress was hitched so that her knees showed.
“Hello, Mrs. Lutz,” John said, trying not to look at her broad, pale knees. “I really hate to bother you at this odd hour.”
“I don’t see anything odd about it.” She took a deep-throated drag on her cigarette and exhaled through her nostrils, the way men do. “Some of the other kids were here earlier this afternoon.”
“I would have come in if anybody had told me.”
Thelma said, “Oh, Janny! Stop trying to make a martyr of yourself. Keep in touch, they say, if you want to keep up.”
He felt his face grow hot and knew he was blushing, which made him blush all the more. Mrs. Lutz shook a wrinkled pack of Herbert Tareytons at him. “Smoke?” she said.
“I guess not, thanks a lot.”
“You’ve stopped? It’s a bad habit. I wish I had stopped at your age. I’m not sure I’d even begun at your age.”
“No, it’s just that I have to go home soon, and my mother would smell the smoke on my breath. She can smell it even through chewing gum.”
“Why must you go home soon?” Thelma asked.
Mrs. Lutz sniffled. “I have sinus. I can’t even smell the flowers in the garden or the food on the table any more. Let the kids smoke if they want, if it makes them feel better. I don’t care. My Thelma, she can smoke right in her own home, her own living room, if she wants to. But she doesn’t seem to have the taste for it. I’m just as glad, to tell the truth.”
John hated interrupting, but it was close to five-thirty. “I have a problem,” he said.
“A problem—how gruesome,” Thelma said. “And here I thought, Mother, I was being favored with a social call.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Mrs. Lutz said.
“It’s sort of complex,” John began.
“Talk like what, Mother? Talk like what?”
�
�Then let me turn this off,” Mrs. Lutz said, snapping the right knob on the television set.
“Oh, Mother, and I was listening to it!” Thelma toppled into a chair, her legs flashing. When she pouted, John thought, she was delicious.
Mrs. Lutz had set herself to give sympathy. Her lap was broadened and her hands were laid palm upward in it.
“It’s not much of a problem,” John assured her. “But we’re having some people to dinner from Philadelphia.” He turned to Thelma and added, “If anything is going on tonight, I can’t get out.”
“Life is just too, too full of disappointments,” Thelma said.
“Look, is there?”
“Too, too full,” Thelma said.
Mrs. Lutz made fluttery motions out of her lap. “These Philadelphia people.”
John said, “Maybe I shouldn’t bother you about this.” He waited, but she just looked more and more patient, so he went on. “My mother wants to give them wine, and my father isn’t home from school yet. He might not get home before the liquor store closes. It’s at six, isn’t it? My mother’s busy cleaning the house, so I walked in.”
“She made you walk the whole mile? Poor thing, can’t you drive?” Mrs. Lutz asked.
“Sure I can drive. But I’m not sixteen yet.”
“You look a lot taller than fifteen.”
John looked at Thelma to see how she took that one, but Thelma was pretending to read a rented novel wrapped in cellophane.
“I walked all the way to the liquor store,” John told Mrs. Lutz, “but they wouldn’t give me anything without written permission. It was a new man.”
“Your sorrow has rent me in twain,” Thelma said, as if she was reading it from the book.
“Pay no attention, John,” Mrs. Lutz said. “Frank will be home any second. Why not wait until he comes and let him run down with you for a bottle?”
“That sounds wonderful. Thanks an awful lot, really.”
Mrs. Lutz’s hand descended upon the television knob. Some smiling man was playing the piano. John didn’t know who he was; there wasn’t any television at his house. They watched in silence until Mr. Lutz thumped on the porch outside. The empty milk bottles tinkled, as if they had been nudged. “Now, don’t be surprised if he has a bit of a load on,” Mrs. Lutz said.
Actually, he didn’t act at all drunk. He was like a happy husband in the movies. He called Thelma his little pookie-pie and kissed her on the forehead; then he called his wife his big pookie-pie and kissed her on the mouth. Then he solemnly shook John’s hand and told him how very, very happy he was to see him here and asked after his parents. “Is that goon still on television?” he said finally.
“Daddy, please pay attention to somebody else,” Thelma said, turning off the television set. “Janny wants to talk to you.”
“And I want to talk to Johnny,” Thelma’s father said. He spread his arms suddenly, clenching and unclenching his fists. He was a big man, with shaved gray hair above his ears, which were small and flat to his head. John couldn’t think of the word to begin.
Mrs. Lutz explained the errand. When she was through, Mr. Lutz said, “People from Philadelphia. I bet their name isn’t William L. Trexler, is it?”
“No. I forget their name, but it’s not that. The man is an engineer. The woman went to college with my mother.”
“Oh. College people. Then we must get them something very, very nice, I should say.”
“Daddy,” Thelma said. “Please. The store will close.”
“Tessie, you hear John. People from college. People with diplomas. And it is very nearly closing time, and who isn’t on their way?” He took John’s shoulder in one hand and Thelma’s arm in the other and hustled them through the door. “We’ll be back in one minute, Mamma,” he said.
“Drive carefully,” Mrs. Lutz said from the shadowed porch.
Mr. Lutz drove a huge blue Buick. “I never went to college,” he said, “yet I buy a new car whenever I want.” His tone wasn’t nasty, but soft and full of wonder.
“Oh, Daddy, not this again,” Thelma said, shaking her head at John, so he could understand what all she had to go through. When she looks like that, John thought, I could bite her lip until it bleeds.
“Ever driven this kind of car, John?” Mr. Lutz asked.
“No. The only thing I can drive is my parents’ Plymouth, and that not very well.”
“What year car is it?”
“I don’t know exactly.” John knew perfectly well it was a 1940 model, bought second-hand after the war. “It has a gear shift. This is automatic, isn’t it?”
“Automatic shift, fluid transmission, directional lights, the works,” Mr. Lutz said. “Now, isn’t it funny, John? Here is your father, an educated man, with an old Plymouth, yet at the same time I, who never read more than ten, twenty books in my life … It doesn’t seem as if there’s justice.” He slapped the fender, bent over to get into the car, straightened up abruptly, and said, “Do you want to drive it?”
Thelma said, “Daddy’s asking you something.”
“I don’t know how,” John said.
“It’s very easy to learn, very easy. You just slide in there—come on, it’s getting late.” John got in on the driver’s side. He peered out of the windshield. It was a wider car than the Plymouth; the hood looked wide as a boat.
Mr. Lutz asked him to grip the little lever behind the steering wheel. “You pull it toward you like that, that’s it, and fit it into one of these notches. ‘P’ stands for ‘park’—for when you’re not going anywhere. ‘N,’ that’s ‘neutral,’ like on the car you have, I hardly ever use it, ‘D’ means ‘drive’—just put it in there and the car does all the work for you. You are using that one ninety-nine per cent of the time. ‘L’ is ‘low,’ for very steep hills, going up or down. And ‘R’ stands for—what?”
“Reverse,” John said.
“Very, very good. Tessie, he’s a smart boy. He’ll never own a new car. And when you put them all together, you can remember their order by the sentence ‘Paint No Dimes Light Red.’ I thought that up when I was teaching my oldest girl how to drive.”
“Paint No Dimes Light Red,” John said.
“Excellent. Now, let’s go.” He reached over and put the car key in the ignition lock, his other keys dangling.
A bubble was developing in John’s stomach. “What gear do you want it in to start?” he asked Mr. Lutz.
Mr. Lutz must not have heard him, because all he said was “Let’s go” again, and he drummed on the dashboard with his fingertips. They were thick, square, furry fingers.
Thelma leaned up from the back seat. Her cheek almost touched John’s ear. She whispered, “Put it at ‘D.’ ”
He did, then he looked for the starter. “How does he start it?” he asked Thelma.
“I never watch him,” she said. “There was a button in the last car, but I don’t see it in this one.”
“Push on the pedal,” Mr. Lutz sang, staring straight ahead and smiling, “and away we go. And ah, ah, waay we go.”
“Just step on the gas,” Thelma suggested. John pushed down firmly, to keep his leg from trembling. The motor roared and the car bounded away from the curb. Within a block, though, he could manage the car pretty well.
“It rides like a boat on smooth water,” he told his two passengers. The simile pleased him.
Mr. Lutz squinted ahead. “Like a what?”
“Like a boat.”
“Don’t go so fast,” Thelma said.
“The motor’s so quiet,” John explained. “Like a sleeping cat.”
Without warning, a truck pulled out of Pearl Street. Mr. Lutz, trying to brake, stamped his foot on the empty floor in front of him. John could hardly keep from laughing. “I see him,” he said, easing his speed so that the truck had just enough room to make its turn. “Those trucks think they own the road,” he said. He let one hand slide away from the steering wheel. One-handed, he whipped around a bus. “What’ll she do on the open road?”
“That’s a good question, John,” Mr. Lutz said. “And I don’t know the answer. Ninety, maybe.”
“The speedometer goes up to a hundred and ten.” Another pause—nobody seemed to be talking. John said, “Hell. A baby could drive one of these.”
“For instance, you,” Thelma said. That meant she had noticed how well he was driving.
There were a lot of cars at the liquor store, so John had to double-park the big Buick. “That’s close enough, close enough,” Mr. Lutz said. “Don’t get any closer, whoa!” He was out of the car before John could bring it to a complete stop. “You and Tessie wait here,” he said. “I’ll go in for the liquor.”
“Mr. Lutz. Say, Mr. Lutz,” John called.
“Daddy!” Thelma shouted.
Mr. Lutz returned. “What is it, boys and girls?” His tone, John noticed, was becoming reedy. He was probably getting hungry.
“Here’s the money they gave me.” John pulled two wadded dollars from the change pocket of his dungarees. “My mother said to get something inexpensive but nice.”
“Inexpensive but nice?” Mr. Lutz repeated.
“She said something about California sherry.”
“What did she say about it? To get it? Or not to?”
“I guess to get it.”
“You guess.” Mr. Lutz shoved himself away from the car and walked backward toward the store as he talked. “You and Tessie wait in the car. Don’t go off somewhere. I’ll be only one minute.”
John leaned back in his seat and gracefully rested one hand at the top of the steering wheel. “I like your father.”
“You don’t know how he acts to Mother,” Thelma said.
