by Tim O'Brien
"Billy—"
"Big blue eyes?"
"Your eyes," she said, "are not blue."
"Right. They are not fucking blue."
"You do hate me."
"Ron's eyes," said Billy. "What shade of blue should we call Ron's eyes?"
"I don't see the point."
"No. You don't."
"Maybe I shouldn't sit here."
"Maybe not."
Dorothy pushed to her feet, not gracefully, and looked down on him. She took his glass from the table. "I can be drunk too. I can be cruel."
She drank up his whiskey. Then she drank the remains of three other glasses that had been left on the table.
"What good is it to hurt me?" she said. "I was young. I wanted some things, like a normal life, and you were just ... You were gone."
"Gone. Odd word."
"He wanted to marry me. He adored me."
"And I was gone."
"You were."
"It's not Siberia," he said. "Indoor malls. Not so gone."
"Well, it felt that way, Billy. Like Siberia." Dorothy stepped over to an adjacent table and came back with someone's drink. "Do you dare me?"
"Go ahead."
She drank it fast. "You know what the statistics say? Eight nodes—five to seven years. Like a manslaughter sentence."
"Ron can afford the funeral."
"Will you please, please dance with me?"
"Please, please," he said.
"I'll dance alone, Billy. I'll take my shirt off."
"Brave you," he said.
"You think I won't?"
"I think you won't."
She went off somewhere. Later on he saw her dancing alone. It ought to have been embarrassing, which it partly was, because she was drunk and loud and fifty-two, almost fifty-three, with a husband and two grown boys, but it was also true that Dorothy was a sensible woman and kept her shirt on.
9. WINNIPEG
BILLY MCMANN left the country on July 1, 1969, eighteen days after graduating from Darton Hall. He had waited as long as he dared. At 11:30 that morning, after twice changing his reservation, Billy boarded an Air Canada flight that arrived in Winnipeg in early afternoon. His life was packed in three small suitcases.
At immigration he declared himself a tourist, showed his passport, picked up his bags, and cleared customs in under a minute. There were no questions. There were no cops, no FBI agents waiting with handcuffs. He took a cab to a downtown hotel, where he checked in, showered, put on jeans and a T-shirt, stared into the bathroom mirror. A tall, scared kid with a ponytail stared back. "God, please," he said. Then he called his parents in southwestern Minnesota. Billy had practiced his speech many times, searching for an efficient way to say things, yet he found himself in emotional trouble as he explained to his mother what he'd just done.
She was bewildered at first, then angry.
"It's your life," his mother said, "and I suppose you're entitled to ruin it." There was a buzz of static. "I'll put your dad on."
His father understood. He would wire money. He would talk to Billy's mother.
"It's the right thing," Billy said.
"Sure it is."
"I'm sorry."
His father made a coughing noise and tried to laugh. "Well, hey," he said. "The right thing. Your own words. Now where do I send the dough?"
When he hung up, Billy gathered himself and dialed Dorothy Stier's number in St. Paul. There was no answer. Dorothy was terrified, no doubt—afraid of the telephone, afraid of the poignant and very sensible excuses she would invent for having missed their flight.
Billy waited an hour, tried again, then went out for a walk toward the river. Hard to believe, he thought. Still July i, 1969. Still Billy McMann. All around him the world seemed impossibly ordinary: people eating ice cream cones, people chatting on street corners. It was hard for Billy to know what to feel. Relief, yes, but also guilt and fear. At times he seemed to slip outside himself, hovering there, a spectator to his own life. Other times he felt like an outlaw.
He had supper in a Chinese restaurant on Provencher Boulevard, returned to the hotel, and again tried Dorothy Stier's number in St. Paul. She did not pick up until well past midnight.
"Just listen to me," she said.
He laughed.
"I was packed, Billy. Actually jumped in a cab, made it halfway to the airport. I'm a coward, I guess."
"I guess you are," he said.
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"You know what," she said. "This is killing me, I can barely breathe, and I wish you'd just listen. I can't stop crying. All day, all night. It feels like—I'm not sure—it feels like my brains are jumbled, like I'm inside a cement mixer."
He pictured Dorothy at her kitchen table: those smart brown eyes, the year-round tan, the well-bred, well-schooled sororitygirl smile that could mean almost anything. She would be reading from notes, keeping her story straight.
"I'm twenty-one years old, Billy, and I can't just run away from everything. It's too dreamy, too romantic."
"Too romantic?"
"I didn't mean it that way."
"I believe you did."
Dorothy cried, or pretended to cry. Afterward, she said, "You don't want to understand, do you? All I meant, I meant it was this impossible, dumb fantasy. Wearing peasant dresses. Living in the woods."
"Winnipeg," said Billy, "is not the woods."
"But you know."
She wasn't crying now. She was thinking. "Anyway. When I got in that cab, I couldn't make myself believe anymore. We're different people. I'm a Republican, Billy. I'm an American. I can't help it."
Later, as an afterthought, she said, "It's not that I don't love you."
Then she said, "I could visit sometime. We could talk."
He knew what was coming next.
"Billy, I'm sorry," she said, with feeling, but in a tone that was more exculpatory than apologetic.
Curiously, Billy did not picture Dorothy's face. What he saw instead was a silver bracelet he'd given to her on Valentine's Day. She had hugged him and teared up. But he had never seen that bracelet again, nor had she ever mentioned it. Which was her way. With Dorothy you had to pay attention to things that were never said, the erasures and elisions.
Right now, for instance, she did not say, "Billy, I love you more than anything," because she did not love him more than anything. She loved cashmere. She was a good person in many ways—witty and bright and visceral and generous and tough-minded—but all that goodness sometimes got smothered by privilege and caveman politics.
Billy wanted to weep. Instead, he seized his anger. "I canceled two flights," he said. "Called a dozen times, two dozen. No answer."
"I was afraid."
"I know very damn well you were afraid."
"Don't swear at me. And don't be cruel or I'll hang up."
He snorted. "Cruel was three nights ago. Under the sheets. When you forgot to mention I'd be flying off alone."
"I wasn't sure then."
"It sounded sure. All those promises."
There was a whirring on the line, as if an air conditioner had clicked on inside Dorothy's head. "I guess you're right," she said, but her tone suggested that he was only partly right, that promises were contingent. "I shouldn't have been so definite. I've admitted that. It was a mistake."
"What about the getting married part?"
"Billy, I wish—"
"That brick house. Those babies you wanted?"
Dorothy's tone went petulant. "Well," she said. "It's obvious you despise me."
"That's insane."
"Is it? Always so high and mighty. Never wrong about anything."
Pretty city, but Winnipeg played with his head. Dreams of exile: Nixon in hot pursuit, numerous sirens and searchlights and barking dogs. Even by daylight, just walking along the river or sitting alone in a park, Billy had the sensation of being watched by an unknown authority on issues of right and wrong—the Mounties, maybe, or his m
other, or a smiling Buddha. In a restaurant one morning, over boiled eggs, he started crying. On other occasions a kind of paralysis came over him, a spiritual shut-down, and he'd close the hotel room drapes and lie in bed, staring at the television. He had no friends in the city. He had no job. He had no ambitions that reached beyond the next sunrise.
For months, during his senior year at Darton Hall, Billy had been fantasizing about this, coordinating things with Dorothy, but in the end it had come down to impulse. The draft notice had arrived eight days after graduation. He had cleaned out his savings account, purchased a pair of one-way plane tickets, packed his bags, and waited at the airport until he could wait no longer.
Billy called her again after two weeks. He tried to keep things hopeful, but the conversation soon weakened. They listened to each other's desperation. Dorothy finally said, "I will try to visit. Maybe in a month or two."
"Where's the bracelet?" he said.
"Bracelet?"
Billy nodded at an open window. There were elm trees and telephone wires. "Forget it. Are you dating someone?"
"I wouldn't call it dating."
"You wouldn't?"
"No."
Dorothy started to add something, probably a qualifier, but in his head Billy could already hear all the other names she might call it.
"Ron?" he said.
"Not just Ron."
"Fine. Mainly Ron?"
"Mainly, I guess."
"How mainly?"
"Just mainly," she said. "Stop it."
Billy looked out at the telephone wires.
"Sure, come visit," he said. "Mainly bring Ron."
The first month had the feel of a dream. Impossible colors, vulgar shapes and vulgar sounds, a horrifying new weight to the world.
Billy cut off his ponytail.
He stopped brushing his teeth.
Sometimes he laughed at himself. Sometimes a pointless rage swept over him: rage at Dorothy and at his country and at smart people who came up with smart reasons to kill other smart people. There were always reasons. Attila had reasons. Once, when he'd tried to express this to Dorothy, she had asked what he would do if someone tried to rape her—wouldn't he fight back? wouldn't he kill the creep?—and Billy had said Yes, if a VC rapist showed up at Darton Hall, flew in from Hanoi, in that case he'd hustle right over and dispatch the little pervert. This had gotten him nowhere. Dorothy was patriotic and abstemious of thought. Irony was not in her repertoire. "That's absurd," she'd said, and Billy had grinned and said No, it was one of those excellent reasons to kill people, the old Greek reason.
He worried that he might be going mad.
Movement was a problem. His body had become stone. On many mornings he had trouble prying himself out of bed. He watched TV. He talked aloud to Dorothy. He delivered long, intricately argued lectures to God, defending himself, explaining his motives.
Hey, you, he'd say.
He'd say, Come on, I'm just a kid.
In early August, down to his last hundred dollars, Billy made himself do something. After two days he found a decent job in a branch of the Winnipeg public library system—part clerk, part janitor.
To remain in Canada, he was told, it would be necessary to secure something called "landed immigrant status," which meant crossing back into the United States and then recrossing again into Canada with evidence of employment. The prospect terrified him. For a week Billy found excuses to put it off, but on August 17 he rented a car and headed south down Highway 7. Three hours later he was waved across the border outside a little town in Minnesota. He had lunch there, thought about calling Dorothy, decided against it, and checked into a motel for his final night as an American.
He slept an hour at most.
On the morning of August 18, 1969, at 10 A.M., Billy McMann took a seat in a small, pine-scented office on the Canadian border. He presented his employment papers and birth certificate. An immigration officer brought him a cold Pepsi.
Altogether, it took just over two hours.
Midway through the paperwork, when Billy wept a little, the officer said, "Tough thing—it has to be—so if you're not sure..."
"What's sure?" Billy said.
The man shook his head and said, "Don't know."
A week later, Billy rented a cheap apartment in the St. Boniface district of Winnipeg. It was the place he and Dorothy used to imagine for themselves: oak floors, high ceilings, a big bay window overlooking a boulevard shaded by giant elms.
Billy bought a camera, snapped photographs of the apartment, and mailed the undeveloped film to Dorothy Stier.
Four years passed. Dorothy never called.
Billy's pain hardened into resentment, then into something close to hatred.
In 1974 he became a Canadian citizen. In 1975 he married a librarian from Calgary. He opened a hardware store, bought a car, had a baby girl. But the bitterness remained with him. There were times when he'd lie in bed beside his wife, feeling dark and restless, full of guilt, full of anger, wondering how things might have turned out if he had gone to the war and died politely.
Not that Billy doubted his own judgment. He had done the right thing, or what he believed was right. But without Dorothy the right thing often felt wrong.
Billy was careful not to mention any of this to his wife. He stayed silent, which seemed necessary, but which increased the guilt. He wanted to be a family man, to give himself completely, but all he could do was pretend. He expanded his hardware store, bought a modest three-bedroom house, feigned contentment at the dinner table. By and large he got away with it. Now and then, though, his wife would stop whatever she was doing and just look at him. The corners of her lips would move.
"What?" he'd say.
In April of 1985 Billy's wife was killed by a hit-and-run driver.
Three months later Dorothy called.
"It was in the alumni bulletin," she said. "I'm sorry."
"How's Ron?" Billy said, and broke the connection.
She called back in twenty minutes.
"Did that help?" she said. "Hanging up?"
"It was a try," he said.
"I can't undo things, Billy. I can't go backward and get on that airplane."
"You didn't say how Ron's doing."
"Ron's fine. He feels terrible too—about your wife, the accident." She seemed nervous, but not too nervous. "Did they catch him? The driver?"
"No. How's Ron?"
"Stop that."
"Stellar human being. The guy married yet?"
"You know very well he's married."
"Right, think I heard. Fancy wedding. And who's the lucky, lucky gal?"
"Billy, what do you want me to say? Do want me to say it was all my fault?"
"Yes."
"It was my fault."
"You forgot a word."
"All," she said.
He hung up again and waited the rest of the night, and then he waited another eighteen months. When she called again, Billy said, "I'll bet he's rich, isn't he? I'll bet you live in a house with a swimming pool. Huge lawn. Big white columns out front. Statues of Agnew."
He had been rehearsing these lines for a long while, not just the words but also the brightness in his voice.
"You wouldn't believe the progress up here," he told her. "Running water. Canned goods."
"Are you finished?"
"Tanning salons."
Dorothy waited.
When he'd exhausted his playbook, she said, "I hurt you. What do you want me to do?"
"Do?" he said.
"I thought you might want to talk." She made a soft, releasing sound in her throat that he recognized from years ago. He could imagine her stately posture. "You have a little girl?"
"Susie," he said.
"Susie. Pretty name."
"Yes."
"And she's—"
"Ten going on a hundred," Billy said. "Very cute, very everything good. Like her mother."
"I'm sorry. Losing someone you love."
"N
othing new," he said.
He looked over at his daughter, who stood scowling at him.
He turned his back and said, "Anyway, there was always this cold shadow in the way. Imagine the shame."
"I'm not cold."
"What are you, then?"
"I'm Dorothy. Nothing else." She made the releasing sound again, not quite a sigh. "I'll stop calling, Billy. Except nobody should hold a grudge this long."
Billy laughed. "Where's the bracelet?"
"Which bracelet?"
"There's my answer."
Dorothy's voice turned brittle, almost snappish. "I think you'd better see someone," she said. "All that bitterness. It isn't healthy."
"Give Ron a big wet kiss for me."
After he'd hung up, Billy's daughter stared. "Well," she said. "Now you're kissing men?"
By 1991 Billy owned a chain of four hardware stores, plus a lumberyard and a successful roofing company. He was vice president of the Winnipeg Rotary Club, secretary of the Winnipeg Arts Council. He had not remarried.
In October of that year, Billy hired a young woman to handle his accounts. She appeared one day, vastly overqualified, wanting a job. Her name was Alexandra Wenz. Right away, Billy felt an attraction, something mysterious, something beyond biology. She was tall and quiet and smart, very efficient, very grave, with slate-blue eyes and red hair. After a few months they began dating. On their fourth night out, when he tried to kiss her, Alexandra confessed that she had killed Billy's wife. "I was seventeen," she said. "I've been wanting to ... Christ, I don't know what. Talk to you."
Billy's hands were still clasped against the small of her back.
"Seventeen," Alexandra said, "and scared."
They were standing on her doorstep. It was just after midnight. There was a bright half-moon, the sound of crickets in the grass behind them.
"So I drove away," she said. "Had the car fixed in Kenora. Didn't talk about it, not to anybody. No one ever knew." Alexandra swept her red hair back, looked at him with a question shaping itself at her forehead. "Sometimes I'd call your house. You'd answer and I'd take a big breath and start to talk, explain what happened, but I couldn't get the words out, not a sound, so I'd just listen for a while. Must've done that a hundred times."
