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Authors: David Adams Richards

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BOOK: Nights Below Station Street
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“I like Ralphie a lot,” Joe would answer.

“Ralphie and I aren’t getting married – we are just going
to live together in common law way out in the woods or something like that there.”

He wouldn’t answer.

“Well, what do you think of that?”

“Doesn’t bother me.”

“Sure it does!”

Joe would look over at her quietly.

“My parents were never married.”

“That’s because, Joe, as everyone in the whole world knows, you had no real parents at all,” she would snip.

Rita would then come in and say something to her and Adele would smirk, yawn, and look out the window. Often, she would go to the fridge and get her pop, with the note on it saying: “I
SPIT IN THIS
.” One afternoon Milly sat in the kitchen while Adele took her pop out of the fridge piously, and went to take a drink. Just as she got the pop to her mouth, Milly sniffed and said: “So did I.”

Adele had other problems. One of them was that she had nightmares and couldn’t sleep very well at all. Then she had a nervous stomach. Then a teacher looked at her in a funny way. Then something happened to her fries at Zellers – she went to sit in a booth with her allowance and they gave her cold gravy and she wouldn’t eat them, and they wouldn’t give her her money back. Then, because of this, she said she wasn’t going to go back to school.

“I’m no one’s fool,” she screeched. “And I’m not going to do the dishes tonight!”

And saying this, and brightening up as if she had quite mysteriously solved everything, she ran upstairs and slammed the door.

“What have we done to you?” Rita yelled.

“Well, Rita, if you want to know the big facts of life – let me teachcha in yer dumb brain – you got married to Joe, who was a alcoholical bastard, so there!”

“So there,” Rita said. “If I go up with a spatula, little lady – you aren’t that big – and if I go up those stairs –”

“Come way up,” Adele squeaked. “I’m not afraid of you or anyone like you – not one little Jesus bit.”

“I will if you don’t grow up.”

“Ha, ha ha, ha haha, ha ha ha ha ha!” Adele roared.

Pause.

Rita started to climb the stairs.

“And I have nothing in this house, and am sick to my stomach all the time – don’t you know that Mom – you know that Mom – I’m sick to my stomach all the time and have nervous feelings.”

Rita stood halfway up the stairs looking over the top of the banister.

Pause.

Rita started to go back down the stairs.

“Like the time, ha, Dad leaves me in the woods so I mayswell have been fried by an Indian or something like that there, it’d not be impossible, or the trip we went on that Christmas – remember that, Dad, I spose you don’t remember that. Or the time you took us to the circus to see the tallest man in the German army, who isn’t as tall as he’s made out to be – and got into a fight with Cecil, and Mom and us had to go home alone because you were locked up, and then the next day you and Cecil went out for a drink together, and if you don’t remember, Dad, many thanks.”

Through these arguments, Joe sat in his chair with his makins in his pocket, and his shirt half opened, listening as the day got dark, his eyes focused on the tile at the end of the rug.

One night, Milly broke out crying when Adele came downstairs with her overnight bag packed, with her scuffed buckled shoes sticking out of the top of the bag, saying she was going to run away with Ralphie Pillar. It was at this
time for some reason that Adele wanted everyone to know how much she knew about sex – and now because she was angry, she told them all she knew, and all that she understood:

“I know all about it,” she said, “I
KNOW THE FACTS!”

Adele stood at the door, while Milly tried to grab onto her, to force her back into the house. The windows were frosted over and there was a smell of ice in the porch. Joe had gone out to get them a treat, but he hadn’t come back yet. His hockey skates were tied to a nail. Milly’s eyes were closed and red, and her nose was running, and her hands kept grabbing at Adele’s black plastic belt, while Adele tried to pry her fingers loose. Milly was roaring at her mother to come and help, but Rita sat at the metallic kitchen table under the light bulb.

Adele turned her somewhat cold little face toward Milly and said: “When I was yer age Milly, I was in a hospital bed, and Joe was out drunk, roaring about in a goddamn fish-tailin car and slappin our mother’s cheeks off every second night. So why do you think, Milly, that this place is so wonderful – h’m?”

And, with that, she walked out and slammed the door, and headed toward the centre of town, perfume on her jeans.

The winter and then the summer months passed, and fall came.

Myhrra called Joe at six o’clock one morning, when it was still dark, and told him that she knew he was asleep but that something was broken in her car. The air smelled cool again. The street outside was broken up. The sky was still filled with pulp and smoke and down below on the river a buoy light winked, saying I am not just any light but a light from a pont-shaped river buoy.

Joe, pulling on his pants and shirt, and fastening his large belt, coughed and lit a cigarette. Through his upstairs window he could smell frost, and he could see the kitchen light on in Myhrra’s trailer above the dark gravel lot which he could not see in the summer but now the leaves were going again. Rita slept. He stepped over her clothes and closed the bedroom door.

When Joe arrived at the trailer, Myhrra was outside and snow fell against the pulp-field in back of them. She wore her heavy coat over her housecoat. She sneezed and rubbed her eyes.

“Joe,” she asked him, “you’ve been in jail, haven’t you?”

“A few times,” Joe said.

“What’s this jail business like?”

“Well, I was in jail for a while for breaking a window,” Joe said. “After the cops came to the house – I hit one.”

“Oh,” Myhrra said. “What happened there, Joe?”

“Nothing,” Joe said. “Rita was going to leave me. I was in a big scrape at the house. The cops took me to jail for my own good, I guess. I didn’t mind er except when Delly came to see me.”

Joe remembered that whole incident. It was the time he threw a chair, and it stuck into the wall at the back of the kitchen. The cops came, and after he hit one, they put the cuffs on him, and he snapped them off. The young female cop, Judy Dennifer, took her cuffs and put them on him, and he snapped them off also. The whole time he kept thinking:
If Rita wants me to go with them, I’ll go
.

It was in summer, There were bags of garbage in the porch, and a lot of the house was being redone. There was paint on his hands and in his hair. He had tried not to get drunk the night before but hadn’t managed to stay sober.

Then all the cops gathered about him and took him out. Everyone was on the street. Rita was crying. He saw a vindictive look on Judy Dennifer’s face. He smiled at her, and then looked at the ground.

“Oh,” Myhrra was saying, “pretty bad way to go, Joe, with Rita and the kids there. …”

Joe nodded. He smiled, and blinked. And suddenly his big face looked confused.

Myhrra sniffed and looked about and there was wind against her eyes.

“Are we all crazy?”

“Who?”

“The whole kit-and-caboodle of us.”

“I don’t know,” Joe said quietly, and lifted up the hood.

Far away a mill whistle blew in the air, and far away a dog barked – and there was the faint rattle of a truck as it passed by.

Joe looked at her and smiled. He could see her bra under her open coat, and when she smiled he could see the scar above her top Up.

“Cub Master said that Byron robbed the money from the troops.”

“The troops,” Joe said.

“The cub troops’ money. They were raising money, had a hundred dollars, but now –” here she stammered – “money is missing, and Byron was blamed.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Joe said.

“Sure, because he needs someone to blame it on – and it mayswell be Byron, because I’m a woman alone!” Myhrra said. She looked in at the engine as she spoke.

“Ya, that’s always the way,” Joe said.

“Are you drinking yet, Joe?” Myhrra said intently, inspecting the carburetor.

“No,” Joe said.

“Oh no you’re not – of course you aren’t – I wish I could quit.”

“Oh,” Joe said, surprised. He knew Myhrra didn’t drink.

“Yes,” Myhrra said. “I’m a drunk,” she said, yawning. Myhrra seemed to be everything anyone else was. A snow-flake came down in the cold air and landed somewhere. One of her thumbs was blistered and had a Band-Aid around it. The dog barked again.

“Byron is smart,” Myhrra said. “As ambidextrous as hell, too. Is Milly passing? Or is she flunking out like she did in kindergarten?”

Joe slapped her hand so she would take it out of the way.

“She’s doing fine,” Joe said. Actually he didn’t know.
After this he became embarrassed, and there was a long silence while he tried to think of something to say.

“You should take care of Rita, Joe,” Myhrra said, as if she had worked herself up into being sad suddenly, just as she worked herself up to be concerned when she carried those month-old magazines down the corridors of the hospital.

Joe nodded. His old canvas coat seemed to crinkle as he worked. The ice in the ditch had the same look as curdled milk, with some weeds sticking up out of it.

“Yes. She’s had a hell of a time. When she was young she did floors for people,” Myhrra said. “I mean, she still does, too. But this was down river. I used to have to stop people from stepping over her while she worked. I can vouch for that.”

Then Myhrra told the story about how she protected Rita, and how Rita always looked up to her. It was always the same story, and she always seemed to tell no one else but Joe this story.

“Anyways,” Myhrra said, “it would have been just terrible if she left you, Joe – when you were at your worst Like a maniac.”

Joe said nothing to this but nodded again.

He cleaned the battery posts off and reattached the cables and tightened them.

“Were you in the navy or army, Joe?”

“Navy.”

“Was it exciting?”

“No.”

“And that’s where you got the tattoos?” Myhrra said.

“That’s it,” Joe said.

“Well, I usually hate men with tattoos, Joe – but I make an exception for you.”

Myhrra then seemed to not know what else to say. Daylight
was coming just as it had come years ago. It smelled of ice in your lungs. Daylight flashed against the naked alders, warmed the side of the bank, and cast light on the dark below them, and Myhrra stood in an old pair of sneakers that were stiff and upturned at the toes.

“I hate hippies, Joe – don’t you?” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“Hate – hippies?” She leaned against the side of the car as he worked, and looked sideways at him, her hair falling over her face.

“I don’t know any hippies.”

“Well, that Ralphie character – and his sister Vera – who’s a real Beatnik, I heard.” She paused. “Thelma Pillar’s children.”

“Oh,” Joe said, “I never considered Ralphie a hippie.”

“Well, perhaps he isn’t,” Myhrra said. “I just know a lot of girls that Mike’s been hanging about town with that look like hippies. Split ends forever.” Then she smiled sadly again, as if to herself, and stepped away quickly when Joe closed the hood of the car.

Ralphie, like his sister Vera a few years before, belonged to the town without being a part of it, knew all about it without people knowing him, and went about as an outsider through no one else’s fault.

He was tall and thin with red hair and delicate features. Though he was tall he weighed only a hundred and twenty-seven pounds. He had gone to university for a while, and then to technical school. But then his father had taken sick. When he was visiting him in the hospital the pressure was on to do something. His father would ask him to make a stab at something, for his mother’s sake. And his mother would tell him he must do something for his father who was sick. His mother was elitist and domineering. For a long while she had never been seen anywhere except at church. Neighbours would not see her all winter long because she always kept to herself. Her house would look cold and solitary amongst the other houses.

BOOK: Nights Below Station Street
7.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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