The Stories of Richard Bausch (46 page)

He couldn’t stop crying. He brought out a handkerchief and covered his face with it, then wiped his forehead. It had grown quiet. The other two were gazing at him. He straightened, caught his breath. “Excuse me.”

“No excuse needed,” Tarmigian said, looking down. His smile seemed vaguely uncertain now, and sad. Even a little afraid.

“What is going on here?” the old woman wanted to know.

“Why, nothing at all out of the ordinary,” Tarmigian said, shifting the small weight of his skeletal body, clearing his throat, managing to speak very loudly, very gently, so as to reassure her, but making certain, too, that she could hear him.

Jane’s husband, Martin
, works for the fire department. He’s on four days, off three; on three, off four. It’s the kind of shift work that allows plenty of time for sustained recreation, and during the off times Martin likes to do a lot of socializing with his two shift mates, Wally Harmon and Teddy Lynch. The three of them are like brothers: they bicker and squabble and compete in a friendly way about everything, including their common hobby, which is the making and flying of model airplanes. Martin is fanatical about it—spends way too much money on the two planes he owns, which are on the workable in the garage, and which seem to require as much maintenance as the real article. Among the arguments between Jane and her husband—about money, lack of time alone together, and housework—there have been some about the model planes, but Jane can’t say or do much without sounding like a poor sport: Wally’s wife, Milly, loves watching the boys, as she calls them, fly their planes, and Teddy Lynch’s ex-wife, before they were divorced, had loved the model planes too. In a way, Jane is the outsider here: Milly Harmon has known Martin most of his life, and Teddy Lynch was once point guard to Martin’s power forward on their
high school basketball team. Jane is relatively new, having come to Illinois from Virginia only two years ago, when Martin brought her back with him from his reserve training there.

This evening, a hot September twilight, they’re sitting on lawn chairs in the dim light of the coals in Martin’s portable grill, talking about games. Martin and Teddy want to play Risk, though they’re already arguing about the rules. Teddy says that a European version of the game contains a wrinkle that makes it more interesting, and Martin is arguing that the game itself was derived from some French game.

“Well, go get it,” Teddy says, “and I’ll show you. I’ll bet it’s in the instructions.”

“Don’t get that out now,” Jane says to Martin.

“It’s too long,” Wally Harmon says.

“What if we play cards,” Martin says.

“Martin doesn’t want to lose his bet,” Teddy says.

“We don’t have any bets, Teddy.”

“Okay, so let’s bet.”

“Let’s play cards,” Martin says. “Wally’s right. Risk takes too long.”

“I feel like conquering the world,” Teddy says.

“Oh, Teddy,” Milly Harmon says. “Please shut up.”

She’s expecting. She sits with her legs out, holding her belly as though it were unattached, separate from her. The child will be her first, and she’s excited and happy; she glows, as if she knows everyone’s admiring her.

Jane thinks Milly is spreading it on a little thick at times: lately all she wants to talk about is her body and what it’s doing.

“I had a dream last night,” Milly says now. “I dreamed that I was pregnant. Big as a house. And I woke up and I was. What I want to know is, was that a nightmare?”

“How did you feel in the dream?” Teddy asks her.

“I said. Big as a house.”

“Right, but was it bad or good?”

“How would you feel if you were big as a house?”

“Well, that would depend on what the situation was.”

“The situation is, you’re big as a house.”

“Yeah, but what if somebody was chasing me? I’d want to be big, right?”

“Oh, Teddy, please shut up.”

“I had a dream,” Wally says. “A bad dream. I dreamed I died. I mean, you know, I was dead—and what was weird was that I was also the one who had to call Milly to tell her about it.”

“Oh, God,” Milly says. “Don’t talk about this.”

“It was weird. I got killed out at sea or something. Drowned, I guess. I remember I was standing on the deck of this ship talking to somebody about how it went down. And then I was calling Milly to tell her. And the thing is, I talked like a stranger would—you know, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your husband went down at sea.’ It was weird.”

“How did you feel when you woke up?” Martin says.

“I was scared. I didn’t know who I was for a couple of seconds.”

“Look,” Milly says, “I don’t want to talk about dreams.”

“Let’s talk about good dreams,” Jane says. “I had a good dream. I was fishing with my father out at a creek—some creek that felt like a real place. Like if I ever really did go fishing with my father, this is where we would have fished when I was small.”

“What?” Martin says after a pause, and everyone laughs.

“Well,” Jane says, feeling the blood rise in her cheeks, “I never—my father died when I was just a baby.”

“I dreamed I got shot once,” Teddy says. “Guy shot me with a forty-five automatic as I was running downstairs. I fell and hit bottom, too. I could feel the cold concrete on the side of my face before I woke up.”

Milly Harmon sits forward a little and says to Wally, “Honey, why did you have to tell about having a dream like that? Now
I’m
going to dream about it, I just know it.”

“I think we all ought to call it a night,” Jane says. “You guys have to get up at six o’clock in the morning.”

“What’re you talking about?” Martin says. “We’re going to play cards, aren’t we?”

“I thought we were going to play Risk,” Teddy says.

“All right,” Martin says, getting out of his chair. “Risk it is.”

Milly groans, and Jane gets up and follows Martin into the house. “Honey,” she says. “Not Risk. Come on. We’d need four hours at least.”

He says over his shoulder, “So then we need four hours.”

“Martin, I’m tired.”

He’s leaning up into the hall closet, where the games are stacked. He brings the Risk game down and turns, holding it in both hands like a tray. “Look, where do you get off, telling everybody to go home the way you did?”

She stands there staring at him.

“These people are our friends, Jane.”

“I just said I thought we ought to call it a night.”

“Well
don’t
say—all right? It’s embarrassing.”

He goes around her and back out to the patio. The screen door slaps twice in the jamb. She waits a moment and then moves through the house to the bedroom. She brushes her hair, thinks about getting out of her clothes. Martin’s uniforms are lying across the foot of the bed. She picks them up, walks into the living room with them and drapes them over the back of the easy chair.

“Jane,” Martin calls from the patio. “Are you playing or not?”

“Come on, Jane,” Milly says. “Don’t leave me alone out here.”

“What color armies do you want?” Martin asks.

She goes to the patio door and looks out at them. Martin has lighted the tiki lamps; everyone’s sitting at the picnic table in the moving firelight. “Come on,” Martin says, barely concealing his irritation. She can hear it, and she wants to react to it—wants to let him know that she is hurt. But they’re all waiting for her, so she steps out and takes her place at the table. She chooses green for her armies, and she plays the game to lose, attacking in all directions until her forces are so badly depleted that when Wally begins to make his own move she’s the first to lose all her armies. This takes more than an hour. When she’s out of the game, she sits for a while, cheering Teddy on against Martin, who is clearly going to win; finally she excuses herself and goes back into the house. The glow from the tiki lamps makes weird patterns on the kitchen wall. She pours herself a glass of water and drinks it down; then she pours more and swallows some aspirin. Teddy sees this as he comes in for more beer, and he grasps her by the elbow and asks if she wants something a little better than aspirin for a headache.

“Like what?” she says, smiling at him. She’s decided a smile is what one offers under such circumstances; one laughs things off, pretends not to notice the glazed look in the other person’s eyes.

Teddy is staring at her, not quite smiling. Finally he puts his hands on her shoulders and says, “What’s the matter, lady?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I have a headache. I took some aspirin.”

“I’ve got some stuff,” he says. “It makes America beautiful. Want some?”

She says, “Teddy.”

“No problem,” he says. He holds both hands up and backs away from her. Then he turns and is gone. She hears him begin to tease Martin about the French rules of the game. Martin is winning. He wants Wally Harmon to keep playing, and Wally wants to quit. Milly and Teddy are talking about flying the model airplanes. They know about an air show in Danville on Saturday. They all keep playing and talking, and for a long time Jane watches them from the screen door. She smokes half a pack of cigarettes, and she paces a little. She drinks three glasses of orange juice, and finally she walks into the bedroom and lies down with her face in her hands. Her forehead feels hot. She’s thinking about the next four days, when Martin will be gone and she can have the house to herself. She hasn’t been married even two years, and she feels crowded; she’s depressed and tired every day. She never has enough time to herself. And yet when she’s alone, she feels weak and afraid. Now she hears someone in the hallway and she sits up, smoothes her hair back from her face. Milly Harmon comes in with her hands cradling her belly.

“Ah,” Milly says. “A bed.” She sits down next to Jane and then leans back on her hands. “I’m beat,” she says.

“I have a headache,” Jane says.

Milly nods. Her expression seems to indicate how unimportant she finds this, as if Jane had told her she’d already got over a cold or something. “They’re in the garage now,” she says.

“Who?”

“Teddy, Wally, Martin. Martin conquered the world.”

“What’re they doing?” Jane asks. “It’s almost midnight.”

“Everybody’s going to be miserable in the morning,” Milly says.

Jane is quiet.

“Oh,” Milly says, looking down at herself. “He kicked. Want to feel it?”

She takes Jane’s hand and puts it on her belly. Jane feels movement under her fingers, something very slight, like one heartbeat.

“Wow,” she says. She pulls her hand away.

“Listen,” Milly says. “I know we can all be overbearing sometimes.
Martin doesn’t realize some of his responsibilities yet. Wally was the same way.”

“I just have this headache,” Jane says. She doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to get into it. Even when she talks to her mother on the phone and her mother asks how things are, she says it’s all fine. She has nothing she wants to confide.

“You feel trapped, don’t you,” Milly says.

Jane looks at her.

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Okay—you just have a headache.” “I do,” Jane says.

Milly sits forward a little, folds her hands over the roundness of her belly. “This baby’s jumping all over the place.”

Jane is silent.

“Do you believe my husband and that awful dream? I wish he hadn’t told us about it—now I know I’m going to dream something like it. You know pregnant women and dreams. I begin to shake just thinking of it.”

“Try not to think of it,” Jane says.

Milly waits a moment and then clears her throat and says, “You know, for a while there after Wally and I were married, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. I remember realizing that I didn’t like the way he laughed. I mean, let’s face it, Wally laughs like a hyena. And somehow that took on all kinds of importance—you know, I had to absolutely like everything about him or I couldn’t like anything. Have you ever noticed the way he laughs?”

Jane has never really thought about it. But she says nothing now. She simply nods.

“But you know,” Milly goes on, “all I had to do was wait. Just—you know, wait for love to come around and surprise me again.”

“Milly, I have a headache. I mean, what do you think is wrong, anyway?” “Okay,” Milly says, rising.

Then Jane wonders whether the other woman has been put up to this conversation. “Hey,” she says, “did Martin say something to you?”

“What would Martin say?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know, Milly. Jesus Christ, can’t a person have a simple headache?”

“Okay,” Milly says. “Okay.”

“I like the way everyone talks around me here, you know it?”

“Nobody’s talking around you—”

“I think it’s wonderful how close you all are.”

“All right,” Milly says, standing there with her hands folded under the bulge of her belly. “You just look so unhappy these days.”

“Look,” Jane says, “I have a headache, all right? I’m going to go to bed. I mean, the only way I can get rid of it is to lie down in the dark and be very quiet—okay?”

“Sure, honey,” Milly says.

“So—goodnight, then.”

“Right,” Milly says. “Goodnight.” She steps toward Jane and kisses her on the cheek. “I’ll tell Martin to call it a night. I know Wally’ll be miserable tomorrow.”