The Stories of Richard Bausch (48 page)

Eveline swallows the last of her beer and then gets up and goes out to stand near the line of wet pavement at the edge of the awninged sidewalk.

“What’s the matter with her?” Milly asks.

“She’s just unhappy.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No—really. It’s nothing.” Jane says.

She pays for the beer. Milly talks to her for a while, but Jane has a hard time concentrating on much of anything now, with sirens going and Eveline standing out there at the edge of the sidewalk. Milly goes on, talking nervously about Wally’s leaving her in her dream and how funny it is that she woke up mad at him, that she had to wait a few minutes and get her head clear before she could kiss him good morning.

“I’ve got to go,” Jane says. “I came in Eveline’s car.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—sure. I just stepped in out of the rain myself.”

They join Eveline outside, and Milly says she’s got to go get her nephews before they knock down the ice-cream parlor. Jane and Eveline watch her walk away in the rain, and Eveline says, “Jesus.”

“She’s just scared,” Jane says. “God, leave her alone.”

“I don’t mean anything by it,” Eveline says. “A little malice, maybe.”

Jane says nothing. They stand there watching the rain and lightning, and soon they’re talking about people at work, the salesmen and the boys in the parts shop. They’re relaxed now; the sirens have stopped and the tension between them has lifted. They laugh about one salesman who’s apparently interested in Eveline. He’s a married man—an overweight, balding, middle-aged Texan who wears snakeskin boots and a string tie, and who has an enormous fake-diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand. Eveline calls him Disco Bill. And yet Jane thinks her friend may be secretly attracted to him. She teases her about this, or begins to, and then a clap of thunder so frightens them both that they laugh about it, off and on, through the rest of the evening. They wind up visiting Eveline’s parents, who live only a block from the café. Eveline’s parents have been married almost thirty years, and, sitting in their living room, Jane looks at their things—the love seat and the antique chairs, the handsome grandfather clock in the hall, the paintings. The place has a lovely
tended
look about it. Everything seems to stand for the kind of life she wants for herself: an attentive, loving husband; children; and a quiet house with a clock that chimes. She knows this is all very dreamy and childish, and yet she looks at Eveline’s parents, those people with their almost thirty years’ love, and her heart aches. She drinks four glasses of white wine and realizes near the end of the visit that she’s talking too much, laughing too loudly.

It’s very late
when she gets home. She lets herself in the side door of the house and walks through the rooms, turning on all the lights, as is her custom—she wants to be sure no one is hiding in any of the nooks and crannies. Tonight she looks at everything and feels demeaned by it. Martin’s clean uniforms are lying across the back of the lounge chair in the living room. The TV and the TV trays are in one corner, next to the coffee table, which is a gift from Martin’s parents, something they bought back in the fifties, before Martin was born. Martin’s parents live on a farm ten miles outside town, and for the past year Jane has had to
spend Sundays out there, sitting in that living room with its sparse, starved look, listening to Martin’s father talk about the weather, or what he had to eat for lunch, or the wrestling matches he watches on TV. He’s a kindly man but he has nothing whatever of interest to say, and he seems to know it—his own voice always seems to surprise him at first, as if some profound inner silence had been broken; he pauses, seems to gather himself, and then continues with the considered, slow cadences of oration. He’s tall and lean and powerful looking; he wears coveralls, and he reminds Jane of those pictures of hungry, bewildered men in the Dust Bowl thirties—with their sad, straight, combed hair and their desperation. Yet he’s a man who seems quite certain about things, quite calm and satisfied. His wife fusses around him, making sure of his comfort, and he speaks to her in exactly the same soft, sure tones he uses with Jane.

Now, sitting in her own living room, thinking about this man, her father-in-law, Jane realizes that she can’t stand another Sunday afternoon listening to him talk. It comes to her like a bad premonition, and quite suddenly, with a kind of tidal shifting inside her, she feels the full weight of her unhappiness. For the first time it seems unbearable, something that might drive her out of her mind. She breathes, swallows, closes her eyes and opens them. She looks at her own reflection in one of the darkened windows of the kitchen, and then she finds herself in the bedroom, pulling her things out of the closet and throwing them on the bed. Something about this is a little frantic, as though each motion fed some impulse to go further, go through with it—use this night, make her way somewhere else. For a long time she works, getting the clothes out where she can see them. She’s lost herself in the practical matter of getting packed. She can’t decide what to take, and then she can’t find a suitcase or an overnight bag. Finally she settles on one of Martin’s travel bags, from when he was in the reserves. She’s hurrying, stuffing everything into the bag, and when the bag is almost full she stops, feeling spent and out of breath. She sits down at her dressing table for a moment, and now she wonders if perhaps this is all the result of what she’s had to drink. The alcohol is wearing off. She has the beginning of a headache. But she knows that whatever she decides to do should be done in the light of day, not now, at night. At last she gets up from the chair and lies down on the bed to think. She’s dizzy. Her mind swims. She can’t think, so she remains where she is, lying in the tangle of clothes she hasn’t packed yet.
Perhaps half an hour goes by. She wonders how long this will go on. And then she’s asleep. She’s nowhere, not even dreaming.

She wakes
to the sound of voices. She sits up and tries to get her eyes to focus, tries to open them wide enough to see in the light. The imprint of the wrinkled clothes is in the skin of her face; she can feel it with her fingers. And then she’s watching as two men bring Martin in through the front door and help him lie down on the couch. It’s all framed in the perspective of the hallway and the open bedroom door, and she’s not certain that it’s actually happening.

“Martin?” she murmurs, getting up, moving toward them. She stands in the doorway of the living room, rubbing her eyes and trying to clear her head. The two men are standing over her husband, who says something in a pleading voice to one of them. He’s lying on his side on the couch, both hands bandaged, a bruise on the side of his face as if something had spilled there.

“Martin,” Jane says.

And the two men move, as if startled by her voice. She realizes she’s never seen them before. One of them, the younger one, is already explaining. They’re from another company. “We were headed back this way,” he says, “and we thought it’d be better if you didn’t hear anything over the phone.” While he talks, the older one is leaning over Martin, going on about insurance. He’s a big square-shouldered man with an extremely rubbery look to his face. Jane notices this, notices the masklike quality of it, and she begins to tremble. Everything is oddly exaggerated—something is being said, they’re telling her that Martin burned his hands, and another voice is murmuring something. Both men go on talking, apologizing, getting ready to leave her there. She’s not fully awake. The lights in the room hurt her eyes; she feels a little sick to her stomach. The two men go out on the porch and then look back through the screen. “You take it easy, now,” the younger one says to Jane. She closes the door, understands that what she’s been hearing under the flow of the past few moments is Martin’s voice muttering her name, saying something. She walks over to him.

“Jesus,” he says. “It’s awful. I burned my hands and I didn’t even know it. I didn’t even feel it.”

She says, “Tell me what happened.”

“God,” he says. “Wally Harmon’s dead. God. I saw it happen.”

“Milly—” she begins. She can’t speak.

He’s crying. She moves to the entrance of the kitchen and turns to look at him. “I saw Milly tonight.” The room seems terribly small to her.

“The Van Pickel Lumberyard went up. The warehouse. Jesus.”

She goes into the kitchen and runs water. Outside the window above the sink she sees the dim street, the shadows of houses without light. She drinks part of a glass of water and then pours the rest down the sink. Her throat is still very dry. When she goes back into the living room, she finds him lying on his side, facing the wall.

“Martin?” she says.

“What?”

But she can’t find anything to tell him. She says, “God—poor Milly.” Then she makes her way into the bedroom and begins putting away the clothes. She doesn’t hear him get up, and she’s startled to find him standing in the doorway, staring at her.

“What’re you doing?” he asks.

She faces him, at a loss—and it’s her hesitation that gives him his answer.

“Jane?” he says, looking at the travel bag.

“Look,” she tells him, “I had a little too much to drink tonight.”

He just stares at her.

“Oh, this,” she manages. “I—I was just going through what I have to wear.”

But it’s too late. “Jesus,” he says, turning from her a little.

“Martin,” she says.

“What.”

“Does—did somebody tell Milly?”

He nods. “Teddy. Teddy stayed with her. She was crazy. Crazy.”

He looks at his hands. It’s as if he just remembered them. They’re wrapped tight; they look like two white clubs. “Jesus, Jane, are you—” He stops, shakes his head. “Jesus.”

“Don’t,” she says.

“Without even talking to me about it—”

“Martin, this is not the time to talk about anything.”

He’s quiet a moment, standing there in the doorway. “I keep seeing it,” he says. “I keep seeing Wally’s face. The—the way his foot jerked. His foot jerked like with electricity and he was—oh, Christ, he was already dead.”

“Oh, don’t,” she says. “Please. Don’t talk. Stop picturing it.”

“They gave me something to make me sleep,” he says. “And I won’t sleep.” He wanders back into the living room. A few minutes later she goes to him there and finds that whatever the doctors gave him has worked. He’s lying on his back, and he looks smaller somehow, his bandaged hands on his chest, his face pinched with grief, with whatever he’s dreaming. He twitches and mutters something and moans. She turns the light off and tiptoes back to the bedroom. She’s the one who won’t sleep. She gets into the bed and huddles there, leaving the light on. Outside the wind gets up—another storm rolls in off the plains. She listens as the rain begins, and hears the far-off drumming of thunder. The whole night seems deranged. She thinks of Wally Harmon, dead out in the blowing, rainy dark. And then she remembers Milly and her bad dreams, how she looked coming from the downpour, the wet street, with the magazine held over her head—her body so rounded, so weighted down with her baby, her love, the love she had waited for, that she said had surprised her. These events are too much to think about, too awful to imagine. The world seems cruelly immense now, and remorselessly itself. When Martin groans in the other room, she wishes he’d stop, and then she imagines that it’s another time, that she’s just awakened from a dream and is trying to sleep while they all sit in her living room and talk the hours of the night away.

In the morning
she’s awake first. She gets up and wraps herself in a robe and then shuffles into the kitchen and puts coffee on. For a minute it’s like any other morning. She sits at the table to wait for the coffee water to boil. He comes in like someone entering a stranger’s kitchen—his movements are tentative, almost shy. She’s surprised to see that he’s still in his uniform. He says, “I need you to help me go to the bathroom. I can’t get my pants undone.” He starts trying to work his belt loose.

“Wait,” she says. “Here, hold on.”

“I have to get out of these clothes, Jane. I think they smell like smoke.”

“Let me do it,” she says.

“Milly’s in the hospital—they had to put her under sedation.”

“Move your hands out of the way,” Jane says to him.

She has to help with everything, and when the time comes for him to eat, she has to feed him. She spoons scrambled eggs into his mouth and holds the coffee cup to his lips, and when that’s over with, she wipes his mouth and chin with a damp napkin. Then she starts bathwater running and helps him out of his underclothes. They work silently, and with a kind of embarrassment, until he’s sitting down and the water is right. When she begins to run a soapy rag over his back, he utters a small sound of satisfaction and comfort. But then he’s crying again. He wants to talk about Wally Harmon’s death. He says he has to. He tells her that a piece of hot metal the size of an arrow dropped from the roof of the Van Pickel warehouse and hit poor Wally Harmon in the top of the back.

“It didn’t kill him right away,” he says, sniffling. “Oh, Jesus. He looked right at me and asked if I thought he’d be all right. We were talking about it, honey. He reached up—he—over his shoulder. He took ahold of it for a second. Then he—then he looked at me and said he could feel it down in his stomach.”

“Don’t think about it,” Jane says.

“Oh, God.” He’s sobbing. “God.”

“Martin, honey—”

“I’ve done the best I could,” he says. “Haven’t I?”

“Shhh,” she says, bringing the warm rag over his shoulders and wringing it, so that the water runs down his back.

They’re quiet again. Together they get him out of the tub, and then she dries him off, helps him into a pair of jeans.

“Thanks,” he says, not looking at her. Then he says, “Jane.”

She’s holding his shirt out for him, waiting for him to turn and put his arms into the sleeves. She looks at him.

“Honey,” he says.

“I’m calling in,” she tells him. “I’ll call Eveline. We’ll go be with Milly.” “Last night,” he says. She looks straight at him.