The Stories of Richard Bausch (75 page)

“You remember how you kissed Betty and then shook hands with little Eddie, how old was he?”

“Fourteen.”

“Think of it,” Susanna says. “It’s all gone so fast.”

“What about it?”

“Well, you’re not as hurt as you are mad. I think you’d be more hurt if you really loved Betty.”

I ignore this. I pull into the road toward Betty’s house. It’s dawning on me that I’m really going to burn it to the ground. Of course I don’t have the slightest trouble finding it.

“Okay,” I say.

And Susanna says, “I was going to tell you something else about when you joined the air force.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“He looked up to you,” she says. “You were big as any hero to him. He told me. I did too, you know.”

“Great,” I tell her. “I’ll give you an autograph.” Real sarcastic.

She says, “What happened to you though?”

I get out of the car and reach into the back seat for the gas can. The house is back in the trees.

“Larry,” she says. “Wait for me.”

I don’t stop. She’s coming along behind me, and then she’s next to me. “Maybe we can run away after this,” she says.

I’m not sure I hear her right. When I stop, she stops.

“They’ll be after you,” she says. It’s like she’s being shy now, toeing the ground, not looking at me.

“How’re they going to know?” I ask.

“I’ll tell them?” She smiles.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Let me sit down so I can get it straight. You want us to run away together or you’ll tell on me?”

“I know it’s ridiculous.”

I walk on back to the car and put the can in the trunk, with this ache like I knew I’d probably never go through with it anyway. And—but, see—I’m totally at a loss, too. Totally
thwarted,
which is one of her words. It comes to me that I might tie her to a tree and let the ants crawl, I confess it. Let the ants thwart her around a little bit. But I don’t, of course. Because the truth is I’m not half so bad when it’s something other than breaking up boxes with a hammer. So we ride without a word back to town and she asks me will I take her home. I do. She asks me in. I can’t believe it.

“No,” I say.

“We’ve had some kind of breakthrough,” she says. “What do you think?”

“I think I’ll get drunk,” I say. “Jesus.”

And she says, “I guess this means we’re not running away.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” I say.

“I like the romance of it, I must admit,” she says.

“Romance,” I tell her.

“Well,” she says, “I’d have to supply it all. I know that.”

Her mother’s already waiting in the open doorway of the house.

“Time to go,” I tell her. “Romance and all.”

“I don’t suppose you want to kiss me,” she says.

And I say, “I never asked for any charity.”

“I’m not interested in charity,” she says. “It wasn’t out of charity that I asked.”

“Right,” I say.

“So?” she says.

“What,” I say.

And she says, “You can’t be serious. I’m offering you riches.”

I don’t have an answer for this.

“Wonderful date,” she says. “We looked at a billboard. We didn’t burn a house down.”

Her mother put on the floodlamps around the yard, and in that light she looks almost pretty. The truth is, I never minded her face. “Well,” she says. “I had fun.” And she smiles.

“Fun,” I say.

“I have fun with you,” she says. “I really do. Even looking at billboards and not burning houses. You have nice clear eyes and when you’re not crazy you make me laugh. And it doesn’t even bother me that you didn’t turn out to be so great.”

“What was I supposed to turn out to be?” I say.

She shrugs. “Different from us, I guess. You were heading off into the sun.”

I watch her fool with the top button of her blouse.

“Poor Larry,” she says. “Trying to bear up under the beams of love.”

“You,” I say, “are truly the oddest person around.”

She’s looking at me with this expression like she might say something really serious. Then she smiles. “I know,” she says. “It’s ridiculous.”

She gets out, and I watch her go up the walk. She’s attractive in a kind of stretched way. Long Susanna. The bigger-than-life girl.

“Ought to put you on that goddamn billboard,” I say. “You’d sell some cigarettes.” I really mean it to be kind. And it’s the first kind thought I’ve had in days. And I’m thinking, well, maybe we have got to some new place, who knows? Nobody likes to be alone. And could be that’s it in the dream: I’m all alone up there in that bigger-than-life picture. I have my shortcomings but I’m not stupid.

“See you tomorrow?” she says.

“If I don’t kill myself or hurt somebody,” I tell her.

“I think we’re safe,” she says.

Ah hell. Susanna. Imagine it. Close your eyes and fantasize. Susanna, of all people. Because we didn’t burn a damn house down. Because I didn’t turn out to be any different.

When I get home, my mother’s sitting out on the front porch.

“Well?” she says.

“I went out with Susanna.” I can hear the surprise in my own voice. Susanna. I almost have to say the name again.

“That’s good, son. Eddie called. Wanted to talk to you.” “No,” I said. “Not for a long time.” “I’m sure he’ll understand,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Everybody understands.” I go in the house. Eddie. Nothing excuses it. Not one thing in it makes a bit of sense to me. But I’m actually quiet inside. And I can breathe all the way out.

“I like Susanna,” she says from the other side of the screen door. “Always have.”

“I could never really stand her,” I say.

“Well, you never know,” says my mother. It’s clear from her voice that she’s already got hopes of some kind, and never mind what I just said. Just then, I don’t think I could’ve told what holds the trees in place, if I ever did know.

“Ma?” I say. “You know what Susanna says? She says it’s ridiculous.”

“Eddie and Betty running off?” she says.

“No. She thinks that’s romantic.”

“Oh, well—that’s Susanna, all right.”

“Do you think it’s ridiculous?” I say. “Susanna and me?” But she doesn’t answer, and maybe I didn’t get it out so she could hear me. I’m sitting in my chair by the window and it’s like I can feel the planet spinning, because I just can’t believe it. Susanna, of all people. Long Susanna. Irritating, talk-too-much, get-in-my-way Susanna.

Jesus. The damn God’s honest truth. Right there in front of me. And then the more I think about it, the more it starts to be funny. I’m laughing, sitting in the chair, and after a while my mother says from the porch, “Give it time, son. It’ll all heal with time.”

I don’t even have the strength to tell her.

Fridays my mother
cleans at the Wiltons’, and last week she said the lady, Mrs. Wilton, asked her if she knew anyone, meaning me, who can give an estimate on some remodeling work. My mother likes to tell people what I can do with a hammer and nails, so I didn’t have any trouble believing this. I can hear her clear as if I’m standing there, her voice with the cigarettes in it, telling Mrs. Wilton about her carpenter son.

She came home all excited. Sure that she’d found me a job. I was sitting in my chair on the porch, and wasn’t in much of a cheerful mood. She said it’s not like me, which is true enough. My boy, Willy, who’s almost eleven years old and ought to know better, had left his brand-new baseball glove out in the yard so the dog could get to it. Dog’s not even our own, this German shepherd pup the people next door are going to start a kennel with. Thing chewed a hole in the thumb; I’d been trying to get Willy interested in baseball, and to tell the truth, Willy’d rather play soldier with plastic dolls. So I was giving him words about the baseball glove, wondering to myself if they called him sissy in school and wanting, even if I don’t know exactly
how to go about it, to at least be there for him—tending to him and giving a damn what happens to him—like my father never was, or did, for me. And to tell you the real truth, I was mad at him about this first baseman’s mitt that I couldn’t afford in the first place being left out all night, so when my mother walked up announcing that she’d got me a job, this whole other area of worry came in on me—as if you could forget a thing like being out of work.

“You’d never let a little thing like that bother you, son,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “But it shouldn’t have happened.”

“Well, things’ll be better now.”

Willy hung back by the door while she went on about the job. He wanted to know, too. But I was a little sore at him, couldn’t help this feeling that he’d begun to depend on her to smooth things over when he was being disciplined. This wasn’t the first time she’d stepped between us, and Willy is smart. There’s no excuse for it, but being in the kind of mess we’re in doesn’t leave a lot in the way of patience. Maybe she should’ve stepped between us a time or two. But sometimes it feels like you put so much into a child, into the raising of him, you love him so hard, there’s not much left for liking him, particularly. “Get inside,” I said to him, feeling low and mean, and out of control some way, watching him go on in.

“Are you listening?” my mother said.

“I’m listening, Ruth. The lady wants an estimate.”

“Paint and carpentry, too. She wants a ceiling redone, and some molding put up, and wallpaper. The library needs redoing, and the whole porch has to be rebuilt and painted, and all the eaves have to be done, too. This is your job if you play your cards right.”

Nothing ever stops her. She moved to the door and caught Willy, who had come back and was standing there. She put her arms around him and asked how’s her little man.

“I told you to get inside,” I said to him.

“Yes, sir.”

He shuffled through the kitchen.

“Are you riding him again?” she said to me, but she was smiling. From the kitchen I could hear Janet rattling dishes. She’d come in from work and insisted that she would put dinner on, as she always does when things are getting her down. Lately she hasn’t been very good about hiding the strain she feels with Ruth here, and there’s no place for Ruth to go, not to mention
the fact that Ruth is also bringing in a good part of the income. These days, she and Janet make the money, and I generally keep the house.

You have
to know that I’ve been all over the area looking: busboy, clerk, salesman, janitor, anything. The last three houses I worked on are still empty in that big meadow south of here, and the builder—Teddy Aubrey—still owes me money. He’s down to selling Oldsmobiles in Charlottesville. Went bust as a builder after the first of the year. One of the new houses that he did manage to sell he never finished, and the people who live there don’t have any screens, are stuck with a dirt-and-weed patch for a lawn. No hydroseeding, because Baylor, who does hydroseeding around here, refused to do it unless Aubrey could pay him cash up front.

Which is what I should’ve done. I worked two months in the last one, flooring and drywall and painting, even some plumbing, and I never got paid a penny for it. I went over to the new house last week and asked the owners if I could hydroseed for them; I’d charge half what Baylor charges. Just enough above cost to pay my rent. Anything. But they don’t have ready cash, either.

“I can’t take blood from a stone,” Aubrey tells me over the phone. “I’m having to bring my kids home from college. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Well, he’s selling cars, is what he’s doing. And he
still
drives a Lincoln. I get cards from him saying, “Come on in!”

“When the big ones go down, they bring all the little ones down with them,” Ruth said.

“I wouldn’t characterize Teddy Aubrey as big,” I told her. “Nor me as being so small, either.” I meant it as a joke, I was always joking and kidding around before. This didn’t come out sounding like any joke, though.

She said, “I was talking about the real estate companies, baby.”

When I was
a kid, we lived in a nice house in the country. Central air before anyone else had it. Swimming pool. Extra rooms, the whole thing. My father worked high up for the space program. Top-level executive, and he traveled all the time. Ruth had somebody in every week to help out with the housekeeping: this big Mexican lady with a partially cut-off ear, who was always blessing the house with her rosary. I wondered about that sudden place where her ear just stopped, especially after my father went off to start a new
life. The ear looked like it had been snipped with scissors, a planned cut, part of some ritual or other, but then I heard my mother say it was the result of a fight between the Mexican lady and her husband, who still lived with her. Knowing this, I was always tempted to ask how it happened, but I never let on that I had noticed it.

When I say my father went off to start a new life, I mean
as
someone else: a man with a new name, a new identity, in another state, or maybe even in another country, who knows? I was afraid of him a lot of the time and wasn’t so sad to realize he wasn’t coming back, except that we started having money problems. We wound up moving to this little place in the north end of the county, living with Ruth’s older brother and his new wife, who never dressed in anything but a nightgown and robe. Someone had told her once that she looked like that movie star, Katharine Hepburn, and it must’ve gone to her head. She wore her hair in the style of those old movies, and she hurried through the house with that ratty robe flowing behind her, constantly in some kind of uproar, like a person playing a scene. She loved piano music. It was always on in the house, always coming from their room during the nights, and we knew it was part of the act. But she liked to have a good laugh, too, and she didn’t mind helping us out. We tolerated each other’s ways, and we shared the bills, and had some fun in the evenings. By then I was working in the summers as an apprentice to Mr. Hall, who was contracting with Aubrey for almost everything. Then Mr. Hall retired and I took over, and for a while there I had a pretty steady source of income, even in the winter months. That was our life for a time. It was what I ended my growing up in. And when the changes came, they came quick.