The Stories of Richard Bausch (27 page)

“My mother’s men friends used to do whatever they wanted to me,” she said. “It went on all the time. All sorts of obscene goings-on.”

Mcrae said, “I’m sorry that happened to you, Belle.” And for an instant he was surprised by the sincerity of his feeling: it was as if he couldn’t feel sorry enough. Yet it was genuine: it all had to do with his own unhappy story. The whole world seemed very, very sad to him. “I’m really very sorry,” he said.

She was quiet a moment, as if thinking about this. Then she said, “Let’s pull over now. I’m tired of riding.”

“It’s almost out of gas,” he said.

“I know, but pull it over anyway.”

“You sure you want to do that?”

“See?” she said. “That’s what I mean. I wouldn’t like being told what I should do all the time, or asked if I was sure of what I wanted or not.”

He pulled the car over and slowed to a stop. “You’re right,” he said, “See? Leadership. I’m just not used to somebody with leadership qualities.”

She held the gun a little toward him. He was looking at the small, dark, perfect circle of the end of the barrel. “I guess we should get out, huh,” she said.

“I guess so.” He hadn’t even heard himself.

“Do you have any relatives left anywhere?” she said.

“No.”

“Your folks are both dead?”

“Right, yes.”

“Which one died first?”

“I told you,” he said, “didn’t I? My mother. My mother died first.”

“Do you feel like an orphan?”

He sighed. “Sometimes.” The whole thing was slipping away from him.

“I guess I do too.” She reached back and opened her door. “Let’s get out now.” And when he opened his door she aimed the gun at his head. “Get out slow.”

“Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Look, you’re not going to do this, are you? I mean I thought we were friends and all.”

“Just get out real slow, like I said to.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’m getting out.” He opened his door, and the ceiling light surprised and frightened him. Some wordless part of himself understood that this was it, and all his talk had come to nothing: all the questions she had asked him, and everything he had told her—it was all completely useless. This was going to happen to him, and it wouldn’t mean anything; it would just be what happened.

“Real slow,” she said. “Come on.”

“Why are you doing this?” he said. “You’ve got to tell me that before you do it.”

“Will you please get out of the car now?”

He just stared at her.

“All right, I’ll shoot you where you sit.”

“Okay,” he said, “don’t shoot.”

She said in an irritable voice, as though she were talking to a recalcitrant child, “You’re just putting it off.”

He was backing himself out, keeping his eyes on the little barrel of the gun, and he could hear something coming, seemed to notice it in the same instant that she said, “Wait.” He stood half in and half out of the car, doing as she said, and a truck came over the hill ahead of them, a tractor-trailer, all white light and roaring.

“Stay still,” she said, crouching, aiming the gun at him.

The truck came fast, was only fifty yards away, and without having to decide about it, without even knowing that he would do it, Mcrae bolted into the road. He was running: there was the exhausted sound of his own
breath, the truck horn blaring, coming on, louder, the thing bearing down on him, something buzzing past his head. Time slowed. His legs faltered under him, were heavy, all the nerves gone out of them. In the light of the oncoming truck, he saw his own white hands outstretched as if to grasp something in the air before him, and then the truck was past him, the blast of air from it propelling him over the side of the road and down an embankment in high, dry grass, which pricked his skin and crackled like hay.

He was alive. He lay very still. Above him was the long shape of the road, curving off in the distance, the light of the truck going on. The noise faded and was nothing. A little wind stirred. He heard the car door close. Carefully, he got to all fours, and crawled a few yards away from where he had fallen. He couldn’t be sure of which direction—he only knew he couldn’t stay where he was. Then he heard what he thought were her footsteps in the road, and he froze. He lay on his side, facing the embankment. When she appeared there, he almost cried out.

“Mcrae? Did I get you?” She was looking right at where he was in the dark, and he stopped breathing. “Mcrae?”

He watched her move along the edge of the embankment.

“Mcrae?” She put one hand over her eyes, and stared at a place a few feet over from him; then she turned and went back out of sight. He heard the car door again, and again he began to crawl farther away. The ground was cold and rough, and there was a lot of sand.

He heard her put the key in the trunk, and he stood up, began to run, he was getting away, but something went wrong in his leg, something sent him sprawling, and a sound came out of him that seemed to echo, to stay on the air, as if to call her to him. He tried to be perfectly still, tried not to breathe, hearing now the small pop of the gun. He counted the reports: one, two, three. She was just standing there at the edge of the road, firing into the dark, toward where she must have thought she heard the sound. Then she was rattling the paper bag, reloading. He could hear the click of the gun. He tried to get up, and couldn’t. He had sprained his ankle, had done something very bad to it. Now he was crawling wildly, blindly through the tall grass, hearing again the small report of the pistol. At last he rolled into a shallow gully, and lay there with his face down, breathing the dust, his own voice leaving him in a whimpering animal-like sound that he couldn’t stop, even as he held both shaking hands over his mouth.

“Mcrae?” She sounded so close. “Hey,” she said. “Mcrae?”

He didn’t move. He lay there, perfectly still, trying to stop himself from crying. He was sorry for everything he had ever done. He didn’t care about the money, or the car or going out west or anything. When he lifted his head to peer over the lip of the gully, and saw that she had started down the embankment with his flashlight, moving like someone with time and the patience to use it, he lost his sense of himself as Mcrae: he was just something crippled and breathing in the dark, lying flat in a little winding gully of weeds and sand. Mcrae was gone, was someone far, far away, from ages ago—a man fresh out of prison, with the whole country to wander in, and insurance money in his pocket, who had headed west with the idea that maybe his luck, at long last, had changed.

Very early in
the morning, too early, he hears her trying to jump rope out on the sidewalk below his bedroom window. He wakes to the sound of her shoes on the concrete, her breathless counting as she jumps—never more than three times in succession—and fails again to find the right rhythm, the proper spring in her legs to achieve the thing, to be a girl jumping rope. He gets up and moves to the window and, parting the curtain only slightly, peers out at her. For some reason he feels he must be stealthy, must not let her see him gazing at her from this window. He thinks of the heartless way children tease the imperfect among them, and then he closes the curtain.

She is his only granddaughter, the unfortunate inheritor of his big-boned genes, his tendency toward bulk, and she is on a self-induced program of exercise and dieting, to lose weight. This is in preparation for the last meeting of the PTA, during which children from the fifth and sixth grades will put on a gymnastics demonstration. There will be a vaulting horse and a mini-trampoline, and everyone is to participate. She wants to be able to do at least as well as the other children in her class, and so she has
been trying exercises to improve her coordination and lose the weight that keeps her rooted to the ground. For the past two weeks she has been eating only one meal a day, usually lunch, since that’s the meal she eats at school, and swallowing cans of juice at other mealtimes. He’s afraid of anorexia but trusts her calm determination to get ready for the event. There seems no desperation, none of the classic symptoms of the disease. Indeed, this project she’s set for herself seems quite sane: to lose ten pounds, and to be able to get over the vaulting horse—in fact, she hopes that she’ll be able to do a handstand on it and, curling her head and shoulders, flip over to stand upright on the other side. This, she has told him, is the outside hope. And in two weeks of very grown-up discipline and single-minded effort, that hope has mostly disappeared; she’s still the only child in the fifth grade who has not even been able to propel herself over the horse, and this is the day of the event. She will have one last chance to practice at school today, and so she’s up this early, out on the lawn, straining, pushing herself.

He dresses quickly and heads downstairs. The ritual in the mornings is simplified by the fact that neither of them is eating breakfast. He makes the orange juice, puts vitamins on a saucer for them both. When he glances out the living-room window, he sees that she is now doing somersaults in the dewy grass. She does three of them while he watches, and he isn’t stealthy this time but stands in the window with what he hopes is an approving, unworried look on his face. After each somersault she pulls her sweat shirt down, takes a deep breath, and begins again, the arms coming down slowly, the head ducking slowly under; it’s as if she falls on her back, sits up, and then stands up. Her cheeks are ruddy with effort. The moistness of the grass is on the sweat suit, and in the ends of her hair. It will rain this morning—there’s thunder beyond the trees at the end of the street. He taps on the window, gestures, smiling, for her to come in. She waves at him, indicates that she wants him to watch her, so he watches her. He applauds when she’s finished—three hard, slow tumbles. She claps her hands together as if to remove dust from them and comes trotting to the door. As she moves by him, he tells her she’s asking for a bad cold, letting herself get wet so early in the morning. It’s his place to nag. Her glance at him acknowledges this.

“I can’t get the rest of me to follow my head,” she says about the somersaults.

They go into the kitchen, and she sits down, pops a vitamin into her
mouth, and takes a swallow of the orange juice. “I guess I’m not going to make it over that vaulting horse after all,” she says suddenly.

“Sure you will.”

“I don’t care.” She seems to pout. This is the first sign of true discouragement she’s shown.

He’s been waiting for it. “Brenda—honey, sometimes people aren’t good at these things. I mean, I was never any good at it.”

“I bet you were,” she says. “I bet you’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No,” he says, “really.”

He’s been keeping to the diet with her, though there have been times during the day when he’s cheated. He no longer has a job, and the days are long; he’s hungry all the time. He pretends to her that he’s still going on to work in the mornings after he walks her to school, because he wants to keep her sense of the daily balance of things, of a predictable and orderly routine, intact. He believes this is the best way to deal with grief—simply to go on with things, to keep them as much as possible as they have always been. Being out of work doesn’t worry him, really: he has enough money in savings to last awhile. At sixty-one, he’s almost eligible for Social Security, and he gets monthly checks from the girl’s father, who lives with another woman, and other children, in Oregon. The father has been very good about keeping up the payments, though he never visits or calls. Probably he thinks the money buys him the privilege of remaining aloof, now that Brenda’s mother is gone. Brenda’s mother used to say he was the type of man who learned early that there was nothing of substance anywhere in his soul, and spent the rest of his life trying to hide this fact from himself. No one was more upright, she would say, no one more honorable, and God help you if you ever had to live with him. Brenda’s father was the subject of bitter sarcasm and scorn. And yet, perhaps not so surprisingly, Brenda’s mother would call him in those months just after the divorce, when Brenda was still only a toddler, and she would try to get the baby to say things to him over the phone. And she would sit there with Brenda on her lap and cry after she had hung up.

“I had a doughnut yesterday at school,” Brenda says now.

“That’s lunch. You’re supposed to eat lunch.”

“I had spaghetti, too. And three pieces of garlic bread. And pie. And a big salad.”

“What’s one doughnut?”

“Well, and I didn’t eat anything the rest of the day.”

“I know,” her grandfather says. “See?”

They sit quiet for a little while. Sometimes they’re shy with each other—more so lately. They’re used to the absence of her mother by now—it’s been almost a year—but they still find themselves missing a beat now and then, like a heart with a valve almost closed. She swallows the last of her juice and then gets up and moves to the living room, to stand gazing out at the yard. Big drops have begun to fall. It’s a storm, with rising wind and, now, very loud thunder. Lightning branches across the sky, and the trees in the yard disappear in sheets of rain. He has come to her side, and he pretends an interest in the details of the weather, remarking on the heaviness of the rain, the strength of the wind. “Some storm,” he says finally. “I’m glad we’re not out in it.” He wishes he could tell what she’s thinking, where the pain is; he wishes he could be certain of the harmlessness of his every word. “Honey,” he ventures, “we could play hooky today. If you want to.”