The Stories of Richard Bausch (74 page)

“Oh, come on, Daddy. You haven’t been much like yourself the last few weeks, right?”

He turned from her and went out onto the porch. It was full dark now, and the crickets and night bugs had started their racket. Perhaps Cat had found it necessary to confide in her daughter about him. If that were so, his place in the house was lonely indeed.

He was ashamed; his mind hurt.

The moon was half shrouded in a fold of cumulus, and beyond the open place in the cloud, a single star sparkled. He took the ladder down, set it along the base of the house, then closed the paint can and put the brush in its jar of turpentine. Twice he saw Susan at the door, looking out for her mother. And when Cat finally drove in, Susan rushed out to her, letting the screen door slam. The car lights beamed onto the corners of the house, and he felt the burst of energy from Susan’s relief, the flurry and confusion of his wife’s return. Cat emerged from the car and held up two packages. He was at the dim end of the yard as she came up the walk.

“What’re you doing?” she asked. “Come eat.”

How he admired her! “Putting things away,” he said. He had meant it to sound cheerful.

“I hope you’re hungry.”

He was not hungry. Cat and Susan went up the steps of the porch and into the house, Susan leading the way, talking about the absurd county caseworkers and their failures, their casual attitude about laws broken, restraining orders left unheeded. He walked around to the garage and put the paint can and the glass jar on a shelf. The night was cool and fragrant. From inside the house, he heard Elaine shout a word and his wife’s high-pitched laughter.

Now they were calling him from the porch. They were all three standing in the light there.

“I’m here,” he said. “I was putting the paint in the garage.”

“You’d better be hungry, old man,” Cat said from the top step, in her way of commanding him, and out of the long habit of her affection. “I’ve got a lot of good food here.”

“A feast,” Susan said.

“Tell me you’re hungry,” said Cat.

“I’m famished,” he said, taking the step toward them. Trying again, gathering himself.

I’d been thinking
about burning my once goddamn intended Betty’s house down for about a week. Playing with the idea and looking at it in my head. This wave of thinking it through, like a push under the chest bone, like I’d really do it. There’d be the sweet revenge of it. After what they did to me. My own brother and my fiancée. One day things are normal as they have been for six years and then bang, Eddie and Betty are absent. Poof. Gone. The two of them.

Well, I let the rage seep down into me through the days. Kept getting this dream: I’m on a big billboard with a cigarette in my fingers, and it says “Alive with pleasure.” Big letters six feet tall. My face ten times bigger than that. Handsome as all hell. In the dream, I go by this thing on my way to Betty’s, on my way to exacting some payback from her and little brother. I’m flying, doubled up on this motor scooter, a tiny mother that squeaks like an un-oiled wagon. I’m headed over there, knowing the whole thing and living absa-fucking-lutely in the middle of it. I’m flying along on the scooter and
there the thing is, up in front of me, bigger than life. This damn billboard with me on it looking like absolute Hollywood.

I’m roiling around in broken glass under my skin, right? But it’s like Betty’s waiting for me anyway, and not in New York fucking my brother. I’m going to bring her over to the billboard and park and wait for her to look up. Hey Betty, look who’s alive with pleasure. Only, in the dream I can’t find her house. It’s gone. Everything’s where it was, trees and bushes and all that, but no house. Nothing. Empty ground. A burn place. Gone, just like Betty. Girl I loved. My own brother. I’m driving all over the county, and then I know again that she’s gone off with him and I’ve burned the house down and for the rest of that dream I’m looking hard for both of them even knowing I’m asleep—like it might be fun to kill them both in there where it doesn’t matter.

And I start wondering if it means something I’m on a fucking scooter, so I start asking questions in a general way about it. Without explaining the whole thing. I find myself telling it to Susanna at work. Worked in the stereo department at the Walgreen’s together. Turns out, I’m given a strong opinion from Susanna, who I’ve known since high school. A vague irritation through all the years. Susanna. “Everything means something,” she says importantly.

We’ve been doing a lot of this kind of talking, and I don’t think it means anything. Other than I’ve got murder in my heart.

“How did you find out?” Susanna asks me.

Took my poor mother telling me. Woman hated confrontations, and here she was wringing her hands, with her hair up in that beehive she always wore. Giving me the bad news. Sixty-three then and still slim, with that way of trying to soften the blow about the whole experience of life on this planet, if you know what I mean. Like she figured all along from the day I was born that I was going to get the shit knocked out of me. I felt that way.

“Larry,” she says, “you got something else you want to do tonight?”

Like that.

“What’re you getting at?” I say, though I guess some part of me knows this isn’t going to be pleasant. There’s too much pain in her face.

“Betty’s gone with Eddie. They headed north, son. Getting married.”

“Eddie?” I say. “Betty?”

She nods like it’s news they’re dead.

Well, I figured they might as well be. I could see the two of them strolling
all over New York together. Honeymooners. Betty wearing clothes I bought her, since I had the job. Betty listening to tapes I made for her.

I don’t know how I could’ve let Susanna in on all this, but I did. Fact is, she was always there, like the walls of a damn room or something. Around, you know. This aggravating somebody you don’t have to be careful with.

“You know what I think your dream means?” she says. “I think it means maybe you got a big head.”

And I say, “Jesus Christ, Susanna.”

And she says, “Well, there it is. It’s only your head in the picture, right?”

“I don’t know why I tell you anything,” I say. We’re being fairly good-natured under the circumstances.

“Well, it is your head, right? Big as a house?”

“It’s my face.”

“Well, your face is on your head.”

“It’s a picture. Like the one out on Interstate Twenty-nine.”

“That’s Jeff Bridges, id’n it?”

“This is a dream,” I say.

“No, the real one. Id’n that Jeff Bridges?”

I figure Susanna’s trying to work me a little, the way she does. When she’s like that, talking to her can be like trying to give complicated instructions to a foreigner.

“I know what it means,” she says. “You’re not as big as you wish you were. That’s why you’re on the scooter.”

“No,” I say. “I owned a scooter last year.”

“You never rode it,” she says.

“Doesn’t matter whether I rode it or not,” I say.

Susanna’s tall. Smart. Back then, she was very skinny and not much at all up top, which she suffered for all through high school. She carried herself in a sort of hunched way, like something was bothering her in her heart. Looking at her, you got the feeling that if she melted she’d go on a long, long time. A river of Susanna. Everywhere I went at work, there she was. I’d known her, ten years? twelve years? An aggravation, generally, but we both hated Grimes, who owned the store. Compared to Grimes, she was all sweetness and light.

Anyway, she says, “I don’t think your dream means anything.”

And I tell her, “You said before that you thought everything means something.”

“Only if you want it to,” she says.

“Bullshit,” I say.

“The fact that you say bullshit could mean something,” she says.

And I say, “A repeated dream means something.”

And she says, “You’re mad at Eddie.”

“Raging,” I tell her.

“He fell in love,” she says. “Poor guy.”

“He snuck around behind my back.”

“I think it’s like in the movies,” she says. “Romantic, like it should have music playing behind it. And they’ll have Betty’s nice house to live in, if you don’t go off the deep end.”

“Shut up, Susanna.”

“Do you love her?”

“She was engaged to me,” I say. “Of course I love her.”

“Did you tell her that? I mean, obviously you didn’t provide something she needed.”

“Yeah, I just trusted her and gave her anything she wanted.”

This goes on all day in the store. Nobody comes in. Mr. Grimes is going to go bust. “Put up a billboard,” I tell him. “You have to advertise.”

“I heard that,” Susanna says. “You’re dreaming again.”

In the stockroom there’s some boxes to break up, so I break them up. I wreck them. Boom. Boom, with a hammer from the hardware section. Splitting Eddie’s skull. Splitting Betty’s. Boom, little brother. Boom, Betty-bye. In my head I’m watching her house go up like any movie fire I ever saw. I’m
her,
come home with my new husband to find everything destroyed.

“I heard you back there,” Susanna says.

“I wasn’t striving for quiet.”

And she says, “Tell me more about your dream.”

There’s nothing else to tell. So I say that.

“You never find her house, right?”

“Right,” I say.

And she says, “Want to go somewhere tonight?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Maybe it’ll help,” she says. “Get your mind off things.”

No. And I wish Betty was home so I could take Susanna over there. Have Betty see me pull up with long Susanna in the car. Another girl. But Betty’s house is empty. Because Betty’s in New York giving it to my goddamn little brother.

And the next thing I do is walk over to the hardware section for a gas can. My blood’s going a mile a minute.

“You’re asking for trouble,” Susanna says, behind me.

“Look,” I say. “Go find somebody else to bother.”

“I’m the voice of your conscience,” she says.

“Fuck off,” I say.

“Okay.” She sings it. “I’m the voice of your future. I’m the voice of consequences—time in jail, trials and fines and Betty’s policeman brother. Boo.”

“I’m going to cut my lawn,” I say.

But then when it’s closing time she’s all primed to come with me. So I tell her no. “I usually cut the grass alone,” I tell her. “I’m weird that way.”

She says, “I know what you’re thinking of doing, Larry. You said you dreamed it was all burned. And it’s just like you. It’s got television written all over it.”

And she does know. I can see that much. I may not know when my fiancée of six years standing is getting set to run off with my brother, but I can see when somebody’s figured out my intendons. “What’ll you do if I don’t take you?” I say.

“It would be a real crisis of conscience for me,” she says.

I don’t have any desire to listen to more of this kind of talk, so I take her with me and we drive to the Gulf station and fill the can up with high-test. I think I might tie her up somewhere and let her spend the night worrying about creatures in the wild, bears and raccoons and insects, I know how scared she is of snakes. But it feels almost normal with her sitting there on the passenger side, waiting for me to get back in. She smiles like it’s perfectly okay to go out in the woods and burn a house down with every fucking thing in it. We head for Betty’s place, a cottage in an acre of trees past the graveyard. The gas is smelling up the inside of the car, and Susanna opens her window and sticks her head out.

“You know, this is against the law.”

“I’m stunned and disappointed,” I say.

“I can’t hear you,” she says. “The wind.”

I yell, “I said I know it’s against the law.”

And she says, “Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

There’s clearly something intentional about how she can’t hear me. We get to the turnoff to Betty’s. There’s the billboard. We look at it.

“Jeff Bridges,” she says.

“It doesn’t say so.”

“Well, it’s not you, Larry.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

She stares at it. “He doesn’t look like a smoker.”

“He’s just somebody in a picture,” I say.

And she says, “Yeah, but look. His teeth are white.”

“It’s a Hollywood guy,” I tell her. “They have special white stains. Dyes they use so their teeth look like that.”

She’s not buying any of it. “They’re people, no different from you and me.”

“They have better dentists,” I tell her. “Better everything.”

“I used to think that, too,” she says.

“Well, it’s true.”

“They’re like anybody else.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Anybody else with an ocean of money and all the sex they want.”

“You can have all the sex you want,” she says. And pauses a little, giving me this look. “Just close your eyes and fantasize.” Then she sings it: “Close your eyes and fantasize.”

“Shut up, Susanna. I’m in no mood.”

“Just teasing,” she says. “Gyah.”

She sits there staring at Jeff Bridges.

“Hey, Larry,” she says, “you remember when you went off to join the air force?”

“No. It slipped my mind until you mentioned it. Was I ever in the air force?”