The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (63 page)

“Don’t worry.” Dave Blount will not stop smiling. “We’ll do everything we can to make it pleasant for you here.”

Travers looks around warily. “This isn’t one of those places where when you try to leave they won’t let you, is it.”

The Daves shake their heads.

“Certainly not.”

“No way.”

“We’re easy here.”

“It’s
sauve qui peut
,” Dave Isham says with a look that tells Travers he isn’t exactly sure what that means. “We were just about to eat. Grab a bowl and pull up a chair.”

“Mi casa su casa.”

“Thanks.”

The chairs are comfortable. The soup they serve him is good. As if Travers has asked, they take turns explaining what they’re doing here. In its own way the talk that surrounds him is as empty as the field he woke up in. The various Daves all got sick of their lives one day in different ways for various reasons
but all more or less at the age Travers is now, which is thirty-five. One way or another they all woke up one morning to the sameold sameold and simply maxd out, but all on a different lover or a different line of work or a different family situation in a completely different place from all the others, although the stories seem interchangeable. Each presents the circumstances as brand-new. Each of them knows there are a million stories like the one he tells and every one of them insists that his story is different. This is what every man honestly believes. The Daves all got sick of their lives and started looking for ways out: the faked death so the survivors would get the insurance money to see them through; the explained runaway, with farewell note (
DON’T LOOK FOR ME
) pinned to the pillow or neatly folded on the kitchen table; the simple disappearance, although with fingerprints on file online and Missing Persons divisions in abundance, no disappearance is simple. Escaping the sameold sameold, the Daves all seem the same.

How long have they been here? The answers vary. How long are they going to stay and what do they want to do next? No one can say.

“We’re cool,” Dave Isham says, “who wants to do anything next?”

Travers feels his head jerk. Was he nodding off or did something sneak up behind him and smack him with a rolled-up newspaper? He isn’t sure. He stands abruptly. “I can’t be here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“What are you going to do?”

Too soon to tell. “I need to think.” He sticks his head back in the door and tells the polite lie. “Back soon.”

“Take your time,” Dave Blount says genially.

Somebody else calls after him, “It’s the one thing we’ve got plenty of.”

The surrounding field is even emptier than before. It is like surfacing in a vacuum. When Travers skims the horizon looking for landmarks to ground himself, the banked Ailanthus look dauntingly the same. No tree stands out from any other tree. If he doesn’t start walking, he’ll never find the road out of here, but he’s reluctant to push off. If he turns his back on the house and starts walking he may never find it again. The changing light is so gradual that he is surprised to see that it’s getting dark. When he looks back, there is smoke curling enchantingly out of the chimney and there are lights glowing in every window, although he remembers them as boarded up. It makes him think of long walks after supper on December nights in New London. When he was old enough to go out alone he used to leave the house as soon as it got dark and roam the neighborhood, waiting for lights to pop on in other people’s windows.
He knows now that he was window-shopping for other lives, checking out the displays in his neighbors’ brightly lighted houses as though what he saw could be his, any time he was willing to pay the price. Did he want to live here, where a high school boy sits over his computer in his very own room or over there, where a couple with a flock of children bend their heads over grace before meals at the kitchen table or does he want to be like this old, old man in the orange stucco and live in silence in a place where nobody comes?

He needs to get moving but nostalgia hobbles him. The lives he used to spy on fuse with the life he thinks he and Sandra were living, bending their heads over nuked chicken dinners on the few nights when they ate together, slouching together on the sofa to watch
TV
while they emptied the identical foil trays, down to the bake-in-place apple cobbler. Sweet, he thinks. From the outside other people’s lives usually look sweet.

OK
, time to decide. Travers has three choices here. He can go back into the house and settle down with the Daves for as long as it takes. He can look for the road and head out into a more productive disappearance or he can do what he already knows he has to do—head back for the tracks—that way, he thinks. The morning train is long gone but if he can find the tracks he can get another train. Head for the tracks and follow them to the next station where, he thinks, his ticket is probably still good. After all, he bought a fare from New Haven to New York and didn’t get the good of it because he jumped off somewhere around halfway. Worst case scenario, he can forget about the city and use his return ticket. He checks. Yep, he’s still holding his return.

OK
. Right. Time to pull up his socks and go back. He thinks: I owe it to my boss and my students, even though none of them ever gets anything above a C. I owe it to Sandra. After all, he thinks, not necessarily correctly, Sandra needs me. Get home, he thinks, walk in and she’ll be so glad to see me that everything will be better for us. He should call ahead, but his phone isn’t necessarily working and he doesn’t want to find out for sure. Besides, he wants it to be a surprise. Things will change if she was really worried and she’s really glad to see him.

If this field was really like the field in
Zork
, Dave’s return would involve a measured number of trials and errors, ordeals and decisions, but it isn’t. If this disconnected state Travers is in was in fact an ordinary crisis, his decision to go back would certainly resolve it. All this would turn out to be one of those dreams that evaporates as soon as the sleeper wakes up.

Travers would wake up on the same train he was riding this morning, surrounded by the same passengers and sitting next to the woman keyboarding with the morning paper folded on his lap and his briefcase at his feet and
he would wake up with no actual time elapsed. Waking, he’d discover that although it’s almost night here in the field where he is standing, on the train he was riding to the city, it is still ten a.m., seconds before he jumped.

There’s also the possibility that he fell out: some kind of seizure—an attack of
petit mal
or a sugar crash that knocked him flat. In that case Travers will come to on the rattling metal floor just over the car’s rear wheels, surrounded by horrified commuters who don’t know what to do because he’s choking on his tongue.
Step back
, one of the passengers will say, brandishing a pencil for him to clench between his teeth.
I’m a doctor
. Worst case scenario is a heart attack, unless it is the best: Travers returning to consciousness in an emergency room in Stamford or Bridgeport because much as the white light beckoned, at the last minute he lost heart and ran away from it. He hopes it doesn’t spin out that way because he knows that people who almost die and come back from the white light spend the rest of their lives in perpetual mourning. They felt so calm, they say with that catch in the breath that masks a bereaved sob.

It was so peaceful there that they will never be happy again.

Travers should be so lucky. As it turns out, once he starts walking away from the house, he has to walk for hours. With no sun to steer by and no sliver of moon to light his way, he has no idea whether he’s going east, toward the water and the tracks, or whether in fact he has circled in the dark and is accidentally heading for the mountains in the west where—if this could only be
Zork
!
—where he’d go through the mountain pass and broach the gorge to find the miserable dam and, with any luck, the lost Atlantis which reveals itself when a player pushes the right buttons and the river drains. When he looks back in hopes of sighting his only landmark, Travers can no longer see the lights of the house glowing behind him. He thinks the breeze is a little damper and he catches a hint of salt on his tongue, so there is a chance he’s really going toward Long Island Sound and the tracks.

Then a string of lights streaks along just above the horizon: the train, he thinks, lucky people staring at nothing out of all those lighted windows. It’s so late here that he has no way of knowing whether it is his train. Probably not. It would appear that this journey is not the product of a temporary fainting fit and he isn’t dreaming, either. His train is long gone. It really is night and it’s getting late. After midnight the Metro North schedule thins to a trickle. Few trains go by at this hour, so he has to wait. There is the additional problem of getting any train to stop for him.

When a train does come its lights pick up Travers standing in the middle of the tracks with his white face glowing like a surrender flag. He wigwags his arms wildly, trying to get the engineer’s attention, but the thing comes roaring
down on him anyway. For a second he wavers, considering. It is an opportunity, and it is tempting. He jumps out of the way, but only at the last minute. When you decide to get back on the train you don’t give in and get trashed by one.

He shrugs. Sighing, he starts walking along the tracks.

It is a long night.

The landscape is barren and the tracks seem endless. Even in gathering daylight the engineers won’t stop for him. The stations, if there are stations where he is heading, must be closed for the night. Eventually, he supposes, he’ll come to at least one crossing where the tracks intersect a major road instead of taking the bridge over it or disappearing into yet another underpass. Then he can take the road and hope drivers are better at the Samaritan thing than the night engineers on Metro North. Hopeful, he looks ahead, but as far as he can tell, it’s unbroken track all the way down the line.

Come on
, he thinks.
I can’t go on this way
. As it turns out, he can. He walks for another hour and except for detritus stirred up by the breeze from passing trains, nothing changes. It’s getting tired out. He’s hungry now.

Defeated, he taps his phone. “Sandra? It’s me. I’m on the train.”

He’s not but it won’t matter. Either his battery’s dead or the nearest relay tower is so far out of range that she won’t hear him.

“I never should have gotten off that train,” he says anyway.

—The Texas Review
, 1986

The Bride of Bigfoot

Imagine the two of us together, the sound of our flesh colliding; the smell of him. The smell of me.

At first I was afraid. Who would not be frightened by stirring shadows, leaves that shiver inexplicably, the suspicion that just outside the circle of bug lamps and firelight something huge has passed? If there was a Thing at all it was reported to be shy; the best photographs are blurred and of questionable origin; hunters said it would not attack even if provoked, but still … The silence it left behind was enormous; I could feel my heart shudder in my chest. With gross figures roaming, who would not be afraid?

We did not see or hear it; there was only the intimation. It had been there. It was gone. Thomas, whom I married six months ago, said, Listen. I said, I don’t hear anything. Roberta said, I’m cold. Thomas persisted: I thought I heard something. Did you hear anything? I did not speak but Malcolm, who was torturing steaks on our behalf, spoke politely. Everybody’s so quiet, it must be twenty of or twenty after. Then Roberta said, Something just walked over my grave. I tried to laugh, but I was cold.

This was the night of our first cookout of the summer, shortly before I found certain pieces of my underwear missing from the line.

Our house is on the outer ring of streets here, so that instead of our neighbors’ carports and arrangements for eating outside we look out at a wooded hillside, dense undergrowth and slender trees marching up the slope.

If it weren’t for dust and attrition and human failure our house would be picture perfect. I used to want to go to live in one of our arrangements; the future would find me among the plant stands, splayfooted and supporting a begonia; I would be both beautiful and functional, a true work of art. Or I would be discovered on the sofa among the pillows, my permanent face fixed in a perpetual smile. I would face the future with no worries and no obligations, just one more pretty, blameless thing. It’s a long road that knows no turning but an even longer one we women go. Each night even as I surveyed my creation I could see fresh dust settling on my polished surfaces, crumbs collecting on my kitchen floor, and I knew soon the light would change and leaves drop from my plants no matter what I did. Each night I knew I had to
turn from my creations and start dinner because although Thomas and I both worked, it was I who must prepare the food. Because women are free and we are in the new society I was not forced to do these things; I had to do them by choice.