Russell Banks - Outer Banks

Anyhow, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father that I first met your father. He came south to Florida, hitchhiking, with nothing more than what he could put in a single battered suitcase. Why he chose Lakeland I’ll never know for sure, but I think it had something to do with a construction job that was going on then. A lot of plumbing was involved, connecting up a couple of lakes in the area for a town water supply, something like that. I never paid much attention to the jobs he worked on, never really understood them very well, though of course I was a good listener and always made sure to praise him highly for his work, both to his face and behind his back.

He chose to stop running in Lakeland, after running all the way south from his family home in New Hampshire in the middle of the winter, hitchhiking on trucks, sleeping alongside the highway in places like Red Bank, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina. He had just turned twenty-two years old, big and strong and not afraid of anything or anyone, except the police, of course. I often think of him, now that you are doing the same thing at almost the same age, hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone, and you aren’t even afraid of the police, naturally, because you don’t think you have killed your father. Anyhow, I often think of your father during those years, and it gives me some slight comfort, because after all, he did the same thing, and no harm came to him for it.

I did say that he was big and strong then, didn’t I? Well, indeed he was. Never in my life had I seen a man as big and strong as your father was then. It’s where you get your height. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed all his muscles, and work pants, and he had come into the Globe to buy some underwear. He had just gotten off work at the pumping station. They were building a new pumping station that year and he had walked up to the foreman with his suitcase in his hand, and the way he told me later, he just said to the foreman, “You probably need pipefitters, and I’m the best damned pipefitter you’re ever going to get the chance to hire, so you ought to hire me whether you need pipefitters right now or not.” The foreman, who later tried to become your father’s friend, Bucky Walker, you remember him, he said, “Anybody thinks that high of himself is either so damned good I can’t afford to let him go, or so damned bad it’ll be a pleasure to fire him. So you’re hired, pal.” That’s how your father told it, and later, when Bucky told me the story, it was the same story, and Bucky had no reason to lie about it, because by that time your father had gone back up north and had left me with you as a baby here in Lakeland. Actually, Bucky was kind of interested in me then. He was hanging around the apartment a lot after work, drinking beer and talking about your father, wondering why he had gone and done what he had done. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone along with Bucky the way he obviously wanted me to and had even married him after my divorce. And after he had divorced Sally, naturally. I mean, he was kind of a sweet man, and God knows, he was in love with me. I guess I never really told you much about all that, did I? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I was still so in love with your father that I couldn’t see the good side of any other man, even a man as sweet as Bucky Walker.

But I’m getting away from the thing I wanted to describe to you, how your father looked to me when we first met. I was modeling a pink one-piece Esther Williams bathing suit in a swimwear fashion show on the mezzanine of the Globe, and I had just started down the ramp when I caught sight of him coming up the stairs from the first floor, where he had bought some underwear. He told me later that, noticing a sign about the swimwear show upstairs, he’d decided to come and take a look. There wasn’t a beach at Lakeland, as you know, it’s so far inland, and at that time he had been in Florida for over a month and hadn’t seen a single woman in a bathing suit, and as he always said, that’s what Florida was to him, “Women in bathing suits and Coney Island with palm trees.” He’d seen the Coney-Island-with-palm-trees part, but so far he hadn’t seen anything of the women in bathing suits. So he decided to walk up the stairs to the mezzanine and take in the fashion show. Your father was always like that, very direct and not at all self-conscious. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only man in the place, or that he was dressed in a construction worker’s clothes, all dirty and sweaty and everything.

I was walking down the platform, with mostly older women shoppers seated around the platform, my boss, Polly Prudhomme, describing the bathing suit I was wearing to the shoppers while I walked along, turning, strolling, kneeling, and then I saw your father’s head as it came over the top of the stairs. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream. A huge, smiling, suntanned face, a great toothy grin, tiny ears, dark eyes twinkling, a mass of black curly hair, a neck like a tree, and then his broad shoulders, thick chest, great brown arms swinging as he came up the stairs, and then that tiny waist of his, the long muscular legs, until finally he was at the top of the stairs, standing there with his legs apart, his hands in fists on his narrow hips, a big smile across his face, good-natured like a boy’s, only somehow hungrier than a boy’s could be. I was so taken by his appearance, especially the way it had gradually come to me, piece by piece like that, like a mirage floating up from the floor — first the head, then the torso, then the legs — until at last standing there before me was a grinning giant, the handsomest man I had ever seen. Anyhow, I was so taken by his appearance that I stopped midway down the ramp, stood still, and stared straight at him, and I smiled. I smiled! All the women in the audience and all the girls waiting to come behind me and even Polly Prudhomme herself followed my gaze until they too were staring straight at him, most of them with their mouths open. Polly had stopped describing the bathing suit I was wearing and was gaping like the rest of us. It was a strange moment, silent, no one moving, your father standing at the top of the stairs, grinning, while maybe fifty women stared back at him, with me motionless up there on that ramp, smiling at him, as if I was a slave girl or something being auctioned off and he had suddenly appeared from the desert to save me from a fate worse than death. It was like the movies!

WELL, LIKE THE old song says, those may have been the best of times, but they were the worst of times too. At least for me they were. Your father, when he wanted to be, was the most charming, thoughtful, witty — oh, God, could he be funny — intelligent, tender, sexy, and all-around interesting man you’d ever want to meet. And when he was, those were the best of times. I was never a happier woman than I was then. I sang all day long until I got off work and could meet him at the door of the Globe, where he’d be waiting for me, standing there in the late afternoon sun, dirty from his job at the pumping station, chatting with the janitor, old Eddie Coy, who locked the door after the store employees had left. I’d come out the door, and your father would see me, and holding his lunch pail under one arm, he’d whip the other arm around me, and he’d lift me right off the ground and spin me in a half-circle and set me down again, and then he’d stare down into my eyes, and he’d say, in that deep, throaty voice of his, “Hi.”

It was really something. I get a little weepy just remembering those days, the best of them. When it comes to the worst of them, though, all I have to do is remember a single one of them, just one of those days, and my eyes clear up pretty fast, let me tell you. There were Friday nights back then before we were married when I’d get off work and would come out the door, expecting your father to be there, as he’d promised, to take me out to dinner, and not finding him, would ask Eddie Coy if he’d seen your father, and Eddie would shake his head, No, not yet, so I’d wait and wait and wait, a half-hour, an hour, and hour and a half, until finally I’d know that he wasn’t coming, and I’d walk on home to my apartment, fix myself some supper, take a long bath, and try to sleep — until along about one in the morning, when I’d still be awake, tossing and turning, and there’d come a loud banging on the door. Jumping out of bed, I’d rush to the door, and when I opened it, I’d see him, standing there, a vicious snarl across his face, bloodied lips and cut eyes, bruises and scrapes, torn clothing, with a half-emptied bottle of whiskey in his hand. “Ran into a little bit of trouble down at th’ Tam,” was how he’d explain all the cuts and bruises. Then, using nothing but the foulest language, he’d describe in gory detail how he’d single-handedly beaten up half a dozen sailors or brickmasons or electricians or “crackers,” though I was never sure what he meant by the word, who he was referring to, exactly. Probably just anyone he couldn’t identify any other way by uniform and such. Anyhow, he’d stagger into my apartment, brushing off my foolish attempts to clean him up and bandage his cuts, pushing me and any sympathy I might have away, physically shoving me into a corner of the room, where I waited, slowly growing frightened of him, as he talked to himself, only to himself, and drank the whiskey from the bottle, growling like a dog, literally growling and curling his lips back and showing his teeth, snapping and snarling, rambling on about his “enemies,” turning everyone into an enemy — his parents, his sisters, his friends in New Hampshire and the people he’d met here in Florida, and of course, even me. Then, after a while, especially me. I was becoming his worst enemy. Every time he came in that drunk and torn up from fighting in the taverns, he would end the night by cursing at me, spitting out horrible names, a little more horrible each time it happened, a little more personally cutting, slicing into the parts of me that were the tenderest parts, taking the cruelest advantage of whatever fears and secrets I might have revealed to him some other night when we had been holding each other tenderly. Teasing and mocking me for my fears, threatening to expose my secrets, he’d call me “stupid” and “idiotic” and “sentimental” for a while, and then “selfish” and “insensitive” and “cruel,” and finally, “whore” and “leech” and “nag”—those last three, it always came down to them, whore and leech and nag. That’s what probably made them hurt so much, the fact that it always came down to the same three names. If he had just been lashing out at the world in general, he might’ve ended up calling me lots of awful things, sure, but all different. But because he always called me only those three, and all three, never one without the other two, he made me think that he really believed it about me, that even when he was sober and being kind to me, he still thought of me as a whore, a leech, and a nag. And of course, because I loved him and he was a man, I started seriously wondering if I was a whore or a leech or a nag, and there was just enough guilt for my own sexual interests in life, just enough dependency, and just enough nagging for me to slip slowly into believing that I was those things he was calling me, until I too thought of myself as a whore, a leech, and a nag. I even felt sorry for him for having to put up with me, for having fallen in love with me. So when he asked me to marry him I was so grateful, and so eager for the chance to prove by my loyalty that I wasn’t a whore and by my wifely support and devotion that I wasn’t a leech and by my trust and obedience that I wasn’t a nag, that I said, “Yes,” I said, “Oh, yes, yes, oh God, yes! Yes, yes,” I said, “yes.”