Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“No.”

“Hey, listen, Eddie, how are you?”

“I’m lousy, Sal. But I’m old and sick.”

“Right.”

“I’ve lived too long already. Wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s not up to us, you know.”

“Oh, fuck that, Sal. What are you giving me? Fucking religion. I’m tired of this. I’m trying to get pills. Something reliable. I don’t like taking street shit.”

“Sure, Eddie.” Salmone disapproved. Man up, partner, he thought. Everybody dies. But of course not everyone has to lose a beautiful child.

“I’m gonna have to come for you and ask for my weapon back, Sal.”

“Not from me you ain’t getting it.”

“I’m glad you took it, I really am. I might have wasted the fuck.”

“You’re not getting it back.”

“I’d buy one, you know. I don’t want to, though.”

“That’s good, Eddie. You don’t need it, a guy like you.”

“You know why I don’t buy it?”

“Of course. You do it, you hurt other people. You hurt me.”

“Let me tell you something. I don’t worry about eating the gun or not. I worry about blasting some individual or other. I can take being remembered as a suicide. I don’t want to go down as an asshole. The raging psycho.”

“Don’t hurt yourself, Eddie. Put it in the hands of God — like — you know, man. Don’t hurt yourself anymore.”

ONE DAY THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Steve Brookman was walking on the campus for almost the last time when he happened to meet John Spofford and Mary Pick in front of the college library.

Spofford, Brookman had been happy to learn, had not been fired after all. The decision to keep him on, Brookman thought, had been wise and just and not at all what Brookman might have expected from the college. The three of them stood in front of the library, the center of covert observation by many of the passersby. They agreed that Amesbury was a great place to be in April; it beat England any day, in spite of everything. People said more or less the same thing to each other every spring. Brookman was more than ready to subscribe to these ritual notions, aware that he expected to be six thousand miles away by the following April. Mary Pick was as cool as ever. Brookman and Spofford could not conceal their embarrassment.

When they were all saying what Brookman and Spofford certainly hoped would be their ultimate goodbyes, Brookman gave him his hand and said, “ Semper fi. ”

“Yes,” Spofford answered. “Right.”

Immediately Brookman realized that the choice of words, in the circumstances, in the present company, was awkward. Spofford’s attempt to disappear the phrase was no less so. It was very painful.

As the two men looked around for some route of withdrawal, Steve, John and Mary saw that a schizophrenic man often seen on campus — a man whose presence Brookman had noticed repeatedly in the weeks before the death of Maud Stack — was standing a few feet away from them. He was staring in something like terror at the three people who were blocking his path. As they hastened to step out of his way, the man uttered a sound, an anguished, fearful groan that seemed to emerge from somewhere inside him, somewhere so deep as to be incorporeal.

Mary Pick looked stricken, though Brookman thought she must have seen him often before. “Are you all right, dear,” she said very sadly to the man.

He gave them a last terrified glance, turned around so that he was headed the opposite way and hurried off. The three stood silently for a while, watching him go.

ELSA BEZEIDENHOUT BROOKMAN TAUGHT HER advanced anthropology class until June. Her husband had contracted for a book on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and he went to Seattle to prepare for the trip. In July Ellie gave birth to another daughter, whom she and Steve named Rosalind after the witty heroine of As You Like It. Brookman came east but missed the event itself, which occurred a little earlier than expected. He was not displeased to be the parent of another daughter. They spent three weeks together before Brookman returned to his operational headquarters. After that, he came back at least once a month before suspending his field research. At the end of the year Ellie moved out of the house the Brookmans had occupied.

Ellie kept her job and, to the disapproval of many at the college, kept Brookman too. They planned to move to Boston, whence she would commute and where they were no longer a component of Amesbury’s social scene. Steve worked on his book. Over time he grew steadily more obsessed with tigers and planned more Siberian adventures, sometimes taking Ellie and the children along.

Maud’s death, and the degree to which his illusion of love for Maud had been its occasion, filled him with remorse and regret. What he suffered most acutely was the sense of his own unworthiness, of the mediocrity into which life at the college, the position and privilege of it, had led him. And Ellie demanded of him something like a promise of connubial fidelity. Not in any formula, utterance, whispered verse or knitted motto. Something worse, something that racked him with shame because it forced him to understand that he had impelled a person such as she was to ask such a thing of him, when what he owed her was nothing less than the renewal of his moral existence.

It came to be that the love and admiration he felt for Ellie, the strength he drew upon to feel like a worthwhile companion to her, were greater than any threat to what bound them together. Something like the same thing was true on Ellie’s side as well. She was in fact a proud person who knew well what love was. No one close to her had ever suspected her of not knowing that. A woman with a sure sense of what she required in a man and who put up with nothing out of mere fond regard. Enduring each other’s strengths, they survived something more formidable than serial adultery, jealousy or naive disillusionment. Survive they did, though, and made do with arctic winters, with watching the aurora and the proximity of tigers.

For a long time Brookman imagined that he had come away intact from the things he had done and the things that had happened to him at the college. Then one day — a Siberian afternoon, while the trees in the forest around him crackled like rifle shots as their branches contracted and a shadow seemed to spread across the snow to darken it from soiled gray to nearly black, Brookman found himself lost. He was on familiar ground. The cabin he shared with Ellie could not have been half a mile distant. But the lay of the land made no sense to him, and nothing clued him to direction. In the next moment he fell. The fall was so violent it felt as though he had plunged downward from a fair height, and he was breathless when his shoulder met the frozen ground. When he tried to stand, the gloom around him seemed to grow deeper than before. He heard the violent snapping of the ice-bound limbs around him but there was not the slightest rush of wind, only frozen stagnant silence encasing the sounds. He had the sense there was a cat not far away.

Brookman’s arm was stretched out on the dry dark snow and he tried to turn it, elbow down, to get a purchase on the ground. But as he labored, breathless now, to turn the arm one way, it turned the other. The more force he brought to bear, gritting his teeth, the more it rotated oppositely on the joint, leaving him in agony. He stared down at the palm of his hand, the palm he was trying to rise on. He shouted. Screamed was more like it. The dark surrounding forest served to illuminate his shame.

Shame that he would never again elude. After that day’s fall the thought of what had happened would be a scourge to him as it had not been before, and every step he took thereafter would be edged with shadow. He had discovered the place to which his own capacity for excusing himself, his self-indulgence, could not penetrate.