Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

She looked at him dry-eyed. “Poor fella,” she said.

“What you have to understand, Grace, is that this drink I’m having”—he raised the glass toward her in a gesture of salute—”is the only worthwhile thing I’ve done in the last year and a half. It’s the only thing in my life that means jack shit, the closest thing to satisfaction I’ve had. Now how can you begrudge me that? It’s the best I’m capable of.”

“You’ll go too far,” she said to him. “You’ll see.”

“What’s that, Grace? A threat to walk?” He was grinding his teeth. “Don’t make me laugh. You, walk? You, the friend of the unfortunate?”

“Don’t you hit me,” she said when she looked at his face. “Don’t you dare.”

“You, the Christian Queen of Calvary, walk? Why, I don’t believe that for a minute.”

She ran a hand through her hair and bit her lip. “No, we stay,” she said. Anger and distraction made her look young. Her cheeks blazed rosy against the general pallor of her skin. “In my family we stay until the fella dies. That’s the tradition. We stay and pour it for them and they die.”

He put his drink down and shook his head.

“I thought we’d come through,” Grace said. “I was sure.”

“No,” Elliot said. “Not altogether.”

They stood in silence for a minute. Elliot sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Grace walked around it and poured herself a whiskey.

“You are undermining me, Chas. You are making things impossible for me and I just don’t know.” She drank and winced. “I’m not going to stay through another drunk. I’m telling you right now. I haven’t got it in me. I’ll die.”

He did not want to look at her. He watched the flakes settle against the glass of the kitchen door. “Do what you feel the need of,” he said.

“I just can’t take it,” she said. Her voice was not scolding but measured and reasonable. “It’s February. And I went to court this morning and lost Vopotik.”

Once again, he thought, my troubles are going to be obviated by those of the deserving poor. He said, “Which one was that?”

“Don’t you remember them? The three-year-old with the broken fingers?”

He shrugged. Grace sipped her whiskey.

“I told you. I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’”

“Yes,” he said, “I remember now.”

“You ought to see the Vopotiks, Chas. The woman is young and obese. She’s so young that for a while I thought I could get to her as a juvenile. The guy is a biker. They believe the kid came from another planet to control their lives. They believe this literally, both of them.”

“You shouldn’t get involved that way,” Elliot said. “You should leave it to the caseworkers.”

“They scared their first caseworker all the way to California. They were following me to work.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Of course I didn’t.” To Elliot’s surprise, his wife poured herself a second whiskey. “You know how they address the child? As ‘dude.’ She says to it, ‘Hey, dude.’” Grace shuddered with loathing. “You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning, noon and night, but you can’t get anybody for that these days.”

“People must really hate it,” Elliot said, “when somebody tells them they’re not treating their kids right.”

“They definitely don’t want to hear it,” Grace said. “You’re right.” She sat stirring her drink, frowning into the glass. “The Vopotik child will die, I think.”

“Surely not,” Elliot said.

“This one I think will die,” Grace said. She took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and looked at him forlornly. “The situation’s extreme. Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

“I would think,” Elliot said, “that would be the one question you didn’t ask.”

“But you do,” she said. “You wonder: Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?” She put a hand to her hair and shook her head as if in confusion. “Some of these folks, my God, the poor things cannot put Wednesday on top of Tuesday to save their lives.”

“It’s a trick,” Elliot agreed, “a lot of them can’t manage.”

“And kids are small, they’re handy and underfoot. They make noise. They can’t hurt you back.”

“I suppose child abuse is something people can do together” Elliot said.

“Some kids are obnoxious. No question about it.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Elliot said.

“Maybe you should stop complaining. Maybe you’re better off. Maybe your kids are better off unborn.”

“Better off or not,” Elliot said, “it looks like they’ll stay that way.”

“I mean our kids, of course,” Grace said. “I’m not blaming you, understand? It’s just that here we are with you drunk again and me losing Vopotik, so I thought why not get into the big unaskable questions.” She got up and folded her arms and began to pace up and down the kitchen. “Oh,” she said when her eye fell upon the bottle, “that’s good stuff, Chas. You won’t mind if I have another? I’ll leave you enough to get loaded on.”

Elliot watched her pour. So much pain, he thought; such anger and confusion. He was tired of pain, anger and confusion; they were what had got him in trouble that very morning.

The liquor seemed to be giving him a perverse lucidity when all he now required was oblivion. His rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze was good for rage. Booze could keep it burning through the darkest night.

“What happened in court?” he asked his wife.

She was leaning on one arm against the wall, her long, strong body flexed at the hip. Holding her glass, she stared angrily toward the invisible fields outside. “I lost the child,” she said.

Elliot thought that a peculiar way of putting it. He said nothing.

“The court convened in an atmosphere of high hilarity. It may be Hate Month around here but it was buddy-buddy over at Ilford Courthouse. The room was full of bikers and bikers’ lawyers. A colorful crowd. There was a lot of bonding.” She drank and shivered. “They didn’t think too well of me. They don’t think too well of broads as lawyers. Neither does the judge. The judge has the common touch. He’s one of the boys.”

“Which judge?” Elliot asked.

“Buckley. A man of about sixty. Know him? Lots of veins on his nose?”

Elliot shrugged.

“I thought I had done my homework,” Grace told him. “But suddenly I had nothing but paper. No witnesses. It was Margolis at Valley Hospital who spotted the radiator burns. He called us in the first place. Suddenly he’s got to keep his reservation for a campsite in St. John. So Buckley threw his deposition out.” She began to chew on a fingernail. “The caseworkers have vanished — one’s in L.A., the other’s in Nepal. I went in there and got run over. I lost the child.”

“It happens all the time,” Elliot said. “Doesn’t it?”

“This one shouldn’t have been lost, Chas. These people aren’t simply confused. They’re weird. They stink.”

“You go messing into anybody’s life,” Elliot said, “that’s what you’ll find.”

“If the child stays in that house,” she said, “he’s going to die.”

“You did your best,” he told his wife. “Forget it.”

She pushed the bottle away. She was holding a water glass that was almost a third full of whiskey.

“That’s what the commissioner said.”

Elliot was thinking of how she must have looked in court to the cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising that things had gone against her.