John Gardner - October Light

When James came home, Ariah was white and shivering, clenching her teeth in pain, refusing to cry out. He stood in the kitchen doorway, reeking of smoke and gin, red-eyed, staring at Sally, his expression both belligerent and defensive. “I burnt the house,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Ariah needs her medicine.”

He turned his head slowly, blood draining from his whiskered cheeks, then stumbled toward the living room and the bedroom beyond. She followed, keeping enough distance to avoid offending him — he’d been a big man then, dangerous — and she watched as he fumbled with the pills. Ariah opened her mouth for them eagerly, like an animal, and he dropped them in, then lifted her head with his left hand, carefully, and with his right gave her the dusty water that had been standing on the bedside table for, probably, days. When she had swallowed she closed her eyes, and he laid her head back into the pillow again, then sat holding her hand, Sally leaning in the doorway, until Ariah was asleep. He stood up, looking around vaguely, baffled by something that hadn’t quite registered; then he saw what it was, that the sheets had been changed and that even without his clothes on he’d be black as soot.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said.

She nodded. “I’ll sleep up with Ginny.”

He looked at her. “You stayin?”

She nodded slightly, not otherwise answering, moving away toward the kitchen and the door to the stairs.

He said, too loudly, “I burnt Richard’s house.” She said nothing — for the moment.

In the morning he couldn’t say why he’d done it — in fact he didn’t even remember, at first, that he had done it. It was hard for Sally Abbott to believe that people could do violent acts and not remember, as Peter Wagner had done in her novel and James had done in life. She never could do violence and forget it; she was certain of it. Yet she couldn’t believe that James was lying about forgetting. It was all far in the past, admittedly; he hadn’t gotten dangerously drunk in years; she oughtn’t to be frightened. To tell the truth, even when he’d chased her up the stairs with the log she hadn’t really been frightened, just alarmed and — mostly — furious. But now she was beginning to have second thoughts. More than she realized, her brother was a stranger to her — possibly even to himself.

She stared at the wall for a time, thinking nothing, at first with an expression of sadness and compassion, then with a sterner expression. Her jaw became firmer, her eyes more fierce. Then, with a quick little shake of the head, Sally returned to her book.

7

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RANK

He woke up with a queer, not entirely unpleasant sense that he had lost days, perhaps months, out of his life. He was in a bunk-room he’d never seen before, its peeling walls trembling with the shudder of engines somewhere aft — not far, he guessed; perhaps on the other side of the bulkhead he leaned on now as he thought about getting up. There were four bunks: his own, one above it, another that was clumsily made up with Army surplus blankets, and the one above that piled high with boxes, folded clothes, two jars of olives, parts of a record player, and a coffee cup, cracked. He remembered, dimly, that someone had spoken poetry — Mr. Goodman. A dream, perhaps? He remembered that someone had sung hymns, and he’d enjoyed himself, but the memory would not come clear in detail, not even the cabin it had happened in.

A sound to his left startled him and he turned. It was the bunkroom door swinging open. The passageway beyond was bathed in sunlight coming down through the hatch like a shaft from heaven, and suddenly, for no reason, he knew where he was and what had happened last night, or some of it: the Captain’s cabin, the pipes of pot, the singing, talking, handshaking. He jumped up and crossed to the door quickly, as if thinking of escape. The galley door across the passageway opened by itself, exactly as the bunkroom door had opened, as if some absentminded ghost were looking for his glasses. The galley was empty except for the sink, the refrigerator, the stove, and two inches of water sloshing on the deck. Someone had left out bread and peanut butter, and the sink was full of cups and plastic plates. He went forward down the passageway, came to the engine room door. The girl Jane turned and smiled at him. She had a shielded mechanic’s lightbulb hanging down through a hole in the decking, and a pipewrench in her right hand. There were grease smudges on her forehead and nose and cheek.

“G’mornin, Cap’n,” she said brightly.

He said nothing, snatching wildly in his mind to get his bearings. She went on smiling, then puckered her lips, blowing him a kiss. He remembered, suddenly, the dream he’d had, and knew it was no dream. He blew a kiss back, joyful and full of sharp panic, then abruptly pulled his head out and closed the hatch. He went up the ladder and stood a moment blinking, adjusting to the sudden and absolute change in the universe.

The sea was serene; the sun was directly overhead. He felt stupidly at peace. It meant nothing, of course; another proof that all human emotion, all experience, is meaningless mechanics. So days grow longer and in chemical reaction the feathers of birds grow brighter and their joys increase. He did not approve of what had happened to him. To Peter Wagner, it was a matter of high indignation that a man eating lunch, approached by a female panhandler, was almost certain to give money, because it was programmed in his genes: centuries ago, in some African cave, sharing the kill with some female had meant getting between her legs. It was an outrage — on occasion a matter for tears — that the noblest human altruism, the young man who throws himself down on a grenade to save his comrades’ lives at the expense of his own, was similarly programmed, as surely programmed as the altruistic self-destruction of that walking bomb of the insect world, Globitermes sulfureus, who to save his tribe from the invading ant could, and sooner or later would, explode himself, sending the splash of his poison in every direction. But even as he scorned the way he was pulled to and fro by the universe, driven by his ancient, monkey past, enslaved by every tremor at the edges of space, he could not deny the fact that he was boundingly happy. The girl was pretty and in love with him, such a playmate as only the gods ever catch; he had sea beneath his legs, sky on all sides of him: he was king of the ocean-faring apes.

“G’mornin, Cap’n,” Mr. Nit said. He touched his black wool cap but did not stir from the canvas chair where he was sitting with an old Science Digest on the deck.

“Morning,” Peter Wagner said. He glanced up at the wheel-house. Mr. Goodman was there, smiling down at him like an old, old friend. Mr. Goodman touched the front of his hat.

“Go ahead,” Mr. Nit said, “look the ole tub over.”

Doubtfully, but full of bliss, Peter Wagner went up the bridge steps, past the radio cubicle and the engine room skylight. He’d gotten used to the smell of pot now and was beginning to catch other things — old steam and the acid in the batteries stored in the louvered box between the Indomitable ’s stacks. And something else: a kind of a toadstool and duff smell, as if the old can had lain for years half sunk in some forest. At the entrance to the Captain’s cabin he glanced at the bridge. The engine room telegraph was as green as the dome of a public building, and the bridge itself was thick with oily dirt. Sandbags barricaded the wheelhouse, half rotten, seeping grit where someone had poked holes in them — or maybe shot at them.

Captain Fist was asleep in his bunk, his hands at his sides. He went on snoring, undisturbed, when Peter Wagner poked his head in.