John Gardner - October Light

All this he might have said, and perhaps the young woman would not have laughed, would even have widened her elegant gray eyes in pretended awe; but he chewed his cheek, eyes smouldering, and kept mum.

Both state policemen were watching the TV. On the screen, two policemen were chasing a big truck. There was an explosion on the highway in front of the police car, and the police went skidding and sliding toward a cliff. There was a shot of the two policemen’s faces. Suddenly there was a white-toothed, smiling woman with a yellow box of soap, then two red, rough hands and a butterfly. Sam Frost came back, zipping as he walked.

James was slightly woozy. The crowd had thinned a good deal by now. The roar of talk had for the most part died out, replaced by the music from the jukebox. On the TV a Negro girl was taking a shower, and though the sound was too low for James to hear, he made out that she was singing about some kind of hair-soap. She was naked as old Judah Sherbrooke’s wife, the way it looked, though the picture broke off right where the swimsuit might be. Did advertising like that cause rapes? he wondered. Suddenly she turned into a bottle. It made him start. Then there was a picture of a horse, and a man smoking a cigarette. The horse had ear-mites, or a little touch of spavins. There was some writing and then, as if nothing had happened, the police car was skidding around the burning place and coming back onto the road and up even with the truck. An arm with a gun came out the window of the truck and the policeman on the right got his gun out and aimed it, steadying his right hand with his left. He fired and there was a picture of the driver of the truck jerking back with his hand shot half off, pieces flying. The two state policemen at the bar were drinking Cokes, looking at the picture. The policeman in the picture shot his gun again — the car and the truck running side by side, something wrong with the truck’s right rear suspension — and this time when the camera looked inside the truck it looked like the driver’s whole head had exploded. Suddenly you were looking from behind the car and truck again as they both went crashing into a wall of rock, the truck pushing against the car, and they both exploded. Suddenly you were looking at a woman in a nightclub, singing to a microphone with nothing on but a stocking-like thing and some spangles around her tits and hole.

Emily poured wine into his glass and set the bottle down. He got out money. Henry Stumpchurch and Sam Frost were still talking about frogs, arguing whether it took cunning to just sit till you vanished. “Horsepiss,” Bill Partridge said. He sounded a little drunk. Henry said, “In all my sixty-four years—” Bill Partridge said, “I say, Horsepiss!” James drank.

The pock-marked boy and the short, fat Bennington girl went gliding slowly past James Page’s table, dancing — or rather hugging each other as they shuffled across the floor. As he looked up, the girl drew her head from the pock-marked boy’s chest and said — she was smiling, timid, “You ever read a writer called John Updike?”

Make me do it, make me do it, the jukebox sang.

He thought of Sally and the party up the mountain, and his anger at once boiled up in him again. He had chores in the morning. How was a man to do chores on no sleep? Did they think his damn house was the Walloomsac Hotel? She’d take his money when she needed, she didn’t mind that, but when it came to even merely allowing him to work, never mind about helping … He’d had fights with his wife, he remembered vaguely, about money and time — and later, fights with his gloomy-hearted, weakling son. His chest gave a jerk as the memory ambushed him, his boy — or rather man, by then — hanging from the gray attic rafter, still as a feedsack, as if he’d never been alive. For days, even months, he’d been unable to believe it: a few harsh words, a quick, impetuous little slap — it seems the boy had been up to something, only God and James’ wife Ariah knew what. Seemed to do with whores. He’d refused to speak up, had called James a bastard, hence the little slap, not even hard, mere show of anger with his open hand—“little” it had seemed to James then, that is; he knew better now, for with this stony stillness, this absolute, dead-final victory, his son had avenged himself. Whatever meaning James Page had imagined he’d seen in this pitiful earthly existence he had known that instant for what it was: mere desperate assertion, mere hopeful agreement between two people who could tear up the contract in an instant. He saw the boy standing high on the haywagon, grinning under his hat, sunlight and the wind-fluttered branches of trees wheeling and sliding above his head; and then the old man saw again in his mind the absolute, drab, metaphysical stillness of rafters. He had survived it, he couldn’t say how or why. Had worked, had walked on the mountain at night, prowling like a lost bear hunting for the door to the underworld; had drunk some, more than was right, for a span; had written lists of words, little scraps of thought, once a kind of prayer, setting what he had by way of heart in his Agro pocket notebook. At night, when he slept and fell off guard, he would wake up crying. His wife would be holding him.

The old man listened to the rumble around him, a noise like train-wheels, mostly in his brain. He wasn’t used to wine, hadn’t been for years, and he no longer had, he discovered now, any natural defense against its physical effects and, worse, mental ones. Put off guard by wine, he’d casually wandered into a past he’d locked up tight, and he’d glimpsed there his reason for getting rid of it. Once, standing by the creek, toward dusk, he had looked down at his reflection and said, cold-blooded, however melodramatic: “You’re a killer.” His voice was flat and lean, knocking against the birches on the creek’s far side. The mountain range beyond stretched away out of sight, rolling toward New Hampshire, dwarfing self-hatred as it dwarfed love. Oh James, James, his wife’s voice whispered in his memory. His eyes filled with flash-tears of anger and grief, and then at once he had forgotten her again — had abruptly forgotten all of it.

Then Emily was there, smiling like a commercial, pouring wine into his glass. He counted out the money; she scooped it up, smiled again. It came to him that he’d drunk too much already. His sensations were as solid and raw as the slats on old apple-crates. Touching his jaw, he felt his whiskers with sharp, numb clarity, like the bristles of a pig, and felt the tonelessness of his flesh. He looked at the clock above the bar and couldn’t make out the hands, not even the blur of them. He drew his watch out. Quarter to twelve. That wasn’t possible. His friends would have left long ago, if that was right. Had they stayed because of him? Carefully, steady as a trivet, he lifted the wineglass to drink.

“What you goin to do about it?” Partridge said.

Emily was back. She gave the table a swipe with her cloth, then plunked down the new round of beers. She picked up the money and then the empties.

“Do?” he said.

“Your sistah,” Partridge said.

He drained the glass, some serious thought at the edge of his mind.

“God knows,” he said, and sighed. A fat old man with a scraggly little beard was dancing with what was perhaps his wife, circling with tiny little steps two, three feet from the jukebox. James tried to place them. They were talking about Jaws, holding each other gently. “Hell of a movie,” the man said.

Henry Stumpchurch sat now with his chin in his fists, struggling to keep his eyes open. James turned briefly for a look at the dancers and saw Stumpchurch sneak a look at his watch. Merton came over from the bar with a beer. With two fat fingers he hooked the back of a chair and dragged it to their booth. He sat down next to James. “You all right here?” he asked and grinned.