Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (33 page)

‘You never touch me anymore.’

’I don’t want to touch you. Why should I? Have you
looked
at yourself?’

‘You’re cruel,’ she said. ‘I never knew how cruel you were.’

She ate, watching him. He did not look at her. Glaring at his plate, he worked with fork and knife like a hurried man at a lunch counter.

‘I bet you didn’t either,’ she said.

That night when he was asleep she took a Milky Way to the bathroom. For a while she stood eating in the dark, then she turned on the light. Chewing, she looked at herself in the mirror; she looked at her eyes and hair. Then she stood on the scales and looking at the numbers between her feet, one hundred and sixty-two, she remembered when she had weighed a hundred and thirty-six pounds for eight days. Her memory of those eight days was fond and amusing, as though she were recalling an Easter egg hunt when she was six. She stepped off the scales and pushed them under the lavatory and did not stand on them again.

It was summer and she bought loose dresses and when Richard took friends out on the boat she did not wear a bathing suit or shorts; her friends gave her mischievous glances, and Richard did not look at her. She stopped riding on the boat. She told them she wanted to stay with the baby, and she sat inside holding him until she heard the boat leave the wharf. Then she took him to the front lawn and walked with him in the shade of the trees and talked to him about the blue jays and mockingbirds and cardinals she saw on their branches. Sometimes she stopped and watched the boat out on the lake and the friend skiing behind it.

Every day Richard quarrelled, and because his rage went no further than her weight and shape, she felt excluded from it, and she remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit, and watched his frustration, his impotence. He truly believed they were arguing about her weight. She knew better: she knew that beneath the argument lay the question of who Richard was. She thought of him smiling at the wheel of his boat, and long ago courting his slender girl, the daughter of his partner and friend. She thought of Carrie telling her of smelling chocolate in the dark and, after that, watching her eat it night after night. She smiled at Richard, teasing his anger.

He is angry now. He stands in the center of the living room, raging at her, and he wakes the baby. Beneath Richard’s voice she hears the soft crying, feels it in her heart, and quietly she rises from her chair and goes upstairs to the child’s room and takes him from the crib. She brings him to the living room and sits holding him in her lap, pressing him gently against the folds of fat at her waist. Now Richard is pleading with her. Louise thinks tenderly of Carrie broiling meat and fish in their room, and walking with her in the evenings. She wonders if Carrie still has the malaise. Perhaps she will come for a visit. In Louise’s arms now the boy sleeps.

‘I’ll help you,’ Richard says. ‘I’ll eat the same things you eat.’

But his face does not approach the compassion and determination and love she had seen in Carrie’s during what she now recognizes . as the worst year of her life. She can remember nothing about that year except hunger, and the meals in her room. She is hungry now. When she puts the boy to bed she will get a candy bar from her room. She will eat it here, in front of Richard. This room will be hers soon. She considers the possibilities: all these rooms and the lawn where she can do whatever she wishes. She knows he will leave soon. It has been in his eyes all summer. She stands, using one hand to pull herself out of the chair. She carries the boy to his crib, feels him against her large breasts, feels that his sleeping body touches her soul. With a surge of vindication and relief she holds him. Then she kisses his forehead and places him in the crib. She goes to the bedroom and in the dark takes a bar of candy from her drawer. Slowly she descends the stairs. She knows Richard is waiting but she feels his departure so happily that, when she enters the living room, unwrapping the candy, she is surprised to see him standing there.

THE CAPTAIN

For Gunnery Sergeant Jim Beer

H
IS SON WORE
a moustache. Over and between tan faces and the backs of heads with hair cut high and short, and green-uniformed shoulders and chests and backs, Harry saw him standing with two other second lieutenants at the bar. His black moustache was thick. Only one woman was at happy hour, a blond captain: she had a watchful, attractive face that was pretty when she laughed. Harry stepped forward one pace, then another, and stood with his back to the door, breathing the fragrance of liquor and cigarette smoke, as pleasing to him as the smell of cooking is to some, and feeling through his body the loud talk and laughter and shouts, as though he watched a parade whose music coursed through him. In his own uniform with captain’s bars and ribbons, he wanted to stand here and have one Scotch. He did not feel that he stood to the side of the gathered men, but at their head, looking down the axis of their gaiety. A tall man, he did look down at most of them, and he wanted to watch his son from this distance. But there were no waitresses, so he went to the bar and spoke over Phil’s shoulder: ‘There’s one nice thing about a moustache.’

The eyes in the turning face were dark and happy. Then Harry was hugging him, and Phil’s arms were around his waist, tighter and tighter, and Phil leaned back and lifted him from the floor, the metal buttons of their blouses clicking together, then scraping as Phil lowered him, and introduced him to the two lieutenants as
my father, Captain LeDuc, retired
. Harry shook hands, not hearing their names, focusing instead on their faces and tightly tailored blouses and the silver shooting badges on their breasts: both wore the crossed rifles and crossed pistols of experts, and above those, like Phil, they wore only the one red and gold ribbon that showed they were in the service during a war they had not seen. He saw them scanning his four rows of ribbons, pretended he had not, and turned to Phil, letting his friends look comfortably at the colored rectangles of two wars and a wound and one act that had earned him a Silver Star. Beside Phil’s crossed rifles was the Maltese cross of a sharpshooter. The bartender emptied the astray, and Phil ordered another round and a Scotch and water, and Harry said: ‘What happened with the .45?’

‘ I choked up. What bothers me is knowing I’m better and having to wear this till next year.
Then
I’ll—’ He smiled and his eyes lowered and rose. ‘Jesus.’

‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘If we couldn’t forget, we’d never enjoy anything after the age of ten. Or five.’

Phil turned to his friends standing at his left and said he had just told his father he didn’t like having to wear the sharpshooter badge until he qualified again next year, and the three of them laughed and joked about rice paddies and Monday and jungle and Charlie, and Harry saw the bartender coming with their drinks and paid him, thinking of how often memory lies, of how so often the lies are good ones. When he was twenty-four years old, he had learned on Guadalcanal that the body could endure nearly anything, and after that he had acted as though he believed it could endure everything: could work without sleep or rest or enough food and water, heedless of cold and heat and illness; could survive penetration and dismemberment, so that death in combat was a matter of bad luck, a man with five bullets in him surviving another pierced by only one. He was so awed by the body’s strength and vulnerability that he did nothing at all about prolonging its life. This refusal was rooted neither in confidence nor an acceptance of fate. His belief in mystery and chance was too strong to allow faith in exercising and in controlling what he ate and drank and when he smoked. Phil had forgotten who he was and where he was going; was that how the mind survived? The body pushed beyond pain, and the mind sidestepped. How else could he stand here, comfortable, proud of his son, when his own mind held images this room of cheerful peace could not contain? He raised a knee and drew his pack of cigarettes from his sock, and Phil gave him a light with a Zippo bearing a Marine emblem, and said: ‘What’s the one nice thing about a moustache?’

‘If I have to tell you, you’re fucking up on more than the .45.’

‘They don’t give out badges for that.’

‘One girl?’

‘No.’

‘Good. It’s too rough on them.’

‘They’ll
all
miss me, Pop.’

‘I’d rather be in the middle of it. I didn’t have a girl, when I was in the Pacific. But, Jesus, I was never warm in the Reservoir, not for one minute, there was always
something
cold—’

‘Frozen Chosin,’ one of the lieutenants said, and drank and eyed Harry’s ribbons over the glass.

‘—Right:
I
was frozen.
Everybody
: we’d come on dead
Chinese
frozen. And tell you the truth, I didn’t think we’d get out, more fucking Chinese than snow, but I’d rather have been freezing my ass off and trying to keep it from getting between a Chinaman’s bullet and thin air than back home like your mother. How do you keep waking up every day and doing what there is to do when you know your man is getting shot at? Ha.’ He looked from Phil to the two lieutenants watching him, respectfully embarrassed, then back at Phil, whose dark saddened eyes had never looked at him this way before, almost as a father gazing at a son, and in a rush of age he saw himself as father of a man grown enough to give him pity. ‘I guess I’m fucking well about to find out.’

‘Fucking-A,’ Phil said, and clapped his shoulder and turned to his drink.

At three in the morning, a half-hour before the alarm, his heart woke him, its anticipatory beat freezing him as normally caffeine did from that depth of sleep whose paradox he could not forgive: needing each night that respite so badly that finally nothing could prevent his having it, then each morning having to rise from it with coffee and tobacco so that he could resume with hope those volitive hours that would end with his grateful return to the oblivion of dreams. He coughed and swallowed, and coughed again and swallowed that too. Phil was in a sleeping bag on an air mattress in the middle of the small room. Last night after dinner at the officers’ club, where they had talked of hunting and today’s terrain, they had spread out on Phil’s desk a map he got from the sportsmen’s club when he drew their hunting area from a campaign hat three nights earlier, and Harry looked, nodded, and listened while Phil, using a pencil as a pointer, told him about the squares of contoured earth on the map that Harry could not only read more quickly, and more accurately, but also felt he knew anyway because, having spent most of his peacetime career at Camp Pendleton, he felt all its reaches were his ground. But he remained amused, and nearly agreed when Phil showed him two long ridges flanking a valley, and said this was the place to get a deer and spend the whole Saturday without seeing one of the other eight hunters who had drawn the same boundaries.

‘It’ll take us too long to walk in,’ Harry said.

‘I got the CO’s jeep. I told him you were coming to hunt.’

At three-fifteen by the luminous dial of his Marine-issued wristwatch that he felt he had not stolen but retired with him, he quietly left the bed and stood looking down at Phil. He lay on his back, a pillow under his head, all but his throat and face hidden and shapeless in the bulk of the sleeping bag. His face was paled by sleep and the dark, eyeless save for brows and curves, and his delicate breathing whispered into the faint hum, the constant tone of night’s quiet. Harry had not watched him sleeping since he was a boy, and now he was pierced as with a remembrance of fatherhood, but of something else too, as old as the earth’s dust: in the darkened bedrooms of Phil and the two daughters he had felt this tender dread; and also looking at the face of a woman asleep, even some he did not love when he woke in the night: his children and the women devoid of anger and passion and humor and pain, so that he yearned during their fragile rest to protect them from and for whatever shaped their faces in daylight.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said, his deep voice, almost harsh, snapping both him and Phil into the day’s hunt: ‘The good thing about a moustache is you can smell her all night while you sleep, and when you wake up you can lick it again.’

The eyes opened and stared from a face still in repose; the mouth was slower to leave sleep, then it smiled and Phil said: ‘You exenlisted men talk dirty.’

They dressed and went quickly down the corridor, rifles slung on their shoulders, Phil carrying in one hand a pack with their breakfast and lunch; they wore pistol belts with canteens and hunting knives, and jeans, and sweat shirts over their shirts, and wind-breakers; Harry wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. Still, the act of arming himself to go into the hills made him feel he was in uniform, and as Phil drove the open jeep through fog, Harry shivered and pushed his hat tighter on his head and watched both flanks, an instinct so old and now useless that it amused him. He had learned to use his senses as an animal does, and probably as his ancestors in Canada and New Hampshire had, though not his father, whose avocation was beer and cards and friends in his kitchen or theirs, the men’s talk with the first beers and hands of penny ante poker in French and English, then later only in the French that had crossed the ocean centuries before the invention of things, so in the flow of words that Harry never learned he now and then heard engine and car and airplane and electric fan. So in 1936, never having touched a rifle or pistol, he went into the Marine Corps with a taste for beer and a knowledge of poker acquired in his eighteenth year and last at home, when his father said he was old enough to join the table, and he trained with young men who had killed game since boyhood, and would learn cards in the barracks and drinking in bars. Four years later he returned home; in the summer evening he walked from the bus station over climbing and dropping streets of the village to the little house where his father sat on the front steps with a bottle of beer; he had not bathed yet for the dinner that Harry could smell cooking; he had taken off his shirt, and his undershirt was wet and soiled; sweat streaked the dirt on his throat and arms, and he hugged Harry and called to the family, took a long swallow of beer, handed the bottle to Harry, and said: ‘I got you a job at the foundry.’ Two days later, Harry took a bus to the recruiting office and reenlisted.

The jeep descended into colder air; fog hid the low earth, so that Harry could not judge the distance from the road to the dark bulk of hills on both sides. He stopped looking, and at once felt exposed and alert; he smiled and shook his head and leaned toward the dashboard to light a cigarette. He could see no stars; the wet moon was pallid, distant. He watched the road, grey fog paled and swathed yellow by the headlights, and said: ‘There was a battalion cut off, when the Chinese came in.’

‘
What
?’

He turned to Phil and spoke away from the rushing air, loudly over the vibrating moan of the jeep: the Chosin Reservoir, the whole Goddamned division was surrounded and a battalion cut off, and they had to go through Chinese to get there and break the battalion out and bring it to the main body. So they could retreat through all those Chinese to the sea. The battalion was pinned down about five miles away, so they started on foot, with a company on each flank playing leapfrog over the hills: two battalions, one of them Royal Marines, and their colonel was in command. A feisty little bastard. ‘I’ve never
liked Limeys
, but the Royal
Marines
are
good
.’ He guessed he liked Limey troops, it was just the country that pissed him off. The reason Marines had such good liberty in Australia in World War II was the Aussies were off in Africa fighting for England. Even the chaplain probably got laid. ‘They loved Ma
rines
and still
do
, and if you ever get a chance to go to Australia,
take
it.’ Their boys were fighting the Goddamn Germans, so it was the Marines keeping Australia safe, and they’d go there for R and R and get all the thanks too. The Limeys were good at that, getting other people to go off and fight in somebody else’s yard. ‘Do you read history?’

‘Not since
college
.’

‘You’ve
got
to.’ He shivered and caught his hat before it blew off, and the jeep climbed into lighter fog. ‘If you’re going to be a
career
man, you’ve got to start
studying
this stuff
now
. Not just
tac
tics and
strategy
; but how these wars get
started
, and
why
, and who
starts
them.’

‘I
will
. What about that bat
tal
ion?’

The flank companies kept making contact in the hills, and the troops in the road would assault and clear that hill, then start moving again; but they were moving too slowly, it was one fire fight after another, so the colonel called back for trucks and brought the people down from the hills, and they all mounted up in the trucks and hauled ass down the road till they got hit; then they’d pile out and attack, and when they’d knocked out whatever it was or it had run off to some other hill, they’d hi-diddle-diddle up the road again—

‘Holy
shit
:

‘I never felt so
much
like a moving
target.
’ He rode shotgun in a six-by; the driver was a corporal and he pissed all over himself; he was good, though; he just kept cussing and shifting gears; probably he was praying too; maybe it was all praying: Jesus Christ
Goddamn
—pissssss—shit Jesus—From the front of the six-by he watched the hills, but what good was it to watch where it’s going to come from, when you’re moving so fast that you know you can’t see anything till you draw fire? He felt like he was searching the air for a bullet. He told the corporal he wished he were up there and the Chinese were down here. Probably that was a prayer too—Harry grabbed his hat as the brim slapped the crown; he put it in his lap, and the air was cool on his bald spot. ‘De-fense is
best
, you know. Or don’t they
tell
you
that
.’ Course they don’t, Marines always attack; but with helicopters you can go behind them and cut off their line of supply and defend that. ‘Read
Liddel Har
t. And learn
Spanish
. That’s where it’s
go
ing to
be
.’