Distortions (29 page)

W
esley has gaps between his teeth. When Wesley doesn’t have anything to do, he pokes things in the spaces to see what will fit: stems, pennies, things. Or he takes a walk to the train station, swivels the seat down in the photo-matic, and deposits a quarter. Last winter Wesley took a lot of pictures before he ran out of money. By the time he got more money, his bowler hat, which photographed well, had blown away in the wind.

In one of today’s pictures Wesley has pulled up his lip to expose the gaps between his teeth. The picture pleases him, and he studies it. That’s how he happens to have the picture in his hand to show Bob Nails.

*

Jeannie Regis’ hair is all different colors. In the sunshine it’s one color. At night, when he lights up her hair with the flashlight, it’s like … copper. He shines the flashlight down the back of her hair. In the half-dark she looks like a painting his father used to have in his bedroom. He aims the beam down her spine. Fuzz. Red fuzz when he holds the light close to the skin. She keeps the flashlight on the night table because, when the babies call for her, the bright hall light frightens them. They wake up in the middle of the night, wanting water. Bob Nails thinks about filling the baby bath and putting it on the floor, maybe sailing little plastic boats in the water, putting glasses on the floor beside it.

There are two glasses on the night table. He drinks the last quarter inch of Bourbon and clicks off the flashlight.

*

When you say “the idiot,” everybody knows you mean Wesley. Wesley acted like an idiot long before the tests confirmed it, so Wesley’s mother tells everyone there was no point in the tests. Wesley is “the idiot,” Thomas is “the normal one,” and of course Mrs. Dutton has always been “the poor woman.” She sends him in to shower and finds him sitting on the toilet, afraid to get into the water. She has to throw back the shower curtain and get all wet herself, soaping and rinsing him, turning the water off and on, off and on so that Wesley will stay in the bathtub.

When Wesley’s brother, Thomas, was eighteen, the minister took him aside and told him he should volunteer to wash his brother. Thomas enlisted in the Army instead. He was Bob Nails’s best friend, so Bob Nails thought about joining the Army too. Bob Nails’s father wouldn’t sign the papers, and he told him that if he found a way around it he’d shoot him in the back. Bob Nails told him he didn’t care—he was in love with Jeannie Parater and he didn’t really want to leave. Mr. Nails told him he’d shoot him in the back if he got married. When school was over, Bob Nails went to work in the gas station. At the end of summer, Jeannie Parater left town, and when they tried to draft Bob Nails he was rejected because he couldn’t hear in one ear.

*

“Well, I guess I’m just going to have to scream at you like you was the idiot,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says to Bob Nails. “Army says you can’t hear, I guess that means you don’t have fit hearing. Same thing with a fairy being rejected,” Sam continues, biting off the end of a Chesterfield and tapping tobacco onto his tongue.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only thing it means,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says, lighting the cigarette, “is that the Army says a man’s got something wrong with him, a man’s got something wrong with him.” He smiles at Bob Nails. Sam Siddell, Junior, has two yellow circles of tobacco stain on his front teeth.

“Well, can I have my job back or can’t I?” Bob Nails says.

Sam Siddell rocks back in the green metal chair behind his desk. “If you can hear,” he says.

“When did you notice anything wrong with my hearing?”

“I didn’t bring it up—the Army did. Army brings up things for a reason—only wants fit men. It don’t take people who lost an arm, or people who couldn’t tell when there was orders to follow, or a fairy that wasn’t like other men.”

Bob Nails doesn’t say anything. A man Sam intended to hire to replace Bob Nails keeps looking from the garage into Sam’s office.

“Knew about my brother, didn’t you?” Sam asks.

“What about him?”

“Army sent him home.”

With the toe of his boot, Sam Siddell strokes the calendar girl’s bare legs.

“Sometimes, when you know something about other people’s misfortunes, you’re willing to give them a minute,” Sam says.

Bob Nails goes home and asks his father about Sam’s brother, who works for him at the grocery store.

“That boy got sent home after he lost half his leg when he done something wrong with explosives,” Bob Nails’s father says. “I don’t know what Sam’s excuse is for losing half his mind. He ever talks to you that way, you let me know and I’ll shoot him in the back.”

*

A woman is found dead, on a deserted farm off the highway. Two hunters discover her. First they see the car, a black Chevrolet, sitting in some brambles. It might have hit the tree to one side. The car looks okay—it doesn’t seem to have hit anything. A woman is sitting in the driver’s seat. Such a strange look frozen on her face; running toward her, they both think she’s frightened of them, of the guns. The doors aren’t locked; they open easily—but the police find that out. The men look in but don’t touch the door. One of the hunters has begun to sweat; he’s afraid he might pass out, so he begins to list facts in his mind: the upholstery is red, the car black, there is a woman. The other hunter makes the telephone call and tells these things to the police.

*

Jeannie? No. She’s home, but she’s unbuttoning one of the babies’ coats and can’t answer the phone. What’s wrong with Bob Nails? What’s he doing here in the middle of the afternoon? He’s talking so loudly that the babies wake up and cry. What’s wrong with him? He tells her all he knows: a woman is dead in a Chevrolet. But her Chevrolet is parked outside—didn’t he notice? Bob Nails looks out the kitchen window.

“If you’d miss me so much, why don’t you marry me?” she says.

Late in the afternoon he’s still there. He doesn’t want to frighten her by telling her that more people might be dead. He
doesn’t want to know himself, so he doesn’t turn on the radio. He stays for dinner, and as they eat she says it again. He thinks about it. Jeannie? No.

*

On the day of the murder, Wesley Dutton walks to the train station. The people coming into town don’t know there’s been a murder, and Wesley doesn’t either because no one has told him. He goes into the photo-matic as usual and sits, waiting for his pictures to develop. He sits there too long. There are girls waiting. He knows it, but he doesn’t move. One of the girls giggles and tells her friend to open the curtain, that maybe it’s just a pair of legs in there and they can toss them out. Wesley thinks that’s funny. When he laughs, the girls get quiet. A little while later a man who works in the train station pulls open the curtain.

“Come on out now, Wesley,” he says.

The girls are standing in back of the man. Wesley smiles and stands, reaches into the metal slot for the pictures, nods, and walks away. But his heart is racing. How did the man know his name? The pictures are too dark. Only the last one is any good. He tears it off to study, but something else attracts his attention. It’s Bob Nails, running toward him. Bob Nails is out of breath. He slows down and raises a hand. Wesley raises his hand too, to give Bob Nails the picture. Bob Nails nods, returns the picture, and goes on running.

If Wesley keeps it, he’ll leave it in a pocket and his mother will ruin it when she does the wash. She’s told him she isn’t going through his pockets any more; she’ll wash what he gives her. Tissues get washed and dried, pennies brighten from wash to wash. Today Mrs. Dutton found a dollar bill she’d washed and said she wouldn’t give Wesley any more money. She screamed. That’s why he went to the train station.

*

Sam Siddell is speaking to Bob Nails. He speaks normally to the other men, but backs off from Bob Nails and speaks in a whisper. At first Bob Nails was convinced that Sam was looking for an excuse to fire him, but Sam gives him the most interesting jobs
and never criticizes his work. He stands under the lift, across the shop from Bob Nails, and whispers—Bob Nails thinks it’s something about a woman who’s come in with an old Chevy. But what would that have to do with Sam’s brother going hunting? Bob Nails finally has to stop work and ask Sam what he’s said.

“I said a girl got killed,” Sam shouts.

“Not somebody from town?”

“Might of been,” Sam hollers.

Bob Nails goes into the office to call Jeannie.

“Young woman,” Sam murmurs as he walks in behind him. “Young woman,” he repeats loudly, nodding in agreement with himself.

She doesn’t answer. Bob Nails tells Sam he’s going to check, he’ll be right back.

“It ain’t his faulty hearing that disturbs me,” Sam Siddell says to the other men. “It’s his faulty ideas of who’s good women and who ain’t.”

Sam walks up to a car that’s being repaired and spits on the hood.

“Not that it ain’t a tragedy he’s got failed hearing.”

*

It’s 1966 and Bob Nails is at Jeannie Parater’s house and she’s showing him pictures of paintings in a book. Bob Nails is going to ask her to marry him before she goes away to college. He’s going to join the Army so they’ll leave town, which is what she always talks about. Tom Dutton likes the Army; he says he’s never getting out. Bob Nails’s father has told him that if he gets married and joins the Army he’ll shoot him in the back, no matter what country they send him to. When Bob Nails’s father isn’t going to shoot someone in the back, then he’s going to get an incurable cancer, and when he gets that, then he’s going to wire everybody’s car and all the people in the business world who’ve cheated him will be blown sky high; or he’ll get two heart attacks and hang the loan shark he’s into before he gets the third.

“Why do you always want to be talking violence?” Bob Nails’s mother says to his father. “If you talked nicer it would be nicer for Bobby to be home.”

Before that, Bob Nails couldn’t really give her a reason for being at the Paraters’ all the time. Now he had one, so when his mother asked why he couldn’t spend more time at home, he said his father was always talking about killing people and blowing things up and he didn’t want to hear it. His mother nodded sadly. She only got mad once, when Bob Nails and Jeannie drove to another town and spent the weekend.

“Do you think your father talks violence in his sleep? At ten o’clock he goes to bed. At ten o’clock you can come home,” Bob Nails’s mother says.

He’s not sure why he never asked Jeannie to marry him. There was something crazy about her—the way she kept showing him pictures: lines and dots and landscapes, all drawn by different men. She said the idea to spend the weekend with him just came to her when they were sitting in the diner. On Monday she didn’t want to leave, but he made her get in the car, convinced now that she wouldn’t want to marry him, that she’d shown him all those pictures just to smart off. He didn’t say anything on the way back. He began to feel the way his father did—that he could kill, strangle, blow things up. But he loved her and didn’t know why. He stayed home at night and thought about it. After a while he went back to see her, but it was only for two weeks because she left in September. Later that month Bob Nails’s father had his first heart attack.

*

She’s giggling, driving too fast on purpose to confuse him. He hates her when she’s this way.

“And do you know what she told my mother? She said the day the Apollo spacecraft landed on the moon Wesley wouldn’t leave the television, even to eat.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

She’s steering with her left hand, and she’s right-handed. There’s a yellow warning sign, but she’s going too fast to notice.

“Some people don’t laugh in the face of progress,” he adds, gripping the dashboard.

“Wait! Let me tell it.”

She’s looking at him instead of the road.

“So later that afternoon Mrs. Dutton heard Wesley pacing. She looked in his bedroom and there he was walking around with two big squares of foam rubber tied under his shoes. He’d cut up the pillows!”

Why did he agree to this ride? Every time the car cuts around a curve he’s sure he’s going to die. Now they’re on a road he’s not familiar with. Neither is she. She throws the gearshift into reverse and they’re back on the main road.

“Where was the accident? I’m confused now.”

“What accident?”

“Sam might make fun of you for going deaf, but he should know you’ve gone stupid too. The murdered woman.”

They’re going around another curve. A car approaching clicks its high beam on and off.

“Is it one of the roads over top of that hill?”

They’re at the top before he has time to answer. Bob Nails is sure she’s going to kill them. “Yeah,” he agrees immediately. “That road, I think.”

She turns and slows down. “This can’t be it. There’d be some markings.”

“Why are you looking for it? What do you care?”

“I just want to know,” she says.

“Know
what?”
Bob Nails says.

“Listen,” Jeannie says, slamming on the brakes. “You always were after me because I wanted to find out about things. You hate books. You’re glad I came back. You don’t want me to find out about anything. You don’t want me to find out about you.”

“Me?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

They’re sitting in the dark and the car has come to a stop, not quite in the middle of the road. She’s stretched her neck toward him so she can scream in his face. There’s a surprised look on her face.

“What?” he asks.

She looks away, through the wheel. “I just wanted to see it. I’ll bet lots of people are driving there to look.”

“Sure,” he says, relieved that she’s talking quietly. “We just found the wrong road is all.”

She smiles at him and starts to drive again, carefully. Bob Nails
begins to feel better, thinks about suggesting a drink. Which way is she headed … what’s closest?

“But we’ll find it,” she says evenly. “Is it this road?”

Bob Nails and Jeannie leave the bar. It’s almost midnight—Jeannie’s mother won’t stay awake any later with the babies, and she refuses to sleep in the spare bed. Bob Nails never liked Jeannie’s mother. She’s been at his mother’s house almost constantly since the funeral, when his father died after his second heart attack. Bob Nails drives the car because Jeannie’s drunk.