Alice Munro's Best (65 page)

“It's all right,” said Eve, and hoisted Daisy up on her hip. “If you could just move the truck ahead, then I could turn around.”

“I don't know no pictures. See, if they was in the front part the house I never would've saw them because Harold, he's got the front part of the house shut off.”

“No, they were outside,” said Eve. “It doesn't matter. This was years and years ago.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” the man was saying, warming to the conversation. “You come in and get Harold to tell you about it. You know Harold? He's who owns it here. Mary, she owns it, but Harold he put her in the Home, so now he does. It wasn't his fault, she had to go there.” He reached into the truck and took out two cases of beer. “I just had to go to town, Harold sent me into town. You go on. You go in. Harold be glad to see you.”

“Here Trixie,” said Philip sternly.

The dog came yelping and bounding around them, Daisy squealed with fright and pleasure and somehow they were all on the route to the house, Eve carrying Daisy, and Philip and Trixie scrambling around her up some earthen bumps that had once been steps. The man came close behind them, smelling of the beer that he must have been drinking in the truck.

“Open it up, go ahead in,” he said. “Make your way through. You don't mind it's got a little untidy here? Mary's in the Home, nobody to keep it tidied up like it used to be.”

Massive disorder was what they had to make their way through – the kind that takes years to accumulate. The bottom layer of it made up of chairs and tables and couches and perhaps a stove or two, with old bedclothes and newspapers and window shades and dead potted plants and ends of lumber and empty bottles and broken lighting fixtures and curtain rods piled on top of that, up to the ceiling in some places, blocking nearly all the light from outside. To make up for that, a light was burning by the inside door.

The man shifted the beer and got that door open, and shouted for Harold. It was hard to tell what sort of room they were in now – there were kitchen cupboards with the doors off the hinges, some cans on the shelves, but there were also a couple of cots with bare mattresses and rumpled blankets. The windows were so successfully covered up with furniture or hanging quilts that you could not tell where they were, and the smell was that of a junk store, a plugged sink, or maybe a plugged toilet, cooking and grease and cigarettes and human sweat and dog mess and unremoved garbage.

Nobody answered the shouts. Eve turned around – there was room to turn around here, as there hadn't been in the porch – and said, “I don't think we should –” but Trixie got in her way and the man ducked round her to bang on another door.

“Here he is,” he said – still at the top of his voice, though the door had opened. “Here's Harold in here.” At the same time Trixie rushed forward, and another man's voice said, “Fuck. Get that dog out of here.”

“Lady here wants to see some pictures,” the little man said. Trixie whined in pain – somebody had kicked her. Eve had no choice but to go on into the room.

This was a dining room. There was the heavy old dining-room table and the substantial chairs. Three men were sitting down, playing cards. The fourth man had got up to kick the dog. The temperature in the room was about ninety degrees.

“Shut the door, there's a draft,” said one of the men at the table.

The little man hauled Trixie out from under the table and threw her into the outer room, then closed the door behind Eve and the children.

“Christ. Fuck,” said the man who had got up. His chest and arms were so heavily tattooed that he seemed to have purple or bluish skin. He shook one foot as if it hurt. Perhaps he had also kicked a table leg when he kicked Trixie.

Sitting with his back to the door was a young man with sharp narrow shoulders and a delicate neck. At least Eve assumed he was young, because he wore his hair in dyed golden spikes and had gold rings in his ears. He didn't turn around. The man across from him was as old as Eve herself, and had a shaved head, a tidy gray beard, and bloodshot blue
eyes. He looked at Eve without any friendliness but with some intelligence or comprehension, and in this he was unlike the tattooed man, who had looked at her as if she was some kind of hallucination that he had decided to ignore.

At the end of the table, in the host's or the father's chair, sat the man who had given the order to close the door, but who hadn't looked up or otherwise paid any attention to the interruption. He was a large-boned, fat, pale man with sweaty brown curls, and as far as Eve could tell he was entirely naked. The tattooed man and the blond man were wearing jeans, and the gray-bearded man was wearing jeans and a checked shirt buttoned up to the neck and a string tie. There were glasses and bottles on the table. The man in the host's chair – he must be Harold – and the gray-bearded man were drinking whiskey. The other two were drinking beer.

“I told her maybe there was pictures in the front but she couldn't go in there you got that shut up,” the little man said.

Harold said, “You shut up.”

Eve said, “I'm really sorry.” There seemed to be nothing to do but go into her spiel, enlarging it to include staying at the village hotel as a little girl, drives with her mother, the pictures in the wall, her memory of them today, the gateposts, her obvious mistake, her apologies. She spoke directly to the graybeard, since he seemed the only one willing to listen or capable of understanding her. Her arm and shoulder ached from the weight of Daisy and from the tension which had got hold of her entire body. Yet she was thinking how she would describe this – she'd say it was like finding yourself in the middle of a Pinter play. Or like all her nightmares of a stolid, silent, hostile audience.

The graybeard spoke when she could not think of any further charming or apologetic thing to say. He said, “I don't know. You'll have to ask Harold. Hey. Hey Harold. Do you know anything about some pictures made out of broken glass?”

“Tell her when she was riding around looking at pictures I wasn't even born yet,” said Harold, without looking up.

“You're out of luck, lady,” said the graybeard.

The tattooed man whistled. “Hey you,” he said to Philip. “Hey kid. Can you play the piano?”

There was a piano in the room behind Harold's chair. There was no stool or bench – Harold himself taking up most of the room between the piano and the table – and inappropriate things, such as plates and overcoats, were piled on top of it, as they were on every surface in the house.

“No,” said Eve quickly. “No he can't.”

“I'm asking him,” the tattooed man said. “Can you play a tune?”

The graybeard said, “Let him alone.”

“Just asking if he can play a tune, what's the matter with that?”

“Let him alone.”

“You see I can't move until somebody moves the truck,” Eve said.

She thought, There is a smell of semen in this room.

Philip was mute, pressed against her side.

“If you could just move –” she said, turning and expecting to find the little man behind her. She stopped when she saw he wasn't there, he wasn't in the room at all, he had got out without her knowing when. What if he had locked the door?

She put her hand on the knob and it turned, the door opened with a little difficulty and a scramble on the other side of it. The little man had been crouched right there, listening.

Eve went out without speaking to him, out through the kitchen, Philip trotting along beside her like the most tractable little boy in the world. Along the narrow pathway on the porch, through the junk, and when they reached the open air she sucked it in, not having taken a real breath for a long time.

“You ought to go along down the road ask down at Harold's cousin's place,” the little man's voice came after her. “They got a nice place. They got a new house, she keeps it beautiful. They'll show you pictures or anything you want, they'll make you welcome. They'll sit you down and feed you, they don't let nobody go away empty.”

He couldn't have been crouched against the door all the time, because he had moved the truck. Or somebody had. It had disappeared altogether, been driven away to some shed or parking spot out of sight.

Eve ignored him. She got Daisy buckled in. Philip was buckling himself in, without having to be reminded. Trixie appeared from somewhere and walked around the car in a disconsolate way, sniffing at the tires.

Eve got in and closed the door, put her sweating hand on the key. The car started, she pulled ahead onto the gravel – a space that was surrounded by thick bushes, berry bushes she supposed, and old lilacs, as well as weeds. In places these bushes had been flattened by piles of old tires and bottles and tin cans. It was hard to think that things had been thrown out of that house, considering all that was left in it, but apparently they had. And as Eve swung the car around she saw, revealed by this flattening, some fragment of a wall, to which bits of whitewash still clung.

She thought she could see pieces of glass embedded there, glinting.

She didn't slow down to look. She hoped Philip hadn't noticed – he might want to stop. She got the car pointed towards the lane and drove past the dirt steps to the house. The little man stood there with both arms waving and Trixie was wagging her tail, roused from her scared docility sufficiently to bark farewell and chase them partway down the lane. The chase was only a formality; she could have caught up with them if she wanted to. Eve had had to slow down at once when she hit the ruts.

She was driving so slowly that it was possible, it was easy, for a figure to rise up out of the tall weeds on the passenger side of the car and open the door – which Eve had not thought of locking – and jump in.

It was the blond man who had been sitting at the table, the one whose face she had never seen.

“Don't be scared. Don't be scared anybody. I just wondered if I could hitch a ride with you guys, okay?”

It wasn't a man or a boy; it was a girl. A girl now wearing a dirty sort of undershirt.

Eve said, “Okay.” She had just managed to hold the car in the track.

“I couldn't ask you back in the house,” the girl said. “I went in the bathroom and got out the window and run out here. They probably don't even know I'm gone yet. They're boiled.” She took hold of a handful of the undershirt which was much too large for her and sniffed at it. “Stinks,” she said. “I just grabbed this of Harold's, was in the bathroom. Stinks.”

Eve left the ruts, the darkness of the lane, and turned onto the ordinary road. “Jesus I'm glad to get out of there,” the girl said. “I didn't know
nothing about what I was getting into. I didn't know even how I got there, it was night. It wasn't no place for me. You know what I mean?”

“They seemed pretty drunk all right,” said Eve.

“Yeah. Well. I'm sorry if I scared you.”

“That's okay.”

“If I hadn't've jumped in I thought you wouldn't stop for me. Would you?”

“I don't know,” said Eve. “I guess I would have if it got through to me you were a girl. I didn't really get a look at you before.”

“Yeah. I don't look like much now. I look like shit now. I'm not saying I don't like to party. I like to party. But there's party and there's party, you know what I mean?”

She turned in the seat and looked at Eve so steadily that Eve had to take her eyes from the road for a moment and look back. And what she saw was that this girl was much more drunk than she sounded. Her dark-brown eyes were glazed but held wide open, rounded with effort, and they had the imploring yet distant expression that drunks' eyes get, a kind of last-ditch insistence on fooling you. Her skin was blotched in some places and ashy in others, her whole face crumpled with the effects of a mighty bingeing. She was a natural brunette – the gold spikes were intentionally and provocatively dark at the roots – and pretty enough, if you disregarded her present dinginess, to make you wonder how she had ever got mixed up with Harold and Harold's crew. Her way of living and the style of the times must have taken fifteen or twenty natural pounds off her – but she wasn't tall and she really wasn't boyish. Her true inclination was to be a cuddly chunky girl, a darling dumpling.

“Herb was crazy bringing you in there like that,” she said. “He's got a screw loose, Herb.”

Eve said, “I gathered that.”

“I don't know what he does around there, I guess he works for Harold. I don't think Harold uses him too good, neither.”

Eve had never believed herself to be attracted to women in a sexual way. And this girl in her soiled and crumpled state seemed unlikely to appeal to anybody. But perhaps the girl did not believe this possible – she must be so used to appealing to people. At any rate she slid her hand along
Eve's bare thigh, just getting a little way beyond the hem of her shorts. It was a practiced move, drunk as she was. To spread the fingers, to grasp flesh on the first try, would have been too much. A practiced, automatically hopeful move, yet so lacking in any true, strong, squirmy, comradely lust that Eve felt that the hand might easily have fallen short and caressed the car upholstery.

“I'm okay,” the girl said, and her voice, like the hand, struggled to put herself and Eve on a new level of intimacy. “You know what I mean? You understand me. Okay?”

“Of course,” said Eve briskly, and the hand trailed away, its tired whore's courtesy done with. But it had not failed – not altogether. Blatant and halfhearted as it was, it had been enough to set some old wires twitching.

And the fact that it could be effective in any way at all filled Eve with misgiving, flung a shadow backwards from this moment over all the rowdy and impulsive as well as all the hopeful and serious, the more or less unrepented-of, couplings of her life. Not a real flare-up of shame, a sense of sin – just a dirty shadow. What a joke on her, if she started to hanker now after a purer past and a cleaner slate.