Days Like Today (12 page)

‘So when the mule turned out to be dead, he gave the winning man twenty bucks and he went away happy. But Jeb – he had about five hundred to take home to his mother. That was a lot more than if he’d just sold it.’

‘That’s right,’ Franklin said. ‘That was pretty smart.’

Sherman looked into his glass. He turned it around in his hand. As Franklin was about to suggest that they call it a night, he asked, ‘Do you have bad dreams?’

‘Well, now that you mention it …’

‘Yeah?’

‘I do have one nightmare that repeats.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It always starts the same way. I’m in a bar someplace, with a friend, and we get so drunk that we just keep talking all night instead of going home and getting some sleep.’

Sherman blew out a small sound like a cough; it wasn’t really a laugh. And after he’d tipped up his glass for the last swallow, Franklin thought:
I
shouldn’t have said that
.
He was
about to confide in me and I pushed him away. I wouldn’t be able
to persuade him to open up now, but maybe I should never try. My
instincts told me not to get mixed up in this man’s bad dreams.

He missed the freedom to go out whenever he needed to be alone or to see friends on his own. He would have liked to give Irene a night out, too: find a baby-sitter for the kids and go to that inn over the state line, where there was a
dance floor in the restaurant; and a really good band, so everyone kept telling him.

The next time they were out together Sherman said to Franklin, ‘I don’t think it’s right that you and your folks had your land stolen by that Raymond fellow. Somebody ought to do something about that.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t let it get to me. It isn’t even my own family.’

‘That’s OK. I’m tolerant. Remember what we said in the service: we kill anyone regardless of race, color or creed.’

‘We’d probably stand a good chance of seeing him in a place like this if he wasn’t so tight-fisted. He does his drinking at home. They say he’s so stingy he only owns one light bulb and whenever he wants to walk from one room to the next in that big house of his, he gets up and unscrews the bulb so he can take it with him.’

‘Nah. He’d be stumbling around, trying to find –’

‘Just a joke. I’m sure that place is flooded with light, day and night. He wasn’t always so bad. His wife died four years ago. We all thought she died because of the way he treated her. He was real hard on her. Didn’t like for her to talk to anybody. I guess he thought she’d be telling tales on him. Some people are just strange.’

‘They have kids?’

‘No. And none of the rest of the family will go near him, even the ones who could get to him in a day’s driving. He’s had fights with everybody. So he sits in his big, empty house and he lives like a hermit. He leads a miserable life except for one thing: he’s preventing Irene from having
what’s rightfully hers. Maybe we wouldn’t mind so much if he had a family. Or – I don’t know. Maybe that would make it worse. Anyway, he’s just a dog in the manger.’

Some thought nagged at Sherman. It wasn’t a memory from the past, but he kept feeling that it was. Every time his mind approached it, the thought dissolved. Trying to pin it down was like trying to remember a lost tune or a forgotten name. It was almost as if he’d had a memory of something in the future.

The next day they were in the car, on the way to ‘Happy Honolulu’, when Franklin said, ‘By God, there’s the old bastard himself. Look, there.’

Sherman turned his head to see where. There, on the other side of the street, was the old man from the library; and his dog.
Dog in the manger and dog from the library.

‘Raymond Saddler,’ Franklin said.

‘Is that right? He don’t look so tough.’

‘He’s plenty mean and he’s a good shot. I’ve seen him in action during the hunting season. He likes keeping some kind of weapon handy. There you are: that’s his shotgun up on the rack there in the pick-up.’

Irene stood at the kitchen table and sliced tomatoes on the chopping board. She worked quickly but she paid attention. She’d never cut herself badly, not even with the special, razor-sharp knives she’d been given by a sister-in-law for Christmas. The thing to remember about weapons was that everything depended on which way they pointed.

He was going to make a move soon, she thought. If he
tried anything, she’d kill him. There, in her own kitchen, each cup and bowl had its place and she knew exactly where everything was. She could be blindfolded and still grab the right handle. But he’d have to look first. As for killing, she’d studied all that from Caesar’s assassination. Long before the dress rehearsal, Miss Moody had been very particular about even the smallest detail. She’d told them not to stab downward from above: upward from below was the right way to do it. Miss Moody had shown them where all the vital organs were and how to hit them fast without slicing into bones. She’d taught them more anatomy than they’d ever learned in biology class. ‘Theater,’ Miss Moody had said, her voice thrilling with conviction, ‘is more true than real life. It’s above and beyond reality. It reaches for eternal values. So if you don’t get the physical part right, it’s a disaster – it looks silly. And then the whole audience can start laughing in the scenes that are meant to be serious.’

Miss Moody had been an inspiration. And they’d done her proud on the night. Irene always smiled when she remembered. Her parents told her that they’d never seen her so excited: after it was over, she kept asking them, ‘How was I? Was I really all right? Could you hear me? Was it scary? Did it look real? Did you like it? Was it good? Honest?’

She’d have loved to be an actress. She was sure she would have been good at it. Acting was almost what she was doing now; as long as Sherman was camped on them, she had to act polite. But at night she dropped the good manners and quarreled with Franklin about whether his friend should go or stay.

‘That look in his eye –’ she said, ‘like a member of some crazy sect, waiting to take their orders from a flying saucer.’

‘You don’t know what it was like,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t know. And you don’t know what it was like carrying your four kids and giving birth to them – especially the first time with that disgusting Dr Graff who gave me the creeps, with his arm all the way up my insides right to the elbow and saying, “Relax, relax,” like I was a new girl in his whorehouse. Thank God he was on the golf course when I went into labor.’

‘Every woman –’

‘You’re damn right. I took it on willingly because I loved you. I’m the one who’s supposed to love. But do you care? You’re out with Margie Robinson.’

‘Oh, not that again.’

‘And I’m stuck here with the servant jobs while you’re in a bar with the boys:
Oh, how about that Margie, what I could
tell you about her, deal me another, kiddo
.
Yes siree.
’

‘You don’t know. You just don’t know what it’s like to imagine that any minute you’re going to be blown to pieces. And picking up the survivors: that wasn’t much fun, either.’

‘Just because –’

‘You stick to the shopping and the gingerbread cookies. And shut up about me.’

‘Jesus God, would I love to kill a few people. Why the hell do you think war is so much more painful and dangerous than what every woman goes through in just ordinary life? All of them standing around, screaming, “Push, push,” and tearing me to pieces so that after Donnie I was
having bowel movements out of my vagina –’

‘Christ, Irene. Just quit it, will you? It isn’t my fault. I would have done anything to spare you that. But you were the one who kept wanting –’

‘I know it isn’t your fault. Of course it isn’t. I’m not blaming you for anything except thinking that this man is some specially deserving case because you went through all that buddy stuff together. Big deal. Was he your best friend out there?’

‘No.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’d be glad if he moved on. I felt sorry for him. Hell, anybody can go through a rough time. If nobody gives you a helping hand, you can stay there for years.’

‘He seems to have plenty to spend. Where does he get all that money?’

‘His disability compensation, I guess.’

‘That couldn’t be much.’

‘He’s been wandering around the country for a long time: no house, no car, no social life. Maybe his money’s been piling up in a bank somewhere.’

‘He’s got a gun.’

‘We’ve all got guns.’

‘A handgun. A pistol. He showed it to Hagen. He said he was going to let him shoot it.’

‘Oh?’ That didn’t sound too good. Taking your boy out to practice target shooting with a four-ten was one thing. Handing a four-year-old a loaded revolver was another.

‘That’s the trouble with bad people,’ she said. They touch you with their evil and you can’t get rid of it To defend yourself against them, you have to hate. And that hate begins to distort you.’

‘Evil? Oh my good Lord. He’s a guy who’s down on his luck, that’s all.’

He knew what was going through her mind: that maybe Sherman was the kind of man who might think it was all right to teach a child how to cheat at cards or to short-change people so that they didn’t notice straight away. Maybe he was worse than that.

‘He’s been through a lot of unhappiness,’ she said, ‘and he’s looking for someone to pin it on.’

Sherman continued to listen. Hearing Franklin say, ‘Christ, Irene’, he remembered the preacher in the hospital:
Christ died for us
. And he was reminded of all the stickers he kept noticing on car bumpers:
Jesus Saves
.

He saves us,
Sherman thought,
and he dies doing it
.
And after
that, we’re redeemed. He doesn’t save us and then go on living.

He came back early from the library one day. Irene was in the kitchen but Addie was in the house too, cleaning the living room. Irene asked if he’d like her to make him a sandwich.

‘Oh, no thanks. I picked up a bite in town. I’ll just sit here for a while.’ He pulled out a chair and sat down. He watched her working. After a few minutes he asked, ‘You ever play cards?’

‘No time,’ she answered shortly.

‘We used to play cards all the time in the service. There’s a lot of waiting around. Most of the time it was poker. All the different types of poker games I’ve played. The one I liked best was called Midnight Baseball, where you’re betting blind. We used to play that when we were drunk and out with the girls. We did a lot of card-playing in the whorehouses. It’s something you don’t forget: the smell of the perfume; the long, black hair; the feel of the silk. Him, too – you think he’s forgotten?’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I know I should feel sorry for your troubles.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to feel sorry for me. I’m doing OK.’

‘You have to pity a man who isn’t right in the head.’

‘Uh-huh. I guess I could get away with a lot if I wanted to make that an excuse, couldn’t I? Like women that say: “I’m a woman, I’m a mother, that’s why I’m like this, that’s why I did that, that’s why these things happen to me.”’

‘I see. Well, you may be crazy, but you aren’t dumb, are you?’

At last, he thought: a woman who understood him. She didn’t like him, but that didn’t matter. Whatever was going to happen between him and her was meant to be. ‘I can tell you something, too,’ he said. ‘Old Franklin ain’t a very good poker player.’

‘And you are?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But games are for children. And cards are just to pass the time. Frank is a grown man. It took him years to get over the war, but he did it and he’s fine now. It can be done. You
could do it, too. Talking to people helps, specially if they were in it with you, but trying to drag a cured man down into your sickness isn’t going to make you well.’

‘Oh. Is that what I’m trying to do?’

‘And drinking doesn’t help, either. It’s bad for you and it doesn’t make you feel that good, anyway, does it? Alcohol is a depressive, that’s what they say. Anyway, it isn’t right for the children to see their father drunk.’

She waited for him to get up and go. He was waiting for her to tell him to leave. When the moment had been allowed to pass, he said, ‘Franklin is a man who’s killed.’

‘But it hasn’t changed him.’

‘How do you know? You didn’t know him before.’

‘I know because he’s a good man.’

‘Except that now he knows it would be easy to do it again. Before you do it, you think it would be impossible. You probably think that.’

‘What?’

‘That you couldn’t kill.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘I remember – I was so little, it’s one of my very first memories: seeing my mother cleaning out a chicken. I thought it was so horrible. We all did. We said:
Ooh, how can she do that?
But you learn that somebody’s got to do that or nobody gets to eat roast chicken. You learn. You put your hands inside a dead animal. You kill and you eat what you’ve killed: birds, fish, deer. And then you stop being so upset. Killing is part of living.’

‘Killing, maybe. Not murder.’

‘Well, two girls I went to school with: they got pregnant by mistake and they got rid of it. Wouldn’t you do that?’

‘That wouldn’t happen.’

‘Accidents can always happen, anywhere. Not just – like they say – accidents in the home. And it’s only a question. Some guy that’s drunk: he flags down your car and you stop because you think he’s in trouble. And then, before you know what he’s trying to do … would you get rid of it?’

‘I certainly would.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And if one of the kids was in danger. I’d kill anybody for that.’

‘Even your husband?’

‘What?’

‘If it came to a choice?’

‘There isn’t any choice. They’re the same thing. Why are you trying to talk me into a corner?’

‘Why don’t you like thinking about things?’

‘This isn’t thinking. It’s that game of “What if?” and most of the answers are things nobody knows. You never know for sure till it happens.’

‘And then?’

‘Then you do what you have to. And sometimes that isn’t what you thought it was going to be. Sometimes you’re tired, you’re scared, your concentration is broken and you forget or you do something dumb or something that’s just the opposite of what you meant to do. Sherman, could you move so I can get to the drawer there?’