Short Cuts (9 page)

Dean wanted to know what he’d done while he was gone, and Stuart took some fish out of the freezer to show him.

“I’m taking him to your mother’s for the day,” I said.

“Sure,” Stuart said and looked at Dean who was holding one of the frozen trout. “If you want to and he wants to, that is. You don’t have to, you know. There’s nothing wrong.”

“I’d like to anyway,” I said.

“Can I go swimming there?” Dean asked and wiped his fingers on his pants.

“I believe so,” I said. “It’s a warm day so take your suit, and I’m sure your grandmother will say it’s okay.”

Stuart lighted a cigarette and looked at us.

Dean and I drove across town to Stuart’s mother’s. She lives in an apartment building with a pool and a sauna bath. Her name is Catherine Kane. Her name, Kane, is the same as mine, which seems impossible. Years ago, Stuart has told me, she used to be called Candy by her friends. She is a tall, cold woman with white-blonde hair. She gives me the feeling that she is always judging, judging. I explain briefly in a low voice what has happened (she hasn’t yet read the newspaper) and promise to pick Dean up that evening. “He brought his swimming suit,” I say. “Stuart and I have to talk about some things,” I add vaguely. She looks at me steadily from over her glasses. Then she nods and turns to Dean, saying “How are you, my little man?” She stoops and puts her arms around him. She looks at me again as I open the door to leave. She has a way of looking at me without saying anything.

When I return home Stuart is eating something at the table and drinking beer.…

After a time I sweep up the broken dishes and glassware and go outside. Stuart is lying on his back on the grass now, the newspaper and can of beer within reach, staring at the sky. It’s breezy but warm out and birds call.

“Stuart, could we go for a drive?” I say. “Anywhere.”

He rolls over and looks at me and nods. “We’ll pick up some beer,” he says. “I hope you’re feeling better about this. Try to understand, that’s all I ask.” He gets to his feet and touches me on the hip as he goes past. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready.”

We drive through town without speaking. Before we reach the country he stops at a roadside market for beer. I notice a great stack of papers just inside the door. On the top step a fat woman in a print dress holds out a licorice stick to a little girl. In a few minutes we cross Everson Creek and turn into a picnic area a few feet from the water. The creek flows under the bridge and into a large pond a few hundred yards away. There are a dozen or so men and boys scattered around the banks of the pond under the willows, fishing.

So much water so close to home, why did he have to go miles away to fish?

“Why did you have to go there of all places?” I say.

“The Naches? We always go there. Every year, at least once.” We sit on a bench in the sun and he opens two cans of beer and gives one to me. “How the hell was I to know anything like that would happen?” He shakes his head and shrugs, as if it had all happened years ago, or to someone else. “Enjoy the afternoon, Claire. Look at this weather.”

“They said they were innocent.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“The Maddox brothers. They killed a girl named Arlene Hubly near the town where I grew up, and then cut off her head and threw her into the Cle Elum River. She and I went to the same high school. It happened when I was a girl.”

“What a hell of a thing to be thinking about,” he says. “Come on, get off it. You’re going to get me riled in a minute. How about it now? Claire?”

I look at the creek. I float toward the pond, eyes open, face down, staring at the rocks and moss on the creek bottom
until I am carried into the lake where I am pushed by the breeze. Nothing will be any different. We will go on and on and on and on. We will go on even now, as if nothing had happened. I look at him across the picnic table with such intensity that his face drains.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he says. “I don’t –”

I slap him before I realize. I raise my hand, wait a fraction of a second, and then slap his cheek hard. This is crazy, I think as I slap him. We need to lock our fingers together. We need to help one another. This is crazy.

He catches my wrist before I can strike again and raises his own hand. I crouch, waiting, and see something come into his eyes and then dart away. He drops his hand. I drift even faster around and around in the pond.

“Come on, get in the car,” he says. “I’m taking you home.”

“No, no,” I say, pulling back from him.

“Come on,” he says. “Goddamn it.”

“You’re not being fair to me,” he says later in the car. Fields and trees and farmhouses fly by outside the window. “You’re not being fair. To either one of us. Or to Dean, I might add. Think about Dean for a minute. Think about me. Think about someone else besides your goddamn self for a change.”

There is nothing I can say to him now. He tries to concentrate on the road, but he keeps looking into the rearview mirror. Out of the corner of his eye, he looks across the seat to where I sit with my knees drawn up under my chin. The sun blazes against my arm and the side of my face. He opens another beer while he drives, drinks from it, then shoves the can between his legs and lets out breath. He knows. I could laugh in his face. I could weep.

Stuart believes he is letting me sleep this morning. But I was awake long before the alarm sounded, thinking, lying on the far side of the bed, away from his hairy legs and his thick, sleeping fingers. He gets Dean off for school, and then he shaves, dresses, and leaves for work. Twice he looks into the bedroom and clears his throat, but I keep my eyes closed.

In the kitchen I find a note from him signed “Love.” I sit in the breakfast nook in the sunlight and drink coffee and make a coffee ring on the note. The telephone has stopped ringing, that’s something. No more calls since last night. I look at the paper and turn it this way and that on the table. Then I pull it close and read what it says. The body is still unidentified, unclaimed, apparently unmissed. But for the last twenty-four hours men have been examining it, putting things into it, cutting, weighing, measuring, putting back again, sewing up, looking for the exact cause and moment of death. Looking for evidence of rape. I’m sure they hope for rape. Rape would make it easier to understand. The paper says the body will be taken to Keith & Keith Funeral Home pending arrangements. People are asked to come forward with information, etc.

Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me. Really change, I mean. We will grow older, both of us, you can see it in our faces already, in the bathroom mirror, for instance, mornings when we use the bathroom at the same time. And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but
you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged.…

The past is unclear. It’s as if there is a film over those early years. I can’t even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me. There was a girl who had a mother and father – the father ran a small café where the mother acted as waitress and cashier – who moved as if in a dream through grade school and high school and then, in a year or two, into secretarial school. Later, much later – what happened to the time in between? – she is in another town working as a receptionist for an electronics parts firm and becomes acquainted with one of the engineers who asks her for a date. Eventually, seeing that’s his aim, she lets him seduce her. She had an intuition at the time, an insight about the seduction that later, try as she might, she couldn’t recall. After a short while they decide to get married, but already the past, her past, is slipping away. The future is something she can’t imagine. She smiles, as if she has a secret, when she thinks about the future. Once, during a particularly bad argument, over what she can’t now remember, five years or so after they were married, he tells her that someday this affair (his words: “this affair”) will end in violence. She remembers this. She files this away somewhere and begins repeating it aloud from time to time. Sometimes she spends the whole morning on her knees in the sandbox behind the garage playing with Dean and one or two of his friends. But every afternoon at four o’clock her head begins to hurt. She holds her forehead and feels dizzy with the pain. Stuart asks her to see a doctor and she does, secretly pleased at the doctor’s
solicitous attention. She goes away for a while to a place the doctor recommends. Stuart’s mother comes out from Ohio in a hurry to care for the child. But she, Claire, spoils everything and returns home in a few weeks. His mother moves out of the house and takes an apartment across town and perches there, as if waiting. One night in bed when they are both near sleep, Claire tells him that she heard some women patients at the clinic discussing fellatio. She thinks this is something he might like to hear. Stuart is pleased at hearing this. He strokes her arm. Things are going to be okay, he says. From now on everything is going to be different and better for them. He has received a promotion and a substantial raise. They’ve even bought another car, a station wagon, her car. They’re going to live in the here and now. He says he feels able to relax for the first time in years. In the dark, he goes on stroking her arm.… He continues to bowl and play cards regularly. He goes fishing with three friends of his.

That evening three things happen: Dean says that the children at school told him that his father found a dead body in the river. He wants to know about it.

Stuart explains quickly, leaving out most of the story, saying only that, yes, he and three other men did find a body while they were fishing.

“What kind of body?” Dean asks. “Was it a girl?”

“Yes, it was a girl. A woman. Then we called the sheriff.” Stuart looks at me.

“What’d he say?” Dean asks.

“He said he’d take care of it.”

“What did it look like? Was it scary?”

“That’s enough talk,” I say. “Rinse your plate, Dean, and then you’re excused.”

“But what’d it look like?” he persists. “I want to know.”

“You heard me,” I say. “Did you hear me, Dean? Dean!” I want to shake him. I want to shake him until he cries.

“Do what your mother says,” Stuart tells him quietly. “It was just a body, and that’s all there is to it.”

I am clearing the table when Stuart comes up behind and touches my arm. His fingers burn. I start, almost losing a plate.

“What’s the matter with you?” he says, dropping his hand. “Claire, what is it?”

“You scared me,” I say.

“That’s what I mean. I should be able to touch you without you jumping out of your skin.” He stands in front of me with a little grin, trying to catch my eyes, and then he puts his arm around my waist. With his other hand he takes my free hand and puts it on the front of his pants.

“Please, Stuart.” I pull away and he steps back and snaps his fingers.

“Hell with it then,” he says. “Be that way if you want. But just remember.”

“Remember what?” I say quickly. I look at him and hold my breath.

He shrugs. “Nothing, nothing,” he says.

The second thing that happens is that while we are watching television that evening, he in his leather recliner chair, I on the sofa with a blanket and magazine, the house quiet except for the television, a voice cuts into the program to say that the murdered girl has been identified. Full details will follow on the eleven o’clock news.

We look at each other. In a few minutes he gets up and says he is going to fix a nightcap. Do I want one?

“No,” I say.

“I don’t mind drinking alone,” he says. “I thought I’d ask.”

I can see he is obscurely hurt, and I look away, ashamed and yet angry at the same time.

He stays in the kitchen a long while, but comes back with his drink just when the news begins.

First the announcer repeats the story of the four local fishermen finding the body. Then the station shows a high school graduation photograph of the girl, a dark-haired girl with a round face and full, smiling lips. There’s a film of the girl’s parents entering the funeral home to make the identification. Bewildered, sad, they shuffle slowly up the sidewalk to the front steps to where a man in a dark suit stands waiting, holding the door. Then, it seems as if only seconds have passed, as if they have merely gone inside the door and turned around and come out again, the same couple is shown leaving the building, the woman in tears, covering her face with a handkerchief, the man stopping long enough to say to a reporter, “It’s her, it’s Susan. I can’t say anything right now. I hope they get the person or persons who did it before it happens again. This violence.…” He motions feebly at the television camera. Then the man and woman get into an old car and drive away into the late afternoon traffic.

The announcer goes on to say that the girl, Susan Miller, had gotten off work as a cashier in a movie theater in Summit, a town 120 miles north of our town. A green, late-model car pulled up in front of the theater and the girl, who according to witnesses looked as if she’d been waiting, went over to the car and got in, leading the authorities to suspect that the driver of the car was a friend, or at least an acquaintance. The authorities would like to talk to the driver of the green car.

Stuart clears his throat, then leans back in the chair and sips his drink.

The third thing that happens is that after the news Stuart
stretches, yawns, and looks at me. I get up and begin making a bed for myself on the sofa.