Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

  “Ha ha,” Frank said. “That’s the spirit. Ready, set, over you go,” and he rolled Kenny onto the boards. Kenny screamed and kicked his legs in the air. When he quieted down Frank and Tub lifted the boards and carried him down the drive. Tub had the back end, and with the snow blowing into his face he had trouble with his footing. Also he was tired and the man inside had forgotten to turn the porch light on. Just past the house Tub slipped and threw out his hands to catch himself. The boards fell and Kenny tumbled out and rolled to the bottom of the drive, yelling the whole way down. He came to rest against the right front wheel of the truck.

  “You fat moron,” Frank said. “You aren’t good for diddly.”

  Tub grabbed Frank by the collar and backed him hard up against the fence. Frank tried to pull his hands away but Tub shook him and snapped his head back and forth and finally Frank gave up.

  “What do you know about fat,” Tub said. “What do you know about glands.” As he spoke he kept shaking Frank. “What do you know about me.”

  “All right,” Frank said.

  “No more,” Tub said.

  “All right.”

  “No more talking to me like that. No more watching. No more laughing.”

  “Okay, Tub. I promise.”

  Tub let go of Frank and turned away. His arms hung straight at his sides.

  “I’m sorry, Tub.” Frank touched him on the shoulder. “I’ll be down at the truck.”

  Tub stood by the fence for a while and then got the rifles off the porch. Frank had rolled Kenny back onto the boards and they lifted him into the bed of the truck. Frank spread the seat blankets over him. “Warm enough?” he asked.

  Kenny nodded.

  “Okay. Now how does reverse work on this thing?”

  “All the way to the left and up.” Kenny sat up as Frank started forward to the cab. “Frank!”

  “What?”

  “If it sticks don’t force it.”

  The truck started right away. “One thing,” Frank said, “you’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. A very ancient, very spiritual culture and they can still make a hell of a truck.” He glanced over at Tub. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you felt like that, honest to God I didn’t. You should’ve said something.”

  “I did.”

  “When? Name one time.”

  “A couple hours ago.”

  “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “That’s true, Frank,” Tub said. “You don’t pay attention very much.”

  “Tub,” Frank said, “what happened back there, I should’ve been more sympathetic. I realize that. You were going through a lot. I just want you to know it wasn’t your fault. He was asking for it.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely. It was him or you. I would’ve done the same thing in your shoes, no question.”

  The wind was blowing into their faces. The snow was a moving white wall in front of their lights; it swirled into the cab through the hole in the windshield and settled on them. Tub clapped his hands and shifted around to stay warm, but it didn’t work.

  “I’m going to have to stop,” Frank said. “I can’t feel my fingers.”

  Up ahead they saw some lights off the road. It was a tavern. In the parking lot there were several jeeps and trucks. A couple of them had deer strapped across their hoods. Frank parked and they went back to Kenny. “How you doing, partner?” Frank said.

  “I’m cold.”

  “Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. It’s worse inside, take my word for it. You should get that windshield fixed.”

  “Look,” Tub said, “he threw the blankets off.” They were lying in a heap against the tailgate.

  “Now look, Kenny,” Frank said, “it’s no use whining about being cold if you’re not going to try and keep warm. You’ve got to do your share.” He spread the blankets over Kenny and tucked them in at the corners.

  “They blew off.”

  “Hold on to ’em, then.”

  “Why are we stopping, Frank?”

  “Because if me and Tub don’t get warmed up we’re going to freeze solid and then where will you be?” He punched Kenny lightly in the arm. “So just hold your horses.”

  The bar was full of men in colored jackets, mostly orange. The waitress brought coffee. “Just what the doctor ordered,” Frank said, cradling the steaming cup in his hand. “Tub, I’ve been thinking. What you said about me not paying attention, that’s true.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No. I really had that coming. I guess I’ve just been a little too interested in old number one. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Not that that’s any excuse.”

  “Forget it, Frank. I sort of lost my temper back there. I guess we’re both a little on edge.”

  Frank shook his head. “It isn’t just that.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Just between us, Tub?”

  “Sure, Frank. Just between us.”

  “Tub, I think I’m going to be leaving Nancy.”

  “Oh, Frank. Oh, Frank.” Tub sat back and shook his head.

  Frank reached out and laid his hand on Tub’s arm. “Tub, have you ever been really in love?”

  “Well—”

  “I mean really in love.” He squeezed Tub’s wrist. “With your whole being.”

  “I don’t know. When you put it like that, I don’t know.”

  “Then you haven’t. Nothing against you, but you’d know it if you had.” Frank let go of Tub’s arm. “This isn’t just some bit of fluff I’m talking about.”

  “Who is she, Frank?”

  Frank paused. He looked into his empty cup. “Roxanne Brewer.”

  “Cliff Brewer’s kid? The babysitter?”

  “You can’t just put people into categories like that, Tub. That’s why the whole system is wrong. And that’s why this country’s going to hell in a rowboat.”

  Tub shook his head. “But she can’t be more than—”

  “Sixteen. She’ll be seventeen in May.” Frank smiled. “May fourth, three twenty-seven p.m. Hell, Tub, a hundred years ago she’d have been an old maid by that age. Juliet was only thirteen.”

  “Juliet? Juliet Miller? Jesus, Frank, she doesn’t even have breasts. She’s still collecting frogs.”

  “Not Juliet Miller. The real Juliet. Tub, don’t you see how you’re dividing people up into categories? He’s an executive, she’s a secretary, he’s a truck driver, she’s sixteen years old. Tub, this so-called babysitter, this so-called sixteen-year-old, has more in her little finger than most of us have in our entire bodies. I can tell you this little lady is something special.”

  “I know the kids like her.”

  “She’s opened up whole worlds to me that I never knew were there.”

  “What does Nancy think about all this?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “You haven’t told her?”

  “Not yet. It’s not so easy. She’s been damned good to me all these years. Then there’s the kids to consider.” The brightness in Frank’s eyes trembled and he wiped quickly at them with the back of his hand. “I guess you think I’m a complete bastard.”

  “No, Frank. I don’t think that.”

  “Well, you ought to.”

  “Frank, when you’ve got a friend it means you’ve always got someone on your side, no matter what. That’s how I feel about it, anyway.”

  “You mean that, Tub?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “You don’t know how good it feels to hear you say that.”

  Kenny had tried to get out of the truck. He was jackknifed over the tailgate, his head hanging above the bumper. They lifted him back into the bed and covered him again. He was sweating and his teeth chattered. “It hurts, Frank.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt so much if you just stayed put. Now we’re going to the hospital. Got that? Say it—‘I’m going to the hospital.’”

  “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “Again.
”

  “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “Now just keep saying that to yourself and before you know it we’ll be there.”

  After they had gone a few miles Tub turned to Frank. “I just pulled a real boner,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I left the directions on the table back there.”

  “That’s okay. I remember them pretty well.”

  The snowfall lightened and the clouds began to roll back off the fields, but it was no warmer, and after a time both Frank and Tub were bitten through and shaking. Frank almost didn’t make it around a curve, and they decided to stop at the next roadhouse.

  There was an automatic hand dryer in the bathroom and they took turns standing in front of it, opening their jackets and shirts and letting the jet of hot air blow across their faces and chests.

  “You know,” Tub said, “what you told me back there, I appreciate it. Trusting me.”

  Frank opened and closed his fingers in front of the nozzle. “The way I look at it, Tub, no man is an island. You’ve got to trust someone.”

  “Frank?”

  Frank waited.

  “When I said that about my glands, that wasn’t true. The truth is I just shovel it in. Day and night. In the shower. On the freeway.” He turned and let the air play over his back. “I’ve even got stuff in the paper-towel machine at work.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your glands at all?” Frank had taken his boots and socks off. He held first his right foot, then his left, up to the nozzle.

  “No. There never was.”

  “Does Alice know?” The machine went off and Frank started lacing up his boots.

  “Nobody knows. That’s the worst of it, Frank. Not the being fat—I never got any big kick out of being thin—but the lying. Having to lead a double life like a spy or a hit man. I understand those guys, I know what they go through. Always having to think about what you say and do. Always feeling like people are watching you, trying to catch you at something. Never able to just be yourself. Like when I make a big deal about only having an orange for breakfast and then scarf all the way to work. Oreos, Mars bars, Twinkies. Sugar Babies. Snickers.” Tub glanced at Frank and looked quickly away. “Pretty disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “Tub. Tub.” Frank shook his head. “Come on.” He took Tub’s arm and led him into the restaurant half of the bar. “My friend is hungry,” he told the waitress. “Bring four orders of pancakes, plenty of butter and syrup.”

  “Frank—”

  “Sit down.”

  When the dishes came Frank carved out slabs of butter and just laid them on the pancakes. Then he emptied the bottle of syrup, moving it back and forth over the plates. He leaned forward on his elbows and rested his chin in one hand. “Go on, Tub.”

  Tub ate several mouthfuls, then started to wipe his lips. Frank took the napkin away from him. “No wiping,” he said. Tub kept at it. The syrup covered his chin; it dripped to a point like a goatee. “Weigh in, Tub,” Frank said, pushing another fork across the table. “Get down to business.” Tub took the fork in his left hand and lowered his head and started really chowing down. “Clean your plate,” Frank said when the pancakes were gone, and Tub lifted each of the four plates and licked it clean. He sat back, trying to catch his breath.

  “Beautiful,” Frank said. “Are you full?”

  “I’m full,” Tub said. “I’ve never been so full.”

  Kenny’s blankets were bunched up against the tailgate again.

  “They must’ve blown off,” Tub said.

  “They’re not doing him any good,” Frank said. “We might as well get some use out of them.”

  Kenny mumbled. Tub bent over him. “What? Speak up.”

  “I’m going to the hospital,” Kenny said.

  “Attaboy,” Frank said.

  The blankets helped. The wind still got their faces and Frank’s hands, but it was much better. The fresh snow on the road and the trees sparkled under the beam of the headlight. Squares of light from farmhouse windows fell onto the blue snow in the fields.

  “Frank,” Tub said after a time, “you know that farmer? He told Kenny to kill his dog.”

  “You’re kidding!” Frank leaned forward, considering. “That Kenny. What a card.” He laughed, and so did Tub.

  Tub smiled out the back window. Kenny lay with his arms folded over his stomach, moving his lips at the stars. Right overhead was the Big Dipper, and behind, hanging between Kenny’s feet in the direction of the hospital, was the North Star, polestar, Help to Sailors. As the truck twisted through the gentle hills the star went back and forth between Kenny’s boots, staying always in his sight. “I’m going to the hospital,” Kenny said. But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back.

  The Liar

  My mother read everything except books. Advertisements on buses, entire menus as we ate, billboards; if it had no cover it interested her. So when she found a letter in my drawer that wasn’t addressed to her, she read it. What difference does it make if James has nothing to hide?—that was her thought. She stuffed the letter in the drawer when she finished it and walked from room to room in the big empty house, talking to herself. She took the letter out and read it again. Then, without putting on her coat or locking the door, she went down the steps and headed for the church at the end of the street. No matter how angry and confused she might be, she always went to four o’clock Mass.

  It was a fine day, blue and cold and still, but Mother walked as though into a strong wind, bent forward at the waist with her feet hurrying behind in short, busy steps. My brother and sisters and I considered this walk of hers funny, and we smirked at one another when she crossed in front of us to stir the fire or water a plant. We didn’t let her catch us at it. It would have puzzled her to think that anything about her might be amusing. Her one concession to the fact of humor was an insincere, startling laugh. Strangers sometimes stared at her.

  While Mother waited for the priest, who was late, she prayed. She prayed in a familiar, orderly, firm way: first for her late husband, my father, then for her parents—also dead. She said a quick prayer for my father’s parents—just touching base; she had disliked them—and finally for her children in order of their ages, ending with me. Mother did not consider originality a virtue and until my name came up her prayers were exactly the same as on any other day.

  But when she came to me she spoke up boldly. “I thought he wasn’t going to do it anymore. Murphy said he was cured. What am I supposed to do now?” There was reproach in her tone. Mother put great hope in her notion that I was cured, which she regarded as an answer to her prayers. In thanksgiving she had sent a lot of money to the Thomasite Indian Mission, money she’d been saving for a trip to Rome. Now she felt cheated and she let her feelings be known. When the priest came in, Mother slid back on the seat and followed the Mass. After communion she began to worry again and went straight home without stopping to talk to Dorothea, the woman who always cornered Mother after Mass to talk about the plots hatched against her by Communists, devil worshippers, and Rosicrucians. Dorothea watched her go with narrowed eyes.

  Once in the house, Mother took the letter from my drawer and brought it into the kitchen. She held it over the stove with her fingernails, looking away so she wouldn’t be drawn into it again, and set it on fire. When it began to burn her fingers she dropped it in the sink and watched it blacken and flutter and close upon itself like a fist. Then she washed it down the drain and called Dr. Murphy.

  The letter was to my friend Ralphy in Arizona. He used to live across the street from us but he had moved. Most of the letter was about a tour we, the junior class, had taken of Alcatraz. That was all right. What got Mother was the last paragraph where I said that she had been coughing up blood, and the doctors weren’t sure what was wrong with her, though we were hoping for the best.

  This wasn’t true. Mother took pride in her physical condition, considered herself a horse: “I’m a regular hors
e,” she would reply when people asked about her health. For several years now I’d been saying unpleasant things that weren’t true, and this irked Mother greatly, enough to persuade her to send me to Dr. Murphy, in whose office I was sitting when she burned the letter. Dr. Murphy was our family physician and had no training in psychoanalysis, but he took an interest in “things of the mind,” as he put it. He had treated me for appendicitis and tonsillitis, and Mother thought he could put the truth into me as easily as he took things out of me, a hope Dr. Murphy did not share. He was basically interested in getting me to understand what I did, and lately he’d been moving toward the conclusion that I understood what I did as well as I ever would.

  Dr. Murphy listened to Mother’s account of the letter. He was curious about the wording I had used and became irritated when Mother told him she had burned it. “The point is,” she said, “he was supposed to be cured and he’s not.”

  “Margaret, I never said he was cured.”

  “You certainly did. Why else would I have sent over a thousand dollars to the Thomasite mission?”

  “I said that he was responsible. That means that James knows what he’s doing, not that he’s going to stop doing it.”

  “I’m sure you said he was cured.”

  “Never. What do you mean by curing James?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Getting him back to reality, what else?”

  “Whose reality? Mine or yours?”

  “Murphy, what are you talking about? James isn’t crazy, he’s a liar.”

  “Well, you have a point there.”

  “What am I going to do with him?”

  “I don’t think there’s much you can do. Be patient.”

  “I’ve been patient.”

  “If I were you, Margaret, I wouldn’t make too much of this. James doesn’t steal, does he?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Or beat people up or talk back?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have a lot to be thankful for.”

  “I don’t think I can take any more of it. That business about leukemia last summer. And now this.”