The salesman has disappeared behind a tepee of skis stacked on their ends and has started to close out his register.
Bob’s face twists on its axis, a big, square-faced man writhing on the pole of his own pain. He lets his hands flop uselessly at his sides. “I want … I want … I want …” This isn’t going right; everything’s coming out wrong. He’s supposed to be talking nicely to this salesman, conning him, getting a good buy, a floor model with scuffs selling for wholesale, the way Eddie always gets things for his kid, one-third off and just as good as new, better, even, because new costs too much. Why can’t he make this salesman like him?
From beyond the skis, the man calls, “They’re locking the doors now!”
Bob says nothing, just stands there as if he were a mannequin.
The salesman peeks around the skis and sees Bob hasn’t left yet. “Come back tomorrow if you want skates!” he shouts, as if he thinks Bob is hard of hearing or maybe simple-minded.
“Tomorrow?” Slowly Bob’s face breaks into a grin, and he laughs, once. “Hah! Tomorrow, It’ll be the same tomorrow,” he says. Still grinning, he takes a step forward, as if to explain. “What I want is …”
“Look, you better get outa here or I’ll hafta call the manager.”
Bob stops, and quietly, somberly, he says, “I’m sorry. I just … I’m sorry.” Turning, he slowly walks away, plods past the copper-toned refrigerators and stoves, the pastel-colored washers and dryers, and up the stairs to street level. A janitor jangling a huge ring of keys lets him out to the sidewalk, where it’s snowing heavily. No one else is on the sidewalks, though cars occasionally pass sloppily by on Main Street. Jamming his hands into his jacket pockets, Bob lowers his head against the flying snow and quickly walks the two blocks to his car on Depot Street.
He stands on the slippery sidewalk next to his station wagon, now a long white mound, and stares at the bar across the street, studies the small red neon sign flashing Irwin’s name at him like a beacon through the falling snow, then gazes up at the darkened blank windows of Doris’s apartment. His bear-like head droops, and glancing at the salt-covered pickup truck, cold and empty, still parked in front of his car, as if deserted in an old war, he looks down Depot Street toward the cannery and the river, and then back up Depot Street to Main. This is his whole world. He knows every square inch of its surface. For a second he studies the candy canes dangling from the lampposts, when all of a sudden, without a thought of it, he doubles up his right fist and holds it out in front of him, as if he were holding a hammer, or as if it were a hammer itself. His left hand remains in his jacket pocket, relaxed and warm, but his right hand is a fist raised against and extended toward the night, and he brings it heel-first swiftly down, smashing it against the windshield on the passenger’s side. The blow shatters the outer layer of glass and sends silvery cobwebs across the windshield, the force of the blow spraying the snow in fantails, clearing the windshield instantly. Again, he brings the heel of his fist down, and again, until he has filled the windshield entirely with spiderwebs of broken glass. Then he attacks the side windows, and the snow shudders and falls like a heavy curtain to the street. First he hits the front window on the passenger’s side, then the back, then the rear window, until he has worked his way around to the other side of the station wagon, where he makes his way forward to the driver’s window, pounding as he goes, as if trying to free a child trapped inside.
Across the street, Pearl, one forearm curled protectively over her large chest, has stepped outside to the sidewalk. “Bob?” she calls. “That you?” Her voice is uncharacteristically small and frightened. She keeps the door behind her open, one hand on it in case she has to retreat quickly.
Bob stops himself and peers through the falling snow to the woman across the street. “Yeah. It’s me.”
“You okay, Bob?” She lets go of the door and it closes slowly.
Bob sighs heavily and lets his hands fall to his sides. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“You want someone to drive you home, Bob? You had a few too many?”
“No, I’m okay. I’m not drunk,” he says. “Just pissed.”
Pearl watches him silently and carefully, as if he were a dangerous animal with a leg in a trap.
“Pissed!” he says with a laugh.
“What’re you doing?”
He laughs again, a hard, humorless laugh. “What am I doing? That’s a good question.” Then, suddenly serious, he says, “You don’t understand, Pearl. No one knows what I mean. About anything. No one.”
“You okay? You want me to get one of the boys inside to drive you home?”
Yes, yes, he’s okay, and no, he doesn’t need anyone to drive him home, he knows the way. He waves her off, as if she were foolish, and gets into the car and starts the motor. As soon as he turns the ignition key, the windshield wipers, still switched on, come to life and clatter bumpily across the shattered windshield glass. Ignoring the noise, Bob drops the car into gear, backs slowly uphill away from the pickup, then pulls out to the street and heads down the hill toward the river, where he turns left toward home.
Pearl shakes her head and walks back inside to the bar. She’s seen this kind of explosion a hundred times before, not usually this early on a Friday night, though, and never with Bob Dubois doing the exploding. But he wasn’t really exploding, she thinks, blowing out of control like some of those guys do when they’ve been drinking and talking mean for hours, suddenly getting physical and smashing everything in sight. No, the way he walked around his car, pounding and breaking the windows one after the other, was methodical and almost calm. He said he wasn’t drunk, and except for the fact that he was breaking the windows of his own car, he didn’t seem to be drunk. It was strange. It’s the quiet ones, she thinks. They’re the guys you have to watch. But she’s never thought of Bob Dubois as the quiet type. He’s a gregarious man, by and large, generally cheerful and talkative, a man with an eye for the women, she thinks, a man who can please women, too, because he talks one way, kind of reckless and sexy, and behaves another, polite and restrained, so that the woman is left free to get a little excited without being afraid of leading him on too fast, and that way, in the end, when she decides to invite him upstairs for a drink or whatever, she thinks that she has made the decision freely. She thinks it’s her decision, not his.
Two of the side windows are shattered completely, the others merely cracked. Hundreds of tiny cubes and chunks of glass lie scattered across the seats and floor. Silvery nebulae spattered over the windshield and rear window and the remaining side windows obscure Bob’s vision as he drives, and a cold, snowy wind blows through the car, swirling around his face and chilling his bare hands. He clutches the steering wheel as if afraid he will fall over. To keep the car from slipping and skidding on the slick surface of the streets, he feathers the brake and gas pedal. Between the top of the dashboard and the windshield the wind steadily builds a small, powdery ridge of snow that the heater can’t melt. It’s dark, except for occasional streetlights, and no cars pass him either way. Bob feels he’s riding in a horse-drawn wagon somewhere in Siberia, as if he were being carted late at night from one prison to another. That’s how he pictures himself, a passive man, inert and shackled, huddled in straw against the cold and snow in the back of an open cart clattering over icy ruts behind a sick old horse. The horse is driven by a pair of stone-faced guards, brutal-looking men who speak an unknown language in grumbling voices, who seem not to know the name of the man they are hauling, or his crime. The guards, though peasants, are specialists in transporting prisoners from one place of confinement to another. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these silent, impassive transporters with their wagons and tired old horses, men whose ultimate purpose is to keep the prisoners moving, keep them in transit from one cold, isolated place to another, so that at no time will all the prisoners have to be accommodated, housed, fed.
The snow, dry and light, flutters to the earth from a low, dark blue sky, blanketing t
he roadway and muffling the blows of the horse’s hooves against the layers of ice and hardened snow beneath, hushing the creak of the wheels of the cart and cushioning the ride through the town. Silver strings of smoke curl upward from chimneys to the sky. Now and then, light from a window peers across a soft gray yard to the road, but there are no signs that the inhabitants of the town know or care that a new prisoner has arrived. Dubois wants to stand in the back of the cart, to raise his fists and shout, “I’m here! I’m … here!” but the chains on his wrists and ankles hold him down, forcing him to turn in on himself, as if to warm his cold body before a tiny, carefully tended fire located at the center of his chest.
3
When Bob Dubois enters the house, his wife Elaine is sitting in the living room on the couch watching Hart to Hart on TV. She’s wearing her flannel nightgown, pink quilted housecoat, and slippers shaped like pink acrylic mounds, and in her hair, large blue plastic curlers. She doesn’t look up when her husband enters but goes on watching TV as if she were still alone.
Quietly, Bob shuts the outside door behind him, locks it, shucks his coat and cap and tosses them onto a basket of dirty laundry in the front hall, then walks slowly into the living room, where he drops his body like a sack of potatoes into the slipcovered armchair. It, like the couch, is aimed at the television set, a large console color set placed against the wall opposite the rest of the furniture in the room. To the left of the TV is a skinny, gaudily decorated Christmas tree, its lights going on and off like channel markers. At the base of the tree a half-dozen brightly wrapped packages have been arranged with care, spread out from the trunk of the tree so as to give the impression of plenitude.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Bob says in a low voice, apologizing to the TV screen. His face is red and puffy, his blue eyes are still wet and his nose is running freely. With shoulders slumped forward and hands hanging limply between his legs like pendulums, the man looks like a thrashed and deserted dog.
Sitting back stiffly but still watching Mr. and Mrs. Hart get dressed for a party, Elaine says, “Did you get the skates?” It’s an accusation, not a question. She’s a small woman, almost tiny, with a handsome head, especially in profile. Her sharp Roman nose and crisp chin clarify a face that’s otherwise ordinary and vague, made so by Elaine herself, because, despite what everyone has told her, she doesn’t think she’s especially pretty and works at hiding her face from other people’s scrutiny.
Silent for a few seconds, Bob finally says, “No. I didn’t get the fucking skates.”
“Oh,” she answers, and then, without looking away from the TV, she touches her hair curlers, as if suddenly frightened, strokes the several strands of reddish-brown hair that lick the nape of her neck, quickly lowers her hands and locks them around her knees. “So, where’d you go? Since work.”
“Irwin’s for a while. That’s where I called you from. Then Sears. The skates at Sears were lousy … and expensive.”
“Oh,” she says. “I was worried. Because of the snow and all.”
An advertisement appears on the screen. A jubilant, pink-faced family in pajamas and plaid bathrobes gathered around a modestly decorated, dark green tree is being photographed by the father of the family with his new Polaroid camera. Elaine turns away from the screen and for the first time looks at her husband’s face and realizes that he’s been crying. He looks at her, and away. Then silence, and she goes on staring at him.
She says his name, as if not believing the man next to her is really Bob. Her hands move to her mouth, and she brushes her lips with her fingertips, as if trying to read unuttered words from them. In the nearly ten years she’s known him, she’s never seen him like this. She’s seen him angry, hurt, glad or sad, but she’s never seen him cry, though she has on a few occasions wished he would break down and cry. There was the time when his father finally died from the cancer, and the summer after that, when his mother died so suddenly, and the time Elaine confessed to having slept with Bob’s best friend, Avery Boone, and when they thought Ruthie would die from the spinal meningitis and she didn’t, and then they thought she’d never walk again but she did—all those times he had simply tightened up, like a man being photographed by the police, a man afraid of being identified later by witnesses as the rapist, the burgler, the driver of the getaway car.
Slowly, without looking at her, he lifts his swollen right hand, opens and extends it so she can see the swelling and discoloration along the heel of the hand. “I broke … I broke all the windows of the car.”
“You what?”
“I said I broke all the windows of the car. Don’t worry, I’ll get ’em fixed. I’ll tell the insurance company some kids vandalized it or something.”
“Broke the windows? Why?” she asks calmly. This is her way. In a crisis she is calm and patient. She saves her rage and alarm, her joy and her grief, even, for later, when she has got all the information.
“I don’t know, Elaine. I don’t know, I just got … so damned … mad. You know?”
“Are you drunk?”
“No, no. I had a couple of beers at Irwin’s, that’s all. Nothing.”
“Then why are you … why were you so mad? Did you get fired? What happened, Bob?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened.” He finally turns and faces her. He knows she’s not angry at him, she’s only confused, and now he wants her to understand. He wants her to know what he knows, to feel what he feels.
Crossing from the couch to his chair, Elaine kneels and cups his injured hand gently in both of hers, as if confining a small, delicate animal there.
“I went to Sears. I went there and looked at the skates there, you know, for Ruthie, and came back to the car … and I got so damned mad … the skates were expensive … I got mad at everything, though, mad at everything … then I just got to pounding on the car windows, and they broke. And then coming home, I felt … coming home I felt worse than I’ve ever felt in my life. I can’t even say it, how bad I felt. And then all of a sudden I just … I just started crying. Me!” he says, almost shouting, his voice breaking, his face forcing a grotesque grin over its surface. “I mean, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, what was the matter, I mean, because I’m okay now, but just like that, all of a sudden I’m crying like a baby. Me! Crying like a fucking baby!”
“Oh, Bob, don’t,” she croons. “Don’t.” She strokes his hand lovingly.
“No, no, I’m okay now. No kidding, I’m fine now. It’s just that … it’s just I was so surprised, you know? Because I was so mad and all. And I have to tell you, I have to tell …”
“No, honey, it’s okay. I understand. Don’t worry, honey.”
“No, you don’t understand. I have to tell you how I felt.”
“I know, baby.” She goes on stroking his hand, soothing and trying to heal it with her touch.
“No, Elaine, you really don’t understand,” he says, pulling his hand away. “Listen to me. It’s this place. This goddamned place. It stinks. And it’s my job at Abenaki, that fucking job. And it’s this whole fucking life. This stupid life. All of a sudden, this whole life came to me, it showed me itself. I had the feelings before I saw it, and I didn’t know what the feelings came from, until I saw it, and then I saw this life, this whole fucking life, and I knew what the feelings came from. I saw that there’s no way out of it for me. It’s like I’m my father all over again. I’m all grown up now, and all of a sudden I’m my own fucking father over again. Just like by the time he was my age he got to be his father. The both of them, dumb Frenchmen down at the goddamned mill running a lathe, the both of them, their whole livelong lives! Only difference now, the mill is turned into a fucking pea cannery where only women work, so I’m fixing broken oil burners for Fred Turner, crawling in and out of boiler rooms and basements my whole livelong life!”
Elaine is silent for a second. Then in a quiet voice she says, “We have a good life, honey. We do.”
Bob looks at his feet. “My father, when I was a kid, u
sed to play a record over and over, I don’t know where the hell he got it, he only bought the record player for Ma and me and Eddie to play, but he had this one record of his own, a forty-five by Frank Sinatra called ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ a really stupid song. But he loved it, and he used to have a few beers and play that record over and over, until he’d get this kind of dreamy look on his face, sitting there in his chair listening to this song and pretending he wasn’t who he was. And me and Eddie, we’d see him doing that and we’d laugh, you know? We’d laugh at him, because we knew we were different, we’d never do anything so stupid as our old man, work all day in a fucking mill and come home and have a couple of beers and play a goddamned record by Frank Sinatra about being destiny’s darling. I mean, Jesus! What an asshole, I’d think. I was only a kid, I was in high school then, me and Eddie, but being such hotshot hockey players and all, getting written up in the papers and all, we thought we were destiny’s darlings. Only now it’s fifteen years later, and here I am. Just like my old man. Only instead of coming home and sitting in my chair and playing ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ I’m watching fucking Hart to Hart or some damned thing on TV. And if my kids were a few years older, they’d be laughing at me, the way me and Eddie used to laugh at my old man. Look at the asshole, they’d say, Ruthie and Emma, bigshot cheerleaders in high school and all, look at the asshole, he thinks he’s Robert Wagner or somebody, they’d say, he doesn’t know he’s half drunk and covered with soot from other people’s furnaces and doesn’t have a pot to piss in and never will.”
“Oh, honey, we have a good life. We do.”
“Maybe you do. Or at least you think you do. Because you happen to be living the way you always wanted to live, the way when you were a kid you hoped you’d live. Because of your old man’s taking off on you and your ma like that, and your ma having to work herself practically to death at the cannery by the time she was forty-five. But me, I don’t know, I thought it was going to be different. Me and Ave Boone, we used to talk about building a boat and going to Australia or someplace in the South Pacific and making a killing. We used to say that, ‘We’ll make a killing.’ If I said those words now, it’d be like sand in my mouth, because I’d be lying and I’d know it. No fucking way I’ll ever make a killing. Ave, he did it. He got out. He built his boat, just like he always wanted to, and he got out. It took him till he was almost thirty, but he got out …”