Andre Dubus: Selected Stories by Andre Dubus Page A

Merrimack. The sky was turning light. Willis let him out a block from his house, and walking home he listened for sounds from the houses he passed. They were quiet. A light was on in his living room. He turned it off and undressed in there, and went softly toward the bedroom; in the hall he smelled the smoke, and he stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the orange of her cigarette in the dark. The curtains were closed. He went to the closet and put his shoes on the floor and felt for a hanger.
    ‘Did you do it?’ she said.
    He went down the hall to the bathroom and in the dark he washed his hands and face. Then he went to her, lay on his back, and pulled the sheet up to his throat.
    ‘Are you all right?’ she said.
    ‘I think so.’
    Now she touched him, lying on her side, her hand on his belly, his thigh.
    ‘Tell me,’ she said.
    He started from the beginning, in the parking lot at the bar; but soon with his eyes closed and Ruth petting him, he spoke of Strout’s house: the order, the woman presence, the picture on the wall.
    ’The way she was smiling,’ he said.
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘I don’t know. Did you ever see Strout’s girl? When you saw him in town?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I wonder who she was.’
    Then he thought: not was: is. Sleeping now she is his girl . He opened his eyes, then closed them again. There was more light beyond the curtains. With Ruth now he left Strout’s house and told again his lie to Strout, gave him again that hope that Strout must have for a while believed, else he would have to believe only the gun pointed at him for the last two hours of his life. And with Ruth he saw again the dropping suitcase, the darting move to the right: and he told of the first shot, feeling her hand on him but his heart isolated still, beating on the road still in that explosion like thunder. He told her the rest, but the words had no images for him, he did not see himself doing what the words said he had done; he only saw himself on that road.
    ‘We can’t tell the other kids,’ she said. ‘It’ll hurt them, thinking he got away. But we mustn’t.’
    ‘No.’
    She was holding him, wanting him, and he wished he could make love with her but he could not. He saw Frank and Mary Ann making love in her bed, their eyes closed, their bodies brown and smelling of the sea; the other girl was faceless, bodiless, but he felt her sleeping now; and he saw Frank and Strout, their faces alive; he saw red and yellow leaves falling to the earth, then snow: falling and freezing and falling; and holding Ruth, his cheek touching her breast, he shuddered with a sob that he kept silent in his heart.

PART II
    THE PRETTY GIRL
But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,
I am about to vomit thee out of my mouth ….
                                             Saint John, The Apocalypse
For Roger Rath, out among the stars
    I DON’T KNOW HOW I feel till I hold that steel. That was always true: I might have a cold, or one of those days when everything is hard to do because you’re tired for no reason at all except that you’re alive, and I’d work out, and by the time I got in the shower I couldn’t remember how I felt before I lifted; it was like that part of the day was yesterday, and now I was starting a new one. Or a hangover: some of my friends and my brother too are hair-of-the-dog people, but I’ve never done that and I never will, because a drink in the morning shuts down the whole day, and anyway I can’t stand the smell of it in the morning and my stomach tells me it would like a Coke or a milkshake, but it is not about to stand for a prank like a shot of vodka or even a beer.
    It was drunk out last night , Alex says. And I always say: A severe drunk front moved in around midnight . We’ve been saying that since I was seventeen and he was twenty-one. On a morning after one of those, when I can read the words in the Boston Globe but I can’t