A Stranger in This World (11 page)

Traffic thinned as they drove the narrow thread of the road, past the bright resorts and busy restaurants, toward the vast blankness of the Gulf. Long stretches of darkness intervened between the villages of neon, lanes of little snug cottages. Lockhart thought of all the happy people in their cottages, all the happy evenings, knowing he was making it up. This end of the island was dark, deserted, the headlights of the pink Jeep cutting crazy shadows in the dense roadside greenery, sword plants and elephant ears and lianas. At the edge of the last parking lot stood a large grass shack of yellow cement: the Luau Hut. “Is this all right?” he asked her.

“What?” She was miles away, slowly coming into focus, looking around. “Well,” she said, “I guess this will have to do.”

She held her arm out toward the emptiness of the Gulf, all around them, as if she meant this to be an argument for something.

The dining room of the Luau Hut was half-busy but the bar was empty; they chose the bar, ordering gin and Bong-Bong Chicken Wings and not talking, still damp with salt water. After a round of drinks, a blind man came in with his dog.

“You can’t bring that dog in here,” the bartender said. “Is that your dog? You can’t bring him in here.”

“You must be new here,” the blind man said, hoisting himself onto a barstool kitty-corner from Lockhart and Margaret. The big German shepherd curled at his feet. “It’s a seeing-eye dog. Now get me a double old-fashioned on the rocks and a glass of water. Thank you.”

The bartender glared at the blind man, glared at the dog, elaborately shrugged his shoulders and set to work. Lockhart wondered whom this little pantomime was for.

“Excuse me,” he said to the blind man.

“Sir?”

Lockhart watched the blind man turn his head in the direction of the voice, another automatic gesture; empty sunglasses in a dead-white face. The blind man looked like he had never been outside in the daylight. He was about forty, dressed in a golf outfit that did not quite fit him, that wasn’t quite clean, and from the relish with which he took up his old-fashioned it seemed that the blind man might drink a little.

“Maybe you can help us out,” Lockhart said. “My friend and I were having a discussion …”

“Friend?” demanded the blind man. “What friend?”

“Over here,” said Margaret.

“Good evening, little lady. Now proceed.”

The bartender scowled at all of them and retreated to the far end of the bar. Margaret started to feed pineapple chunks to the dog, who wolfed them down.

“We were talking earlier about whether or not animals have souls,” Lockhart said. “Actually, we had it narrowed down to whether or not animals had as much of a soul as humans—so we wouldn’t have to figure out if humans had souls.”

“Good,” the blind man said. “I was going to bring that up.”

“And anyway, since you seem to spend quite a bit of time with your canine friend there, I was hoping you might have some thoughts on the matter you could share with us.”

“I do,” said the blind man, and scooted his barstool six inches closer, the dog following automatically. Margaret was fishing maraschino cherries out of the well across the bar and popping them to the dog, who shagged them easily as Willie Mays.

“My name is Wilson Petie,” he said. “After having thought long and hard on this topic for a good many years, I have come to the conclusion that there is no innate difference between the basic existence of myself and the basic existence of that dog, or, God bless her, Trixie, a golden retriever who preceded Rex in this capacity. In other words, that dog is as much of a being as I am or you are.”

“Is that all animals?” Margaret asked. “Or just some? How far down the chain of command would you draw the line? Fish? Mosquitoes?”

“Are fish the issue here?”

“They are,” Lockhart said. “My friend here claims that it’s OK to kill a few fish so the rich vacationers can feel sand between their toes.”

“While
he
says it is murder,” Margaret said. “All the time he’s eating chicken.”

She slipped the bone out of a Bong-Bong wing and lobbed the resulting gob of meat toward the German shepherd, who caught it easily.

“I cannot speak to fish,” said Wilson Petie. “I cannot speak in regard to fish, I mean. But I will tell you: the fundamental differences between a dog and a human being are in regard to capabilities, not existence. In other words: if you walked on four paws, had a great sense of eyesight and of smell, had fur all over your body and liked to relieve yourself outdoors, you would be—”

“My first husband,” Margaret said.

“A dog,” said Wilson Petie. “I have felt this through my long years of association with the dog. What I cannot tell you is whether a person would get that same intuition about the inner being of that animal if he or she spent long years of intimacy with a fish.”

“So where does that leave us?” Lockhart asked.

“Where we started,” Margaret said. “Nowhere. Excuse me, Mr. Petie, but …”

“Since birth, eleven months but I had the one before for thirteen years, drive a car.”

“What?”

“The three questions you were going to ask,” Wilson Petie said, irritably. “How long have I been blind, how long have I had my dog, what’s the one thing I’d most like to do—always the same damn three questions.”

“Actually, I was going to ask if I could take Rex out into the parking lot and play fetch with him.”

“You could drive a car,” Lockhart said. “Maybe not solo, but if you had someone to give you some directions and took it nice and easy.”

“I’ve felt the same thing for many years myself,” Wilson Petie said. “Unfortunately, I’ve never found anyone else who agreed with me. How would you like to give me a driving lesson?”

“No problem,” Lockhart said. “Come on.” He left a ten on the bar and yelled to the bartender to mind their drinks. Wilson Petie groped for the leather handle on the dog’s harness and let himself be led out into the parking lot. The night was warm, thick, buzzing with millions of bug wings.

“Now, get yourself situated.” Lockhart sat in the back of the Jeep with the dog, Margaret up front, with the top down to get the full rush of wind. “That thing on the left is a brake pedal. You’re going to use it when you want to stop …”

“I know what a brake does,” said the blind man. “I listen to plenty of TV. This must be the gas.”

“You got it. Shift lever here.” He led Wilson Petie’s hand to rest on the shifter between the seats. “Automatic, so you don’t have to worry about the clutch. Now we start it up”—he turned the key in the ignition—“and away we go.”

They backed up—screeched to a stop—backed some more, almost into a Camaro. Margaret had her hand on the emergency brake, but she waited to apply it, and finally Wilson Petie found the means to stop.

“Easy,” Lockhart said. “Nice and easy. Now we’ll drop it into Drive.”

“This is all right,” said Wilson Petie.

Before they started forward, though, Margaret turned and grinned at Lockhart, free and easy. She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me. Lockhart thought, This is it, this is all I’ve ever wanted. He slipped the gearshift into Lo and the car lurched forward.

“This is all right,” Wilson Petie said again. He accelerated forward slowly, listening intently to Margaret’s instructions: a little left, left, now straighten it out, that’s good, out onto the highway. She leaned forward as he brought it up to speed, intent. Lockhart leaned forward, too, rested his cheek against the side of her head and touched her neck with his hand. The engine roared and heaved in the low gear, propelling them down the dark, deserted lane as slowly and jerkily as a clown-car in a circus. Lockhart felt deranged with happiness.

“I love you,” he whispered to Margaret.

“Not now,” she said, still poised over the emergency brake.

“This is all right,” Wilson Petie said for the third time. In the dashboard light, his face was manic, lit with glee, wind pouring through the sides of the open car.

“Let’s go,” Lockhart said to the blind man. “Let’s do it. Make this pig squeal.”

MARIAN IS IN THE BEDROOM
,
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
,
TALKING TO
her sister on the telephone, when her two-year-old Will walks in with a plastic bag over his head.

“Mom,” he says, lips muffled by the bag. “Mom!” He seems very pleased with himself.

Then he tries to breathe in, and the thin plastic molds itself to his features, clinging to his face. Will tries to scream. Marian can’t seem to move. She can’t focus her mind on the problem but thinks instead of how strange it is to see Will’s face in a different material, a cast in plastic of his head and shoulders, a something: a bust, she remembers, that’s the name for it, and awards herself a little prize for remembering.

But this is no dream. Will takes one step toward her, then runs away, down the hall toward the rest of the house: open doors, branching hallways. She drops the phone and races after him, stopping to look in every open room. Where is he? Where did he go? He’s trying to hurt her, trying to punish her for talking on the phone and it’s working—she nearly throws up, tasting it at the base of her tongue, a black roaring in her ears, helpless. Her hands dart toward the doors of empty rooms like little panicky animals. Not in his bedroom, not in the guest room, not in the study, not in the kitchen, nowhere—but then in the bathroom, she might see something, the edge of a towel coming to rest.

Finds him shivering behind the laundry hamper. With the nail of her index finger, she slits the plastic where it stretches over his open mouth, and the good air rushes into his lungs, and she feels the convulsions that will bring tears starting deep in his chest. One breath, two, three, he’s alive. She tears the bag off his little red face and touches his forehead and his neck, listening for the familiar cries that finally come, ear-piercing.

You little bastard, she thinks. I can’t even talk on the phone for one minute … This isn’t what she’s supposed to be feeling, she knows it, and she tries to find the peacefulness
inside herself, holding him close, trying to fit inside the memory of the little blue bundle, the milky silences of infancy. But he looks ugly to her with his red, crying face. She can’t help it. This is my life, she thinks, this is my only life and you’ve taken all of it. Before she knows what she is doing, she draws back her open hand and slaps her son across the cheek, not hard.

Marian stops short, not breathing, expecting the world to open under her feet or lightning to strike her down, but nothing happens—only fresh tears from Will, who looks even more blotchy and undesirable than before, but suddenly he’s her own child again. She gathers him to her chest and holds him there until the tears subside, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” This is a thing she was never going to do, hitting her child. This is a thing she’s not capable of. And her own child, the boy she’s given her life to love and protect … She searches for the magic saying, the thing that will let her go back and live the last five minutes over again, but it can’t be erased. Marian will always know that she hit her child, though Will won’t remember long.

Marian is looking over Will’s shoulder at the black branches of the trees framed in the bathroom window. It’s been snowing off and on for months and the sky is the color of an old nickel. When this winter started she was happily married and maybe she is still. But somewhere out in that cold afternoon is her husband, Robb, who was not here to help when her child almost died. Where is he? At a bookstore. At a bar. Marian can hear her own whiny, bitchy voice, telling Robb, “He almost died! He almost died!” That’s it, the bitch voice, the voice he hates, but it’s what she feels. What a bitch. No wonder he’s gone.

Be fair, she lectures herself. He’s only gone to the hardware
store. We are happily married. In the front of her mind she repeats the old promises to Will, like a catechism: I will love you, I will take care of you, I will make the world safe for you. Maybe the words will protect him.

That night they leave Will with a sitter and go to the movies and everything’s good at first—girls and guns and explosions and loud rock music booming out of the screen—and it’s all fine with Marian up to a point. This is Robb’s idea of a good time.

Then the girl gets left alone in a big motorboat and the terrorists start burning holes in her with their cigars and Marian checks out. She notices that they are in a place, in a room with three hundred other people. The light of the movie is shining down on the members of the audience and they’re laughing or looking scared on cue. They’re eating popcorn, holding hands, slouched into their seats. Marian is the only one awake, the only one watching them. It’s a kind of power. Robb is laughing along with the rest of them and he doesn’t know she’s watching him.

After a minute she gets bored with the audience and tries to train her attention back on the screen but it won’t stick. People are getting shot and blown up, the girl has a cigar burn on her cheek. Why is this entertainment? But Marian knows why: she likes to see blood, the same as everybody else. Her mother told her, before Will was born, that there was no difference between someone who would hit a child and someone who wouldn’t. “You’ll never do it,” her mother said. “You’ll never get there. But you can see how you could be capable of it, even though you never will.” Sitting in the theater she remembers
how her hands had burned and she could hit him and hit him again and it wouldn’t keep him from these stupid things, he was only two years old. You would just keep hitting him and he would never stop crying. Waiting for the movie to be over. It’s just nothing she wants to see.

The next day, Sunday afternoon, they bundle up and go to the park, Marian and Will. He plays seesaw with a kid from Laos, feeds the frozen ducks until a dozen cars of men arrive and start to play basketball. “Motherfucker,” they shout, every fourth word, “I got you, motherfucker.” Their curses hang in the air, suspended in their silvery breath.

When they get home Will takes a nap and the house lapses into quiet, a truce. Robb’s reading the last of the paper and drinking the last of the coffee, sitting in the living room, and Marian is allowed into the room only if she will be a good girl. This is Robb’s special quiet world. When the telephone rings she fights the urge to apologize.