Adultery & Other Choices (4 page)

‘Maybe I better talk to him,' he said.

‘You better not,' Paul said. ‘He's Episcopalian, and he doesn't like Brothers. He—'

‘He what, Paul?'

‘I heard him talking once—he wants to—'

‘He wants to what, Paul?'

‘He wants to use those things. With my mother.'

He looked down at the horn in his lap. Then he stroked it with his fingers and looked at Brother Eugene's robe and shoes.

‘We can stop for today,' Brother Eugene said. ‘If you'd like to talk about the other—'

Paul shook his head.

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘And I can practice in the afternoons. Just there's not much time.'

He took the mouthpiece from the horn and put the horn in its case.

In the kitchen his mother said: ‘I never did think that was the right instrument for you. But Daddy will be disappointed.'

‘Why should he be?' Barbara said. ‘Nobody has to play the French horn.'

‘Well, he spent a lot of money on that horn.' She looked at Paul. ‘Are you going to tell him? I want you to stand up like a man and tell him yourself.'

‘Okay,' he said.

He went out to the back yard. The day was blue and warm and he stood waiting in the sunlight, clinging to the vision of tomorrow when it would all be over, until in the shadows of twilight he heard the slamming of his father's car door and then Mike growling happily. When those sounds stopped he went into the kitchen as his father pushed through its door. His mother was at the stove and Barbara was gone. He looked quickly at his father and said: ‘I want to quit the horn.'

‘What?' His father still wore his hat, and his overcoat was over his arm. ‘You want to
what
?'

‘Now don't shout at him,' his mother said.

His father looked at them both, then sighed and shook his head.

‘Goddamn,' he said, and went back through the door; he went through it fast and it swung twice behind him before it closed.

‘You should have waited till he had his drink. You know I always wait till he's had his drink.'

When his father came back he had taken off his coat and tie and rolled up the cuffs of his white shirt. He was midway across the kitchen toward the liquor cabinet when he stopped and looked at Paul: ‘What do you mean, you want to quit? You've only been at it a month! You haven't even
started
the Goddamn thing! Why do you want to
quit
?'

Paul shrugged and looked down, then raised his eyes to his father; his father's face was blurred. He blinked and it was clear again and he was too ashamed of the tears on his cheeks to wipe them.

‘Goddamnit what are you
cry
ing for. What's he
cry
ing for.' His father stood between them, his fierce clenched jaws now turned to her. ‘
Why
is he crying! Okay, he wants to quit the Goddamn horn.
Okay
. I can't
make
him play it. He stands there crying.
I'm
the one who borrowed the Goddamn hundred dollars. What'll I do with that horn now, huh?' He looked at Paul. ‘Huh? Can you tell me that?'

‘We can sell it,' his mother said.

‘We can sell it.' His father looked at her. ‘That's not even the point. Why in the hell did he ever think he wanted to play the Goddamn thing to begin with? He didn't
ever
want to. It's just something he and the other one, Eddie, dreamed up. When did Eddie quit?'

‘I don't know,' his mother said. ‘Yesterday. Brother Eugene shouldn't have—'

‘The hell with Brother Eugene. What's
he
got to do with it? I pity the poor bastard for wasting his time. With
what
?' Looking at her, he pointed a finger at Paul. ‘What's he good for? Not a Goddamn thing. He doesn't do one Goddamn thing but mope around the house, he's not good for one Goddamn thing but to go to cowboy shows and shoot Japs and Indians in the back yard. What the hell else does he do? Huh? What else?—' Paul would not remember the rest. In the explosion of his father's voice he stood with the tears he would not wipe. Once he felt he was kneeling with his head bowed. Finally the sound ended and he left the room and his father's face. He went to his room and lay face-down on his bed and wiped his eyes. Then he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Barbara came in and sat on the bed and held his hand. She looked as though she might cry.

‘He's terrible,' she said.

In her pink cheeks and blue eyes he saw himself, saw the narrow breadth of his soul which in ten years had learned nothing of courage and so much of lies; to her face and the clasp of her hand he silently asked his father's question—
What's he good for?
—and he could not accept the answer of her gaze and touch, that he was a little brother she loved. Closing his eyes he found no answer there either, in the dark of his mind where memories of himself swam: he saw the day of snow when he was five, the only time in his life he had seen snow and that night it melted; in the afternoon his father came home and threw snowballs at them and one hit Paul in the eye and he cried and his mother said:
You're too rough with him, he's only a little boy
; and he saw the night when he was two and after supper his father picked him up and held him laughing and tossed him in the air and caught him, then again, both of them laughing as his father tossed and tossed while his mother's voice cut through the blur of ceiling and walls and his father's arms and laughing upturned face:
You'll make him sick
, and then he was, in the air, and on the rug as his father lowered him to the floor and her voice started again. Opening his eyes to look at Barbara he murmured: ‘No he isn't.'

The Bully

H
E DID NOT
tell even Eddie about the cat. It was in summer, in August. The Clements were renting a strange house then. It had been built by the owner and a Negro; it was two stories and its brick and cement walls were a foot thick. It was shaped like a box. For some reason no one had ever explained, the owner had dug a basement under the house after it was built; perhaps he could not stop building. A mule had dragged the dirt away, climbing up the steep ramp which later became the driveway. After that the mule died. It was the only basement in town, it was always wet, and there was a sump pump they could hear inside the house when it rained.

It was raining the day Paul found the cat down there, crouched between the car and the wall at the driest side of the basement. It was white with a large brown spot on its left side, and the right forepaw was brown. Paul picked it up and stared into its eyes. When the cat tried to look away Paul held its head. He could feel the cat's heart above his hand; it was beating as fast as his was. Then he walked with it to the pump, walking barefooted in the cool rainwater that ran down the ramp and across the floor. He squatted over the round hole of the pump. Then he thrust the cat's head under water. The cat's legs kicked and reached but Paul's hands were behind its head. Then he was afraid of what he was doing and he put the cat on the floor. It ran under the car and lay watching him. Paul quickly left the basement, walked up the ramp, into the rain. He looked up into the rain at God.

The cat was young, little more than a kitten. An older cat would have been smarter; Paul knew that. But this one stayed. Next morning it gripped the screen door with its front paws and watched the family in the kitchen eating fresh figs on cereal. Amy was eighteen and she had hated all five dogs Paul had lost to cars, age, and sudden disappearance; but she loved cats and when she heard it then saw it she left the table and went outside and picked it up. She stood with the early sunlight on her black hair and held the cat and stroked it and talked to it and it stretched against her breasts.

‘I'll give him some milk,' she said through the door.

‘Oh no,' his mother said. ‘Don't feed strays.'

Barbara went on eating and reading the paper. She was fifteen and smart and plump and she wanted a boy friend and Paul knew she was seldom happy. Paul's father was reading the sports section.

‘Come eat before your cereal gets mushy,' his mother said, and Amy came in.

The cat was mewing at the screen again. Paul looked at it and knew if he was alone this morning he would do it, he knew he had to and he wanted to but he faintly hoped someone would stay home and he would be saved. But after his father went to work some girls came in a car and took Amy swimming, his mother went shopping, and Barbara rode her bicycle to a friend's house. In the house alone he felt wicked and he could feel the cat down there in the yard. He went downstairs and into the kitchen. It was on the back porch, a small square of concrete with an iron railing. When the cat heard him it stood on its hind legs and clung to the screen and mewed, and Paul looked at its pink mouth and small pointed teeth.

‘Hello, cat,' he said softly.

Then he opened the screen, fast and hard and wide, and slammed the cat against the railing. He stepped out and let the screen shut behind him. The cat was crouched in the corner made by the railing and the brick wall; it watched him; then it looked away and licked its paws. An older cat would have arched its back and prepared to fight or, with a wise and determined face, darted past him. But this one was afraid and uncertain and was now pretending that nothing had happened. When Paul leaned forward and stroked its back it quivered and looked at him. He wished the cat would fight him, would spring at him howling and hissing and clawing. He imagined him and the cat rolling off the concrete steps and onto the ground, fighting. He picked it up and carried it down the back stairs into the basement; all the time he was stroking it. He went to the dark corner where the old clothesline lay on the floor; he picked it up and climbed the stairs again, into the bright sun. He crossed the back yard and went behind the neighbor's garage, where the sycamore tree was. While he slipped the noose over the cat's head the cat was very still. Paul's breath and heart were quick.

Larry Guidry was a short wiry boy with biceps like baseballs, thin curly hair, a small head, and a face the color of housedust. Paul thought his head looked like a cottonmouth's. Larry had no friends but sometimes at recess he joined a group that was joking about girls or parts of girls and when he laughed his eyes were bright. They were bright too when he hurt Paul. In the fifth grade the Brothers had stopped failing him. That was the first year Paul was his classmate. It was, he thought, as if Larry had been waiting for him to catch up. For two years Larry punched his arms, twisted his ears, yanked his hair, and stomped his cold instep as the class waited in line outside of school on winter mornings. Once at supper his mother saw the bruise on his arm and asked him what had happened. He told her a boy hit him. She said he must tell the boy not to do it again, a bruise like that could cause cancer. Did you hit him back? his father said. We were playing, Paul said. Walking home from school in the afternoons and in bed at night Paul fought with Larry, blackened and closed his eyes, broke his nose and jaw, covered his small crinkled face with cuts and blood, and hearing Larry's helpless and defeated pleas, his breast filled as with the brass and bass drum of a passing parade.

Larry came from a poor family. Paul knew this because he came on the school bus from the north end of town and because everything he wore was old: the clean starched and ironed khakis in the fall and spring, the corduroys and sweat shirts and mackinaw in winter, and the black tennis shoes with their soles worn nearly smooth. Paul also believed he had many brothers and sisters. He looked like he came from one of those families. In the summer Larry sold snowballs. He had a roofed, glass-windowed cart attached to the front of his bicycle and he rode about town. Usually he worked the north end where the swimming pool and golf course were and where poor white families lived on the borders of the Negro section. But sometimes on summer afternoons when Paul and Eddie walked to a movie they saw him on the main street and bought a snowball from him. The three of them spoke nervously and politely, like old schoolmates who hadn't been close. Paul knew Larry wouldn't do anything to them, though he didn't know how he knew it or why it was true: whether because working and bullying didn't go together or because it was summer and bullying was left back there with books and desks and blackboards and ringing bells. I saw Brother Daniel driving somewhere. I saw Louis at the pool. Larry bent over the block of ice, his head and arms inside the cart as he scraped with the hand-scraper; then he packed ice into paper cups and poured over it the flavored syrup. I'll take grape this time. The small hand gave him the cup. He placed a nickel in the palm, his thumb and finger touching the hand.

When Paul went back to school for the seventh grade Larry was sixteen years old, his voice was deeper, but he had not grown; the khakis he wore could have been the same he had worn the autumn before. On the first day of school, about twenty minutes late, Roland Comeaux joined the class. He missed the first bell which summoned the boys to line up in two files facing their teacher, and the second bell which rang usually as the principal, a large, jovial and irascible Frenchman, emerged from the building and stood on the back steps and, with his hands resting on his round belly, looked down at the entire school: the third graders to his left, the high school seniors to his right, and the black-robed Christian Brothers standing with roll books at the head of each column. Brother Gauthier, the seventh-grade teacher, was also from France and he used snuff. In other years Paul had smelled oiled wooden floors, washed blackboards, chalk dust, and the glossy pages of new books. The seventh grade would be the year that smelled of snuff.

Roland Comeaux missed more than the morning line: he missed the morning prayers recited in the classroom, Brother Gauthier leading, each boy standing at his desk, fingering the black rosaries they all carried. Roland came in after they had recited the first decade of the joyful mysteries. They were seated and Larry, sitting behind Paul, had just given his tricep a long hard pinch, and Paul had turned to him a smiling face. When he looked to the front of the class again Roland was coming through the door. He wore khakis and a T-shirt whose sleeves were taut around his veined biceps; in tennis shoes he strode poised and graceful to the desk where he smiled at Brother Gauthier and then, turning, smiled at the class. The smile did not ask for anything. Then he turned back to Brother Gauthier.