All of Us (18 page)

It’s what the kids nowadays call weed. And it drifts

like clouds from his lips. He hopes no one

comes along tonight, or calls to ask for help.

Help is what he’s most short on tonight.

A storm thrashes outside. Heavy seas

with gale winds from the west. The table he sits at

is, say, two cubits long and one wide.

The darkness in the room teems with insight.

Could be he’ll write an adventure novel. Or else

a children’s story. A play for two female characters,

one of whom is blind. Cutthroat should be coming

into the river. One thing he’ll do is learn

to tie his own flies. Maybe he should give

more money to each of his surviving

family members. The ones who already expect a little

something in the mail first of each month.

Every time they write they tell him

they’re coming up short. He counts heads on his fingers

and finds they’re all surviving. So what

if he’d rather be remembered in the dreams of strangers?

He raises his eyes to the skylights where rain

hammers on. After a while —

who knows how long?—his eyes ask

that they be closed. And he closes them.

But the rain keeps hammering. Is this a cloudburst?

Should he do something? Secure the house

in some way? Uncle Bo stayed married to Aunt Ruby

for 47 years. Then hanged himself.

He opens his eyes again. Nothing adds up.

It all adds up. How long will this storm go on?

In those days we were going places. But that Sunday

afternoon we were becalmed. Sitting around a table,

drinking and swapping stories. A party that’d been

going on, and off, since Friday a year ago.

Then Guy’s wife was dropped off in front of the apartment

by her boyfriend, and came upstairs.

It’s Guy’s birthday, after all, give or take a day.

They haven’t seen each other for a week,

more or less. She’s all dressed up. He embraces her,

sort of, makes her a drink. Finds a place

for her at the table. Everyone wants to know

how she is, etc. But she ignores them all.

All those alcoholics. Clearly, she’s pissed off

and as usual in the wrong company.

Where the hell has Guy been keeping himself?

she wants to know. She sips her drink and looks at him

as if he’s brain-damaged. She spots a pimple

on his chin; it’s an ingrown hair but it’s filled

with pus, frightful, looks like hell. In front

of everyone she says, “Who have
you
been eating out

lately?” Staring hard at his pimple.

Being drunk myself, I don’t recall how he answered.

Maybe he said, “I don’t remember who it was;

I didn’t get her name.” Something smart.

Anyway, his wife has this kind of blistery rash,

maybe it’s cold sores, at the edge of her mouth,

so she shouldn’t be talking. Pretty soon,

it’s like always: they’re holding hands and laughing

like the rest of us, at little or nothing.

                         Later, in the living room,

thinking everyone had gone out for hamburgers,

she blew him in front of the TV. Then said,

“Happy birthday, you son of a bitch!” And slapped his

glasses off. The glasses he’d been wearing

while she made love to him. I walked into the room

and said, “Friends, don’t do this to each other.”

She didn’t flinch a muscle or wonder aloud

which rock I’d come out from under. All she said was

“Who asked you, hobo-urine?” Guy put his glasses on.

Pulled his trousers up. We all went out

to the kitchen and had a drink. Then another. Like that,

the world had gone from afternoon to night.

His wife. Forty years he painted her.

Again and again. The nude in the last painting

the same young nude as the first. His wife.

As he remembered her young. As she was young.

His wife in her bath. At her dressing table

in front of the mirror. Undressed.

His wife with her hands under her breasts

looking out on the garden.

The sun bestowing warmth and color.

Every living thing in bloom there.

She young and tremulous and most desirable.

When she died, he painted a while longer.

A few landscapes. Then died.

And was put down next to her.

His young wife.

My life’s on an even keel

these days. Though who’s to say

it’ll never waver again?

This morning I recalled

a girlfriend I had just after

my marriage broke up.

A sweet girl named Jean.

In the beginning, she had no idea

how bad things were. It took

a while. But she loved me

a bunch anyway, she said.

And I know that’s true.

She let me stay at her place

where I conducted

the shabby business of my life

over her phone. She bought

my booze, but told me

I wasn’t a drunk

like those others said.

Signed checks for me

and left them on her pillow

when she went off to work.

Gave me a Pendleton jacket

that Christmas, one I still wear.

For my part, I taught her to drink.

And how to fall asleep

with her clothes on.

How to wake up

weeping in the middle of the night.

When I left, she paid two months’

rent for me. And gave me

her black and white TV.

We talked on the phone once,

months later. She was drunk.

And, sure, I was drunk too.

The last thing she said to me was,

Will I ever see my TV again?

I looked around the room

as if the TV might suddenly

appear in its place

on the kitchen chair. Or else

come out of a cupboard

and declare itself. But that TV

had gone down the road

weeks before. The TV Jean gave me.

I didn’t tell her that.

I lied, of course. Soon, I said,

very soon now.

And put down the phone

after, or before, she hung up.

But those sleep-sounding words

of mine making me feel

I’d come to the end of a story.

And now, this one last falsehood

behind me,

                         I could rest.

Waking before sunrise, in a house not my own,

I hear a radio playing in the kitchen.

Mist drifts outside the window while

a woman’s voice gives the news, and then the weather.

I hear that, and the sound of meat

as it connects with hot grease in the pan.

I listen some more, half asleep. It’s like,

but not like, when I was a child and lay in bed,

in the dark, listening to a woman crying,

and a man’s voice raised in anger, or despair,

the radio playing all the while. Instead,

what I hear this morning is the man of the house

saying “How many summers do I have left?

Answer me that.” There’s no answer from the woman

that I can hear. But what
could
she answer,

given such a question? In a minute,

I hear his voice speaking of someone who I think

must be long gone: “That man could say,

    ‘O, Mesopotamia!’

and move his audience to tears.”

I get out of bed at once and draw on my pants.

Enough light in the room that I can see

where I am, finally. I’m a grown man, after all,

and these people are my friends. Things

are not going well for them just now. Or else

they’re going better than ever

because they’re up early and talking

about such things of consequence

as death and Mesopotamia. In any case,

I feel myself being drawn to the kitchen.

So much that is mysterious and important

is happening out there this morning.

“I only have two hands,”

the beautiful flight attendant

says. She continues

up the aisle with her tray and

out of his life forever,

he thinks. Off to his left,

far below, some lights

from a village high

on a hill in the jungle.

So many impossible things

have happened,

he isn’t surprised when she

returns to sit in the

empty seat across from his.

“Are you getting off

in Rio, or going on to Buenos Aires?”

Once more she exposes

her beautiful hands.

The heavy silver rings that hold

her fingers, the gold bracelet

encircling her wrist.

They are somewhere in the air

over the steaming Mato Grosso.

It is very late.

He goes on considering her hands.

Looking at her clasped fingers.

It’s months afterwards, and

hard to talk about.

“My wife,” said Pinnegar, “expects to see me go to the dogs
when she leaves me. It is her last hope.”

—
D. H. LAWRENCE
,
“
JIMMY AND THE DESPERATE WOMAN
”

She gave me the car and two

hundred dollars. Said, So long, baby.

Take it easy, hear? So much

for twenty years of marriage.

She knows, or thinks she knows,

I’ll go through the dough

in a day or two, and eventually

wreck the car—which was

in my name and needed work anyway.

When I drove off, she and her boy-

friend were changing the lock

on the front door. They waved.

I waved back to let them know

I didn’t think any the less

of them. Then sped toward

the state line. I
was
hell-bent.

She was right to think so.

I went to the dogs, and we

became good friends.

But I kept going. Went

a long way without stopping.

Left the dogs, my friends, behind.

Nevertheless, when I did show

my face at that house again,

months, or years, later, driving

a different car, she wept

when she saw me at the door.

Sober. Dressed in a clean shirt,

pants, and boots. Her last hope

blasted.

She didn’t have a thing

to hope for anymore.

The afternoon was already dark and unnatural.

When this old woman appeared in the field,

in the rain, carrying a bridle.

She came up the road to the house.

The house behind this one. Somehow

she knew Antonio Ríos had entered

the hour of his final combat.

Somehow, don’t ask me how, she knew.

The doctor and some other people were with him.

But nothing more could be done. And so

the old woman carried the bridle into the room,

and hung it across the foot of his bed.

The bed where he writhed and lay dying.

She went away without a word.

This woman who’d once been young and beautiful.

When Antonio was young and beautiful.

All that day we banged at geese

from a blind at the top

of the bluff. Busted one flock

after the other, until our gun barrels

grew hot to the touch. Geese

filled the cold, grey air. But we still

didn’t kill our limits.

The wind driving our shot

every whichway. Late afternoon,

and we had four. Two shy

of our limits. Thirst drove us

off the bluff and down a dirt road

alongside the river.

To an evil-looking farm

surrounded by dead fields of

barley. Where, almost evening,

a man with patches of skin

gone from his hands let us dip water

from a bucket on his porch.

Then asked if we wanted to see

something—a Canada goose he kept

alive in a barrel beside

the barn. The barrel covered over

with screen wire, rigged inside

like a little cell. He’d broken

the bird’s wing with a long shot,

he said, then chased it down

and stuffed it in the barrel.

He’d had a brainstorm!

He’d use that goose as a live decoy.

In time it turned out to be

the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.

It would bring other geese

right down on your head.

So close you could almost touch them

before you killed them.

This man, he never wanted for geese.

And for this his goose was given

all the corn and barley

it could eat, and a barrel

to live in, and shit in.

I took a good long look and,

unmoving, the goose looked back.

Only its eyes telling me

it was alive. Then we left,

my friend and I. Still

willing to kill anything

that moved, anything that rose

over our sights. I don’t

recall if we got anything else

that day. I doubt it.

It was almost dark anyhow.

No matter, now. But for years

and years afterwards, living

on a staple of bitterness, I

didn’t forget that goose.

I set it apart from all the others,

living and dead. Came to understand

one can get used to anything,

and become a stranger to nothing.

Saw that betrayal is just another word

for loss, for hunger.