The Ax (13 page)

I told Marjorie I was going to a job interview in Binghamton, so I have to wait until I’m far enough south to be on a route that makes sense for that to be where I’m coming from. Then, with the help of the rain, I’ll take care of this problem.

My chance doesn’t come until early afternoon, just short of Kingston, New York, where I will cross the Hudson River. For my route back, I continue south after Utica, and although I’m starving I wait a good long time, until almost noon, before I stop at a diner to eat what they would call lunch but I would call breakfast. While I’m in there, I make sure to put the Voyager where no one can casually see the front end of it.

After breaking my fast with lunch, I drive on down through Oneonta, where I turn southwest on State Route 28 through the Catskill Mountains, a winding hilly road, mostly only two lanes wide. It’s in a little town along in there that my opportunity knocks.

There’s a lumberyard up ahead on the left side of the road, with several vehicles along its front, parked facing in. A pickup truck suddenly backs out from there, too fast and too far, without the driver paying sufficient attention. I could avoid him, if I tromp on the brake, or if I drive briefly onto the shoulder to steer around him, but I do neither. I tromp on the accelerator and ram him, my left front against his left side by his rear wheel.

The pickup skids away sidewise on the wet road, taking my hooked bumper with him, and winding up just off the road in front of the lumberyard. I fight the wheel, roll to the right shoulder, and stop. I turn off the ignition, and get out of the car.

Three men in mackinaws come out of the lumber-yard, staring at the destruction. The driver of the pickup truck, a skinny kid in his early twenties wearing a New York Giants warmup jacket and a baseball cap on backwards, sits in the truck, stupefied with shock. His engine has stalled, and his right hand is still high on the steering wheel, holding tight, and country music is blaring loudly from his radio. A dozen planks and a big can of joint compound are in the back of the pickup.

I cross the road and meet the three men in mackinaws. I say, sounding as dazed as that kid over there looks, “Did you see that?”

“I heard it,” one of them says. “That was good enough for me.”

“He came,” I say, and shake my head, and point this way and that, and start again. “He came out, all of a sudden all the way across the road. I was going
that
way, I was way over
there
.”

One of the men in mackinaws goes over to tell the kid to turn off his ignition, and he does, and the music stops. Another of them says to me, “We better call the cops.”

“He came
right out
,” I say.

Everybody agrees I am not at fault. Even the kid knows he’s to blame, jumping way out into the road like that, not looking both ways, playing his radio too loud.

The state police treat me with the calm courtesy reserved for the innocent victim, and they treat the kid with the cold efficiency reserved for assholes. They take down everybody’s particulars, get names and phone numbers from the three men in mackinaws in case witnesses are ever needed, and assure me they’ll send me a copy of the accident report for me to give my insurance company.

I thank them all for their help, and at last I get back into the car, which still runs, though it has some new rattles, and I drive on, and when I reach Kingston I stop in a little neighborhood bar, nearly empty at this time of day, to have a beer, to quiet my nerves.

When I come back out, a Kingston city cop is looking at the damage to the front of my car, parked at the curb by the door to the bar. This damage is now considerably more severe than it was. He asks me if it’s my car, and I say yes. He asks to see a driver’s license, and I show it to him. Still holding my license, he says, “Do you mind telling me when you got that?”

“About half an hour ago,” I tell him, “maybe ten miles back up Route 28. I was just calming myself with a beer in there.”

He asks me the particulars of the accident, and then asks if I mind waiting while he calls in, and I tell him in that case I think I’ll have another beer.

“Don’t drink too much,” he says, but he smiles, and I assure him I won’t. He walks off to his own car, carrying my license.

I’m still in the bar, a warm and dark and comforting place, five minutes later, halfway down this second draft beer, when the cop comes in and says, “Just wanted you to know, it checked out.” He hands me my license. “Thanks for the cooperation.”

“Sure,” I say.

We still treat Sunday as something different, Marjorie and I, although there’s no reason to any more. I don’t mean we go to church. We don’t, though we did years ago, when the kids were young and we were trying to be a good influence. Since I was chopped, Marjorie’s mentioned the idea once or twice, going to church some Sunday, but she hasn’t made a real point of it, and we don’t have a church in particular here in Fairbourne, don’t really know any churchgoers, so it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t suppose it will.

No, what I mean by our treating Sunday as something different, I mean we still act as though it’s the day I don’t go to work. (The
other
day. Saturdays I get up early and do chores, still maintaining that fiction as well.) We sleep an hour later, not getting up till eight-thirty or nine, and we dawdle over a long breakfast, and we don’t dress until lunchtime, and we spend most of the daylight hours with the Sunday
New York Times
. Of course, these Sundays I turn first to the help wanted section, so that’s a change.

So today, this Sunday, is a true time-out. After my experiences last Thursday and Friday up in Lichgate, I’m ready for some time out. Tomorrow I’ll take the Voyager to a body shop for an estimate on the damage, which I hope I can get taken care of very soon. I mean, urgently.

Originally, I thought I’d spend part of this afternoon in the office, to decide which of the three remaining resumés I should deal with next, and how to deal with him with less chance of the kind of disaster I’ve been having. But then it occurred to me, with that damage on it, the Voyager is a lot more identifiable than it used to be. I probably shouldn’t use it to go after the others until it’s been made anonymous again.

Which I don’t like. I want to do it now, I want to get it over with, I really want to get this whole thing over and done with. While I was burning that confession in the backyard yesterday, during the time Marjorie was away at her movie-house job, I realized the tension of this situation could get to me again, that I could have more weak moments, and that some time, in dread and despair, I might even actually make a phone call to the authorities, blurt it all out, destroy myself. So the sooner I get this over with, the better.

“Burke! Burke!”

We’re in the living room, Marjorie and I, in our robes, with the sections of the Sunday
Times
and our cooling coffee. I’m in my regular chair, with its view slightly leftward to the TV set on the far side wall and its view slightly rightward through the picture window to the front of our yard and the plantings that partly shield us from the road and our neighbors. Marjorie is, as usual, on the sofa to my left, feet curled up under her, newspaper spread all across the sofa beyond her.

And now I realize she’s calling to me. I start, the paper rattling, and look at her. “What? Something wrong?” Something in the paper, I mean.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

She looks surprisingly tense, agitated. I hadn’t noticed that before. Is this about something that
isn’t
in the paper?

I’m a pretty big guy, now going to seed a bit, and Marjorie’s what they call petite, with very curly brown hair and wide bright brown eyes and a wholehearted way of laughing that I love, as though she’s about to blow herself over. Though I haven’t heard that laugh for a while, really.

When we first started going together in ’71, back in Hartford, we had to put up with a lot of not-very-witty jokes from our friends because I was so big and tall and she was so skinny and short. I was still a bus driver, then, for the city, and in fact I first met Marjorie when she got on my bus one morning. She was a college student, twenty years old, and I was an Army vet and a bus driver, twenty-five, and she had no intention of getting involved with somebody like me, and yet that’s what happened. And even though I was a college graduate myself, she took a lot of ribbing from her friends at school when she started going out with a bus driver, and I suppose it was that as much as anything that led me to apply to Green Valley, and get the job selling paper, and find my life’s work, that’s now been temporarily lost.

And now she’s telling me I haven’t heard a word she’s said, and it’s true. “I’m sorry, sweet,” I say. “I was distracted, I was a million miles away.”

“You’ve
been
a million miles away, Burke,” she says. There are little white blotches under her eyes, high on her cheekbones. She almost looks as though she might cry. What
is
this?

I say, “It’s the job, sweet, I just can’t—”

“I
know
it’s the job,” she says. “Burke, honey, I
know
what the problem is, I know how much this has been weighing on your mind, driving you crazy, but—”

“Well, not entirely crazy, I hope.”

“—but I
can’t stand it
,” she insists, not letting me interrupt or make a joke. “Burke, it’s driving
me
crazy.”

“Sweet, I don’t know what I can—”

“I want us to go into counseling,” she says, with that abrupt matter-of-factness people use when they finally say something they’ve been thinking about for a long time.

I automatically reject this, for a thousand reasons. I start with the most explainable of those reasons, saying, “Marjorie, we can’t afford—”

“We can,” she says, “if it’s important. And it
is
important.”

“Sweet, this can’t go on forever,” I tell her. “I’ll find another job before you know it, a good job, and—”

“It’ll be too late, Burke.” Her eyes are bigger and brighter than I’ve ever seen them. She’s so
serious
about this, and so
worried
. “We’re being torn apart
now
,” she says. “It’s been too long, the damage is being done. Burke, I love you, and I want our marriage to survive.”

“It
will
survive. We love each other, we’re strong in—”

“We’re not strong enough,” she insists. “
I’m
not strong enough. It’s wearing me down, it’s grinding me down, it’s making me miserable, it’s making me desperate, I feel like a… I feel like a woodchuck in a Hav-a-Hart trap!”