The Times Are Never So Bad (2 page)

Andre Dubus
Haverhill, Massachusetts
January, 1986

The Times Are Never So Bad

…
the man in the violent situation reveals
those qualities least dispensable in his personality,
those qualities which are all he will have to take into
eternity with him
….

Flannery O'Connor, ‘On Her Own Work'

The times are never so bad but that a good man
can live in them
.

Saint Thomas More

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 remember them long enough to understand the story, I work out. If it's my off day from weights, I run or go to the Y and swim. Then the hangover is gone. Even the sick ones: some days I've thought I'd either blow my lunch on the bench or get myself squared away and, for the first few sets, as I pushed the bar up from my chest, the booze tried to come up too, with whatever I'd eaten during the night, and I'd swallow and push the iron all the way up and bring it down again, and some of my sweat was cool. Then I'd do it again and again, and add some weights, and do it again till I got a pump, and the blood rushed through my muscles and flushed out the lactic acid, and sweat soaked my shorts and tank shirt, the bench under my back was slick, and all the poison was gone from my body. From my head too, and for the rest of the day, unless something really bothered me, like having to file my tax return, or car trouble, I was as peaceful as I can ever be. Because I get along with people, and they don't treat me the way they treat some; in this world it helps to be big. That's not why I work out, but it's not a bad reason, and one that little guys should think about. The weather doesn't harass me either. New Englanders are always bitching about one thing or another. Once Alex said:
I think they just like to bitch, because when you get down to it, the truth is the Celtics and Patriots and Red Sox and Bruins are all good to watch, and we're lucky they're here, and we've got the ocean and pretty country to hunt and fish and ski in, and you don't have to be rich to get there
. He's right. But I don't bitch about the weather: I like rain and snow and heat and cold, and the only effect they have on me is what I wear to go out in them. The weather up here is female, and goes from one mood to another, and I love her for that.

So as long as I'm working out, I have good days, except for those things that happen to you like dead batteries and forms to fill out. If I skip my workouts I start feeling confused and distracted, then I get tense, and drinking and talking aren't good, they just make it worse, then I don't want to get out of bed in the morning. I've had days like that, when I might not have got up at all if finally I didn't have to piss. An hour with the iron and everything is back in place again, and I don't know what was troubling me or why in the first place I went those eight or twelve or however many days without lifting. But it doesn't matter. Because it's over, and I can write my name on a check or say it out loud again without feeling like a liar. This is Raymond Yarborough, I say into the phone, and I feel my words, my name, go out over the wire, and he says the car is ready and it'll be seventy-eight dollars and sixty-five cents. I tell him I'll come get it now, and I walk out into the world I'd left for a while and it feels like mine again. I like stepping on it and breathing it. I walk to the bank first and cash a check because the garage won't take one unless you have a major credit card, which I don't because I don't believe in buying something, even gas, that I don't have the money for. I always have enough money because I don't buy anything I can't eat or drink. Or almost anything. At the bank window I write a check to Cash and sign both sides and talk to the girl. I tell her she's looking good and I like her sweater and the new way she's got her hair done. I'm not making a move; I feel good and I want to see her smiling.

But for a week or two now, up here at Alex's place in New Hampshire, the iron hasn't worked for me. While I'm pumping I forget Polly, or at least I feel like I have, but in the shower she's back again. I got to her once, back in June: she was scared like a wild animal, a small one without any natural weapons, like a wounded rabbit, the way they quiver in your hand and look at you when you pick them up to knock their heads against trees or rocks. But I think she started to like it anyways, and if I had wanted to, I could have made her come. But that's Polly. I've known her about twelve years, since I was fourteen, and I think I knew her better when we were kids than I ever did after high school when we started going together and then got married. In school I knew she was smart and pretty and tried to look sexy before she was. I still don't know much more. That's not true: I can write down a lot that I know about her, and I did that one cold night early last spring, about fifty pages on a legal pad, but all of it was what she said to me and what she thought I said to her and what she did. I still didn't understand why she was that way, why we couldn't just be at peace with one another, in the evenings drink some beer or booze, talking about this and that, then eat some dinner, and be easy about things, which is what I thought we got married for.

We were camping at a lake and not catching any trout when we decided to get married. We talked about it on the second night, lying in our sleeping bags in the tent. In the morning I woke up feeling like the ground was blessed, a sacred place of Indians. I was twenty-two years old, and I thought about dying; it still seemed many years away, but I felt closer to it, like I could see the rest of my life in that tent while Polly slept, and it didn't matter that at the end of it I'd die. I was very happy, and I thought of my oldest brother, Kingsley, dead in the war we lost, and I talked to him for a while, told him I wished he was here so he could see how good I felt, and could be the best man. Then I talked to Alex and told him he'd be the best man. Then I was asleep again, and when I woke up Polly was handing me a cup of coffee and I could hear the campfire crackling. Late that afternoon we left the ground but I kept the tent; I didn't bring it back to the rental place. I had a tent of my own, a two-man, but I rented a big one so Polly could walk around in it, and arrange the food and cooler and gear, the way women turn places into houses, even motel rooms. There are some that don't, but they're not the kind you want to be with for the whole nine yards; when a woman is a slob, she's even worse than a man. They had my deposit, but they phoned me. I told them we had an accident and the tent was at the bottom of Lake Willoughby up in Vermont, up in what they call the Northern Kingdom. He asked me what it was doing in the lake. I said I had no way of knowing because that lake was formed by a glacier and is so deep in places that nobody could know even how far down it was, much less what it was doing. He said
on
the lake, what was it doing
on
the lake? Did my boat capsize? I said, What boat? He had been growling, but this time he barked: then how did the tent get in the fucking lake? I pitched it there, I said. That's the accident I'm talking about. Then he howled: the deposit didn't cover the cost of the boat. I told him to start getting more deposit, and hung up. That tent is out here at Alex's, folded up and resting on the rafters in the garage. This place was Kingsley's, and when his wife married again she wanted to give it to me and Alex, but Alex said that wasn't right, he knew Kingsley would want her to do that, and at the same time he knew Kingsley would expect us to turn it down and give her some money; their marriage was good, and she has his kid, my niece Olivia who's nearly ten now. I was still in school, so Alex bought it.

What I thought we had—I know we had it—in the tent that morning didn't last, and even though I don't understand why everything changed as fast as our weather does, I blame her because I tried so hard and was the way I always was before, when she loved me; I changed toward her and cursed her and slapped her around when every day was bad and the nights worse. There are things you can do in the daytime that make you feel like your marriage isn't a cage with rattlesnakes on the floor, that you can handle it: not just working out, but driving around for a whole afternoon just getting eggs and light bulbs and dry cleaning and a watchband and some socks. You listen to music in the car and look at people in their cars (I've noticed often you'll see a young girl driving alone, smiling to herself; maybe it's the disc jockey, maybe it's what she's thinking), and you talk to people in their stores (I always try to go to small stores, even for food), and your life seems better than it was when you walked out of the house with the car key. But at night there's nothing to distract you; and besides at night is when you really feel married, and need to; and there you are in the living room with all those snakes on the floor. I was tending bar five nights a week then, so two nights were terrible and sad, and on the others I came home tired and crept into the house and bed, feeling like I was doing something wrong, something I didn't want her to wake up and see. Then near the end Vinnie DeLuca was in that bed on the nights I worked, and I found out and that was the end.

I treated her well. I shared the housework, like my brothers and I did growing up. I've never known a woman who couldn't cook better than I do, but still I can put a meal on the table, and I did that, either fried or barbecued; I cooked on the grill outside all year round; I like cooking out while snow is falling. I washed the dishes when she cooked, and sometimes remembered to vacuum, and I did a lot of the errands, because she hated that, probably because she went to supermarkets and never talked to anybody, while I just didn't quite enjoy it.

Never marry a woman who doesn't know what she wants, and knows she doesn't. Mom never knew what she wanted either, but I don't think she knew she didn't, and that's why she's stayed steady through the years. She still brings her Luckies to the table. When I was little I believed Mom was what a wife should look like. I never thought much about what a wife should be like. She was very pretty then and she still is, though you have to look at her for a while to see it. Or I guess other people do, who are looking for pretty women to be young, or the other way around, and when they see a woman in her fifties they don't really look at her until they have to, until they're sitting down talking to her, and seeing her eyes and the way she smiles. But I don't need that closer look. She's outdoors a lot and has good lines in her face, the kind of lines that make me trust someone.

Mom wants Lucky Strikes and coffee, iced in summer after the hot cups in the morning, and bourbon when the sun is low. When she has those she's all right, let it rain where we're camping or the black flies find us fishing. During the blizzard of 1978 Mom ran out of Luckies and Jim Beam, and the coffee beans were low; the old man laughs about it, he says she was showing a lot of courage, but he thought he better do something fast or be snowed in with a crazy woman, so he went on cross-country skis into town and came back with a carton and a bottle and a can of coffee in his parka pockets. I tried to stop you, she says when they joke about it. Not as hard as you've tried to stop me going other places, the old man says. The truth is, it was not dangerous, only three miles into town from their house, and I know the old man was happy for an excuse to get out into the storm and work up a sweat. Younger, he wouldn't have needed an excuse, but I think his age makes him believe when there's a blizzard he should stay indoors. He's buried a few friends. At the store he got to in the snow they only had regular coffee, not the beans that Mom buys at two or three stores you have to drive to. He says when he came home she grabbed the carton first and had one lit before he was out of his ski mask, and she had two drinks poured while he was taking off his boots; then she held up the can of coffee and said: Who drinks this? You have a girl friend you were thinking about? He took the drink from her and said I don't have time for a girl friend. And she said I know you don't. They didn't tell us any more of that story; I know there'd be a fire going, and I like to think he was down to his long underwear by then, and he took that off and they lay in front of the fireplace. But probably they just had bourbon and teased one another and the old man took a shower and they went upstairs to sleep.

I hope the doctors never tell Mom she has to give up her Luckies and coffee and bourbon. You may call that an addiction. So what is my pumping iron? What is Polly?

She would say I raped her in June and so would her cop father and the rest of her family, if she told them, which she probably did because she moved back in with them. But maybe she didn't tell them. She didn't press charges; Alex keeps in touch with what's going on down there, and he lets me know. But I've stayed up here anyway. It's hard to explain: the night I did it I naturally crossed the state line and came up here to the boondocks; I knew when they didn't find me at home or at work, Polly would tell them to try here, but it was a good place to wait for a night and a day, a good place to make plans. In the morning I called Alex and he spoke to a friend on the force and called me back and said, Nothing yet. Late that afternoon he called again, said, Nothing yet. So I stayed here the second night, and next morning and afternoon he called me again, so I stayed a third night and a fourth and fifth, because every day he called and said there was nothing yet. By then I had missed two nights of a job I liked, tending bar at Newburyport, where I got good tips and could have girls if I wanted them. I knew that a girl would help, maybe do more than that, maybe fix everything for me. But having a girl was just an idea, like thinking about a part of the country where you might want to live if you ever stopped loving the place where you were.