Distortions

Gaps

Wesley has gaps between his teeth. When Wesley doesn’t have anything to do, he pokes things in the spaces to see what will fit: stems, pennies, things. Or he takes a walk to the train station, swivels the seat down in the photo-matic, and deposits a quarter. Last winter Wesley took a lot of pictures before he ran out of money. By the time he got more money, his bowler hat, which photographed well, had blown away in the wind.

In one of today’s pictures Wesley has pulled up his lip to expose the gaps between his teeth. The picture pleases him, and he studies it. That’s how he happens to have the picture in his hand to show Bob Nails.

*

Jeannie Regis’ hair is all different colors. In the sunshine it’s one color. At night, when he lights up her hair with the flashlight, it’s like … copper. He shines the flashlight down the back of her hair. In the half-dark she looks like a painting his father used to have in his bedroom. He aims the beam down her spine. Fuzz. Red fuzz when he holds the light close to the skin. She keeps the flashlight on the night table because, when the babies call for her, the bright hall light frightens them. They wake up in the middle of the night, wanting water. Bob Nails thinks about filling the baby bath and putting it on the floor, maybe sailing little plastic boats in the water, putting glasses on the floor beside it.

There are two glasses on the night table. He drinks the last quarter inch of Bourbon and clicks off the flashlight.

*

When you say “the idiot,” everybody knows you mean Wesley. Wesley acted like an idiot long before the tests confirmed it, so Wesley’s mother tells everyone there was no point in the tests. Wesley is “the idiot,” Thomas is “the normal one,” and of course Mrs. Dutton has always been “the poor woman.” She sends him in to shower and finds him sitting on the toilet, afraid to get into the water. She has to throw back the shower curtain and get all wet herself, soaping and rinsing him, turning the water off and on, off and on so that Wesley will stay in the bathtub.

When Wesley’s brother, Thomas, was eighteen, the minister took him aside and told him he should volunteer to wash his brother. Thomas enlisted in the Army instead. He was Bob Nails’s best friend, so Bob Nails thought about joining the Army too. Bob Nails’s father wouldn’t sign the papers, and he told him that if he found a way around it he’d shoot him in the back. Bob Nails told him he didn’t care — he was in love with Jeannie Parater and he didn’t really want to leave. Mr. Nails told him he’d shoot him in the back if he got married. When school was over, Bob Nails went to work in the gas station. At the end of summer, Jeannie Parater left town, and when they tried to draft Bob Nails he was rejected because he couldn’t hear in one ear.

*

“Well, I guess I’m just going to have to scream at you like you was the idiot,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says to Bob Nails. “Army says you can’t hear, I guess that means you don’t have fit hearing. Same thing with a fairy being rejected,” Sam continues, biting off the end of a Chesterfield and tapping tobacco onto his tongue.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only thing it means,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says, lighting the cigarette, “is that the Army says a man’s got something wrong with him, a man’s got something wrong with him.” He smiles at Bob Nails. Sam Siddell, Junior, has two yellow circles of tobacco stain on his front teeth.

“Well, can I have my job back or can’t I?” Bob Nails says.

Sam Siddell rocks back in the green metal chair behind his desk. “If you can hear,” he says.

“When did you notice anything wrong with my hearing?”

“I didn’t bring it up — the Army did. Army brings up things for a reason — only wants fit men. It don’t take people who lost an arm, or people who couldn’t tell when there was orders to follow, or a fairy that wasn’t like other men.”

Bob Nails doesn’t say anything. A man Sam intended to hire to replace Bob Nails keeps looking from the garage into Sam’s office.

“Knew about my brother, didn’t you?” Sam asks.

“What about him?”

“Army sent him home.”

With the toe of his boot, Sam Siddell strokes the calendar girl’s bare legs.

“Sometimes, when you know something about other people’s misfortunes, you’re willing to give them a minute,” Sam says.

Bob Nails goes home and asks his father about Sam’s brother, who works for him at the grocery store.

“That boy got sent home after he lost half his leg when he done something wrong with explosives,” Bob Nails’s father says. “I don’t know what Sam’s excuse is for losing half his mind. He ever talks to you that way, you let me know and I’ll shoot him in the back.”

*

A woman is found dead, on a deserted farm off the highway. Two hunters discover her. First they see the car, a black Chevrolet, sitting in some brambles. It might have hit the tree to one side. The car looks okay — it doesn’t seem to have hit anything. A woman is sitting in the driver’s seat. Such a strange look frozen on her face; running toward her, they both think she’s frightened of them, of the guns. The doors aren’t locked; they open easily — but the police find that out. The men look in but don’t touch the door. One of the hunters has begun to sweat; he’s afraid he might pass out, so he begins to list facts in his mind: the upholstery is red, the car black, there is a woman. The other hunter makes the telephone call and tells these things to the police.

*

Jeannie? No. She’s home, but she’s unbuttoning one of the babies’ coats and can’t answer the phone. What’s wrong with Bob Nails? What’s he doing here in the middle of the afternoon? He’s talking so loudly that the babies wake up and cry. What’s wrong with him? He tells her all he knows: a woman is dead in a Chevrolet. But her Chevrolet is parked outside — didn’t he notice? Bob Nails looks out the kitchen window.

“If you’d miss me so much, why don’t you marry me?” she says.

Late in the afternoon he’s still there. He doesn’t want to frighten her by telling her that more people might be dead. He doesn’t want to know himself, so he doesn’t turn on the radio. He stays for dinner, and as they eat she says it again. He thinks about it. Jeannie? No.

*

On the day of the murder, Wesley Dutton walks to the train station. The people coming into town don’t know there’s been a murder, and Wesley doesn’t either because no one has told him. He goes into the photo-matic as usual and sits, waiting for his pictures to develop. He sits there too long. There are girls waiting. He knows it, but he doesn’t move. One of the girls giggles and tells her friend to open the curtain, that maybe it’s just a pair of legs in there and they can toss them out. Wesley thinks that’s funny. When he laughs, the girls get quiet. A little while later a man who works in the train station pulls open the curtain.

“Come on out now, Wesley,” he says.

The girls are standing in back of the man. Wesley smiles and stands, reaches into the metal slot for the pictures, nods, and walks away. But his heart is racing. How did the man know his name? The pictures are too dark. Only the last one is any good. He tears it off to study, but something else attracts his attention. It’s Bob Nails, running toward him. Bob Nails is out of breath. He slows down and raises a hand. Wesley raises his hand too, to give Bob Nails the picture. Bob Nails nods, returns the picture, and goes on running.

If Wesley keeps it, he’ll leave it in a pocket and his mother will ruin it when she does the wash. She’s told him she isn’t going through his pockets any more; she’ll wash what he gives her. Tissues get washed and dried, pennies brighten from wash to wash. Today Mrs. Dutton found a dollar bill she’d washed and said she wouldn’t give Wesley any more money. She screamed. That’s why he went to the train station.

*

Sam Siddell is speaking to Bob Nails. He speaks normally to the other men, but backs off from Bob Nails and speaks in a whisper. At first Bob Nails was convinced that Sam was looking for an excuse to fire him, but Sam gives him the most interesting jobs and never criticizes his work. He stands under the lift, across the shop from Bob Nails, and whispers — Bob Nails thinks it’s something about a woman who’s come in with an old Chevy. But what would that have to do with Sam’s brother going hunting? Bob Nails finally has to stop work and ask Sam what he’s said.

“I said a girl got killed,” Sam shouts.

“Not somebody from town?”

“Might of been,” Sam hollers.

Bob Nails goes into the office to call Jeannie.

“Young woman,” Sam murmurs as he walks in behind him. “Young woman,” he repeats loudly, nodding in agreement with himself.

She doesn’t answer. Bob Nails tells Sam he’s going to check, he’ll be right back.

“It ain’t his faulty hearing that disturbs me,” Sam Siddell says to the other men. “It’s his faulty ideas of who’s good women and who ain’t.”

Sam walks up to a car that’s being repaired and spits on the hood.

“Not that it ain’t a tragedy he’s got failed hearing.”

*

It’s 1966 and Bob Nails is at Jeannie Parater’s house and she’s showing him pictures of paintings in a book. Bob Nails is going to ask her to marry him before she goes away to college. He’s going to join the Army so they’ll leave town, which is what she always talks about. Tom Dutton likes the Army; he says he’s never getting out. Bob Nails’s father has told him that if he gets married and joins the Army he’ll shoot him in the back, no matter what country they send him to. When Bob Nails’s father isn’t going to shoot someone in the back, then he’s going to get an incurable cancer, and when he gets that, then he’s going to wire everybody’s car and all the people in the business world who’ve cheated him will be blown sky high; or he’ll get two heart attacks and hang the loan shark he’s into before he gets the third.

“Why do you always want to be talking violence?” Bob Nails’s mother says to his father. “If you talked nicer it would be nicer for Bobby to be home.”

Before that, Bob Nails couldn’t really give her a reason for being at the Paraters’ all the time. Now he had one, so when his mother asked why he couldn’t spend more time at home, he said his father was always talking about killing people and blowing things up and he didn’t want to hear it. His mother nodded sadly. She only got mad once, when Bob Nails and Jeannie drove to another town and spent the weekend.

“Do you think your father talks violence in his sleep? At ten o’clock he goes to bed. At ten o’clock you can come home,” Bob Nails’s mother says.

He’s not sure why he never asked Jeannie to marry him. There was something crazy about her — the way she kept showing him pictures: lines and dots and landscapes, all drawn by different men. She said the idea to spend the weekend with him just came to her when they were sitting in the diner. On Monday she didn’t want to leave, but he made her get in the car, convinced now that she wouldn’t want to marry him, that she’d shown him all those pictures just to smart off. He didn’t say anything on the way back. He began to feel the way his father did — that he could kill, strangle, blow things up. But he loved her and didn’t know why. He stayed home at night and thought about it. After a while he went back to see her, but it was only for two weeks because she left in September. Later that month Bob Nails’s father had his first heart attack.

*

She’s giggling, driving too fast on purpose to confuse him. He hates her when she’s this way.

“And do you know what she told my mother? She said the day the Apollo spacecraft landed on the moon Wesley wouldn’t leave the television, even to eat.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

She’s steering with her left hand, and she’s right-handed. There’s a yellow warning sign, but she’s going too fast to notice.

“Some people don’t laugh in the face of progress,” he adds, gripping the dashboard.

“Wait! Let me tell it.”

She’s looking at him instead of the road.

“So later that afternoon Mrs. Dutton heard Wesley pacing. She looked in his bedroom and there he was walking around with two big squares of foam rubber tied under his shoes. He’d cut up the pillows!”

Why did he agree to this ride? Every time the car cuts around a curve he’s sure he’s going to die. Now they’re on a road he’s not familiar with. Neither is she. She throws the gearshift into reverse and they’re back on the main road.

“Where was the accident? I’m confused now.”

“What accident?”

“Sam might make fun of you for going deaf, but he should know you’ve gone stupid too. The murdered woman.”

They’re going around another curve. A car approaching clicks its high beam on and off.

“Is it one of the roads over top of that hill?”

They’re at the top before he has time to answer. Bob Nails is sure she’s going to kill them. “Yeah,” he agrees immediately. “That road, I think.”

She turns and slows down. “This can’t be it. There’d be some markings.”

“Why are you looking for it? What do you care?”

“I just want to know,” she says.

“Know what?” Bob Nails says.

“Listen,” Jeannie says, slamming on the brakes. “You always were after me because I wanted to find out about things. You hate books. You’re glad I came back. You don’t want me to find out about anything. You don’t want me to find out about you.”

“Me?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

They’re sitting in the dark and the car has come to a stop, not quite in the middle of the road. She’s stretched her neck toward him so she can scream in his face. There’s a surprised look on her face.

“What?” he asks.

She looks away, through the wheel. “I just wanted to see it. I’ll bet lots of people are driving there to look.”

“Sure,” he says, relieved that she’s talking quietly. “We just found the wrong road is all.”

She smiles at him and starts to drive again, carefully. Bob Nails begins to feel better, thinks about suggesting a drink. Which way is she headed … what’s closest?

“But we’ll find it,” she says evenly. “Is it this road?”

Bob Nails and Jeannie leave the bar. It’s almost midnight — Jeannie’s mother won’t stay awake any later with the babies, and she refuses to sleep in the spare bed. Bob Nails never liked Jeannie’s mother. She’s been at his mother’s house almost constantly since the funeral, when his father died after his second heart attack. Bob Nails drives the car because Jeannie’s drunk.

“Would you be mad if I still wanted to see where the accident was?”

“Why do you keep calling it an accident? She was murdered,” Bob Nails says.

“What’s the big deal about being so precise?”

“You’re the one who always thought you had to understand everything in detail,” Bob Nails says.

“You’re drunk. You always want to fight when you’re drunk.”

“I don’t know what I want. I’m sorry you’re having a bad time. I should of planned something.”

He looks over to see if she agrees, but she’s just smiling prettily. Her face is pretty even if her hair is messed up.

“Then if you don’t have anything planned why don’t we do what I want to do?”

“Hell,” he says, accelerating, “I’ll find the goddamn place.”

He makes a turn and drives a few miles. This is all familiar ground — where he and Tom Dutton used to hunt pheasants when they were young. He tries to remember what he read in the newspaper. Peterson’s old farm, he guesses. Around the corner he coasts to a stop.

“Okay,” he says.

“Where?” she asks, sitting forward.

“Must of been here somewhere …”

He turns the car onto the shoulder and the headlights illuminate a patch of field.

“Quiet,” she whispers, sliding close.

“Quiet? What for?”

Jeannie lights a cigarette and tosses the match into the ashtray. “How do they think it happened?”

“I don’t know. They figured she picked up a hitchhiker and he shot her.”

“She was riding along the road,” Jeannie says, before she hears his explanation, “and she picked up a man who stabbed her in the neck.”

“I thought he shot her.”

“Bang!”

Bob Nails’s hands tighten on the wheel. “What the hell was that for?”

“If you were her you’d be dead.”

What’s she doing now? What’s she starting to laugh about? But she isn’t laughing. She’s just the way she was. He shivers, feeling her finger on the back of his neck. She shivers too. Something is moving — an animal, trying to get away from the headlights. He’s not sure this is where it happened, because it could have been the other side of Peterson’s farm. He thought there would be a NO TRESPASSING sign, but there isn’t. He thought it was an animal, but it isn’t. It’s Wesley Dutton.

“Wesley?” Jeannie whispers. “What’s Wesley doing here?”

Bob Nails opens the car door. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Wesley says.

It’s cold outside. Hunching his shoulders against the wind, Bob Nails walks into the field. Wesley has on his winter coat, a hat, and a scarf double-knotted at the throat. His hands are dirty and he’s holding something out to Bob Nails. Pictures. He’s been putting them in the ground, he tells Bob Nails. Why? Wesley tells him about a man in a movie who misses a dead lady and goes to her grave to put his picture in the ground there. Wesley’s eyes fill with tears. He sits and rubs his hands over the dirt. He says he just found out from people talking at the train station. They said it was Peterson’s farm.

Bob Nails gives Wesley a hand and tells him he’ll take him home. Wesley squats to pick up the remaining pictures.

“Hello, Wesley,” Jeannie says when he climbs into the back seat.

“Good evening,” Wesley says.

“Why were you out there?” she asks.

Wesley smiles politely. In a moment his expression changes. He remembers. He hitched a ride. He smiles triumphantly.

They ride the rest of the way to Wesley’s house in silence. When they pull up, it’s dark inside.

“Don’t worry, Wesley,” Bob Nails says, opening the car door. So Wesley’s mother won’t hear the door slam and wake up, Bob Nails drives off holding it shut. At the end of the block, closing the door, he notices his watch and sees that it’s two in the morning.

“She’ll stay with them. She just tells me to come back to bluff,” Jeannie says.

He passes her house and keeps driving. After a while he realizes that he’s driving in circles. He’s tired, there’s something wrong, and he’s not sure what. He drives fifteen more miles to a hotel and gets a room for the night. Once in the room, they talk. Even though they stay awake for hours, they can’t understand, can’t agree on anything for sure.

He oversleeps and goes to work hours late, leaving Jeannie at the hotel. She said she was going home in the morning, but when they woke up they both knew she wouldn’t. Bob Nails is exhausted. He begins to explain why he’s late to Sam. When he tells Sam about finding Wesley Dutton on Peterson’s farm, and what Jeannie thinks, Sam’s mouth drops open. His mouth drops open even before he hears what Jeannie thinks. He tells Bob Nails to get the hell out in the garage to fix the car on the lift before the customer shows up and the job isn’t done.

Bob Nails is surprised when the police show up at the garage. Later, Sam tells him that he was too dead tired to know right from wrong, so he decided to take care of it for him.

*

Bob Nails’s mother tells him on the telephone that Wesley was sent to the state hospital. According to Mrs. Dutton, when they were taking him away, Wesley just smiled politely and tried to help the detective into his coat, and the detective misunderstood and thought Wesley was trying to take it. The detectives exchanged looks. Bob Nails says he’ll listen to the rest of it when he comes home for his things. He hangs up and paces around the room, remembering the story his mother told him years ago about what Wesley did when he heard a TV newscaster say that Mrs. Kennedy put her wedding ring in her husband’s casket. He went to the graveyard the next day, and someone asked him what he was doing there. Wesley said he had his mother’s diamond ring and that he had to give it to someone who was dead. The man took the ring away and called Mrs. Dutton, but Wesley tried to fight, so the man held it on his tongue until Mrs. Dutton arrived.

Jeannie wants Bob Nails to buy her an engagement ring. That’s always on his mind, and Wesley Dutton is always on his mind. It’s quiet out on the street, quiet in the room. Jeannie’s sulking because he won’t drive to Peterson’s farm. She said it would be exciting, like criminals returning to the scene of the crime. They aren’t criminals; can’t she understand that?

He looks out the window. He’s started to hate the cheap room, the lousy furniture, the plastic lampshades. It will be better when they move to an apartment. The room is too cold. Jeannie sits wrapped in her coat, reading the same magazines again. His father died reading a magazine; when his mother came into the room his face was all red and he was staring at the page, but his mother knew he didn’t look that way from anything he read in Consumer Reports.

“Let’s get a drink,” he says.

“You know,” she says slowly, “there never was any such movie.”

“I don’t want to talk about Wesley Dutton.”

He wants to talk about what’s going on, but he doesn’t know how to do it. She’s going to get the babies when they move. Is that when he’s supposed to marry her? She looks so pretty. Her hair shines. He thinks about asking why her hair shines. When she stands, her hair covers her shoulders. Her coat is wrinkled because it’s been bunched up underneath her. In high school the girls used to call her “Queen Jean” because her clothes were wrinkled and her sweaters never had enough buttons. It makes him angry to remember her being ridiculed.

“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to,” she says, turning and walking across the room. He gets his jacket and follows her down the stairs. When he pushes open the door a wind hits them. She bows her head and starts across the street.

“Not that bar,” he says. “Someplace nice.”

Doesn’t she hear him? He catches up with her, grabs the back of her scarf.

“I don’t notice that that bar smells any particular way,” she says.

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“You said that was why you wouldn’t go there last night, didn’t you?”

What should he say? He drives past several bars, hoping she’ll be in a better mood when they stop, but she hasn’t spoken since they got in the car. They pass a row of bars, and later another bar pointed to by a red neon arrow shooting through a blue neon waterfall. He can’t tell if she likes any of the bars, because she’s looking at her hands in her lap. At the next bar he pulls in.

All the booths are taken, so they sit at a little wooden table covered by place mats soaking in puddles. They serve food here. He orders two cheeseburgers. Jeannie just looks at hers, so he eats that too. They sit in silence, pouring from a pitcher of beer. There’s a clock advertising Schlitz above the bar. A foam of tiny lights constantly overflows the beer mug. Every so often a man sitting at the bar below the light looks at them — at him, or at Jeannie? Bob Nails decides the man must be looking at her.

They leave the bar at midnight. Tomorrow she starts her job with the telephone company. What’s she going to do with the babies if she gets a job? What makes her hair shine? Couldn’t Wesley have gone to the farm to see what it looked like, the way they did?

“Well?” Bob Nails says.

He’s holding the car door open, but she hasn’t gotten in. She’s looking over his shoulder.

“What do you think that says?”

Jeannie’s looking at a sign across the street. He squints, trying to focus. Jeannie squints too, but walks down the gravel driveway toward it. He wants to call after her to find out if she’s that unsteady from drinking, or if it’s because the driveway is so full of holes. Instead, he follows her.

The sign is in the window of a little house. A light glows in one of the rooms, but the sign has been turned off.

“She’s a fortune teller!” Jeannie says.

“Come on,” Bob Nails says.

“There’s a light inside.”

“Jeannie, it’s late at night.”

But she’s already knocked on the door and is knocking again, harder. He grabs her hand and holds it at his side. Inside the house a dog barks, then is quiet.

“Satisfied?” he says, leaning against the door.

He stumbles for balance when the door is opened. In the corner of his eye he sees an old man with a rifle, but the next second he isn’t sure there was any old man. A young girl is facing them, wearing a quilted robe, her hair rolled in curlers. Her face is very pink. Bob Nails smells incense, or musk perfume. The girl cocks her head.

“Is it too late to have our fortunes told?” Jeannie asks.

The girl’s mouth moves oddly, as if she might be chewing gum. Very softly, very precisely, she says, “You are going to die,” and closes the door.