I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

Good ’Til Now

VANGIE THOUGHT this day would never end, and what got her through it was thinking about the time her husband had been fired for having sex with a woman in a cardboard carton. Vangie had always been more interested in the carton than in the woman. The woman was just a faceless coworker who had crawled — how else would you get in there? — into a cardboard box and had sex with Charles. But the box was something else. How big was it? Was it lying horizontally? Who crawled in first? Was there protocol involved here, etiquette? What did you say to someone in a cardboard box? They had been caught not by one person, who might just conceivably have kept his mouth shut, but by four or five workers who’d come into the storeroom to sneak cigarettes and been treated to an impromptu floor show.

It was about the size of a goddamned refrigerator box, Charles had said sullenly. Charles had been contrite and humiliated for about fifteen minutes, and then the Hemingway implications of the whole thing had struck him. It seemed in some manner tied to the level of his testosterone. It proved beyond all conjecture the appeal he had to women. It was an ego thing, and since Charles was a hunter who mounted the heads of his victims on wooden plaques, Vangie thought it was a shame he hadn’t managed to get some sort of trophy out of the whole affair.

This had been five years ago, and it had crossed her mind a few times that she and Charles might not be as made for each other as they had once thought; but by then their son, Stephen, was a year old, and Stephen was such an enormity in her life that he dwarfed even so tacky a thing as adultery committed inside a cardboard box.

All day she had been thinking that she and Stephen and Robert might just pile everything into the car and flee. Flee had been Robert’s word. Just flee west ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. She was wondering if adultery had an expiration date like something you’d pick up from a supermarket shelf. A statute of limitations. If she left and Charles tried to win custody of Stephen, maybe she could hit him with that. Perhaps hit him first. He had even beaten her once, in a halfhearted way, but he had been drinking a lot then, and he had cried and promised that it would never happen again, and it had not.

Even this Robert Vandaveer business could be laid at Charles’s door, if you wanted to carry things back far enough.

Charles had been deer hunting with a band of his friends down on the river, and he came back talking about Vandaveer. We met this weird fellow down on Buffalo, Charles said. Some kind of writer, songwriter or something. Weird, but all right. He gave us permission to camp on his place. Hair down to his ass, but he’s all right. He even drank a beer with us.

For a while all Charles could talk about was Robert Vandaveer. Vangie figured he’d taken Vandaveer for some proponent of the cult of machismo, some writer of the Hemingway-Jim Harrison school. Robert had done this, Robert had done that. Robert had constructed his lodge with his bare hands. Robert had even cut the timber with which he bare-handedly constructed his lodge. Then Charles had abruptly stopped talking about Robert Vandaveer.

What happened to Robert Vandaveer? she asked him.

We’re not hunting down there anymore, Charles said.

Yet that night a year ago the name had stirred some lost memory, and before bedtime she went through her record collection. She’d always loved music, had written songs herself, and she owned an enormous number of tapes, CDs, records. She found what she was looking for with absurd ease. As if they had been stored, all stacked in sequence and lying in wait for her. The subtle machinations of fate, Robert would have said in an ironic tone, if she had ever told him. Emmylou Harris had covered two of Robert Vandaveer’s songs. Johnny Cash had recorded a Dylanesque song that Vandaveer had written. There was even a recording by Vandaveer himself, one of his own songs, on a Rhino collection called Folk Troubadours of the Seventies.

Later she wondered why she had searched for the songs. Why she hadn’t just let it lie. Maybe we are all the authors of our own doom, she thought. Maybe we lay by the cobwebbed artifacts we’ll need for our future undoing. At some unknown point we’ll rummage through them for the cord that fits the throat just so, the knife with the perfect edge.

VANGIE WAS A TEACHERS’S AIDE and a counselor. Stephen was in the second grade, and she had taken the job when he started kindergarten. The days had been long then, too. They had been long, but they hadn’t cut the way this one did.

At noon she went to the teachers’ lounge and used the phone to dial Robert’s number. The phone rang and rang. She held it so tightly against her ear that it hurt, but she just let it ring. She could see the room the phone was in. The scarred pine table it sat on. She wondered if he was drinking. She wondered if he was passed out on the couch with an empty Wild Turkey bottle cradled against his chest as you’d cradle a child. She didn’t think so. She figured he was laying rock on the chimney he was building. He’d completed the fireplace, but the lodge was an A-frame and high roofed, and the chimney would have to be enormously tall to clear it. He kept building scaffolding higher and higher. She kidded him about the thin air, about nesting eagles. He wrestled the stones from one level of the scaffold to the next. Five-gallon buckets of mortar. He was stronger than he appeared.

He had called her Sunday to see if she would come out. She was still off balance, disoriented; she could not. His voice didn’t sound quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. There was a feeling of distance in it, distance you couldn’t measure in miles. You’re not drinking are you? she asked him. There’d been a pause, as if he’d looked to see was he drinking or not. No, no, he said. I’m not drinking. I thought I might mix up some mortar, lay a few rocks.

A teacher came in and stood watching her. Waiting perhaps for the phone. She hung it up. She wondered how long she had let it ring, but she really didn’t want to know. She didn’t look at her watch. She wondered what she was going to do.

YOUR BUDDY Robert Vandaveer’s going to be at the school, she told Charles. This had been almost exactly a year ago.

Say he is? What in the world for?

He’s supposed to address one of the English classes on creativity. On poetry, the process of converting experience into a poem.

My question remains unanswered, Charles said.

Well, he is a songwriter. A poet. A long time ago he was almost famous, in a fifteen-minute kind of way. The superintendent heard there was a poet living in the wilds of Buffalo River and figured the English class might benefit from hearing him talk and asking him questions.

I have a question of my own, Charles said. How much money is the county pissing away on this?

They’re not paying him, she said.

She had a free period that day, and she thought she might just see this semifamous Vandaveer. When the lecture was over and the students had filed out of the classroom, she was standing in the hallway. She’d stood aside to let them pass, and when Vandaveer went by he nodded to her. She nodded in return, and that should have been that, except she heard herself say: My husband, Charles, told me about meeting you.

He paused and turned to study her. I knew you the moment I saw you, he said.

You what? How could you do that?

Your husband showed me your photograph.

She wondered why Charles was going around showing strange men her picture. She wondered if he’d had a leer on his face to show them what hot,stuff she was.

How did he come to show you my photograph?

It was my fault, Vandaveer said. I led him into it. I just had a feeling he had a photograph I wanted to see. I thought it might be you, and as it turned out I was right.

Then why did you nod and just walk on past me without speaking? She figured to let him know she could play word games as well as he could.

He smiled. Because I was sure you’d speak to me.

Vangie was trying to relate the aging hippie before her to the young man whose photograph was on the back of the album sleeve. A young man with anarchic hair, firebrand eyes, an impatient look of arrogance on his face. Vandaveer looked about fifty, like a man salvaged weatherworn but intact from the ’60s. He had a gray-brown ponytail, and he was wearing an old black sport coat over a white shirt. His jeans were faded, and his shoes were spotted with what looked like dried brick mortar. There seemed little of the revolutionary left in Vandaveer’s face, and his eyes were the most changed feature of all: There was an enormous stillness to them. There were depths, blank spaces, burnt landscapes. They seemed to say that they had seen all the world had to show them and there was nothing they could do about it.

I have a recording you made, she said. Some of your own songs. She knew he was going to ask her which songs, and she had the titles ready, even the lines that she had liked best. He didn’t, though.

Do you like music? he asked.

I like it very much.

There’s a thing, a folk music part of the arts and crafts fair. Some pretty good guitar players and songwriters are going to be there. Would you like to go?

She was confused. You mean with you?

That’s what I mean.

Well, you know my husband. Charles. If I have a husband, it follows I’m married.

It was just to listen to music, he said. Bring the boy. He was in the picture, too. Bring Charles, it’s just a family thing. Folks show up from all over, campers full of families.

Charles doesn’t even like music, she said. He hates crowds, too.

Then I wouldn’t bring him. This pretty much consists of crowds listening to music.

I’d have to tell him.

I would imagine so.

It really might be fun. There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask you about music, anyway.

He had unpocketed a cigarette. He lit it with a thin gold lighter. There was engraving on the side, but she couldn’t read what it said.

You can’t smoke in here.

He didn’t seem to hear. Oh hell, he said. I forgot. I’m sorry I even brought it up. The transmission’s out of my truck, and it might not be ready.

That was another place when that should have been that, but she said: Stephen and I will pick you up if you’ll give me directions.

He told her where the road turned off and which fork to follow to the river. Just drive ’til you run out of road, he said.

When he’d turned to go, she said: I really am happily married.

He looked surprised she’d bring it up. That’s cool, he said. I’ve been there a few times myself.

IF THEY HAD NOT LOST Stephen that night, she would not have gone to bed with him. That was what she told herself later, but she did not believe it. If they had not lost Stephen, they would have lost something else. It was fated, Robert had said, and she believed him. Fated was a word Robert was fond of. Fated and flee. We are fated to flee.

Though before that happened, a year had passed and they had fallen into the habit of going places together. First to the music festival, then to a music store Robert knew about in Nashville that sold hard-to-find records on obscure labels. To art galleries, musty-smelling bookstores. To other places beyond reproach. Once, he took her and Stephen to a Mexican restaurant in Franklin. Stephen was always along, nothing was going to happen with Stephen along. Stephen seemed to have fallen in love with Vandaveer. Robert talked to him the way he might talk with another adult. When he took Stephen fishing, Vangie sipped a Corona and watched but would only let Stephen fish from the riverbank. She would not allow Robert to take him out in the boat.

Of course she knew this was crazy. Each time when the days ended — they ended too fast, like events rushing in fast-forward — she told herself how crazy it was. They were just comfortable together, they had grown too fond of each other. They seemed to fit. Something about him affected her the way medicine might. She thought she affected him the same way, but she didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about it. Maybe comfort was just another kind of medicine. She’d be all right a week or two, and then the need for the comfort would tighten her nerves, tighten his nerves, and one of them would call.

Partly it was the music, but it was not entirely the music. When she pestered him hard enough, he’d laugh and tell stories about people who were just names on record labels, names in the pages of Rolling Stone. Once in the early ’70s he’d been playing the Fifth Peg in Chicago’s Old Town with John Prine and they had gotten drunk and stolen shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot and raced them in the streets, and he told her about getting in a fight with Townes Van Zandt in a Texas honky-tonk so rough the stage was chicken-wired to deflect the beer bottles and Van Zandt had hit him in the corner of the eye with a metal wastebasket. He showed her the scar.

These stories with their names familiar to her did not seem to be told to impress her. The names he dropped were just names, and he did not tell stories that made him look good. They were just things that had happened to him, and in time the most sordid of them became very dear to her.

For there were times when the stories darkened. Once when he’d backslid and was drinking Wild Turkey, his mind sidestepped past the harmless pranks to a point where the high, wild times were lost past all reclaiming, and he and Van Zandt were shooting heroin in the bathroom of a honky-tonk with vomit on the floor and a drunk sleeping sprawled in a stall and a hole in the roof where you could see the constellations turning slowly on themselves like carousels of unreckonable magnitude, and the night itself seemed to be settling over him like the folds of a shroud.

Or maybe he just knows which buttons to push, she told herself in a moment when her mind was clear. He’s been at this all his life; by now he knows what works, what doesn’t.

There were silences when he seemed to be hearing something she couldn’t hear, or maybe just listening for it to begin. Silences that gave her the eerie impression that he was not there, maybe not even alive, as if all his life had been used up. As if his life had consisted of a finite number of events and the time to do them, but everything had become unphased, and the things had all been done, and he was left with dead space he did not know how to fill.

♦ ♦ ♦

WHAT IS THIS Robert Vandaveer bullshit about? Charles wanted to know.

Charles wants to know what this Robert Vandaveer bullshit is about, she told Robert.

What did you tell him it was about?

I told him I enjoyed your company, that nothing was going on. I told him I didn’t complain about the time he spent with his friends, and that Stephen was always with us.

What did he say to that?

He said his friends weren’t old enough to be his father and they didn’t have hair down to their ass.

By now they’d passed some subtle point. It wasn’t marked, but they knew they’d passed it anyway. They weren’t exactly flirting, but they weren’t exactly anything else, either.

Tell him I’m gay.

What? she was laughing. Are you?

No, but I don’t mind if Charles thinks so. In fact I want him to think so. Tell him I’m using you to get to him. Tell Charles I have designs on him.

Charles, when told a slightly modified version of this, was surprised. I knew the son of a bitch was queer when he wouldn’t let us kill deer off that place, he said.

SHE WAS WATCHING a music documentary on public television and reading a book when a heavyset young man with a wing of blond hair falling over his left eye was being interviewed and mentioned Robert’s name. The volume seemed to grow louder just for the length of time it took to say Robert Vandaveer. She closed the book and laid it aside.

He was the daddy of us all, the young man, whose name was Steve Valle, said. Without him we’d never have been, it’s as simple as that. He kicked open a lot of doors, and the rest of us slipped through. He could have been the biggest of us all. He could have been another Dylan. But booze and sex and drugs, maybe in that order, brought him down. Brought him down hard.

How well did you know him?

Vangie suddenly realized they sounded as if they were discussing a dead man.

I knew him as well as one man can know another. He took me under his wing. He showed me the ropes.

Vangie thought the young man sounded pompous and arrogant. He’d only recorded one album.

Robert was working on his interminable chimney when she told him about Valle. She wondered what he’d do with his time when he finished the chimney. Perhaps commence another right beside it.

He made you sound important, she said. He said you were the daddy of them all.

I believe I remember him, Vandaveer said. But not like that. But God knows I don’t remember a lot of things. I’ve got whole years with long stretches erased out of them. The way I remember it, he was just another hustler. Trying to steal songs, lines out of songs. There were a thousand of him. Kids who’d slit your throat for a killer line.

You took him under your wing.

Grinning, he laid the trowel down and extended his arms out from his side. Then he was obviously lying, he said. As you can see, I possess not a wing to my name.

You could have been the biggest of us all, but booze and sex and drugs brought you down hard, she told him, grinning back. You never showed me the ropes.

WHEN THEY LOST STEPHEN they were watching the nighthawks. They lost him that quick. He was there, he was gone. They were at a music fair in a Nashville park. The Parthenon was lit by a battery of floodlights, and the stage bled strobic, pastel neon into the August night. They were sprawled on their backs before the stage where a funk band was playing, and where the light merged seamlessly with the ebony heavens, thousands of nighthawks darted and checked on the updrafts like bats, and they seemed to be feeding on the light itself.

Stephen? she said.

She was up instantly, looking wildly about. There were so many people sprawled around them. Did you see my little boy leave? she demanded of the man next to them on the grass. The man was apologetic; he seemed to feel this was something he’d be held accountable for. I’m sorry, the man said, I wasn’t even looking, I was watching the stage. Stephen’s Coke and a CD Robert had bought him still lay on the grass. She snatched them up. Let’s go, she said.

They searched in widening circles through the crowd. Everyone looked alike, a faceless mass. Hundreds of children, none of whom were Stephen. Everyone else seemed to have kept up with their children. She was scared, and then she was more scared. We’ve got to get his name over the public-address system, Robert said. She looked once at Robert’s face for comfort, but he looked as frightened as she felt. Stephen was hopelessly lost, kidnapped, and already jammed roughly into the trunk of a car, riding away, easing into a night of horror that would climax with his naked body flung in a ditch and a piece of dirty plastic thrown over it.

When Robert saw him, Stephen was coming out of a yellow portable toilet fastening his jeans. He was almost on the other side of the park, but he didn’t look as if he knew he was lost. Robert picked him up, held him tightly in his arms. There was a bandstand nearby where no one was performing, and they went and sat down on folding chairs. By now Vangie was crying. She was crying, and she couldn’t stop. She kept shaking her head and trying, but she couldn’t stop. Finally Robert put his arm around her. It was the first time he’d touched her. She twisted away. We can’t, we can’t, she said, don’t touch me. He released her, lowered the arm. Robert had only seen him coming out the door of a portable toilet, but she felt he’d snatched Stephen from the arms of a madman,’ from the path of a drunken driver. It felt like a miracle. As if the rest of her life had been torn from her to show her what loss would be like, then handed carelessly back.

Let’s go home, she said.

Charles is on that week-long fishing trip. He won’t be back tonight.

No, all the fun’s gone out of this, I’m leaving.

I’ll get the blanket.

No, leave it, I don’t care about the blanket, let’s just go.

The ride back was mostly silent. Usually, they talked all the way, and there was never enough time to get everything said, but tonight she drove and Robert smoked and watched the night roll by, lights of distant hillside towns rolling up and subsiding like St. Elmo’s fire in the wake of a ship.

This was a bad idea, she finally said.

No, it was a good idea. I loved it. You know me, I’d go with you anywhere. A rattlesnake hunt. A Baptist foot washing.

That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I meant it’s crazy, this whole thing’s crazy.

A public stoning. A hanging. Well, maybe not a hanging.

Crazy, she said, smiling in spite of herself.

When she stopped the station wagon in front of Robert’s lodge, he opened the door to get out, then paused and turned toward her. You want to come in awhile?

No, she said, but her hand was on the door latch, then the door was open and she was standing beside the car. Robert got out. He opened the rear door and unbelted a sleeping Stephen and took him up in his arms. He started up the flagstone walk. Vangie followed. Her feet seemed to be taking steps on their own; they needed no instruction from her. The lodge, all rough-hewn timbers and glass, was built on a bluff, and below it you could see the river rolling dark as tarnished brass through the cedars.

They went from the deck through French doors into the living room, and Robert made a bed for Stephen on the couch and tucked a blanket around him.

You want a drink?

No, she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, as if she had never heard it before, or heard just that precise tone in it.

Then she didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. When he looked in her eyes, he stepped toward her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She moved against him. They embraced. She felt as if their flesh had flowed together, merged in some manner, as if they’d fallen from some enormous height and struck the earth clasped in this fashion. He felt so thin, but his arms almost crushed her. God, he said against her face. God. For a moment he just held her. As if after so long a time the embrace itself was enough. Then he lowered his mouth to hers, and she drew him tighter and opened her mouth under his.

In the bathroom she washed her face, but she didn’t look in the mirror. She felt that Charles might be staring back. She felt that after all a cardboard box is simply a matter of geography.

THE ROOM WAS DARK, and a woman was singing out of it in a smoky listless languor: Balled out, wasted, and I feel I’m goin’ down …

I love this record, Robert said.

It doesn’t seem very apt, Vangie said. I’m not going to get wasted on half a glass of wine, and I seem not to be balled out. I can’t keep my hands off you.

Just indulge yourself, Robert said.

Hard to find a place I won’t get cut on, you’re all angles and bones. Don’t you ever eat?

Goodbye, darl’n’, I’ve been good ’til now. …

Well, it seems apt to me, Robert said. You’ve probably been as pure as milk, or at least good ’til now, and I’m for damn sure going down.

She glanced sharply at him as if she’d read the context of his words, but he made no move toward her, and he wasn’t even looking at her. He was just lying there staring at the ceiling.

What are we going to do? he finally asked.

I don’t know. I don’t know. She was sipping from a glass of wine he’d brought her. She was half reclining on pillows stacked against the headboard of the bed. Robert still wasn’t drinking. He was smoking, and in the dark she could see the orange pulse of his cigarette when he drew on it.

What we ought to do is just flee, Robert said. Just get the hell out of Dodge. I was reading this book by Robert Penn Warren, and this guy Jack Burden found out the woman he’d loved all his life was sleeping with his boss. His boss was supposed to be Huey Long. Burden drove all the way to California and checked into a motel. He drank a pint of whiskey, and in the morning he just started driving back. He said Flee is what you do when the telegram says all is discovered. It’s what you do when you look down and see the bloody knife in your hand.

She didn’t say anything. The wine was strawberry, and she could smell summer in it, hot green leaves, berries warm in the sun. She was thinking how little time it took to alter things forever. To arrive at a place you can’t get back from. She realized the mental picture of herself she’d carried all these years didn’t favor her much anymore.

We ought to just go and not look back. Like that Dylan song. Go all the way, ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. Something like that.

She wondered how much of him was real. How much was Robert Vandaveer and how much was cobbled up out of lines from songs, words from books, wisdom that fell ponderous as stones from the dust-dry tongues of dead philosophers.

I’ve got to go, she said.

She got up naked and set the wineglass on the nightstand. She began to search for her clothes. They seemed to be everywhere. She started putting them on.

What are we going to do?

I don’t know, she said. Well just sort it out. We can’t do this.

If you go, you’ll just come back. I told you a year ago it was fated, and I wasn’t lying. I knew it the moment I saw you. Before I saw you, when a man showed me a picture of his wife. We’re like the two halves of something — what, I don’t know — but together we’re a whole. Apart we’re just cripples, half a set of twins.

She was buttoning her blouse. You can’t do this to me, she said. You can’t put a lien on my life, some sort of attachment. On me, on my child. With your lines about fate and talking to Charles because he had a picture of me in his wallet. I admit I fell in love with you, but that talk’s all bullshit. I can’t lose my son, that’s what’s real to me.

By now he was up and putting on his clothes. I’ll get Stephen for you, he said.

Don’t start drinking. Don’t you start drinking.

She didn’t think he ever used drugs anymore, but she thought he might have a stash laid by for hard times. These were hard times. She knew he kept an unopened fifth of Wild Turkey sitting on the table where he could see it. She’d asked him about drugs once and never forgotten what he’d said. Everybody’s on drugs, he said. The world’s on drugs. Heroin, sex, booze, money. Television. Comfort. What I get from you, that’s a drug. Calmness. Any kind of crutch you can hobble through the goddamned day on is a drug. Darkness. They say when you get old enough, you look forward to dying. That’s the drug you reach for when the other crap doesn’t work anymore.

It was hard to leave. Harder than anything she’d ever done. She kept going back, leaving in stages, on the steps of the lodge, in the yard, leaning across Stephen’s sleeping body to kiss Robert. She clung to him when he snapped Stephen in and closed the door. She was half crying. Go in the house and shut the door, she said. I can’t leave like this, I can’t drive off looking at you standing in the yard.

He went.

She felt like a thief who’d stolen something it was impossible to return, she felt like Jagger the Midnight Rambler, Joan Osborne with her panties stuffed in the bottom of her purse, the girl in the song, balled out, wasted, feeling she was going down. There in the moonlight with her shoes in her hand and dew on her feet, with Stephen in the backseat looking not like her child but some waif she’d snatched at random from a Wal-Mart parking lot and shuttled far from his home, there wiping condensation from the windshield with Charles’s wadded shirt and the moon a yellow blur through the glass, even then she knew — she knew she was going down.

SHE PICKED UP STEPHEN at three o’clock, and by then she had decided to leave Charles. She hadn’t thought much past that. Just take Stephen and a change of clothing and head out for Robert’s lodge. Just flee.

The first thing she did was run a stop sign behind the school, and a beat-up yellow Econoline van slammed into her right rear quarter panel. Her head struck the window frame hard, and she bit her lip, but Stephen was strapped in, and he wasn’t hurt.

Stephen was outraged. Are you crazy? he asked. That was a stop sign, are you crazy?

A fat man wearing a Red Man baseball cap was at the window. Jesus, lady, he said, then he saw Stephen. Are you both all right?

We’re fine, she said. She’d found a paper napkin in a crumpled Hardee’s bag and was wiping the blood off her mouth.

Lady, that was a stop sign.

I know. I know it was my fault.

I got no insurance. The damn cops’ll pull my license because I don’t have liability. Even with you running the stop sign and all, it’ll still be my fault.

There didn’t seem to be any cops around. Even any onlookers. It might have been a midnight collision in trackless desert.

She got out, and they looked at the damage. The van didn’t have a mark on it, but the fender of her station wagon was folded against the wheel.

Never mind the police, she said. We won’t call them. Your van’s not hurt, and I have insurance. I’ll think of something to tell them.

He got a galvanized pipe out of the back of the van. ATKINS PLUMBING, she read from the van’s side. He inserted the pipe into the fender well and, grunting, pried the crumpled fender away from the tire.

I really am sorry, she said.

Forget it, the plumber said. He tossed the pipe into the van and climbed behind the wheel.

She got in the station wagon and put it in gear and drove cautiously away.

If Daddy’s there, don’t run in telling him about the accident the first thing, she said. I’ll tell him after supper.

Can I tell him?

You can even tell him you were driving if you want to, she said.

She was hoping it wouldn’t be, but Charles’s pickup was in the driveway loaded down with tents and camp stoves and fishing gear. He was in the living room drinking a beer and reading through the daily copies of the Tennessean she had saved for him. He laid the papers aside and grasped Stephen and tossed him into the air and caught him. Stephen came down laughing and yelling to be thrown again.

Don’t do that, Charles. I’m always afraid you’ll hurt him.

You’re next, Charles said. He set down Stephen and grinned at her. While you’re getting supper, I aim to take a bath, he said. Haven’t seen you in a week, and you might appreciate me more tonight if I smelled a little better.

She sat on the couch and closed her eves. He hadn’t said anything about her mouth. But the cut was inside her lip, and he hadn’t kissed her. Her head hurt. Maybe she’d slammed it harder than she’d thought. She could hear Charles clattering around in the bathroom. Stephen turned the TV on and put a cartridge into his video game console. She could hear the music from his Mario Brothers game.

For a moment terrible in its intensity, she thought of leaving them both. Just for an instant. Slipping into the night and leaving them sleeping, shoes in her hand like that midnight rambler, just another hard traveler down the line and gone. She knew it was going to be a long night, and she didn’t know if she could take it: shouting, cursing, crying, perhaps he’d beat her, she hoped he’d beat her, that might make going easier. All she knew for certain was that she and Stephen were leaving.

You could save me, Robert had said a long time ago, if you could call five months a long time. By then she was attuned to nuances in his voice, and he’d said it in the self-mocking tone he used when he wanted you to think he didn’t mean it. He had been drinking whiskey then, but he was not drunk.

It seemed a terribly presumptuous thing to say, laid out like that. You can save me, you can let me slide. Having someone lay their life in your hands was oddly embarrassing, like accidentally walking in on someone naked. She did not want this weight on her, and she brushed all these implications lightly aside.

I can’t even save myself, she smiled.

You could save two birds with one stone, Robert said and smiled at that to show her it had all been a jest to see what her response would be. And that it hadn’t been the one he wanted to hear, but he’d have to settle for it.

She rested her head against the upholstery, and after a few moments she dozed. She must have slept for only a moment, but the dream she had seemed to encompass an enormous amount of time.

In the dream she was swinging somehow far above the earth, so high she could see the hazy ellipse of its curvature, the azure blue of the oceans. She was descending, arcing back and forth, the distance of the arc controlled by whatever suspended her by the left ankle. She looked up. A thin silver strand led up and up, tended away to nothingness in the high, cold air. When she looked down again, the earth was closer. The countryside was covered with snow, detail was rushing at her, fences, a pasture, a tarnished brass river snaking through cedar and cypress.

She was still swinging out, and she felt the moment of pause when her body strained against its tether. Then the pull of momentum back. She had no control over it. She was just arcing on the silver strand of cord. There was a snow-covered beech tree on the side of a wet black bluff, its branches reaching earthward as a beech’s will. It was in her path. She was going to slam into it hard, it was physics, it was gravity, it was fate. At the speed she was moving the impact would kill her, impale her on broken branches.

When she struck the tree, she felt only a rush of cold air, but the tree exploded into broken crystal glass that went glittering away in the light of a sun she couldn’t see and dimpled the snowy earth for miles when they fell.

Are you going to get that or not? Charles yelled.

The phone was in the kitchen. She answered it leaning against the counter. She turned on the tap and began to fill a glass with cold water. It was someone from the sheriff’s department, she didn’t get the name. Someone wanted to know her name, and she told them. There seemed to be too much noise. Water was running in the bathroom, water was running in the sink, Mario and Luigi were bouncing around the living room.

Do you know a man named Robert Vandaveer?

Yes.

Why is there no soap in here? Charles yelled from the bathroom. How about bringing me a bar of soap?

… Meter reader found him. Of course, it could be an accident, but it’s under investigation. The thing of it is, there was a sealed letter with your name on it in his pocket. I don’t actually have to have your permission, considering the circumstances, but I thought as a courtesy …

Cold water was running in the glass, running out of the glass.

No, she said viciously into the phone. If it’s sealed and it has my name on it, it’s mine. It’s mine, and you leave it alone.

She slammed the phone down. Stephen had come into the room, and he was staring at her. He seemed to be rising into the air, floating, growing as tall as she was. Then she felt the cold linoleum against the calves of her legs, the handle of a cabinet door against her back, and realized she was sitting on the floor. The phone began to ring.

Are you getting the goddamned soap or not? Charles had come into the room. She looked up. Charles looked ludicrous with water streaming off him and a towel clutched in front of his loins. She saw that Charles was getting fat.

I leave for a week and this place just … Charles’s face was altering, anger that had been rushing toward rage shifted to uncertainty, confusion, finally to consternation.

She folded Stephen into her arms so hard he cried out arid tried to twist away. He couldn’t, she was holding him so tightly. She thrust her face against the hollow of his throat. She could smell him, feel his hair, the poreless texture of his skin.

I’m getting your goddamned soap, she cried against the coarse fabric of Stephen’s sweater. I’m looking for it, I’m looking for it, Fm looking for it.