Tony and Susan

EIGHT

The sun explodes, so does the book. Susan Morrow stops a last time to appreciate, reading almost over, only one chapter left. Dorothy and Henry are upstairs, having returned from skating just when Tony put his fingerprints on the door latch. She heard them stomping on the porch, calling good bye across the snow, then in the vestibule breathing and giggling. Now they are talking upstairs, Rosie too, probably a rehash.

Again Susan finds the screened porch in her mind, the one in Maine, the path and rocky steps by the boathouse, the still harbor with a mirror afternoon sheen across to the trees. Dying, like her mother and father. Like Bobby Andes. Like her jealousy. Like Edward’s writing. Like this book.

Edward is coming, so is Arnold. Susan, for no reason at all, is full of dread.

Nocturnal Animals 26

The trailer was open to the woods, its walls gone, its roof propped on stakes to make a shelter. He was under a picnic table, and Ray had escaped down a stream bed, and others were looking for him because they knew Tony could not. The people who had been fussing over him had disappeared, the picnic bench was on his chest, he couldn’t push it away, he thought if he rested he would be all right.

The sky beyond the trees was a dome of darkness weakening into light, dim green. Beyond it was another dome which he could not see, world within a world. It was the inside of an eyelid the size of a world, but he lacked the strength to open it. This is dream, he said.

There was no sky and no eyelid, however, and it was no dream. It was total dark, and the picnic tables and trees were inventions of thought. He knew that sometimes in a dream you wonder if it is real, but in waking life there is never a doubt. He knew now. He was awake, with something on his eyes like a bandage. He could not see, but it was no dream.

He remembered the trailer, Ray coming after him, the sun bursting. He was lying on a floor, the back of his head against a wall, his right arm crowded against a bulky object. Something had fallen on his legs. Something else was pushing his head.

He could not feel what was on his eyes. He raised a hand from the floor, a move he could make, moved his hand toward his eyes, then stopped, frightened. It was no bandage. He did not want to touch his eyes, afraid what he would find there. He wanted to know, am I in the darkness or is the darkness in me? If Ray had turned out the light, could it be this dark? He tried to test, look for the window, the door, but he did not know how to look, something was missing in the forward part of his face, a blank space, wires cut. He heard the news whispered in the back: I’m blind, which in younger years would have been the worst of all possible news.

He moved his right leg, it was okay, his left leg too. The object lying across his legs was the chair, he remembered falling backward. He raised his knee and shoved it aside. He wondered what Ray had done to his eyes, whether he had blinded him with a blow to the head or had attacked them directly, fingers or knife or fork, torn them or stabbed them with a pain he was yet to feel. He wondered why Ray had not grabbed the gun and shot him dead. He wondered how much time had passed, how far Ray had gone by now. He would have taken my car, Tony said. If he had gone. If he was not sitting over there now watching and waiting for me to wake up so as to torture me.

He felt too heavy and leaden to be frightened by that thought. Even the blindness did not frighten him yet, though he knew a moment was coming when it would rip him like a rake. He felt cold, shivering. His insides rose, gorge, he turned his head to heave but nothing came.

Tony Hastings knew time had passed but he had no memory of it except the scraping where his eyes had been. Now he felt the gouges burning, holes dug in the front of his face with fish hooks in them. The pain was a loud noise, he could not think, wonder, calculate, the only words were Stop This Now. Still unable to move because of something on his head, he banged his legs and hips against the floor. He shoved his hand into his pocket for his handkerchief, too small, tore off his necktie, rolled it up, put it gingerly to his face but it was not enough. He pulled his shirt out of his belt, tried to tear it, could not, remembered obscurely dish towels above a sink, and after a long resolve forced himself to move despite the threat of a headache like Zeus out of the sky. No headache could be as bad as this though, and thereby he discovered he could get up. He staggered, leaned against the wall, bumped into some huge object at his feet, found the sink, felt above it, the soft edge of one dish towel, then the other, grabbed them both, crumpled them, touched them lightly to the holes in his face, then pressed hard and soft to keep out the acid air.

The pain was deep and permanent but no longer a flame. He found the chair with his feet, lifted it up and sat in it, keeping the towels on his eyes to keep it out. Not knowing if he had eyes or sockets, not daring to feel and find out, nor if Ray had gouged him or merely smashed him hard in the eyes with his fist or if it wasn’t Ray at all but the gun going off too close to his face. Someday someone would examine him and tell him. Wet streams and crusted riverbeds on his cheeks.

He thought, Am I sure it’s both eyes? He took the towel away from first one side, then the other. The air was quicklime. The second edition of the news came screeching: I’m blind. Not dead, blind. His worst childhood fear. The rest of my life, blind man, grope. Green, yellow, trees, mountains, ocean, red blue and magenta shades, tints of violet.

Looking ahead, the question, Can I endure it? Thinking, could he learn braille? Would people read to him? A seeing eye dog. A white tipped cane.

On the chair, himself as tragic. Chosen for catastrophe. The bad things that can happen which won’t happen to you. The third edition of the news—I’m blind—was the melancholy fulfillment of a long downward process, his fate confirmed. He thought woefully, the life and career of Tony Hastings, mathematics, Louise Germane. Louise Germane and the blind man. Instead, unlucky fellow.

He heard a car on the curve, like some old myth of danger. What he needed was help. They should come looking for him. If they missed him when he didn’t return, it wouldn’t be much longer. He tried to remember what the ugly thing was that darkened the recent memories of his friends.

Then he realized that if Ray Marcus took his car, no one would think of looking here. He would have to rescue himself.

He would have to grope his way out of the trailer and up to the road. He would have to stand by the road with the bloody towels on his eyes and hope a driver would see his distress and stop. He would say, Help me to the state police office in Grant Center. There was a reason not to go to the state police in Grant Center. Bobby Andes, he was on the edge of remembering something. He felt around on the floor and found his necktie which he tied around his head to bind the towels to his eyes. Wondering, night or day? He listened and heard the cool distant whistle of a bird, two clear notes, and again the fortified distant roar of mankind being civilized, so it must be day.

Every move exhausted him as if he had been kicked in the belly. Force himself. Which way the door? He turned, and his foot caught against whatever it was on the floor, big. Like a bag of earth, he remembered feeling something like that against him when he was lying there. He felt down, touched heavy cloth containing something hard, an arm, a shoulder, a person.

“Ah,” Tony said. “You.”

This would be Ray, then, and he had not got away. From the shoulder, he felt for the head and recoiled, cold skin. He lifted the arm and let go, heard it fall, thump.

So I killed you, Tony Hastings whispered.

He had bought something with his blindness.

To make sure he was dead, Tony forced himself against revulsion to touch the head again, feel around the eyes, up to the bald front. The touch shocked him, and he allowed his hand to rest a moment on the brow, the hair of the eyebrows, the shape of the forehead, liberties he could never have taken before. The devil had a skull like Tony’s. The devil had guts and organs, charted in an endlessly replicated geography like his own, like all of us, making it easy for doctors, who would find the same things wherever they looked.

He wondered how he had killed him and if Ray had had time while dying to reflect and understand why. But from the talk they had had just before, he realized there was no way Ray would understand, no way he could grasp what he had done or see what Tony saw, neither the crime nor the punishment. The only understanding would be what Tony could imagine for him as he went, the figure of Tony’s imagination, suffering in Tony’s imagination. Eventually that could be plenty, a tremendous satisfaction, later when Tony was himself again, though at present he felt nothing, and the only Ray was a dead body.

He tried to resurrect his hatred so as to enjoy this death by imagining Ray dying slowly. Bleeding to death, not so much pain as weakness and helplessness and knowing he was dying. But his hatred and vengeance all seemed remote, dead feelings of no interest now. He remembered Ray’s boast about the pleasure of killing and his own imagined superiority, and he wondered if Ray had blinded him to make him pay for that superiority. Blinding him because he wanted Tony to be conscious of something too. Refinements of revenge.

He felt around for the gun. His hand discovered a cold place on the floor, sticky, crusty, Ray Marcus’s clotting blood. He started back, banged his head on the table. He tried to get up, put his hand on the table for support, found the gun there. Think about that, Tony. That means Ray Marcus found the gun before he died. Then watched himself bleed to death.

He didn’t want to stay in the room with the corpse. He put the gun in his pocket, forced himself up, and tried to find his way around the obstacle, prodding with his feet. The stickiness on the floor seemed to be everywhere. He stumbled against the bed where it shouldn’t be. He found the wall, the stove in the wrong place, he rearranged it, found the door. Cautiously he stepped out, but despite his care there was no ground. He dropped, landed hard against tree roots, for he had forgotten the trailer door had no step.

Head aching from his fall, pain returning, he waited a while to recover. His belly ached from where he must have been kicked. The air was moving sweetly, it was warm, he could feel the sun on him. He would try to find the car. He thought if he went downhill he would end in the ditch under the curve and could climb up to the shoulder. He would stand by the road and when he heard a car step out to wave. The ground scrambled beneath his feet, he slid and fell again. Held by branches, he grabbed them, staggered over roots and mossy rocks and tangled limbs. He kept going down, longer than he should. He was on bare rock and slipped again, lost his footing and landed in water. A cold stream ran around his ankles.

He was so tired he sat down in the water. His clothes soaking cold made his middle ache, he couldn’t stay there. After waiting a moment for breath, he decided to retrace his steps. He tried to climb up but the bare rock wouldn’t have him, he stumbled upstream and then managed by reaching out for saplings to grab and pull himself up by. He came to what seemed like a grassy spot. He could feel the sun which he couldn’t see. He had no idea where the trailer or the road were. His strength gone, he decided to rest until the sound of a car could give him a clue.

After a few minutes one went by. It was closer than he expected, off to his left and below in the direction from which he had come. He thought, I’ll sit in the sun and wait here. Close enough that when they come, if they don’t already see me, I can call out. Up here, you guys. He didn’t know whether it was shock from having been blinded or the kick in the belly, but he felt faint, like spots before his eyes if he had eyes.

He thought, Now we’re square. You took my wife and daughter and blinded me, and I killed you. That’s three to one, but he could accept it as the additional price he had to pay for his pretensions. His ego and vanity, the comfort he took in his name and title, which cost something, quite a lot, evidently. Right now they meant nothing, but at a later date doubtless they would again.

Similarly he anticipated the plans he would make later for a future restored by blindness, as if he had not had a future during the last dark year. There would be an interval of preparation and learning. He would be granted a leave by the university to learn how to change his living habits. New ways, how to study, how to prepare classes, how to teach. Where to live. What to do about clothes, food, hygiene, all the details, which he could see ahead like a mess of trees on a mountainside becoming distinct as he approached. He could see himself on the campus, on the streets of his neighborhood, with his black glasses, his cane, perhaps his dog, known to everyone as a story: Tony Hastings blinded by the man who killed his family. The black glasses, hiding the eyes not there, would spread the legend.

He was not afraid of the police. For them too, he thought, the blinding exonerated him. Not to claim self-defense as Bobby had said, how could he claim self-defense when he had the gun? He thought he would tell them what actually happened. It would give him a good feeling to tell it. I found Ray Marcus in the trailer, asleep. We had a conversation. What did you talk about? What if they asked what you were doing with that gun? What if they said you were trying to provoke Ray to attack?

Which reminded him of Bobby Andes. Was he still obligated to say Ray killed Lou Bates? The possibility sickened him, but he thought his blindness excused him from having to think about it, and he did not think about it.

The day dragged on, he felt the sun shining on his head, the temperature rising, the day getting hot. The early birds silent now, the woods still at midday. He thought, I can wait.

Sitting there under the blind dome, Tony Hastings felt the light through his skin. He reconstructed without eyes the place where he sat: a clearing with sunbaked yellow grass dropped down in front of him into small trees beyond which were the trailer and the curve of the road with his car parked on the shoulder. He grew big trees in the other directions with an oak near by and a rising slope of woods beyond. As clear as seeing, absolute knowledge, he did not know where it came from.

Bravado then. Give it a test. He picked up the gun. The oak tree was to his left, he would hit it with the gun. Target practice for a blind man, it made him laugh. He cocked the gun, pointed it. Fire. That horrible loud explosion knocking his hand back again. The silence of the violated woods returned after the echoes, the endless midday went on and on.

Then the roll of the earth brought the sunlamp directly on his blindfolded face. It must be afternoon. He was obsessed by the thought that his body was identical in all its formal features to that of Ray Marcus. But when he tried to stretch, his body resisted as if tied to the ground. And his unique wounds were already old and familiar, permanent endurable pains, and he had been a blind man most of his life. Never eaten a meal. Never had to pee. He discovered his pants were chilly wet as if he had peed without realizing it. Another effect of the shock, he told himself. The reason he did not go back down to the road was the steepness of the slope, which his imagination saw. He would wait until the police came and helped him down. They would come when Bobby Andes reported his failure to return. If no one else thought to look on this road, George Remington would see the car on the way to his house. There was no reason to be alarmed by the long drag of the day. It’s not forever.

Maybe he had been asleep. He heard voices, footsteps on gravel. Words, not loud, he couldn’t distinguish. Then, “What’s it doing here?”

“Are you sure that’s it?”

“Where’d he go?”

He heard a louder harsh male voice, intoning, numbers, a squawk—police radio. They had come at last. He raised his head, held still, listened.

The police radio squawked on and off, bursts. The live voices stopped.

Suddenly one: “Hey Mike, Jesus Christ.”

Feet scurrying, gravel loosened. “Holy cow!”

They had found Ray Marcus.

He could not hear what they were saying.

“Look, bloody tracks.”

“See where they go.”

“Stay here.”

He heard crashing in the brush below. Blind Tony Hastings as quarry, stretched on the ground not knowing if he was visible or not, took the gun by his side and cocked it as a precaution. The police are your friends, he said.

Someone shouted. “It goes on down, I can’t see where.”

The other. “Forget it. We’ll wait for the others.”

“Call it in, will you? Tell Andes.”

And Tony still not knowing what Andes had told them about who killed Lou Bates.

A voice said, “Probably bleeding to death in the woods.”

Tony Hastings was lying on his side, head propped on elbow trying to listen, not knowing if they could see him if they looked up. The police radio kept spattering. He couldn’t make out what it said but guessed the men were reporting their find. Then on the radio distinct: “Andes here.”

“Marcus, not Hastings?”

“Are you sure of that, god damn it?”

He thought, they will bring dogs to follow his bloody footsteps. Like a fugitive. They will train guns on me, and if I don’t obey swiftly, they will kill me. I killed Ray Marcus, who was unarmed.

Remember the headlights approaching in the woods and hiding in the shadow of a tree so as not to be seen, and the voice trying to find him calling, Mister. I don’t want them to see me when I can’t see them, he said.

You’ll have to come out sometime, they said. I’ll wait for Bobby Andes, he said.

He heard them walking around below, not their voices. Then nothing. Almost silence, a long time. He knew they were there because the radio was going, though the volume had been turned down, he could hardly hear it. Either in the car or in the trailer with the body, if he were they he would prefer to wait outside. Maybe they were outside, sitting on the shoulder smoking cigarettes. He heard bird songs again, the two clear notes, chickadee, pewee. He felt the retreat of the afternoon sun, some cooling breeze. A woodpecker telephoning a tree. The distant ceaseless sound of traffic, the Interstate somewhere bearing families and commerce and thugs through this countryside from all the other countrysides.

The leash tethering his belly to the trees was getting uncomfortably tight. It was silly hiding here like a fugitive. Tony Hastings knew that. He didn’t intend to be a fugitive. If he had any guilt, he had reconciled himself to it. He had not forgotten his plans and his conversation with himself a few hours ago. It’s time, he said. Wake up, you can’t stay here forever.

Still, he waited. Preferring to let the others arrive, if Bobby Andes were among them. If Bobby Andes could find him first and give him the latest news on the death of Lou Bates before someone else should ask. It was not long now. The cars drove up, he heard their feet, their radios, voices, exclamations. He heard Bobby Andes, “Where the fuck did he go?”

Here is what happened. He wanted to get up and call, Hey Lieutenant, Bobby Andes, look up here. As he turned he rolled over the gun which he had cocked earlier. He groped for it with his hands, found it, and put it in his left hand so he could push down and raise himself with his right. He had just got one foot under his body and started to push up when the gun went off. The whip slammed into his gut, the sound he hated came later. Damn! he said, why did I do that? For a moment he thought he had shot himself.

What a recoil, he’d forgotten how hard it could kick, it knocked him flat. If it was a bullet through his gut, he’d be dead. He was on his back, face up to what should have been sky. The blow of it tightened the rope around his middle, worse than before. He tried to work it loose. He tried to move, but the rope was tightening, holding him down. If it was a bullet, it had missed his vital parts, it wasn’t as if he was dying, but it was pulling through him, it was dragging him on the ground. My God, he said. If that’s what it was. He thought, Why did I do a stupid thing like that? If I’m bleeding to death. The rope was tied through his middle, holding the broncos in the corral so they wouldn’t spill out, but they were bucking pretty hard. Field mice were slipping out under the lower bars.

If this was really the big news, he wondered why it didn’t seem more important. He thought, Would a bullet feel like a rope? It would feel like what it feels like. He groaned, recognizing. So, he said, here comes another life for Tony Hastings. This would be a lifetime of dying. It would stretch from past to future dominated by one fact, a bullet through his belly. Though you get used to everything, he had no interest in anything else.

A long time afterward he was aware he had long ago heard a voice saying, “Jesus, what was that?” You would expect the police to round up the cattle set loose by the rustlers pretty soon, wouldn’t you? Yet they did not come. It was a long time before they did not come.

If they did not come: a remnant of brain suggested he should be thinking about dying, he should be giving it his full attention. Tony Hastings dying, think of that. He ought to be more surprised. Vaguely he remembered things he had wanted to think about when he died, but he couldn’t remember what they were. At least he ought to figure out why he had died. The kind of question others would ask, how it could have been avoided, what he should have done differently. Must be he got his left and right hands mixed up. If he had meant to lift himself by the right hand against the ground, but had pushed down instead with the left, which was holding the gun in his gut. Pressure of finger against the trigger, in the confusion of groping for the hard ground through his soft belly. A neurological mistake, caused by the shock of being blind, though he should have been used to that, having been blind so long already.

It occurred to him if the police got up here in time they might save him. If having heard the shot they scrambled up through the brush, they could call an ambulance on their radio. It didn’t seem likely. He heard no signs of them.

It occurred to him they would find his body and think he had committed suicide. It seemed like a logical conclusion, they would not be surprised. He wondered what motives they would attribute to him. Probably (they would say) he did it because he could not tolerate being blinded on top of all he had lost. (They would not know he had reconciled himself to that.) Or perhaps he was so obsessed with the crime committed against him and the need for revenge that when Ray died he had no further need to live. (They did not know about Louise Germane waiting for him—if she would take him blind.) Or else (underestimating his cynicism and his cowardice, those all-important qualities) it was his idealism: his inability to endure the self-knowledge forced on him by Bobby Andes and Ray, whereby he too was revealed with no moral advantage over his enemies except what he retained from the fact that they started it. More likely (not knowing how cheerfully he had reconciled himself to waiting) they would simply attribute it to impatience with pain and dying: having realized not only that he was blind but that he had been shot by Ray and was bleeding to death, he couldn’t take it any longer. It was too much for him and he cracked. It was unlikely the cops would call his death an accident.

He really didn’t want to die, and he wished they would hurry up. Meanwhile the rope through his middle explored him, it mapped his territory. The organs in his middle included, though he did not know exactly which was which or where each one was, the liver, kidney, spleen, appendix, pancreas, gall bladder, and miles of intestines, large and small. He tried to think what else there was and regretted he had not been on more familiar terms with them while he lived.

The only definite thing he knew was this: he was free to continue his trip to Maine. After all this time, more than a year. The police told him this when they arrived at last, standing by the door congratulating him as he got into the driver’s seat and strapped himself in. The seat belt was tight around his middle. They shook his hand. Wished him well. Told him the route, estimates of how long it would take.

And so he had gone, and now he was driving fast with a little of the cowboy and the baseball player still in him, almost singing for the joy of it, and in no time at all he was there. He saw the summer house at the end of the road, down the slope. It was a big old-fashioned two-story house with gable windows and a porch. All the windows and the porch were screened, it was covered with screens. He drove down the drive and onto the grass, and saw them in the water waiting for him. He walked down the grass to the water’s edge.

“Come on in,” Laura said, “we’ve been waiting for you.”

“What took you so long?” Helen said.

He asked, “Is it cold?”

“Pretty cold,” Laura said, “but you can bear it.”

“It’s better after you’ve been in a while,” Helen said.

They were standing up to their necks so he could see only their heads. The water was flickering blue and white like sweet milk in the afternoon light, and the fuzzy pine islands out in the bay shimmered with summer joy.

He stepped into the water, icy around his feet. Laura and Helen laughed. “You’ve been away too long,” Laura said. “You’re all out of shape.”

He looked back up the slope to the house standing on the grass, high and spacious and beautiful. The screen door on the screened porch was propped open, and two of the screened windows on the second floor were open, he did not know why. He thought how good it would be to return to the house after his swim, to walk up the grass and go inside and sit in the big empty pine-smelling rooms and enjoy the warming up after the chill. Then they could talk, all he remembered that he wanted to tell them. He wanted to tell her about her arms swinging as she walked up to the house. He wanted to ask if they had ever quarreled. He couldn’t remember and he hoped not. He wondered if he was ever jealous, he thought probably not, and if she was jealous of him, he hoped not, for he did not think he had ever given her cause. He wanted to tell her he remembered the blueberry field and something after that, he had forgotten.

But not yet, first there was this. Only their heads were above the surface, laughing and encouraging him, as he moved gingerly in the bitter cold water step by step toward them. It was hard to move, while they waited with such generosity and welcome he could hardly bear his happiness. With all his strength he pushed on, while the ice kept rising. It rose from his ankles to his knees, from his knees to his groin and groin to hips. It seized him freezing around his belly. It crept up to his chest, it covered his heart, it clutched his neck. Then still rising still freezing it reached his mouth and filled his nose and closed his burning eyes.