The Times Are Never So Bad Read online

  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 wan
ted 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.

  So I wanted to want a girl, but I didn’t, not even when these two pretty ones came in almost every night I worked and sat at the bar and talked to me when I had the time, and gave me signs with their eyes and the way they joked with me and laughed at each other. I could have had either one, and I don’t know how the other one would have taken it. Sometimes I thought about taking both of them back to my place, which is maybe what they had in mind anyway, but that wouldn’t be the same as having a girl I wanted to want, and I couldn’t get interested enough to go through the trouble. Once, before Polly, I went to a wedding where everyone got drunk on champagne. I noticed then something I hadn’t noticed before: girls get horny at weddings. I ended up with two friends of the bride; I had known them before, but not much. They were dressed up and looking very good, and when the party broke up we went to a bar, a crowded bar with a lot of light, one of those places where the management figures it draws a crowd with all kinds in it, so one way to keep down fights and especially guys pulling knives is have the place lit up like a library. I sat between them at the bar and rubbed their thighs, and after we drank some more I had a hand up each of them; it was late spring and their legs were moist, squeezing my hands; then they opened a little, enough; I don’t remember if they did this at the same time or one was first. Then I got my hands in their pants. The bar was crowded and people were standing behind us, drinking in groups and pairs, buying drinks over the girls’ shoulders, and I was stroking clitoris. When I told Alex this he said, How did you drink and smoke? I said I don’t know. But I do know that I kept talking and pretending to each girl that I was only touching her. I got the drinking done too. Maybe they came at the bar, but pretty soon I couldn’t take it anymore, and I got them out of there. But in the car I suddenly knew how drunk and tired I was; I was afraid I couldn’t make it with both of them, so I took the plump one to her apartment and we told her good night like a couple of innocent people going home drunk from a wedding. Then I brought the other one to my place, and we had a good night, but every time I thought of the bar I was sorry I took the plump one home. Probably the girl with me was sorry too, because in the morning I took a shower and when I got out, the bed was made and she was gone. She left a nice note, but it was strange anyway, and made the whole night feel like a bad mistake, and I thought since it didn’t really matter who I got in bed with, it should have been the one that was plump. She was good-looking and I’m sure was not lonesome or hard up for a man, but still for the rest of the day and that night I felt sorry when I remembered her leaving the car and walking up the walk to her apartment building, because you know how women are, and she was bound to feel then that her friend was slender and she wasn’t and that was the only reason she was going home alone drunk, with juicy underpants. She was right, and that’s why I felt so bad. Next day I decided to stop thinking about her. I do that a lot: you do some things you wish you hadn’t, and thinking about them afterward doesn’t do any good for anybody, and finally you just feel like your heart has the flu. None of this is why I didn’t take the two girls this summer back to my place.

  What is hard to explain is why, when I knew Polly wasn’t going to press charges, I stayed here instead of giving my boss some almost true story. I thought of some he would believe, or at least accept because he likes me and I do good work, something just a few feet short of saying Hey, lookit, I was running from a rape charge. But I didn’t go back, except one night to my apartment for my fishing gear and guns and clothes and groceries. Nothing else in there belonged to me.

  When I came up here that night I did it, I went to my place first and loaded the jeep with my weights and bench and power stands. So when I knew nobody was after me, all I did was work out, lifting on three days and running and swimming in the lake on the others. That was first thing in the morning, which was noon for everybody else. Every day was sunny, and in the afternoons I sat on a deck chair on the wharf, with a cooler of beer. Near sundown I rowed out in the boat and fished for bass and pickerel. If I caught one big enough for dinner, I stopped fishing and let the boat drift till dark, then rowed back and ate my fish. So all day and most of the night I was thinking, and most of that was about why I wasn’t going back. All I finally knew was something had changed. I had liked my life till that night in June, except for what Polly was doing to it, but you’ve got to be able to separate those things, and I still believe I did, or at least tried to hard enough so that sometimes I did, often enough to know my life wasn’t a bad one and I was luckier than most. Then I went to her house that night and I felt her throat under the Kabar, then her belly under it. I don’t just mean I could feel the blade touching her, the way you can cut cheese with your eyes closed; it wasn’t like that, the blade moving through air, then stopping because something—her throat, her belly—was in the way. No: I felt her skin touching the steel, like the blade was a finger of mine.

  They would call it rape and assault with a deadly weapon, but those words don’t apply to me and Polly. I was taking back my wife for a while; and taking back, for a while anyway, some of what she took from me. That is what it felt like: I went to her place torn and came out mended. Then she was torn, so I was back in her life for a while. All night I was happy and I kept getting hard, driving north and up here at Alex’s, just remembering. All I could come up with in the days and nights after that, thinking about why I didn’t go back to my apartment and working the bar, was that time in my life seemed flat and stale now, like an old glass of beer.

  But I have to leave again, go back there for a while. Everything this summer is breaking down to for a while, which it seems is as long as I can keep peaceful. Now after my workout I get in the hot shower feeling strong and fresh, and rub the bar of soap over my biceps and pecs, they’re hard and still pumped up; then I start to lose what the workout was really for, because nobody works out for just the body, I don’t care what they may say, and it could be that those who don’t lift or run or swim or something don’t need to because they’ve got most of the time what the rest of us go for on the bench or road or in the pool, though I’m not talking about the ones who just drink and do drugs. Then again, I’ve known a lot of women who didn’t need booze or drugs or a workout, while I’ve never known a man who didn’t need one or the other, if not both. It would be interesting to meet one someday. So I flex into the spray, make the muscles feel closer to the hot water, but I’ve lost it: that feeling you get after a workout, that yesterday is gone and last night too, that today is right here in the shower, inside your body; there is nothing out there past the curtain that can bring you down, and you can take all the time you want to turn the water hotter and circle and flex and stretch under it, because the time is yours like the water is; when you’re pumped like that you can’t even think about death, at least not your own; or about any of the other petty crap you have to deal with just to have a good day; you end up with two or three minutes of cold water, and by the time you’re drying off, the pump is easing down into a relaxed state that almost feels like muscle fatigue but it isn’t: it’s what you lifted all that iron for, and it’ll take you like a stream does a trout, cool and easy the rest of the day.

  I’ve lost that now: in the shower I see Polly walking around town smiling at people, talking to them on this warm dry August day. I don’t let myself think anymore about her under or on top of or whatever and however with Vinnie DeLuca. I went through that place already, and I’m not going back there again. I can forget the past. Mom still grieves for Kingsley, but I don’t. Instead of remembering him the way he was all those years, I think of him now, like he’s forever twenty years old out there in the pines around the lake, out there on the water, and in it; Alex and I took all his stuff out of here and gave it to his wife and Mom. What I can’t forget is right now.
I can’t forget that Polly’s walking around happy, breathing today into her body. And not thinking about me. Or, if she does, she’s still happy, she’s still got her day, and she’s draining mine like the water running out of the tub. So lately after my workout I stand in the shower and change the pictures; then I take a sandwich and the beer cooler out to the wharf and look at the pictures some more; I do this into the night, and I’ve stopped fishing or whatever I was doing in the boat. Instead of looking at pictures of Polly happy, I’ve been looking at Polly scared shitless, Polly fucked up, Polly paying. It’s rime to do some more terrorizing.

  So today when the sun is going down I phone Alex. The lake is in a good-sized woods, and the trees are old and tall; the sun is behind them long before the sky loses its light and color, and turns the lake black. The house faces west and, from that shore, shadows are coming out onto the water. But the rest of it is blue, and so is the sky above the trees. I drink a beer at the phone and look out the screen window at the lake.

  ‘Is she still living with Steve?’ I say to Alex. A month ago he came out here for a few beers and told me he heard she’d moved out of her folks’ house, into Steve Buckland’s place.

  ‘Far as I know,’ Alex says.

  ‘So when’s he heading north?’

  Steve is the biggest man I know, and he has never worked out; he’s also the strongest man I know, and it’s lucky for a lot of people he is also the most laid back and cheerful man I know, even when he’s managed to put away enough booze to get drunk, which is a lot for a man his size. I’ve never seen him in a fight, and if he ever was in one, I know I would’ve heard about it, because guys would talk about that for a long time; but I’ve seen him break up a few when he’s tending bar down to Timmy’s, and I’ve seen him come out from the bar at closing time when a lot of the guys are cocked and don’t want to leave, and he herds them right out the door like sheep. He has a huge belly that doesn’t fool anybody into throwing a punch at him, and he moves fast. Also, we’re not good friends, I only know him from the bar, but I like him, he’s a good man, and I do not want to fuck over his life with my problem; besides, the word is that Polly is just staying with him till he goes north, but they’re not fucking, then she’ll sublet his place (he lives on a lake too; Alex is right about New England) while he stays in a cabin he and some guys have in New Hampshire, and after hunting season he’ll ski, and he won’t come back till late spring. Alex says he’s leaving after Labor Day weekend. I have nothing against Steve, but Vinnie DeLuca is another matter. So I ask Alex about that gentleman’s schedule.