The Stories of Richard Bausch Read online

  * * *

  THE STORIES

  OF

  RICHARD BAUSCH

  * * *

  Richard Bausch

  These are all for Karen

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD

  VALOR

  RICHES

  SELF KNOWLEDGE

  GLASS MEADOW

  PAR

  SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

  FATALITY

  THE VOICES FROM THE OTHER ROOM

  TWO ALTERCATIONS

  1951

  THE MAN WHO KNEW BELLE STARR

  WHAT FEELS LIKE THE WORLD

  ANCIENT HISTORY

  CONTRITION

  POLICE DREAMS

  WISE MEN AT THEIR END

  WEDLOCK

  OLD WEST

  DESIGN

  THE FIREMAN’S WIFE

  CONSOLATION

  THE BRACE

  THE EYES OF LOVE

  LUCK

  EQUITY

  LETTER TO THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

  AREN’T YOU HAPPY FOR ME?

  NOT QUITE FINAL

  WEATHER

  HIGH-HEELED SHOE

  TANDOLFO THE GREAT

  EVENING

  BILLBOARD

  THE PERSON I HAVE MOSTLY BECOME

  1-900

  “MY MISTRESS’ EYES ARE NOTHING LIKE THE SUN”

  THE WEIGHT

  ACCURACY

  UNJUST

  GUATEMALA

  THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY RICHARD BAUSCH

  Copyright

  About The Publisher

  PREFACE

  I started out, like almost every other writer I know, composing stories, as if to do so were a sort of apprenticeship for the novel. One learns later in life that the two forms have their own demands, and that the difficulties peculiar to each will age a writer as much as anything else will age him. Perhaps the greatest demand that can be put on the human imagination is that of time. One embarks on the composition of a novel with the knowledge that, added to all the other considerations of constructing an involving, believable imaginative expression about things that matter, one will be faced with the problem of getting it down over a span of months or years, of staying with it and working it over until it is right, and complete—all emotions earned, all strands of interest played out, everything resonating as it should, everything as lucid as it can be made without doing violence to the demands of the story.

  Writing a short story involves struggling with a different kind of time—not so much the time you will spend struggling with it (though in fact that can also take months or years, and there are several stories in this book that took that long, for one reason or another), but the time you will portray in it, and how much of it you will be able successfully to suggest, again without doing damage to the story. How deeply back you may go, or how deeply in, while remaining true to the confines of the form, its shapeliness and completeness: the world in miniature. But it is, finally, always about the story, long or short.

  I don’t remember which of these stories came first. It’s probably “Contrition.” Since several stories are always lying around on my desk in various stages of completion, and they end up being finished as they come to hand, sometimes months or weeks or even years after any previous work on them, I have very sketchy memory as to when and where many of them were begun, or worked on, or finished. Probably it doesn’t matter. I’m always working on one or another, or several. I have noticed in the college anthologies, and in the various year-end anthologies an increasing interest about the circumstances surrounding the writing of any given story, and I have found myself growing irritable at the blow-by-blow descriptions of how this or that story got written, and what the writer was after. I don’t think it should matter so much. The story is what matters.

  In the present volume I have arranged the stories according to how I think the whole collection would read if it were not a compendium of several collections, with newer ones included, but a book of stories—its own. I place no importance on one story over another. I am fond of all of them. The ones I’m not so fond of, I never let out of the house. Each of them calls up its own cache of memories, of what sorts of bustle and confusion obtained in our happy home when they were being written. Some were written in bed. Several were written while sitting at the kitchen table on pretty spring mornings, or in the fall, with the leaves turning and dropping outside the window, or in the middle of winter storms. Others were written late at night, all night, and I would look up and see that the sun had risen, and maybe there had been a rainstorm in the pre-dawn that I hadn’t quite noticed, the leaves dripping and everything looking washed new, and I had that pins and needles feeling of having been awake all night.

  I have always believed that writing stories is not so much a matter of obsession as it is of devotion—being there for work in the days, as the good men and women who came before you were; attempting to be as determined and stubborn and willing to risk failure as they were. You work in the perfect understanding that you will probably never write as well as they, but that by being faithful to their example, you can be worthy of their company. The rest is silence.

  —RB

  Broad Run, Va.

  March, 2003

  NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD

  I was pummeled as a teenager. For some reason I had the sort of face that asked to be punched. It seemed to me in those days that everybody wanted to take a turn. Something about the curve of my mouth, I guess. It made me look like I was being cute with people, smirking at them. I am what is called a late life child. My brother, Doke, is twenty years older and played semipro football. But by the time I came along, Doke was through as a ballplayer and my father had given up on ever seeing a son play pro. I was a month premature, and very, very tiny as a child. Dad named me Ignatius, after an uncle of his that I never knew. Of course I didn’t take to sports, though I could run pretty fast (that comes with having a face people want to hit). I liked to read; I was the family bookworm. I’m four feet nine inches tall.

  Doke married young, divorced young, and had a son, Doke Jr., that the wife took with her to Montana. But Doke missed the boy and went out there to be near him, and when I graduated from high school, he invited me for a visit. That’s how I ended up in Montana in 1971. I’d gone to spend the summer with Doke, in a hunter’s cabin up in the mountains. It was a little cottage, with a big stone hearth and knotty-pine paneling and color photos of the surrounding country. On the shelf above the hearth were some basketball trophies belonging to the guy who owned the place, a former college all-star now working as an ophthalmologist down in Dutton.

  Doke taught me how to fly-fish. A fly rod had a lot of importance to Doke, as if being good with the thing was a key to the meaning of life or something. He had an image of himself, standing in sunlight, fly rod in hand. He was mystical about the enterprise, though he didn’t really have much ability.

  While I was staying with Doke, I met Hildie, my eventual ex-wife. She was a nurse in the hospital where Doke took me the night I met his new girlfriend, Samantha. I met Samantha about two hours before I met Hildie.

  Samantha had come home to Montana from San Francisco, where she’d been with her crazy mother. Before I met her—many days before—Doke had talked about her, about how beautiful and sexy she was. According to Doke, I just wasn’t going to believe my eyes. He’d met her in a bar he used to frequent after working construction all day in Dutton. She was only twenty-five. He told me all about her, day after day. We were drinking pretty heavy in the evenings, and he’d tell me about what she had gone through i
n her life.

  “She’s so beautiful to have to go through that stuff,” he said, “suicide and insanity and abuse. A lot of abuse. She’s part Indian. She’s had hard times. Her father was a full-blooded Cherokee. She’s a genius. He killed himself. Then her mother went crazy, and they put her in this institution for the insane over in San Francisco. Her mother doesn’t know her own name anymore. Or Samantha’s. Pathetic, really. Think about it. And she looks like a goddess. I can’t even find the words for it. Beautiful. Nobody in the world. Not even Hollywood.”

  At the time, I was worried about getting drafted into the army and was under a lot of stress. They were drafting everybody back then, and I was worried. I didn’t want to hear about Doke’s beautiful girlfriend. “Man,” he said, “I wish I had her picture—a snapshot of her—so I could show you. But the Indian blood means she has this thing about having her picture taken. Like it steals part of her soul. They all believe that.”

  He was talking about her the night she arrived, the traveling she’d done when she was a back-dancer for the Rolling Stones (“She knows Mick Jagger, man”) and the heavy things she’d seen—abused children and illicit drugs and alcohol—and also the positions she liked during sex, and the various ways they had of doing it together.

  “She’s an Indian,” he said. “They have all kinds of weird ways.”

  “Could we go out on the porch or something?” I said.

  He hadn’t heard me. “She wears a headband. It expresses her people. When she was six her mother went crazy the first time. A white woman, the mother, right? This poor girl from Connecticut with no idea what she was getting into, marrying this guy, coming out here to live, almost like a pioneer. Only the guy turned out to be a wild man. They lived on the reservation, and nobody else wanted anything to do with them because of how he was. A true primitive, but a noble one, too. You should hear Samantha talk about him. He used to take her everywhere, and he had this crazy thing about rock concerts. Like they were from the old days of the tribe, see. He’d go and dance and get really drunk. Samantha went with him until she was in her teens. She actually has a daughter from when they traveled with the Rolling Stones. The daughter’s staying with her mother’s sister back East. It’s a hell of a story.”

  “She’s only twenty-five?”

  He nodded. “Had the daughter when she was seventeen.”

  “The Rolling Stones,” I said. “Something.”

  “Don’t give me that look,” he said.

  I smiled as big as I could. “No,” I said. “Really, I wasn’t. I’d just like to go outside. It’s kind of stuffy in here, isn’t it?”

  “Could be Mick Jagger’s kid,” my brother said, significantly. “Samantha knew him.”

  “Well,” I said. “Hey. She’ll be here soon. We better clean up a little.”

  He poured himself another drink. “What have we done in our lives?” he said, staring at the table and looking sad. “I’ve worked a few jobs. Bought a car here and there. Got married and got divorced. And you—you graduated from high school. Went to the prom, right? I mean, we haven’t really experienced anything. Imagine having your father kill himself.”

  “How’d he do it?” I asked.

  “I told you,” he said. “He shot himself. Jesus, are you listening to me?”

  A little while later, Samantha pulled in, and we went out to greet her. She’d been driving for two days, she told us. It was almost full dark, but from what I could see she looked like death itself. We all went inside, and Doke poured more whiskey. He kept watching me, waiting for some sign, I suppose. I couldn’t give him one. He’d built up so many of my expectations that I’d begun to think beyond what was really possible for a big, not too nice-looking former high school football star with a potbelly and a double chin. Samantha wasn’t pretty. Not by a very, very, very long stretch. And it wasn’t just the fact that she’d been sitting behind the wheel of a ratty carbon-monoxide-spewing car for two days. She could’ve just walked out of a beauty parlor after an all-afternoon session and it wouldn’t have made any difference. She did have nice dark skin, but her eyes were set deep in her skull, and they were crossed a little. They were also extremely small—the smallest eyes I ever saw, like a rodent’s eyes, black and with a scary glitter in them. They fixed on you as if you were something to eat and swallow. She was tall and had long legs, and she had hips wider than Doke’s. Her hair was shiny, crow-black, and stiff. She’d let it grow wild, so it appeared that it hadn’t seen a brush in her lifetime. She was not physically beautiful by any standard you care to name.

  Doke stood by, staring, all moony-eyed and weepy with the booze and love, and I guess I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my face. I had thought I was going to meet this beautiful woman; instead I’d met Samantha.

  “I have to go freshen up,” she said after we’d been through the introductions. She went into the bathroom and closed the door with a delicate little click of the latch. Then we heard what sounded like water being poured out of a big vat into other water.

  Doke turned to me. “Well?” he said. “Right?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. I thought he meant the sound.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  I said, “Right.”

  “You ever see anything …,” he said. He was standing by the table, tottering a little, holding onto the back of the chair. “You know?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He pulled the chair out and sat down, and ran his hands through his hair. “Just,” he said. “Really.”

  I nodded.

  “Right?” he said.

  I said, “Uh-huh.”

  He picked up the bottle and drank. Then shook his head. “Something.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  After another drink, and a few seconds of staring off, he said, “What’s the matter with you?” He still wasn’t looking at me.

  I said, “Nothing. Why?”

  He poured more whiskey. Then sat there and seemed to study it. “You got something to say?”

  “Can’t think of anything,” I said.

  He looked at me, and I sat down, too. “Well?” he said. “I don’t like that look.”

  “She’s been on the road,” I said. “She’s tired.”

  “Not her. You. I don’t like your look.”

  I ran my hands over my face. I thought he might think I was smirking at him. “Oh,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

  I reached for the whiskey. “I think I’ll have some more of that,” I told him. “That all right with you?”

  He didn’t answer. He was thinking.

  Samantha came out of the bathroom. I didn’t know what she’d done to freshen up. Nothing had changed at all. She sat down and leaned back in the chair and clasped her hands behind her head. “So this is your brother.”

  “That’s him,” Doke said.

  “You’re so little compared to Doke. It’s strange.” She went over and got herself a glass, brought it back to the table, where Doke poured her some of the whiskey.

  “I told Ignatius about your dad and mom,” Doke said to her.

  She drank, then shook her head. “Terrible.” She looked a lot older than twenty-five. She had little gold rings piercing her ears; the rings went all the way up the side of each ear. This was the first time I ever saw that phenomenon. “I got a baby that’s severely retarded. The oxygen wasn’t right.”

  Doke seemed surprised. “You never said she was retarded.”

  “That’s what I said.” She nodded, sadly. She was watching me. “My father took me to Altamont. I was there. I know Mick Jagger.”

  “It might be his kid,” Doke said, all excited. “Right?”

  She seemed to think this over. “No. I doubt it.”

  “But it could be, though. Right?”

  She frowned. “No.”

  “Didn’t you—” Doke said, then stopped. He was confused.

  “We saw them. We were close, you know
. But not that close.”

  Nobody said anything. I was watching Doke because I couldn’t look at Samantha—the difference between his description of her and the reality was too much. He said, “Well, I thought you said the kid was Jagger’s kid.”

  “I suppose it could be. I had so many lovers back then.”

  “You mean you might not’ve noticed it was Mick Jagger?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Why’d he look at me like that?” she said.

  Doke took a drink. He was thinking.

  I said something to smooth things over. “I have the kind of face that makes people think I’m being smart with them.”

  “He’s always got that look,” Doke said.

  “Where is your kid?” I asked her.

  She said, “With my mother’s family, back East. My father was killed by the government for protesting against them.”

  “I thought your father killed himself,” Doke said.

  “He did.”

  We waited for her to clear up the mystery.

  “The government drove him to it.”

  “Hell,” I said.

  She nodded importantly. “The government is not legitimate, you know. As long as there are whites living on Indian lands.”

  “Which Indian lands?” I said.

  The whole country.”

  “Oh, you mean—like the Constitution and all that. That’s not valid.”

  Right,” she said.

  “Not much chance of that going away,” I said, meaning to sympathize with her.

  “My father was a full-blooded Cherokee,” she said. “Doke told you, I’m sure.”

  “I told him,” Doke said. “I told him about that and I told him about the Rolling Stones.”

  “It wasn’t just the Rolling Stones. I traveled a lot. I had three hundred lovers before I was twenty-two.”

  Doke shook his head.

  “Looking for love,” I said.

  She said, “At least three hundred of them.”

  “Lovers,” I said.