Beginners Read online

  I turn at the first light, then turn again and drive until I come to the highway and read the sign: SUMMIT 117 miles. It is ten thirty and warm.

  The highway skirts the edge of town, then passes through farm country, through fields of oats and sugar beets and apple orchards, with here and there a small herd of cattle grazing in open pastures. Then everything changes, the farms become fewer and fewer, more like shacks now than houses, and stands of timber replace the orchards. All at once I’m in the mountains and on the right, far below, I catch glimpses of the Naches River.

  In a little while a green pickup truck comes up behind me and stays behind for miles. I keep slowing at the wrong times, hoping he will pass, and then increasing my speed, again at the wrong times. I grip the wheel until my fingers hurt. Then on a long clear stretch he does pass, but he drives along beside for a minute, a crew-cut man in a blue workshirt in his early thirties, and we look at each other. Then he waves, toots the horn twice, and pulls ahead of me.

  I slow down and find a place, a dirt road off of the shoulder, pull over and shut off the ignition. I can hear the river somewhere down below the trees. Ahead of me the dirt road goes into the trees. Then I hear the pickup returning.

  I start the engine just as the truck pulls up behind me. I lock the doors and roll up the windows. Perspiration breaks on my face and arms as I put the car in gear, but there is no place to drive.

  “You all right?” the man says as he comes up to the car. “Hello. Hello in there.” He raps the glass. “Are you okay?” He leans his arms on the door then and brings his face close to the window.

  I stare at him and can’t find any words.

  “After I passed I slowed up some,” he says, “but when I didn’t see you in the mirror I pulled off and waited a couple of minutes. When you still didn’t show I thought I’d better drive back and check. Is everything all right? How come you’re locked up in there?”

  I shake my head.

  “Come on, roll down your window. Hey, are you sure you’re okay? Huh? You know it’s not good for a woman to be batting around the country by herself.” He shakes his head and looks at the highway and then back at me. “Now come on, roll down the window, how about it? We can’t talk this way.”

  “Please, I have to go.”

  “Open the door, all right?” he says, as if he isn’t listening. “At least roll down the window. You’re going to smother in there.” He looks at my breasts and legs. The skirt has pulled up over my knees. His eyes linger on my legs, but I sit still, afraid to move.

  “I want to smother,” I say. “I am smothering, can’t you see?”

  “What in the hell?” he says and moves back from the door. He turns and walks back to his truck. Then, in the side mirror, I watch him returning, and close my eyes.

  “You don’t want me to follow you toward Summit, or anything? I don’t mind. I got some extra time this morning.”

  I shake my head again.

  He hesitates and then shrugs. “Have it your way, then,” he says.

  I wait until he has reached the highway, and then I back out. He shifts gears and pulls away slowly, looking back at me in his rearview mirror. I stop the car on the shoulder and put my head on the wheel.

  The casket is closed and covered with floral sprays. The organ begins soon after I take a seat near the back of the chapel. People begin to file in and find chairs, some middle-aged and older people, but most of them in their early twenties or even younger. They are people who look uncomfortable in their suits and ties, sports coats and slacks, their dark dresses and leather gloves. One boy in flared pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt takes the chair next to mine and begins to bite his lips. A door opens at one side of the chapel and I look up and for a minute the parking lot reminds me of a meadow, but then the sun flashes on car windows. The family enters in a group and moves into a curtained area off to the side. Chairs creak as they settle themselves. In a few minutes a thick, blond man in a dark suit stands and asks us to bow our heads. He speaks a brief prayer for us, the living, and when he finishes he asks us to pray in silence for the soul of Susan Miller, departed. I close my eyes and remember her picture in the newspaper and on television. I see her leaving the theater and getting into the green Chevrolet. Then I imagine her journey down the river, the nude body hitting rocks, caught at by branches, the body floating and turning, her hair streaming in the water. Then the hands and hair catching in the overhanging branches, holding, until four men come along to stare at her. I can see a man who is drunk (Stuart?) take her by the wrist. Does anyone here know about that? What if these people knew that? I look around at the other faces. There is a connection to be made of these things, these events, these faces, if I can find it. My head aches with the effort to find it.

  He talks about Susan Miller’s gifts: cheerfulness and beauty, grace and enthusiasm. From behind the closed curtain someone clears his throat, someone else sobs. The organ music begins. The service is over.

  Along with the others I file slowly past the casket. Then I move out onto the front steps and into the bright, hot afternoon light. A middle-aged woman who limps as she goes down the stairs ahead of me reaches the sidewalk and looks around, her eyes falling on me. “Well, they got him,” she says. “If that’s any consolation. They arrested him this morning. I heard it on the radio before I came. A guy right here in town. A longhair, you might have guessed.” We move a few steps down the hot sidewalk. People are starting cars. I put out my hand and hold on to a parking meter. Sunlight glances off polished hoods and fenders. My head swims. “He’s admitted having relations with her that night, but he says he didn’t kill her.” She snorts. “You know as well as I do. But they’ll probably put him on probation and then turn him loose.”

  “He might not have acted alone,” I say. “They’ll have to be sure. He might be covering up for someone, a brother, or some friends.”

  “I have known that child since she was a little girl,” the woman goes on, and her lips tremble. “She used to come over and I’d bake cookies for her and let her eat them in front of the TV.” She looks off and begins shaking her head as the tears roll down her cheeks.

  3.

  Stuart sits at the table with a drink in front of him. His eyes are red and for a minute I think he has been crying. He looks at me and doesn’t say anything. For a wild instant I feel something has happened to Dean, and my heart turns.

  Where is he? I say. Where is Dean?

  Outside, he says.

  Stuart, I’m so afraid, so afraid, I say, leaning against the door.

  What are you afraid of, Claire? Tell me, honey, and maybe I can help. I’d like to help, just try me. That’s what husbands are for.

  I can’t explain, I say. I’m just afraid. I feel like, I feel like, I feel like…

  He drains his glass and stands up, not taking his eyes from me. I think I know what you need, honey. Let me play doctor, okay? Just take it easy now. He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand begins to unbutton my jacket, then my blouse. First things first, he says, trying to joke.

  Not now, please, I say.

  Not now, please, he says, teasing. Please nothing. Then he steps behind me and locks an arm around my waist. One of his hands slips under my brassiere.

  Stop, stop, stop, I say. I stamp on his toes.

  And then I am lifted up and then falling. I sit on the floor looking up at him and my neck hurts and my skirt is over my knees. He leans down and says, You go to hell, then, do you hear, bitch? I hope your cunt drops off before I touch it again. He sobs once and I realize he can’t help it, he can’t help himself either. I feel a rush of pity for him as he heads for the living room.

  He didn’t sleep at home last night.

  This morning, flowers, red and yellow chrysanthemums. I am drinking coffee when the doorbell rings.

  Mrs. Kane? the young man says, holding his box of flowers.

  I nod and pull the robe tighter at my throat.

  The man who called,
he said you’d know. The boy looks at my robe, open at the throat, and touches his cap. He stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the top step, as if asking me to touch him down there. Have a nice day, he says.

  A little later the telephone rings and Stuart says, Honey, how are you? I’ll be home early, I love you. Did you hear me? I love you, I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you. Good-bye, I have to run now.

  I put the flowers into a vase in the center of the dining room table and then I move my things into the extra bedroom.

  Last night, around midnight, Stuart breaks the lock on my door. He does it just to show me that he can, I suppose, for he does not do anything when the door springs open except stand there in his underwear looking surprised and foolish while the anger slips from his face. He shuts the door slowly and a few minutes later I hear him in the kitchen opening a tray of ice cubes.

  He calls today to tell me that he’s asked his mother to come stay with us for a few days. I wait a minute, thinking about this, and then hang up while he is still talking. But in a while I dial his number at work. When he finally comes on the line I say, It doesn’t matter, Stuart. Really, I tell you it doesn’t matter one way or the other.

  I love you, he says.

  He says something else and I listen and nod slowly. I feel sleepy. Then I wake up and say, For God’s sake, Stuart, she was only a child.

  Dummy

  MY father was very nervous and disagreeable for a long time after Dummy’s death, and I believe it somehow marked the end of a halcyon period in his life, too, for it wasn’t much later that his own health began to fail. First Dummy, then Pearl Harbor, then the move to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee, where my father finished out his days caring for a dozen apple trees and five head of cattle.

  For me, Dummy’s death signaled the end of my extraordinarily long childhood, sending me forth, ready or not, into the world of men—where defeat and death are more in the natural order of things.

  First my father blamed it on the woman, Dummy’s wife. Then he said, no, it was the fish. If it hadn’t been for the fish it wouldn’t have happened. I know he felt some to blame for it, because it was Father showed Dummy the advertisement in the classified section of Field and Stream for “live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.” (It may be there now, for all I know.) That was at work one afternoon and Father asked Dummy why not order some bass and stock that pond in back of his house. Dummy wet his lips, Father said, and studied the advertisement a long while before laboriously copying the information down on the back of a candy wrapper and stuffing the wrapper down the front of his coveralls. It was later, after he received the fish, he began acting peculiarly. They changed his whole personality, Father claimed.

  I never knew his real name. If anyone else did, I never heard it called. Dummy it was then, and Dummy I remember him by now. He was a little wrinkled man in his late fifties, bald headed, short but very muscular arms and legs. If he grinned, which was seldom, his lips furled back over yellow, broken teeth and gave him an unpleasant, almost crafty expression; an expression I still remember very clearly, though it’s been twenty-five years ago. His small watery eyes always watched your lips when you were speaking, though sometimes they’d roam familiarly over your face, or your body. I don’t know why, but I had the impression he was never really deaf. At least, not as deaf as he made out. But that isn’t important. He couldn’t speak, that was certain enough. He worked at the sawmill where my father worked, the Cascade Lumber Company in Yakima, Washington, and it was the men there who had given him the nickname “Dummy.” He had worked there ever since the early 1920s. He was working as a cleanup man when I knew him, though I guess at one time or another he’d done every kind of common-labor job around the plant. He wore a grease-spotted felt hat, a khaki work shirt, and a light denim jacket over a bulging pair of coveralls. In his top front pockets he nearly always carried two or three rolls of toilet paper, as one of his jobs was to clean and supply the men’s toilets; and the men on nights used to walk off after their shift with a roll or two in their lunchboxes. He also carried a flashlight, even though he worked days, as well as wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, friction tape, all the things the millwrights carried. Some of the newer men like Ted Slade or Johnny Wait might kid him pretty heavily in the lunchroom about something, or tell him dirty jokes to see what he’d do, just because they knew he didn’t like dirty jokes; or Carl Lowe, the sawyer, might reach down and snag Dummy’s hat as he walked under the platform, but Dummy seemed to take it all in stride, as if he expected to be kidded and had gotten used to it.

  Once, though, one day when I took Father his lunch at noon, four or five of the men had Dummy off in a corner at one of the tables. One of the men was drawing a picture and, grinning, was trying to explain something to Dummy, touching here and there on the paper with his pencil. Dummy was frowning. His neck crimsoned as I watched, and he suddenly drew back and hit the table with his fist. After a moment’s stunned silence, everyone at the table broke up with laughter.

  My father didn’t approve of the kidding. He never kidded Dummy, to my knowledge. Father was a big, heavy-shouldered man with a crew haircut, a double chin, and a paunch—which, given the chance, he was fond of showing off. He was easy to make laugh, just as easy, only in a different way, to get riled. Dummy would stop in the filing room where he worked and sit on a stool and watch Father use the big emery-wheel grinders on the saws, and, if he wasn’t too busy, he’d talk to Dummy as he worked. Dummy seemed to like my father, and Father liked him too, I’m certain. In his own way, Father was probably as good a friend as Dummy had.

  Dummy lived in a small tarpaper-covered house near the river, five or six miles from town. A half mile behind the house, at the end of a pasture, lay a big gravel pit that the state had dug years before when they were paving the roads in that area. Three good-sized holes had been scooped out and over the years they had filled with water. Eventually, the three separate ponds had formed one really large pond, with a towering pile of rocks at one side, and two smaller piles on the other. The water was deep with a blackish-green look to it; clear enough at the surface, but murky down toward the bottom.

  Dummy was married to a woman fifteen or twenty years younger than he, who had the reputation of going around with Mexicans. Father said later it was busybodies at the mill that helped get Dummy so worked up at the end by telling him things about his wife. She was a small stout woman with glittery, suspicious eyes. I’d seen her only twice; once when she came to the window the time Father and I arrived at Dummy’s to go fishing, and one other time when Pete Jensen and I stopped there on our bicycles to get a glass of water.

  It wasn’t just the way she made us wait out on the porch in the hot sun without asking us in that made her seem so distant and unfriendly. It was partly the way she said, “What do you want?” when she opened the door, before we could say a word. Partly the way she scowled, and partly the house, I suppose, the dry musty smell that came through the open door and reminded me of my aunt Mary’s cellar.

  She was a lot different than other grown women I’d met. I just stared for a minute, before I could say anything.

  “I’m Del Fraser’s son. He works with, with your husband. We were just on our bicycles and thought we’d stop for a drink…”

  “Just a minute,” she said. “Wait here.”

  Pete and I looked at each other.

  She returned with a little tin cup of water in each hand. I downed mine in a single gulp and then ran my tongue around the cool rim. She didn’t offer us any more.

  I said, “Thanks,” handing back the cup and smacking my lips.

  “Thanks a lot!” Pete said.

  She watched us without saying anything. Then, as we started to get on our bicycles, she walked over to the edge of the porch.

  “You little fellas had a car now, I might catch a ride into town with you.” She grinned; her teeth looked shiny white and too large for her mouth from where I stood. It was worse than seeing
her scowl. I turned the handle grips back and forth and stared at her uneasily.

  “Let’s go,” Pete said to me. “Maybe Jerry’ll give us a pop if his dad ain’t there.”

  He started away on his bicycle and looked back a few seconds later at the woman standing on the porch, still grinning to herself at her little joke.

  “I wouldn’t take you to town if I had a car!” he called.

  I pushed off hurriedly and followed him down the road without looking back.

  There weren’t many places you could fish for bass in our part of Washington: rainbow trout, mostly, a few brook trout and Dolly Varden in some of the high mountain streams, and silvers in Blue Lake and Lake Rimrock; that was mostly it, except for the migratory runs of steelhead and salmon in several of the freshwater rivers in the late fall. But if you were a fisherman, it was enough to keep you occupied. No one I knew fished for bass. A lot of people I knew had never seen a real bass, only pictures now and then in some of the outdoor magazines. But my father had seen plenty of bass when he was growing up in Arkansas and Georgia: back home, as he always referred to the South. Now, though, he just liked to fish and didn’t care much what he caught. I don’t think he minded if he caught anything; I believe he just liked the idea of staying out all day, eating sandwiches and drinking beer with friends while sitting in a boat, or else walking by himself up or down a riverbank and having time to think, if that’s what he felt like doing that particular day.

  Trout, then, all kinds of trout, salmon and steelhead in the fall, and whitefish in the winter on the Columbia River. Father would fish for anything, at any time of the year, and with pleasure, but I think he was especially pleased that Dummy was going to stock his pond with black bass, for of course, Father assumed that when the bass were large enough, he’d be able to fish there as often as he wished, Dummy being a friend. His eyes gleamed when he told me one evening that Dummy had sent off in the mail for a supply of black bass.

  “Our own private pond!” Father said. “Wait till you tie into a bass, Jack! You’ll be all done as a trout fisherman.”