Beginners Page 5

  “Look at this,” Sam said, hitching his pajamas and squatting down with the robe fanned over his knees. He pointed his light at the ground.

  I looked and saw some thick white slugs curled on a bare patch of dirt.

  “I just gave them a dose of this,” he said, raising a can of something that looked like Ajax. But it was a bigger and heavier can than Ajax and had a skull and crossbones on the label. “Slugs are taking over,” he said, working something in his mouth. He turned his head to one side and spit what could have been tobacco. “I have to keep at this nearly every night to just come close to staying up with them.” He turned his light onto a glass jar that was nearly filled with the things. “I put bait out for them at night, and then every chance I get come out here with this stuff and hunt them down. Bastards are all over. Your backyard has them too, I’ll bet. If mine does, yours does. It’s a crime what they can do to a yard. And your flowers. Look over here,” he said. He got up. He took my arm and moved me over to some rosebushes. He showed me little holes in the leaves. “Slugs,” he said. “Everywhere you look around here at night, slugs. I lay out bait and then I come out and try to pick off the ones who don’t eat the little banquet I’ve fixed up for them,” he said. “An awful invention, a slug. But I save them up in that jar there, and when the jar is full and they’re nice and ripe, I sprinkle them under the roses. They make good fertilizer.” He moved his light slowly over the rosebush. After a minute he said, “Some life, isn’t it?” and shook his head.

  A plane passed overhead. I raised my eyes and saw its blinking lights and behind the lights, clear as anything in the night sky, the long white stream of its exhaust. I imagined the people on the plane as they sat belted into their seats, some of them involved in reading, some of them just staring out their windows.

  I turned back to Sam. I said, “How’re Laurie and Sam junior?”

  “They’re fine. You know,” he said and shrugged. He chewed on whatever it was he was chewing. “Laurie’s a good woman. The best. She’s a good woman,” he said again. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have her. I think if it wasn’t for her I’d want to be with Millie, where she is. Wherever that is. I guess that’s nowhere, as far as I can tell. That’s my idea on the matter. Nowhere,” he said. “Death is nowhere, Nancy. You can quote me if you want.” He spat again. “Sammy’s sick. You know he gets these colds. Hard for him to shake them. She’s taking him to the doctor again tomorrow. How’re you folks? How’s Clifford?”

  I said, “He’s fine. Same as ever. Same old Cliff.” I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at the rosebush once more. “He’s asleep now,” I said.

  “Sometimes when I’m out here after these damn slugs, I’ll glance over the fence in your direction,” he said. “Once—,” he stopped and laughed quietly. “Excuse me, Nancy, but it strikes me kind of funny now. But once I looked over the fence and saw Cliff out there in your backyard, peeing onto those petunias. I started to say something, make a little joke of some kind. But I didn’t. From the looks of things, I think he’d been drinking so I didn’t know how he’d take it, if I’d said anything. He didn’t see me. So I just kept quiet. I’m sorry Cliff and me had that falling out,” he said.

  I nodded slowly. “I think he is too, Sam.” After a minute I said, “You and he were friends.” But the picture of Cliff standing unzipped over the petunias stayed in my head. I closed my eyes and tried to get rid of it.

  “That’s true, we were good friends,” Sam said. Then he went on. “I come out here nights after Laurie and the baby are asleep. Gives me something to do, is one thing. You folks are asleep. Everybody’s asleep. I don’t sleep good anymore. And what I’m doing is worth doing, I believe that. Look there now,” he said and drew a sharp breath. “There’s one there. See him? Right there where my light is.” He had the beam directed onto the dirt under the rosebush. Then I saw the slug move. “You watch this,” Sam said.

  I closed my arms under my breasts and bent over where he was shining his light. The slug stopped and turned its blind head from side to side. Then Sam was over it with the can, sprinkling, sprinkling. “Goddamn these slimy things,” he said. “God, I hate them.” The slug began to writhe and twist this way and that. Then it curled and then it straightened out. It curled again and lay still. Sam picked up a toy shovel. He scooped the slug into that. He held the jar away from him, unscrewed the lid, and dropped the slug into the jar. He fastened the lid once more and set the jar on the ground.

  “I quit drinking,” Sam said. “I didn’t exactly quit, I just cut way back. Had to. For a while it was getting so I didn’t know up from down. We keep it around the house still, but I don’t have much to do with it anymore.”

  I nodded. He looked at me and he kept looking. I had the feeling he was waiting for me to say something. But I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Nothing. “I’d better get back,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Well, I’ll continue with what I’m doing awhile longer, and then I’ll head in too.”

  I said, “Good night, Sam.”

  “Good night, Nancy,” he said. “Listen.” He stopped chewing, and with his tongue pushed whatever it was behind his lower lip. “Tell old Cliff I said hello.”

  I said, “I will. I’ll tell him you said hello, Sam.”

  He nodded. He ran his hand through his silvery hair as if he were going to make it lay down for once. “ ’Night, Nancy.”

  I went back to the front of the house and down the sidewalk. I stopped for a minute with my hand on our gate and looked around the still neighborhood. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly I couldn’t do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I’d have when I had been young and looking ahead to things. I couldn’t remember now what I’d wanted to do with my life in those years, but like everybody else I’d had plans. Cliff was somebody who had plans too, and that’s how we’d met and why we’d stayed together.

  I went in and turned off all the lights. In the bedroom I took off the robe, folded it, put it within reach so I could get to it after the alarm went off. Without looking at the time, I checked again to make sure the stem was out on the clock. Then I got into bed, pulled the covers up, and closed my eyes. Cliff started to snore. I poked him, but it didn’t do any good. He kept on. I listened to his snores. Then I remembered I’d forgotten to latch the gate. Finally I opened my eyes and just lay there, letting my eyes move around over things in the room. After a time I turned on my side and put an arm over Cliff’s waist. I gave him a little shake. He stopped snoring for a minute. Then he cleared his throat. He swallowed. Something caught and rattled in his chest. He sighed heavily, then started up again, snoring.

  I said, “Cliff,” and shook him, hard. “Cliff, listen to me.” He moaned. A shudder went through him. For a minute he seemed to have stopped breathing, to be down at the bottom of something. Of their own accord, my fingers dug into the soft flesh over his hip. I held my own breath, waiting for his to start again. There was a space and then his breathing, deep and regular once more. I brought my hand up to his chest. It lay there, fingers spread, then beginning to tap, as if thinking what to do next. “Cliff?” I said again. “Cliff.” I put my hand to his throat. I found the pulse. Then I cupped his stubbled chin and felt the warm breath on the back of my hand. I looked closely at his face and began to trace his features with the tips of my fingers. I touched his heavy closed eyelids. I stroked the lines in his forehead.

  I said, “Cliff, listen to me, honey.” I started out everything I was going to say to him by saying I loved him. I told him I had always loved him and always would love him. Those were things that needed saying before the other things. Then I began to talk. It didn’t matter that he was someplace else and couldn’t hear any of what I was saying. Beside
s, in mid-sentence it occurred to me he already knew everything I was saying, maybe better than I knew, and had for a long time. When I thought that, I stopped talking for a minute and looked at him with new regard. Nevertheless, I wanted to finish what I’d started. I went on telling him, without rancor or heat of any sort, everything that was on my mind. I wound up by saying it out, the worst and last of it, that I felt we were going nowhere fast, and it was time to admit it, even though there was maybe no help for it.

  Just so many words, you might think. But I felt better for having said them. And so I wiped the tears off my cheeks and lay back down. Cliff’s breathing seemed normal, though loud to the point I couldn’t hear my own. I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn’t have any more thoughts except I thought maybe I could sleep.

  The Fling

  IT’S October, a damp day outside. From my hotel room window I can look out and see much of this gray midwestern city; just now, lights are coming on here and there in some of the buildings, and smoke from the tall stacks at the edge of town is rising in a slow thick climb into the darkening sky. Except for a branch of the university campus located here—a poor relation, really—there isn’t much to recommend the place.

  I want to relate a story my father told me last year when I stopped over briefly in Sacramento. It concerns some sordid events that he was involved in nearly two years before that, before he and my mother were divorced. It could be asked that if it is important enough to warrant the telling—my time and energy, your time and energy—then why haven’t I told it before this? I’d have no answer for that. In the first place, I don’t know if it is that important—at least to anyone except my father and the others involved. Secondly, and perhaps more to the point, what business is it of mine? That question is more difficult to answer. I admit I feel that I acted badly that day with regard to my father, that I perhaps failed him at a time when I could have helped. Yet something else tells me that he was beyond help, beyond anything I could do for him, and that the only thing that transpired between us in those few hours was that he caused me—forced might be the better word—to peer into my own abyss; and nothing comes of nothing as Pearl Bailey says, and we all know from experience.

  I’m a book salesman representing a well-known midwestern textbook firm. My home base is Chicago, my territory Illinois, parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. I had been attending the Western Book Publishers Association convention out in Los Angeles when it occurred to me, sheerly on the spur of the moment, to visit a few hours with my father on my way back to Chicago. I hesitated because, since his divorce, there was a very large part of me that didn’t want to see him again, but before I could change my mind, I fished his address out of my wallet and proceeded to send him a telegram. The next morning I sent my things on to Chicago and boarded a plane for Sacramento. The sky was slightly overcast; it was a cool, damp September morning.

  It took me a minute to pick him out. He was standing a few steps behind the gate when I saw him, white hair, glasses, brown Sta-Prest cotton pants, a gray nylon jacket over a white shirt open at the throat. He was staring at me, and I realized he must have had me in view since I stepped off the plane.

  “Dad, how are you?”

  “Les.”

  We shook hands quickly and began to move toward the terminal.

  “How’s Mary and the kids?”

  I looked at him closely before answering. Of course, he didn’t know we’d been living apart for nearly six months. “Everyone’s fine,” I answered.

  He opened a white confectionery sack. “I picked them up a little something, maybe you could take it back with you. Not much. Some Almond Roca for Mary, a Cootie game for Ed, and a Barbie doll. Jean’ll like that, won’t she?”

  “Sure she will.”

  “Don’t forget this when you leave.”

  I nodded. We moved out of the way as a group of nuns, flushed and talking excitedly, headed for the boarding area. He’d aged. “Well, shall we have a drink or a cup of coffee?”

  “Anything you say. I don’t have a car,” he apologized. “Really don’t need one around here. I had a cab bring me out.”

  “We don’t have to go anyplace. Let’s go to the bar and have a drink. It’s early, but I could use a drink.”

  We located the lounge and I waved him into a booth while I went over to the bar. My mouth was dry and I asked for a glass of orange juice while I waited. I looked over at my father; his hands were clasped together on the table and he gazed out the tinted window that overlooked the field. A large plane was taking passengers and another was landing farther out. A woman in her late thirties, red hair, wearing a white knit suit, was sitting between two well-dressed younger men a few stools down. One of the men was close to her ear, telling her something.

  “Here we are, Dad. Cheers.” He nodded and we each took a long drink and then lighted cigarettes. “Well, how’re you getting along?”

  He shrugged and opened his hands. “So-so.”

  I leaned back in the seat and drew a long breath. He had an air of woe about him that I couldn’t help but find a little irritating.

  “I guess the Chicago airport would make three or four of this one,” he said.

  “More than that.”

  “Thought it was big.”

  “When did you start wearing glasses?”

  “Not long ago. A few months.”

  After a minute or two I said, “I think it’s time for another one.” The bartender looked our way and I nodded. This time a slender pleasant girl in a red and black dress came to take our order. All the stools at the bar were taken now, and there were a few men in business suits sitting at the tables in the booths. A fishnet hung from the ceiling with a number of colored Japanese floats tossed inside. Petula Clark was singing “Downtown” from the jukebox. I remembered again that my father was living alone, working nights as a lathe operator in a machine shop, and it all seemed impossible. Suddenly the woman at the bar laughed loudly and leaned back on her stool, holding onto the sleeves of the men who sat on either side of her. The girl came back with the drinks, and this time my father and I clinked glasses.

  “I liked to have died over it myself,” he said slowly. His arms rested heavily on either side of his glass. “You’re an educated man, Les. Maybe you can understand.”

  I nodded slightly, not meeting his eyes, and waited for him to go on. He began to talk in a low monotonous drone that annoyed me immediately. I turned the ashtray on its edge to read what was on the bottom: HARRAH’S CLUB RENO AND LAKE TAHOE. Good places to have fun.

  “She was a Stanley products woman. A little woman, small feet and hands and coal black hair. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she had nice ways about her. She was thirty years old and had kids but, but she was a decent woman, whatever happened.

  “Your mother was always buying something from her, a broom or a mop, some kind of pie filling, you know your mother. It was a Saturday, and I was home alone and your mother was gone someplace. I don’t know where she was. She wasn’t working. I was in the front room reading the paper and drinking a cup of coffee, just taking it easy. There was a knock on the door and it was this little woman, Sally Wain. She said she had some things for my wife, Mrs. Palmer. ‘I’m Mr. Palmer,’ I said. ‘Mrs. Palmer is not here right now.’ I asked her just to step in, you know, and I’d pay her for the things. She didn’t know whether she should or not, just stood there a minute holding this little paper sack and the receipt with it.

  “ ‘Here, I’ll take that,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come in and sit down a minute till I see if I can find some money.’

  “ ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You can owe it. I can pick it up anytime. I have lots of people do that; it’s all right.’ She smiled to let me know it was all right.

  “ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve got it, I’d rather pay it now. Save you a trip back and save me owing another bill. Come in,’ I said again, and held open the screen door. ‘It isn’t
polite to have you standing out there.’ It was around eleven or twelve o’clock in the morning.”

  He coughed and took one of my cigarettes from the pack on the table. The woman at the bar laughed again, and I looked over at her and then back at my father.

  “She stepped in then and I said, ‘Just a minute, please,’ and went into the bedroom to look for my wallet. I looked around on the dresser but couldn’t find it. I found some change and matches, and my comb, but I couldn’t find my wallet. Your mother had gone through that morning cleaning up. I went back to the front room and said, ‘Well, I’ll turn up some money yet.’

  “ ‘Please don’t bother,’ she said.