coffee was almost finished. I excused myself and snuck down the hall. I still remembered where every board creaked in that hallway. I shut the bathroom door quiet as a burglar and let loose, trying to aim just above the waterline. In the next room my father snored like an engine revving and dying over and over. I don’t know how my mother stood it. I put the lid down to muffle the flush and turned on a trickle of water to wash my hands and face.
I glanced into my old room on my way back down the hall. My mother had gotten rid of the cots and put in a double bed, probably for Walt and Louise’s visits. It took up most of the room and was already made up. I wonder if Walt had specifications on how she did that, too—quarter bounce and all that. On the floor next to the bed stood a brown hard-sided suitcase. A gray wool coat draped over it, a navy beret on top of that. Ready to be picked up and carried out the door at any moment.
In the kitchen Louise stood with her back to me, looking out at the backyard. She cut a narrow line in the room, and I came in quiet so I could look at her longer before she turned around. I’d been with women a lot more beautiful than her. Big-busted, full mouths, thick red hair—I had a thing for redheads, that’s true. I’d been with women who knew how to do anything you wanted, and they weren’t whores; they just wanted to have a good time. That’s all I thought I wanted. I figured people just married when they decided it was time. And I didn’t want that, no way and never.
Standing in the doorway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up finding myself in a raggy motel with a woman named Babette who had a mole on one breast like an extra nipple. I’d met her at the Arcade Lanes in St. Louis. Babette, with her big tits and the third nipple and her wide hips bearing down on me before I even got my pants off—goddamn. I tried to remember what Louise and I had even been talking about before. She turned around, and I remembered—the base in Arkansas, where her father worked.
“So what’d he do?” I asked her, reaching for the coffeepot.
“What?”
“Your father.”
She looked at me like as if she was trying to figure out what I was asking—strange, because it was a straightforward question.
“He worked in the biological munitions plant there. Only one in the country,” she said, and then she was the proud daughter, arms folded over her girl breasts.
“That must’ve been something,” I said. I poured the coffee. “How do you like it?”
“Just black.”
“No sugar, even? Never met a woman who didn’t take at least a little.” I smiled at her and handed her the cup, and she just looked back at me, all serious.
“Walt got me to learn to do it,” she said, blowing over the rim. “He said we had to be able to do without.”
Everything about him came back to me then. The way he used to look at me like I was a stray he wanted to kick when he walked out in the morning with Dad. The way he used to grunt at our mother when he wanted something. She’d never complained, or at least not in front of us. She just did what was expected. Women pour themselves out for you, but I didn’t know that yet, standing in the kitchen that morning with Louise. What I did know was that I wasn’t sorry my brother was dead, because he’d made his wife do without sugar. Just because he could, and she’d obey him, because that was what she’d promised to do. It was a small thing. Maybe it even made her feel better, thinking of that instead of the idea of him gone and her alone. Where was she going to go? She must have been scared, standing there in her pumps with it barely even light out yet, like she had some kind of plan. More likely she didn’t have slippers and didn’t want to go out of her room barefoot to hunt up coffee and drink it bitter like Walt wanted her to.
It was a small thing. But that’s what life narrows down to. One time I decided to catch a train rather than ride with two guys to the next tourney, because even though I was almost out of cash, I was too tired to leave at four in the morning. And it turned out they died an hour out of Buffalo. Hit a patch of ice and then a truck. Most things we do don’t seem to count for much, but sometimes they do. My mind snagged on that sugar.
“There’s plenty,” I said, scooping a spoonful.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I like it this way now.”
I dumped it in my cup, even though I could take it or leave it, and right then the phone started ringing and it didn’t stop for the rest of the day.
By midmorning, the house was filled with women, and in spite of the cold, they spilled out into the yard, the street, even. This wasn’t visiting hours or anything official. This is what people did in our town back then. After the first shifts let out, the men showed up and sat out back and drank and smoked. By then, the women were hip to hip in the kitchen. The windows were steamed from food cooking on and in the stove, the table crowded with casseroles and sliced meats and pastries. There were children all over the place. I’d walk through the living room and one would slam face-first into my thigh, bounce on his bottom and get up tearing off somewhere else. The older folks, people from mass whose faces I recognized but whose names I’d forgotten, sat in the living room on the couch and on the kitchen chairs someone had thought to drag out there, to make more room. There were people on the swing and in lawn chairs on the stoop, standing in clumps on the lawn—mothers letting their kids run wild. I recognized a few of them, too, from high school. Girls I’d tried to get somewhere with had three kids now, and their husbands looked my father’s age.
My brother’s body was supposed to get there in two days. I guess all those people were good for my mother, to give her something to do. From the backyard I saw her through the kitchen window, moving back and forth from the oven to the table, wearing a dark gray dress and a green apron, gray being as close as she could maybe let herself get to black at that point. Walt’s was the first war casualty in our town since Korea, and we weren’t even supposed to be at war. It had everyone whipped up, though. You didn’t have a town more ready to get into that jungle right then than Sandusky.
As the day went by, I stayed most of the time with the men out in the back, watching my father drink himself bloodshot. I took a couple of sips from the flasks that were going around, just to be social.
“We ought to fix them up but good over there,” said Horace Schlemmer, one of the guys my dad worked with. He was drunk, his talk thick.
My father nodded and stared at the ground. He drew the tip of his boot across the dead grass, back and forth, back and forth, all the men watching him, his grief on display.
“What do you say, Leo?” said Rich Neidermeyer, another Engineered Fittings guy, retired by then.
I looked at him. “About what?”
“Those Viet Cong, they call themselves. Gooks.” He was red-faced, bottle choked in his fist.
“They’re all gooks, aren’t they?” I meant nobody here would know the difference between Viet Cong and a rice farmer, and apparently that was a problem over there. If officers on the ground couldn’t figure it out, we sure as hell weren’t going to.
But Neidermeyer read me wrong. “Yeah, you’re right,” and he grinned mean. “We oughta kill them all.”
I’d dated his daughter in high school. Kept her legs tighter than a lockbox.
Then Horace asked about my game, and I said it was as good as it could be, which was the truth. I was doing the circuit, winning here and there. But I could feel my old man watching me. He’d said before that I’d be back when I’d starved long enough. I knew what I’d see if I looked at him. Too bad I didn’t get it yet, that’s what he was thinking. I ought to put in for a spot on the facers at the plant, get in at the bottom and work up like any other man with sense. Start a family. Give in and give up like he did.
“Must be nice out there, a different town every day,” Horace said.
“Has its merits.” But I knew as soon as I’d said it that I’d had enough. I wasn’t ready to quit just yet, but I wasn’t getting any better, neither. There was