October Light by John Gardner
“Shame on you!” she barked. She saw him wilt a little, puckering his wide, almost lipless mouth, glancing left and right like a cornered rabbit; and furious though she was, her heart went out to the old maniac. He’d never in his life been a man to defend the indefensible, and both of them knew she had him dead to rights. He noticed he was holding the door open, letting in October, and abruptly closed it.
“Go let her out, Dad,” she said. A muscle was jerking in her right cheek, and with a start she realized that the exact same muscle was jerking in his. It for some reason gave her heart a wrench. She wanted to cry, throw her arms around him as she’d done as a little girl. Oh God, she thought, things are so terrible! Tears squirted into her eyes. She thought then: Christ, where are my cigarettes?
He crossed his arms across his chest, fingers on each hand hanging over his elbows, thumbs hooked inside—crooked, stiff fingers, with huge, arthritic knuckles; a farmer’s fingers: knuckles barked and scratched, one finger cut off just below the fingernail, from an argument with a baler. She remembered when his hair, snow white, had been brown as shoepolish. He said nothing, biting his lips together and not meeting her eyes, staring a little cross-eyed at the yellow wall beside her. He could stand that way all year if he took a firm notion.
“Dad,” she said still more sternly, “go let her out.”
“No sir!” he said, and snapped up his eyes to meet hers. “Sides, she be asleep.” He turned and stalked straight across the room to the cupboard, practically stamping in those iron-toed shoes, and got a glass out. He looked at it critically, as if expecting Aunt Sally would have left it streaked and spotted, though a better housekeeper never lived, and he knew it. He took it to the icebox and got out ice from the blue plastic tray, then carried the ice-filled glass to the upright cupboard in the corner where his whiskey was.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” she asked.
He tipped his head sideways and stared at her in rage. “I’ve had one damn glass ah night and that’s ah,” he said. It was true, she knew. For one thing he’d never told a lie in his life, and for another he was not a hard drinker; he’d been through it and he’d stopped. She bit her lips together, watching him pour the whiskey, then the water. What time is it?, she wondered, and where the hell did I leave my cigarettes? She’d had them, she remembered, just before she went over to the couch to pick up Dickey to carry him to the car. She saw her hand putting them on the fireplace mantel. Without a word, she opened the living-room door and went to get them. Just as she was picking them up—Dickey was fast asleep—the phone rang. Lewis, she thought. Oh, Jesus.
“That’ll be fer you,” her father called from the kitchen.
The phone was on the murdered television. She shook out a cigarette as she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she said. She got a match out and hurriedly struck it. On the cover there was a picture of the Boston Tea Party. Everywhere you looked, it was the Bicentennial. Did people have no fucking shame? “Hello?” she said again. Her hands were shaking.
“That you there, Ginny?” Lewis asked. He sounded baffled and only half awake, as if it were she who’d called him.
“Hi, Lewis,” she said. She took a quick suck at the cigarette. Thank God for cigarettes, she thought, and then, thinking of her father and Aunt Sally, Thank God for cancer! Softly, trying not to wake Dickey, she said, “Honey, I’m still up at Dad’s. There’s been a little trouble, and—”
“I can’t hear you too good,” Lewis called to her.
“There’s been a little trouble,” she said again, more loudly.
“Trouble?” he called.
“It’s nothing serious. Dad and Aunt Sally—” She stopped, a sudden chill running up her spine. It took her a moment to register the cause: out in the yard, the car had died.
“Ginny? You still there?” Lewis asked.
She took a deep drag on the cigarette. “Yes, I’m still here,” she said.
“Ginny, your cah’s died,” her father called in to her.
She clenched her left fist and rolled her eyes up.
Lewis asked, “Are you all right, Ginny?” Not exactly critical—that wasn’t his nature—more in the way of offering information that might be new to her, he said, “It’s half past one in the mahnin.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “Look, sweetheart, I’ll be home just as quick as I can. You go to sleep.”
“Dickey’s not sick, is he?”
“No no, Dickey’s fine. You go on to sleep.”
“Well ah right, sweet-hot,” Lewis said. “Don’t be too long.” It was not, of course, an order; he never gave orders, even to his dogs. It was merely good advice. “Goodnight, then, sweet-hot.”
“Yes, goodnight, sweetie.”
When she replaced the receiver and glanced over at Dickey, he had his eyes open, watching her.
“You go back to sleep,” she said, and pointed at him. He clicked his eyes shut.
Back in the kitchen with her father, Ginny said, “Dad, are you going to unlock that door or am I?”
“Must be you are, if ennabody does,” he said. He pursed his lips and looked down into the glass in his hand. He swirled the ice around.
It wasn’t much but it was more than she’d hoped for. “Where’s the key?” she said.
“Likely as not it’s in there in the dish on the TV,” he said, “where it always is.”
She went and got the key, then came back into the kitchen and started for the door to the stairway. As she was opening it she paused and looked at him and asked, “What did she do that you thought was so terrible?”
“Talked,” he said.
“Talked,” she echoed. She waited. She listened to the hum of the clock over the stove.
“Said a lot of things not fit for a young child’s ears,” he said. He took a sip of the whiskey. He held the glass awkwardly, elbow straight out, as if he’d be a bit more comfortable with a dipper.
“Like for instance?”
“It’s not woth discussin.”
“I’d really be interested to know,” Ginny said, eyebrow cocked. She tossed the key in her hand, the same hand that held the cigarette. But she knew that smug, self-righteous look. Doomsday could come and go, and he’d stand in the wind like a cornshock and tell her no more.
“You can lead a hoss to water but you can’t make him drink,” he said.
“Or a mule,” she said. She started up the stairs. When she’d unlocked the door she turned the handle and gave it a tug, then pushed inward. Nothing happened. It was bolted on the inside.
“Aunt Sally?” she called softly.
No answer.
She thought a moment, then rapped lightly on the door. She tipped her head to listen. “Aunt Sally?” she called again.
“I’m asleep,” Aunt Sally called.
“Aunt Sally you’re not asleep, you’re talking.”
“I talk in my sleep.”
Ginny waited. Nothing. After a time she called, “Aunt Sally, your light’s on. I can see it under the door.” Again she stood with her head tipped, listening like a bird. She thought she heard the floor creak; otherwise nothing.
“You’re both crazy,” she said.
No response.
She had half a mind to lock the door again but thought better of it. “All right,” she said, “sulk then. When and if you decide to come out, the door’s unlocked.” She waited half a minute longer, but the old woman wouldn’t speak, so she walked down the hall, stopped and used the bathroom, then went back downstairs. Her father was not in the kitchen now. She went to the living room and put the key in the dish, then changed her mind and slipped it into her pocket so the old man couldn’t use it to lock the door again—not that that would stop him if his stubbornness hung on. He could nail the thing shut. She wouldn’t put it past him.
“Dad?” she called.
“I’m in bed,” he called back. He had the bedroom in back of the living room, the room that, when she was a child, had been used for the ironing
“If you can’t stot the cah, you just run up and sleep with Aunt Sally,” he called. “He hee!”
“Like God damn hell,” she said. “You’ll hitch me up the horses.”
“Don’t fahget to turn out the lights,” he said.
Above, they heard Aunt Sally sneaking to the toilet.
The car, for some reason, started the second time she turned the key. She went back to the living room for Dickey, turned off the lights, put the screen over the fireplace—her father never used it, “Steals the heat,” he said—carried the child and Snoopy back out to the Chevy, and started for home.
The old woman, up in the bedroom, listened to her leave. She smiled wickedly, exactly like a witch on TV—she was aware of it herself, and relished it. What had it ever actually gotten her, those years of trying to be a Christian, fair and decent? A television set with the works shot out of it, a crooked old bedroom she wouldn’t have put a hired girl in if she still had her house in the village, a bedroom that, whenever the wind was strong, was so troubled by drafts that the doors rumbled, and so unhealthy, for some reason, that her coleus in its green ceramic cart—a plant that had nearly taken care of itself when she’d lived in town—was now half-dead, and nothing she could do seemed to help worth a Hannah cook. No, she would read her trashy novel; they could think what they liked.
She opened the paperback to the place she’d left off, closed her eyes for just a moment, and at once fell asleep.
It was morning when she awakened, and James was knocking, calling to her at the door. Through the window she could see the mountain, garish pink with sunrise. The air in the room around her was crisp. It smelled of winter.
“You planning to get up and have breakfast?” James called. Meaning, she knew: “You planning to get up and get me breakfast?” Ha! Before she’d come here to cook and keep house for him, he’d been sick all the time on account of the way he ate—nothing but fried foods, never any vegetables, so that he was constipated both day and night, and walked bent over at the waist with cramps. She saw him again, in her mind’s eye, waving that stick of firewood at her, eyes like a wild drunken Indian’s, prepared to kill her, his own blood sister without a friend or protector in this world.
“Sally? You hear me?”
She decided to keep silent, as she’d done with Ginny. It was a fact of life that if people knew what you were feeling they could work you around.
With a little start of joy, she remembered the apples in the attic. She could get by on those, for a while at least. She didn’t need to cook him breakfast. In her sudden happiness, she forgot her resolve to keep silent. “I’m not hungry, James,” she called. When he was out doing chores she’d sneak down and poach herself a nice egg, and make herself some toast. “I’m just not hungry this morning,” she said.
That stopped him a minute. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, standing there pulling at his long, whiskered chin, bushy white eyebrows lifted, eyes staring straight down his nose. He said: “You’ve gotta come out of there sooner or later, if it’s only to go to the potty.”
She thought about that. It was true enough, and it would be more like sooner than later. She could use the bathroom while he worked at his chores; but the rest of the time … Then her gaze, restlessly roving around the room as she groped for a rejoinder, landed on the washstand in the corner, beyond the attic door, and she realized with a start that she had him! Down inside that washstand, tucked in among old towels and washcloths, lay Ariah’s old bedpan, and right there on top, under the wooden towel-rack on its oaken lyre, peeking out from behind the kerosene lamp, sat a whole box of Kleenex! If he wanted war, war he would get. She could outlast any siege he could mount!
“All the same, I’m not hungry, James,” she called brightly.
There was another minute’s silence. She held her breath, smiling.
“Well I be cussed,” he said—more to the doorknob, she imagined, than to her. Now she heard his footsteps moving away, hay-foot, straw-foot, maugering slowly toward the head of the stairs, just past the bathroom, and then down the stairs into the kitchen.
“Well I be God damned,” said James Page to himself, down in the kitchen. The cat ducked out of sight. It was all very well for the old woman to play games, he told himself, but the facts of the matter was as they was. He was willing to admit that by rights the house was as much hers as his, now that his daughter had called it to his attention—though they was many a man he knew would never been so generous. It was him had the deed in the Courthouse. So far as the Law was concerned, she damn well had the clothes on her back. Well, tell it to the bees; law was law and fair was fair, as he’d said himself. He was willing to grant she had a certain, as you might say, moral right. But by the same token, he had certain rights. Did she think she could take away his house from him and, like some scoundrel on Relief, just lay there in her dad-blame bed like a pig in a pughole? They’d see about that!
He frowned, head thrown forward, stroking his chin, his left hand fingering the snakehead in his pocket; then, reaching his decision, went into the living room for the key. He smiled when he saw it was missing from the dish that held the others (the dish held also a thimble and some coins and buttons). He should’ve known right off his daughter would’ve taken it. And she should’ve known he’d have another one. There was always two keys to everything; that was one of the unalterable rules of the universe. And in this case, the second was in his shoebox, in his upper right desk draw.
Sally, in her bed, with her teeth in now, was still smiling with self-satisfied, malicious delight, like a foxy old general—or like wicked Captain Fist in the novel she was reading—when she heard her brother James coming back up the stairs, then down the hall toward her door. She was puzzled, a little. It was unlikely that he’d beg; even more unlikely that he’d stoop to persuasion. Then what?, she wondered. The footsteps stopped outside her door and she leaned forward, listening. After a minute, she heard—her heart fluttered—the lock click! She continued to smile, but her eyes were thoughtful, even a little troubled, as his footsteps went back to the head of the stairs and then down them. Soon she smelled bacon and eggs frying.
She got up and used the bedpan (thank God for the bedpan!), then turned the stiff winglatch on the attic door, pulled the small china knob until the door came unstuck, and went up to get two apples. She polished them on her nightie as she brought them back down, and, after she’d re-latched the attic door, took them to bed with her, along with her book. She heard James whistling as he went out to milk the cows—tunelessly chirping, not a trouble in this world!—to torment her. Well they’d see about that.
By now the pink had nearly faded from the clouds, and the mountain had settled to the various reds, yellows, purples, dark greens, and browns of high autumn in Vermont. She did love autumn. Always had.
She could last on apples—they were big, juicy Winesaps—as long as he could last, too stupid or set in his ways to cook a vegetable or nibble at a fruit. She remembered how sorry she’d felt for him when she came, seeing him doubled over with the constipation cramps. Sally smiled.
She found her place in the book, got her pillows adjusted, and settled down serenely to her reading.
3
IN WONG CHOP’S RESTAURANT
Captain Johann Fist was a terrifying old man. Sometimes at night when he climbed into an occupied taxi by mistake people would glance at him once and have a stroke. Jane did not like him, by any means, but she was not so childish as to blame him for things he couldn’t help. He was an Aries, born with Saturn in the ascendent. “He’s an unfortunate man,” she’d written to her mother, feeling it was better not to give too much detail. “He has no family, no friends, not even a pet—though he used to have a parrot, he tells me, but it bit him. I pray for his soul, but I don’t really t
Jane was a wonderful letter writer, for which her mother was grateful. Every time she got a chance, relaxing out at sea, she would write a good long letter to her mother or, sometimes, as they called him, Uncle Fred. She never said what she was thinking; just loving chat and news. She would put all her letters in envelopes and stamp them, and the first time the Indomitable put in, she would mail them all off—all she could still find. Sometimes there were nearly a hundred in a shipment. Her mother was right to cherish them. Since it would be awkward to tell what the real news was, Jane made things up. Sometimes, when she was tired, she copied things from books.
Tonight, walking with the Captain toward Chinatown (he had a habit of hurrying from doorway to doorway, peering around corners before daring to step out), Jane’s mind was troubled. Perhaps she had made a mistake somewhere, she was beginning to think. She had been all her life a decisive girl, quick to think and act, though she fooled people by her casual smile and the innocence of her large blue eyes. She had come to California and had sized up the situation instantly: Aeronautics, that was where the future was at. You could tell by just glancing at the black, roaring sky. She’d gone to a place where they gave flying lessons, had craftily extracted two twenty-dollar bills from the hundred dollars Uncle Fred had given her—a whole lot of money for a hired man to have put by in Nebraska—and she had set the forty dollars on the counter and said to the man, “Can you teach me to fly for that much? It’s all I’ve got.” The man had grinned. “Not a chance, lady.” He was a red-headed, freckle-faced man with a dimple. She’d looked at him like a lost child, letting her innocent blue eyes do their work—besides he was the kind of man you couldn’t help but like—then had slowly drawn back the money from the counter and, like a lady she’d seen in the movies one time, had tucked it in her bosom, giving him a little glimpse. She let a tear slide down her cheek. “Oh hell,” he’d said. She’d let him put his arm around her when he was talking about buttons and gauges, and once or twice she’d made no remark when his gloved hand came to rest, as if accidentally, on her thigh. She’d proved no ordinary student. Breaking horses in Nebraska, she’d developed one especially valuable trait: she never panicked. She was looping the loops in no time, and he’d given in to her every new, more outrageous demand—instrument training, multi-engine … She’d paid him well enough. As soon as he’d agreed to let her go to twin engines, she’d let him initiate her sexually, so to speak. She owed him at least that. He was a Sagittarius. She’d been eighteen when all this happened—four years ago now. It was two days after she’d gotten her air-transport rating that she’d met Captain Fist.