In surprise she looked up at him. Her nails were long and she’d painted them red, to match her lipstick. A scarf of flowery design covered some rollers in her dark hair. “I love you too, baby,” she said. She held out her hand to him, and he stepped over and took it in his own. They remained thus awkwardly for a minute, almost as if James had meant to take her pulse, and had discovered there wasn’t any. “I rustled up some bedding for your brother and his touring company,” she said. “We can play hospitality to the whole outfit.”
His son Wyatt began screeching out by the door like a crow. “Can’t he open that door by himself?” He let go his wife’s hand and scratched his belly viciously.
“Maybe his hands are full,” Stevie said.
“You want the door open talk English!” James shouted down the stairs. There was a big Corning Ware pot on the stove, and suddenly he noticed that the windows were steamy near the ceiling and the walls dripped with a little moisture: she’d been cooking stew, or soup. Claustrophobia touched him. He went to the head of the stairs and saw his son at the screen door down there, wearing a green cowboy hat with a string that went under his chin, his hands dangling at his sides, screeching for assistance and pretending he didn’t know how to talk or open a door. “Hey,” James said. “Open up that door by yourself.”
“Baby—” Stevie said, as the boy let out another yodel of feigned despair.
“He’s acting like a two-year-old,” James said to her, and spoke softly and clearly down the stairs: “Shut up and open that door.” Wyatt kept on hollering wordlessly, kind of talking around James, James perceived, to the boy’s mother — as if James weren’t standing there at all. An almost uncontrollable rage gripped the father in the region of his heart. “If I have to come down those stairs, I will make you regret it forever,” he told his son. Then he came down the stairs two at a time and shoved the door open violently, so that Wyatt sat down and set up a cry that was completely genuine and more than somewhat terrified. James yanked him up onto his feet by the hand and showed him the door. He was surprised to find that he was still holding his can of beer, and he took a drink from it, making a conscious effort to slow himself down. “Now you reach up and open that motherfucking door, or I will kill you,” he told his son. Wyatt raised his arm and let it fall back, giving out with miserable sobs. “Don’t fuck with me,” James said, and turned him around and spanked him hard three times on the seat of his oversized black shorts. He put him back in front of the door. “Go, you little shit,” he said. “Do not disobey me.” Although Wyatt lifted his arm and took hold of the doorlatch, he seemed helpless to operate it. Convinced he was shamming, James turned him around and slapped his face back-and-forehanded, and Wyatt fell as if struck by paralysis onto the wooden porch. His sobs carried out over the street. James stood over him with a beer in his hand.
Suddenly shame made him give up this contest of wills. He opened the screen door, dragged his son through it with one hand and deposited him there, and then stood on the porch looking across the street at the neighbors’ place, feeling torn apart. He believed they were watching. He flung his beer into the roadway between him and their prying eyes, trying to find some word that might make this unexpected incident comprehensible. I have one of the very few two-storey places in this whole section of town, he told some fancied inquisitor.
He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael’s Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him — it was not the first time — that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth.
Outside in the night the dust began to coat the surface of the water, and the styrofoam life preserver, hanging by its nylon rope, banged continually against the chain-link fence around the pool. Burris Houston concentrated on this sound, and on the sounds of things moved by the wind that found its way into the apartment through any minuscule aperture. He sat in the wicker chair in the living room, dark save for the light of a single tiny reading lamp, his knees drawn up to his chin, drinking a beer and Jack Daniels whiskey and watching the shadow of a model Japanese Zero as it moved on the wall. He was sick inside, withdrawing contrary to his will from heroin.
He tried to forget all about his body, watching the mobile shadow of the weapon of a defeated nation, sipping the liquor, listening to the repeated, nearly comprehensible signalling of the life preserver against the fence outside. He tried to concentrate on the atmosphere — the dust and plyboard aura of dwellings thrown up hastily around swimming pools in the desert. He waited, in a state beyond patience or impatience, for his woman. In his mind’s eye and in the shrunken room of his heart, Jeanine came to him with money in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks.
But he didn’t call Jeanine his woman in his heart. Amid a rush of good luck, intoxicants, and money, he’d been married fourteen months ago to Eileen Wade, whom he couldn’t stop loving, despite the fact that he passionately hated her.
At her job at a rock-and-roll place up on MacDowell, Eileen had always worn hot-pants and stockings with seams down the calves, and he’d leaned against the bar every night going deaf from whatever band might be playing, proud to get special attention from her because she was his wife, and prouder still to think how the other men leaning against the bar — flushed and drunken cowpokes who didn’t know how they’d gotten there, or empty purveyors of cocaine wearing golden rings, with necklaces waiting to be tightened around their throats — needed what he had, and couldn’t get it. They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.
But everything had fallen to pieces somewhere in the disordered barrooms of the city, and Eileen had turned unaccountably into someone else — all the songs on the radio talked about his experience. Eileen was living now with a man known to him only as Critter, a dealer in drugs, a person very much at the center of things, and there was talk that she was pregnant. But Burris didn’t believe it. Critter had many qualities for a woman to admire, but there was something not quite right about the man, and whenever Burris let his mind run, it started to seem obvious that something was not quite right about the whole situation, and it seemed to him only temporary — as if all of this was a stupid mistake, something Eileen would regret soon. And as he considered these things, suffering the crawling of withdrawal through his ribs and chest, bathing his electrified bones in whiskey to quiet them, he became certain that Eileen regretted it already, and he realized that all he needed to do to change everything was to see her just once.
Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she’d loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn’t possibly suffer any change.