I wasn’t sure of the time when he finally gave it all up and went to bed. Late, with just the sounds of the trains rushing through the night in the hills, and the hoot of a barn owl lost somewhere in leafy midnight trees.
The next couple days I worked overtime. The road project had fallen behind. In the early weeks of the job there’d been an easy camaraderie on the work site. But that was gone for good now. The supervisors no longer took the time to joke, and looked you over skeptically every time you walked back to the wagon for a drink of water.
Kelly came back at dusk on Friday night. She stepped out of a brand-new blue Mercury sedan, Pete Briney at the wheel. She carried a lone suitcase. When she reached the porch steps and saw Murch and me, she looked away and walked quickly toward the door. Briney was right behind her. Obviously he’d told her not to speak to us.
That night, Murch and I spoke in whispers, both of us naturally wondering what had happened. Briney had gone over to her mother’s, where Murch had suggested she go, and somehow convinced Kelly to come back.
They kept the curtains closed, the TV low and if they spoke, it was so quietly we couldn’t hear them.
I spent an hour with Caesar on my lap and Murch in my ear about politicians. He was a John Kennedy supporter and tried to convince me I should be, too.
For the next two days and nights, I didn’t see or hear either of the Brineys. On Saturday afternoon, Murch returned from one of his patrols with his shoebox. He went in the back and buried a cat he’d found and then came out on the porch to smoke a pipe. “Poor little thing,” he said. “Wasn’t any bigger than this.” With his hands, he indicated how tiny the kitten had been.
Kelly came out on the porch a few minutes later. She wore a white blouse and jeans and had her auburn hair swept back into a loose ponytail. She looked neat and clean. And nervous.
She muttered a hello and started down the stairs.
“Ain’t you ever going to talk to us again, Kelly?” Murch said. There was no sarcasm in his voice, just an obvious sadness.
She stopped halfway toward the sidewalk. Her back was to us. For long moments she just stood there.
When she turned around and looked at us, she said, “Pete don’t want me to talk to either of you.” Then, gently, “I miss sitting out on the porch.”
“He’s your husband, honey. You shouldn’t let him be your jailer,” Murch said.
“He said he was sorry about the other night. About hitting me.” She paused. “He came over to my mother’s house and he told my whole family he was sorry. He even started crying.”
Murch didn’t say anything.
“I know you don’t like him, Murch, but I’m his wife and like the priest said, I owe him another chance.”
“You be careful of him, especially when he’s drinking.”
“He promised he wouldn’t hit me no more, Murch. He gave his solemn word.”
She looked first at him and then at me, and then was gone down the block to the grocery store. From a distance she looked fifteen years old.
He went two more nights, Briney did, before coming home drunk and loud.
I knew just how drunk he was because I was sitting on the porch around ten o’clock when a new pink Mercury came up and scraped the edge of its right bumper long and hard against the curbing.
The headlights died. Briney sat in the dark car smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was staring at us.
Murch just sat there with Caesar on his lap. I just sat there waiting for trouble. I could sense it coming and I wanted it over with.
Briney got out of the car and tried hard to walk straight up the walk to the porch. He wasn’t a comic drunk, doing an alcoholic rhumba, but he certainly could not have passed a sobriety test.
He came up on the porch and stopped. His chest was heaving from anger. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and Old Spice.
“You think I don’t fucking know the shit you’re putting in my old lady’s mind?” he said to Murch. “Huh?”
Murch didn’t say anything.
“I asked you a fucking question, old man.”
Murch said, softly, “Why don’t you go in and sleep it off, kid?”
“You’re the goddamned reason she went to her mother’s last week. You told her to!”
And then he lunged at Murch and I was up out of my chair. He was too drunk to swing with any grace or precision but he caught me on the side of the head with the punch he’d intended for Murch, and for a dizzy moment I felt my knees go. He could hit. No doubt about that.
And then he was on me, having given up on Murch, and I had to take four or five more punches while I tried to gather myself and bring some focus to my fear and rage.
I finally got him in the ribs with a good hooking right, and I felt real exhilaration when I heard the air whoof out of him, and then I banged another one just to the right off his jaw and backed him up several inches and then—
Then Kelly was on the porch crying and screaming and putting herself between us, a child trying to separate two mindless mastodons from killing each other and—
“You promised you wouldn’t drink no more!” she kept screaming over and over at Briney.
All he could do was stand head hung and shamed like some whipped giant there in the dirty porch light she’d turned on. “But honey...” he’d mumble. Or “But sweetheart...” Or “But Kelly, Jeez I...”
“Now you get inside there, and right now!” she said, no longer his wife but his mother. And she sternly pointed to the door. And he shambled toward it, not looking back at any of us, just shuffling and shambling, drunk and dazed and sweaty, depleted of rage and pride, and no longer fierce at all.
When he was inside, the apartment door closed, she said, “I’m real sorry, Todd. I heard everything from inside.”
“It’s all right.”
“You hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m real sorry.”
“I know.”
She went over to Murch and touched him tenderly on the shoulder. He was standing up, this tired and suddenly very old-looking man, and he had good gray Caesar in his arms. Kelly leaned over and petted Caesar and said, “I wish I had a husband like you, Caesar.”
She went back inside. The rest of our time on the porch, the Brineys spoke again in whispers.
Just before he went up to bed, Murch said, “He’s going to kill her someday. You know that, don’t you, Todd?”
This time I was ready for it. Six hours had gone by. I’d watched the late movie and then lay on the bed smoking a cigarette in the darkness and just staring at the play of streetlight and tree shadow on the ceiling.
The first sound from below was very, very low and I wasn’t even sure what it was. But I threw my legs off the bed and sat up, grabbing for my cigarettes as I did so.
When the sound came again, I recognized it immediately for what it was. A soft sobbing. Kelly.
Voices. Muffled. Bedsprings squeaking. A curse — Briney.
And then, sharp and unmistakable, a slap.
And then two, three slaps.
Kelly screaming. Furniture being shoved around.
I was up from the sweaty bed and into my jeans, not bothering with a shirt, and down the stairs two at a lime.
By now, Kelly’s screams filled the entire house. Behind me, at the top of the stairs, I could hear Murch shouting down, “You gotta stop him, son! You gotta stop him!”
More slaps; the muffled thud of closed fists pounding into human flesh and bone.
I stood back from the door and raised my foot and kicked with the flat of my heel four limes before shattering the wood into jagged splinters.