It wasn’t Laura and Helen because these two were naked and looked like children sprawled asleep, or stunned, knocked out on the head, in a coma, or possibly dead. He was walking fast, away from Bobby Andes who was trying to hold him back, because he wanted to make sure they were not Laura and Helen. He was not running because he knew of course they were not.
Only they were. That was why he was out of the car even before it stopped, he knew the instant he saw them, naked children asleep in the bushes, they were Laura and Helen, this was the meaning of the car coming in back here last night and the lesson of Ray and Turk and Lou, he knew it before he saw them, before he saw the kerchief on the bush, before he heard the cries of outrage of the two men in the front, he knew it.
Helen’s kerchief, Laura’s sweater and slacks. He was hurrying because he could not yet see their faces. They looked too small, children only, nor could he yet tell their sexes, which was the girl, which the boy.
They were inside the bush with crushed branches as if they had crashed and fallen there, and he could not see their faces, the graceful naked girl lying on her back with her head turned away, the bigger person lying close by face down, head down concealed by her shoulders so he could not see her hair, and his way was blocked by the branches. “Easy man,” holding him.
“Let me see, let me see.”
The policeman holding him while Bobby Andes slashed at the branches with a knife, shoved through to the girl, where he knelt and lifted her head gently in his hand, he saw the face from the side, from an angle, still unsure. While Bobby Andes dropped her and climbed over her quick to the other, pushing her by the shoulder, trying to force her over, the dark hair, the thick black hair like Laura’s, lifting her face.
He saw Laura’s mouth half open like a cry, her cheeks and eyes contorted with pain, he recognized the cry, the cheeks and eyes, he recognized the pain, the frozen intelligence, the language, the years. There was Bobby Andes, contorted too, looking up at him, supporting her head for him to see. Bobby Andes, a stranger from the world. He plunged forward to look, if there was still a chance, if not too late, the vines grabbed him around the feet, he fell forward, he sagged into branches.
“Is this your wife?”
“Is she all right?”
The face was white, the eyes fixed. Bobby Andes did not answer.
ELEVEN
Susan Morrow reads to a stop, shocked. You killed them, Edward, she says, you went ahead and did it. What she thought she couldn’t bear. She feels stunned with Tony as if she had not seen it coming. A terrible sad crime, though she believes that if they had not died having come this far she would have been disappointed. Poor Tony, how much her pleasure depends on his distress. She has a notion that the pain the scene uncovers, incarnated in Tony, is really her own, which is alarming. Her own designated pain, old or new, past or future, she can’t tell which. It’s obscure because she knows that unlike Tony’s her pain is not here but somewhere else, and its absence, made so vivid, is what makes the moment thrilling. Not sure what she means by this, she resorts to critical appreciation. Appreciate the narrative, details of discovery, irrationality everywhere, denial of the obvious, appreciate that. Later you can criticize if you object to the victimization of women, for instance—but not yet, first submit, appreciate, horrible though it be.
Next page: PART TWO on a blank sheet. So it’s Part One we have been reading, putting Tony into a shape, like a bottle. Where do we go now? Whatever it is will be different, which makes a risk for Edward, like starting over. For that, she wishes him well.
Susan Morrow had intended to stop here but that’s impossible. Besides, someone is still taking a shower. She must take a look at Part Two.
Nocturnal Animals 10
The word in Tony Hastings’s mind was no!, denial slamming up against the hard fact his mind had prepared him for. They walked with him back to the police car, holding him by the arm like an old man. He sat in the back seat with the door open, looking back. He listened to the police radio, loud voices and the trooper talking into the microphone making a report which he did not understand. He looked at the bushes with the clothes draped on them. He looked at what was under the bushes, which did not change, every time he looked they were the same, like the trees. With grasshoppers buzzing in the tall grass and a flycatcher with faint whistle darting from a branch into the still air. He looked away, at the policeman leaning into the front seat to speak into the microphone, at the tops of the trees on the edge of the clearing where he saw a hawk’s nest, and he looked back at the bushes and saw them again, placed, established, a photograph.
There was only no! no!, his refusal to follow the movement of time through the intersection. End of future. Moment separated from moment, time moving away without his participation. No thought except no. Sorry, someone said, we can’t touch them, we can’t move anything until they come. Waiting, without wondering what they were waiting for, nor noticing how long, only looking again from time to time to the scene in the bushes, the same every time he looked. Bobby Andes and the policeman walked around the clearing, back and forth, looking at the ground, poking delicately into the brush, back to the car and out again. He could not remember afterward if he walked around too.
The cars came as if there had been no wait at all, flashing their lights in the woods at midday, and the men jumped out and tromped the clearing, measuring and taking pictures. They lined up with their backs blocking his view, chattering like sparrows, and he did remember thinking, they’re mine, my Laura, my Helen. He saw them working awkwardly with gray canvas, and when the view cleared, the clothes weren’t there and neither were they.
He saw the wrapped cocoon carried out of the broken bushes on a stretcher. Then he saw the other one. He wondered which was which, lying side by side. He thought he knew, then realized he did not, and no way to find out except by asking someone, who might get it wrong. Thinking he ought to know, his own Laura and Helen, the thought knocked something loose in his throat, leaking down his cheeks like a child.
A young policeman said, “Come, I’ll take you back.”
“Where?”
He looked for Bobby Andes, the trooper, someone he knew.
“I’ll take you to your motel.”
“What can I do there?”
Bobby Andes was reading from his notebook into a tape recorder. He noticed Tony Hastings. He said, “You can go with George. I’ll talk to you this afternoon.”
Tony Hastings pulled the world together. He said, “Will my car be usable?”
“Tomorrow. I want to examine it first.”
“Can I have my suitcase?”
“George will get it.” Bobby Andes spoke to George: “Tell Max he needs his worldly goods.”
The one Bobby Andes called George drove him back, the long trip out the terrible woods track like a gash in his mind, and fast on the country roads to his motel across from the police station. Afterward, Tony Hastings remembered him only vaguely, like a blond high school football player in a policeman’s uniform. They did not speak. Tony Hastings stared at the repeating woods, two times in each direction, backdrop to dizzy thought. Afterward he remembered the display of his thought upon the big deciduous trunks, the fallen branches, the rock outcrops with the radio police voices. The word No. He did not know what he was thinking, except that what had happened was the worst and the world was over. Nor what he was feeling, if he was feeling anything. Fatigue and lethargy. He wondered what he should do. He guessed there would be no point in going to Maine. Of course there would be no point, what was he thinking about? What would he do with August and the rest of the summer? What would he do with his car? What when the policeman left him at the motel? He wondered if his emotions required him to skip lunch, but he was hungry, whatever his emotions were, which he didn’t know anyway. He wondered where he could eat lunch and what it would be like. He wondered what to do in the afternoon, and looked forward to his interview with Bobby Andes, which would be something, anyway. Then there would be dinner to think about. After dinner, the evening.