11: A BUNDLE OF LAUNDRY

Hold on, Friend, to the only friend you’ve got.

Howard felt tricked into reading the words, written (this week, probably, judging by the freshness of the pencil markings) over the urinal in the men’s room of Miranda’s Bar. He could still see the words in his mind as he walked back to his table. You couldn’t get away from words; they were everywhere, like black flies in the spring. He didn’t mind the black flies. All they wanted was your blood. The words wanted your brain. Both the barroom and the men’s room smelled of beer and piss to greater and lesser degrees, and he tried to make something of the relationship but couldn’t. He filed the thought away.

Outside, the street was black in the dim afternoon light, with patches of dirty plowed snow between the street and the sidewalk. Howard Elman began to think. Here walked the human race: going places, coming from places, going and coming in straight lines and at right angles like the gears, pulleys, and levers of a great machine; concerned with looking good and living long, concerned with loving and being loved, concerned with getting rich, or richer than their neighbors, anyway; busy creatures with never enough sleep, never enough time; inventors of gears, pulleys, and levers after their own image to do better what was not necessary in the first place; speechmakers, hunters, homemakers, riggers, agents, merchants, pursuing happiness like a pack of hounds after some poor frightened rabbit. He could sit here at the window of Miranda’s Bar thinking and watching the street, but he couldn’t move. A man had to have a job to move, and then he could stop thinking.

He wondered whether Elenore knew that he no longer searched for a job, that he stood in front of the employment office but did not enter, that he walked the streets like a man lost in the woods, that he stood on the city common and watched his footprints in the slush, that he had no idea, even, why he came to the city each day or why he felt false to himself and yet secure in that falseness. She knew, he thought.

He tried now to picture her as she must be at this moment—a dewdrop draped in rosary beads in a chair in front of the television’s cool light. But the image wouldn’t form. When they married, her eyes were blue, but they had changed; and now he could not remember what color they were. He opened his wallet, searching for the frayed photo of Elenore in the garden holding a tomato. She was beautiful; the tomato was beautiful; everything was beautiful that year.

He remembered now that she had been surprised, even shocked, at the first labor pains for the birth of all her children, because the babies had not come when she expected them to. (“Your mother ain’t never sure how pregnant she is,” he would say, introducing one of the few family jokes. “That’s why I married him—to remind me,” she would reply.) He smiled now, thinking of it. He was her clock, and she had married him to toll the time of day. He wondered why he could bear to think of her only as one thinks of someone who has died long ago.

Usually in the afternoon he sat in Miranda’s, brooding, or seeming to brood—often his mind was completely vacant for minutes at a time. But sometimes he felt the need for conversation, and he would talk with the drunks at the bar, almost always making a speech that led to an argument that was never concluded, and the reason for which he could not remember clearly later. Once, the Greek behind the bar had told him to leave (in tones so hushed that at first Howard thought he had misunderstood). And it seemed to him the Greek had said as he left, “Someday that one will do something bad with his hands.” Probably, though, the Greek had said something else, and he had only imagined he had heard the words.

Once, he had impressed the drunks at Miranda’s by giving a speech about education: “A man’s mind is like a good engine—you can’t improve it by souping it up with books. Oh, it may look better, sound better, run faster; but it won’t run longer, and it will break down when you least expect it. You soup up a good engine, and something happens”—here he lacked a word, “integrity,” and substituted in its place “life”—“to its life; I mean the lifeblood, the . . .” He did not complete the speech, because the thought in his mind never fully developed. No matter; the drunks were impressed. For a moment he was triumphant. Later, after he had worked out the idea in his mind, he had blurted out, “See, there ain’t no such thing as education. For every thing you learn, you unlearn another.” But they had looked at him dully, and he realized that whatever had touched them earlier was something in his voice and not what he said, and that now he had lost it. They were not interested in meaning. They were interested in amusement, in relief.

Another time he had told the drunks, in an argument about religion whose substance he could not now remember, that the pope was a Christian; and it was not until later that night, in bed, sweating in the cold after awakening from a bad dream and then to the reality of the sound of dogs’ running deer in the woods, that he had realized how stupid the comment had been, and he had wanted to explain to the drunks, and to the world, that he was not stupid, at least not unrelentingly stupid like some men, but selectively stupid like most men.

Hold on, Friend, to the only friend you’ve got. The thought surfaced in his mind. Everywhere men were writing in books, in newspapers, on billboards, and, yes, on shit-house walls, telling other men what to think, putting things in their heads and pushing other, probably finer things out. There ought to be a law, he thought. And then, contradicting his own outrage, he figured if he could write well, clearly and beautifully as a stream flows, he would write over the urinal “A man wastes his life with 70,000 trips to the bathroom.” He watched the street and brooded.

There were certain facts he had to face up to. He had not been a good father. Oh, he had some strengths—he had provided (to a point), had loved (to a point), had been fair with them; but in the important areas—setting an example, understanding their problems, and deciphering the secret code of each child in order to guide that child—he had been a failure. The role of father had always been strange, unnatural to him. Elenore seemed to sense it, too. There were times when she insisted he keep away from the babies, as though she feared he would eat them. And there were times when he might, in a way, have eaten them, when they did not seem to him to be human, or even worth anything—as, say, a chicken is worth something—but merely another useless burden to the earth. He guessed they would taste like veal. The girls especially did not seem human to him, because they reacted in unreasonable ways, holding up in the face of disaster and breaking down at the sight of a crushed flower petal; having neither the sense nor the instinct to kill; demanding for the sake of demanding. And then there was the mysterious anger of women. The anger of a boy or a man could be understood. It was rooted in wounds to his pride; it sought confrontation; it passed with victory, or with apparent victory. Female anger was different. It was rooted in wounds to the soul; it was anger at God. He remembered Sherry Ann, in his arms during one of her rages, wrestling, shaking, twisting, with all the tricks and doggedness of a brook trout on a hook. At sixteen she had run away, and never returned. And he had been wounded, not so much by the loss but because he had never understood what the loss was, only that it was there.

Elenore had been relieved when Sherry Ann left, as though freed from her main competition: a secret revealed—he didn’t like it. How should a man react when confronted with knowledge only God should have?

He wished then that Ollie Jordan were there so he could explain some of these problems while they were still clear in his mind. Intelligence, in a man, is up and down like a river, he would tell Ollie; and usually with the same result, he would add. It flowed best when it was high and swift; it was harmless when it was low; and it was at its worst when it overflowed its banks and covered the country around it with muck. But, of course, he would not say these things, because though the thoughts were there, the words were not. And, too, Ollie Jordan had changed. He was stricken with a sense of duty toward his mad son, Willow. Ollie’s friendship, like Cooty Patterson’s, had slipped away.

Certain facts to face. Howard had not been a good father, especially to his son. He had been absolutely certain, right from the start, that the boy’s prime talent and his future lay in his ability to shoot a rifle. He had never stopped to ask the boy whether he liked to hunt. He had expected him to be a younger, perhaps bookish version of himself—the new model, an improvement of the old model. He had committed the basic mistake of parents everywhere. Now, having realized his mistake, he also realized that he had no idea what his son really wanted, and that despite knowing better, he, Howard, was not going to change; he would still insist that his son be like himself, only a little better—not a great deal better. Sad, he thought. Even his love was a mistake.

Heather was the happiest of his children. And why? he asked himself. Because he and Elenore had largely ignored her. A child needed food, cover, safety, and free time. A child did not need instruction. Instruction was destruction that had already been incurred by the parents, passed on to the child under the guise of instruction.

None of this was true, he thought. It was only thinking.

The problem was, he had not known a father himself, unless he counted Uncle Jack, the possessor of a small range of smart-alecky wisdom and nothing else; a farmer, and a poor farmer at that. Only the bear, whom he did not know, could he think of as a father. Not a particular bear, but the spirit bear that was the remaining spirit of his youth. Maybe if he weren’t so ignorant. Maybe if, like Freddy, he had some education, he could roam libraries and pull together enough facts to go with his thoughts and create . . . what? Well, he didn’t know.

And so Howard brooded, considering the great problems, the deep problems, but not the immediate problem, the real problem—the fact that he was running out of money, and that because of taxes, insurance, oil bills, and debts, the day would come when he could not afford to live in his own house.

“Take time, Howie, but not too much time,” Reason had said only last night on the telephone. “Things of value take time, you’ll say, and by the Christ, you’ll be right most of the time. But not always. I mean, a man can fall for a woman in thirty seconds and can fall on his ass even quicker—or maybe they’re the same thing. Ha-ha. . . . Too much and too little time, hey, Howie? Let’s get to what’s real now—real estate. My latest offer on behalf of my client—you know who!—and my last offer, I might add, is thirty-nine thousand nine hundred. I believe my client has a prejudice against going over forty thousand. And why not? The whole piece is only worth twenty-five thousand and you know it. Howie, I know you well enough by now to know you are not being cagy. You are being stubborn. Child stubborn, bear stubborn. See, we’re talking like friends now. Have you looked at—in the legal parlance, searched—your deed of late? Probably not. Because, like most men, you thought you owned what you thought you owned. I’m sure it has never occurred to you that the stone-wall boundary on your north border may be in some dispute, not as a stone wall, mind you—ha-ha, of that there is no reasonable doubt—but as a boundary. . . .”

He was looking into the green-brown sun-flecked woods that were the eyes of Fralla Pratt.

“Howie,” she said, “you awake?”

“Course I’m awake. Sit down and take the load off your feet,” he shouted, loud even to him, and the drunks turned to look at him, and the Greek behind the bar moved to the Little League baseball bat he kept under the bar to calm the tumultuous. The smooth silver ball of the pinball machine was the only thing in the room moving with its original purpose.

Fralla jumped back, fear on her face—hunted, sexual. “Howie, you ain’t drunk, are you?”

He got ahold of himself.

“No,” he said normally, if not softly, “I ain’t drunk. I was here thinking, and you surprised me.”

She sat down and lit a Kent. He saw now that she was nervous, pained, and that she was going to tell him something. But not yet. First they must indulge in some chitchat. Rule of life, he thought.

She told him she was glad the shop had closed, because she had found work for which she was better suited. She was a waitress at the Jade Dragon. Had he been there? Well, he ought to try it. The food was strange but tasty, and the prices more reasonable than you’d expect. And it wasn’t true what they said about Chinese serving rats from the cellar. Those were chickens. The tips were, well, not great, but okay. The place was bathed in green light, like trees, if—that is—trees could be like jewels. Well, never mind. It was hard to explain. Anyway, it was very restful.

Howard explained that he was not working, but—without lying outright—he made it sound as though his unemployment were by choice, and as though he had no money worries, was in fact a kind of playboy, dallying here at Miranda’s and . . . He didn’t finish. Didn’t have to. Fralla wasn’t listening. The chitchat was over, and she had interrupted him and was telling him about her son.

“I don’t come here, usually—at least not without an escort,” she said. “I ain’t that kind. It’s my Porky. I’ve got to find him. He’s got a gun. I saw it in his pants. He can’t fool his mummy. Howie, I’m so scared.”

She explained that someone had gypped Porky (someone was always gypping Porky), had sold him a car with a sawdust transmission, and now she was afraid Porky would do something bad and go to jail. Jails were terrible places, she said, full of criminals and police. Porky was sensitive; he was unaware; he was trusting. Did Howard know what they would do to Porky in jail? Howard didn’t answer, as indeed he was not expected to. He looked deeply into Fralla’s eyes. They were a forest unto themselves, deep, deep, deep with stone walls, rich green ferns, towering oaks, and sugar maples with streams, and a pond of still brown and white water, with the dimple of a single trout, feeding on the surface, the pattern repeated on the bark of a giant pine, and in the sunlight here and there, butterflies. I love you, he thought he said. But of course he had said nothing. In a single second, as he looked at her eyes, he felt his gloomy mood turn inside out. He was young; he was optimistic.

“Do you see, Howie? Do you see?” she pleaded.

“Oh, yes, yes. Yes indeed.”

“I knew you would.” She was holding his hand.

She ordered a beer. She hoped that Lloyd Hills would come in and tell her where Porky was. Lloyd was Porky’s only friend. Not a friend, really—a companion. And a bad companion at that. (He had served time.) But Porky looked up to him and might confide in him. They waited five minutes, and Fralla began to cry. It was hopeless, she said. Porky must be driving around (he had taken her car), drinking, and building himself up to be hurt. “Help me, Howie.”

With a six-pack of beer between them, Howard and Fralla drove the streets of Keene searching for Porky Pratt. Howard was happy. The beer was making him mellow. He felt as though he had been given something useful to do—find Porky and bring him home to his mother. His only regret was that he had not brought the De Soto to Keene today. He explained to Fralla that he owned many vehicles, several of them registered, and she appeared to be impressed.

Porky was twenty-five, Fralla’s only child. She was a failure, she said, for producing only one child and not raising it to be fit to survive in a hard world. She cried. Howard gave her beer. It was the only thing he could think of to do. She seemed grateful, and blew her nose. Porky was the product of Fralla’s second marriage, Howard gathered, but he couldn’t be sure, because although Fralla talked at length about her private life, she left out key facts and dates, disguised others, and mixed events in time. Porky had worked briefly at the shop, and Howard remembered him as lazy, stupid, unpredictable, destined for trouble.

It was hard to see, she realized, but Porky was saintlike. He had bad dreams; he was frightened of his own bed. Very beautiful. Did Howie understand? No. No, of course not. Only a mother could understand. She cried some more and then lit a Kent.

She asked about his own children, and Howard told her about Freddy’s liking college. “College.” She spoke the word reverently. She explained that Porky might have gone to college, but his teachers in high school had never given him a chance and had forced him to quit at age sixteen. Howard must be very proud of Freddy. Yes, very proud, Howard said, and, saying it, believed it, understanding that he had been proud all along.

They drove around town for almost an hour until it was dark. They stopped at a gas station to get some fuel and to let Howard go to the bathroom. The six-pack was gone, the empties shoved under the front seat. Fralla called her apartment from the gas station, but Porky had not returned. She called the Jade Dragon and told Paul Hui that she was sick and wouldn’t be in tonight.

Then, abruptly, she announced that she was hungry, and Howard understood he was to take her out to eat.

He called Elenore. She was a long time coming to the phone. He told her he had met an old friend from the shop and they were having a few beers and not to worry. The half truth dried his mouth. He waited for her to speak. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies: a favorite expression of Uncle Jack’s. Elenore said she had no intention of worrying and hung up. He was troubled for a moment. It had been too easy. Deception ought to come for some price.

Still, he put the phone call out of his mind. Events were washing over him, and he was very calm. It was as if he had been swimming against a current for days, and now he had given up and let the sea take him where it would.

Howard and Fralla ate supper at the Chrysalis Restaurant, in downtown Keene. It was the oldest restaurant in the city. Years ago it had giant chandeliers that vaguely resembled the pupae of monarch butterflies, but they were gone now, although much of the restaurant was still painted in patterns of orange and black, which most people in town believed to be in honor of the colors of the local high school—specifically, in honor of the football team. In fact, the reverse was true. The founder of the Chrysalis Restaurant, a Yankee named Nathaniel Vernon, had also been a butterfly collector, specializing in monarchs. He had bequeathed the high school a great deal of money in 1880, the only condition being that the school colors henceforth be orange and black. Howard Elman was ignorant of these facts now, but one day he would read them and rejoice inexplicably.

Fralla wept and talked, talked and wept, between bites of a hamburger and some coleslaw on the side. She talked about the wonders of her only son, branching out to include comments about her various husbands and boyfriends.

“I used to dream that Porky would grow up and become a doctor,” she said. “God, he was cute. He had fat, smooth hands, soft as flowers. I was so sweet on the idea of doctors that—Christ forgive me—I married a man for his nickname, ‘Doc’ Pratt. Let me assure you, he wasn’t no doctor, unless you could call him Doctor of Difficulty. Well, ‘Good-bye, Doctor,’ I says. By that time it was too late. The good doctor had a way of making Porky jealous, and he poisoned the idea of a father in Porky no matter who I went with after that. Oh, I admit I spoiled him, but what could I do? He was all I had. When Porky was five years old, he was as touchy as a poodle. ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself; they tell me. But I can’t help it; I do. That’s the way I am.”

Here Fralla wept with such vigor that she couldn’t speak for a whole minute and had to take sips of beer to compose herself. When she resumed speaking, she told about a Marine on a train in North Carolina during the Korean War and how it was hot and they couldn’t get any ice and they had become separated because of this problem, although she didn’t explain how, assuming oddly that Howard already knew, and how even then she was one to laugh loud and cry often, and why was it that the more feelings you had, the harder life was, and the harder life was, the more feelings you had. . . .

Howard nodded, grunted, gestured meaninglessly at her, as though fascinated. In fact, he wasn’t listening or remembering or feeling; he was eating. In his tippy-bird fashion he downed a Western, home fries, pumpkin pie, and a beer, served in a long, elegant restaurant bottle, which he imagined made it taste lighter, bubblier, less alcoholic.

After supper they drove back to Miranda’s in the hope that Porky—or perhaps Lloyd—would show up there. Every few minutes Fralla called her apartment, hoping her son would answer. Howard brought her a handful of dimes, and she put them in front of her on the table, arranging them and rearranging them—nervously, yes, but with some apparent purpose in mind, too, thought Howard, until it struck him that there was a relationship between Fralla’s playing with the dimes and his own cleaning the .308 on the living-room floor. It seemed for a second that he was on the verge of a revelation, but he was not. He verified the connection between arranging dimes and arranging gun parts over and over in his mind, but the significance of it escaped him, indeed seemed farther away than ever.

There was a certain pleasure in discovering relationships, but it didn’t mean you learned anything, he tried to explain to Fralla. She touched his hand and said that Porky had grown up lacking in something. He was like those Indians—not real Indians but India Indians—who never got enough food and felt sick all the time. Porky was starved for a father’s love and his strong hand. She blamed herself. She was always falling in love with “doctors of difficulty.”

Howard bought a cigar. Sometimes, when he reached a certain stage of drinking, a certain pleasure in living that he knew would be short, he bought a cigar.

He thought about the gun. Porky was carrying it in his pants. He didn’t know how yet, but he would trick Porky into turning it over to him. It could be done, he assured himself. After all, everyone else had tricked Porky.

Later Howard would remember that he had said little, that he had listened patiently as Fralla went on and on about Porky and her troubles. In fact, as Howard began to get drunk, he said much, bragging a great deal about his house, his cars, even his trees.

Up the hill from the house there was a flat, boggy spot, he told her. Here grew a stand of old spruce, useless for lumber but valuable in its own way, as a cemetery is valuable. Here moss lay over the ground like a green shroud, and the sun was just a nickel of light through the trees. Here the wind could be heard but not felt. Few animals or plants thrived under those trees. It was a place to visit, but not to live in.

Fralla had a plan, she explained. When Porky slept, she would take the gun outside and drop it in a storm drain. . . .

He had bought a house from a farmer after the war, he said, interrupting her. He used to think the farmer was too stupid to know its true value. But now he had changed his mind. The farmer had simply tired of the place, as one can tire of anything—an old watch, the sound of crows, dust in August, a wife. You could see the fatigue of the farmer in the farm itself. He, Howard Elman, returning GI, dogface, had awakened it, freshened it. He had installed an oil furnace, insulated the attic, put on storm windows, covered the worn, unpainted clapboards with colorful asphalt shingles, added a new roof, which (face it) would have to be replaced soon (this summer, maybe next summer), cleaned out the barn and dumped all the shit in the pigsty and the next spring plowed it under for a vegetable garden (not a truck garden), and prayed to the boulders in the field (the boulders that had conspired to wear out the farmer) and promised them that he would never farm. Never. Did she understand? Did Fralla understand?

Why sure, Howie. She continued where she’d left off. It would be difficult to take the gun from Porky. He didn’t sleep the way normal people did. He had nightmares, fought in his sleep, always losing, it seemed; he was frightened of his bed, the way little children are sometimes. (Howard was nodding, nodding, thinking about how he would tell her of his new truck and how he had dropped a rebuilt engine into it.) After the gun was disposed of, Fralla continued, Porky would be grateful, but not at once. First he would be hurt, and he would want to hurt her, because he would know that she had taken his gun. Once, when he was drunk, she had taken the keys to his motorcycle and he had slapped her and she had cried. And then he had done a beautiful thing—he cried, too. Wasn’t that beautiful?

Yes, yes it was, Howard said. Did he tell her he had a new truck?

It was at this point that Lloyd Hills entered Miranda’s Bar. He failed to see Fralla Pratt before she was upon him, demanding to know where her Porky was. Where was Porky? Where? Fralla demanded. Lloyd, backed against the wall, at first denied having seen Porky that night and then abruptly admitted that yes, he had been with Porky, driving around, having a few beers, and that Porky had gone to Winchester to the Rhythm Ranch to listen to Raymond and Carla Stone and the Seven Little Pebbles. Fralla believed it, and she was calmed. But a moment later she started in again, asking Lloyd about the gun. And Lloyd was scared. Almost kindly he asked her to shut up, explaining that he didn’t know anything about a gun, that he didn’t want to know anything about a gun, because he was on probation and they could send him back to jail. Fralla was satisfied that Porky would do no harm that night. Lloyd left hurriedly, and Fralla gave Howard a big kiss and ordered a beer.

Howard knew they would make love, although even then something in the back of his mind bothered him. Lloyd was lying. And Fralla knew he was lying, and had lied to herself in believing him. It would not be until the next summer that Howard figured out what Lloyd and Porky were up to that night, when he read in the newspaper that they had been arrested for a series of burglaries in the winter.

Howard drove Fralla to her apartment, which was just a short walk from Miranda’s Bar. It had a small kitchen with grease stains on the ceiling. In the living room was a couch, used by Porky as a bed when he was home, a television, a hi-fi, and a dresser. Howard sat on the only easy chair in the room, and Fralla sat on his lap. She kissed him. “I love cheek to cheek,” she said.

She was bigger than Elenore, yet less soft, with more bones, more muscles.

She would not let him see her in the light. She went into the bedroom and closed the door; she ordered him to undress in the bathroom. When he returned, the bedroom was dark, and she was under the covers. He groped for her with all the hunger of a miner groping in a dark mine for what he thinks is gold.

Afterward she made him look away while she put on her clothes. Then she went to the bathroom, staying a long time. She returned fully dressed, holding his pants and a beer. The two of them sat up in bed and watched television.

She put her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her breathing lightly. He was extremely happy. Well, as happy as you can be while drunk, he thought he told her. But she didn’t seem to understand him. He let it pass. They watched a program about African animals, which, Howard gathered, lived in a zoo that went on for miles. Then he was looking at the doorway, filled with a shape.

Porky Pratt was standing there holding a forty-five-caliber service pistol.

“Get away from my mother,” he whispered. Even from across the room, Howard could smell the nervous sweat of the man. He thought immediately of Cooty Patterson and the woman in Cooty’s room. He lurched forward to his feet, almost falling, outraged.

“Your mother is a grown-up woman, a decent woman. And you’ve done nothing better than worry her sick. . . .”

“Shhhhutup.” Fralla stepped in front of him. “Bay-beee, bay-bee,” she said, changing her tone.

Howard understood now that Porky was prepared to kill him.

“Bay-bee, it ain’t nothing. He didn’t hurt Mummy. He didn’t do nothing to Mummy.” She picked up Howard’s shoes, shirt, and coat, and put them in Howard’s hands. Keeping herself between the gun and Howard, she guided him toward the door.

“You get out of here and don’t you come back,” Fralla shouted. He was standing barefoot in the snow, wind crawling along his back like cold insects. It struck him that moments ago he had been drunk and now he was sober.

He drove for a block before stopping to put on his clothes. He was agitated—not nervous exactly, nor shaky, but anxious for combat, full of a lover’s jealousy.

He stopped at the Beaver Street Market and bought a quart of beer. It was almost midnight, and it felt strange to be in the city so late. The streetlights made everything blue. Bay-bee, she had said. It was clear she was protecting not him but the son. He tried now to remember the sex act with her, but it seemed long ago in his mind. The darkness the woman insisted upon had made the act incomplete. It would never be complete. He felt unpleasantly chaste. He drove home, drinking.

The effect of the beer came upon him very suddenly, and by the time he reached home, he was very drunk. He could not negotiate the curve into his driveway, and the pickup came to rest over an old snowbank and then would not move. The tail of the truck was in the road a little. He thought that was funny. He stepped out of the truck and fell down. The sky above whirled blackly. He threw up in the driveway, stood breathing loudly. Then he went back to the pickup and gulped down the last of the beer. It seemed important to dispose of the bottle, as though it were evidence against him. He stood holding it. Finally he pissed into it. (The next day he discovered he had put the bottle in the middle of the road. It was still there, the urine frozen.)

He staggered into the house, too drunk for remorse or guilt or even caution. He began to sing: “Piss in the field, piss on old Mrs. Cutter! Piss in the grave. Horse piss, Jesus H. Christ, piss. Piss on ’em all.”

Still singing, he shut off the lights and walked up the stairs. He checked Freddy’s room—he was gone. He checked Heather’s room—she was asleep. He checked the other rooms—empty, all. He went back to Freddy’s room. “I, ah . . .” He started to say something, but no words came. So he resumed singing. “Piss in the grass, piss in the grave, piss on the stars. Dee dum, do dee.”

He retired to his bed. It was moments before he realized that Elenore was not in the bed. Hm. He giggled. He looked under the bed. “Dee dum, do dee.” He checked the closet, running his hands through the clothes and knocking down a row of hangers. Strange. Had he drunk so much that she had vanished? It seemed like a sound idea, and he pondered it.

He snapped on the light in the hallway. “Elenorrr? Where are you?” No answer.

He went downstairs and paused at the bottom. There he discovered that there was a bundle of laundry on the floor. He pushed at it with his foot and found that it was not laundry but his wife, crumpled up on the floor as though her bones had suddenly turned to water. He wondered whether in his drunkenness he had knocked her down the stairs and killed her.