6 ◆ Charles

WHEN IT GOT LATE and Lyris didn’t come home, Charles left her a note explaining that he had been called out on a job and had taken Micah with him.

He went to the boot room and unlocked a cabinet, from which he took the double-barreled Savage shotgun that, of his three long-barreled guns, most resembled the one held so dear by Farina Matthews. Outside, he opened the door of the pickup and exchanged the gun for the umbrella he kept as a joke in the gun rack. He leaned the umbrella on the porch and went upstairs and into Micah’s room. The boy had fallen asleep in his clothes.

“Wake up,” said Charles. “Wake up. You’re going on a sleepover.”

They drove down the road with the moon cruising lopsided and bright over the town and bridges and fields. Micah slept with an Indian blanket on his legs, his head nodding against the passenger window of the truck. Charles carried him crosswise into his mother’s house, put him on the davenport, and settled the blanket over him. In sleep, the boy’s innocence seemed so absolute that it was hard for Charles to imagine it would not last forever.

In the kitchen, wondering where Colette might be, he saw two black speakers in metal casings on the counter and heard a scrabbling noise coming from the cracked linoleum at his feet. As he watched, a double-stranded wire emerged from a small hole in the floor, frazzled ends extended.

“Mom?” he called.

“I’m in the cellar” came her muffled reply.

He went out behind the house and ducked under a clothesline hung with stiff worn dresses swaying in the wind. The bulkhead doors lay open, spilling pale light on the grass. Charles’s mother was coming slowly up the stairs with wire cutters and electrical tape.

“I wonder if you could help me,” said Charles.

“I wonder if I could.” She stopped on the steps to turn off the light. “What time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty. I got called out on a job, but I’m watching Micah.”

Colette handed up the tape and the cutters. “Joan told me she was going away.”

“When’d you see Joan?”

“She came by yesterday, wanting me to ask Farina Matthews for that gun you like.”

“She knows my mind,” said Charles.

“What good would it do?”

“Probably none,” Charles agreed. “I’ve tried talking to Farina, but I get nowhere.”

“What do you want with it?”

“More than she does, I would think.”

“It didn’t belong to your father anyway. It belonged to your sister Bebe’s father.”

“I know.”

Colette pulled clothespins from the hanging wash and laid the dresses over Charles’s arms. “Say you got it. So what?” she said. She led the way into the house, where Charles dropped the clothes into a wooden basket with broken slats.

“Now if you’ll be so kind as to fetch up those wires,” she said.

“Micah’s in the living room.” When he lifted the guillotine catches of the speakers and secured the wires, music began to play. It sounded like the wailing and mourning of many men.

“What are we listening to?”

“This is the Hilliard Ensemble, singing the ‘Mass for Four Voices’ by Thomas Tallis,” said Colette. She picked up a CD case from the top of the stove and took out the accompanying booklet and read. “‘It is not possible for a man to rise above himself and his humanity,’ says Montaigne. ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’ What do you think? Agree? Disagree?”

The voices faded to silence and then began again. He pictured the singers climbing a steep rock, on top of which waited some fate that they were afraid of but that they had to face or they would never feel right. “It does hit home.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Who’s Montaigne?”

“Some thinker of great degree, from the sound of it.”

“I’m going.”

“What happened, someone’s pipes give out?”

“No one you know.”

“If it’s true, I believe you,” said Colette.

They went to look at Micah, who slept with his face resting on hands that were pressed together in the attitude of prayer.

Charles left the house and closed the door, but he could still hear the voices of the Hilliard Ensemble. He took the roundabout route toward Grafton, where Farina Matthews lived, and plunged his truck down a lane between two cornfields. Then he parked, put his feet up on the seat and his back against the door, drank some whiskey and Coke from a Mason jar, and went to sleep. When he woke, he looked at his watch and took the gun from the rack behind the seat and walked through a field with the sound of leaves rustling in his ears. Some odd hunter he made in the black trough of the nighttime cornrow.

When the field ended, he climbed the fence and walked across the quiet yards of the town. On the back side of the widow’s house, he leaned the shotgun against the clapboard, slit the screen above the weatherboard with a utility knife, and separated the hook from the eye that secured the screen. He rested the screen against the house, raised the sash, and went in, first one leg, then his torso, and then the other leg, not forgetting the shotgun, which he held in one hand, bringing it sideways through the open window. Mrs. Matthews’s black Labrador came padding and panting into the room. He scratched the dog on the back of the neck. It collapsed, melted to the floor, turned on its side. Charles stood up and looked around. It had been a long time since he had stolen something, but he had no trouble finding the old thrill of it. In the wrong house, at the wrong time, he felt alive. But this wasn’t stealing, anyway; it was more like trading.

In her bed, Farina Matthews dreamed in that familiar mode in which something that happened long ago is happening again, except with new fantastic touches that constitute the dream’s imaginary or psychological aspect. She knew it was a dream while having it; it was lucid dreaming. She and the Reverend Matthews were driving along in their Edsel with the deep seats and pushbutton transmission, a car ahead of its time, although the dream reconstructed an incident from so long ago that by now both the car’s actual time and the time it had been ahead of had well passed. They were going up to the hospital, where he would visit sick parishioners and she would distribute gifts to the new mothers. In those days hospitals did not hustle the women out the door as they do now but kept them languishing for days. The bewildered and isolated mothers were always happy to receive a basket of soaps and blankets and pacifiers, tied with ribbon. In the dream, however, the baskets were full of the kitchen rags from beneath Mrs. Matthews’s sink.

On the way to the hospital they encountered a hitchhiker, and the reverend pulled over. An open trailer was hooked to the car, and she saw the man walking up past its wooden side. He had short hair and melancholy eyes and was dressed like a laborer. His name was Sandover. He was Charles’s stepfather.

“Afternoon,” said the reverend. “Where you headed?”

“Morrisville.”

“Get in. What did you put in the trailer?” Farina’s husband was always so observant. He could see rain on the horizon of what looked to anyone else like a clear day.

“A shotgun.”

“What are you going to do in Morrisville?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I got laid off at the molasses plant, and I heard they might be planning to call some back.”

“With the gun, though.”

“The gun I hope to register at a pawnshop.”

The reverend drove along for a while, then said, “I’ll give you forty for it.”

“This is unexpected.”

“I’ll give you sixty dollars and you can leave it right there in the trailer and save yourself going to the pawnshop.”

“The thing is, I’ll want it back when the work starts up again and I can redeem the price.”

“That’s a promise.”

“It’s a good gun. It’s light and it looks smart and it hardly kicks at all. And I think you’ll find that it shoots accurate. But I should tell you it’s a four-ten. It’s not really a beginner’s gun, although many consider it to be one, without thinking it through. Maybe you don’t want to hear about this.”

“No, it’s fascinating.”

“Well, some are of the opinion that you give a small-bore gun to a kid who’s just starting off in their shooting. The problem is they won’t be able to hit anything with it, and whatever they do hit, they might just wing, so that it gets down in the brush and runs, or drags along till it meets up with a fox or a hawk. Not that you want something too massive. A twenty-gauge isn’t a bad idea. But the four-ten is more of a gun for the specialist.”

The reverend did not like to have anyone alter the position of his rearview mirror, so Farina turned to look at the back seat. Jack Sandover had opened one of the baskets and draped the rags up and down his arms. Now her son was in the back seat too, not grown, but still a child. “Stop the car,” her boy said. “At the rate we’re going, I’ll never get my doctorate.”

Farina’s husband pulled over on the shoulder and they all got out to look in the trailer. The shotgun rested on a bed of straw. Sandover picked it up and began dismantling it, handing out the pieces of wood and metal. Then the car began moving, with the child behind the wheel. Farina ran after the car, dropping shotgun parts on the pavement while Sandover laughed. The steering wheel emerged from the window, for it had come off in the boy’s hand. The Edsel veered from one side of the highway to the other, and thick black smoke rolled from the chassis.

The dream had turned ominous, and Farina woke herself by force of will. She got up and went to the bathroom for a drink of water. Waves of guilt seemed to travel down her back; what sort of guilt? she wondered. She looked in the mirror, noting sleep’s contradictory effects. It made her look older but feel younger, with all the fears and anxieties of a young woman, uncertain of herself and what life would bring. Yet she told herself to wake up, because most of what life would bring had already arrived. She had her health and her income and her collection of miniature lighthouses, which seemed an ironic commentary on her never having seen a real one. Once there had been a fake lighthouse at a restaurant on the lake. Even here, in the middle of so much land, everyone thought of the sea, as if in genetic recollection of the Flood, looking out from the island of Ararat with perhaps a cardinal bird on each shoulder, the red male and the fawn female, if cardinals lived in that faraway place.

She drained the water glass and the dream came back to her in fragments — the rags on the man’s arms, the crumbling gun, the sunlight sliding like oil over the Edsel’s lavender hood. She did not know why the night had to be so heartbreaking, unless its simple loneliness served as an intimation of the final solitude. But she was not alone, or at least something unusual was going on. She heard the rapid thump of the dog’s leg, its involuntary scratching, and she heard intermittent footfalls followed by long silences, as if someone were stepping on stones in a pool of water that rose to reclaim each rock once it had been disturbed, and she heard random small metallic clicks and scrapes that seemed to underscore the material nature of our lives. She had laughed last spring, reading of the high school’s plan for a substance-free prom. She had imagined the disembodied seniors floating like wandering souls in a bottomless miasmal gymnasium.

Farina could not defend herself without a weapon, so she went to the closet and selected a cedar clothes hanger that was good stout wood on all three sides, with the image of an evergreen burned into its apex, below the hook. She moved silently, while conceding to herself that the correct approach might be to turn on the lights and make all kinds of noise. On the other hand, if the intruder were after her and not her television set or the good silver that came from Rainy Lake, then creating a racket would only be playing a high card to his inevitable trump. It surprised her how calm she felt. She did not want to lose the Rainy Lake silver, which was packed in a zippered burgundy case so well made that the forks could only be wrenched from their felt slots.

“Take the television,” she whispered. “Take the television and go.”

Charles lifted his stepfather’s shotgun from the rack on which it rested and broke open the barrels to make sure no shells were inside. He laid the gun on the davenport before putting the other one in its place. Then he heard Mrs. Matthews moving slowly down the stairs. He could not get the shotgun and himself out the window before her arrival, so he sat down in a chair to wait for her. Best not to go running around, because a house with one gun may well have two. More shootings occur in mutual panic and confusion than when one of the parties is sitting in a chair. He might even turn on a light; yes, that would be a good idea. There was a lamp on a table next to the chair. It had one of those elusive cord switches, and as he groped up and down the cord for the notched wheel, Farina Matthews came into the room. Moving swiftly past the chair, she backhanded him on the bridge of the nose with a fragrant mallet. Tears fell from his eyes and his nose ran and his head filled with some awful decaying smell, but still he did not get up. He covered his face with his hands.

“Don’t hit anymore,” he said. “It’s Charles. Charles the plumber.”

She reached for the lamp cord, and the light came on. “You’re bleeding.”

He breathed into the cave of his hands. “I came back for that shotgun.”

“I dreamed of it,” she said. “Let’s get you out in the kitchen and off these rugs.”

Farina Matthews wrapped ice cubes in a rag from beneath the sink, and Charles sat in a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor, like someone getting a haircut. He dropped his head back and pressed the numbing cloth to his nose.

“Is it broken?” she said.

“It was broken a long time ago.”

“I gave you a clout, didn’t I?”

“Let me see that coat hanger.”

She handed it to him, and he held it up to the light. The arms were curved and smooth, and the bottom rail was chamfered in with Phillips-head screws.

“They ain’t made the coat that will fall off this,” he said, giving it back. “You ever play softball?”

“No.”

“You ought to take it up.”

“I ought to call the police, if I had any sense . . . I did used to play tennis.”

“You got the swing for it.”

“Listen, I remembered something about that gun,” she said. “You know how you said you didn’t have any right to it? Well, it turns out you do, in a way. I hate to say it, but I’ve always told the truth.”

He lowered the ice. “How do you figure?”

“My husband lent your stepfather sixty dollars while hold- ing the gun as surety. That’s how we got it. So pay me the money and take the gun and we’ll say we’re even. I never want to see you again, but I’m sure I will.”

“I always thought he just gave it to him.”

“That’s not how it happened.”

“Well, you know better than me.” He stood up and got out his billfold, and gave her ten extra for the slit screen. She opened the freezer and stuffed the bills into a coffee can.

“Come,” she said, and they went back into the living room, where she took down the gun Charles had brought to her house. Then she turned and saw the other gun lying on the davenport. “Wait a minute.”

“I can explain this,” said Charles, and he did.

“Did you think I wouldn’t know the difference?” She held the shotgun and looked from one gun to the other. “Actually, I might not have.”

“I tried for a match. The one I brought is a larger gauge and it has the checkering on the stock. My stepfather’s is older, and you can see that in the way the wood’s gone sort of honey-colored. And his has the thumb safety, behind the barrels.”

“Which is which?”

“The one you’ve always had is on the davenport. The other one you can keep, if you want something over the fireplace.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Well, no, but I’m just saying. I’ve got extras.”

Charles left the house through the door, with a shotgun in each hand. The stars were bright, with an airplane crossing beneath. He imagined what the people in the plane were doing. A woman was running away, a man was blowing his nose, a child was reading a book upside down. Meanwhile, the pilot tried to remember a song he used to know. Whatever people did down here, they were doing up there. And then they were gone. Unlike Joan, Charles could see no patterns in the stars: no heroes, no animals. Only a random pelting of space.

“I’m here,” he said. “Where are you?”

And by you he did not mean Joan, and he did not mean Lyris. He didn’t know who or what he meant.

He’d always realized too late the ones he wanted and what it would take to keep them.

Farina Matthews sat up long after Charles had gone. The dream that set the record straight about the gun had brought back memories of her dead husband. She sat in the chair where Charles had sat, holding a poem in a frame. It was called “Everything Comes” and had been written by Thomas Hardy about the house in England, Max Gate, that had given her house its name:

The house is bleak and cold

Built so new for me!

All the winds upon the wold

Search it through for me;

No screening trees abound,

And the curious eyes around

Keep on view for me.

Driving up to a roadhouse called the Clay Pipe Inn, Charles saw Jerry’s car. He pulled in, but the tavern door was locked.

“We’re closed,” said someone behind the door. “Everybody went home.”

“You got my brother in there.”

“Charles?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh, Christ, hold on.”

The bolt shook free and the door opened. Jerry was sitting at the bar rattling dice in a cup. He turned to look when his brother came in. “What happened to you?” he said.

Charles told him all about it. He offered to go get their stepfather’s gun from the pickup to show Jerry, but the bartender said guns were not allowed in the tavern, which seemed reasonable, in the abstract.

The phone rang in its cubbyhole beneath the liquor bottles, and the bartender answered. “We’re closed,” he said again.

Jerry held up his hands to indicate that he was not taking calls. Kenny, the bartender, smiled. “Yeah . . . he’s here.” He set the phone on the bar facing Jerry and ducked under the cord.

“Hello?” said Jerry. “What’s up?” He put down the cup of dice and picked up a felt-tip pen. Cradling the phone with his shoulder, he wrote Octavia P in bleeding blue letters on a paper napkin. “Listen, honey, I understand that and I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be calling me. The bar has locked its doors. By rights I shouldn’t even be here . . . No, that’s true. Have you tried that thing I told you about? Just put your foot flat to the floor . . . Well, how do you know if you haven’t tried it? . . . No . . . I’m saying no . . .” Staring into space, Jerry covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Would you guys move off or something? Give me some privacy.”

Charles took up the pen and drew a donkey on the napkin, and then he and the bartender went to play pinball. Jerry leaned close to the wooden rail of the bar and spoke into the phone while shielding his mouth from their eyes. A handprinted sign on the wall above the pinball machine said:

If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

— William James, Psychologist

“You know what he’s doing?” said the bartender. He drew back on the plunger of the game, the theme of which was the adventures of Oliver North. Painted on the glass façade, Fawn Hall slipped documents into her boots.

Charles shook his head.

“Talking her to sleep.”

“No lie.”

“I wish it was. I’ve seen it before. It’s the saddest thing imaginable.”

“What’s he supposed to be, her boyfriend?”

“She calls him and he tells stories into the phone, and beyond that I ask no questions.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It ain’t natural, whatever it is.”

Jerry hung up the phone and sat for a moment before coming over, waving the paper napkin. “What’s this you drew — a dog?”

“It’s a jackass,” said Charles.

“I don’t see that.” He showed the drawing to the bartender. “What do you think, Kenny?”

“A zebra would have been my guess.”

“You’re blind,” said Charles.

“Well, what are these marks supposed to be?”

“Obviously you know nothing about commercial art.”

“Maybe not, but I know a zebra from a jackass.”

“And what does that make Jerry?”

“Oh, well, he’s a jackass. But this, I would have to say, is a zebra.”

“We’re friends,” said Jerry. “You guys don’t even know what grade she’s in.”

“You, Gerald, are walking on an earthquake.”

“Remains to be seen.”

Charles looked at the pinball machine. Oliver North glared, gap-toothed, patriotic to a fault. “What does she want with a friend like you?”

“I don’t understand all of it,” said Jerry. “People think she’s so together, but she’s what you might call a bundle of insecurities.”

“I’m taking my guns and going.”

The remark reminded them all that it was time to go home. In the parking lot, Charles showed the old shotgun to Jerry, who picked it up and sighted idly along the ridge between the barrels.

“Really this should go to Bebe. He was her dad.”

“I feel like he was mine too,” said Charles.

“Yes, because he lasted the longest. We must have been born under bad stars.”

“I’ll tell you who was born under the bad star, and that’s Colette.”

“Yes,” said Jerry. “I think you’re right.”

Charles went home. He could not resist opening and closing the barn doors to admire the work that he and Lyris and Micah had done. They had made themselves a team; it hadn’t gone too badly. Hearing the doors, the goat came down from the back porch and paced in the long grass. She snorted softly, favoring one of her legs.

“I just may have bought myself a lame goat,” said Charles out loud.

Still no Lyris. Her bed was empty under a quilt of green and blue. He called the sheriff’s office and left a message and then sat at the kitchen table cleaning the shotgun. He unclipped the barrels from the stock and worked a patch of flannel through each one with a dowel rod. It was five minutes to two. He oiled the flannel and ran it through again. Then he took the cloth and cleaned the breechblock, the triggers, the guard, and the stock. The phone rang. It was Earl the deputy, reporting that Lyris hadn’t been in any accidents. Charles thanked him and hung up. The two parts of the gun lay on the table. He wondered if she had run away, but then thought not, given the good day they’d had together. So he figured she must have gone for a ride, and if her absence worried him — as it did — it was a small sample of the worry he had given to others when he was young and even when he was older. Or, while he was on the subject, the worry he must’ve caused Farina Matthews tonight before she smacked him with the hanger. He thought that Montaigne had got it right: what he did not admire in himself he was in no position to get rid of. It was ahead of him, always, guiding his moves. He made a cup of tea, cut another square of flannel with a pair of rusted scissors, and cleaned the gun again.