Facing the Music Read online

  FACING THE MUSIC

  STORIES BY

  Larry Brown

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  for Mary Annie

  CONTENTS

  Facing the Music

  Kubuku Rides (This Is It)

  The Rich

  Old Frank and Jesus

  Boy and Dog

  Julie: A Memory

  Samaritans

  Night Life

  Leaving Town

  The End of Romance

  Larry Brown's Letters from Tula

  About the Author

  Praise for Facing the Music

  Also by Larry Brown

  FACING THE MUSIC

  For Richard Howorth

  I cut my eyes sideways because I know what’s coming. “You want the light off, honey?” she says. Very quietly.

  I can see as well with it as without it. It’s an old movie I’m watching, Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. This character he’s playing, this guy will do anything to get a drink. He’d sell children, probably, to get a drink. That’s the kind of person Ray’s playing.

  Sometimes I have trouble resting at night, so I watch the movies until I get sleepy. They show them—all-night movies—on these stations from Memphis and Tupelo. There are probably a lot of people like me, unable to sleep, lying around watching them with me. I’ve got remote control so I can turn it on or off and change channels. She’s stirring around the bedroom, doing things, doing something—I don’t know what. She has to stay busy. Our children moved away and we don’t have any pets. We used to have a dog, a little brown one, but I accidentally killed it. Backed over its head with the station wagon one morning. She used to feed it in the kitchen, right after she came home from the hospital. But I told her, no more. It hurts too much to lose one.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say, finally, which is not what I’m thinking.

  “That’s Ray Milland,” she says. “Wasn’t he young then.” Wistful like.

  So he was. I was too once. So was she. So was everybody. But this movie is forty years old.

  “You going to finish watching this?” she says. She sits on the bed right beside me. I’m propped up on the TV pillow. It’s blue corduroy and I got it for Christmas last year. She said I was spending so much time in the bed, I might as well be comfortable. She also said it could be used for other things, too. I said what things?

  I don’t know why I have to be so mean to her, like it’s her fault. She asks me if I want some more ice. I’m drinking whiskey. She knows it helps me. I’m not so much of a bastard that I don’t know she loves me.

  Actually, it’s worse than that. I don’t mean anything against God by saying this, but sometimes I think she worships me.

  “I’m okay,” I say. Ray has his booze hanging out the window on a string—hiding it from these booze-thieves he’s trying to get away from—and before long he’ll have to face the music. Ray can never find a good place to hide his booze. He gets so drunk he can’t remember where he hid it when he sobers up. Later on, he’s going to try to write a novel, pecking the title and his name out with two fingers. But he’s going to have a hard time. Ray is crazy about that booze, and doesn’t even know how to type.

  She may start rubbing on me. That’s what I have to watch out for. That’s what she does. She gets in bed with me when I’m watching a movie and she starts rubbing on me. I can’t stand it. I especially can’t stand for the light to be on when she does it. If the light’s on when she does it, she winds up crying in the bathroom. That’s the kind of husband I am.

  But everything’s okay, so far. She’s not rubbing on me yet. I go ahead and mix myself another drink. I’ve got a whole bottle beside the bed. We had our Christmas party at the fire station the other night and everybody got a fifth. My wife didn’t attend. She said every person in there would look at her. I told her they wouldn’t, but I didn’t argue much. I was on duty anyway and couldn’t drink anything. All I could do was eat my steak and look around, go get another cup of coffee.

  “I could do something for you,” she says. She’s teasing but she means it. I have to smile. One of those frozen ones. I feel like shooting both of us because she’s fixed her hair up nice and she’s got on a new nightgown.

  “I could turn the lamp off,” she says.

  I have to be very careful. If I say the wrong thing, she’ll take it the wrong way. She’ll wind up crying in the bathroom if I say the wrong thing. I don’t know what to say. Ray’s just met this good-looking chick—Jane Wyman?—and I know he’s going to steal a lady’s purse later on; I don’t want to miss it. I could do the things Ray Milland is doing in this movie and worse. Boy. Could I. But she’s right over here beside my face wanting an answer. Now. She’s smiling at me. She’s licking her lips. I don’t want to give in. Giving in leads to other things, other givings.

  I have to say something. But I don’t say anything.

  She gets up and goes back over to her dressing table. She picks up her brush. I can hear her raking and tearing it through her hair. It sounds like she’s ripping it out by the roots. I have to stay here and listen to it. I can understand why people jump off bridges.

  “You want a drink?” I say. “I can mix you up a little bourbon and Coke.”

  “I’ve got some,” she says, and she lifts her can to show me. Diet Coke. At least a six-pack a day. The refrigerator’s crammed full of them. I can hardly get to my beer for them. I think they’re only one calorie or something. She thinks she’s fat and that’s the reason I don’t pay enough attention to her, but it isn’t.

  She’s been hurt. I know she has. You can lie around the house all your life and think you’re safe. But you’re not. Something from outside or inside can reach out and get you. You can get sick and have to go to the hospital. Some nut could walk into the station one night and kill us all in our beds. You can read about things like that in the paper any morning you want to. I try not to think about it. I just do my job and then come home and try to stay in the house with her. But sometimes I can’t.

  Last week, I was in this bar in town. I’d gone down there with some of these boys we’re breaking in, rookies. Just young boys, nineteen or twenty. They’d passed probation and wanted to celebrate, so a few of us older guys went with them. We drank a few pitchers and listened to the band. It was a pretty good band. They did a lot of Willie and Waylon stuff. I’m thinking about all this while she’s getting up and moving around the room, looking out the windows.

  I don’t go looking for things—I don’t—but later on, well, there was this woman in there. Not a young woman. Younger than me. About forty. She was sitting by herself. I was in no hurry to go home. All the boys had gone, Bradshaw, too. I was the only one of the group left. So I said what the hell. I went up to the bar and bought two drinks and carried them over to her table. I sat down with them and I smiled at her. And she smiled back. In an hour we were over at her house.

  I don’t know why I did it. I’d never done anything like that before. She had some money. You could tell it from her house and things. I was a little drunk, but I know that’s no excuse. She took me into her bedroom and she put a record on, some nice slow orchestra or something. I was lying on the bed the whole time, knowing my wife was at home waiting up on me. This woman stood up in the middle of the room and started turning. She had her arms over her head. She had white hair piled up high. When she took off her jacket, I could tell she had something nice underneath. She took off her shirt, and her breasts were like something you’d see in a movie, deep long things you might only glimpse in a swimming suit. Before I knew it, she was on the bed with me, putting one of them in my mouth.

  “You sure you don’t want a drink?” I say.

  “I want you,” she says, and I don’t know wha
t to say. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking out the window. Ray’s coming out of the bathroom now with the lady’s purse under his arm. But I know they’re all going to be waiting for him, the whole club. I know what he’s going to feel. Everybody’s going to be looking at him.

  When this woman got on top of me, the only thing I could think was: God.

  “What are we going to do?” my wife says.

  “Nothing,” I say. But I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve got these big soft nipples in my mouth and I can’t think of anything else. I’m trying to remember exactly how it was.

  I thought I’d be different somehow, changed. I thought she’d know what I’d done just by looking at me. But she didn’t. She didn’t even notice.

  I look at her and her shoulders are jerking under the little green gown. I’m always making her cry and I don’t mean to. Here’s the kind of bastard I am: my wife’s crying because she wants me, and I’m lying here watching Ray Milland, and drinking whiskey, and thinking about putting another woman’s breasts in my mouth. She was on top of me and they were hanging right over my face. It was so wonderful, but now it seems so awful I can hardly stand to think about it.

  “I understand how you feel,” she says. “But how do you think I feel?”

  She’s not talking to me; she’s talking to the window and Ray is staggering down the street in the hot sunshine, looking for a pawnshop so he can hock the typewriter he was going to use to write his novel.

  A commercial comes on, a man selling dog food. I can’t just sit here and not say anything. I have to say something. But, God, it hurts to.

  “I know,” I say. It’s almost the same as saying nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.

  We’ve been married for twenty-three years.

  “You don’t know,” she says. “You don’t know the things that go through my mind.”

  I know what she’s going to say. I know the things going through her mind. She’s seeing me on top of her with her legs over my shoulders, her legs locked around my back. But she won’t take her gown off anymore. She’ll just push it up. She never takes her gown off, doesn’t want me to see. I know what will happen. I can’t do anything about it. Before long she’ll be over here rubbing on me, and if I don’t start, she’ll stop and wind up crying in the bathroom.

  “Why don’t you have a drink?” I say. I wish she’d have a drink. Or go to sleep. Or just watch the movie with me. Why can’t she just watch the movie with me?

  “I should have just died,” she says. “Then you could have gotten you somebody else.”

  I guess maybe she means somebody like the friendly woman with the nice house and the nice nipples.

  I don’t know. I can’t find a comfortable place for my neck. “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “Well it’s true. I’m not a whole woman anymore. I’m just a burden on you.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Well you don’t want me since the operation.”

  She’s always saying that. She wants me to admit it. And I don’t want to lie anymore, I don’t want to spare her feelings anymore, I want her to know I’ve got feelings too and it’s hurt me almost as bad as it has her. But that’s not what I say. I can’t say that.

  “I do want you,” I say. I have to say it. She makes me say it.

  “Then prove it,” she says. She comes close to the bed and she leans over me. She’s painted her brows with black stuff and her face is made up to where I can hardly believe it.

  “You’ve got too much makeup on,” I whisper.

  She leaves. She’s in the bathroom scrubbing. I can hear the water running. Ray’s got the blind staggers. Everybody’s hiding his whiskey from him and he can’t get a drink. He’s got it bad. He’s on his way to the nuthouse.

  Don’t feel like a lone ranger, Ray.

  The water stops running. She cuts the light off in there and then she steps out. I don’t look around. I’m watching a hardware store commercial. Hammers and Skilsaws are on the wall. They always have this pretty girl with large breasts selling their hardware. The big special this week is garden hose. You can buy a hundred feet, she says, for less than four dollars.

  The TV is just a dim gray spot between my socks. She’s getting on the bed, setting one knee down and pulling up the hem of her gown. She can’t wait. I’m thinking of it again, how the woman’s breasts looked, how she looked in her shirt before she took it off, how I could tell she had something nice underneath, and how wonderful it was to be drunk in that moment when I knew what she was going to do.

  It’s time now. She’s touching me. Her hands are moving, sliding all over me. Everywhere. Ray is typing with two fingers somewhere, just the title and his name. I can hear the pecking of his keys. That old boy, he’s trying to do what he knows he should. He has responsibilities to people who love him and need him; he can’t let them down. But he’s scared to death. He doesn’t know where to start.

  “You going to keep watching this?” she says, but dreamy-like, kissing me, as if she doesn’t care one way or the other.

  I don’t say anything when I cut the TV off. I can’t speak. I’m thinking of how it was on our honeymoon, in that little room at Hattiesburg, when she bent her arms behind her back and slumped her shoulders forward, how the cups loosened and fell as the straps slid off her arms. I’m thinking that your first love is your best love, that you’ll never find any better. The way she did it was like she was saying, here I am, I’m all yours, all of me, forever. Nothing’s changed. She turns the light off, and we reach to find each other in the darkness like people who are blind.

  KUBUKU RIDES

  (This Is It)

  Angel hear the back door slam. It Alan, in from work. She start to hide the glass and then she don’t hide the glass, he got a nose like a bloodhound and gonna smell it anyway, so she just keep sitting on the couch. She gonna act like nothing happening, like everything cool. Little boy in the yard playing, he don’t know nothing. He think Mama in here watching Andy Griffith. Cooking supper. She better now anyway. Just wine, beer, no whiskey, no vodka. No gin. She getting well, she gonna make it. He have to be patient with her. She trying. He no rose garden himself anyway.

  She start to get up and then she don’t, it better if she stay down like nothing going on. She nervous, though. She know he looking, trying to catch her messing up. He watch her like a hawk, like somebody with eyes in the back of they head. He don’t miss much. He come into the room and he see her. She smile, try to, but it wrong, she know it wrong, she guilty. He see it. He been out loading lumber or something all day long, he tired and ready for supper. But ain’t no supper yet. She know all this and ain’t said nothing. She scared to speak because she so guilty. But she mad over having to feel guilty, because some of this guilt his fault. Not all his fault. But some of it. Maybe half. Maybe less. This thing been going on a while. This thing nothing new.

  “Hey honey,” she say.

  “I done unloaded two tons of two-by-fours today,” he say.

  “You poor baby,” she say. “Come on and have a little drink with Mama.” That the wrong thing to say.

  “What?” he say. “You drinkin again? I done told you and told you and told you.”

  “It’s just wine,” she say.

  “Well woman how many you done had?”

  “This just my first one,” she say, but she lying. She done had five and ain’t even took nothing out the deep freeze. Wind up having a turkey pot pie or something. Something don’t nobody want. She can’t cook while she trying to figure out what to do. Don’t know what to do. Ain’t gonna drink nothing at all when she get up. Worries all day about drinking, then in the evening she done worried so much over not drinking she starts in drinking. She in one of them vicious circles. She done even thought about doing away with herself, but she hate to leave her husband and her little boy alone in the world. Probably mess her little boy up for the rest of his life. She don’t want to die anyway. Angel ain’t but about thirty years old. She still
good-looking, too. And love her husband like God love Jesus. Ain’t no answer, that’s it.

  “Where that bottle?” he say.

  Now she gonna act like she don’t know what he talking about. “What bottle?” she say.

  “Hell, woman. Bottle you drinkin from. What you mean what bottle?”

  She scared now, frightened of his wrath. He don’t usually go off. But he go off on her drinking in a minute. He put up with anything but her drinking.

  “It’s in the fridge,” she say.

  He run in there. She hear him open the door. He going to bust it in a million pieces. She get up and go after him, wobbly. She grabbing for doors and stuff, trying to get in there. He done took her money away, she can’t have no more. He don’t let her write no checks. He holding the bottle up where she can see it good. The contents of that bottle done trashed.

  He say, “First glass my ass.”

  “Oh, Alan,” she say. “That a old bottle.”

  “Old bottle? That what you say, old bottle?”

  “I found it,” she say.

  “Lyin!” he say.

  She shake her head no no no no no. She wanting that last drink because everything else hid.

  “What you mean goin out buying some more?” he say. He got veins standing up in his neck. He mad, he madder than she ever seen him.

  “Oh, Alan, please,” she say. She hate herself begging like this. She ready to get down on her knees if she have to, though.

  “I found it,” she say.

  “You been to the liquor store. Come on, now,” he say. “You been to the liquor store, ain’t you?”

  Angel start to say something, start to scream something, but she see Randy come in from the front yard. He stop behind his daddy. Mama fixing to get down in the floor for that bottle. Daddy yelling stuff. Ain’t no good time to come in. He eight year old but he know what going on. He tiptoe back out.

  “Don’t pour it out,” she say. “Just let me finish it and I’ll quit. Start supper,” she say.