Dusk and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer. Oh, God, she said, oh, Lord, oh God our Father. She could see the long stretch of road that came up from the highway, the unpaved surface very pale. Someone would come up that road and not turn off. The disastrous road. She had been driving it that day with her husband. There was something he had been meaning to tell her, Henry said, his head tilted back at a funny angle. He was making a change in his life. Her heart took a skip. He was breaking off with Mara, he said.
    There was a silence.
    Finally she said, “With who?”
    He realized his mistake. “The girl who … in the architect’s office. She’s the draftsman.”
    “What do you mean, breaking it off?” It was hard for her to speak. She was looking at him as one would look at a fugitive.
    “You knew about that, didn’t you? I was sure you knew. Anyway it’s over. I wanted to tell you. I wanted to put it all behind us.”
    “Stop the car,” she said. “Don’t say any more, stop here.”
    He drove alongside her trying to explain but she was picking up the biggest stones she could find and throwing them at the car. Then she cut unsteadily across the fields, the sage bushes scratching her legs.
    When she heard him drive up after midnight she jumped from bed and shouted from the window, “No, no! Go away!”
    “What I never understood is why no one told me,” she used to say. “They were supposed to be my friends.”
    Some failed, some divorced, some got shot in trailers like Doug Portis who had the excavation business and was seeing the policeman’s wife. Some like her husband moved to Santa Barbara and became the extra man at dinner parties.
    It was growing dark. Help me, someone, help me, she kept repeating. Someone would come, they had to. She tried not to be afraid. She thought of her father who could explain life in one sentence, “They knock you down and you get up. That’s what it’s all about.” He recognized only one virtue. He would hear what had happened, that she merely lay there. She had to try to get home, even if she went only a little way, even a few yards.
    Pushing with her palms she managed to drag herself, calling the horse as she did. Perhaps she could grab a stirrup if he came. She tried to find him. In the last of the light she saw the fading cottonwoods but the rest had disappeared. The fence posts were gone. The meadows had drifted away.
    She tried to play a game, she wasn’t lying near the ditch, she was in another place, in all the places, on Eleventh Street in that first apartment above the big skylight of the restaurant, the morning in Sausalito with the maid knocking on the door and Henry trying to call in Spanish, not now, not now! And postcards on the marble of the dresser and things they’d bought. Outside the hotel in Haiti the cabdrivers were leaning on their cars and calling out in soft voices, Hey, blanc , you like to go to a nice beach? Ibo beach? They wanted thirty dollars for the day, they said, which meant the price was probably about five. Go ahead, give it to him, she said. She could bethere so easily, or in her own bed reading on a stormy day with the rain gusting against the window and the dogs near her feet. On the desk were photographs: horses, and her jumping, and one of her father at lunch outside when he was thirty, at Burning Tree. She had called him one day—she was getting married, she said. Married, he said, to whom? A man named Henry Vare, she said, who is wearing a beautiful suit, she wanted to add, and has wonderful wide hands. Tomorrow, she said.
    “Tomorrow?” He sounded farther away. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “God bless you,” he said.
    That summer was the one they came here—it was where Henry had been living—and bought the place past the Macraes’. All year they fixed up the house and Henry started his landscaping business. They had their own world. Up through the fields in nothing but shorts, the earth warm under their feet,