“Why aren’t you going back to work?”
He answered her honestly. He said, “I don’t know.”
“Oh. Huh,” she said. “You can’t even try?”
“I’ve gone through that. I want to start over. It’s just about that simple. I’m not doing anybody any good. I’m going to be alone for a while. Does that make any sense?”
“No.”
“It must, Suzanne. It must make some.”
“It doesn’t, because you’re going back to see that cunt.”
“That’s not what she is.”
“You’re right. She’s something worse than that. I just can’t find the words.”
“Please, Suzanne.”
“I just thought the whores around the embassy would have gotten this out of your system by now.” She said this in a small voice.
“Suzanne.”
“I never complained about that.”
“I know.”
She sat quietly for a moment, looking pale. “It wasn’t easy for me to not complain. You see, I’m not an up-to-date girl. Your whores got on my nerves. But I saw it as a form of insurance. Evidently it was not sufficient insurance. Because you’re on the track of the queen of them all, aren’t you? A lot of good it did me. I suppose I should have fucked myself a wide swath, but my heart wasn’t in it, despite the fact that you don’t have a single friend who didn’t try. I guess that should make me feel stupid, but somehow it doesn’t. It fills me with awe to see you throw away everything you have that’s any good.”
“You’ve been storing this up, darling.”
“Will you be going straight back to Montana?”
All Lucien had for this was a long, feckless sigh, like an addict asked why he was killing himself with drugs. When Suzanne started crying, he stared at her as if across a state line. She shook and shook as she cried, sitting straight up in the wooden chair; she didn’t make a sound. She doesn’t want to wake up James, Lucien thought; but why can’t I stop myself? I have the soul of a lab rat.
Lucien was alone for one day on the slave-breeding farm. He was in a kind of shock, but he hoped that shock would be one merely of transition rather than injury. If I’m so bad, he thought, they are better off without me and I have done them a good turn. With that, his spirits began to rise minutely. Sexually speaking, he thought, haven’t I been a real success? I’ve spent thousands of hours with my ass flying and sweat spraying off me. In almost every case my partner pumped and sprayed with comparable ardor, sometimes when paid to do so. I’ve been the real article. He looked around himself with fear, confusion and dismay: God almighty!
That day too, he sat on the toilet daydreaming of Emily, when his half-erect penis aligned itself between the porcelain rim and the seat, and fired urine halfway across the room before he could clamp off his sphincter. It’s a monster, he thought, I know that much. Poor Old Dick, he called it. Me and Poor Old Dick are going home. Lucien was running absolutely blind. He had wanted to be in the country he loved once more. He wanted to paint, though he set only a modest store by that; he just wanted to get a few things down, like the Indians who traced the red ocher elk on the walls of the old hobo caves outside of town. He felt that his life had transformed him into a functionary. He felt lost, and he knew with absolute sincerity that Emily was certainly no cunt.
While he waited for his plane, he read the only thing he could find, a back number of a gardeners’ magazine, an October issue. Inside, and perhaps it was his mood, he discovered that nothing is more autumnal than a bad writer discussing apples. And too, there was something about wild geese mating for life that made him wish to return to waterfowling and shoot till his barrels were hot.
Things started to become more final to him as the plane flew north. There was nothing beneath it but ocean, and in a short while the sun went down. When you are drafted in wartime, he thought, it must feel like this. You are called and you will serve. No, that wasn’t quite it. The point was, he longed to feel the fatality of his action. When he had given his boy a hug, it was clear that with little more emphasis the child would fall straight into the middle of this. So their departure was without emphasis, staged as a clear fork in the road. They would be moved by forces to differing sections of the grid.
In any event, the process of stain had begun; he would not have known what to call it as it sank deeper inside him, nor been able to assess the turbulence and damage that was to come; but it was certainly shame.
3
Later he would think it was early in the morning. He was going back some, but it would have had to have been before breakfast. He remembered he could smell someone cleaning a cat box at the hired man’s, and there was an empty barbecue-chip bag, the big size, flapping away in the sage that grew to the door. Toward the house, a cat was curved over the wheel of the manure-spreader, staring for mice in the shadows under the box. And there was a sprinkler whirling on a yellow stool out in the garden; he supposed it must have run all night. It had taken Lucien nearly a month to make it from the county courthouse to here, an hour’s drive. Lucien’s unexpected appearance at Emily’s hearing had been their longest and most intimate time together in all those years.
Lucien pressed the door shut on the sedan. There were willows alongside the garden, and birds continually speared down from them into the berries. There were numerous signs she was taking care of the place. He had put all he could borrow into making her bail; so these small sedentary indications were important. Still, it would take more than that to assure her being around on trial date.
The heat wave had gone overnight into the first edge of fall; the Crazies had come out of the shimmer and stood clear and separate above the foothills. Lucien was going to be there until the trial in late fall. He had an assortment of sporting trifles and equipage: rod, rifle, shotgun and a small pointer bitch curled in the sedan, a dog perfectly trained for the silence of the high plains hotels he had frequented. Such hotels exclude the barking, ill-mannered dog, some any at all. For the latter, Lucien had prepared the dog, Sadie, by teaching her to travel short distances, silently, in the bottom of his duffel. Her reward was silent dancing behind the locked door of the room, for high-protein baby snacks from the grocer. Watching her soar amiably past the television and the cheap furniture for midair interceptions of miniature sausages always prepared Lucien for the long sleeps he required to stalk the plains by day. It consoled him as his solitude deepened.
Lucien realized the hired man was looking at him. He must have been thereabouts all along, as he came up past the log chicken house with a border collie close at heel and silent. He was a tall man in his thirties with a mustache waxed off to points, and severely undershot boots. He was what they called around there “punchy”-looking — from cow-puncher, not punch-drunk. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to say anything. So Lucien told him who he was there to see, and he said about what. And Lucien told him that he had made Emily’s bail. The man indicated the house.
Lucien must not have been comfortable, because instead of going directly to the house, he began to pile his belongings next to the sedan, as though he were going to move things indoors by installments. Then that was done and he put one foot in front of the other, clumped across the plank porch, thankful that the slant of morning light made the windows blank, and knocked. No one came, but Sadie appeared from the sedan and burned around the porch as though it were the lobby of a crazily permissive hotel.