“Kill the motherfucker!” Bob declared.
He served two years for breaking, entering, and assault with intent to kill. When he got out at eighteen, he married the first woman who was nice to him, a half Indian waitress at a local diner, named Joanne. She was five years his senior and on the rebound from a broken marriage, with three boys of her own. Over the next three years, they had two more children. It was a stormy marriage. Bob was sure that the first child — a son — was not his. The second, a little girl named after him, Bobbi-Dee, he loved as much as anything in his life. Bob and Joanne spent the winter months in Florida, living near his father, within the tangles of an extended southern country family, in which he was by no means the only one in and out of trouble. Summer, at first with Joanne, but later on his own, he’d move to Texas and work the shrimp boats that ran up and down the Gulf, from Port Arthur to Brownsville. Aransas Pass, a few miles seaward of Corpus Christi, was the place he usually started from. He was surprised I’d ever heard of the tiny tidewater town. But it had figured in a story by Theodore Sturgeon, “A Way of Thinking.” Thanks to the Sturgeon magic, I felt I already knew the place. Shrimp fishing, he explained, was a pretty wild life and attracted some pretty wild men. In Freeport, Texas, another Gulf town, he was sure he was still wanted for a night of barroom fights and drunken vandalism that had involved some robberies on the part of some of the other guys. Not him — but the law didn’t know that. For the last year, both in Texas and Florida, he’d been in so much minor trouble, now in jail for drunk and disorderly charges, now with the police called in to stop an argument between him and Joanne that had gotten to furniture throwing, he was sure she was happy to be shut of him. When a brother-in-law of his, another ex-convict, had decided to take off north with a young prostitute, Bob had decided to come along. Maybe he could start in at something new — and, to his disbelief and astonishment, he had.
This was the history into which he was sending his letter. (And fifty dollars.) He asked us to read it. Addressed to his stepmother, simply and straightforwardly it said he loved them, that he knew from time to time he’d been a burden, but now he was settled in New York. He had a job in a tool-and-die shop. He’d made some good friends here — not the kind who would get him in trouble. He hoped to send more money soon. Later on in the summer, he might even come down and visit a few days. He’d be glad to see them. He hoped they’d be happy to see him.
A week later, I took out a letter from behind our tarnished brass mailbox door. It was addressed to “Bobby” in a childishly sloping hand and postmarked Florida. I took it upstairs. That evening, when he got home from work, I was cooking string beans and told him he’d had a letter from home.
“Where?”
“On the table.”
He sat down and opened it. Marilyn came in while he was reading it. “Bob’s family wrote back,” I said, while she was hanging up her coat.
“Oh,” she said, “what do they say?”
A few minutes later, Bob threw the letter down on the floor and started for the back room. Marilyn frowned at me. Bob hesitated in the doorway. He didn’t look back. But he said, “You wanna read it? It’s from my stepmother. Go ahead.” Then he went into the bathroom.
Dear Bobby,
Things have been real hard since you left but not too hard and I guess we all feel better since you run off, Joanne’s boys are getting used to you not being here but Bobbi-Dee cried a lot at first, she don’t now. We got your letter and was good to hear things were settling down for you. Your dad said you should of written before and was very mad, you still part of the family, which is true, Bobby, thank you for the money, but that’s what he said. This is what we all feel, I guess, you said you could send us some more money maybe, if we wanted you to come visit, and you sure should send some more money, after what you done when you left, but not if you coming back. We don’t want you to come back and would like not to have the money if that’s what it means.
That’s very hard, I know, but I hope you can write me again if you want, your letter got everybody here and daddy all upset. I hope you don’t come here,
Sincerely,
— Momma
“And my stepmomma,” Bob said, coming back from the bathroom, “is the one in the family who likes me!”
I don’t have the letter today. But I feel sure of my reconstruction: a few months later, when I was writing a story called “The Star-Pit,” to create a similar letter sent to one of my characters, I put Bob’s letter on the green metal wing of the typing stand and, sentence by sentence, translated it, as carefully as I could, into the text of my story. I worked on that section half a day; thus twenty-two years on, with the story text beside me, it is fairly easy to translate it back.
Now Bob pulled on his shirt and announced, “I don’t think I’m gonna eat tonight. I’m gonna go out and get me fuckin’ drunk!”
Marilyn looked distressed. Bob saw her, frowned. Then he went to her and put his wrists on her shoulders. “Don’t worry. I didn’t say I was gonna kill myself!” He smiled. She didn’t. “I just said I’m gonna get drunk.”
“But I don’t want you — ”
“But I do want to,” he said. “You all can come along with me, if you like. I’ll probably need somebody to get me home!”
“I’ve got my linguistics class tonight …” Marilyn said, in a very small voice.
“I’ll go out with you,” I said.
“Then come on.”
So most of dinner was put back in the icebox.
Bob and I went out.
We went to three small, dark, neighborhood bars, none of which I’d been in before. In the first two, we drank silent glasses of beer, Bob putting away two to my one. At the third place, Bob finally began to talk, very much as he usually did, about his adventures hitchhiking in the south, about hustling in the north, or working along the Gulf Coast. Near midnight, he seemed pretty much back to normal. It was only when we got up to leave that I realized, as he almost overturned his barstool, that he really was unsteady. Once, on the corner, he nearly fell. But by the time we were going upstairs together, we were laughing about something.
He hadn’t drunk anything else but beer.
When we came in the door, Marilyn, reading at the table, looked up with delighted relief. I started to explain the joke to her. But suddenly Bob lurched into the back. A moment later, a retching came from the bathroom.
“Oh, Jesus …” Marilyn said. We both went in after him, where he’d thrown up, half on the bathroom floor and half in the toilet. We got him (and the floor) cleaned up, then into bed.
That night he slept in the middle, holding on to both of us. About dawn, I woke to hear him crying. A couple of hugs, and we were all back to sleep.
The next morning, when he came out while I was putting up the coffee, I asked him: “Are you going to work today?”
“Sure,” he said. “I feel like shit. But ain’t that the point of gettin’ drunk?”
51.4. Perhaps the best emblem of what was good about the relationship was that it survived all this to return to days and nights that were, for all of us, as satisfying as anything in the first three — a kind of pleasure that to detail any more would simply be meaninglessly repetitious, indulgently salacious.