Free Andre Dubus: Selected Stories by Andre Dubus Page A

Sunnyhurst today getting cigarettes and aspirin, and there he was. She can’t even go out for cigarettes and aspirin. It’s killing her.’
    ‘Come back in for a drink.’
    Matt looked at his watch. Ruth would be asleep. He walked with Willis back into the house, pausing at the steps to look at the starlit sky. It was a cool summer night; he thought vaguely of the Red Sox, did not even know if they were at home tonight; since it happened he had not been able to think about any of the small pleasures he believed he had earned, as he had earned also what was shattered now forever: the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood. They went inside. Willis’s wife, Martha, had gone to bed hours ago, in the rear of the large house which was rigged with burglar and fire alarms. They went downstairs to the game room: the television set suspended from the ceiling, the pool table, the poker table with beer cans, cards, chips, filled ashtrays, and the six chairs where Matt and his friends had sat, the friends picking up the old banter as though he had only been away on vacation; but he could see the affection and courtesy in their eyes. Willis went behind the bar and mixed them each a Scotch and soda; he stayed behind the bar and looked at Matt sitting on the stool.
    ‘How often have you thought about it?’ Willis said.
    ‘Every day since he got out. I didn’t think about bail. I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about him for years. She sees him all the time. It makes her cry.’
    ‘He was in my place a long time last night. He’ll be back.’
    ‘Maybe he won’t.’
    ‘The band. He likes the band.’
    ‘What’s he doing now?’
    ‘He’s tending bar up to Hampton Beach. For a friend. Ever notice even the worst bastard always has friends? He couldn’t get work in town. It’s just tourists and kids up to Hampton. Nobody knows him. If they do, they don’t care. They drink what he mixes.’
    ‘Nobody tells me about him.’
    ‘I hate him, Matt. My boys went to school with him. He was the same then. Know what he’ll do? Five at the most. Remember that woman about seven years ago? Shot her husband and dropped him off the bridge in the Merrimack with a hundred pound sack of cement and said all the way through it that nobody helped her. Know where she is now? She’s in Lawrence now, a secretary. And whoever helped her, where the hell is he?’
    ‘I’ve got a .38 I’ve had for years. I take it to the store now. I tell Ruth it’s for the night deposits. I tell her things have changed: we got junkies here now too. Lots of people without jobs. She knows though.’
    ‘What does she know?’
    ‘She knows I started carrying it after the first time she saw him in town. She knows it’s in case I see him, and there’s some kind of a situation—’
    He stopped, looked at Willis, and finished his drink. Willis mixed him another.
    ‘What kind of a situation?’
    ‘Where he did something to me. Where I could get away with it.’
    ‘How does Ruth feel about that?’
    ‘She doesn’t know.’
    ‘You said she does, she’s got it figured out.’
    He thought of her that afternoon: when she went into Sunnyhurst, Strout was waiting at the counter while the clerk bagged the things he had bought; she turned down an aisle and looked at soup cans until he left.
    ‘Ruth would shoot him herself, if she thought she could hit him.’
    ‘You got a permit?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I do. You could get a year for that.’
    ‘Maybe I’ll get one. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just stop bringing it to the store.’
    Richard Strout was twenty-six years old, a high school athlete, football scholarship to the University of Massachusetts where he lasted for almost two semesters before quitting in advance of the final grades that would have forced him not to return. People then said: Dickie can do the work; he just doesn’t want to. He came home and did construction work for his father but refused his father’s offer to learn the