The Night In Question (12 page)

Phil Dove got Miller’s mother so mixed up she forgot how good their life was. She refused to see what she was ruining. “You’ll be leaving anyway,” she told him. “You’ll be moving on, next year or the year after”—which showed how wrong she was about Miller, because he would never
have left her, not ever, not for anything. But when he said this she laughed as if she knew better, as if he wasn’t serious. He was serious, though. He was serious when he promised he’d stay, and he was serious when he promised he’d never speak to her again if she married Phil Dove.

She married him. Miller stayed at a motel that night and two nights more, until he ran out of money. Then he joined the Army. He knew that would get to her, because he was still a month shy of finishing high school, and because his father had been killed while serving in the Army. Not in Vietnam but in Georgia, in an accident. He and another man were dipping mess kits in a garbage can full of boiling water and somehow the can fell over on him. Miller was six at the time. Miller’s mother hated the Army after that, not because her husband was dead—she knew about the war he was going to, she knew about ambushes and mines—but because of the way it happened. She said the Army couldn’t even get a man killed in a decent fashion.

She was right, too. The Army was just as bad as she thought, and worse. You spent all your time waiting around. You lived a completely stupid existence. Miller hated every minute of it, but there was pleasure in his hatred because he believed that his mother must know how unhappy he was. That knowledge would be a grief to her. It would not be as bad as the grief she had given him, which was spreading from his heart into his stomach and teeth and everywhere else, but it was the worst grief he had power to cause, and it would serve to keep her in mind of him.

Kaiser and Lebowitz are describing hamburgers to each other. Their idea of the perfect hamburger. Miller tries not to listen but their voices go on, and after a while he can’t think of anything but beefsteak tomatoes and Gulden’s
mustard and steaming, onion-stuffed meat crisscrossed with black marks from the grill. He is at the point of asking them to change the subject when Kaiser turns and says, “Think you can handle some chow?”

“I don’t know,” Miller says. “I guess I could get something down.”

“We were talking about a pit stop. But if you want to keep going, just say the word. It’s your ball game. I mean, technically we’re supposed to take you straight back to base.”

“I could eat,” Miller says.

“That’s the spirit. At a time like this you’ve got to keep your strength up.”

“I could eat,” Miller says again.

Lebowitz looks up into the rearview mirror, shakes his head, and looks away again.

They take the next turn-off and drive inland to a crossroads where two gas stations face two restaurants. One of the restaurants is boarded up, so Lebowitz pulls into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen across the road. He turns the engine off, and the three men sit motionless in the sudden silence. Then Miller hears the distant clang of metal on metal, the caw of a crow, the creak of Kaiser shifting in his seat. A dog barks in front of a rust-streaked trailer next door. A skinny white dog with yellow eyes. As it barks the dog rubs itself, one leg raised and twitching, against a sign that shows an outspread hand below the words “KNOW YOUR FUTURE.”

They get out of the jeep and Miller follows Kaiser and Lebowitz across the parking lot. The air is warm and smells of oil. In the gas station across the road a pink-skinned man in a swimming suit is trying to put air in the tires of his bicycle, jerking at the hose and swearing loudly. Miller pushes his tongue against the broken bridge, lifting it gently. He wonders if he should try eating a hamburger, and
decides it can’t hurt as long as he’s careful to chew on the other side of his mouth.

But it does hurt. After the first couple of bites Miller shoves his plate away. He rests his chin on one hand and listens to Lebowitz and Kaiser argue about whether people can actually tell the future. Lebowitz is talking about a girl he used to know who had ESP. “We’d be driving along,” he says, “and out of the blue she would tell me exactly what I was thinking about. It was unbelievable.”

Kaiser finishes his hamburger and takes a drink of milk. “No big deal,” he says. “I could do that.” He pulls Miller’s hamburger over to his side of the table and takes a bite out of it.

“Go ahead,” Lebowitz says. “Try it. I’m not thinking about what you think I’m thinking about.”

“Yes you are.”

“All right, now I am,” Lebowitz says, “but I wasn’t before.”

“I wouldn’t let a fortune-teller get near me,” Miller says. “The way I see it, the less you know the better off you are.”

“More vintage philosophy from the private stock of W. P. Miller,” Lebowitz says. He looks at Kaiser, who is eating the last of Miller’s hamburger. “Well, how about it? I’m up for it if you are.”

Kaiser chews ruminatively. He swallows and licks his lips. “Sure,” he says. “Why not? As long as Miller here doesn’t mind.”

“Mind what?” Miller asks.

Lebowitz stands and puts his sunglasses back on. “Don’t worry about Miller. Miller’s cool. Miller keeps his head when men all around him are losing theirs.”

Kaiser and Miller get up from the table and follow Lebowitz outside. Lebowitz is bending down in the shade of a dumpster, wiping off his boots with a handkerchief.
Shiny blue flies buzz around him. “Mind what?” Miller repeats.

“We thought we’d check out the prophet,” Kaiser tells him.

Lebowitz straightens up and the three of them start across the parking lot.

“I’d actually kind of like to get going,” Miller says. When they reach the jeep he stops, but Lebowitz and Kaiser walk on. “Now listen,” Miller says, and skips a little to catch up. “I have a lot to do,” he says to their backs. “I have to get home.”

“We know how broken up you are,” Lebowitz tells him. He keeps walking.

“This won’t take too long,” Kaiser says.

The dog barks once and then, when it sees that they really intend to come within range of his teeth, runs around the trailer. Lebowitz knocks on the door. It swings open, and there stands a round-faced woman with dark, sunken eyes and heavy lips. One of her eyes has a cast; it seems to be watching something beside her while the other looks down at the three soldiers at her door. Her hands are covered with flour. She is a gypsy, an actual gypsy. Miller has never seen a gypsy before, but he recognizes her as surely as he would recognize a wolf if he saw one. Her presence makes his blood pound in his veins. If he lived in this place he would come back at night with other men, all of them yelling and waving torches, and drive her out.

“You on duty?” Lebowitz asks.

She nods, wiping her hands on her skirt. They leave chalky streaks on the bright patchwork. “All of you?” she asks.

“You bet,” Kaiser says. His voice is unnaturally loud.

She nods again and turns her good eye from Lebowitz to Kaiser, then to Miller. Gazing at Miller, she smiles and
rattles off a string of strange sounds, words from another language or maybe a spell, as if she expects him to understand. One of her front teeth is black.

“No,” Miller says. “No, ma’am. Not me.” He shakes his head.

“Come,” she says, and stands aside.

Lebowitz and Kaiser mount the steps and disappear into the trailer. “Come,” the woman repeats. She beckons with her white hands.

Miller backs away, still shaking his head. “Leave me alone,” he tells her, and before she can answer he turns and walks away. He goes back to the jeep and sits in the driver’s seat, leaving both doors open to catch the breeze. Miller feels the heat drawing the dampness out of his fatigues. He can smell the musty wet canvas overhead and the sourness of his own body. Through the windshield, covered with mud except for a pair of grimy half-circles, he watches three boys solemnly urinating against the wall of the gas station across the road.

Miller bends down to loosen his boots. Blood rushes to his face as he fights the wet laces, and his breath comes faster and faster. “Goddamn laces,” he says. “Goddamn rain.” He gets the laces untied and sits up, panting. He stares at the trailer. Goddamn gypsy.

He can’t believe those two fools actually went inside there. Yukking it up. Playing around. That shows how stupid they are, because anybody knows that you don’t play around with fortune-tellers. There’s no predicting what a fortune-teller might say, and once it’s said, no way of keeping it from happening. Once you hear what’s out there it isn’t out there anymore, it’s here. You might as well open your door to a murderer as to the future.

The future. Didn’t everybody know enough about the future already, without rooting around for the details? There is only one thing you have to know about the future:
everything gets worse. Once you have that, you have it all. The specifics don’t bear thinking about.

Miller certainly has no intention of thinking about the specifics. He peels off his damp socks and massages his crinkled white feet. Now and then he glances up toward the trailer, where the gypsy is pronouncing fate on Kaiser and Lebowitz. Miller makes humming noises. He will not think about the future.

Because it’s true—everything gets worse. One day you’re sitting in front of your house poking sticks into an anthill, hearing the chink of silverware and the voices of your mother and father in the kitchen; then, at some moment you can’t even remember, one of those voices is gone. And you never hear it again. When you go from today to tomorrow you’re walking into an ambush.

What lies ahead doesn’t bear thinking about. Already Miller has an ulcer, and his teeth are full of holes. His body is giving out on him. What will it be like when he’s sixty? Or even five years from now? Miller was in a restaurant the other day and saw a fellow about his own age in a wheelchair, getting fed soup by a woman who was talking to some other people at the table. This boy’s hands lay twisted in his lap like gloves somebody dropped there. His pants had crawled up halfway to his knees, showing pale wasted legs no thicker than bones. He could barely move his head. The woman feeding him did a lousy job because she was too busy blabbing to her friends. Half the soup went onto the boy’s shirt. Yet his eyes were bright and attentive. Miller thought: That could happen to me.

You could be going along just fine and then one day, through no fault of your own, something could get loose in your bloodstream and knock out part of your brain. Leave you like that. And if it didn’t happen now, all at once, it was sure to happen slowly later on. That was the end you were bound for.

Someday Miller is going to die. He knows that, and he prides himself on knowing it when everyone else only pretends to, secretly believing that they will live forever. But this is not the reason the future is unthinkable to him. There is something else worse than that, something not to be considered, and he will not consider it.

He will not consider it. Miller leans back against the seat and closes his eyes, but his effort to trick himself into somnolence fails; behind his eyelids he is wide awake and fidgety with gloom, probing against his will for what he is afraid to find, until, with no surprise at all, he finds it. A simple truth. His mother is also going to die. Just like him. And there is no telling when. Miller cannot count on her to be there to come home to, and receive his pardon, when he finally decides that she has suffered enough.

Miller opens his eyes and looks at the raw shapes of the buildings across the road, their outlines lost through the grime on the windshield. He closes his eyes again. He listens to himself breathe and feels the familiar, almost muscular ache of knowing that he is beyond his mother’s reach. That he has put himself where she cannot see him or speak to him or touch him in that thoughtless way of hers, resting her hands on his shoulders as she stops behind his chair to ask him a question or just rest for a moment, her mind somewhere else. This was supposed to be her punishment, but somehow it has become his own. He understands that it has to stop. It is killing him.

It has to stop now, and as if he has been planning for this day all along Miller knows exactly what he will do. Instead of reporting to the Red Cross when he gets back to base, he will pack his bag and catch the first bus home. No one will blame him for this. Even when they discover the mistake they’ve made they still won’t blame him, because it would be the natural thing for a grieving son to do. Instead
of punishing him they will probably apologize for giving him a scare.

He will take the first bus home, express or not. It will be full of Mexicans and soldiers. Miller will sit by a window and drowse. Now and then he will come up from his dreams to stare out at the passing green hills and loamy ploughland and the stations where the bus puts in, stations cloudy with exhaust and loud with engine roar, where the people he regards through his window will look groggily back at him as if they too have just come up from sleep. Salinas. Vacaville. Red Bluff. When he gets to Redding Miller will hire a cab. He will ask the driver to stop at Schwartz’s for a few minutes while he buys some flowers, and then he will ride on home, down Sutter and over to Serra, past the ball park, past the grade school, past the Mormon church. Right on Belmont. Left on Park. Leaning over the seat, saying Farther, farther, a little farther, that’s it, that one, there.

The sound of voices behind the door as he rings the bell. Door swings open, voices hush. Who are these people? Men in suits, women wearing white gloves. Someone stammers his name, strange to him now, almost forgotten. W-W-Wesley. A man’s voice. Miller stands just inside the door, breathing perfume. Then the flowers are taken from his hand and laid with other flowers on the coffee table. He hears his name again. It is Phil Dove, moving toward him from across the room. He walks slowly, with his arms raised, like a blind man.

Wesley, he says. Thank God you’re home.

G
ilbert saw her first. This was in late June, at a party.

She was sitting alone in the backyard, stretched out on a lawn chair, when he went to get a beer from the cooler. He tried to think of something to say to her, but she seemed complete in her solitude and he was afraid of sounding intrusive and obvious. Later he saw her again, inside—a pale, dark-haired girl with dark eyes and lipstick smears on her teeth. She was dancing with Gilbert’s best friend, Rafe. The night after that she was with Rafe when he picked Gilbert up to go to another party, and again the night after that. Her name was Mary Ann.