Bear and His Daughter (13 page)

“You are undermining me, Chas. You are making things impossible for me and I just don’t know.” She drank and winced. “I’m not going to stay through another drunk. I’m telling you right now. I haven’t got it in me. I’ll die.”

He did not want to look at her. He watched the flakes settle against the glass of the kitchen door. “Do what you feel the need of,” he said.

“I just can’t take it,” she said. Her voice was not scolding but measured and reasonable. “It’s February. And I went to court this morning and lost Vopotik.”

Once again, he thought, my troubles are going to be obviated by those of the deserving poor. He said, “Which one was that?”

“Don’t you remember them? The three-year-old with the broken fingers?”

He shrugged. Grace sipped her whiskey.

“I told you. I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’”

“Yes,” he said, “I remember now.”

“You ought to see the Vopotiks, Chas. The woman is young and obese. She’s so young that for a while I thought I could get to her as a juvenile. The guy is a biker. They believe the kid came from another planet to control their lives. They believe this literally, both of them.”

“You shouldn’t get involved that way,” Elliot said. “You should leave it to the caseworkers.”

“They scared their first caseworker all the way to California. They were following me to work.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Of course I didn’t.” To Elliot’s surprise, his wife poured herself a second whiskey. “You know how they address the child? As ‘dude.’ She says to it, ‘Hey, dude.’” Grace shuddered with loathing. “You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning, noon and night, but you can’t get anybody for that these days.”

“People must really hate it,” Elliot said, “when somebody tells them they’re not treating their kids right.”

“They definitely don’t want to hear it,” Grace said. “You’re right.” She sat stirring her drink, frowning into the glass. “The Vopotik child will die, I think.”

“Surely not,” Elliot said.

“This one I think will die,” Grace said. She took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and looked at him forlornly. “The situation’s extreme. Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

“I would think,” Elliot said, “that would be the one question you didn’t ask.”

“But you do,” she said. “You wonder: Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?” She put a hand to her hair and shook her head as if in confusion. “Some of these folks, my God, the poor things cannot put Wednesday on top of Tuesday to save their lives.”

“It’s a trick,” Elliot agreed, “a lot of them can’t manage.”

“And kids are small, they’re handy and underfoot. They make noise. They can’t hurt you back.”

“I suppose child abuse is something people can do together” Elliot said.

“Some kids are obnoxious. No question about it.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Elliot said.

“Maybe you should stop complaining. Maybe you’re better off. Maybe your kids are better off unborn.”

“Better off or not,” Elliot said, “it looks like they’ll stay that way.”

“I mean our kids, of course,” Grace said. “I’m not blaming you, understand? It’s just that here we are with you drunk again and me losing Vopotik, so I thought why not get into the big unaskable questions.” She got up and folded her arms and began to pace up and down the kitchen. “Oh,” she said when her eye fell upon the bottle, “that’s good stuff, Chas. You won’t mind if I have another? I’ll leave you enough to get loaded on.”

Elliot watched her pour. So much pain, he thought; such anger and confusion. He was tired of pain, anger and confusion; they were what had got him in trouble that very morning.

The liquor seemed to be giving him a perverse lucidity when all he now required was oblivion. His rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze was good for rage. Booze could keep it burning through the darkest night.

“What happened in court?” he asked his wife.

She was leaning on one arm against the wall, her long, strong body flexed at the hip. Holding her glass, she stared angrily toward the invisible fields outside. “I lost the child,” she said.

Elliot thought that a peculiar way of putting it. He said nothing.

“The court convened in an atmosphere of high hilarity. It may be Hate Month around here but it was buddy-buddy over at Ilford Courthouse. The room was full of bikers and bikers’ lawyers. A colorful crowd. There was a lot of bonding.” She drank and shivered. “They didn’t think too well of me. They don’t think too well of broads as lawyers. Neither does the judge. The judge has the common touch. He’s one of the boys.”

“Which judge?” Elliot asked.

“Buckley. A man of about sixty. Know him? Lots of veins on his nose?”

Elliot shrugged.

“I thought I had done my homework,” Grace told him. “But suddenly I had nothing but paper. No witnesses. It was Margolis at Valley Hospital who spotted the radiator burns. He called us in the first place. Suddenly he’s got to keep his reservation for a campsite in St. John. So Buckley threw his deposition out.” She began to chew on a fingernail. “The caseworkers have vanished—one’s in L.A., the other’s in Nepal. I went in there and got run over. I lost the child.”

“It happens all the time,” Elliot said. “Doesn’t it?”

“This one shouldn’t have been lost, Chas. These people aren’t simply confused. They’re weird. They stink.”

“You go messing into anybody’s life,” Elliot said, “that’s what you’ll find.”

“If the child stays in that house,” she said, “he’s going to die.”

“You did your best,” he told his wife. “Forget it.”

She pushed the bottle away. She was holding a water glass that was almost a third full of whiskey.

“That’s what the commissioner said.”

Elliot was thinking of how she must have looked in court to the cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising that things had gone against her.

He walked over to the window and faced his reflection again. “Your optimism always surprises me.”

“My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn’t optimism.”

“No?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I forget,” she said.

“Maybe it’s your religious perspective. Your sense of the divine plan.”

She sighed in exasperation. “Look, I don’t think I want to fight anymore. I’m sorry I threw the sugar at you. I’m not your keeper. Pick on someone your own size.”

“Sometimes,” Elliot said, “I try to imagine what it’s like to believe that the sky is full of care and concern.”

“You want to take everything from me, do you?” She stood leaning against the back of her chair. “That you can’t take. It’s the only part of my life you can’t mess up.”

He was thinking that if it had not been for her he might not have survived. There could be no forgiveness for that. “Your life? You’ve got all this piety strung out between Monadnock and Central America. And look at yourself. Look at your life.”

“Yes,” she said, “look at it.”

“You should have been a nun. You don’t know how to live.”

“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I stopped doing counseling. Because I’d rather talk the law than life.” She turned to him. “You got everything I had, Chas. What’s left I absolutely require.”

“I swear I would rather be a drunk,” Elliot said, “than force myself to believe such trivial horseshit.”

“Well, you’re going to have to do it without a straight man,” she said, “because this time I’m not going to be here for you. Believe it or not.”

“I don’t believe it,” Elliot said. “Not my Grace.”

“You’re really good at this,” she told him. “You make me feel ashamed of my own name.”

“I love your name,” he said.

The telephone rang. They let it ring three times, and then Elliot went over and answered it.

“Hey, who’s that?” a good-humored voice on the phone demanded.

Elliot recited their phone number.

“Hey, I want to talk to your woman, man. Put her on.”

“I’ll give her a message,” Elliot said.

“You put your woman on, man. Run and get her.”

Elliot looked at the receiver. He shook his head. “Mr. Vopotik?”

“Never you fuckin’ mind, man. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to the skinny bitch.”

Elliot hung up.

“Is it him?” she asked.

“I guess so.”

They waited for the phone to ring again and it shortly did.

“I’ll talk to him,” Grace said. But Elliot already had the phone.

“Who are you, asshole?” the voice inquired. “What’s your fuckin’ name, man?”

“Elliot,” Elliot said.

“Hey, don’t hang up on me, Elliot. I won’t put up with that. I told you go get that skinny bitch, man. You go do it.”

There were sounds of festivity in the background on the other end of the line—a stereo and drunken voices.

“Hey,” the voice declared. “Hey, don’t keep me waiting, man.”

“What do you want to say to her?” Elliot asked.

“That’s none of your fucking business, fool. Do what I told you.”

“My wife is resting,” Elliot said. “I’m taking her calls.”

He was answered by a shout of rage. He put the phone aside for a moment and finished his glass of whiskey. When he picked it up again the man on the line was screaming at him. “That bitch tried to break up my family, man! She almost got away with it. You know what kind of pain my wife went through?”

“What kind?” Elliot asked.

For a few seconds he heard only the noise of the party. “Hey, you’re not drunk, are you, fella?”

“Certainly not,” Elliot insisted.

“You tell that skinny bitch she’s gonna pay for what she did to my family, man. You tell her she can run but she can’t hide. I don’t care where you go—California, anywhere—I’ll get to you.”

“Now that I have you on the phone,” Elliot said, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Promise you won’t get mad?”

“Stop it!” Grace said to him. She tried to wrench the phone from his grasp, but he clutched it to his chest.

“Do you keep a journal?” Elliot asked the man on the phone. “What’s your hat size?”

“Maybe you think I can’t get to you,” the man said. “But I can get to you, man. I don’t care who you are, I’ll get to you. The brothers will get to you.”

“Well, there’s no need to go to California. You know where we live.”

“For God’s sake,” Grace said.

“Fuckin’ right,” the man on the telephone said. “Fuckin’ right I know.”

“Come on over,” Elliot said.

“How’s that?” the man on the phone asked.

“I said come on over. We’ll talk about space travel. Comets and stuff. We’ll talk astral projection. The moons of Jupiter.”

“You’re making a mistake, fucker.”

“Come on over,” Elliot insisted. “Bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid. Don’t be embarrassed if your head’s a little small.”

The telephone was full of music and shouting. Elliot held it away from his ear.

“Good work,” Grace said to him when he had replaced the receiver.

“I hope he comes,” Elliot said. “I’ll pop him.”

He went carefully down the cellar stairs, switched on the overhead light and began searching among the spiderwebbed shadows and fouled fishing line for his shotgun. It took him fifteen minutes to find it and his cleaning case. While he was still downstairs, he heard the telephone ring again and his wife answer it. He came upstairs and spread his shooting gear across the kitchen table. “Was that him?”

She nodded wearily. “He called back to play us the chain saw.”

“I’ve heard that melody before,” Elliot said.

He assembled his cleaning rod and swabbed out the shotgun barrel. Grace watched him, a hand to her forehead. “God,” she said. “What have I done? I’m so drunk.”

“Most of the time,” Elliot said, sighting down the barrel, “I’m helpless in the face of human misery. Tonight I’m ready to reach out.”

“I’m finished,” Grace said. “I’m through, Chas. I mean it.”

Elliot rammed three red shells into the shotgun and pumped one forward into the breech with a satisfying report. “Me, I’m ready for some radical problem-solving. I’m going to spray that no-neck Slovak all over the yard.”

“He isn’t a Slovak,” Grace said. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes closed. Her face was chalk white.

“What do you mean?” Elliot demanded. “Certainly he’s a Slovak.”

“No he’s not,” Grace said.

“Fuck him anyway. I don’t care what he is. I’ll grease his ass.”