Scare Tactics (30 page)

“I’m a lawyer,” he said stubbornly.

“Jim, let’s get down to hard facts now, baby. Certainly you’re a lawyer. You have a degree to prove it and you’ve passed all those difficult state examinations. I’m proud of you. But you don’t have to beat your brains out in some little office for coolie scale the next fifteen years to prove a point. I want a few things out of life, Jim.”

“You’ve got the house, his car, and his insurance.”

“His house, his car. And damned little insurance. I want a house of my own, a
new
one. The agency is mine, Jim, and I’m not letting go of it, not just to salve your ego. Why, you can make ten times more money at the agency than you’d make as a lawyer. Let’s just keep our heads about this.” He had his weaknesses; Steppie was only one of them. The memories of a redneck boyhood were still painfully real to him. Money, or the promise of big money, weakened him further. After a show of indecision, and a great wrestling with his conscience, he took over the automobile agency.

The funny thing was, as soon as he had done so, Steppie wasn’t the same Steppie anymore. But he didn’t become aware of this all at once. He was too busy. The new house was going up in the best part of town; he was learning the business, or doing his best to learn it; and nearly every night he and Steppie were entertaining or being entertained.

It took him just sixteen months to steer the agency to the brink of bankruptcy. He was not a businessman; even if he had been, the endless alcohol-fogged nights that stretched well into the following days would have numbed him to the point where making a go of the agency was a near impossibility. Besides his own inexperience, he had inherited another handicap; Wilbur Saunders had been something of a cheat, and there was no backlog of goodwill to speak of. Practice tried to lure vanished customers with a heavy advertising campaign; unhappily, the new model was a lemon. Not even the shrewdest dealers were moving it that year.

He was working fourteen hours and staying out most nights until three, and one day he carried a bottle to work with him from the party the night before. Thereafter, a full pint accompanied him to work every morning and went, empty, into the trash can at night. The pint became a fifth. Vaguely, he understood what was happening to him, but he couldn’t help it. The liquor put a necessary fire into him. Only because of the liquor could he go down every day to the agency, which had assumed the proportions of a devouring ogre in his mind. He and Steppie were in debt up to their ears; home was no refuge, only another battleground.

The end of their marriage came at one of the interminable parties where everybody knew everybody else, much too intimately. They were Steppie’s “crowd”; he was a gander among swans, honking as loudly as anybody but somehow not in unison. He had suspected her for months—this men, that man—she was too friendly with some of the bastards she’d known most of her life, and had dated. They were probably all having a good laugh behind his back. The shame of failure had blighted most of his confidence; the liquor had turned to pure jealousy and hatred in his veins. No, he hadn’t caught her, but by God he knew there was something, had to be.

That night he was playing the game he had rigged; sulking with his liquor in one corner of the house, pretending drunkenness so they would leave him alone, so Steppie would feel safe. The drunkenness, however, became a fact and he lost track of great chunks of time. He knew only that it was very, very late and that he hadn’t seen his wife for some time. He went in search of her, through the crowded rooms of an unfamiliar house, feeling a barely discernible anxiety that had nothing to do with a possible infidelity on Steppie’s part. He felt that he was going to die, that he must tell her before it was too late, and his anxiety became a paralyzing dread.

His search took him to a small back bedroom on the second floor of the house, and there was Steppie sitting on the edge of a bed with the straps of her dress down. A man was bending over her, one hand on her shoulder. It looked to him as if she were getting dressed after being on the bed, at least the covers were disarrayed. There was no surprise in her face at his appearance, only a weary resignation.

What he had to say to her brought a scowl and then a murderous look.

He might have saved them both if he had dragged her from the room and out of the house in full view of everyone present. But he could only hang on to the door frame, gasping out filth, while the man protested and tried to restrain him.

Steppie rose from the bed and came toward him, slit-eyed and filled with wrath. She pushed the man aside and began talking to her husband in a high but controlled voice. She demolished him on the spot, or rather she completed the demolition that was well under way. He didn’t see the people in the hall behind him, and he didn’t know how still the house became as her voice carried.

Even while the carnage was going on, he had the insight that she was begging him to be a man, to make her stop. He tried. He gathered his strength and for a few moments his mind functioned, and he started toward his wife. Then he broke down again inside, and tears gushed from his eyes. There might have been a moment of horror in her own eyes, but he didn’t see it; instead he turned and fled from Steppie, beating his way down the hall with an incoherent stammer, desperate to be free of the house and the faces that swam in the air around him, desperate to hide from her, and all the truth she had told.

They were his last moments of clarity for some time.

Six weeks later he woke up in an unfamiliar room with a clear blue sky outside that made his eyes ache. He fumbled on the floor beside the bed for his bottle, and, finding no bottle, struggled up from the blankets in a panic to see John Guthrie sitting in a chair nearby, watching him. Guthrie was wearing boots, Levi’s, and a corduroy hunting coat. His glasses flashed in the light of the lamp behind his chair.

“Welcome to the fourth day,” he said.

“Fourth day?”

“Your fourth day without a drink. For a man in your condition, you’ve put up some good scraps.” He touched a hand to a lump on his chin and grinned. “Three good scraps.” He turned his head toward a small kitchen in the cabin. “The liquor’s in there, if you want to try to get it. If you try, we’re going to go ’round again.”

Practice looked at a half-shattered mirror and a broken chair and sank back onto the bed.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Playing Christus, I suppose. How do you feel?”

“I ache, I ache! Steppie.”

John Guthrie rose and crossed slowly to the bed.

“There is no more Steppie,” he said. “She came to me and asked me to handle the divorce, but I wouldn’t do it. Tried to talk her out of it, but nobody’s ever talked to that kid and made it stick. She’s in Reno now, on the fifth week of her six weeks’ residence. I’m a little sorry for you, if that’s worth anything.”

“I don’t care what you feel, you son of a bitch.” He closed his eyes then and dozed off. When he woke it was dark, and there was a smell of broiling steak in the cabin. His sore stomach muscles contracted. He could barely move his body at all.

He began trying to reconstruct the last few months, but each effort threw him into such profound despair that he gave up trying. Then he struggled up again to a sitting position, and hung on to the frame of the bed, gasping. “Need help?” Guthrie asked.

“You’d better give me a drink,” Practice said, “because if you don’t, the first chance I get I’m going to kill you.” Guthrie’s chair scraped on the floor. The next thing Practice knew, Guthrie was standing over him with a glass of whiskey in his hand. Practice’s throat muscles worked but there was no saliva; he was dehydrated.

“I’ll give it to you, and a full quart besides,” Guthrie said, “if you still want it after you hear me out. I’ll give you the quart and take you back to Fort Frontenac and drop you approximately where I dug you up out of the mud, and let you rot there. You’ll rot, all right, because you’re
an
alcoholic. That’s the worst of your problems. You’ve lost your wife and fumbled your way to the door of bankruptcy court, but this”—and he held out the glass—“is your big problem. I don’t even say you can lick it, I don’t know
that
much about alcoholism. But I have a friend who does,
a
real sweet retired M.D. who’s made a specialty of rehabilitating problem drinkers at his farm up in the northeast corner of the state. I’ve told him about you, and he’s willing to take you on. The question is, are you worth the effort?”

Practice tried to reach for the glass but the strain on his arm was too much and he fell back, gasping. “I’m not worth the effort,” he said.

“I don’t know you very well,” Guthrie went on. “My firm was ready to give you a job until Steppie steered you into the automobile business. Maybe we would again; maybe I could use you in the Attorney General’s office. I’m not making any definite offer because I haven’t seen any real signs of life yet.” He put his face closer to Practice’s. “You hurt, don’t you? Good.”

“You bastard.”

“Because when you stop hurting you’re a goner. Let me tell you what really hurts, boy. You castrated yourself in front of fifty people, and that kind of shame is forever.”

This time Practice got his hand up to swing at the glass of whiskey, and it spilled on the floor.

Guthrie hit him across the face.

“Maybe all that’s left for you to do is break even,” he said. “And to do that you might have to go down to the last inch of your guts. Smell the booze? It’s a smell you’re going to have to pretend doesn’t exist.”

“I’d like to kill you,” Practice muttered.

“Why?”

“Because you’ve had it all handed to you, every goddamn thing. Money, family, everything.”

“Ahhh ...” Guthrie said in disgust. “Chicken guts. How’d you ever get through the war, Patsy?”

“I was good at it,” Practice said through his teeth.

“You were good at it. So good that a spoiled brat with a shrewish tongue could shoot you down in a mess of bloody feathers. Patsy, have I ever wasted a week! I’ve got better things to do than sit here nursing you and mopping up your chin after you’ve puked up more of that self-pity you’re bloated with. Get on your feet. I’m taking you back to Fort Frontenac, Patsy, where you can bury yourself.”

Practice found strength he didn’t know he had and shot out a hard right at Guthrie’s face. His fist hit high, on the man’s temple, and snapped his head around.

Guthrie looked back, grinning, and spat on the floor.

“So you hate me? That figures. I’m a better man than you.”

“Not when I’m sober.”

“Anytime, Patsy. I had my woman trouble once, and it was worse than anything you can think of. But I didn’t go down into the bottle to get away from it. Get on your feet. I’m tired of you stinking up my place.”

Practice put his feet over the side of the bed and sat up, trembling, but he didn’t take his eyes off Guthrie.

“Who won?” he asked weakly. “You said we had some scraps.”

Guthrie smiled, a little cruelly.

“I whipped your ass good.”

“You’ll never do it again,”

“I figure,” Guthrie said, “that even with you in top shape, you’re no better than equal to me, and I give away years.”

“I’m better,” Practice said, “because I want to kill you. And I will.”

“Don’t you believe it.”

“I want to kill you for sticking it in my life, for bringing me back. For holding whiskey under my nose, then slugging me with the bottle. Oh, I’ve got lots of reasons.”

Guthrie went away, then returned with a pair of Levi’s and a shirt. He threw them contemptuously at Practice, who put them on. His muscles screamed and his hands trembled. Hut he dressed, and stood on his feet, with tears streaming down his face.

“Did she send you to find me? Was it Steppie’s idea?”

“Steppie wrote you off,” Guthrie said evenly. “The idea was my own—a bum one.”

“Maybe,” Practice said, wiping his wet face on his sleeve, “maybe she shouldn’t have written me off.”

“How do you feel now?” Guthrie asked in a different tone of voice.

“Sick.” He was weaving on his feet, but still standing, thinking about Steppie and about his life.

“Could you eat?”

“I don’t know. I’d ... like to try.”

“Sure. I bought some vitamins and some salt tablets. They’re good for what ails you. Look, it’s five hours to Doc Merrill’s. If we leave after dinner we can make it by one in the morning. He’s expecting you. When you’re able to work, he’ll put you to work. Farm labor. Who knows? A couple of months—maybe you won’t be Patsy anymore.”

“How much—will it cost?”

“Who knows?” Guthrie said with a little smile of satisfaction. “Who knows how much it’ll cost?”

—

Seeing Steppie at the steak house had awakened a beast of a mood, and it was crawling all over him; he didn’t have the will to throw it off.

A sound came to Practice. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Then he remembered the weak plank on the back porch and how his weight caused it to give. Part of his mind focused on the porch and the dark kitchen, but he didn’t move. The sound wasn’t repeated. Instead, he heard the rusty action of hinges as the screen door was slowly opened.