The web she weaves, p.43
The Web She Weaves, page 43
“One side. Let us through.”
Cop killing! I ran after them, trying to explain. They raced through the kitchen out into the yard.
“It was a pig! Only a pig!” I shouted after them. Brenda, in the kitchen, was trying to stop one of them, held onto his arm, and was swept out into the yard. I followed, still hoping to explain the colossal mistake.
In his yard Guttierez stood facing the pig now strung head down from a low-hanging ailanthus branch. The blood-streaked machete was still in his hand; he was preparing to disembowel. The charcoal in the trench was flaming and the double-pointed stake stood ready to impale its victim.
Scores of policemen were swarming into all the neighboring gardens up and down the block, vaulting the fences, converging on the big party. Cop killing is not taken lightly in this town.
Brenda had not loosened her grip on the arm of the law. She clung, and with her free arm pointed to the hung pig; she chattered, gasped, and shook. Her words tumbled out in an incoherent stream. The policeman looked stunned; all the policemen looked blank and chagrined, their drawn pistols hung superfluous and obscenely naked at their sides. They had come to do battle for a brother and found only a barbecue.
In that momentary hiatus before explanations and recriminations must be made, in the silence before the full weight of embarrassment descended, understanding came to Guttierez. And with it fury. It swelled his chest and added inches to his height. His narrowed eyes sought Brenda, and the fury erupted from his throat.
“A-a-y-y! PIG!” he screamed.
And the machete flashed in the sun once more. It left his hand in a graceful arc, crossed the fence and seemed suspended in the still evening air for endless ages before it came to rest.
At almost the same instant a policeman standing near Guttierez fired once. He later said he was aiming for the up-swung arm but was too close and a split second too late. Guttierez lay beneath the hanging pig, the wreckage caused by a bullet in the brain mingling with the slow drip from the draining carcass.
Brenda sprawled at the foot of Christian Dior, the machete still quivering in her chest. The slowly spreading stain on her blouse matched the roses that drooped over her.
Somebody turned the radio off. And then the screaming began.
NORMAN AND THE KILLER
Joyce Carol Oates
Of her numerous short stories and novels, Joyce Carol Oates has said, “All of my writing is about the mystery of human emotions.” In “Norman and the Killer” this theme is embodied in a gentle, ordinary man who is brought to violence by feelings that he cannot—and indeed does not attempt to—understand. Ms. Oates, who teaches English at Princeton University, won a National Book Award in 1970 for her novel Them, as well as several O. Henry prizes for her short stories. A Guggenheim Fellow and member of the Institute of Arts and Letters, she is one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers of her generation.
Because he was an ordinary man, whose reflection in mirrors and in incidental windows could have belonged to anyone, Norman had never thought of himself as involved in anything that could attract attention. He had no interest in going to see accidents or fires or other disasters because he would be pushed around by the crowd and would not complain, and because he had no heart to peer in, there, at the very center of the jostling, to see the exposed bleeding flesh suddenly catapulted out of the usual channels of life. Because he was a gentle man, a shy man, no longer exactly young, whose life had attached itself gently to his family, he was surprised at the professional hardness with which he was able to meet customers in the clothing store he managed, and at the violence of the love he was suffering through for a woman his brother-in-law had introduced him to. In his youth he had read much and was able to appreciate the spiritual hardness of the heroes of great fiction, who seemed to him to walk upon ropes stretched over nothing, dazzling and performing endlessly, without fear of death. Their absolution of their humanity made them heroes and for this Norman envied them but could not believe in them; they told him nothing about himself.
The young woman’s name was Ellen and she too had read much in her youth, which her dark opaque eyes suggested had been an extension of the life she now led, sternly bleak and self-satisfied, a loneliness that had to be respected because it had been her own choice. She had been married for several years, in her early twenties, but of this Norman did not allow himself to think. He often frightened himself at the anxiety he felt for her: his desperation to protect her from whatever startled her eyes, whatever drew her mind away from him as if he were no more than an accidental accomplice to the caprices of her memory, calculated to remind her always of other evenings, other years. Yet he knew he had no right to that desperation, for she did not belong to him. At times he disliked her for her power over him, but most of the time, during the long identical days at the store, his love for this woman—whom he did not really know—was so absurdly great as to overwhelm him, threaten him with an obscure, inexplicable violence, something that might have been building up in him through the years while he had lived at home, a child grown into a man without anyone really noticing. Waking each morning in his old room, in the old house, he would smell resentfully the odors of breakfast being cooked downstairs and would think that, if he did not marry Ellen, he would wake to this every morning for the rest of his life.
One afternoon they drove out of the city to a summer playhouse. The drive took two hours, and Norman was pleased at Ellen’s friendliness. She spoke of the playhouse, some actors she knew, and this made him think idly that she was to him like the women he had been seeing in movies all his life: ethereal and majestic, following a script he did not know, could not anticipate, yet smiling out of the very graciousness of their own near-beauty, welcoming his admiration while not exactly acknowledging it. She wore white; the self-conscious pose of her profile distracted him from the road. She was talking now of her job. Norman thought of marrying her, of living with her, but at this his face flinched, for it seemed impossible that this should ever be; his very reflection, glancing down at him out of the rear-view mirror, the dusty reflection of a rather heavy, polite, stern face, with wisps of damp dark hair curled down on his forehead, caught his eye as if he were sharing a secret with it, a secret of perplexed failure. “I may have to leave this job, after six years,” she said. He glanced over at her. “There are complications,” she said.
He turned into a filling station to get gas. He did not want to ask her about these complications, but he knew she was anxious to continue. In the bright glare from the sun she looked younger than she was; her youth had always seemed to Norman like a weapon. They waited for the man to put in the gas. “Always complications, involvements,” she said. “Personal relationships start off so cleanly but then become too involved. Even business relationships …” She smirked at something, some memory; for a moment her face was unfamiliar, her nose sharp, her eyes darker with the intensity of a bemused unpleasant thought. Norman, unhappy, turned to pay the station attendant. He peered up at a man his own age, of moderate height, dressed in greasy clothes; the man’s face was smeared with dirt and perspiration. “Hot day,” said the man, with a smirk something like Ellen’s. Norman, staring at him, felt his heart begin to pound absurdly. The man’s face was familiar, unmistakable. For an instant they stared at each other. The man licked his lips, a stout strong man yet a little startled by Norman’s look, and turned away. Norman stared at his back. He wanted to open the door and get out, do something. Beside him Ellen was talking, he could not understand her. Finally she touched his arm. “Is something wrong?” she said. “I think I know that man,” he said. As soon as he said this something seemed to assure him: he did not know the man, it was impossible, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. “Know him from where?” Ellen said. “I don’t know, nothing. It doesn’t matter,” he said.
The man returned with Norman’s change. Norman tried not to look at him, for the intensity of his feeling had alarmed him: he thought of his uncle, now institutionalized, who had been committed at last by his patient wife, an ordinary man who could not stop talking. In that instant, as he first looked at the attendant’s face, Norman felt a kinship with that other, lost man, whom he had not thought of for ten years… . But he did look at the station attendant’s face after all. The man was smiling without enthusiasm, a smile that stretched his lips to show discolored teeth, leaving the rest of his face indifferent. He had a rather plump face, he had obviously gained weight, Norman saw, but still, out of that heavy, dirt-streaked face, another face confronted him, unmistakable. It was the face of a boy, maybe seventeen. “Here y’are, thank you,” the man said. He had a dirty rag over one shoulder. It was strange, Norman thought, fumbling for the ignition, that the man had not offered to clean his windshield.
He drove away. His heart was pounding furiously. “Why didn’t you ask him if he knew you?” Ellen said. “It seems to mean a lot to you.” She sounded resentful, but he knew that if he were to continue she would lose interest. “No, nothing. A mistake,” Norman said. Yet his mind flashed and dazzled him: he knew the face, of course, he might have been shuffling through a deck of cards to come to it, through a handful of old snapshots, waiting patiently for it to turn up. “You’re driving rather fast,” Ellen said. He slowed down. He glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that it was so early. A great block of time seemed to have passed, jerked away from him. Back at the garage, was the man staring after this car, his smile abandoned? Norman looked fiercely at the countryside. He shut his mind, pushed everything away. Aside. He would not think, he would not remember.
They had dinner at a country inn near the theater. It was dim and pretentious, but he saw that Ellen enjoyed it. In her white silk dress and dark necklace she looked clean, harshly clean and young, her shoulders poised against an unfamiliar background of rough-hewn wooden walls decorated with old wrought-iron objects Norman could not have identified. Yet Norman heard himself say, “Did you say you had a brother?” Yes, she had said. Why did he ask that? Why at this moment? She had a brother who lived in Europe, what did it matter? She was always antagonistic about families, friends, any relationships that belonged to the past. Norman wanted to touch her hand, not to comfort her but to ask for help. The darkness of his mind was released, flowing steadily, unhurriedly, and out of that flood of old faces his heartbeat anticipated the anguish of his revelation. “Excuse me,” he said, standing. He caught her glance: she was thinking that he behaved strangely, he could not be trusted. He went to the men’s room. There, his back against the tiled wall, he rubbed his eyes and waited until the turmoil ceased. He remembered the face now. He knew he had remembered it at once. Now it came clearly, a boy’s face, dirty and hard, and rearing behind it a gray March morning, an indifferent mottled sky. “My God,” Norman said aloud. He wanted to rush back to Ellen as if he had something joyous to tell her. But his legs were weak; he reached out to get his balance. Or he would go to a telephone. He would telephone the police. And his father—but his father was dead, had been dead for years. He felt strangely peaceful; something might have been decided. When he returned to their table, where this attractive young woman awaited him, concerned for him, he felt his fingers twitch as if he wanted to reach out to embrace her, to have her draw him to her so that he would no longer need to think.
One Saturday afternoon when he was fifteen Norman and his brother Jack were coming home from a movie. It was about four-thirty: late winter, the day already ending, a chill bleak wind. The Technicolor of the movie had dazzled Norman’s eyes, so that the warehouses they passed now seemed to him unsubstantial and deceptive, not remnants of a world but anticipations of a fuller, greater world he would grow into. Invisible behind the vision of that movie had been flights of music, but here there was no music, only their hurrying footsteps. Jack, at seventeen, was not much taller than Norman, both were small for their ages, with meek, dark, defensive faces. There were other boys Norman preferred to be with—even his younger brother—but Jack never made friends easily, shrugged away the long days spent at the high school with a disdainful closed expression, so that only after his death did Norman find out, from other people, that Jack was considered a little strange—not slow, exactly, because he had always been good at mathematics, but not quite quick enough, not right enough, somehow inferior.
They went down by the river, Jack’s idea, and here the wind was stronger. An odor of something rotting was in the air. Norman and his brother wore jackets that were alike, the same size, made of material like canvas, a dull faded green. Sitting at the end of one of the old docks was a middle-aged man in the same kind of jacket. He did not look around, he might have been asleep or drunk. “What’s he doing out here, he don’t have a fish pole,” Jack said resentfully. They walked past the dock. Norman shared Jack’s resentment, because it seemed to him something was wrong, something adult was out of place, and if this was so, then everything might be out of place. The familiar waterfront had become, in the poor light, parched with heavy clouds that gave to everything a strange lightless glare that hurt Norman’s eyes. Jack, as if to comfort him, talked of what they would have for supper that night—he had smelled the spaghetti sauce cooking before they left. But Norman was watching something ahead—movement back by the unloading platform of one of the old warehouses, a giant monstrosity that had been abandoned for years. An immense exhaustion touched him suddenly, for this world was so banal a betrayal of the world of that movie, so unimaginative a failure, that he could not respond to it. A few more years, he thought, and his life would change: he did not yet know just how it would change. He would not be like Jack, begging to quit school, his side of the room cluttered with auto racing magazines. And he thought, glancing at Jack’s worried face, that he could not admire him as an older brother, for Jack was not big or strong enough. He did not like Jack because Jack did not bully him; he pitied Jack because Jack at seventeen had to wear the same jacket he wore at fifteen, and the two of them, bored with each other, were doomed to be brothers forever and could do nothing about it.
“There’s some guys,” Jack said. Norman saw three boys on the dock ahead. Something was tilting, falling over. It was a hollow metal cylinder that was buoyed up for a moment on the water, then sank. “Do you know them?” Norman said. “Are they in your class?” “No, not them bastards,” Jack said. As a child, Norman had always taken his responses from other people, and now, at fifteen, he felt Jack’s sudden stiffened look pass over him at once. They kept on walking, Jack a little ahead. The three boys were laughing at something, their snatches of words incomprehensible and harsh, as if they spoke a foreign language. One, in a soiled flannel shirt, was lighting a cigarette. They were about Jack’s age. As Jack and Norman approached they grew quiet, staring out at the water. Jack was looking straight ahead, but Norman could not help but glance at the boys—absolutely ordinary faces with identical blank, cautious expressions, their hair much too long. They stood with their legs apart, as if posing. The boy in the flannel shirt lit his cigarette and tossed the match out into the water. Jack and Norman passed by, were by them, and Norman felt his legs want to run—he did not know why—but Jack did not hurry. Norman’s breathing had quickened. Nothing had happened, no one had said a word, yet just before he was hit something in him shouted at the back of Jack’s head: You fool! You goddamn fool for getting us into this!
A board struck Norman on the right shoulder and he spun around, gaping. He saw the three faces lunge at him, serious and quiet. Then the pain exploded again, this time on his chest, and he felt himself falling, falling back into nothing; then he struck the water hard. It swelled upon him and he sank into its frigid softness with his eyes opened in terror at the sky. His arms jerked, his legs thrashed, but caught at nothing. It seemed queer to him that the water was cold and hard, yet could not support him… . Then he came to the surface, choking. Someone yelled, “Get that one!” and Norman tried to fling himself backward, anywhere. He did not know yet that Jack was in the water too. Something struck the water beside his head, he did not know what, and disappeared at once. Through the film before his eyes he saw one of the boys striking at the water by the dock with a long piece of rusty metal, his face hard and deliberate, as if he were chopping wood and counting the strokes. Norman pressed backward, out and backward, his heart pounding so violently that he could not see. Someone shouted—a word Norman did not recognize—and it seemed that in the freezing water words were shattered and had no meaning, did not matter, nothing mattered.
When he woke, it was with reluctance. Immediately the air assaulted him: he lay on his back against something hard, faces were peering down at him. Adults. He had been brought back. In curious alarm they stared at him and he at them; then he began to vomit. Someone held him. His body convulsed as if struggling against an invisible enemy, writhing and fleeing. They spoke to him, there was a siren somewhere, even a woman’s voice, and though he could now understand their words he felt himself an intruder, someone returned from the dead who has no business overhearing anything. It was said later that he called for Jack at once, but he never remembered this. They had answered by assuring him that Jack was all right, he was already in the ambulance, but of course this was a lie.
During the play he could not sit still. He perspired heavily. Onstage, the actors moved through their lines without hesitation, pert and skillful, but Norman understood nothing. He might have been drowning again, drowning in air and words of another language, remote even from the woman who sat beside him. At intermission they went outside and he could tell from her silence that she was not pleased. They stared out together at a flower garden, some design of grass and flowers murky in the twilight but heavy with meaning, deliberate and plotted. “Would you like to go home?” Ellen said softly. As if guilty, Norman could not meet her eyes. He heard her words but could not make sense of them, for he was staring once again through that cold film at the boys up on the dock—secure and dry—the faces of two of them raw and blurred, but the other face now clear. He recognized it.
Cop killing! I ran after them, trying to explain. They raced through the kitchen out into the yard.
“It was a pig! Only a pig!” I shouted after them. Brenda, in the kitchen, was trying to stop one of them, held onto his arm, and was swept out into the yard. I followed, still hoping to explain the colossal mistake.
In his yard Guttierez stood facing the pig now strung head down from a low-hanging ailanthus branch. The blood-streaked machete was still in his hand; he was preparing to disembowel. The charcoal in the trench was flaming and the double-pointed stake stood ready to impale its victim.
Scores of policemen were swarming into all the neighboring gardens up and down the block, vaulting the fences, converging on the big party. Cop killing is not taken lightly in this town.
Brenda had not loosened her grip on the arm of the law. She clung, and with her free arm pointed to the hung pig; she chattered, gasped, and shook. Her words tumbled out in an incoherent stream. The policeman looked stunned; all the policemen looked blank and chagrined, their drawn pistols hung superfluous and obscenely naked at their sides. They had come to do battle for a brother and found only a barbecue.
In that momentary hiatus before explanations and recriminations must be made, in the silence before the full weight of embarrassment descended, understanding came to Guttierez. And with it fury. It swelled his chest and added inches to his height. His narrowed eyes sought Brenda, and the fury erupted from his throat.
“A-a-y-y! PIG!” he screamed.
And the machete flashed in the sun once more. It left his hand in a graceful arc, crossed the fence and seemed suspended in the still evening air for endless ages before it came to rest.
At almost the same instant a policeman standing near Guttierez fired once. He later said he was aiming for the up-swung arm but was too close and a split second too late. Guttierez lay beneath the hanging pig, the wreckage caused by a bullet in the brain mingling with the slow drip from the draining carcass.
Brenda sprawled at the foot of Christian Dior, the machete still quivering in her chest. The slowly spreading stain on her blouse matched the roses that drooped over her.
Somebody turned the radio off. And then the screaming began.
NORMAN AND THE KILLER
Joyce Carol Oates
Of her numerous short stories and novels, Joyce Carol Oates has said, “All of my writing is about the mystery of human emotions.” In “Norman and the Killer” this theme is embodied in a gentle, ordinary man who is brought to violence by feelings that he cannot—and indeed does not attempt to—understand. Ms. Oates, who teaches English at Princeton University, won a National Book Award in 1970 for her novel Them, as well as several O. Henry prizes for her short stories. A Guggenheim Fellow and member of the Institute of Arts and Letters, she is one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers of her generation.
Because he was an ordinary man, whose reflection in mirrors and in incidental windows could have belonged to anyone, Norman had never thought of himself as involved in anything that could attract attention. He had no interest in going to see accidents or fires or other disasters because he would be pushed around by the crowd and would not complain, and because he had no heart to peer in, there, at the very center of the jostling, to see the exposed bleeding flesh suddenly catapulted out of the usual channels of life. Because he was a gentle man, a shy man, no longer exactly young, whose life had attached itself gently to his family, he was surprised at the professional hardness with which he was able to meet customers in the clothing store he managed, and at the violence of the love he was suffering through for a woman his brother-in-law had introduced him to. In his youth he had read much and was able to appreciate the spiritual hardness of the heroes of great fiction, who seemed to him to walk upon ropes stretched over nothing, dazzling and performing endlessly, without fear of death. Their absolution of their humanity made them heroes and for this Norman envied them but could not believe in them; they told him nothing about himself.
The young woman’s name was Ellen and she too had read much in her youth, which her dark opaque eyes suggested had been an extension of the life she now led, sternly bleak and self-satisfied, a loneliness that had to be respected because it had been her own choice. She had been married for several years, in her early twenties, but of this Norman did not allow himself to think. He often frightened himself at the anxiety he felt for her: his desperation to protect her from whatever startled her eyes, whatever drew her mind away from him as if he were no more than an accidental accomplice to the caprices of her memory, calculated to remind her always of other evenings, other years. Yet he knew he had no right to that desperation, for she did not belong to him. At times he disliked her for her power over him, but most of the time, during the long identical days at the store, his love for this woman—whom he did not really know—was so absurdly great as to overwhelm him, threaten him with an obscure, inexplicable violence, something that might have been building up in him through the years while he had lived at home, a child grown into a man without anyone really noticing. Waking each morning in his old room, in the old house, he would smell resentfully the odors of breakfast being cooked downstairs and would think that, if he did not marry Ellen, he would wake to this every morning for the rest of his life.
One afternoon they drove out of the city to a summer playhouse. The drive took two hours, and Norman was pleased at Ellen’s friendliness. She spoke of the playhouse, some actors she knew, and this made him think idly that she was to him like the women he had been seeing in movies all his life: ethereal and majestic, following a script he did not know, could not anticipate, yet smiling out of the very graciousness of their own near-beauty, welcoming his admiration while not exactly acknowledging it. She wore white; the self-conscious pose of her profile distracted him from the road. She was talking now of her job. Norman thought of marrying her, of living with her, but at this his face flinched, for it seemed impossible that this should ever be; his very reflection, glancing down at him out of the rear-view mirror, the dusty reflection of a rather heavy, polite, stern face, with wisps of damp dark hair curled down on his forehead, caught his eye as if he were sharing a secret with it, a secret of perplexed failure. “I may have to leave this job, after six years,” she said. He glanced over at her. “There are complications,” she said.
He turned into a filling station to get gas. He did not want to ask her about these complications, but he knew she was anxious to continue. In the bright glare from the sun she looked younger than she was; her youth had always seemed to Norman like a weapon. They waited for the man to put in the gas. “Always complications, involvements,” she said. “Personal relationships start off so cleanly but then become too involved. Even business relationships …” She smirked at something, some memory; for a moment her face was unfamiliar, her nose sharp, her eyes darker with the intensity of a bemused unpleasant thought. Norman, unhappy, turned to pay the station attendant. He peered up at a man his own age, of moderate height, dressed in greasy clothes; the man’s face was smeared with dirt and perspiration. “Hot day,” said the man, with a smirk something like Ellen’s. Norman, staring at him, felt his heart begin to pound absurdly. The man’s face was familiar, unmistakable. For an instant they stared at each other. The man licked his lips, a stout strong man yet a little startled by Norman’s look, and turned away. Norman stared at his back. He wanted to open the door and get out, do something. Beside him Ellen was talking, he could not understand her. Finally she touched his arm. “Is something wrong?” she said. “I think I know that man,” he said. As soon as he said this something seemed to assure him: he did not know the man, it was impossible, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. “Know him from where?” Ellen said. “I don’t know, nothing. It doesn’t matter,” he said.
The man returned with Norman’s change. Norman tried not to look at him, for the intensity of his feeling had alarmed him: he thought of his uncle, now institutionalized, who had been committed at last by his patient wife, an ordinary man who could not stop talking. In that instant, as he first looked at the attendant’s face, Norman felt a kinship with that other, lost man, whom he had not thought of for ten years… . But he did look at the station attendant’s face after all. The man was smiling without enthusiasm, a smile that stretched his lips to show discolored teeth, leaving the rest of his face indifferent. He had a rather plump face, he had obviously gained weight, Norman saw, but still, out of that heavy, dirt-streaked face, another face confronted him, unmistakable. It was the face of a boy, maybe seventeen. “Here y’are, thank you,” the man said. He had a dirty rag over one shoulder. It was strange, Norman thought, fumbling for the ignition, that the man had not offered to clean his windshield.
He drove away. His heart was pounding furiously. “Why didn’t you ask him if he knew you?” Ellen said. “It seems to mean a lot to you.” She sounded resentful, but he knew that if he were to continue she would lose interest. “No, nothing. A mistake,” Norman said. Yet his mind flashed and dazzled him: he knew the face, of course, he might have been shuffling through a deck of cards to come to it, through a handful of old snapshots, waiting patiently for it to turn up. “You’re driving rather fast,” Ellen said. He slowed down. He glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that it was so early. A great block of time seemed to have passed, jerked away from him. Back at the garage, was the man staring after this car, his smile abandoned? Norman looked fiercely at the countryside. He shut his mind, pushed everything away. Aside. He would not think, he would not remember.
They had dinner at a country inn near the theater. It was dim and pretentious, but he saw that Ellen enjoyed it. In her white silk dress and dark necklace she looked clean, harshly clean and young, her shoulders poised against an unfamiliar background of rough-hewn wooden walls decorated with old wrought-iron objects Norman could not have identified. Yet Norman heard himself say, “Did you say you had a brother?” Yes, she had said. Why did he ask that? Why at this moment? She had a brother who lived in Europe, what did it matter? She was always antagonistic about families, friends, any relationships that belonged to the past. Norman wanted to touch her hand, not to comfort her but to ask for help. The darkness of his mind was released, flowing steadily, unhurriedly, and out of that flood of old faces his heartbeat anticipated the anguish of his revelation. “Excuse me,” he said, standing. He caught her glance: she was thinking that he behaved strangely, he could not be trusted. He went to the men’s room. There, his back against the tiled wall, he rubbed his eyes and waited until the turmoil ceased. He remembered the face now. He knew he had remembered it at once. Now it came clearly, a boy’s face, dirty and hard, and rearing behind it a gray March morning, an indifferent mottled sky. “My God,” Norman said aloud. He wanted to rush back to Ellen as if he had something joyous to tell her. But his legs were weak; he reached out to get his balance. Or he would go to a telephone. He would telephone the police. And his father—but his father was dead, had been dead for years. He felt strangely peaceful; something might have been decided. When he returned to their table, where this attractive young woman awaited him, concerned for him, he felt his fingers twitch as if he wanted to reach out to embrace her, to have her draw him to her so that he would no longer need to think.
One Saturday afternoon when he was fifteen Norman and his brother Jack were coming home from a movie. It was about four-thirty: late winter, the day already ending, a chill bleak wind. The Technicolor of the movie had dazzled Norman’s eyes, so that the warehouses they passed now seemed to him unsubstantial and deceptive, not remnants of a world but anticipations of a fuller, greater world he would grow into. Invisible behind the vision of that movie had been flights of music, but here there was no music, only their hurrying footsteps. Jack, at seventeen, was not much taller than Norman, both were small for their ages, with meek, dark, defensive faces. There were other boys Norman preferred to be with—even his younger brother—but Jack never made friends easily, shrugged away the long days spent at the high school with a disdainful closed expression, so that only after his death did Norman find out, from other people, that Jack was considered a little strange—not slow, exactly, because he had always been good at mathematics, but not quite quick enough, not right enough, somehow inferior.
They went down by the river, Jack’s idea, and here the wind was stronger. An odor of something rotting was in the air. Norman and his brother wore jackets that were alike, the same size, made of material like canvas, a dull faded green. Sitting at the end of one of the old docks was a middle-aged man in the same kind of jacket. He did not look around, he might have been asleep or drunk. “What’s he doing out here, he don’t have a fish pole,” Jack said resentfully. They walked past the dock. Norman shared Jack’s resentment, because it seemed to him something was wrong, something adult was out of place, and if this was so, then everything might be out of place. The familiar waterfront had become, in the poor light, parched with heavy clouds that gave to everything a strange lightless glare that hurt Norman’s eyes. Jack, as if to comfort him, talked of what they would have for supper that night—he had smelled the spaghetti sauce cooking before they left. But Norman was watching something ahead—movement back by the unloading platform of one of the old warehouses, a giant monstrosity that had been abandoned for years. An immense exhaustion touched him suddenly, for this world was so banal a betrayal of the world of that movie, so unimaginative a failure, that he could not respond to it. A few more years, he thought, and his life would change: he did not yet know just how it would change. He would not be like Jack, begging to quit school, his side of the room cluttered with auto racing magazines. And he thought, glancing at Jack’s worried face, that he could not admire him as an older brother, for Jack was not big or strong enough. He did not like Jack because Jack did not bully him; he pitied Jack because Jack at seventeen had to wear the same jacket he wore at fifteen, and the two of them, bored with each other, were doomed to be brothers forever and could do nothing about it.
“There’s some guys,” Jack said. Norman saw three boys on the dock ahead. Something was tilting, falling over. It was a hollow metal cylinder that was buoyed up for a moment on the water, then sank. “Do you know them?” Norman said. “Are they in your class?” “No, not them bastards,” Jack said. As a child, Norman had always taken his responses from other people, and now, at fifteen, he felt Jack’s sudden stiffened look pass over him at once. They kept on walking, Jack a little ahead. The three boys were laughing at something, their snatches of words incomprehensible and harsh, as if they spoke a foreign language. One, in a soiled flannel shirt, was lighting a cigarette. They were about Jack’s age. As Jack and Norman approached they grew quiet, staring out at the water. Jack was looking straight ahead, but Norman could not help but glance at the boys—absolutely ordinary faces with identical blank, cautious expressions, their hair much too long. They stood with their legs apart, as if posing. The boy in the flannel shirt lit his cigarette and tossed the match out into the water. Jack and Norman passed by, were by them, and Norman felt his legs want to run—he did not know why—but Jack did not hurry. Norman’s breathing had quickened. Nothing had happened, no one had said a word, yet just before he was hit something in him shouted at the back of Jack’s head: You fool! You goddamn fool for getting us into this!
A board struck Norman on the right shoulder and he spun around, gaping. He saw the three faces lunge at him, serious and quiet. Then the pain exploded again, this time on his chest, and he felt himself falling, falling back into nothing; then he struck the water hard. It swelled upon him and he sank into its frigid softness with his eyes opened in terror at the sky. His arms jerked, his legs thrashed, but caught at nothing. It seemed queer to him that the water was cold and hard, yet could not support him… . Then he came to the surface, choking. Someone yelled, “Get that one!” and Norman tried to fling himself backward, anywhere. He did not know yet that Jack was in the water too. Something struck the water beside his head, he did not know what, and disappeared at once. Through the film before his eyes he saw one of the boys striking at the water by the dock with a long piece of rusty metal, his face hard and deliberate, as if he were chopping wood and counting the strokes. Norman pressed backward, out and backward, his heart pounding so violently that he could not see. Someone shouted—a word Norman did not recognize—and it seemed that in the freezing water words were shattered and had no meaning, did not matter, nothing mattered.
When he woke, it was with reluctance. Immediately the air assaulted him: he lay on his back against something hard, faces were peering down at him. Adults. He had been brought back. In curious alarm they stared at him and he at them; then he began to vomit. Someone held him. His body convulsed as if struggling against an invisible enemy, writhing and fleeing. They spoke to him, there was a siren somewhere, even a woman’s voice, and though he could now understand their words he felt himself an intruder, someone returned from the dead who has no business overhearing anything. It was said later that he called for Jack at once, but he never remembered this. They had answered by assuring him that Jack was all right, he was already in the ambulance, but of course this was a lie.
During the play he could not sit still. He perspired heavily. Onstage, the actors moved through their lines without hesitation, pert and skillful, but Norman understood nothing. He might have been drowning again, drowning in air and words of another language, remote even from the woman who sat beside him. At intermission they went outside and he could tell from her silence that she was not pleased. They stared out together at a flower garden, some design of grass and flowers murky in the twilight but heavy with meaning, deliberate and plotted. “Would you like to go home?” Ellen said softly. As if guilty, Norman could not meet her eyes. He heard her words but could not make sense of them, for he was staring once again through that cold film at the boys up on the dock—secure and dry—the faces of two of them raw and blurred, but the other face now clear. He recognized it.
