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Authors: Lee Martin
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barely say the feeling it gave me to watch him hold my glasses in his fingers and reach in with the tip of that screwdriver. It was delicate work, and he took care.
Looked after. I guess that’s what I felt. Seen to. And who among us hasn’t wanted that?
When he was done, he slipped the glasses onto my face, and I leaned toward his hand to help him. “How’s that?” he said, and I told him it was good.
I was thinking what a puzzle we were, the two of us. He was so chatty and I was so used to being alone. “People,” my father always said. “Go figure.”
There were all sorts of secret lives in our town. They came out sooner or later on deathbeds, in letters, police reports, whispered confessions. Think of it, and it was true: incest, dope, suicide, adultery, arson, theft, murder. The lunatic and the maimed. So many feeble souls.
The stories came out, and when they did, we had ways to explain the dying: too duty-bound, too fast, too careless, too drunk, too desperate. We died in the war in Vietnam. We took the S-curve west of town with too much speed and smashed into the bridge abutment or left the road and crashed into a tree. We went joyriding, didn’t take care at the crest of Sugar Hill and ended up smashing into a gravel truck just then turning onto the highway. We left cigarettes burning and died in house fires, ignored weather reports and got hit by lightning, went swimming at the quarries and got in too deep. We got up on kitchen chairs, tied ropes around beams in our basements, looped nooses around our necks, and then kicked the chairs away.
All these things happened in our small town.
The Dog ’n’ Suds across from the hospital had an old wreck of a car—its hood crumpled, its windshield cracked—arranged so it looked like someone had driven it into the side of the building. It was one of the first things anyone saw when they came into town from the west—that optical illusion of a horrible accident and a sign reminding us to take care:
This is not a fairy tale! It’s the truth! It’s a tragedy!
We found ways to forget the warning, to think of the crumpled car as a cartoon. We imagined that as long as we lived cautious lives we were safe.
That evening, after he had fixed my glasses, Raymond R. opened his glove compartment and took out an envelope. The flap was tucked in, and he undid it and held the envelope open so I could see what was inside: the fluff of Katie’s hair that I kept in the drawer of my night table. Sometime, and this knowledge sent a chill up the back of my neck, Raymond R. had been in my house.
I didn’t say a word. What could I say?
“I don’t know whose hair this is.” He closed the envelope’s flap. “But I know it isn’t yours. For a price, I’ll forget all about it. I won’t tell a soul.”
Something gave way inside me, not because Raymond R. was threatening me with blackmail, but because here, at last, was someone who knew about me.
It had become too much to hold the secret to myself. My love for Katie was something I couldn’t keep quiet forever, and surely I’d been waiting for this chance a good while. I would have paid Raymond R. what he asked just to have him listen. So I told him the whole story. I told him the truth.
Gilley
O NE EVENING that summer—it was the day Katie got her new bicycle—a man came to our house. He was a man who worked for my father. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know why he had come. We were on the patio, where my father was cooking steaks on the grill. My mother and Katie were inside.
The man was no one I could describe, the sort you see and then can’t call to mind. Dark hair parted on the side and combed over the way so many men then did. I recall that he was neatly dressed, a blue sport shirt tucked into his tan slacks.
He stepped up onto our patio, and he said to my father, “Junior, I ought to have something for those days I worked last week. You can’t just let a man go and not pay
Looked after. I guess that’s what I felt. Seen to. And who among us hasn’t wanted that?
When he was done, he slipped the glasses onto my face, and I leaned toward his hand to help him. “How’s that?” he said, and I told him it was good.
I was thinking what a puzzle we were, the two of us. He was so chatty and I was so used to being alone. “People,” my father always said. “Go figure.”
There were all sorts of secret lives in our town. They came out sooner or later on deathbeds, in letters, police reports, whispered confessions. Think of it, and it was true: incest, dope, suicide, adultery, arson, theft, murder. The lunatic and the maimed. So many feeble souls.
The stories came out, and when they did, we had ways to explain the dying: too duty-bound, too fast, too careless, too drunk, too desperate. We died in the war in Vietnam. We took the S-curve west of town with too much speed and smashed into the bridge abutment or left the road and crashed into a tree. We went joyriding, didn’t take care at the crest of Sugar Hill and ended up smashing into a gravel truck just then turning onto the highway. We left cigarettes burning and died in house fires, ignored weather reports and got hit by lightning, went swimming at the quarries and got in too deep. We got up on kitchen chairs, tied ropes around beams in our basements, looped nooses around our necks, and then kicked the chairs away.
All these things happened in our small town.
The Dog ’n’ Suds across from the hospital had an old wreck of a car—its hood crumpled, its windshield cracked—arranged so it looked like someone had driven it into the side of the building. It was one of the first things anyone saw when they came into town from the west—that optical illusion of a horrible accident and a sign reminding us to take care:
This is not a fairy tale! It’s the truth! It’s a tragedy!
We found ways to forget the warning, to think of the crumpled car as a cartoon. We imagined that as long as we lived cautious lives we were safe.
That evening, after he had fixed my glasses, Raymond R. opened his glove compartment and took out an envelope. The flap was tucked in, and he undid it and held the envelope open so I could see what was inside: the fluff of Katie’s hair that I kept in the drawer of my night table. Sometime, and this knowledge sent a chill up the back of my neck, Raymond R. had been in my house.
I didn’t say a word. What could I say?
“I don’t know whose hair this is.” He closed the envelope’s flap. “But I know it isn’t yours. For a price, I’ll forget all about it. I won’t tell a soul.”
Something gave way inside me, not because Raymond R. was threatening me with blackmail, but because here, at last, was someone who knew about me.
It had become too much to hold the secret to myself. My love for Katie was something I couldn’t keep quiet forever, and surely I’d been waiting for this chance a good while. I would have paid Raymond R. what he asked just to have him listen. So I told him the whole story. I told him the truth.
Gilley
O NE EVENING that summer—it was the day Katie got her new bicycle—a man came to our house. He was a man who worked for my father. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know why he had come. We were on the patio, where my father was cooking steaks on the grill. My mother and Katie were inside.
The man was no one I could describe, the sort you see and then can’t call to mind. Dark hair parted on the side and combed over the way so many men then did. I recall that he was neatly dressed, a blue sport shirt tucked into his tan slacks.
He stepped up onto our patio, and he said to my father, “Junior, I ought to have something for those days I worked last week. You can’t just let a man go and not pay
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