Quiet Desperation

That night, we ate rabbit. Forest had recently gotten married, so we went to his house for dinner. Ray, whose wife was tall and beautiful beyond anything he had rights to, was a bit henpecked and wasn't able to come. Eugene came by himself. So Forest's wife was left to cook, serve, and clean up on her own. Since his brother had died, my father had been the patriarch of the family, if in absentia, so in a way, this was a minor coming out party. Forest's wife was a pretty blond with a tiny waist and a good figure. This was the first time I'd seen her, and I was taken.

All of the boys had pretty wives which was a cause of both pride and misery. Ray and Eugene had each hunted down suspected lovers and had beaten them or threatened them with murder while holding pistols to their brains. They were criminals who had been caught and convicted for some of their many crimes. There had been little profit in any of it other than the inherent low-grade thrill and the minor ability to supplement their incomes by trading in illegal contraband and by sometimes passing counterfeit bills. Their stories for me, however, were the stuff of myth, a family mythology that I viewed from afar, coming into brief physical contact with it only once or twice a year for a few days at a time. It formed the substrate of antiauthoritarianism activity in me, though, and fomented rebellion against the "common" life, tempered, of course, by my father's sweetness and romanticism, none of which any of these boys had. This night over dinner, I would fill in more of the blank spots, hearing the old, familiar stories, of course, but new ones, too, as I was now an adult and allowed to hear things kept from me before.

"Remember the time those fellows chased you down for dating that girl on Holden Avenue. . . ." This was one I'd not heard before. Forest had been seeing a girl who had a boyfriend, and one night at the Big Boy, he'd been confronted by him and a group of his friends. Forest made it to his car, but they chased with the intent of beating him, he said. When he got stopped by a red light, rather than wait for them, he grabbed a baseball bat out of the back seat and ran to their car, jumping up on the hood and onto the roof where he began to scream, "C'mon, get out of the car you sonsofbitches," swinging the bat down onto the windows with all his might. No one, of course, attempted an exit, so when the light turned green, he beat on the windshield until it cracked and then ran back down the hood and got into his car and drove away.

"Turned out it was the mayor's son's car I'd smashed up. The police came out and arrested me for that. I had to pay for all the damage but they didn't put me into jail. I was lucky on that one."

Forest had once owned a Jaguar XKE. All the boys loved cars, loved souping them up and putting on special springs and shocks and whatever else the big racers had. "That sonofabitch was really fast," he said, "but it didn't handle worth a shit." He'd been driving it out near Mount Holly on the highway one day seeing how fast the car would go, but when he got to where the highway turned on a hill, the car wouldn't hold the road and he flew over the guardrail and through a billboard sign. "Totaled. That was the end of the Jaguar."

Tale after tale unfolded, each bigger and more outrageous than the last, culminating with the seldom told story of the time Forest and Eugene had robbed a nightclub using machine guns. There was a car chase and a get away, but Eugene was known and eventually arrested. He'd protected his brother and had gone to prison for a while. I watched Gene as the tale was told, and he seemed to morph before my eyes. Yes, he looked like a guy who had gone to prison.

I guessed that Forest's wife had heard these stories before, knew who she was marrying and got a charge from it, but looking at her through the dining room window, you wouldn't have known what she was hearing. None of it seemed to register with her. She could have been listening to a radio show or the Fuller Brush Man. Her face never changed. Her forehead never wrinkled. She simply maintained that pleasant, even smile.

Dinner over, we lingered at the table for awhile, then it was time to go. It had been a long day, first hunting rabbits then eating them. I thought back to that morning at the diner, to the cold corn field and the grayness of the day. Everything was different from what I knew.

Back in the car, my father began to talk about his brother's kids. "They grew up rough," he said. "My brother didn't make a lot of money at first and they lived in some pretty hard places. You've been lucky, and I don't want you to get any ideas about things. You don't need to do any of that kind of stuff, do you hear me? I mean it. I love those boys, but some of the stuff they've done. . . ." He shook his head. "You just don't need to be thinking like that. You're gonna finish college, and nobody can take that away from you, right? You hear what I'm saying?"

I nodded my head a bit feeling silly. I didn't need to be lectured to now. I'd already been through all that, had already had my opportunities to go wrong, but I didn't say anything. I just wanted to let him say what he thought he had to say and get it over with. I didn't want to be like them. They were like aliens to me, like things from another planet. I'd told Eugene something similar earlier when he was recounting one of his twisted stories to me.

"We don't live in the same world," I said. He narrowed his eyes and seemed to take it hard.

"We all live in the same world," he replied in a tone that held menace, and I knew what he meant for I'd seen enough of it.

There were still patches of snow on the ground. The night was cold and dark. My father was silent now as we passed through the landscape watching the headlights on the barren road. I thought of my cousins and my cousins' wives. They lived the life that surrounded them. We all do, but my father had changed that, had left to live another way. I remembered a phrase that I had learned in one of my classes that stayed with me. "Lives of quiet desperation." I thought of Donnie's wife and the look in her eyes after we talked when it was time to go home. I knew I shouldn't, but I'd been thinking about her a lot. I tried to picture her at home, sitting at the dining room table, perhaps, her husband in the living room watching television and getting stoned. We were leaving in two days, I thought. One more day, really. I felt tired. I was ready for bed.