To the memory of Brian “Tom” Thomson, artist’s model,
check-out operator, librarian and linguistics expert. Anything from the fifties
made his boat float. A disease from the eighties made it sink.
Tom is sitting on
the sofa over in the corner drinking whisky with coke. He holds his glass with
both hands. I’m sitting at the table with my glass in front of me. No coke.
Coke ruins whisky, I tell him. Tom seems a little shocked. Or surprised. But
not because of what I’ve just said about coke. Because of something else that
we really haven’t discussed yet, but we will try to do.
“So what are you
gonna do?”, he asks.
He
takes a look at his drink. Probably watching the bubbles.
I pick
up my glass.
“Nice whisky,
this,” I say.
“Uh-uh,”
says Tom.
“Teacher’s”,
I say.
“Now,
I mean”, says Tom.
“Now?”,
I ask.
“Yeah.
What are you going to do?”
I don’t know what
I’m going to do. Especially now. I look at the whisky in front of me. I take a
drink and hold it in my mouth for a while. It burns a little, but pleasant.
“I
suppose I’ll carry on with my work”, I say.
I go
over and turn the TV on. Six thirty. We always watched the six thirty news.
Tom wants to make a
phone call. He does.
“Local
number”, he says.
I look
out the window, drink some more whisky, study the records. It’s getting dark.
Tom puts down the receiver.
“Going
out tonight”, he says, after a while.
“No”,
I say, also after a while, thinking it’s a question.
I’m standing by the
window and looking out at the land. Darkness takes hold of the land slowly. You
can’t notice it if you look away for a half hour and then look back; you can
only notice it if you watch all the time and don’t get distracted for a second,
because in one second you can miss something that might be important. Darkness
seems to seep up from inside the land and possess it. It doesn’t come from
above, that’s light; darkness comes from below.
Tom is watching TV.
I can see it from where I sit. Some guy in Utah has killed his three wives. He’s
talking on TV now. Says he’d had enough of them complaining about his salary.
Says he reads the Bible every day. He’s saying something else when the mike is
pushed away by a police officer. The newsman said he chopped them up with an
ax.
“Jesus”,
says Tom.
I
don’t say anything. Tom has another whisky.
“Are you gonna be
okay on your own?”, asks Tom.
“I’ve
got my work to do”, I say.
I put
on a record. Gil Evans. Tom says he likes it. Tom’ll say anything to avoid
saying what he should say.
The
whisky finishes.
“Whisky’s
finished”, says Tom, over at the bar.
“’s
beer in the ice-box”, I say.
Tom
goes to the kitchen.
“Jesus!”,
he says when he comes back.
Tom is
twenty-eight. He’s a lawyer at De Voer and Rosenblat. The best firm in town,
they say. He’s tall, blond and slightly tanned. He is wearing faded baggy blue
jeans and a sweat-shirt that says “Land of the Free”. He is carrying a can of
beer.
I’ve switched to
vodka. Neat. Tom doesn’t like vodka. Gil Evans ends. Just after seven. Normally
I’d be having dinner now. Normally we’d be having dinner now. Watching TV.
“Why did she
leave?”, Tom asks, holding his glass in both hands again. Not the same glass as
before, of course.
Tom’s going out. He
leaves by the back porch, and I sit in the rocking chair and watch him get into
his Opel Kadett and roll across the yard until he gets onto the driveway and
then the highway. Going into town. It’s dark.
I told him why she
left.
“Jesus!”,
he said. “Jesus!”
Tom is driving
along the freeway now, I suppose. The TV is still on. A talk show. I can hear
it from the porch, and its slight light reaches me in this pitch blackness out
here. There are other noises, too. In the distance I can see the lights of the
town. If I strain my ears I can imagine I hear the noises of the bars and cars,
but I can’t really. Apart from this everything is black. Occasionally a car
shines its headlights this way, but mostly they don’t. It’s a hot night. Like
last night. I’m hot again, like last night. The vodka has finished now. But
there’s beer in the ice-box.
