The Beginning Place Read online

The television set was vibrating with canned laughter. He turned it off, then heard the kitchen timer buzzing and hurried to turn it off. The kitchen clock said five to nine. The turkey dinner was withered in its little aluminum coffin. He tried to eat it but it was stone. He drank a quart of milk and ate four slices of bread and butter, a pint of blueberry yogurt, and two apples; he got the bag of peanuts from the living room floor and shelled and ate them, sitting at the dinette table in the kitchen, thinking. It had been a long walk home. He had not looked at his watch, but it must have taken pretty near an hour. And surely he had spent an hour or more by the stream; and it had taken him a while to get there, even if he had been running, he wasn’t any four-minute miler. He would have sworn it was ten o’clock or even eleven, if the clock and his watch did not unanimously contradict him.

  Never much of a one for argument, he gave it up. He finished the peanuts, moved into the living room, turned off the light, turned on the television, instantly turned it off again, and sat down in the armchair. The chair shook and creaked, but this time he was more aware of its inadequacy as an armchair than of his own clumsy weight. He felt good, after his run. He felt sorry for the poor sleazy, shoddy chair, instead of disgusted with himself. Why had he run? Well, no need to go over that. He had never done anything else all his life. Run-and-hide Rogers. But to have run and got somewhere, that was new. He had never got anywhere before, no place to hide, no place to be. And then to fall over his own feet onto his face into a place like that, a wild, secret place. As if all the suburbs, the duplex development motorhome supermarket parking lot used cars carport swingset white rocks juniper imitation bacon bits special gum wrappers where in five different states he had lived the last seven years, as if all that was unimportant after all, not permanent, not the way life had to be, since just outside it, just past the edge of it, there was silence, loneliness, water running in twilight, the taste of mint.

  You shouldn’t have drunk the water. Sewage. Typhoid. Cholera…No! That was the first clean water I ever drank. I’ll go back there and drink it any damned time I want.

  The creek. Stream, they would call it in the states where he had been in high school, but the word “creek” came to him from farther back in the darkness of remembrance, a twilight word to suit the twilight water, the racing shift and glimmer that filled his mind. The walls of the room he sat in resonated faintly to the noises of a television program in the apartment overhead, and were streaked with light from the streetlamp through lace curtains and sometimes the dim wheeling of the headlights of a passing car. Within, beneath that restless, unsilent half-light was the quiet place, the creek. From thinking of it his mind drifted on to old currents of thought: If I went where I want to go, if I went out to the college here and talked to people, there might be student loans for library school, or if I save enough and got started maybe a scholarship—and from this further, like a boat drifting past the islands within sight of shore, moving into a remoter future dreamed of earlier, a building with wide and much-frequented steps, stairways within and grand rooms and high windows, people quiet, at work quietly, as much at home among the endless shelves of books as the thoughts in a mind are at home, the City Library on a fifth-grade school trip to celebrate National Book Week and the home and harbor of his longing.

  “What are you doing sitting in the dark? Without the TV on? And the front door not locked! Why aren’t the lights on? I thought nobody was here.” And when that had been talked about she found the turkey dinner, which he had not jammed far enough down into the garbage pail under the sink. “What did you eat? What on earth was wrong with it? Can’t you read the directions? You must be taking the flu, you’d better take some aspirin. Really, Hugh, you just can’t seem to look after yourself at all, you cannot manage the simplest thing. How can I be comfortable about going out after work to have a little time with my friends when you’re so irresponsible? Where’s the bag of peanuts I bought to take to Durbina’s tomorrow?” And though at first he saw her, like the armchair, as simply inadequate, trying hard to do a job she wasn’t up to, he could not keep seeing her from the quiet place but was drawn back, roped in, till all he could do was not listen, and say, “All right,” and, after she had turned on the last commercial of the movie she had wanted to watch, “Good night, mother.” And run and hide in bed.

  At the small supermarket in the last city, where Hugh had first moved up from carrier to checker, things had been easygoing, with plenty of time for conversations or loafing around back in the stockrooms, but Sam’s did heavy business, and each job was specialized and without relief. It might look like your line was going to finish with the next customer, but there was always another one coming. Hugh had learned how to think in bits and pieces, not a good method, but the only one available to him. During a working day he could get a certain amount of thinking done if he kept coming back to it; a thought would wait for him, like a patient dog, until he returned. His dog was waiting for him today when he woke up, and went to work with him, wagging its tail: He wanted to go back to the creek, to the place by the creek, and with time enough to stay a while. By ten-thirty, after checking through the old lady with an orthopedic shoe who always had to explain that canned salmon used to cost ten cents a can but now it was so outrageously overpriced because it was all being sent abroad on lend-lease to socialist countries, while she paid for her margarine and bread with food stamps, he had figured out that the best time to go to the creek place would be in the morning, not in the evening.

  His mother and her new friend Durbina were studying some kind of occultism together, and lately she had been going to Durbina’s at least once a week after work. That gave him a free evening; but only once a week, and he never knew which evening, and would have to worry about not getting home ahead of his mother.

  She did not mind getting home before he did in daylight, but if she expected him to be there and he wasn’t, or if she came home to an empty house in the dark, then it was no good. And lately it hadn’t been good when she stayed alone in the house while it was getting dark. So there was no use trying to count on going out in the evening; it was like night school, no use thinking about it.

  But in the morning, she left for work at eight. He could go to the creek place then. It was two hours, anyhow. In daylight there might be people around, he thought (in the afternoon, while Bill took over Seven to give him his break), there might be other people, or signs saying private property, no trespassing; but he would take the chance. It did not look like a place where many people came.

  He was home at his usual time, quarter to seven, tonight, but his mother did not come and there was no telephone call. He sat around reading the newspaper and wishing he had something to eat, like peanuts, the peanuts he had eaten last night that his mother had wanted to take to Durbina’s tomorrow, that was tonight. Oh, hell, he thought, I could have gone to the creek place after all. He got up to go, but could not go now, not knowing when she would come back. He went to make himself dinner, but could find nothing he wanted; he ate bits and scraps, and made up and drank a can of frozen orange juice. He had a headache. He wanted a book to read, and thought, Why don’t I get a car so I can drive downtown to the Library, why don’t I go anywhere, why don’t I have a car, but what was the use of a car if he worked from ten to six and had to stay home evenings? He watched a news-in-review show on television to shut out the dog of his mind that had turned on him and snarled, showing its teeth. The phone rang. His mother’s voice was sharp. “I wanted to be sure before I started home this time,” she said, and hung up.

  In bed that night he tried to summon up images of solace, but they turned to torment; he fell back finally on a fantasy from years ago, a waitress he had used to see when he was fifteen. He imagined himself sucking her breasts, and so brought his masturbation to climax, and then lay desolate.

  In the morning he got up at seven instead of eight. He had not told his mother that he was going to get up early. She did not like changes of routine. She sat with coffee cup
and cigarette in the living room, the morning television news going, a frown between her penciled black eyebrows. She never had anything for breakfast but coffee. Hugh liked breakfast, he liked eggs, bacon, ham, toast, rolls, potatoes, sausage, grapefruit, orange juice, pancakes, yogurt, cereal, whatever; he put milk and sugar in his coffee. His mother found the sight, sounds, smells of his preparations sickening. There was no door between the kitchen area and the living-room area in this open-plan apartment. Hugh tried to move quietly, and did not fry anything, but it was no good. She came in past him where he sat at the dinette table trying to eat cornflakes noiselessly. She dropped her cup and saucer in the steel sink and said, “I’m going to work.” He heard in her voice the terrible thin sound, a scraping sharpness, which he thought of (not in words) as the knife’s edge. “All right,” he said not turning, trying to make his voice soft, neutral, neuter; for he knew that it was his deep voice, his size, his big feet and thick fingers, his heavy, sexual body that she couldn’t stand, that drove her to the edge.

  She went straight out, though it was only twenty-five to eight. He heard the engine start, saw the blue Japanese car go past the picture window, going fast.

  When he came to wash up at the sink he found her saucer chipped and the handle broken off the coffee cup. The small violence made his stomach turn over. He stood with his hands on the rim of the sink, his mouth open, swaying a little from foot to foot, a habit he had when distressed. He reached slowly forward, turned the cold water tap on, and let the water run. He watched it, the rush and stream and clarity of it, filling and overflowing the broken cup.

  He washed the dishes, locked up, and set off. Right on Oak Valley, left on Pine View, and on. It was pleasant walking, the air sweet, the lid of the hot day not closed down yet. He got into a good swinging pace and after ten or twelve blocks had walked free of the grip of his mother’s mood. But as he went on, checking his watch, he began to doubt that he could get to the creek place before he had to turn around and start back towards Sam’s in order to get to work at ten. How had he got to the creek, stayed there, and come back, night before last, all in two hours? Maybe he was off course now, not going there by the shortest way, or headed wrong altogether. The part of his mind that did not use words to think with ignored these doubts and worries, guiding him from street to street through about five miles of Kensington Heights and Sylvan Dell and Chelsea Gardens to the gravel road above the fields.

  The big building near the freeway was the paint factory; from here you saw the back of its big many-colored sign. He went as far as the chainlink fence around its parking lot and looked down from the higher land there, trying to see the golden sunset fields he had seen from the car. In the morning light they had no glamour. Weedy, farmed once but no longer plowed or grazed, derelict. Waiting for the developers. A NO DUMPING sign stuck up out of a ditch full of thistles near the rusted chassis of a car. Far off across the fields clumps of trees cast their shadows westward; beyond them were the woods, rising blue in the smoggy, sunlit air. It was past eight-thirty, and getting hot.

  Hugh took off his jeans jacket and wiped the sweat off his forehead and cheeks. He stood a minute looking towards the woodlands. If he went, even if he did no more than drink from the creek and leave at once, he would probably be late to work. He swore out loud, bitterly, and turned, and went back down the gravel road by the down-at-heel farmhouses and the tree nursery or Christmas tree lot or whatever it was, cut through to Chelsea Gardens Place, and walking steadily along the curved treeless streets between lawns, carports, houses, lawns, carports, houses, reached Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten minutes to ten. He was red-faced and sweaty, and Donna, in the stockroom, said, “You overslept, Buck.”

  Donna was about forty-five. She had a lot of dark red hair, which she had recently got made into a fashionable mane of curls and tendrils that made her look twenty from behind and sixty face on. She had a good figure, bad teeth, one bad son who drank, and one good son who drove in stock-car races. She liked Hugh and talked to him whenever she got a chance, telling him—sometimes from checkstand to checkstand across the carts and customers—about the teeth, the sons, her husband’s mother’s cancer, her dog’s pregnancy and its complications; she offered him puppies; they told each other the plots of movies and television shows. She had named him Buck his first day at work. “Buck Rogers in the twenty-first century, I bet you’re too young to remember the real one,” and she laughed at the paradox. This morning she said, “You overslept, Buck. Shame on you.”

  “I got up at seven,” he countered.

  “Then what you been running for? There’s steam coming off you!”

  He stood not knowing what to say, then gasped at the word. “Running,” he said. “You know. Supposed to be good for you.”

  “Yeah, there was some besseller about that, wasn’t there? Like jogging only a lot harder. What do you do, just run around the block ten times? Or go to a gym or something?”

  “I just sort of run,” Hugh said, discomforted by meeting her sympathetic interest with a lie; yet it never entered his head to try to tell her about the place he had found by the creek. “I’m sort of overweight. I thought I’d try it.”

  “I guess you might be heavy for your age. You look fine to me,” Donna said, looking him up and down. Hugh was profoundly pleased.

  “I’m fat,” he said, slapping his belly.

  “A little podge, maybe. But look at all the bone you got to carry it on. Where do you get it? Your mom is such a little tiny thing, she’s so thin I can’t believe it, when she comes shopping here. Your dad must of been big, huh, you got your size from him.”

  “Yeah,” Hugh said, turning aside to put on his apron.

  “Is he dead, Hugh?” Donna asked, and there was a maternal authority to the question which he could not ignore or evade but was unable to answer adequately. He shook his head.

  “Divorced,” Donna said, speaking the word as an ordinary one and an option certainly preferable to death; Hugh, to whose mother the word was an obscenity, unspeakable, would have agreed with relief but had to shake his head again. “Went off,” he said. “I got to help Bill with the crates.” And he went off. Went off, ran away, hid. Among the crates, among the imitation bacon bits and the green shifting and wink of the cash registers, anywhere, you could hide anywhere, and no place was any better than any other place.

  But from time to time during the day’s work he thought of the water of the creek in his mouth and on his lips. He craved to drink that water again.

  He took the idea Donna had given him home with him.

  “Thought I’d get up early in the morning and jog,” he said at dinner. They ate on TV trays in front of the TV. “That’s why I got up early this morning. To try it. Only earlier would work better, I think. Five or six, maybe. When there’s no cars on the streets. And it’s cool. And that way I won’t bother you getting ready for work.” She was beginning to glance at him warily. “If you don’t mind me leaving before you do. I feel sort of out of shape. Standing around at the checkstand isn’t very good exercise, I guess.”

  “More than you’d get sitting behind some desk all day,” she said, which surprised him as a flank attack; he had not mentioned library school or anything about library work for months, since before they left the last town. Maybe she just meant office work like her own. The knife’s edge was not in her voice, though it was sharp enough.

  “Would it bother you if I got up and went out for a couple of hours real early? I can be back when you leave, and get my breakfast after you’ve gone to work.”

  “Why should it bother me?” she said, glancing down at her thin shoulders to arrange the straps of her summer dress. She lighted a cigarette and looked at the television screen, where a reporter was describing an airplane crash. “You’re perfectly free to come and go, you’re twenty, nearly twenty-one years old, after all. You don’t have to consult me about every little thing you want to do. I can’t decide everything for you. The only thing I do insist on is not
leaving the house empty at night, I did have a terrible shock night before last when I drove in and there were no lights on. It’s just purely a matter of common sense and consideration for others. It has just got to the point where a person can’t be safe in their own home even.” She had begun to speak tightly and to flip the filter end of her cigarette repeatedly with her thumbnail. Hugh was tense, dreading the next step towards the edge; but she said no more, watching the television intently. He did not dare pursue the subject. When he went to bed nothing further had been said. Ordinarily he would have heeded the threat of hysteria and not done whatever it was he wanted to do; but in this matter he was driven. It was thirst, he must drink. He woke at five, and was standing by his bed pulling his shirt on before he was fully awake.

  The apartment looked unfamiliar seen in this new light, the twilight of dawn. He did not put on his shoes till he was out on the front steps. The sun’s rays ran level down the side streets from behind the apartment houses. Oak Valley Road lay in fresh blue shadow. He had no jacket, and shivered. In his haste he knotted his shoelace wrong and had to fight with the knot, like a little kid late to school; then he was off. At a jogtrot. He did not like to lie. He had said he was going jogging, so he jogged.

  It took him a little less than an hour, jogging, and walking when he got out of breath, and forcing himself with increasing difficulty to jog again, to reach the woods on the far side of the waste fields. Pausing there under the eaves of the wood he checked his wristwatch. It was ten minutes to six.

  Though the trees did not grow very close together the wood was a place entirely different from the open, as different as indoors from outdoors. Within a few yards the hot, bright, early sunlight was shut out except for scattered drifts and flecks of light on leaves and ground. Since leaving the suburban streets he had not seen anyone. There were no fences maintained as boundaries, though at the edge of the woods there was a straggle of rotten posts and tangled wire. More than one vague path branched off among the trees and underbrush, but he followed his way without hesitation. He noticed a fleck of tinfoil under the clawed sprays of blackberry near the path, but no beer tabs, no soft-drink cans, condoms, Kleenex, candy wrappers. Nobody came here much. The way turned left. He looked for the tall pine with the reddish, scaly trunk, and saw its upper branches dark against the sky. The path narrowed and led downward, darkening, the ground softening underfoot. He came between the pine and the high bushes, the gateway to the creek place, and there it was, the glades on the near and the far side of the water, the motion and singing of the water, and the cool air, the cool, sweet, clear twilight of late evening.