I glanced at the tall trees above us, tried to guess which ones would be the next to fall, and wondered if the forest felt relieved that Billy was gone now—if those trees would be free now to just rot, once they fell.
We rode past the swans’ pond. It was a cold night and earlier in the day Amy had lit a few fires around the edge. The fires were beautiful in the falling snow, though diminished and not putting out much heat. The swans had moved in as close to the small ragged orange fires as they could get without leaving the pond. Their beauty was of no help to them, it seemed; they were cold.
They watched us, silent as ever, as we passed, the swans graceful and perfect in the firelight, and I rolled my window down, thinking that as we passed some of them would cry out at Billy’s death. But then I remembered it was only for their own death that they sang, and only that once.
The Prisoners
ARTIE AND DAVE work together. They are going fishing with Dave’s younger brother, Wilson, who has his own company, even though he is only twenty-eight. He sells and installs cellular car phones and electronic car locks and things like that.
The three men live in Houston. Wilson is single. Artie and Dave are not; they are in their late thirties. Artie is still in his first marriage, though perhaps not for long. Dave is into his second marriage, but it’s going well. They both have children: Artie, two young sons, whom he is not that wild about, and Dave, two daughters—one with his ex-wife and one with his new wife.
Dave is wild about both of his daughters, hates to be gone from either of them for more than a few hours, and each time he sees them it is like swimming to the surface from a great depth; when he does not see them, he feels as if his lungs are about to burst.
Dave’s first wife had left him when they had been living in Orange, New Jersey—had moved to Texas with her boyfriend and received custody of their daughter two years ago—and so Dave followed her down to Texas and got a job there, and was able to see his daughter on Wednesday evenings, plus every other weekend.
It was in Houston that Dave met and married his new wife, Nancy, and had the new baby, who to him is just as precious as the first. Because Dave owes his ex-wife $896.12 each month in child support, Dave and Nancy and the baby live in a small apartment in a not-very-safe neighborhood. They can’t go for walks at night and, afraid of drive-by shootings, they sleep with lightweight bulletproof flak jackets, with the baby in between them. Dave’s learning to be a real estate appraiser, and in his work he has seen how easily bullets can penetrate thin hollow plasterboard walls. He appraised an apartment in Phoenix into which a pistol had been fired, and he was amazed to see that the bullet had traveled through six walls before going through a refrigerator door.
Nancy took six weeks off from her job when the baby was born but has now been back at work for a couple of months. There’s a woman they pay over in Bellaire—a forty-minute drive in good traffic, an hour in bad traffic—to watch the baby each day. Under the terms of her maternity leave, Nancy could have taken off eight weeks, but she’s heard that her boss rewards employees who come back to work early.
Dave has not been at his job as long as Artie has, but he’s better at it, more confident with both people and numbers, and so already he’s a little higher in the company than Artie. The boss likes Dave, and likes the way the work isn’t the most important thing in the world to Dave. The boss knows that Dave’s daughters are what matter to him, and that because of this he doesn’t have to worry about his loyalty: knows Dave’s not going anywhere. And Dave always gets his work turned in on time; he hasn’t been late with a project yet.
Dave is pleasant-looking, tall, friendly, with blue eyes. He smiles a lot, laughs easily, hides from everyone the thing that used to be rage and despair, about his wife taking his daughter away from him, the thing that is now neither rage nor despair, but some harder, sadder, more deadened thing. You couldn’t tell that thing was in him unless you cut him open with a knife, or unless he opened up and told you—which he isn’t going to do.
Artie is dark, heavy, sulky. He doesn’t know how to laugh. He can pretend-laugh, can ridicule things, but he hasn’t opened up and laughed, hasn’t felt the cleansing opening-up trickling of simple, gurgling laughter since he was about ten or twelve. His skin is as dark as a plum, as if he’s bruised. His eyes are hooded from nonspecific worries, from chronic frowning. He’s about twenty pounds overweight. When he drinks beer he gets friendlier, though not happier. Artie listens to conservative radio talk shows and feels strongly an impending sense of disaster, as if he is in a fast car that is racing flat-out and hard for a concrete wall. He and Dave and Wilson have taken off a Monday from work to go fishing down near Galveston. They’ve hired a guide, whom they’re supposed to meet at daylight, down at one of the Texas City piers on the Gulf. The guide has said that he will take them to wherever the fish are biting. Artie is worried that they won’t catch anything, that the money will be wasted, and on the drive down he keeps pressing Dave and Wilson to reassure him that this is a good guide. Dave and Wilson have been fishing with this guide once before and each caught his limit of
