The Stories of Richard Bausch Read Online Free Page A

think I was complaining.

VALOR

    After it was all over, Aldenburg heard himself say that he had never considered himself the sort of man who was good in an emergency, or was particularly endowed with courage. If anything, he had always believed quite the opposite. The truth of this hurt, but there it was. Problems in his private life made him low, and he’d had no gumption for doing anything to change, and he knew it, way down, where you couldn’t mask things with rationalization, or diversion, or bravado—or booze, either. In fact, he would not have been in a position to perform any heroics if he had not spent the night sitting in the bar at whose very door the accident happened.
    The bar was called Sam’s. At night, the neon Budweiser sign in the window was the only light at that end of the street. Aldenburg had simply stayed on past closing, and sobered up playing blackjack for pennies with Mo Smith, the owner, a nice gentleman who had lost a son in the Gulf War and was lonely and had insomnia, and didn’t mind company.
    It had been such a miserable winter—gray bone-cold days, black starless nights, ice storms one after another, and a wind blowing across the faceof the world like desolation itself. They talked about this a little, and about the monstrosities all around.
Monstrosity
was Smitty’s word; he used it in almost every context to mean vaguely that thing he couldn’t quickly name or understand. “Bring me that—monstrosity over there, will you?” he’d say, meaning a pitcher of water. Or he would say, “Reagan’s presidency was a monstrosity,” and sometimes it was as though he meant it all in the same way. Smitty especially liked to talk about the end of the world. He was perpetually finding indications of the decline of everything, everywhere he looked. It was all a monstrosity.
    Aldenburg liked listening to him, sometimes, and if on occasion he grew a little tired of the dire predictions, he simply tuned him out. This night he let him talk without attending to it much. He had been struggling to make ends meet and to solve complications in his marriage, feeling depressed a lot of the time because the marriage had once been happy, and trying to work through it all, though here he was, acting bad, evidently past working to solve anything much—staying out late, giving his wife something to think about.
    The present trouble had mostly to do with his brother-in-law, Cal, who had come back from the great victory in the Gulf needing a cane to walk. Cal was living with them now, and the victory didn’t mean much. He was as bitter as it was possible to be. He had been wounded in an explosion in Riyadh—the two men with him were killed instantly—less than a week before the end of hostilities, and he’d suffered through three different surgical procedures and eleven months of therapy in a military hospital in Washington. Much of his left knee was gone, and part of his left foot and ankle, and the therapy hadn’t helped him much. He would need the cane for the rest of his life. He wasn’t even twenty-five and he walked like a man in his eighties, bent over the cane, dragging the bad leg.
    Aldenburg’s wife, Eva, couldn’t stand it, the sound of it—the fact of it. And while Aldenburg thought Cal should be going out and looking for some kind of job, Eva seemed to think nothing should be asked of him at all. Aldenburg felt almost superfluous in his own house. He was past forty and looked it. He had a bad back and flat feet, and the money he made selling shoes wasn’t enough to support three adults, not to mention Cal’s friends who kept coming around: mostly pals from high school, where he had been the star quarterback. Cal’s fiancée, Diane, ran a small beauty parlor in townand had just bought a house that she was having refinished, so she was over a lot, too. There seemed never anywhere to go in the house and be alone. And lately Eva had started making innuendos to these people about her