Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver Read Free Book Online

been a time when he’d had trouble with it too. The next thing I knew I was on my way to an establishment down there near Santa Rosa. It was in Calistoga, California. I spent three weeks there. When I came home I was sober and the desire to drink had left me. Evelyn, that’s my first wife, she met me at the door when I came home and kissed me on the lips for the first time in years. She hated alcohol. Her father and a brother both died from it. It can kill you too, don’t forget it. Well, she kissed me on the lips for the first time that night, and I haven’t had a drink since I went into that place at Calistoga.”
    Betty and Sarah were clearing the table. I sat on the sofa and smoked while Pete talked. After he’d put up the screen he took a slide projector out of a box and set it on an end table. He plugged in the cord and flicked a switch on the projector. Light beamed onto the screen and a little fan in the projector began to run.
    “We have enough slides that we could look at pictures all nightand then some,” Pete said. “We have slides here from Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, the Middle East, Africa too. What would you like to see?”
    Sarah came in and sat down on the other end of the sofa from me.
    “What would you like to see, Sarah?” Pete said. “You name it.”
    “Alaska,” Sarah said. “And the Middle East. We were there for a while, years ago, in Israel. I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska.”
    “We didn’t get to Israel,” Betty said, coming in with the coffee. “We were on a tour that went only to Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon.”
    “It’s a tragedy, what’s happened in Lebanon,” Pete said. “It used to be the most beautiful country in the Middle East. I was there as a kid in the merchant marines in World War II. I thought then, I promised myself then, I’d go back there someday. And then we had the opportunity, Betty and me. Didn’t we, Betty?”
    Betty smiled and nodded.
    “Let’s see those pictures of Syria and Lebanon,” Sarah said. “Those are the ones I’d like to see. I’d like to see them all, of course, but if we have to choose.”
    So Pete began to show slides, both he and Betty commenting as the memory of the places came back to them.
    “There’s Betty trying to get on a camel,” Pete said. “She needed a little help from that fellow there in the burnoose.”
    Betty laughed and her cheeks turned red. Another slide flashed on the screen and Betty said, “There’s Pete talking with an Egyptian officer.”
    “Where he’s pointing, that mountain behind us there. Here, let me see if I can bring that in closer,” Pete said. “The Jews are dug in there. We could see them through the binoculars they let us use. Jews all over that hill. Like ants,” Pete said.
    “Pete believes that if they had kept their planes out of Lebanon, there wouldn’t be all that trouble there,” Betty said. “The poor Lebanese.”
    “There,” Pete said. “There’s the group at Petra, the lost city. Itused to be a caravan city, but then it was just lost, lost and covered over by sand for hundreds of years, and then it was discovered again and we drove there from Damascus in Land Rovers. Look how pink the stone is. Those carvings in the stone are more than two thousand years old, they say. There used to be twenty thousand souls who lived there. And then the desert just covered it up and it was forgotten about. It’s what’s going to happen to this country if we aren’t careful.”
    We had more coffee and watched some more slides of Pete and Betty at the souks in Damascus. Then Pete turned off the projector and Betty went out to the kitchen and returned with carameled pears for dessert and more coffee. We ate and drank and Pete said again how they would miss us.
    “You’re good people,” Pete said. “I hate to see you leave, but I know it’s in your best interests or you wouldn’t be going. Now, you’d like to see some slides from Alaska. Is that what you said, Sarah?”
    “Alaska,