Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online Page A

to kill some of the weak among too many deer in a small state-protected woods in a neighboring town, the women threatening—and not bluffing, she knew, and with good intentions, she knew—to go in with the hunters and stand in front of their shotguns to save the deer, and even insisting that if the deer starved to death that winter, it was not only nature’s way but painless. Why didn’t they know that, having killed or run off for buildings and asphalt the deer’s natural predators, people had to perform the function of coyotes and wolves? She also, on those evenings, entertained Cal, made him laugh at her anecdotes about the supermarket,or traffic, or phone calls from friends. By evening, Cal’s body and mind were near the state of hers when the alarm clock woke her, and, as relaxed and cheerful as he might be, he looked in need of a nap until midway or more through his first martini. Her name was Rusty. It had been Margaret until Cal Williams met and courted her when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three; he had called her Rusty, because of her hair, because he was in love with her, and it had become her name.
    He was sleeping on his right side now, his face toward her, his left hand resting on her stomach. Below his hand her legs were tensed to spring from the bed, to run not from but at an intruder in the room, while her hand grabbed whatever weapon it could to swing at his face; beneath Cal’s hand her stomach rose and dropped with her accelerated breath, and she felt her heart beating with that adrenaline they now said could kill you, if you were sedentary, if your heart were accustomed to a soft cushion of quotidian calm. Hers was not; but even if it were, she knew the thought of a heart attack would still be as distant as their home among the pines and poplars and maples and copper beeches on the long, wide hill. For she knew it was not the birds that had alerted the muscles in her legs and arms and the one beating beneath her ribs, ready to fight the intruder her body was gathered for, the intruder she had known when she first woke was not there; it was the day itself that woke her: the fourteenth of July.
    It had waked her before, while Cal slept as he did now, as he had on that night one year ago when the day ended and she and Cal and Gina and Ryan had showered the salt water and perhaps some of the terrorfrom their bodies, had eaten even, for they were very hungry, and their bodies were frail, too, with a weakness that food alone could not strengthen, and in the restaurant in Christiansted they had drunk a lot, all of them, before and during and after dinner. Then Gina had gone to her room in the hotel and Ryan to his, and she and Cal had gone to bed, and soon Cal was asleep, while she smoked and listened to Gina and Ryan settling in their rooms on either side of hers, and she knew Cal slept so easily not because he was oblivious but because his body was more in harmony with itself and life, and death, than hers. His family had survived. The young captain and mate were dead, the captain at least ashore now to lie beneath a monument marking his passage on earth and his possession of his final six feet of it, while the mate was forever in the Caribbean, swallowed by its creatures, parts of him—some bones, perhaps even flesh (where was his head, his face?)—left to sink, to become parts of the bottom of the sea, parts of the sea itself. Cal’s body and mind and heart had endured that, and in bed after dinner they demanded of him, as they should, as hers could not or would not, that he sleep. For a week after his mother’s death, when he was forty-eight, he skipped the evening drinks, ate early and with the effort of a tired child, and was in bed sleeping by seven.
    For a long time that night a year ago, she did not sleep. Once she heard Gina flush the toilet and she looked at her traveling clock on the bedside table and it glowed two-fifteen at her; at three-twenty Ryan flushed his toilet. And both