Something Is Out There by Richard Bausch

Author:Richard Bausch [Bausch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59288-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

When he and his mother and Sean visit the old Highpoint house, they all end up sitting near the big wooden frame, tryoing to talk over the noise of Max’s labor. Walker watches his sister-in-law move back and forth from the house to the end of the yard, and the rib cage of blond wood there, and then he tries hard not to watch her. She’s a shape in his peripheral vision, and he hears her voice, that softness coming from her throat; he could pick it out of a crowd of people all talking at once. When he glances at her he sees the soft curve of her breasts in the little area of the open collar of her blouse. He hates his own mind, his own senses, because they are so attuned to every nuance of her being—sound, breath, touch, the fragrance of her, the physical power of her proximity, bones and flesh and the dark shine of the eyes and the hair with its perfect straight shimmer in sunlight.

Work on the boat takes up the hour before dinner. The family moves through the shade of the lawn in the sound of it.

Finally their mother shakes her head and makes her slow way into the house, to sit with Jenny and play gin rummy. Walker tolerates Sean’s teasing and banters with him, not really attending to what is said, feeling only annoyance with the other’s constant chatter. Sometimes they toss a baseball back and forth. Walker wonders if Jenny can see him from the window. Now and then Max joins in the talk—that is, when he’s not rattled and aggravated, trying, he says, to focus on the work. He allows Walker only a boy’s tasks, really: holding tools and fetching things.

Jenny serves the evening meal out in the yard, and they all sit in the striped shade of the unfinished boat, and Walker attempts to see past her, around her, away from her. He knows that this thing he’s struggling with is not a crush. This is a passion so deep it has taken everything else out of him; it feels like a form of starvation—or, no, a form of drowning. Something wells up in his spirit, and leaves him inwardly gasping. She talks about trying to sleep in the ruckus at night, Max with his boat, his manic dream of maritime riches, the floodlights pouring in the window, her weekends and evenings sacrificed to this set of ribs on scaffolding. Her husband treats the talk as a form of mockery. Nothing gets through to him. It occurs to Walker that Max has one obsession and he, Walker, has his. Walker desires to set the older man straight, and then, like part of the same thought, hopes that Max will never get it and that Jenny’s discontent will grow. This thought makes him sorry and sick inside.

Most days now, after Sean gets home from school, Walker will play a little distracted basketball with him, and then leave him

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