THE MAN THAT TURNED INTO A STATUE
Joyce Carol Oates, a well-known and prolific American author, combines her creative activities with teaching at a Canadian university. The winner ol' numerous literary awards since her debut in 1963, she has published over fifty books in diverse genres. Her admirers and critics alike claim that she is the strongest as a short story writer. The story presented below was first published in 1966, in the collection «Upon the Sweeping Flood» - and, among others, serves an illustration of the author's creative credo: «1 am concerned,» she says, «with only one thing: the moral and social conditions of my generation.»
When reading the story pay attention to the repetitions of «bad luck», «gone wrong», «hate»; also to the significance of tense changes (esp. the appearance of Past Perfect, Future in the Past); to the signals of viewpoint shifts.
They emerged from the bushes at the side of the road. The girl, who was really a child, had a sardonic dazed look that seemed frozen into her face; she wore an orange sweater with an orange cord that tied at her waist and white pedal pushers that were soiled. Each step she took drew wrinkles sharply across these pedal pushers. Her clothes were too tight for her, she had grown out of them in this past year, her body pushing up and out like a vegetable swelling patiently in the earth. Her face was round and hard, with small pursed lips and eyes that seemed to slant in her face like almonds; her brown hair was reckless about her face, snarled from the wind. The man, grunting as he climbed up to the road, was over forty: his dark hair was thin, receding back sharply from his forehead but leaving a patch there right in the center; his face was pale and surprised-looking, this look, too, frozen into him. It was October and chilly; in the bluish light that came at sundown in this part of the country, the narrow road with its cracked pavement and snakelike strips of tar seemed to glow and rise slightly up above the dirt shoulders.
«Now whatcha going to do, you're so smart?» the girl said.
Something had caught across the man's chest, a vine that was entangled in the bush. He paused to tug at it - a slender green vine with tiny ruined flowers - and when he could not get it off at once he tore viciously at it. The girl, watching him with her arms folded and her legs set apart in a pretence of confidence, saw a ripple of fear cross his face. The man muttered something. He had a long nervous nose; his lips were always loose, always about to mutter something, perhaps because his teeth protruded slightly and he could not quite close his mouth.
«Now it's dark so if anybody comes we can see them first. See the headlights,» he said.
«Yeah, you're so goddamn smart,» the girl said. She wiped her eyes.
«Smart enough to get us out of this, I guarantee that.»
But he stood on the road, looking back and forth in both directions and rubbing his hands, and did not seem to know what to do after all. «Spost to be in Canada by now,» the girl said. «That map you showed me -»
«Just bad luck,» he muttered. The girl watched his hands and felt something prod at her brain: fear, like the touch of a bat's wing. But she hardened her face again and looked down at her shoes, which were new, red-and-white- striped sneakers she had been seeing in the shoe store window for weeks. But this shoe store had been too near home, it was a mistake to think of it. She wiped her eyes again and her mouth turned into a bitter line. «1 had bad luck all my life,» the man said. She had heard this before. The first time she had seen him, when he was sitting on the steps that led down to his basement apartment, he had started to talk about this out of nowhere, angrily and mournfully, as if his bad luck were something he expected to get hold of with his hands. «Some people get born with it and others don't. Those bastards you see on the expressway, driving out of the city, they don't have it. Got jobs downtown and then drive home out of the city; got born without it. Nobody that gets born without bad luck can understand or give a damn about somebody that has it...» His words ended in a murmur, as if he were no longer paying attention to them. «Okay, come on. This way.»
«You're sure, this way?» she said sarcastically.
«Come on.»
They walked. It was getting dark and this long day was coming to an end at last, but the end did not mean anything because nothing had been settled. So much had happened, had gone wrong, they were still on foot... The girl remembered suddenly, without wanting to, the door opening and the woman rushing in: the back of the fruit store, smelly and grubby, with empty fruit baskets piled all over, and she standing beside this man as he rifled desperately through a tin box that was supposed to have hundreds of dollars in it but had only a few bills scattered among papers that made no sense. Why had the woman come in just then? She and her old husband had been carrying strips of canvas back along the side of the building, as they did every morning, opening the store up. They lived in two or three rooms on the second floor.
But something had gone wrong with the man's plans, though he and the girl had watched the dilapidated back door of the building from the man's basement window across the alley for days. Yet the man had acted like someone in a movie, whirling around and striking the woman without even thinking, he was so fast; the girl's mind was dazzled still at the spectacle of his fist and the woman's surprised face, an image isolated out of the dim jumble of junk behind it; something she would remember all her life. Thinking of it now, she glanced at the man fondly. If only his teeth did not protrude like that and make his jaw slant up to meet them... All his life, he had told her, he had tried to fight his way up and had been pushed back down. His bad luck was like a sickness. The girl, though only thirteen, understood vaguely the difference between her world and the world promised her in movies and in movie magazines, and felt bitterness side by side with her infatuation for this other world. Sitting in the movie house, seeing a movie over for the second or third time, she had often been startled at the way her love for the people on the screen had jerked away, suddenly, to leave her sullen and hateful. When she went home the feeling would get worse, and only in sleep would it vanish; but then she would have to wake up the next morning, another school day, and lying in bed staring at the gritty windowpane, she could feel the waiting familiar world discharge itself into her mouth and down her throat, into her heart and stomach, turning her heavy and inert with hate as if something had caught there, some seed, and had begun to grow.
«If we try for a ride we'll get picked up,» the man said, cracking his knuckles. «That bitch got a good look at me and you both, should of hit her harder... Hell of a chance, hitching for a ride, because some bastard driving by would go and call the cops from a garage or some-place. That's how they are. Nobody asks why you do something or if something made you do it, they don't give a damn. You slip off the road and can't get back on again. They might as well take your name from you and slice off your face, because you can't make it back up again, they don't give a damn, they never think how easy it might be to trade places with you...»
The girl was not listening but dreaming of a field somewhere, of a morning in warm weather, and of herself walking slowly toward this man, who stood leaning against a fence waiting for her. From this distance he looked young and not really familiar. She began to hurry through the grass - which was green and vivid, like grass in a magazine picture - with her arms outstretched to him, her heart racing - «Here comes a car!» the man said. He grabbed at her and they ran clumsily through the bushes and into the ditch. The bottom of the ditch was wet. The girl did not watch the car but stood rubbing her arm. It was not really dark and yet everywhere objects were losing their shapes. The wild field ran back in a tumult to a wood some distance away where trees were dissolved into one another like water in water. The car's headlights seized upon the leaves of the bush and then swept past. «Wonder who's riding in there, lucky bastards,» the man muttered.
«1 should hitch for a ride myself, I'm tired as hell of walking and hiding,» the girl said. «1 said, I should get a ride by myself.» The man turned to her. She saw in his expression the queer tense bafflement she had seen when the woman had walked into the back room of the store and when the vine had caught across his chest.
«You wouldn't be safe by yourself,» he said.
«Yeah?»
«You need somebody to take care of you, a little girl like you -»
«Yeah, sure.»
She was ready to step away if he came toward her; he knew this and did not move. The girl followed rules that had come to her out of nowhere - she did not know where - and told her always what to do, when to do it, when it was not right to do anything: in the daylight or when other people were around. She would have been sick to her stomach if he had forced her to break these rules, though she did not know where she had learned them. The man, who had often cringed before her and pressed his wet cheeks against her knees, murmuring things to her she did not hear and after a while did not pay attention to, now stared at her and cracked his knuckles. «I'm going to take good care of you, get some food in you. You're hungry, that's all. You believe all I told you, don't you?»
«Sure I believe you.»
«1 was married one time and I took care of her too,» he said. «Begun all over from a beginning but hit a snag. Three times already I begun over and this is the fourth and last. Going to begin over again up in Canada. Don't you believe me?»
«Sure.» The girl ran through the bushes and back up onto the road. A branch had swept across her eye and made it smart, but instead of getting angry she made herself laugh. This was only the second time that she had run away from home. The first time had been a mistake, she had been too young, hadn't any money; she had tried to keep going just on her hatred for her mother and father. But it was different now. She knew what she was doing now. She would keep her hatred for them safe, as if it were a tiny seed she carried greedily inside her, and once away from them and across the shadowy border that separated her from the real world she would let this hatred blossom and so get rid of it. And they would yearn for her across this border, they would keep waiting for her to come home, her mother would be stuffed with baby after baby and yet they would keep waiting for her to come home... .
«Something wrong?» the man said.
The girl turned away. She had begun to cry and was ashamed.
«Yeah, it's cold,» the man said nervously, «1 got to get you someplace warm and safe. Get some food into you. Don't you worry.» He slid his arm about her shoulders and they walked along the edge of the road. The girl stared down at the rigid strips of tar in the pavement, one after another across the road like flattened snakes. «I'll change how we are now, don't you worry. Nothing stays the same but has to change. Change is a fact of our life. I read you that part in my book about the laws, didn't I? How they change every place you go and every different person you are?» The girl had forced herself to think of that warm sunlit field again and she resented his question. «Why are you writing that crazy old book anyway,» she said. «How the laws change before you even have time to learn them,» the man said. He was excited now and could talk to himself as if she were not even there. «Everything changes, won't stay fixed. When my grandmother died I was ten, ten years old, a boy. I was a boy. I went in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror for half an hour, maybe. I made faces and looked at my teeth... Do you believe that? I was a boy but I can't remember it, I can remember only a boy in the mirror that I couldn't possibly have been, that was somebody else, a boy who's still a boy... not me... And when that boy that was supposed to be me came out of the bathroom he had to think about his grandmother again, because she was dead and the house smelled of it and there was no way to forget. Everybody smelled of it. All this is in my book too. The Man That Turned into a Statue, that's what it's called.» He touched his coat gently; he must have been carrying the notebook there. «Remember why it's called that?»
«Cause that's what you're trying to do,» the girl sneered. «Turn into a statue!»
«My wife too, she's in there... She was a small woman with hair your color, she had pierced ears. Bluish hands, as if she could never get them warm. She put a crucifix up on the wall that I could feel watching me, tiny little blind eyes in the crucified man, no eyes at all, really, but I could feel them watching me even in the dark... I didn't want to hate her,» he said angrily. «1 didn't want to hate anyone. Never. Not once. I was always pushed into it, like being pushed into a fire from other people crowding up close. It was like a big whirlpool in the ocean, the deepest part, where everything spins round and round and gets sucked in, and you can't get away from it. If you ran your whole life in the opposite direction you'd get sucked there anyhow, so what the hell? But I never wanted to hate.»
He hugged her clumsily and she felt a surge of gratitude. He would take care of her. She did not understand much of what he said, did not even listen to it, but she knew he would take care of her. These shoes she wore, right now, he had paid for; he had not even asked for the change. He had seemed not to know there was any change.
«Another incident in my book,» he said in a different voice, a chatty voice, «a man and woman were fighting in a bar. I was there. The man knocked her down right by the juke box, that was all lit up different colors and playing some song. Then he started kicking her and I went over. I said, what the hell are you doing? I told him to stop. But he never paid any attention, and when I pulled his arm he just pushed me away. He never paid any attention. So I went back and sat down. That incident is in there too, with a lot of description. I'm particularly good at description -»
Somewhere close, a dog had begun to bark. The man froze. They could hear the dog running but in the dusk could see only the vague jumbled field beside them. The girl began trembling. «Don't worry,» the man muttered. «Bad comes to worst I got this knife.»
The dog appeared before them: not a large dog but nervous and wiry, with a dull black coat and dancing paws and ears cringing back alongside its head. «Here, here boy,» the man said. «It's okay, boy. We don't want no trouble. It's okay.» The dog snarled. It leaped toward them and froze; crouched low, with its mouth twisted up into what looked like a grin. The girl stood behind the man, shivering. She was frightened, not so much by the dog itself as by the way the dog seemed to hate them, as if there were something wrong with them, people the dog had never encountered before. She could feel her own face twisting into a painful mirroring of the dog's look. «Here, boy. Nice boy. Here, here,» the man pleaded. He even extended his hand. The dog eyed them suspiciously. For a moment it hesitated, as if thinking; then it leaped at the man's hand. They heard its teeth click. «Bastard,» the man said. The dog fell away as it yanked to one side. The man turned to face it, cracking his knuckles. He began again, murmuring to the dog, bending with his hand out, his shoulders hunched and obsequious. The dog crouched snarling against the road. For some seconds it did not move and the man straightened a little. «Maybe if we just keep on walking,» he said. «Show him we got somewhere to go. Sometimes they let you go, then.»
They walked on. The dog followed them. At first it kept some distance away but then it came nearer; just as the girl glanced around it lunged at the man's leg, its snarls breaking out into harsh barks that sounded like coughs. The man cried out and kicked it away. «The bastard, why don't it let us alone! The bastard!» he said. His voice was profoundly sad. The dog retreated and watchcd them. After a moment the man put his arm around the girl's shoulders again, to protect her, and they turned to walk on. The girl kept looking back. That dog, she thought, was the kind of dog she had always seen whining at screen doors or looking out car windows, its ears flapping in the wind; it never barked viciously or leaped at anyone. She had been seeing dogs like this all her life but now something was wrong.
Then the dog leaped again. Suddenly it was close behind them and against the man's legs, its muzzle darting from place to place and its teeth flashing. The man kicked it away but it lunged back at once. Something seemed to enliven it, some inexplicable energy that drove it on, snarling maliciously and desperately. The man cried out in pain. He stooped and picked something up - a tree branch -and slashed at the dog. The dog pranced and leaped; «Get back or I'll kill you,» the man sobbed. He tried to flick the branch across the dog's face but the dog always ducked away. «I'll kill you, kill you,» he said. He threw the branch at the dog and took out of his pocket the knife he used to clean his fingernails and to pick mud off his shoes. The girl could not tell if he threw himself down on the dog or if his knees suddenly collapsed, jerking and terrified.
When the man got to his feet he was panting violently. He stumbled backward. The dog lay writhing; it was bleeding from a wound in its stomach. The man stared as if he could not remember where he was, what had happened. «Well, you got him,» the girl said hollowly. She touched the man and he did not seem to notice. «He shouldn't of come after us,» she said. She saw that the front of the man's pants was speckled with blood. They would get him, then, she thought, and when they did she would say he had kidnapped her. He had forced her to come with him. And they would believe her, and she would wait for another man to come to her just as she had waited for this one...
«Let's go. Got to keep going,» the man said. He began walking fast. The girl hurried to keep up with him. In a while they saw a house ahead, with its porch light on. «That was their dog. I spose,» the man said. «Think they heard him bark?» But no one was out on the porch. The light was an ugly yellow light that fell upon the porch roof and slashed the floor in half, lighting up an old sofa and some junk but leaving the rest in shadow, and lighting up the driveway and a car parked there on a small incline.
The girl felt terror rising stupidly within her at the sight of this house. Each window was lit, even the attic window. Someone lived up there - a child, probably. A little bedroom. She knew they would not go past the house but would go in, and this knowledge pressed down upon her like a giant palm on the top of her head. Her legs were suddenly exhausted under the strain. «We had better hurry on past here,» she said.
«But we got to get some food,» the man said. He was still trembling and his voice too was trembling. She had known he would say this. «It's not like I don't have the money to pay for it. I do. I'll pay for it. If I just didn't have this bad luck always behind me... somebody else would be up in Canada now, all safe, and not make you walk around at night, chased by dogs...»
«1 don't want to go in that house,» the girl said.
«1 never asked for no dog to come, that's for sure,» the man said. They were at the end of the driveway now. The girl had stopped shivering. She saw, brushing behind one of the windows, a woman's figure, a flash of color drawing back a curtain and almost immediately releasing it. «You think they might know about us, those people in there?» the man said. «Heard about it on the radio or something?»
«How the hell do I know,» said the girl.
«1 got to take care of you. I guarantee that...» He took a step forward. She wanted to pull him back but instead stared at the side of his face in fascination. What was there about him that enchanted her, what was it in his humble malicious face that seemed to show how he was enchanted as well? «1 bet they're eating in there. Smell it? That's food. Do you smell it?»
«No, nothing.»
She smelled something else - an odor of blood and earth and night.
«Sure you smell it. Potatoes or something. Meat...» He put the knife away and went up the driveway. His feet crunched in the gravel. Tediously the girl followed; as he approached the light she saw the bloodstains on his pants, dark wet clots. She was too exhausted to say anything. It did not matter anyway. «We can pay for anything we eat, that's not the trouble. I pay as I go. Always have always will. My word is always been good, you can ask anybody that... .»
Before he got to the porch someone was at the door, a fat man in just an undershirt and pants. «Yeah, what do you want?» he said. He loomed up close against the screen door so that his face was dim. «What do you two want?»
«Hello, mister,» said the man in a new voice. He waited for the girl to come up beside him; her legs had begun to ache. «We had a accident up the road and had to walk. Had some trouble. Was wondering if we could -»
«Car trouble?»
«Car trouble, yes, and had to walk, and haven't eaten for a long time -»
A child appeared behind the man, a girl with long dark hair. The man turned and said something to her; she went away. The girl's eyes narrowed, seeing her.
«Mister, we had a lot of bad luck and sure would appreciate some help.»
The man hesitated. He had a big stomach that strained against his white undershirt and bulged a little over his belt. Then he said, «We got no telephone here.»
«If we could have something to eat -1 - I'll pay for it -»
«No.»
«1 got money, look here. Look, that's a fact. I'll pay for it, anything you want. My little girl here -»
«No.»
The girl wondered if that fat man had seen the blood. He had begun shaking his head, but the man continued up the driveway and went right up to the porch just the same. He muttered all the way, right through the fat man's angry voice, as if he did not hear it. «1 don't run no roadside restaurant here,» the fat man said, «1 don't have no open house for tramps! What the hell are you doing? What do you think you're -»
Still with his shoulders bent apologetically, the man opened the screen door and plunged the knife into the fat man's chest. The girl's eyes seemed to pinch, jerking her head forward. The fat man had been talking and was now silent. He fell back into the light, his body turning, his arms outstretched, and the girl could see now a brilliant stream of blood emerging out of him as if his words had turned into this. Inside the house, someone screamed. The man went right in the house, as if he were coming home, and with the knife still in his hand ran through to the next room. He might have known all the rooms in the house, nothing would surprise him. The girl, leaning against the door frame, caught the screen door as it swung idly back to her and stared at the dying man; he stared at her. Coldness enveloped her body like a flame. The dying man gazed at her with a look of angry curiosity over the heaving blossom of blood on his chest. From the other room there were screams; something overturned. Crashing. Glass, dishes broken. Every sound was another weight added to her body, making her heavy and old, so that she did not think she would ever be able to move again.
After a minute or so the man returned, still hurrying. «Come on,» he said. «It's okay. I fixed it.» He pulled at the girl's arm and she saw that he was trying to smile. «Okay. Everything okay. I'll take care of you.» She stared at him. She had forgotten how to talk.
«Come on,» he said. «In here, I got them dragged out back. They won't bother you now, come on. We better hurry.»
She allowed him to lead her into the kitchen. There things were knocked about - chairs, plates, silverware on the floor, a mess of potatoes down by her feet. They had been eating supper, apparently. Most of the dishes were still on the table. «Come on. Sit. Sit down,» the man said nervously. Blood had splashed up onto his chest and throat, but he did not notice. There was blood smeared faintly on his forehead. The girl, sitting at the table, looked about and saw blood gleaming on the linoleum, by the sink. A screen door led out back into the darkness; there was blood in great sweep strokes, like angels' wings, to this door and out it, into nothing. The girl sat, slowly. She felt the chair hard beneath her and the table against her cold arms, elbows. «Here, there's this,» the man said. He pushed a plate toward her: on it were a piece of meat and some mashed potatoes with gravy on them. The gravy was greasy. She looked up to see the man shaking salt on his food. He tried to smile, nervously, brightly, like a host uncertain of his charm. «Okay, come on. We better hurry. Got us a car now but we better hurry anyway. You know how it is.» The girl's gaze fell back down to the plate before her, as if it were suddenly overcome. Her hand groped for something - a fork. She found one and picked it up. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the man eating, his head lowered toward the plate, like a dog, and turned also a little to the side so that he chewed with a look of precise, methodical concentration. The girl tried to remember something but could not. She could not remember what it was that eluded her, just as she could not get hold of the dreams that pleased her so at night when she woke: everything vanished, brushed away. Was something lost or had she simply passed over into the real world, so that now old things were dismissed and new things had names yet to be learned? She could hear the man chewing.
She poked at the mashed potatoes with the fork. The man, raising his head suddenly, said through a mouthful of food, «Here, it needs this,» and pushed the salt shaker at her. The salt shaker was in the form of a baby chick, bright lacquered yellow. The girl picked it up and shook salt onto the half- eaten food. She watched the tiny white granules fall; they were not lost but remained there, waiting to be eaten. She set the salt shaker down and her fingers brushed against the man's arm, reaching out for something else across the table. «Got to be always in a hurry, sorry for it,» he muttered, stuffing bread into his mouth, «but it ain't always going to be like this. I guarantee that.
Got us a new life coming up.» She could see the faint pale gleam of his skin beneath his hair, blank and white, something she had never been able to see before. She felt like a bride awakened to a body strange and new.