Friend of My Youth

Austin. Austin got Brent to stop drinking; he pulled and pulled on Brent until he pulled him right out of the life he was leading and into a new life of running this House with money from the church, the government, and so on, and he made a big mistake, Austin did, in thinking he could hold Brent there. Brentonce started on the holy road went shooting on past; he got past Austin’s careful quiet kind of religion in no time and cut Austin out with the people in his own church who wanted a stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity. Austin was shifted out of Lazarus House and the church at about the same time, and Brent bossed the new minister around without difficulty. And in spite of this, or because of it, Austin wants to give Lazarus House the money.
    “Who’s to say whether Brent’s way isn’t closer to God than mine is, after all?” he says.
    Karin says just about anything to anybody now. She says to Austin, “Don’t make me puke.”
    Austin says she must be sure to keep a record of her time, so she will be paid for all this work, and also, if there is anything here that she would particularly like, to tell him, so they can discuss it.
    “Within reason,” he says. “If you said you’d like the car or the snowblower, I guess I’d be obliged to say no, because that would be cheating the folks over at Lazarus House. How about the vacuum cleaner?”
    Is that how he sees her—as somebody who’s always thinking about cleaning houses? The vacuum cleaner is practically an antique, anyway.
    “I bet I know what Brent said when you told him I was going to be in charge of all this,” she says. “I bet he said, ‘Are you going to get a lawyer to check up on her?’ He did! Didn’t he?”
    Instead of answering that, Austin says, “Why would I trust a lawyer any more than I trust you?”
    “Is that what you said to him?”
    “I’m saying it to you. You either trust or you don’t trust, in my opinion. When you decide you’re going to trust, you have to start where you are.”
    Austin rarely mentions God. Nevertheless you feel the mention of God hovering on the edge of sentences like these, and itmakes you so uneasy—Karin gets a crumbly feeling along her spine—that you wish he’d say it and get it over with.
    Four years ago Karin and Brent were still married, and they hadn’t had the baby yet or moved to their place above the hardware store. They were living in the old slaughterhouse. That was a cheap apartment building belonging to Morris Fordyce, but it really had at one time been a slaughterhouse. In wet weather Karin could smell pig, and always she smelled another smell that she thought was blood. Brent sniffed around the walls and got down and sniffed the floor, but he couldn’t smell what she was smelling. How could he smell anything but the clouds of boozy breath that rose from his own gut? Brent was a drunk then, but not a sodden drunk. He played hockey on the O. T. (over thirty, old-timers) hockey team—he was quite a bit older than Karin—and he claimed that he had never played sober. He worked for Fordyce Construction for a while, and then he worked for the town, cutting up trees. He drank on the job when he could, and after work he drank at the Fish and Game Club or at the Green Haven Motel Bar, called the Greasy Heaven. One night he got a bulldozer going, which was sitting outside the Greasy Heaven, and he drove it across town to the Fish and Game Club. Of course he was caught, and charged with impaired driving of a bulldozer, a big joke all over town. Nobody who laughed at the joke came around to pay the fine. And Brent just kept getting wilder. Another night he took down the stairs that led to their apartment. He didn’t bash the steps out in a fit of temper; he removed them thoughtfully and methodically, steps and uprights one by one, backing downstairs as he did so and leaving Karin cursing at the top. First she was laughing at him—she had had a few beers herself by that time—then, when she realized he was in earnest, and she was being marooned there, she started cursing. Coward neighbors peeped out of the doors behind him.
    Brent came home the next afternoon and was amazed, orpretended to be. “What happened to the
steps?
” he yelled. He stomped around the hall, his lined, exhausted, excited face working, his blue eyes snapping, his smile innocent and conniving. “God damn that Morris! God-damn steps caved in. I’m going to sue the shit out of him. God