Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

They were always falling downstairs, bumping into sharp-edged furniture and driving their cars into ditches. When they arrived at a party they would be impeccably dressed but her right arm would be in a sling. He would support a game leg with a gold-headed cane and wear dark glasses. She had sprained her arm in a fall. He had broken his leg in the winter and the dark glasses concealed a mouse that had the thrilling reds and purples of a late winter moon, cloud-buried and observed by some yearning and bewildered youth. Their brilliance was not diminished by their injuries. In fact they almost always appeared with some limb in a sling, some extremity bandaged, some show of court plaster.

Their brilliance, their ardor as celebrants, is serious. After any common weekend when they have lunched and dined out for three days running the seriousness of their role can best be estimated when the light of Monday morning shines on them as they sleep. When the alarm rings he mistakes it for the telephone. Their children are away at school and he concludes that one of them is sick or in trouble. When he understands that it is the alarm and not the telephone he puts his feet onto the floor. He groans. He swears. He stands. He feels himself to be a hollow man but one who has only recently been eviscerated and who can recall what it felt like to have a skinful of lively lights and vitals. She whimpers in pain and covers her face with a pillow. Feeling himself to be a painful cavity he goes down the hall to the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror he gives a loud cry of terror and revulsion. His eyes are red, his face is scored with lines, his light hair seems clumsily dyed. He possesses for a moment the curious power of being able to frighten himself. He soaks his face with water and shaves his beard. This exhausts his energies and he comes back down the hall to the bedroom, says that he will take a later train, returns to bed and pulls the blankets over his face to shut out the morning. She whimpers and cries. She then leaves the bed, her nightgown hooked up over her comely backside. She goes to the bathroom but she shuts her eyes as she passes the mirror. Back in bed she covers her face with a pillow and they both lie there, groaning loudly. He then joins her on her side of the bed and they engage in a back-breaking labor of love that occupies them for twenty minutes and leaves them both with a grueling headache. He has already missed the 8:11, the 8:22 and the 8:30. "Coffee" he mutters, and gets out of bed once more. He goes downstairs to the kitchen. Stepping into the kitchen he lets out another cry of pain when he sees the empties on the shelf by the sink.

They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. "Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers." Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels-scotch, gin and bourbon-have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a wastebasket, but this does not dispose of their force. He puts some water on to boil and feeling for the wall like a blind man makes his way back to the bedroom where he can hear his wife's cries of pain. "Oh I wish I were dead," she cries, "I wish I were dead." "There, there, dear," he says thickly. "There, there." He sets out a clean suit, a shirt, a tie and some shoes and then gets back into bed again and pulls the blankets over his face. It is now close to nine and the garden is filled with light. They hear the schoolbus at the corner, sounding its horn for the Marsden boy. The week has begun its splendid procession of days. The kettle begins to whistle.

He gets out of bed for the third time, returns to the kitchen and makes some coffee. He brings a cup for them both. She gets out of bed, washes her face without examining it and then returns to bed. He puts on some underwear and then returns to bed himself. For the next hour they are up and down, in and out, struggling to rejoin the stream of things, and finally he dresses and racked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards his Gethsemane -the Monday-morning 10:48.

There was nothing hypocritical about the Wick-wires' Monday mornings, and so much for the adolescent

The stranger might observe that the. place seems very quiet; they seem to have come inland from the sounds of wilderness-gulls, trains, cries of pain and love, creaking things, hammerings, gunfire- not even a child practices the piano in this precinct of disinfected acoustics. They pass the Howestons (7 bedrooms, 5 baths, $65,000) and the Welchers (3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, $31,000). The wind draws through the beam of their headlight some yellow elm leaves, a credit card, potato chips, bills, checks and ashes. Are there songs for this place, the stranger might wonder; and there are. Songs sung to children and by children, songs for cooking, songs for undressing, water songs, ecclesiastical doggerel (We throw our crowns at Your feet), madrigals, folk songs, and a little native music. Mr. Elmsford (6 bedrooms, 3 baths, $53,000) dusts off his tarnished psalter which is something he never mastered and sings: "Hotchkiss, Yale, an indifferent marriage, three children and twenty-three years with the Universal Tuffa Corporation. Oh, why am I so disappointed," he sings, "why does everything seem to have passed me by." There is a rush for the door before he starts his second verse but he goes on singing. "Why does everything taste of ashes, why is there no brilliance or promise in my affairs." The waiters empty the ashtrays, the bartender locks an iron screen over the bottles and they finally turn off the lights, but he goes on singing, "I tried, I tried, I did the best I knew how to do so why should I feel so sad and blue?" "This place is shut, mister," they tell him, "and you're the guy who shut it." Then there are the affirmative singers: " Bullet Park is growing, growing, Bullet Park is here to stay, Bullet Park shows great improvement, every day in every way…"

Vital statistics? They were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil. The winters were too inclement for citrus fruit but much too clement for the native white birch.

Hazzard drew his car up in front of a white house with lighted windows.