A Good Life

A GOOD LIFE.

"Third boxcar, midnight train,
Destination Bangor, Maine.."

The song had more or less steered the car, jumping out of the map all
afternoon, all the way back from when Cooper was too young to know how
much people change. It was a song from the soundtrack of life with all
the promise of second chances in its rehearing.

But he had stopped short, perhaps as ever, leaving Bangor just over
the river with its autumn maple, its timber board houses and office
buildings, and instead, he had pulled in at Brewer where a line of
tacky motels looked safer for the budget.

Now, in the basement of that in which he took a room, under the diner
where he ate, in a bar half full of people emerging to reclaim their
ground from the summer's tourists, he sat listening to a country
band.

He thought about London, all of sixty hours, one cheap flight, one
seedy New York hotel and two days' drive ago and not yet long
enough.

The head needed a clear-out. Nothing desperate. Just some cruising.
New England in Autumn. Perhaps a few strangers to meet, to see what was
wrong in their rotten lives. Maybe even
some heart pouring.

What had she said? That he never really went for it? That he couldn't
hack it when things went wrong? That he always copped out? That the
security of middle management wasn't enough for her, because nothing
was secure these days anyway?

He sat on a bar stool and stared at his beer, turning the ironies and
bothering no one. And, in a London pub, it would have gone on like that
as it had for weeks already. But eventually these new, foreign
surroundings began to penetrate.

Thus it was that Cooper crossed the threshold out of inner
contemplation with his fifth Budweiser at about 10.00pm. His eyes rose
from the rim of the glass and ranged along the bar, from the sturdy
barmaid with back combed hair and a face which spoke of too much
necessary bar work, to the couple sitting at the end, to the spread of
the tables around the place and the band.

The band was passable. Country was country but they had a few tunes
and they were pleasing the punters on a midweek evening. Mechanics?
Shopkeepers? Factory workers? Housewives? .....Middle managers?
.....Single parents?

One day James would come to places like this, drifting along on some
adventure. Cooper would see to it. Cooper hadn't done much himself. It
had been all packages to Spain and Italy before he got married and, for
that matter, ever since, because that was then what she wanted, a tan
at all costs despite her claimed need for adventure. For Cooper,
drifting solo was certainly radical. But James would do some, and when
he was old enough, too.
Freewheeling needed the prime of young adulthood when the spirit was
willing and the flesh was able, not late adolescence before either was
ready, nor even middle age when both had they had set in their moulds.
James would do more, much more, if Cooper could see enough of him, that
is; if he could get him looking outwards for long enough to get to know
himself and then to shape his life to what he knew. Cooper, looking
outwards lately and belatedly, had seen only the missed chances, but
James would be different. He might, thought Cooper suddenly, even meet
ladies like the one along the bar.

The man had gone. In the mirrored wall behind the optics, Cooper
watched the woman. She was slim with wiry hair and flushed cheeks. She
wore slacks and a loose fitting silk top. She was perhaps thirty and
now smoking a contemplative cigarette, speaking occasionally to the
barmaid as if for company and getting only spare responses.

So what, as the saying went, was a nice girl like her doing in a joint
like this?

Cooper needed a cigar. He rose from the stool to take money from his
pocket and she saw the movement in the mirror. Avoiding eye contact, he
ordered one, projecting his English accent in her direction.

She heard it. Her eyes followed the barmaid to the rack and then
followed her back again, leaving him the legitimate option of reacting
to the turned face in his peripheral vision, which he took, and,
niceties observed, she completed the connection.

"On holiday?"

"Yes."

It was okay. She was on home ground. She knew the barmaid. She knew
others in the place. She could afford to lead the way knowing she had
plenty of back-up if she wanted to withdraw.

"What do you think of Brewer?"

"All I've seen is this motel."
"You haven't missed much."

"No?"

She shook her head slowly and half smiled, turning her eyes back to
the cigarette gripped between fingers around her glass. She took a
drink. She had lived there for three years, she said. Nice enough
sometimes but she would be leaving soon. She looked at the barmaid as
she said it. The barmaid smiled and wiped the bar top.

Cooper nodded, unwrapping the cigar.

"Nice part of the country from what I saw on the drive up" he
offered.

She blew smoke and lowered the cigarette. "Oh yeh. Like any place, I
suppose. You see the good bits first and the bad bits when you live
there. What do you think of the band?"

They talked about the band. She said they were regulars, local boys
with day jobs. But they were pretty good, weren't they? Her name was
Leah. Could she buy him a beer? She moved her stool closer.

Cooper had agreed about the band. Country wasn't his first choice but
the sad songs fitted the place and, for that matter, his
situation.

And so, already, did this Leah. She had a resigned look about her but
a body that, Cooper was already deciding, would look good draped across
the bed in his motel cabin out back. The evening could even lead to a
little of what would do him good.

They talked about music and what people did for a living around there:
farming, timber, government. Bangor over the river was the local focus,
she said. She worked there, a secretary in government department, or at
least she had done.

"Got laid off today. Cutbacks. That guy I was talking to earlier, he
got laid off, too. Over a hundred went."

"Sorry to hear that" said Cooper and he was. Being unemployed was one
of the things he feared most. "What's the job market like at the
moment?"

"Pretty bad. We got a pay-off but mine won't last too long."

"So that's why you're leaving?"

"Partly."

Cooper waited for more but nothing came. So he upped the ante a
fraction.

"I thought that guy earlier was your husband."

"Jeff? No, he's not my husband. I don't have a husband."

Ah! She didn't have a husband.

"I have something worse than a husband."

"What?" said Cooper when she paused.

"I have a boyfriend who does drugs and then knocks me about."

She had a .... Cooper didn't know anybody who did drugs, let alone
knocked women about. He sat considering that prospect for several
seconds.

"That sounds .. er... difficult."

"Difficult! Huh! You don't know how bad it's been!"

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." She said slowly. She took a mouthful of beer and a drag on
the cigarette and stared at her glass. "I'm keeping out of his way
tonight. He was doing speed and took a swing at me. I just hope he's
asleep when I get back."

Cooper turned his glass slowly on the bar top, not knowing what to
say. He thought he had trouble with a nagging, grasping wife who had
gone home to Mother "while he discovered some ambition". Perhaps he and
Leah could arrange to swap partners.

"Why do you stay?"

"Because ..." Now she turned to face Cooper, "Because we've been
through a lot together. I've been with him for three years and it
wasn't all bad. It just went bad a couple of years ago. We had a
baby."

"So you stay for the kiddie?"

"No" she said slowly. "The kid is dead."

The kid was ......

"A little boy. Six months old. Cot death."

This was getting worse. "Oh" said Cooper, even more at a loss. "I
really am sorry" And he really was. He looked out to the band in
desperation. There had to be a country song about this sort of
thing.

"So am I" she said again. "So ... am.... I." She took a another drink
and dragged again on the cigarette. "But" she went on, with smoke
spurting from her mouth, "The real reason I've stayed is that he would
probably kill me if he thought I was leaving."

Her delivery was matter of fact but Cooper was now reeling under this
onslaught of bad news. Things had been shaping well, chatting with a
nice lady in a bar. He had dreamed about this sort of thing lately. But
now he had dug up a disaster. He could only respond weakly and
piecemeal to a slice of life that he had never been near.

"But he wouldn't know until you'd gone."

"Right, except that I do have possessions and it's difficult to pack
when he's there. And he's there just about all the time. I'm the one
who works in that household." She looked at the barmaid who was
pretending not to hear. "Or I was. Now, with the job finishing, he's
really been watching me."

"Where would you go?"

"Back home for a while, probably. Des Moines, Idaho."

"That's Midwest?"

"Right. A thousand miles from here."

"That's a long drive."

"I'd get a Greyhound. The car wouldn't make it anyway."

The car wouldn't make it....

Suddenly, in among all the wreckage of this woman's situation, Cooper
was getting a picture. Here was a lady getting more presentable with
the Budweiser, who was shacked up with a no-hoper who was doing drugs
and knocking her about. She wanted to leave and her job was already
finished. He had a hire car, two credit cards, some cash and nearly two
weeks to play with. She could pack a bag while the boyfriend was out of
his tree and Cooper could whisk her away from some street corner.
Meanwhile, for tonight, he had a motel cabin out the back. Was this not
all the stuff of the best road movies, of his missed adventures, of the
precise prescription, indeed, for his present condition?

He ordered two more beers and when they had arrived, she said "Aren't
you going to ask me to dance?"

They danced.

They danced through three numbers and by the third, she had crept
closer and he knew she was a runner. As the band said good night,
Cooper was relaxing a little and thinking Good Night. They got back to
their beer and he started to lay the ground.

"Well" he said, choosing his words carefully, striving for the right
note. "If things are going to be difficult when you get home, I have a
cabin out the back....." he moved on quickly to add as much decency as
she might need "... I have a sleeping bag. You could have the bed...."
adding an immediate rider to dispel the weirdo implication ".... and
I've even got a bottle of scotch for a nightcap."

She studied her glass and smiled. "That's real nice of you" she said
"But I don't really think I should."

Ah. Probably a tactical error. It had been a while and anyway he had
never been very practised. He should have just started with the
nightcap. But she had still said "Should", not "could". The place was
closing. Outside, he would offer the nightcap anyway and see what she
made of it.

But as they reached the top of the stairs in the cold air, she put her
hand in his arm and he knew again that it was on. Maybe even a few days
drifting over to Des Moines. It was the stuff he should have done years
ago.

They stood there in the river of neon which lit that main road. People
were trickling out behind them.

"Not many cabs about" said Cooper, with an expectant chuckle.

"I've got the car" she said, nodding to a battered Fairlane among
several cars parked along the front.

She had the car.

He looked at it and then looked at her. "You've had a few drinks," he
said, trying to sound more concerned than expectant.

She thought for a second. "You're right." She looked up at him. "Maybe
I have." She squeezed his arm and made no move.

Cooper nodded slowly, looking at the car sitting in neon as bright as
day.

"Still, if you've got the car, at least he can't come and find you
drinking with strangers."

"Oh, he's got a motorbike. And he often goes riding when he's high.
He's a real menace on the road."

He had a motorbike and he often.......

"So" said Cooper slowly, thinking that one through. "What if he had
come past and seen your car and come in?"

"I guess we might both have been dead." She was smiling and looking up
into his face.

They might both have been dead.

"Really?" he said

"Really. But I don't give a shit anymore. I really don't want to go
back there tonight. I've had enough. The man's an asshole. You know
what? He was looking after our kid the afternoon he died. Cot death at
four in the afternoon! And the bastard was doing acid!"

She took Cooper's arm with both hands and buried her eyes slowly into
his shoulder, holding back tears.

"I just want to get out of this town alive and get away."

Cooper stood there, stiff with chill and ramifications and this lady
hanging on his arm.

Here was the prospect of two weeks easy riding across America with a
lady ready to go. She was good looking and entertaining and had got
more so with the Budweiser. Here was some escapist treatment for the
rupture in his life. Here was proof that he could take it, that he had
his options, that he could still compete.

Here also was the prospect of some psychopath roaming the streets on a
motorbike, looking for his woman, seeing her car which he could hardly
miss parked there, and then sitting and waiting for her to appear. He
would have a gun - all American psychopaths had guns - and when she
appeared, he would blow them both away.

Cooper had James to think of, and a job to go back to and a lot more
years to live. He even had a holiday which didn't need interrupting.
And anyway, she had declined his invitation and she probably wasn't
interested.

"Well" said Cooper, "I hope everything's okay when you get
home."

She froze slightly and her face came slowly away from his
shoulder

"Yeah...?." she said. He felt her hands gradually loosen on his arm.
She turned to look absently down the street and then turned back to
him. Cooper stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking out at
the road and saying nothing more.

"Okay.....yeah..." she said again, releasing his arm. Slowly she took
keys from her bag. "Well...." She reached up and kissed Cooper's cheek
lightly. He didn't react. "Well, good night" she said. She stood back
and stared at him for a second more before walking slowly to the
car.

The Fairlane started with a shudder and rolled backwards out of its
space. Cooper stood watching, hands still in pockets.

She wound down the window and looked up at him.

"Nice meeting you," she said. "Have a good life."

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