CHAPTER NINE Introductions
I spend most of the drive home running my hands across my face, trying to compare its present state with an unreliable memory, enjoying the shush of my palms against the smooth skin. “What the hell is this?” Jerm says as we turn onto Wilder Street; looking up I see the two men we passed on the way out. They are dancing about on the lawn next to the yawning pickup in the drive, and it takes me a moment to realize what is happening, that the older man is swinging a wrench at the younger man’s head and the younger man is attempting to duck the wrench and kick the older man simultaneously, like some Cossack dancer in overalls. Jerms swerves off to the side, slams the car to a stop and heaves himself out into the street before I can manage to unbuckle myself with my numb fingers, before I can even say “What in blue blazes?” or “Should we call the authorities?” When I am halfway across the street, I see Jeremiah Graves scrambling up the slope of the lawn and launching himself headlong into the fray, the vast plate of his forehead his only armor. I see the younger man fall backward, his legs still kicking sunward, as my friend backs the older man against the pickup by a fistful of fabric, the hood slamming shut. And I catch the moment that this man realizes what has happened, lowers his eyes to meet those of his significantly shorter attacker and realizes that he is still holding the wrench in his hand. And then I cry out in pain and everything stops.
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I don’t know myself, you understand, how much of this is a tactic and how much it is an actual twinge of pain in my side. But everything stops, and I have a moment to take in the whole tableau: Jeremiah on tiptoe with his fist cocked; the other fellow gazing maniacally down at him like something out of Fritz Lang, gray hair wild, freed from the fallen cap; and there, just landed on the lawn, Bruegel’s Icarus in dirty boots. I stand there in the street, clutching my side, and then they all come running to my aid. It’s heartening to know that your distress can quell a dispute, snuff out an act of violence in its infancy. I sit on the step before their front door and the three of them mill sheepishly about, retrieving caps, shaking hands, figuring out how to laugh the whole thing off, what to do with all the adrenaline. “Franklin Landry, and this is my boy Yates,” the older man is saying. In an effort to do my part to clear the tension I spread my arms and smile up at them. “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” I say. For a moment there is confusion, and then Jerm says, “He was an English teacher,” and they nod as if this perfectly explains some deficiency or disorder, and they now know they need pay me no mind. We are there for fifteen minutes or so, all told. No explanation for the scene we happened upon is offered, nor is one requested, and I form the impression, which will prove correct in the coming months, that this is a common occurrence between them, some sort of ritual they have been performing since Yates’ adolescence. “You good to go, old timer?” Yates asks, helping me to my feet. Franklin slaps Jerm on the shoulder, a little too hard.
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“You boys come by anytime for a beer,” he says, squirting a brown jet of saliva into the grass near where his son lay a few minutes earlier. “We only rented this place about a month ago, and we plan on sticking around for a while.” “We’ll take you up on that,” Jerm says, “and I promise to knock more gently next time.” Franklin grins, squeezing the cap back onto his head. Then he orders his son to grab their tools as he heads inside. Before I leave, I notice a bumper sticker on the back of the truck: No One Rides Free. Gas or Ass. On the way to the idling car, Jerm’s arm around me, I hold onto my side, either to keep up the pretense or to cradle the pain, to keep it from crawling elsewhere.
CHAPTER TEN Home Again, Home Again
I lie on the couch, a cold glass of ginger ale stationed nearby on the coffee table. “Don’t coddle him, Dee,” Jerm says, stripped again to his undershirt, lowering himself back into the recliner. “Although,” he says, “you might want to roll him over, check him for bedsores while you’ve got him there.” “You look so pale,” she says, leaning over me, black hair spilling around her frowning face. “What have you been doing?” “He’s been making friends,” says Franklin, winking, aiming the remote. A little old lady’s heart breaks when she is told the monetary value of her cuckoo clock, an heirloom. “It was my great-grandmother’s,” she says, uncomprehending. “Her daddy died in the Civil War.” Her lip quivers. The appraiser nods sympathetically. This woman and I are the same age. How can that be? I feel myself rolling down a gentle declivity into a delicious sleep. When I come to an hour or two later, Jerm is asleep in his chair. Delia sits on the arm of the couch at my feet, watching me with a mixture of amusement and pity. “This is how I’ve been imagining you,” she says. “Over these last few years, I mean.”
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“A cadaver on a couch?” “No, you goof. Just asleep. For the first few months I would sometimes think of you and wonder what you could be doing over there. Finally, I just decided you were asleep all the time. Or at least whenever I wondered what you were doing. It was easier that way.” “You were probably right every time,” I say, grimacing as I try to sit up. “Is that true? Really?” She gazes at me searchingly, much the way that detective watched his suspect on TV this morning, minus the scowl. “Please believe that what I did over there was not worth the breath, nor the thirty seconds it would require for me to recount.” A joyless smile, a shake of her curls. “That’s fantastic,” she murmurs. “You won’t tell me why you wouldn’t come out, you won’t tell me what you were doing. And I’m guessing you’ll tell me you’re not interested in talking anymore if I ask you to tell me more about this kid you found on your lawn this morning.” “Well, I’m happy to discuss it if you like, but there’s so little to discuss. I looked out the window and there he was, like an upended bicycle. I helped him up and he went on his way.” “You said he was hurt, though.” “Yes, but I was exaggerating. It was the shock of it all. He was hurt, yes, but hurt in the way boys sometimes get hurt. You know, roughhousing and so on. Or he might have been struck . . . he might have been passing by and decided to lay down on my lawn, for a rest. Anyway, his injuries, such as they were, were not lifethreatening. He’ll heal. He’ll live.” I look away, toward the window, where a window would not be if I were at home. The darkness outside startles me; I realize I have slept through the afternoon and into the night. A ring of water gleams on the coffee table, and when I look back at her she
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is rubbing her hands over her face in what looks like a pantomime of ablution. “Come over in the morning and we’ll get you some groceries,” she says, and she reaches for my shoulder, presses the clavicle with her thumb. “You looked better with the beard, more distinguished,” she says, standing. When she is gone, I notice Jerm in his chair, still in the same attitude of repose, his eyes wide open now, staring into mine. I do not turn the lights on when I walk into my house; I do not need them. My brain throbs behind my sore eyes as I slide down the hallway wall, trying to compare the day with the version of it I’ve imagined for the last five years, mixing up the details of the two in my exhaustion. At some point, your expectation of a thing mixes with the memory of a thing to become the thing, and the reality is no longer a factor. I throw myself facedown onto the bed—like the boy, I think for an instant—having forgotten the pile of paper scraps I left there in the morning, the dreams I’d meant to peruse. They whirligig down to the floor where I will find them in the morning, where I will stoop to retrieve them, showered and dressed and aflame with various pains as I slide open the drawer to build my nest of dreams anew.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Second Morning Out
I emerge into the cold the next morning, cautious as a crocus, ready for more bracing winds and frost. The weather is mild, though, and my next-door neighbor, taking in the new day with a steaming cup of coffee to warm her palms, seems pleasantly surprised to see me. “Madame,” I say, doffing an imaginary cap. “Sir,” she replies, lifting her cup with mock solemnity. We both laugh, grateful that the day has started off so auspiciously, and I don the cap and push off, leaving her to do the arithmetic, to determine how long it has been since she’s laid eyes on me. As I cross the street I think of her children, remember them shrieking as they streaked from a blinking bus on autumn afternoons. They will be older now, naturally; they will have grown. They will have grown even more than I have shrunk. I try to look jaunty in case she is watching, like just another carefree codger out looking for modest adventure with the sun on his face. But then I hear her door slap shut and I settle back into the slow shuffle to which I’ve grown accustomed. My key still fits the lock, so I let myself in. It takes a moment to get my bearings again in this dreamhouse, to get the mirrored blueprint of my own home fixed in my mind. The occupants are still abed; I have the run of the place until they rise. Inspired by my cheerful neighbor, I decide on a cup of coffee. I tiptoe, as best I can, into the kitchen.
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This, I imagine, would be one of the great pleasures of family life: to rise early in the morning and sip a cup of coffee at the table, to wait and watch the room fill with sunlight and people you love. To listen to the sounds of spring outside—bundled children laughing, shedding layers; the robin redbreast piping its lungs out on its vibrating branch—and to memorize them so that you can mimic them for those people when they join you. I sometimes realize all over again that I have reached my old age unaccompanied, and I still find it jarring. How did I get here like this? How did this happen? We were on a path, myself and some people I cared for, we were arm in arm, and then I looked around one day and realized my arms were empty. Oh, well. I don’t envy Jerm his life any more than he envies me mine. I’m sure that, were you to ask him, he’d aver that it’s better to have loved and lost Linda than never to have loved Linda at all. His dead wife, his daughter, his stout constitution, his stint in the Navy, his anecdotes, his memories—I am happy that he has these things, and I do not want them for my own. I have loved and lost, too, I suppose. That will have to do. As for children, I’ve had hundreds, and I remember only a few of them. They filed through the door to my classroom every day for years, and I read them poetry while they dozed on one another’s shoulders, and then they were dismissed, and I never saw them again. I remember one gangly youngster standing just before the bell and calling out, “Stand not upon the order of your going!” No doubt an attempt at humor, at impressing some girl in the class. He was always hanging around my desk and asking questions, the answers to which I always felt he couldn’t possibly have cared about, not really. He wrote me a letter some years back; I have it in a box somewhere. It was a very nice letter, really, but on
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reading it I remember that old feeling came back to me, the feeling that I was being mocked for the benefit of some unseen audience. No, that life was not for me—the family man, the pillar of the community, et cetera. This is our lot, those of us who haunt the outskirts of other people’s stories. You spend your life imagining that you are at the center of things, that you are Hamlet, and then suddenly you realize, peeking from your hiding place, that you’re Polonius. You think you’re Gary Cooper when you’re actually Walter Brennan. A certain measure of cowardice, that’s the difference, I suppose. I have a bright yellow streak, Jerm once told me. And underneath it, a column of peanut brittle for a spine. He would say that was why I locked myself up for five years, while I would assert that it was, in reality, an attempt to be brave, an attempt at accountability, at penance. Still, there are sources of comfort, even for a wretch such as I. Just as Jerm might look to me for consolation, I often think of those poor souls who must putter into their senescence in the company of strangers, of personnel in crisp white duds. I think of those who spend their afternoons pushing globs of paint around on sodden pieces of construction paper, drooling and awaiting their sunset dose. There but for the grace of God, I tell myself. And I consider myself lucky as I sit here, a hollow carapace filling slowly with hot coffee and waiting for the daughter of my friend to join me, to slip a coat over my shoulders and lead me wherever it is that she would have me go today.
CHAPTER TWELVE To Market,To Market
I wonder, as we stroll together past detergents and plungers, past paper towels and scarlet steaks expiring beneath thin plastic wrapping, if the other shoppers take us for father and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, jaundiced mendicant and good Samaritan. I wonder how many cans of soup I’ve emptied and discarded over the last five years, how the county landfill swelled with their number. “Surely you were lonely,” she says. “Surely I was,” I say. “No one to talk to. Did you ever call anyone?” “I had no one to call. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have done it. That was part of it.” “No conversation at all? That’s not healthy. People need conversation to stay sane.” “What do I need conversation for when I have the Dialogues of Plato, the Confessions of Saint Augustine?” She stops in the center of the aisle, looks at me doubtfully. “Is that what you were reading all that time?” I shrug. “Elmore Leonard, mostly.” With a nod she pushes the cart into motion again. “Did you teach yourself to play chess, at least?” she asks, scanning the fine print on a colossal tub of vanilla yogurt. “I knew how to play before,” I say. “Now I’ve forgotten.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Social Call
At home we deposit each item in the correct cabinet, the correct drawer, the correct compartment of the refrigerator. When we are done she looks around the place and seems content with my work. “Much better,” she says. “Let’s try to keep it that way.” “Consider it done,” I say, and I salute her. We cross the street together, laughing, and the neighborhood rings with our laughter, a very different place from the blasted, stygian landscape I stepped out into the previous morning to see to the boy on my lawn. I was an exile then, a wild-eyed alien in a flannel robe. I was a spooked hermit in an old cartoon, my open mouth an oval hole in a hoary cumulus, my knees knocking. I was frightened then. Now I fairly skip, the ache in my ankles dissolving with every step, and my fear is melting away like the final fall of spring snow. Delia chatters on, detailing our plans for the summer, and I can hear nothing over the roaring in my ears, not even my own voice saying, Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. When we stumble indoors again there is Jerm, waiting for us at the table, the quarter tumbling endlessly across his knuckles, his eyes intent. “We’ve got somewhere to be,” he grumbles, pushing himself to his feet. “Where?” Delia asks, a note of worry in her voice.
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“Not you,” he says without looking at her, and I begin to feel a bit of worry myself. I feel like I should be asking some specific question, but all I can get out is the question mark at the end, an empty syllable curling upward. No one notices. “Yeah, I’m coming along,” she says, and she opens the door, holds it open so that he has to hurry up with his preparations (wallet, watch) to get through it. A neat little trick that transfers control of the situation to her and gives her the right to act annoyed when he doesn’t move fast enough. He is too flustered to object, so we all exit together. “No need for that,” he says when he notices her removing her car key from the pocket of her coat, and he points toward the end of the street and starts walking. I realize now what is happening and the question arrives, free from inflection since its punctuation arrived before it. “We’re going back there,” I mutter, and she casts a look my way with the expectation of explanation. I, of course, have none to offer. He strides past the pickup and up to the door, punches it lightly six or seven times. Voices inside, gruff and querulous. When it finally opens it is the older one who stands there, Franklin Landry, and he breaks into a smile when he finds Jerm waiting for him. “Borrow a cup of sugar?” Jerm says, returning the smile. “Motherfucker, we have no sugar,” he says, and waves us inside. All the blinds are closed; it takes a second for the eyes to adjust. When the room condenses it is essentially what you would imagine it would be: aged carpet, burned in spots; faintly musty odor; lacquered wooden mallard next to the TV; Confederate flag on the wall over a frowzy sofa; ziggurat of empty cans on a squat
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coffee table; parade of empty varicolored bottles marching around the perimeter. “Pardon the dead soldiers,” Franklin says, brushing past us into the kitchen. “Dead soldiers is right,” say Jerm, looking around. “It’s goddamn Arlington National Cemetery in here.” He looks at me with a meaning I cannot interpret. “Your hero’s here,” Franklin hollers into the other room, and then we are joined by his son, who looks us over with a bemused grin and shakes hands all around, holding Delia’s a moment longer than the rest, his eyes probing hers for a moment and then, finding them unresponsive, going flat as he lets the hand fall. “I’ve seen you two around the neighborhood,” he says, indicating Jerm and Delia with a gesture; then his finger settles on me and his voice lowers. “Not you, though,” he says. “You wouldn’t have,” I manage to reply. “He’s a bit of a homebody,” Delia chimes in, a trifle defensively. He nods, his eyes narrowing, asks me to remind him of my name. I oblige, and the strange tension, the feeling of interrogation, leaves the conversation. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better today. I thought for sure you was about to kick the bucket right in the middle of the damn street yesterday.” “Yes, well,” I mutter, blushing beneath Delia’s gaze, and then the three of us just stand there watching Jerm and Franklin talk. I have never really understood the rules or rhythms of male conversation, even in my youth. I tried for years to break the code, to ape the casual mannerisms, the practiced insouciance. I never managed. For a time, before I grew too old to care, it was one of the more devastating failures of my life. Franklin and Yates are still in yesterday’s overalls, and I take this opportunity to observe them more closely, to note the
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resemblances between them. They share the same stature, the same beard (also in rust-red and gray), the same pale green eyes— irises the color of, say, a pair of peeled grapes—and, most striking, the same way of faintly smiling when they listen to others speak. It’s something I recognize immediately, that I remember from certain boys I taught long ago, a kind of tug at the corners of the mouth, the prelude to mockery. They are bullies, it’s clear; they are minding their manners for the time being, but their minds are carrying on the sharkish, single-minded work of bullying as their faces twitch with the effort of holding back the words, of remaining silent behind a smirk. “You boys really tied one on last night,” Jerm says, scanning the room. “Naw, that’s a few nights’ work,” says Franklin, slapping his stomach proudly. “My old lady’s staying with her sister for a while, so it’s just us boys. You know how that goes.” “How does that go?” Delia asks, cocking her head to the side. “Here we go,” says Yates, throwing up his arms and returning to the kitchen. Franklin scratches the back of his neck, grinning at Jerm, whose face betrays nothing. “I guess we’re just not much good at cleaning up after ourselves,” he says, trying to appear chastened. “You’re right, though, we ought to do better.” Behind him Jerm shakes his head, less in disapproval than in an effort to silence Delia, who is about to reply. “You probably ought to,” she says, and lets it drop. Yates returns with his arms full of cold cans and passes them around. I hand mine to Jerm and notice the amused expression that father and son share. Delia moves closer to me and I grip my arm in the place where I used to keep a bicep.
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“How long you boys been here?” Franklin asks after a few gulps. “Few years now,” Jerm says. “Six, seven?” He looks to me for confirmation. “Yes, just about,” I say. “These two moved in across the street just after I did, which was just about seven years ago, almost exactly.” “Uh huh. And what brought you old bastards here?” Yates asks, unleashing a jeering belch that bounces from wall to wall, threatens to upset the aluminum structure on the coffee table. “My wife passed,” Jerm says, staring straight at him, daring him. Their mouths twitch, father’s and son’s; the sentence and the belch both hang over us and I begin to feel overheated in my coat, almost faint. “I retired,” I say in a small voice, “and it seemed like the thing to do, to move. I just moved.” Silence. After a few minutes it is obvious that the visit has run its course, has curdled. My coat weighs on me, my legs feel weak, my elbows ache and I realize I’ve kept my arms crossed for some time now in some feeble gesture of defense. Franklin coughs, says, “My boy was rude, and I apologize for that. He’s a bit of a peckerhead, but don’t hold it against him. We had a late night, probably ought to get some more sleep.” “Working late?” Jerm asks, a look of innocent concern on his face that I’ve never seen before. They look at each other before Yates answers. “No,” he says, “no work last night. Just up late, you know. Drinking. Making the rounds.” “The rounds?” Delia says.
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“Aw, you know,” he says, shrugging, smiling, “just runnin’ around the neighborhood. Just looking around.” Jerm nods sympathetically. “I do,” he says. “I think I do know. Thank you.” And he looks at me, and I look at Delia, and Delia looks toward the door, and it is time to go. In the driveway next to the truck we say our goodbyes, make vague plans to visit again, but the general feeling is that they would rather we didn’t, and that we feel much the same. “If we get the chance, sure,” Jerm says, “long as you boys aren’t too busy. You work around here?” “I’m a bouncer at Fancy Sam’s during the week,” Yates says, winking at Delia before turning to his father, whose face has gone dark and who continues to glower at him as he turns back to us, confused. It is one of those looks that says, You’ve said too much, and, in so saying, says too much. We turn away, toward our homes. “Yep,” Jerm keeps muttering as we walk away. “Yep, yep, yep.” Delia watches the sky, as if she’s looking out for a storm. I can feel things shuffling around in my head as I trudge behind, inspecting the cracks in the asphalt. I never noticed how many there were, what terrible shape the street is in in some places, how the cracks proliferate and squiggle along like varices, plotting their eager, ugly courses toward some common terminus.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN April
April arrives, its sweet incessant showers converting potholes to puddles, sending soggy, spongy lawns gushing green and shaggy over their boundaries. There is a sudden infestation of grass, grass pressing in on the scenery from all sides and squeezing through the fences, whispering to itself in the night, twitching at the soft touch of spring rain, springing up through sidewalk cracks and surging toward the doors, the windows. The boy stops by and offers to mow my lawn; I pay him a hundred dollars, so thrilled am I that he has thought of me. Watching him pedal away, I choke up in the doorway. Delia resumes her work at the hospital, satisfied that I can get along alone for the most part, that my time away has not totally deprived me of my reason. Voices, rested from their long hibernation, fill Wilder Street again, and winter becomes spring. One afternoon I suffer an especially violent sneeze and throw out my back, and Delia has to help me back across the street. It takes me almost a week to get upright again, and I am in agony for a while thereafter, but no matter. The bark of the trees is black and slick; the branches drip on your head as you pass underneath, tears of mirth to trickle down inside your collar. The air is laced with the perfume of ragweed, the scent of woodsmoke. Dandelions peer upward with tawny faces, greedy for glimpses of intermittent sunshine. My neighbor
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plants gardenias, waves merrily to me with a soiled gardening glove. I doff my imaginary cap again and she chuckles, resumes her tender task. I look out the window at night when sleep proves elusive, see the world bathing itself in the dark. I take to weighing myself in the mornings, then have to stop when it becomes something of an obsession, when I begin recording the numbers in a notebook and fretting over losses of fractions of a pound, over decimal points. On Easter Sunday it takes me half an hour to fasten a tie around my neck. The three of us sit on the porch in the morning nibbling chocolates and watching a band of tots hunting for eggs a few houses down. Jerm keeps looking in the other direction, toward the house at the other end of the street, until Delia swats his knee, orders him to stop. I dream that I am stripped naked by the bailiff in a courtroom, and the stenographer, who seems familiar to me, cannot stop giggling. The judge beats my bare heart with her gavel and someone is holding my arms behind my back. I won’t defend myself, I keep crying, but they will not let go of my wrists. I record it faithfully when I wake, bury it in the bottom of the drawer and stare at my rubicund face in the mirror. It takes shame to give me color, make me look like a living thing. My arthritis improves slightly; at times I feel almost seventy again. I am alive to everything; I am positively scintillant.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN May
May arrives, the merry month of May, the most romantic of months, the month of my birth. The green buds swell, the sun massages housecats through windowpanes. Spring in the air, spring in my step. I could do without the allergies, though. I keep a handkerchief in my pocket—more an affectation than anything, since I’m too squeamish to make use of it—and take short walks, shambling along Wilder Street, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied. I can hear the sludge in my veins beginning to flow again, I can hear its purling hum. Jerm wants to take me to a shooting range, but Delia says no. Instead we drive to a nearby carnival and take shots with toy guns at scarred targets while the man running the game questions our eyesight and manhood, all in good fun. Jerm wins a plush Pinocchio and presents it to me as a crowd of onlookers applauds. I bow and a twinge in my back drowns out their cheers. I give the toy to a little boy whose mother gives me her guarded thanks. It’s a good day. On my birthday Delia presents me with six pairs of socks, one for today and five to make up for the years we lost. We laugh and sit down to slices of chocolate cake and Jerm tells me the story of the time Delia booted a fourth-grade bully in the gonads and was suspended for three days. “That little shit was out for five,” he notes proudly, “It took that long for the swelling to go down.” I’ve heard this story before, but I do love it so.
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On Memorial Day I try to thank Jerm for his service and he asks me will I please kindly shut up and grab him a beer. We watch a John Wayne marathon on TV together. It was almost a decade before Jerm enlisted in the Navy that I went off to college, mostly because I found I couldn’t find a way to envision life outside of a classroom. I lose a tooth. Just like that, it drops onto the table, rolls onto the floor. Like a poorly told joke at a dinner party. Jerm offers me five dollars for it, to save me the trouble of sticking it under my pillow. On the last day of the month the air-conditioning goes out; Jerm inspects the unit and is nonplussed to find that he can do nothing to fix it. The repairman won’t be over until the next day, so I tell Jerm he is welcome to spend the day at my house. He tells me he’d rather spend his day in a morgue. We place an oscillating fan on the table between us and play Canasta while the house grows stuffy and stale around us until Delia gets home and asks us why we haven’t opened the windows.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN June
June was my mother’s name, and I loved her deeply. I deeply loved every moment I was allowed with her, right up until she took to spitting on people, to wandering off on her own and contemptuously referring to everyone she encountered as Bucko. She’s planted in the earth now, ’neath the green, green grass of home, next to dear old Dad and near some other relatives whose names I can no longer recall. Delia tries to accompany me on an old ukulele she’s found in the garage as I warble “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” Jerm dozes in his chair, a bottle protruding upward from between his legs. It’s unlikely I’ll ever get back there now, I suppose. No, I don’t believe I’ll ever make it back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN July
On the Fourth we sit outside on folding chairs, passing a gigantic bowl of popcorn around and watching the pyrotechnics, such as they are. Children wave bottle rockets like flags and tear up and down the street in the dusk, through the thickening haze, beneath bright webs of streaking light, amid hoots and coughing and laughter. Little terrors with their whole portion of terror still ahead of them, young and daily growing. You envy them even as you pity them. We toast passersby with bottled water and watch dogs and cats huddle together under automobiles, peering out with alternating looks of fear and curiosity of a distinctly eschatological nature. My knees begin to ache and when I stand to stretch my legs I hear, between the percussive pops of the fireworks, a voice down the street screaming, “Fuck you, Daddy! Fuck you!” At the end of Wilder Street two shadows are brawling on a canted lawn, rolling into the ditch. A few drunk neighbors clap their hands before returning their attention to the spectacle in the sky. In the morning the air is acrid and my ears won’t stop ringing. “Ring out, and let me die,” I mutter, and I return to bed. One afternoon we take a trip downtown and Jerm takes me into a shop he discovered in my absence which specializes in military memorabilia. He chats with the owner while I browse amongst his wares: the recreated helmet of a Hun; an
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unidentifiable piece of a submarine recovered from the Adriatic Sea; a book on Sergeant York, autographed by the author with an esoteric message addressed to Jimbo and the Boys; a scabbard of parched, cracked leather; a series of lithographic prints depicting a grim, uniformed Roman centurion from various angles; an amateurish painting depicting the surrender of Lee’s sword at Appomattox as the one-armed specter of Stonewall Jackson hovers overhead, his sole remaining hand clamped over his head, his mouth agape in mute, sorrowful supplication. It is hideous; everyone’s legs are too short. Jerm purchases a bayonet which has supposedly been traced back to the battlefield at Antietam and gives it to me as a late birthday gift. “Hoo boy!” the proprietor keeps saying, dabbing at his dripping nose with a Kleenex. In the car I question the authenticity of its provenance and he snickers. “No chance in hell that thing’s for real,” he says, “but the guy’s wife just passed, and business is bad.” We visit a zoo and the gorilla seems to wave to me from its enclosure, daring me to come down to his level and face him. Everyone laughs; I blanch and perspire through my shirt and secretly fear I am experiencing the first symptoms of cardiac arrest. Delia finds a bench for me to sit on near the gift shop; Jerm gives me a look while she goes to get me a cold drink. He takes my pulse, checks my pupils, steps back to take in the corpus as a whole before offering his considered opinion: “You look like the Mummy. Like Boris Karloff in The Mummy.” When Delia returns, I sip a soda and he looks on as she asks if I think I’ll need an ambulance. I tell her I believe I’ll be okay, that I just need a rest, and once she is willing to take my word for it he steps forward again, lifts my chin and looks into my eyes and says, “You remember Boris Karloff in The Mummy?”
JEFFR EY W INTER
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I sleep all the way home and dream I am a gladiator armed with a rusty bayonet, in sandals with severed straps which keep flying from my feet, flopping in front of me like a pair of desperate fishes. I am facing an exasperated Gary Cooper—I think it is Gary Cooper; his helmet hides everything but his eyes—who finally throws down his weapon and turns to the emperor in disgust when I try to explain that I cannot catch my breath, I just need to catch my breath. My skin smarts in the shower and I realize that I have burned it. How irresponsible of me. I want to feel that it makes me look healthier, but really I just look like I am constantly ashamed. Delia and I have an argument about her desire for me to visit a doctor for a checkup. It’s not much of an argument; it consists mostly of her entreaties and my refusals and the sound of the television rising in volume every few seconds, Jerm lodging his protest. Finally I explain to her that I am happy with the amount of time which has been allotted to me, that I consider it more than I’ve deserved, that I do not wish to prolong my stay any further, particularly if it means being perforated by needles and imbibing bitter medicines. I explain this calmly, both palms on the table. She storms out of her own house, slamming the door behind her, and I stay in the same position for an hour or so afterward, thinking. The volume of the television subsides. We sit outside one evening when the violet summer horizon is afflicted with spasms of heat lightning, and I remember being a child, the awe and excitement of glimpsing the vast violent forces that can break at any moment through the polite veneer of the natural world and obliterate you. She leans her head against my shoulder, and I try to seem solid, craning my aching neck to watch
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the pulses of electricity limning the world beyond our world, just for us, just this once. It is like eavesdropping on God, really, like every flash is another vowel penetrating the veil. When I cross the street to my house later in the night the lightning has ceased and the sky has gone black and empty and the crickets are trilling ecstatically, secure again in the places where they hide from their Maker so that they may safely serenade Him.