CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Day Ends
The next morning, we pull three chairs outside and sit and watch the day develop. Periodically I stand to shake out my limbs, to fling feeling back into the extremities. Imagine one of those fullbody diagrams of the circulatory system in which each wrist, each ankle contains a tangle of veins and the hands and feet are empty, white. This is how it is; this is what you have to look forward to. The bellies of the clouds, broad and white. The fresh air blowing clusters of children down the street while their mothers sweep stoops to prepare a place for the jack-o’-lanterns. Footballs falling from the sky, blue smoke hovering over the fences and that peculiar sunlight in which your first day of school and your funeral intermingle. Do you ever feel this in autumn? The presence of all the places where your cells have been spent, all in one place, all at once? You don’t yet, probably, but one day you will. It’s a beautiful day, but in the end that doesn’t matter. The story of that day ends the same as the story of every other day: In the end, the day ends. By the time night falls we have moved inside to watch the orange light slide across the carpet and vanish. We eat supper in silence, the TV off. I keep waiting for her to say something, to burst into tears, to forbid it. She never does, and I know that part of me is more hoping than waiting.
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When it is time to go, Jerm heads into the bedroom and she wraps her arms around me once more before helping me with my coat. “You’ve put on some weight,” she remarks, in the tone of an approving pediatrician. As she holds the coat open for me to step inside, she asks if I am sure about this. “Oh, yes,” I say. “I get cold very easily, and this will weigh me down in the event of wind, keep me from blowing away.” When I am in the coat, I turn to her and she says, “That’s not what I mean. Are you sure? Absolutely sure?” I pat her on the cheek, and next to her smooth skin the veins and liver spots of my hand are especially hideous, almost unforgivable. Youth will in time decay. Beauty must fade away. “This is how it has to be,” I say, “how it has always been. Castles are sacked in war; chieftains are scattered far. Truth . . . ” “Let’s get a move on,” says Jerm, bursting like a bullet from the bedroom. “No time like the goddamn present.” We part on the sidewalk in front of the house to head in opposite directions. “Give me five minutes since I’ve got a bit further to go,” he says, shaking my hand, “Then go ahead. And remember what I told you about afterward. Don’t be stupid. We’re right here, and we . . . well, just remember.” I tell him that I will, that I appreciate it. Before he walks away we shake hands once more and he gives me a gentle pat on the arm, then looks confusedly at my coat. “It’s a bit chilly,” I say, “I’m still sensitive to it.” He stands there for a second, shakes his head. “If you say so.” Then he starts off.
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Five minutes. I stuff my hands into the pockets of the coat and try to count Mississippis, but I lose track and decide instead to take in Wilder Street from outside once more, to enjoy my remaining time as much as I can. And then, like magic, the door to my house swings open on the other side of the street and a woman steps out, backlit, a vision from an alternate life. Like magic, of course, it is not real. It is my neighbor’s door that has swung open; it is she who stands there in the light, her face hidden in shadow, raising her arm to wave to me and then halting as a young man barges outside to call her back, takes her in his arms and carries her away, kicking the door shut on the sound of her laughter. Her son, I realize. He is twice my size now. “Close enough,” I mutter, and I start down the street.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Execution of the Sentence
Six years ago, nearly, I did a terrible thing for which I deserved to be punished, for which I punished myself. I suppose I am going to have to tell you, now, what that thing was. Jeremiah Graves and I were fast friends when we met, although I don’t recall exactly how it happened. I loved him from the first, and I loved his dear daughter Delia as well. I spent all the time I could with them—mostly with Jerm, because he and I were both retired and had so much time to kill. And we often killed that time in town, buying drinks for one another and learning about one another’s lives. At the end of one bitter cold March day that we spent in that fashion, as evening approached, we decided that we’d better get home, and we recited the alphabet backward to determine who would drive. Then we sat for some time, sipping hot coffee and waiting until we felt we were ready to shove off. Have you ever seen the way that children draw birds at the tops of their pictures? Did you draw your birds that way? I assume I did when I was a boy, but I really can’t remember now. All children draw their birds as loose letters, as the letter M, the letter W. If a child draws a bird in flight, they will invariably fill the sky with one, or both, of these letters. And this is what I saw ahead of me that night, this white shape flapping like a great bright bird along the side of the darkened road on our way home. It was a boy in a white shirt two sizes too large, his father’s maybe, running along the side of the road, flapping his sleeves, and I squinted over the wheel and could not understand what I was seeing, and Jerm kept
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saying, “Careful, careful, goddamnit, be careful,” until finally he reached over and gave the wheel a jerk, and I realized in the second before we clipped him what was happening and so I slammed on the brake and Jerm was out of the car before I finished fumbling with the gear shift. And I don’t know, if he hadn’t been there, what I would have done. Then the boy was in the back, blood trickling down his brow, and Jerm was in the driver’s seat, where I will never be again. It felt like a matter of seconds before we pulled into the drive, and I don’t know how he knew where the boy lived, if the boy had been conscious in the ditch, if he was conscious in the back, and I will never know these things because I am too much of a coward to ever ask. But there we were, at the boy’s house, and Jerm was helping him out of the back, helping him to walk to the front door where his mother stood waiting, the porch light burning above her, her hands over her face. And I could hear her voice through the window—Where were you going, it said, or What were you doing—and I could see Jerm backing down the steps and waving his hands, warding off her questions, her apologies, and then he was hurrying to the car in a way I had never seen him hurry before, with a worry verging on panic. The car seemed to grind backward before he had even shut himself inside, and the last thing I saw was a man—the boy’s father—rushing off the porch, toward the road, as his wife helped the boy through the door into the house and we sped off for home. I left the keys with Jerm the following morning, with instructions to dispose of the car however he saw fit. I asked him to find someone to fetch my groceries for a while and after I announced my intention, my sentence, I crossed the street and closed my door. Eventually he and Delia stopped knocking, stopped shouting questions through the door and went back
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to their lives assuming—I’m assuming—that I would stop this foolishness at some point and come out again, come back to them and enjoy my golden years. I did not, though. Five years I spent inside my home, watching my face fall in the mirror and walking away from my window whenever either of them stepped forward to fill it. And I never once considered walking out before my sentence was complete, before the morning I found you lying in the frost on my front lawn, five years later, like a reminder of what I had done, a chance to make up for it. So this is what I am thinking of as I make my way to the end of Wilder Street, kicking a few prematurely fallen leaves aside, doing my part. I slap my palm against the door to spare my knuckles and hear a voice bark out a muffled curse inside. When the door opens there stands Yates in dingy jeans, ripped at the knee, and I notice for the first time, on the forearm of the arm which he extends to hold the door open, a gigantic tattoo: the word Luscious, in a swirling cursive script. For just a moment I regret that I will never get to hear that story. “What?” he asks petulantly, not as in What do you want, so much as in, What did you say, even though I haven’t said anything yet. “Cup of sugar?” I say without thinking, and it takes me a second to realize why I’ve said it, to remember having heard it said before. “Who the hell is it?” Franklin Landry bellows inside, and just before his son swings the door partly shut to respond I see the sliding glass door sliding slowly open over his shoulder. “This old coot,” Yates answers, or “This old goat,” I can’t be sure of which. I give myself a moment to decide which I’d prefer,
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and I settle on Old Goat. More virile somehow, with the suggestion of a propensity, perhaps, for mischief. I like that. From the moment that I throw myself against the door, everything happens too fast to relate with complete accuracy. For one thing, I am blinded momentarily by a flash of white light, the cause of which I realize, just as my vision regrettably returns and I see Franklin on the sofa in a pair of briefs and a tattered T-shirt, dropping a paper plate of meatloaf to the floor, is that I have very probably dislocated my shoulder or broken my arm. Then I remember that the immediate threat is behind me, where Yates stands stunned by the door, waiting for his world to come back into focus. So I turn around, prepared to take full advantage of the element of surprise, per the plan. Lifting the arm I can still operate, I point a trembling finger at him and distort my face as best I can into a horrible mask. “I know what you did, you bastard,” I rasp, stepping forward. “I know what you did to that boy.” He comes to his senses just before I reach him, and I am flattered by the amount of fear I can make out in his face, then disheartened when I see, a second later, how angry his fear has made him. He grabs my coat and spins me around to plant me against the wall and huff the odor of beer through his beard into my face. I have the feeling that my feet are not in contact with the floor, but I know at the same time that they are, and I also know that this is going to work, that this is all part of the plan and I am going to pull it off. And while he is making up his mind what to say, what to do, I reach up and begin to unzip my coat. He doesn’t even notice; he is too busy becoming acquainted with this new hatred that has just entered his life as I reach inside to remove the bayonet I have stashed in the inside pocket; he is too stupid and angry to
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realize what is happening when I reach inside to grab hold of the bayonet, to pull it from the coat and hold its point to his throat and coolly insist that he release me at once. I am almost laughing at how stupid he is, how stupid people are when they look at the elderly and feel only pity or disgust, never fear, when they fail to imagine what we are capable of, what we see from our windows and what we are willing to do about it. I am almost laughing in his stupid face, into his beer-spattered beard, when I reach inside the coat and find the bayonet missing, when I then realize that it is not missing at all, that the pocket is located on the other side, on the side I cannot reach because I cannot raise that arm because I hurled that shoulder against the door to gain entry, damaging it, rendering it useless. And then, remembering the injury, the pain returns from its hiatus and I feel faint in the heat of the coat, in his breath, in my agony, in my helplessness. And he has decided what to say now, he is saying something to me, but I cannot hear it over the sloshing of blood in my flooded ears. That’s not what it is, though. That is not blood sloshing through my ears at all; rather, it is gasoline sloshing onto the walls, onto the floor off to the right, from Jerm’s jerrycan. And I understand this to be the case because I see Yates understanding this to be the case when he looks over his shoulder to discover the source of the sound, which he hears too, and discovers Jerm there, spilling fuel all over his kitchen. “Daddy!” he gasps, pointing as if at a ghost visible only to himself, and Franklin, still in his briefs, still slack-jawed over his spilled meatloaf, turns to look just as Jerm throws the can to the floor and reaches, grinning, deep into his pocket. As Franklin bolts to his feet, Yates moves to join him, dragging me along for the first couple steps. First I realize that I am free, and I manage to shove my good hand, my left hand, down into the coat on that side and grasp the bayonet, to twist it around in an effort to yank it from the pocket. I realize then, however, that I am falling,
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that Yates has pulled me from the wall, and I am tilting over and will not be able to regain my balance. Consequently, I realize, I will never be able to pull the blade completely from the pocket before I reach the floor. The momentum carries me, I imagine, to the coffee table, because before I feel myself strike anything solid, I hear a sound like thunder crashing all around me, clattering into the far corners of the room. Then I slide to the floor on my left side and a flame stabs into my flesh a few inches above the hip and I hear Jerm’s voice cackling above the whoosh of fire rushing from the floor to the ceiling, and I can feel the heat from the other room and also inside me, burning its way into my vitals. I roll over onto my back and pull the coat closed, pressing my left elbow against my side, and my prone position affords me a look at how things have progressed: the floor where I lie littered with beer cans; flames pouring up the walls of the kitchen, blackening the ceiling; Franklin and Yates hopping in place, trying to get at a cabinet which I assume contains a fire extinguisher; Jerm holding them off with a short baseball bat with which he swipes at their faces while swearing and smiling, his blue eyes gleaming demonically. “Back, you fuckers!” he howls, swinging his bat as they hop and hoot like gigantic baboons. “Get the fuck back from there!” You can see them working it out, the timing; you can see them figuring out that there are two of them and one of him, that if they both just move in on him at once they can make short work of him and salvage what remains of their kitchen. Even I, who have never witnessed such a thing in all my life, in all the years I spent in a classroom, can see what is happening, and I try to rise and rush to his defense but an explosion in my side puts me back on my back, gasping for air and mercy. And then something strikes me in the side of the head, an empty can, and looking to my right I see Delia Graves streaking through the front door, through the
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living room and into the kitchen where she jabs the knob of her own bat into Yates Landry’s back and then, when he turns around, into the bridge of his nose. Two jets of blood spurt down his shirt, painting it with parallel streaks, and then he is on the floor next to me, groaning, her boot planted in his groin, blood bubbling from his nostrils. Beneath Franklin’s yowling in the kitchen I hear Delia’s voice as she looks down on him, her black curls aglow around her face like coals in the firelight. “You’re going to leave now,” she says. “You’re going to go away, and you will not be coming back. If I see you again, I’ll go straight to the law and I’ll show them how I know what I know about you, about what you’ve done.” Her voice is calm and her face is almost bored when she turns from him, grinding her heel in, and he screams and rolls over onto his side, facing me, his hands clamped between his thighs. “Truth is a fixed star,” I say, but he cannot hear me and would not understand. So I reach over and grab a fistful of his shirt, and I use the last ounce of strength I have to pull myself closer to him and hiss the words into his fruit-green, pain-blind eyes, the words he will understand, the lesson he is to take from this, that I have come tonight to teach him: “No one rides free.” Then his father is pulling him to his feet, screaming, “Let’s go, goddamnit! Move it, boy!” And then they are gone, and I hear their truck squealing out into the road and off into nothing. “Come on, my friend.” Jerm lifts me up, like something insubstantial, and I find that I cannot speak anymore. The sweat burns my eyes, and the nausea is relentless. When I am upright, he stands back to assess me, sees that something is wrong. He asks with a look and I answer with a nod, dipping my chin downward and to the right. “My shoulder,” I say, closing the coat again with my left hand. “That’s all.”
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Delia comes up behind him, gently removes the bat from his hand and tosses it, with her own, into the fire. It has made its way partly into the living room now, nibbling at the carpet, licking at the flag on the wall and giving off an odd sound like a long, continuous inhalation. I turn to the front door and Jerm wipes the sweat from his forehead, says, “Nope,” kicks it shut; together they help me out the back, through the fire. We make our way through the spaces between back yards, through that zone where private lives are played out, away from the performances that families put on for the benefit of the street, for other houses, other families. It is silent here, and it stays silent until we emerge between two houses further down and see children running down Wilder Street, their parents strolling behind them and calling their names half heartedly, all of them headed toward the conflagration on the corner. The street shines like brass in the night and the shadows walking toward the fire are like calm souls moving unhurriedly to collect some eternal reward. A car horn sounds some distance away and in a drowsy voice a woman says, “Has anyone called anyone?” I leave Jerm and Delia at the door and there is no time to say goodnight, to say anything. Halfway across the street I allow my coat to fall open, try to reach my right hand over to feel my side but find it still dangling there, useless. I try with my left and on pushing back the coat I feel the empty pocket, the ragged hole torn in it. The bayonet is gone, left behind on another battlefield. On its first, in all probability. I fall on my face in my lawn, allow myself to lie there for a moment. When I struggle to my feet I hear a voice calling behind me. I wave it off, though I do not know if it was directed at me. Probably, I think, it was not. I do not think it was.
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When the door is closed and locked behind me, that is when the sirens arrive, bleating and blaring. They pass me by; they are not coming for me. Thank God they are not coming for me. I have a calendar on the wall next to my door. I try to read the date, but the numbers blur together, contracting and expanding like living, breathing things. I hold my hand to my side and hold my breath and tell myself I will not move from this spot until I am sure of the date; I will do nothing more until I am sure, absolutely sure, that I will be able to remember this date.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX DoYou Remember Me?
I want to tell you about this one last dream; it won’t take long. I am rising from my bed, sheets around my shoulders, a sharp pain in my side. Pesky thing, pain. I drink from a bottle of water on the nightstand and I realize how thirsty I am, that my throat is on fire. Then, still parched, I stoop to open the drawer and find it empty. Puzzled, I push it closed, and its scrape seems to come from behind me. I do not turn around; instead, I walk backwards to the bedroom door, facing the wall. I pad down the hall and into the living room, where some snide cowpoke is getting his comeuppance on the TV. More snide cowpokes are produced every day, I think, while the people who are willing or able to give them their comeuppance come along only once in a great long while. I am suddenly ravenously hungry, so I open the cupboards but find them empty too, every last one. There is nothing left for me. Water will have to suffice, and so I go to the sink and turn on the tap and the water comes gushing out, cold and gurgling like a brook falling into my hands. Drink, drink, drink; it’s all I can do, all I ever want to do. When I lift my head the excess water drains down through my beard, and looking out the window I realize that some time has passed, some time since the last time I closed my eyes and rolled down the shallow slope into sleep. And out the window I see the house across the street, and I know that I will be going there today, soon, that I am expected there, and I forget my hunger and my thirst. That house is all there is, and so I do not bother to dress; I wrap a robe around myself and leave the
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door open behind me, because I know I will not be coming back. The air is cold and smells of smoke and I limp stiffly down the drive, my eyes on the lawn, by the mailbox, until I look up into the sunrise, see the street glittering with frost, glittering like sugar tinted orange by the sunrise that you come walking from, that you emerge from to come walking toward me, your long sleeves dragging the street, sweeping frost from the street, leaving twin black tracks on the street behind you. I can see them, slim tracks left in the frost by the wheels of bicycles, by your sleeves, and I am standing in the middle of the street when you walk up to me, the ends of your sleeves encrusted with frost, your jacket tinted orange at the edges and the rest a deep blue, a deep spotless blue. And you look up at me with big brown smiling eyes, and your hair is mussed by the breeze but your face is clear and your brow is clean, and you look up at me as if you are listening, as if you are waiting to hear what I have to say to you. I know I can only say one thing, that there is only time to say the one thing, and I search for the words, slipping my hand into the pocket of the robe where I find it, small and hard, and when I open my hand to you it is there, a tooth in my palm, and I hold it out to you in the morning light, in the middle of the street in the cold morning air, and you look at it and then back up to me, and I know what to say now, now that you have found your way back to me. I am ready to say it, now that you are here. I am no longer afraid of the answer. I am ready to ask you the question.