“No.”
“Neither do I, just now, but the feeling may pass. Still, I doubt you and I have ever been men of real faith. I much more enjoyed our friendly competitions than anything else about Sunday churchgoing.”
Mather Grouse smiles. As ushers, they always made tiny wagers on who would take in more in the collection basket. “You could always afford to make up the difference. My side was always dimes and quarters, the occasional dollar bill. A crisp new ten-spot always turned up in yours. If it hadn’t been for that, you’d never have won.”
“You were better at making people feel guilty. They saw you coming and dug into their pockets. They saw me and said, let him pay. Perhaps if you came back to church I’d get my religion back.”
Mather Grouse knows all this is leading somewhere. His friend is a master of indirection, but he will not be able to conceal the purpose of his visit much longer. “It was you who insisted I give it up to begin with.”
“Yes,” the other man admits, but his voice is tentative.
“Besides,” Mather Grouse says, “I get all the religion I need right here.” The two friends smile and watch the evangelist, whose face is aglow with love and makeup.
“I have another patient with emphysema,” Dr. Walters ventures. “About your age, though according to the X-rays the damage to his lungs is far greater.”
Mather Grouse says nothing. The two men are not looking at each other. It is very close now, and Mather Grouse begins to suspect the direction they are heading.
“The man is a mover. He carries people’s furniture up and down flights of stairs. I told him this would have to stop. He has two big, strong sons. I said he’d have to let them do the heavy work.”
“Very good advice.”
“But you see what I’m driving at?”
“No,” Mather Grouse lied.
“Here, then. You are suffering from emphysema, a disease we’re only now learning about. We know it will gradually grow worse, because that’s the only thing it can do. Eventually, unless you get hit by a car in the meantime, it will take your life. This much we know. But for a long time I’ve suspected—and now I’m certain of it—that you are sicker than you should be. Your lungs have suffered some deterioration, and there’s the phlegm. But you should be able to breathe.”
“That’s very good to know. I promise to turn over a new leaf.”
Dr. Walters frowns. Mather Grouse has always been difficult. He is resisting, and the doctor won’t easily discover what he wants to know. If at all, perhaps. “Tell me about the bad days. When do they come?”
“Whenever,” Mather Grouse says. “Sometimes I’m feeling good, then all of a sudden the tightness. If I happen to be awake, I have time to prepare. If I’m asleep, sometimes there isn’t time.”
“Do you dream?”
“Not often. Sometimes I have the sensation of dreaming, but when I wake up I can never remember what about.”
“Tell me about the last attack.”
Mather Grouse is growing annoyed. “I was in the park, sitting on a bench. I shouldn’t have walked all that way.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was Mrs. Grouse with you?”
“No.”
“What were you doing?”
Mather Grouse decides to tell the truth, which might throw his friend off the track. “I was smoking. It felt wonderful.”
“I see.”
“I doubt it,” Mather Grouse says. “I’ll never be able to convince you, but it’s not the cigarettes.”
Mather Grouse steals a look and is surprised to see the other man looking so alert. So intense that he’s nearly cross-eyed, the doctor is studying Mather Grouse as if he were something under a microscope. “I believe you,” he says. “I have another patient. A little girl with asthma. Her parents are going through a divorce. A very ugly one. Her attacks coincide with her father’s visits.”
“My father is dead,” Mather Grouse says. “You are the only one who visits here.”
“Yes.” Dr. Walters leans back against the sofa and crosses one knee. “But what I want to know is what you think about. What you think about and dream about when the tightness comes. That’s what I want you to tell me, my friend.”
13
Anne Grouse never set eyes on Dan Wood until he came home from Korea. By then she and Dallas had been dating for nearly a year. Dan lacked Dallas’s good looks, but her first conscious thought, the afternoon they met at her cousin’s, was regret that she had so openly committed herself to Dallas, whose light suddenly seemed dim. Not that Dan was a show-off. On the contrary, he was Dallas in geometric reverse. Where Dallas was garrulous, Dan was reserved. All the girls thought Dallas the handsomest man they knew, and Anne felt certain they would find Dan Wood plain by comparison, yet he was the most attractive man she’d ever met. She doubted that any girl, including her cousin, would ever value him at anything near his worth. What she admired most was his self-assurance. He wasn’t always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.
Though she fought the feeling, Anne was jealous of her cousin’s good fortune, for Diana and Dan were a match from the beginning. They had known each other before he went overseas and, though they’d never dated, he began writing letters. Those letters amounted to a courtship, and by the time he returned it was to a woman he’d never really known, except as she emerged through her responses on paper. If Dan was disappointed in Diana in the flesh, he showed no sign. For her part, Di was like the fairy-tale princess who waited, confident that every promise of future happiness would be redeemed in full, confident too that she would recognize the man she had waited for and that he would transform her. She had few physical charms, but when Dan came home from Korea, she simply opened her arms to him and in doing so became lovely in her own eyes and his.
For a long time Anne Grouse refused to admit that she was in love with her cousin’s fiancé. No one suspected. The two couples double-dated frequently, often at Anne’s suggestion, but despite their age difference, that seemed natural enough. There were times when Dallas would’ve preferred to have his girl all to himself, but when they were alone together, she was not as affectionate as he could’ve wished. She was far more agreeable, more willing to reciprocate affection, when they shared a cozy booth with Dan and Diana. Dan treated Dallas like a favored younger brother, humoring him, never showing him up, teaching him things without ever seeming to, providing Dallas with a social education as painless as osmosis. In turn, especially after drinking too much, Dallas was subject to flights of wild admiration for his new best friend. “Helluva guy,” he would say once he and Anne were alone.
“Yes.”
“One helluva guy,” he insisted, bleary-eyed, as if he had detected some implied reservation. “I want us all to be best friends. We should all four of us get married right away. Til’ death do us part.”
Many an evening would have ended in a fight over an imagined insult had Dan not been present. Dallas was ambivalent about the fact that no matter where they went, Anne was likely to be the prettiest girl. He took great pleasure from the fact when the night was young and he was still relatively sober, but later the knowledge weighed heavily, especially when other young men intruded on their happy foursome, wanting Anne to dance. Dan often defused the situation by taking Anne onto the dance floor himself, the quarrel fizzling for lack of a prize. Though he drank as heavily as Dallas, Dan was older and accustomed to it; Dallas went out with the idea of getting tight, and succeeded by forced marches.
At the end of these evenings, back in her bedroom in her father’s house, the walls turning visible in the early morning light, Anne would try to hold onto the evening. But soon there was little but gray hopelessness. If things seemed fine when they were all together, when she was alone the fact that Dan belonged to her cousin, that they could not simply change partners, could not be ignored. To make matters worse, she had always bee
n fond of Diana and genuinely pleased that the family prediction of spinsterdom would be foiled. If she was annoyed with her cousin at all, it was the result of a realization that came to Anne during the course of the summer—that Diana and Dan were actually lovers. At first she rejected the possibility as absurd. Diana had always been comically modest, not wanting to change into her swimsuit in front of other girls, failing to see the humor in dirty jokes. Moreover, she and Dan seldom showed the slightest public affection. Dallas always made sure he and Anne held hands, and often kissed her if he thought it was likely to be noticed. Though Dan and Diana were far more circumspect, the more Anne observed them, the more subtle signs of intimacy she began to detect. For the longest time she was unable to think what Diana and Dan reminded her of, then it came to her: a married couple.
Ironically, Anne’s realization was compounded by a second intuition oddly out of synch with the first—that Dan Wood might have feelings for her. There never was anything overt between them, of course, and Dan never paid her any special attention, except when Dallas got too drunk to function, at which time Dan’s attentions would take on the air of dutiful friendship by holding a chair or offering an arm.
Dancing had always been one of Anne’s passions, and Diana, who danced indifferently, was always cheerful about lending Dan. Dallas danced like he did everything else, with wild enthusiasm and little staying power. The energy he put into a jitterbug often seemed comic, his arms and legs flailing about; with him for a partner, you danced at your own risk. In his rampant fits of dancing, his feet seldom firmly planted on the floor, fueled in part by drink but not quite drunk, he was always a threat to hurl Anne into tables of unsuspecting drinkers. Dan, on the other hand, moved effortlessly, always within himself, and he seemed as aware as Anne of the song’s nuances. Their signals to each other were neither false nor obvious.
14
As usual, Wild Bill Gaffney stopped at the Mohawk Grill at three in the afternoon. He never used the front door like the real customers, but came through the door that opened onto the alley. As always, he waited until the midafternoon dead time when Harry was alone. If there were customers, he waited patiently outside until they left. Then Harry would be glad to see him, at least after a fashion, and maybe even treat him to coffee without being asked. Today nobody was in the diner to make him uncomfortable, but Wild Bill discovered after climbing onto his stool at the end of the counter that it was impossible to appreciate his new winter coat indoors. Harry’s grill gave off enough heat to warm the whole place, and Wild Bill’s stool was right next to it.
To make matters worse, Harry was acting suspicious, and when he asked where the new coat came from, Wild Bill didn’t know what to tell him. The man who had given it to him had told him to forget it, so he had. Forgetting was something he was good at. Sometimes he just went ahead and did it without having to be told. The only trouble was that some things just wouldn’t stay forgotten. Once he figured he had them erased real good, his memory would jog and there he’d be—remembering again before he could do anything about it.
He didn’t want to remember who had given him the coat because he knew he wasn’t supposed to, but the coat was so nice and warm that he couldn’t help thinking about it. If he ever needed to remember, by concentrating hard and reconstructing the series of events that led up to having it, he’d be able to. First, he would recall where he had been and how he’d felt without the coat, and then how it felt not to be cold anymore, until the person who handed it to him and made him try it on to see if it fit became a clear image in his mind’s eye. Just thinking about the process of remembering almost made him do it, but when he saw the image focusing he forced everything to go blank before any harm was done.
The coat was waist length, dark blue with white stripes along the sleeves. It seemed full of air and squeaked when he swung his arms. The coat made Wild Bill feel a little like a balloon. It was very warm, especially in the pockets where he stuffed his hands. Maybe he didn’t remember exactly where it came from, but even Harry’s needling could not shake Wild Bill’s conviction that he hadn’t stolen it.
Wild Bill drank his coffee quickly, his face sweaty. He was unaccustomed to such warmth and so many questions from his only friend. He had some coins and put them on the counter. Harry took one or two and shoved the rest back for Bill to put in his pocket. Outside, the November air was raw and the wind that howled down Main Street made Wild Bill feel comfortable all over again inside the coat. He neither sweated nor shivered. He hoped no one would take the coat away.
When he emerged from the alley, the junior high was getting out and some of the boys and girls along the other side of Main Street called to him. He waved and shouted back, which increased the general merriment. One of the boys began to walk with an exaggerated limp, his arms hanging down at his sides like a gorilla’s. Wild Bill thought several of the young girls were pretty, though not nearly as pretty as the girl he had forgotten. At times, if he thought real hard, he could remember her, how she had looked with her long black hair and slender white arms, but because he was afraid his father or his uncle the policeman would catch him at it, he didn’t think of her often. Sometimes, though, he would see somebody that reminded him of her, and there she was. She was beautiful to think about. Occasionally he waited for her in front of the high school, but she never came out, and he was always told to move along.
When the boys and girls were gone, Wild Bill zipped his coat and headed back up the alley between the Mohawk Grill and the junior high, still thinking about, and nearly remembering, the girl. He failed to notice that he wasn’t alone until he had practically walked into the circle of boys. He recognized them immediately, though he knew none of their names. One of them had once punched him hard, and the blood from his nose had trickled down into his mouth and tasted like salt. When Wild Bill got closer, he saw that this boy had another pinned to the ground, one arm twisted up under his shoulder blade. The others were hooting encouragement. The smaller boy squirmed and, every time he tried to wriggle free, the boy on top grabbed him by the hair with his free hand and pushed his nose in the gravel. The victim didn’t cry, though he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. Wild Bill thought he knew this boy, too, though it was hard to tell with his face so scraped and bloody.
Wild Bill drew closer and watched, at once concerned and skeptical, since these particular boys had once tricked him by pretending to fight among themselves. When he had tried to stop them, they hooted, made faces and told him to go do a bad thing with his mother. Then they ran away. Wild Bill was not at all certain that this wasn’t a similar trick, despite the blood from the one boy’s nose and the fear in his eyes.
Everyone seemed to notice Wild Bill at the same instant, even the boy on the ground. “Get out of here,” said the larger boy, refusing to surrender his victim’s twisted arm or let him off the pavement. Somewhat reluctantly, one of the boys stepped forward to prance around in front of Wild Bill, dancing left, then right, throwing up a small fist in the general direction of his frowning face. Bill neither dodged nor ducked, and the third jab landed and he felt his lower lip swell. When the boy swung again, Wild Bill pushed him to the pavement.
“Get him!” somebody yelled, but nobody moved after seeing their comrade dispatched with so little effort and respect. Finally the large boy got up to do the job himself. His opponent, now free, held his twisted arm like a broken wing, but didn’t run away. This was definitely the boy he knew, Wild Bill decided, the one who made him think of the girl. As he was thinking about this he was doubled-over, punched hard in the stomach. But when the boy uppercut, his fist encountered Wild Bill’s stony forehead and his knuckles cracked audibly. Bill sat down, then stood up immediately, determined not to be hit again and embarrassed to have been sat down. His belly hurt. When one of the other boys, finally shamed into action and heartened by seeing their adversary felled, offered to knock Wild Bill down a second time, Wild Bill caught him by the waist and flung him through the air against Harry’s
metal dumpster, where the boy’s head rang against the steel. The sound took all the fight out of the rest, even the large one. They clustered around the dumpster. Each had seen his share of fights with bloody noses and chipped teeth, but they’d never seen anyone lie motionless like the boy on the ground, and the gravity of the situation struck them dumb. They forgot completely about Wild Bill, who had also forgotten completely about them and was grinning benevolently down at the boy he’d rescued. “Jesus Christ,” muttered the large boy. “Jesus H. Christ.”
When a delivery truck turned into the alley, the gang scattered, leaving only Wild Bill and the bloodied boy and the one motionless on the ground. The driver pulled up and got out, kneeled by the inert figure, quickly glanced up, then hurried into the diner. By the time he returned with Harry, the alley was empty save for the unconscious boy. It soon filled up, though, and the ambulance that screamed the short block and a half down Hospital Hill had to wait for the crowd of spectators to clear a path.
Wild Bill followed the boy at a discreet distance, first up Main Street as far as the fire station, then up the hill as far as Mountain. As the boy limped homeward, the man who followed—certainly sinister-looking, his hair long and scraggly, his face unshaven—felt his anxiety grow, for the boy appeared to be leading him to the one place in Mohawk he was most forbidden to go, and the further they went, the more he feared their destination. The tightening in Wild Bill’s stomach had nothing to do with the fact that he’d just been slugged there. He’d forgotten all about the fight. Nobody had told him to, he’d just done it.
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