by Annie DeWitt
I started in on a sonata, quietly and without much breath at first. But then with more confidence as I went. There was a seriousness about Otto which I respected. His was not a soul easily turned.
I looked over my shoulder at one point while I played. Otto was sitting in the recliner. A peacefulness had invaded his face.
I hadn’t seen His Helene in the other room watching. She was sitting in her wheelchair with her feet in a bedpan. Here you are, she seemed to say, a bit of my letting go.
There I was, all these trinkets of hers, and her husband’s eyes boring into me. By the time I got to the final movement I felt I knew something of her inner life. I tried to tell it just as I heard it. Strong faithful chords. Easy on the flutes and the runs. I wanted to splay the notes in good conscience.
“You’ve been lonely then too,” His Helene said from the other room, when I had finished.
I went to her, kneeling down at her feet and putting my arms on her legs. I tried to be rough with her when I could to remind her that she was still a woman.
“Do you want to go for a stroll, Helene?” I said.
“Sure do, darlin’,” she said. “It’s frightful small in here tonight.”
We bundled her in the old fur from the front closet and all of Otto’s gear, her throat every bit covered. On her head we put the coon hat Otto wore riding in the winter. Wilson donated his glasses to shield her eyes. “We can’t let the wind take those now can we,” Otto said affixing them to her face. “There’s no natural tears left.”
It was true. I’d put the drops in. What water His Helene had left in her had congregated in her feet. They were bulbous and bloated. The doctor said next it would move to her heart. That’s what would take her. That one big rush of her own stream.
She took her grapes. I put them in a small blue bowl, which I wedged on her lap. In a panic, she liked to feel a frozen grape on her tongue. The nurse had shown me where to place it.
Otto took the flashlight. Together we rolled His Helene into the night. Otto’d built a ramp off the back porch that she’d used to wheel herself out to the barn when she’d still had some strength in her arms.
“Take her around front,” Otto said. “I want to show her off one last time even if there’s no one to see her.”
It took too much emotion out of him to push. He just wanted to run alongside and watch the fear being lifted from her face. I broke into a steady jog after we cleared the driveway. The shadows of the branches overhead splayed out on her lap. I watched them move over her as we ran.
“Go, go, go,” she said.
After a few laps, Otto sat on the porch and held the light for us. We made a few more runs in front of the house. I wondered if Father was watching as we passed. I wondered if someday I wouldn’t be doing this with him too.
When I feared the cold would take her, I took her in. As I undressed her, His Helene started to panic. She could feel the gravity shifting. The water in her feet had begun its migration.
Otto went for her box of shots in the freezer. Some high-altitude sedative. That kind of devil had to be kept fresh. Once the needle was under the skin, His Helene looked peaceful. We laid her out on the pullout in the front room. She slept on the ground floor of the house. Otto feared she’d fall down the stairs. The other night, he’d said, she had managed to push herself out of bed and had taken a few steps before crashing into the bookcase. He’d found her on the floor struggling to lift her face out of the carpet. She’d fought him off kicking and wailing.
“You’ll suffocate yourself,” he’d said.
“Who says I’ll let you kill me like this,” she’d replied.
Otto wouldn’t get a night nurse. He said people wait for everyone to leave a room before they die. “Sometimes,” he said, “I pace the house just to give her room to slip away.”
Once His Helene was quiet we went out onto the front porch to get some air. Outside there was a weightiness between us. I stood next to Otto on the mat that lined the door looking out at the road.
“What do you do,” he said, “when there’s almost no one left?”
The way he took me in his arms, pulling the small of my waist into his belt, I felt the sudden surging up of all the ways I’d wanted to be needed. I saw Mother in Father’s arms that morning as they’d danced next to the drain board in the kitchen. I saw Callie push Father into her bed. And too, I saw everything of His Helene. I tilted my head back. He was careful with my lips.
Afterward, Otto took my face in his hands and turned it sideways examining my profile under the gloomy spin of the porch light. There was a softness to my chin which the dentist had once suggested doing away with. “A little insert,” he’d said, turning my face in his hand just as Otto did now, showing Father my weakness in the mirror of the examination room. “Best to correct for any overbite before she grinds her teeth and lockjaw sets in.”
“You have a long nose,” Otto said.
“It belongs to my mother,” I said.
“It’s good to know what belongs where,” he said.
It was late. Or it was getting late. But there was something in the way Otto looked at me, that pride brimming up in his eyes, I was afraid to leave it alone. “Come inside,” he said. “I’ll put us on a pot of coffee and some cards.”
“I suppose I could deal just one hand,” I said.
The table in the kitchen was littered with piles of hospital bills, dirty coffee cups, and mountains of discarded creamers. We sat across from each other. The table was small. Our knees touched from time to time.
“He doesn’t mean any harm,” Otto said nodding toward the RV where Wilson had retired as he poured a glass of Whiskey. “He’s just looking for someone his own age. There isn’t anyone left.”
“Who’s left for you?” I said.
“Well,” he said. “Callie keeps me busy from time to time.”
“How long have you known her?” I said.
“Long enough,” he said. “To hate her a little. I’ve raised her like one of my own.”
“I’ve seen her on your lawn,” I said.
“Always up and out the door before the next day breaks over top of her,” he said. “Never could shake the life out.”
He reached out across the table and handed me the cards. The box was soft and worn at the edges.
“Deal me a good hand, Jeanie,” he said, taking my hands in his as I reached for the deck. A wind came in through the slat where the window next to the table was open. The old hobbyhorse clanged against the side of the house in the breeze. I could make out the outline of its hooves where they hung in the dim light of the porch, the thin strips of gun-metal silver. I wondered how old Callie had been when she’d spray-painted her name on its rump and where she’d ridden it on his lawn.
“I’ll deal,” I said. “You cut the deck.”
There’s something about hands that cuts to the quick of a man. Otto’s were lithe and narrow, with large boxish fingernails which he kept clipped close to the flesh. Watching them move over the pile of cards reminded me of the way Grandfather had once sharpened knives in a steady arc against the carving stone in his kitchen. “A fast even clip,” Grandfather had said. “That’s where you find your edge.” Otto’s hands flipped and spit with the same confidence. Here was a man without patience for clumsiness or idle. He’d had so much backward speed fall into his life, it was all he could do to get himself and his son washed each morning. Every now and again he groomed his own mustache or changed the straight pin on his lapel. Occasionally, when he needed to get away from the world, he cracked his whip at the air for a while.
Otto flipped his last card. I still had two on deck.
“I win,” Otto said.
“You always win,” I said.
The speed fell out of us. At some hour Otto’s Scotch turned into Whiskey. My cup he filled with sweet cognac, which he cut with a teaspoon of sugar
. The edges of the cards adopted a haze. Each time Otto shuffled they fluttered momentarily.
His knees gripped mine.
I got up to go the bathroom. How long I sat on that yellow toilet seat counting the cracks in the rim, I couldn’t say. When I came out, the room was spinning and my body had taken on a leftward lilt. I stood for a moment in the hallway and steadied myself against the expanse of wall. Otto was in the living room with his tumbler of Scotch regarding the pale screen of the television, its lead-bellied glow illuminating the thick grain of the carpet, which he hadn’t bothered to vacuum since His Helene had stopped entertaining and now lent considerable dirt to the bottom of the foot. Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” played on the hi-fi. Otto wore his field boots inside the house as of late. He said he feared gnats. He feared lice. He feared paper fleas on account of the newspapers he kept stored in the wood crate next to the fireplace. Some nights, he said, he awoke to the feeling that a strange mold was growing up his throat on account of the floorboards. The earth around the foundation had crumbled in recent years. In the winter when the snow came in under the house, the floors were damp for weeks. He’d taken to packing old trash bags with dried leaves to try and patch up the gullys under the house where he could. The bags provided little protection. When the wind got to raging he swore he could hear it cursing the floor beneath him.
Other nights, he’d told me, he woke to the feeling that the house had been raised off the earth. I imagined him in his robe throwing himself toward the window in order to look out and regain some sense of his habitation. There was the earth. There was the barn. He searched for the line of trees in the distance to convince himself the house itself hadn’t been swept from the earth like some dwelling in the Malaysian peninsula which stood suspended next to the shore on thin legs of reed in case the river swelled after the storm. A kelong they called it. He’d seen the word in a recurring dream.
The dream, as he’d told it, began with a knock at the door. His first thought was of his wife. He was living in a motel next to the sea in the old fishing town in Galicia where he’d gone to dry out his head after the war. His Helene had caught him at the door with a towel around his waist, some dark-eyed woman who he’d met behind the glass at the currency exchange laying in the blue glare of the rented bed.
His second thought was that the police were on to him. When he opened the door, a man who looked like Wilson handed him a summons. “D. B. Cooper?” Wilson said. “You signed a bad check to the bank.” In 1971 D. B. Cooper had boarded a Boeing 727 on flight between Oregon and Washington, ordered a drink and announced to the stewardess that he had a bomb in his bag. After receiving a sack-full of ransom at a refueling in Reno, D. B. Cooper ordered the plane disembark and fly south to Mexico. He’d plummeted mid-flight with the money.
Alone under the weight of his anxieties, the dream, Otto’d said, took on the presence of his reality. Cooper was a man of sophistication and precision. After announcing to the stewardess that he had a bomb, he’d ordered a bourbon and water, paid his tab, and told the stewardess to keep the change. “Looks like Tacoma down there,” he’d said reassuringly. Of D. B. Cooper’s effects two items stood out in Otto’s mind, his black attaché case and his mother-of-pearl tiepin. Otto himself owned a mother of pearl pin, which his wife had given him when their first horse had won the Grand Prix.
As I walked into the living room, the newscaster on the television was talking about a euthanasia machine. The image of a woman who looked not unlike Mother flashed across the scene. “And this stops the heart as soon as it reaches it,” a thin elderly doctor named Kevorkian said leaning over a machine which resembled His Helene’s series of drip tubes hanging next to the pullout in the corner where she now lay. “Her decision had been made some time ago,” the husband of the woman on the television said. The image of the crummy old van in an RV park where Kevorkian had attached the woman to her death looked almost identical to the RV in back of Otto’s house where Wilson now slept. I looked at the woman’s face on the screen and looked over at His Helene on the pullout. Helene’s thin, colorless head was propped up on a pillow, a few wisps of hair brushed over her temple. It was hard to tell if she was watching.
Otto slumped over on the couch in front of the window. The shades behind him were cracked open just enough that I could see the outline of the Bottom Feeder in the background, Father and Birdie asleep in it, wallowing in the shadows across the street. Slowly I approached the old man. “Shoeless,” I reassured Otto, taking his worn-out body into my arms on the sofa as he fumbled to get my dress over my head. “It’s like boarding a train, I promise.”
“Just lie back,” I said.
Or, maybe he said, “Just look out the window.”
Have you ever seen Skeeter Davis sing “The End Of the World”? Really seen it? “Hey, listen. Why don’t we have Skeeter Davis do another song right now,” the host of the night show says. And this angelic platinum haired woman who looks not unlike Birdie stands in front of the microphone in a dress buttoned up to her chin and sings, “Why does the sun keep on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world cause you don’t love me anymore?”
This is what I pictured as Otto pulled my dress over my head that night. Birdie as Skeeter Davis performing at a carnival on television, her blonde hair aglow and the world watching. I imagined the scout who had stopped Mother in the mall and looked at Birdie and said, “Hey, that kid would show up well on television.” And I thought of my ugly little chin and the dentist’s stale breath in my face as he’d whispered, “Just a little insert.” And the way Father wanted to keep his girls a little ugly, the better to protect our brains.
The old man began to kiss my neck and reach for his belt beneath me. I stopped him. “Let me do it,” I said. I undressed him the way Mother had done for Father, the way Birdie and I had practiced. His body was boxy and not unathletic. The way his skin hung loose over the bones you could tell he’d left something of himself behind. He’d let something get away from him, love or lust or maybe just time. In the process, he’d gotten smaller.
He held my head into his neck. He didn’t want me to see him. I remember the pain pushing up into me little by little and then more forcefully until he could no longer manage. The pain, the shock of it, provided an opening, into which I could recede. I came to understand what to do, there was a steady rhythm to it.
“You can look at me and say, ‘You’re a criminal,’” Kevorkian said on the television.
It was Wilson who interrupted us. He was standing at the window. His breath fogged a halo around his face in the glass. When I looked up, he waved.
“Don’t encourage him,” Otto said without turning his head.
“Who’s encouraging who?” I said.
“He’s better off outside,” Otto said.
“I’ll check on him,” I said.
“Let him watch,” he said. “That yard’s not big enough for an old hound dog to scare up a squirrel. I should worry. It’s not often I get a woman like you in my lap.”
I straightened my spine. Every now and again Wilson moved his palm against the glass to clear the fog. I had all the attention he’d ever wanted.
How it ended I don’t remember. The room had taken on a slant by the time the dog started barking.
“Do me a favor, Jeanie,” Otto said, my clothes strewn across the floor. “Let that mutt out to do his business.”
I stood and walked across the living room carpet and onto the cool slip of kitchen linoleum in my bare feet with my flat chest shining. The minute I opened the back door, I smelled Wilson’s stench. A pool of urine had gathered at his feet where he’d been watching. As the old Setter ran outside, he leapt over the standing liquid. Wilson looked down at the dark trail that stained the front of his pants and laughed. Tears were coming down his cheeks.
“Pretty girl, Jeanie,” he said. “Daddy says I like the
pretty girls.”
Otto was on him before I heard the crash of the chair in the kitchen behind me from where Otto’d overturned it. I felt the rush of the old man’s body and the stale whiff of Scotch as he sailed through the doorway. His hand landed solidly against Wilson’s face. The crack of skin against skin was sharp and high. At the last minute Otto released his fist. At least his palm was open. The way the shadows caught Wilson’s features, all I saw was the slack skin of his jaw and the long wrinkled gullet under his chin flap sideways from the impact.
In that moment, I knew Otto Houser was a spy. He was trading for some old team where he’d once had a bit part as a pitch hitter. All that slapping and shouting. When he looked at me he saw a way back into those days when he’d spun his wife around the old inn in Cheshire where they were married among the silver and the paintings of hunting dogs and cavalry that hung on the porch. After the war and the bum kid and the thing cleaved inside of His Helene’s lungs, he’d dragged himself back to that place on his belly. He’d righted himself on the portico of that old inn with a bottle of whiskey and an envelope of lists. Everyone on Fay Mountain could see the way he clung there to the banister. His cheeks had sallowed. Only the liquor brought back the rush of light to his eyes. He had his felt derby hat and his long tan cigarettes that left the yellow around his gums and under his nails. People still envied him for his head of hair. Everything else he had was built on nostalgia. That brown and white Spaniel at his chair under the table could just as soon have been the reincarnation of some old porcelain figurine cutting up a rust on top of the piano had it not been for the way he licked his master’s feet.
I grabbed my dress from the floor and took off across the yard before I saw the look in Wilson’s eyes. I was afraid they would still be laughing.
As I crossed the road that separated our houses, I heard a long deep wailing followed by the yapping of a dog. I stopped in the shadows beneath the two trees of knowledge, and slid my underwear from around my waist. A stain had gathered on the moist strip of white cotton where it had clung between my legs. I held it up to the moon to examine it. In the crotch there was thin streak of blood. I buried the underwear between two rocks in the stone wall. The lights in Otto Houser’s house were off by the time I entered the Bottom Feeder and locked the door behind me.