by Jay Varner
“I don’t get it,” he said. “This should clot.”
His skin began to look like clay and the hand that pinched those washcloths trembled. I wondered how long it would take for him to bleed to death.
“I don’t think this is an ulcer,” he said, and rolled his eyes toward my mother.
His pupils looked glassy and dilated. The strong man who had carried me to see that helicopter when I was sick suddenly looked tired, weak, and sad. An hour later, the bleeding stopped. My father slowly stood, gently washed the dried blood from his nose, mouth, and chin, and then slept on his La-Z-Boy the rest of the night.
His face looked washed in exhaustion — blue crescent pouches formed under his eyes, and the lids looked permanently heavy. He took several days off work and underwent tests at Lewistown Hospital. The doctors, concerned about my dad’s low white blood-cell count, ordered a CAT scan, spinal tap, X-rays, and fed another camera into his stomach. He returned home tired and sore, moving slowly and saying he felt like a pin cushion. After all the tests, his doctors called and said that they had found nothing. Deep blue and purple bruises appeared on his arms and legs. My dad had no explanation for them. The doctors thought it might be leukemia and performed more tests. Something seemed terribly wrong. I feared that whatever sickness my father had, the doctors couldn’t fix it. I wanted him well again — even if it meant that he would spend every night at the firehouse, I wanted my old dad back.
By the third weekend in March, we still waited for a definitive diagnosis. Winter had sulked long and heavy for months. But that Saturday, temperatures soared into the fifties. The wet, fertile scent of spring wafted in the breeze — we longed to shed our winter coats and heavy bedspreads, ready to start over again, with the hope that my father would be fine. That night, my mother washed dishes in the kitchen while my dad calculated numbers for a new tanker truck for the firehouse. He had tuned the radio to Dick Bartley’s American Gold syndicated oldies show.
When the opening drums of “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys played, my dad stood from the dining room table, walked into the kitchen, and put his hands on my mother’s hips. She turned and smiled. They danced close and slow — careful not to waltz into the refrigerator or the counter.
“Listen to this song,” my dad said. “ ‘Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.’”
My mother looked up at my father, stood on her toes, and kissed him.
A week later, I woke to a rainstorm pattering the roof. I walked into the living room, ready to watch Saturday morning cartoons, but saw that my mother sat on the couch, tall and stiff. She looked worried. Nena sat on my father’s La-Z-Boy and asked me to sit on her lap. My grandmother’s green Jeep sat in our driveway and the world outside looked gray and foggy. For a while, nobody spoke.
Finally, Nena said, “Jay, we have to talk to you about something.”
My mother cleared her throat. “The doctors had to put a needle into your father’s hip and take out some of the marrow inside of his bone,” my mother said. She stopped and held a hand over her mouth, as if ready to cry.
Nena squeezed her arm around me. Just a few minutes earlier, all I had wanted to do was watch television. I couldn’t understand what was happening or why they seemed so upset.
My mother looked at me, her eyes hard and scared. “Your father has cancer, and he’s very sick. He has multiple myeloma. It’s in his bones.”
Cancer. The word seemed to seep through my skin, numbing my body. It must be a mistake, I thought. Someone like my father could never get cancer.
“Are they sure?” I asked.
“They’re sure,” Nena said.
“How could he get cancer?”
“We just don’t know how people get cancer,” she said.
My dad had just moved us into this new house, his new house. He was barely thirty-two years old. People that young didn’t get cancer. I had heard stories about great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, and people in McVeytown who had cancer. All of them had died.
“But he’s going to be okay,” I said. I squeezed Nena’s hand. “Right?”
Nena nodded and pursed her lips. “We have to put faith in God that he will be. And his doctors. He has very good doctors.”
My mother explained that my dad would be in the hospital for the next week receiving chemotherapy that would kill the cancer. The chemo would make his hair fall out, she said, and it would also make him sicker than he had been before.
“But then how does he get better?” I asked.
My mother patted her fingertips together. “He has to be strong. He has to fight. He might have to get chemotherapy for a year.”
“But you have to be strong too,” Nena said. “Your father will need you to be strong.”
I turned to Nena. Tears welled in her eyes. Cancer. The word still pounded through my chest. But it was like my father said: “Don’t worry, baby.”
“I’ll be strong,” I said. I turned to my mother. “Can I watch cartoons now?”
I turned on the television and my mother and Nena cried.
Part Three
Fifteen
I’m typing a story about the upcoming Pennsylvania Farm Show when my phone rings. The caller is a woman who sounds old and angry.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Jay Varner.”
“Well, Jay Varner, I have subscribed to the Sentinel for over thirty years,” she says.
I lean back in my chair, ready to get an earful from this woman.
“I think it’s awful that your paper stopped printing obituaries,” she says.
“We haven’t stopped,” I say.
She pauses for a moment. I can tell that she’s getting more flustered. “Well, I haven’t seen any obituaries in the paper for the past three days.”
“No one died. Just as soon as they do, I promise you’ll know about it.”
The woman sighs, sounding disappointed and impatient. “Fine. I’ll just check tomorrow.”
Somehow, I understand her frustration. When the scanner sounds on my desk, I sit at rapt attention, hoping for another fire. Each afternoon, I pore over the obituaries and faxes from the local police, hoping the names will correspond and I’ll have a front-page homicide story.
The worst part about the job isn’t the $8.75 an hour that I earn or the 3 – 11 p.m. shift that ruins any chance to see my friends throughout the week. The worst part is the death. I gleefully listen as two veteran state troopers try to one-up each other with horror stories. They tell of discovering bloated bodies — at the slightest touch, the corpses popped open like soda cans and spewed gas. They both remember witnessing their first autopsy. Stand behind the fan in an autopsy, they warn me; if you stand down wind, you’ll vomit three seconds after the first cut, because it will be the worst smell you can imagine. And don’t wear any good clothes — the smell of death will never come out, no matter how many times you wash them.
Death becomes a daily expectation, a constant in my life. One night, I type sixteen obituaries. People die in their nursing-home beds, in their favorite recliner, on emergency-room gurneys. They die while driving drunk; they stab each other over drugs; they suck on shotgun barrels and blow their heads apart.
One man kills himself on the railroad tracks. I later hear two of the responding paramedics joke that the dead man must have had split personalities — the train’s steel wheels severed him into three parts: legs, torso, and head.
A deaf family of four burns to death in a house trailer. Smoke alarms bleated and neighbors pounded on doors and windows, all in vain.
Many of the dead mean more to me than just a name or a story — I know them.
Chip Lemon, one of Lewistown High School’s former football players, gets into a fight at the bar and punches a man so hard it sends him down a flight of stairs. The man lands on his head, breaks his neck, and dies instantly. Lemon then pisses in the bathroom, walks out the back door, and drives home. When the police find him, he’s at
home, asleep in bed.
There is Carl Black, the twenty-two-year-old junkie who dies in the Lewistown Hotel with a needle in his arm. He was in my twelfth-grade gym class.
Kyle Jones, the schizophrenic who breaks open Glade Plug-Ins and dies after drinking the liquid inside, served in the high school Key Club with me.
Autumn Rucker, twenty-three, is found dead in her apartment with a pile of cocaine on her coffee table and a stomach full of pills. Each morning throughout high school, Autumn sat next to me in homeroom.
Timmy Johns who graduated with me dies of intestinal cancer at only twenty-two.
Sam Martin dies after driving his pickup truck into an oak tree while speeding toward McVeytown. The town’s Methodist minister had adopted him while she was in Africa on mission work. We sometimes played pickup basketball games together.
And of course, there are many others whose names I have difficulty remembering.
The two elderly brothers who die when a tree blows over onto their car.
The five teenagers who die on their way home from a state wrestling match in Harrisburg. Their car hits a semitruck head-on. All of them attend the same high school.
The two high school students who commit suicide together on a mountaintop lookout. They shoot themselves in the head. No notes or explanations are found next to their bodies.
My girlfriend, Megan, drives down from Connecticut to visit me for the entire week after Christmas. We met in college and had decided to continue our relationship even though she lives six hours away. We have managed to keep our commitment intact through nightly phone calls. It is only the third time we have seen each other since May.
“What do you want to do while I’m here?” she asks. Her brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she wears a sweater and blue jeans. She looks even prettier than I remembered.
“There’s nothing to do,” I say.
“Do you want to go out to eat?”
“Where? McDonald’s? Burger King?”
“What about Jimmy’s Pizza?” she asks. Then she remembers and lowers her head. “Sorry. I forgot.”
“Haven’t been back since he died,” I say.
I have to work only one night while she visits. I return home at 11:30 p.m. and tell her about a high school honors student who was accepted to Harvard. She died when she lost control of her car. Because she wasn’t wearing a seat belt, she was thrown through the passenger-side window.
Megan winces. “Is this what you write about?”
“Pretty much,” I say. “Fun times.”
On New Year’s Eve, we stay at home and play Trivial Pursuit. I tell her more about my job and how it’s beginning to wear on me.
Megan sighs and pats my leg. “Like I told you, my dad said that you’re welcome to come there.”
Somehow Connecticut seemed worse than Mifflin County. I hated things like the Merritt Parkway and the endless suburbs and strip malls. But Megan also hated the isolation of central Pennsylvania and the stink of cow manure that always seemed to permeate the air.
“I know,” I say. “That’s really nice of you to say.”
We smile at each other but then sit in silence.
The doublewide trailer feels cramped and small. Winter air blasts through the cheap windows, through the electrical plugs. I have hated the place for a long time. It seems that none of the work my father put into the house was correct — things break on a regular basis. One night while I’m at work, a massive tree in our front yard blows down in a storm, missing the house by inches.
“This place is a hole,” I tell my mother. “I wish it’d just burn down.”
“What’s wrong with you? This is our home.”
“It’s a dump.”
“It’s our home,” she says. “I didn’t want this place. You know who wanted it.”
“What a surprise that nothing’s hooked up right,” I say. “He did it all himself.”
Trouble has plagued the house for years.
The pipes my father worried so much about burst. We had to hire a man in a backhoe to come and dig them up and replace them.
“Good thing you found it so soon,” the man said. “This water would have eventually gone right into the fuse box in the basement and caught fire. Plus your well would have run dry.”
One day while I was in high school, the basement flooded and we had to buy a sump pump. I spent the soggy afternoon digging a ditch across the driveway with a pickax and shovel so the water would flow away from the basement. During the storm, the brick walls cracked and we had to prop them up with boards.
“This is what happens when you hire the AARP to lay your foundation,” I said.
“I knew those people weren’t good,” my mother said. “But your dad just had to use them because they were so cheap.”
When I was a senior in college, the stovepipe on the woodstove fell apart while I was home during Christmas vacation. I coughed myself awake and saw that black smoke was pouring through the house. If we hadn’t discovered it, we would have suffocated. It took weeks to get the smell out of the house.
At the paper, my mood sinks and my temper flares. The Associated Press picks up a story I wrote about a local man who spent thirty years collecting one million pennies. College friends from across the country read the article in their own local newspapers and recognize my name in the byline. They send postcards and e-mails congratulating me and asking how I am doing. I throw away or delete all of them. Then on Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey make an attempt at a joke about the man and his coin collecting on “Weekend Update.” The next Monday, my co-workers smile, amazed that a story from the Sentinel had made national news.
My mother sees the story on the ticker on CNN.
“You made CNN,” she says. “How about that?”
“What’s it matter?” I snap. “It was a fluff piece.”
That’s not news. Death is news. Death is like a drug. Over time, the regular car accidents aren’t enough. The freakish accidents aren’t enough. I need a bigger fix. And then I get one.
Four-year-old James Van Ness plays with his two stepbrothers in an upstairs bedroom of a house near Chestnut Street in Lewistown. Their mother sits in the downstairs kitchen and talks to a friend. Another stepbrother, fourteen-year-old Keith Thompson, walks into the bedroom to play with James and the boys.
Keith’s stepfather has just taken him small-game hunting. A .12-gauge shotgun — still loaded — rests in the corner of the room. Keith picks up the gun, shows it to the younger kids, and says his stepfather told him that guns need to be cleaned after hunting. For some reason, Keith then aims the barrel at James’s face and pulls the trigger.
The coroner’s report includes all of the details leading up to the shooting. The muzzle had been less than four inches away from James’s face when the gun fired. I read details of how James’s head — his bone, blood, skin, blond hair, and brains — splattered over half the room. Some of his teeth had been embedded in the wall. James’s little body slumped onto the floor.
I call the coroner’s office to ask if the death had been ruled an accident or a homicide. The coroner’s new assistant answers the phone and I hear the horror in her voice. She had started just a few weeks earlier — this was the first death scene that she had visited.
“I’ve never seen a body like that before,” she says. “I’ve seen dead kids in morgues. But being in that room was something different. To see that little boy with just nothing left above his neck. And the worst thing was the smell. He wasn’t even dead for an hour yet, but I’ll never forget that smell.”
After I hang up the receiver, I walk into the restroom and dry-heave. I slide against the wall of the bathroom stall and wish I could vomit. This is what I looked forward to — a little boy taking a shotgun blast full on in the face. Guilt gnaws at me. I wished for others to suffer — for their children or fathers to die, for their possessions and homes to burn up. I wonder if this was what my father had felt. Perhaps he had raced toward f
ires because it added excitement to his life. Maybe he had been bored by life at home. I sit on that cold bathroom floor for what feels like hours and decide that the best thing for me would be to leave Mifflin County.
Sixteen
The Sunday after my father was diagnosed with cancer, my mother and I visited him at Lewistown Hospital. Though just a twenty-five-minute drive from McVeytown, the hospital felt like it was in another country altogether. Its sterile hallways smelled of turpentine and iodine. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead and cast whiteness onto the glossy floors — it seemed there were no shadows in the entire hospital. We walked past nurses and doctors, many of whom smiled at us and said hello as if trying to comfort us. Machines and gurneys sat parked behind nurses’ counters or in hallways.
My dad’s room on the second floor overlooked the boiler room of the hospital. Outside, steam and smoke lifted into the evening air. My dad, dressed in a white hospital gown, lay in his hospital bed and watched the wall-mounted television. Machines sat next to his bed. One looked like a suitcase and held two plastic bags full of a liquid the color of cranberry juice. A long tube snaked from the bottom of the bag and fed into my father’s left wrist. On the other side of his bed, an IV dripped a clear liquid that led into a vein on his right wrist. Also in the room, in the corner, sat a large machine on wheels, about the size of that massive television Helen and Lucky had given us. I recognized this machine from CHiPs — it was a defibrillator, meant to jump-start someone’s heart.
My mother and I sat down in chairs next to my dad’s bed. He smiled and said he was glad to see us. He said the hospital food tasted horrible and joked that if we wanted to see him again, we had better bring food.
“This stuff is going to fix me right up,” he said to me and pointed to the machine with the cranberry juice. “That’s the chemo. I have to get it twenty-four hours straight for five days.” He turned to my mother. “I called Art and he was going to tell the guys at the firehouse. I hope it’ll be okay there without me.”