It’s night now, and cold. I wish I’d brought a jacket. And a flashlight. Can’t hardly see the ground I’m stepping on, almost fall down a couple times for thinking it’s six inches higher than it really is. We don’t go too far out, just enough that she won’t bring the coyotes too close to the house. I can hear them tittering in the distance. They’d about gone extinct for a while there, but now they’ve made a comeback in every single county of the state, thanks, I’m sure, to the tireless, devoted paperwork of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
When we’re far enough out, I lay her between the roots of an oak tree, and then I stand here, just looking down at the bundle, trying to think of something to say. One branch, swaying in the wind, creaks like an old door opening. My palm still rings with the shudder of the skinning knife, of blade grating bone.
She’d want to be closer to the house. Not out here in the woods by herself. Close to Frank.
“You took good care of him,” I say. “Real good.”
The stars, carved into the dark sky, glint. I try to pull three or four of them from the whole vertiginous mass and hold them separate, hold them apart, to see them only in relation to one another, and give that relation a shape and a story and a name: the Twins, descending from Olympus, scraping across the sky on their way to the underworld.
If he could name just one of them. If he could name just one of them, it would be all right. I could let it all go, Daisy and him and our whole life, I could let it all go quiet and easy, if I could hear him tell me just one of them. That’s the last thing I would ever ask.
The coyotes laugh their wild, hysterical laughter, as if they’ve never heard a funnier joke. Ursa Major doesn’t look a thing like a bear, and Orion’s Belt is just three stars in a line. It could be any three stars. It was always too clear to me that there was no real pattern between them, only some tricks sailors made up to guide them home. That doesn’t make the sky a map.
Still, I tried to see. But I never could.
I plug the screwdriver into the outlet in the hall and drill two holes into the molding of the bedroom door, on the outside where he won’t see them, one halfway between the doorknob and the top corner, the other halfway to the bottom. He stirs awake, sits up in the bed. I push the bit into the wood slowly, hold it trembling in place until the trembling stops and I feel it spinning in emptiness. Sawdust trickles into a tiny mound on the floor. The smell of it muddles the air. Into each of the holes, I screw the eye of a latch, twisting it in by hand until it lodges inside solid wood and I can’t twist any more, and then I shove a thin drill bit through the eye, use it as a handle to wrench the eye horizontal, driven so deep into the frame it can’t tear loose.
I jam the bottom hook into its eye, pull the door almost shut, and trace a circle around the spot where it meets the wood. It shines pale silver for a moment before the thread of the drill tears it away, bores beneath it. The door’s tougher, more solid than the molding was, creaks loud and pushes back against the bit. I bend over and brace the door with one arm.
“What’re you doing?” Frank says. Doesn’t even twist himself around enough to see.
“Sanding down the doors,” I say. “Where I painted the paint on too thick.”
He makes a face like this is a real interesting, real intriguing bit of information.
With all my strength I bear down on the drill, bracing my elbow against my hip to drive the bit into the wood. It catches, squealing, and twists the drill near out of my hand, sends a hot crack running through my wrist and along my forearm. I stand up straight, take a deep breath. I put the drill in reverse and pull the trigger. It winds itself out.
“I’ll get up soon,” Frank says, as if this ought to comfort me. “Just as soon as I recuperate.”
I reach overhead and drill the top hole, the bit spinning toward my palm flat on the other side of the door. If I pushed it all the way in, its full length, it would break through the wood and pierce my hand, tearing the muscle, and shuddering splinter the thin bones inside. I screw each hook into its hole, feeling for the moment when its point reaches the solid wood and its thread lodges inextricably inside. I pull the door shut, snug in its frame, and push the hook of each latch into its eye.
“Recuperate,” Frank says, slowly, as if sounding the word out to deduce its spelling, his voice blunted by the closed door. I lean against it, rest my forehead on the cool wood.
In the kitchen, the pot rattles with an insistent tap: Daisy’s bottom jaw, probably, come unhinged by the boiling, buffeted against the side by the force of water erupting from itself.
“Recuperate,” Frank says. “Recuperate. Re-cu-per-ate.” But no matter how hard he tries, no matter how he turns the word over and stresses each syllable, testing for weak spots, he can’t find any place to break it open. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t pry the thing apart.
NINETEEN
I used to go through a bale of excelsior every month, big as a refrigerator and packed dense, but now they don’t even carry it in the supply catalogs. Now you can only get it from the craft-and-hobby store, in tiny bags as if it were shredded iceberg lettuce: ‘American Moss,’ they call it, though it looks more like dried-up curls of crabgrass than any kind of moss, and use it as bedding for gift baskets, a rustic nest in which to tuck gourmet cheeses and handmade soaps, or else dye it green for the grass in children’s Easter baskets—though they rarely even do that anymore, the watery-eyed lady with her blond hair braided into a long, fat braid, whom I asked to check the stockroom to see if there were any extra bags back there, informed me: most parents prefer plastic grass in their Easter baskets these days. Cellophane.
“The cellophane you can reuse,” she said, “year after year. I highly recommend it.”
“Excelsior’s perfectly durable when used properly,” I said. “Mounts wrapped with excelsior have stood in leaky hunting lodges and musty basements for a hundred years without a spot of mildew.”
I rip a handful from the tangle of it, stray curls drifting through the air. It’s real resilient, hard to bunch together, tries to expand into shapelessness the moment you ease your grip like grass springing up after your lifted bootsoles, but I spray it with water to help it condense, and slowly my hands remember how to hold and shape it, the loose tufts tightening into muscle through the same instinct by which muscle contracts. I bunch it into long, stringy bundles and bind them tight to the wire bones of her forelegs. I can only do a little bit at a time before the twine burns my fingertips, before my knuckles start to throb from pulling it tight. If you let it loosen, even a little, the muscles turn shapeless and shambling.
The sputtering drum of urine on plastic resounds through the house. I bought him what the package calls a ‘portable male urinal,’ but which I am fairly sure is nothing but an iced-tea pitcher with a screw-on lid. The burbling gets higher and higher pitched, then trickles into silence.
I press the leg on the counter, spread both hands on the top of it, above the elbow, and bear down with all my weight to flatten it out. Dogs’ legs are real flat, not all round and hammy like people’s legs.
“Wendell,” Frank shouts. “Wendell.”
“What?” I yell.
“My jug’s full.”
“Do you have to go more? It didn’t sound like you had to go more.”
“It’s full.”
“Hold on to it a minute. I’m busy.”
They ought to make them bigger. It doesn’t hold hardly anything.
On the tiny black-and-white television I bought for the counter, Debbie’s short little lawyer leans casually against the wooden bar in front of the jury and goes on, real friendly and jovial, like they’re just having a get-to-know-you chat over a beer, about how her parents never loved her, and how her father touched her when she was a girl, and how the baby’s daddy left her soon as he found out she was pregnant, and how she was working double shifts at the Pancake Palace to keep Little Larry fed and clothed while the truckers harassed her and the ugly girls kept stealing h
er tips, as if any of that is some kind of explanation: as if any explanation, even an actual one, could make that boy one bit less dead.
“Wendell,” Frank yells. “My jug’s full.”
I get my little hammer from the back of the silverware drawer. The latches are so thin, and they fit so tight, I can’t pinch them good enough to pry them open by hand, have to tap the hook up from underneath with the hammer, real gentle so it doesn’t bend the thing and real quiet so Frank won’t hear, then grab it in the claw to yank it the rest of the way out. I leave the hammer propped between the molding and the wall, and pull up the dish towels I keep shoved into the crack at the bottom of the door. He never stops talking now, but the towels soften the edges of his words, blur them into one long smear so that, if you work hard at not listening, you can’t separate one from the next.
The smell hits me soon as I open the door, thick and smothering with excrement and urine and stale skin. After just a minute or two you get used to it, but every time you leave and come back, it’s as new and strong as if you’ve never smelled it before. Frank’s lying on his right side, facing the door, with the urinal tucked against him in the crook of his elbow. His toilet, a metal frame with a thick, padded seat hinged atop a white plastic bucket, sits right against the side of the bed, its back braced against the nightstand. Liquids in the urinal, solids in the toilet, that’s the rule. I took one of the arms off so he can drag himself onto it without having to turn around, and fastened all the feet to the floor with wood screws so he can’t tip the thing over. He’s left the lid open again, and he’s forgotten to screw the cap back on his jug.
I don’t look at him while I reach for it. If you look at him, if you make eye contact or acknowledge his presence in any way, he’ll start to talking. Instead I act real interested in the television I got us for in here, sitting silent—he keeps it muted all the time—on a folding tray at the foot of the bed, the defense attorney strutting back and forth across the glass bulge of the screen. I like to turn all the televisions to the same channel, so you can walk from one room to the other and see the same program continue unbroken. Makes the place almost seem to hold together.
“One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side,” Frank says, holding his jug up in toast, “and forthwith came there blood and water.” The liquid inside, such a dark gold it looks like maple syrup, sloshes around so bad a little spills across the brim and spatters the floor.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say. “You got blood in your urine?”
“And he that saw it bare record,” he says, “and his record is true.” He smiles, and his top teeth slide slowly down, pink plastic gums drawing away from the paler gums underneath. He cracked one of the clasps forcing them on, I know he did, and now every time he smiles or says more than two words, his top dentures drift downward. I can’t look at anything else for watching them, and I can barely pay attention to a word he’s saying. Which is one little blessing, I suppose.
He shuts his mouth, and his lower jaw knocks the top one back into place with a loud clack, but soon as he starts to talk again, it resumes its slow downward slide.
“My jug’s full,” he says.
I snatch it out of his hand. He’s holding it by the handle, of course, so I’ve got to grab it around the side and feel the sickly warmth of his urine radiate through the plastic.
“Then don’t let it get so full before you call me next time,” I say. I slam the toilet shut. “And close the lid when you use the commode. I don’t want your mess smelling up the bedroom all day long. The smell gets into the sheets.”
“I been calling you a little while,” he says.
“I mean don’t fill it all the way up. Leave a little room.”
“It’s been sitting there all day. Wasn’t nobody stopping you from taking it earlier.”
“You need to drink more water. Looks like maple syrup in here.”
At least he hasn’t had an accident. About that one thing, that one last thing, he’s real fastidious.
I take the jug to the bathroom and pour it into the toilet. It takes so long to empty, air bubbles squeezing in the opening, urine glugging out, that I have to rest against the sink. He’s already asleep again when I set the container on his nightstand. The thud of the plastic startles him.
“Just resting my eyes,” he says, and rears back in the pillow a little, as if seeing me here is just the most delightful surprise, his eyes bright and blank and huge in his gaunt face. The weight’s running off him again, faster than before it seems, lifting to the surface every cord in his neck and string of gristle on his arm once buried in muscle and fat, pushing them right up against the skin. Any further and they’d cut through. He looks like something children would see in their dreams and wake up crying. The pouch I sewed for him hangs over his side of the mattress, jammed full of fruitcakes. I haven’t had to restock it in days.
“Roll over,” I say.
He looks up at me, weary.
“When was the last time you did it?”
He shrugs.
“Then roll over.”
Every hour, before bedsores open him up, eat his thigh into some weeping cavity. They say every two hours, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ve seen the pictures on TV, in those nursing-home exposés. I pull his shoulder to get him started. He turns cumbersome onto his back, grabs the mattress, and struggles to lift himself sitting. The pillow that was between his knees I shove under his thighs. Keeps the pressure off his hips a little, the bones from boring their way through the skin. It astounds me, sometimes, how weak it is. I tug out the waistband of his pajama trousers and dust each hip with zinc powder. It cools the burns on my fingertips, red and raw, and still it feels like I don’t have any skin there at all. Every rustle of fabric, every brush of the breeze is agony. I thought so much twine had passed between my fingers that the calluses would never fade, but just a few years of ease and the skin goes right back to delicacy, as if that whole life of hard work hadn’t made a bit of difference, hadn’t left a single mark.
“What time is it?” he says, sitting forward suddenly, panicked.
“You’re not going to your mother’s.”
“We have to be there by eight,” he says. “She’s waiting on us.”
He tries to get up, but I push him back against the bed.
“She’s waiting,” he says, wriggling in vain. I could hold him down one-handed if I had to. “She’s waiting.” Tears fill his eyes. “I need to—”
“You’re not going anywhere.” I press him against the headboard until he stops squirming. Then I rip some paper towels from the roll on the nightstand and push them around the floor with my foot to wipe up his urine. I pull a fruitcake from his pouch.
“Here,” I say, tearing open the plastic. The cake’s heavy and damp and dense, feels like somebody’s dead arm. Condensation’s beaded like sweat on the inside of the wrapper. “Eat.”
He stares out the window. Clouds haul themselves crumbling over the treetops. The light doesn’t fall around them so much as hold itself absolutely still, tense, and try to endure their passing through it.
“Fix me up a chair on the porch, will you?” he says. “So I can watch the birds?”
The goldfinches are still winter’s dingy yellow-gray, but every day the sun burns down on them a little bit longer, and their feathers, like the leaves, draw in a bit more of its light. Soon they’ll be full of all the brightness they can bear, until their tiny bodies tremble and whir with it and they have to fly off north to more temperate climes and let it fade away.
I shake the fruitcake in front of his face. “Eat,” I say.
He turns his head away, as if the sight disgusts him.
“You don’t need to buy any more of those,” he says. “I’m tired of them.”
“I don’t care if you’re tired of them. You have to eat.”
“I don’t want it.”
“If you don’t want it, you have to tell me what you do want. What do you want?”
>
“Nothing,” he says, and jerks away from me.
“Eat.” I shove the fruitcake at his mouth. He keeps it clenched shut, just like I knew he would, and I smear it across his lips, trying to force in just a crumb, I smear it all over his cheek. I throw it in the toilet.
He stares at me in shock and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. I stop and straighten up, correct my posture and take myself some deep, cleansing breaths like the lifestyle gurus on TV say to do whenever your anger starts to spiral out of control and threaten your most cherished relationships. I unhook the handles of the plastic bag lining the toilet, tie them together, and set it on the hallway floor.
“Leave the door open,” Frank says. He reaches out and pats the empty air between us. His fingernails are long like a woman’s. “I can’t get it back open when you close it.”
I shake open another bag and fit it into the toilet.
“Please?” he says, a little quaver in his voice.
“You need to trim your nails.”
I close the door and latch it.
The grass is halfway up my shins already, the stars-of-Bethlehem lifting their purple-tinged heads, grown up all over his garden so you could never tell it had been anything but common, useless earth, and the pear trees are in bloom with that sweet, rotten odor that tricks even the flies, who swarm about their clusters of tiny white blossoms as if they were bodies burst open. The early-evening light sags, thick, too heavy and clogged with the mess it’s picked up in the sun’s slow drag across the sky to hold itself up any longer, a net thrown through the air to catch all the dust and dirt it can before falling down on us, every night, full of refuse.
Hide Page 21