Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “The party is Saturday night, in case you change your mind. I’d like you to change your mind.”

  He shook his head, drew a deep breath, the air around them heavy with the smell of scorched sheets. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  Nelson had deliveries to make by Friday: three tanks of helium for Pizza Palace, liquid hydrogen for the hospital, water bottles to the office park, concrete mix to some guy building a garage. Roxie was at home, fixing lunch. He sat in the truck, chewing one of the ginseng toothpicks Myra had given him to help him quit smoking. For all of his adult life he’d been delivering something to somebody. When Roxie was studying for her degree, she told him that a writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Make yourself necessary to somebody.” She told Nelson that’s what he did, with the delivery business he’d had since he was eighteen and bought his first pickup. Nelson liked the way Roxie could make what he did sound important and indispensable. He’d written the quote on a notecard and taped it to the visor next to his roadmap holder and looked at it now as he cranked the engine, pulling out down Taylor Avenue toward Mary Alice’s place.

  The house stood in the middle of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores. A small wire fence guarded the weedy yard, the broken walkway lined with cement blocks and headless, unpainted lawn ornaments of squirrels and deer. The brown asbestos shingles that covered the house were wrapped in a layer of kudzu, the tendrils of the vines stretching up the chimney and along the far wall. The house looked sunken, as if it had drawn back from all the commerce that surrounded it. Two Chihuahuas sat panting in a ring of dirt where the grass had worn away, the ring marking the length of the chains that tethered them to the dog house. Above them, dense as a thundercloud, was an oak tree, and in the middle and top branches were the darker green patches of mistletoe spotted with white berries. He tried to imagine what it would feel like, swallowing the berries, the slow wait as their poison wound through the bloodstream, snapping out nerves like light switches, shutting down the lungs, the heart. She’d found out about it from the suicide book she’d gotten from the Hemlock Society. The book had some lavish title meant to make killing yourself sound reasoned and noble. At her first party Myra told a variation of the old funeral parlor joke, saying that the Hemlock Society must not be a very good club, seeing how everyone was dying to get out. Her friends laughed like she’d said something cute.

  Why was it nothing mattered to anyone anymore?

  Without much thought, Nelson stepped up to Mary Alice’s rotted porch and knocked. Tacked to the doorframe was a recent notice to condemn. They were booting her out, finally, squeezing in another car wash or Taco Bell. Nelson knocked again. From inside came the faint sounds of shuffling and things knocked over. She was a mean old woman, he knew from the years delivering heating oil to her house. He’d ask about the mistletoe, she’d chase him from the yard, and that would end it; he would have his excuse for Myra. The latch on the door sounded. Through the window Mary Alice looked like a shrunken version of his memory of her, her hair fully white now and thinning, her apple-doll mouth puckered brown, her eyes a whitish blue.

  She swung the door open, looked at him through the dirty screen. “You here to see to those moles?”

  “Ma’am? No, I just wanted to ask you something.”

  “My daughter-in-law hates me,” Mary Alice said, her voice trailing to a mumble. As he leaned to hear her, Nelson noticed her smell, like creosote and attic trunks, and her feet, covered in men’s wingtip shoes bound with twine.

  “I bet she doesn’t hate you,” Nelson said. He didn’t know what else to say. “Do you know your oak tree is full of mistletoe?” Beneath thinning hair, her scalp was bright pink and spotted.

  “Just another parasite. That’s all there is anymore. Them moles, my daughter-in-law. The whole list.” A can of tuna fish sat open on the hall table behind her.

  “Looks like the county is on that list, too,” Nelson said. She squinted at him. “They mean to condemn your place and take it, ma’am.”

  She made a grunting noise. “Like to see that happen. See them try that again.”

  Nelson shrugged. “It’s not really a matter of trying. They just go on ahead.” He thumped the notice stapled to her doorframe. “What I wondered was if I could take some of that mistletoe out of your tree before they take it down with a bulldozer.”

  She frowned at him. “You get rid of those moles, you can take anything you want, except my dogs. They caught my asthma from me, you know.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not really here about your moles …” He stopped, not wanting to get into the whole thing again. She looked at him, blinking. He told her he would do what he could. As he climbed into his truck, he took another look at the clumps of mistletoe high in the tree. She pushed open the screen door to shout after him.

  “Don’t you put down any poison,” she said, her thin voice a wire stretched across the yard. “You’ll kill my dogs if you do.”

  “I’ve said it before, I think you should go,” Roxie said. She sat at her small desk, hands busy with changing the ribbon in her typewriter. Since her degree in English from the state college, she’d had a job writing captions for the Walter Drake household gift catalogue. So far this afternoon she had finished up descriptions of an electric callus remover and a bathtub safety seat. She was working on a sheepskin recliner cover when the ribbon went out.

  Nelson nodded, rubbed his face, finished his fried chicken. “She wants me to bring poison to the party.”

  “Poison?” Roxie looked at him.

  “Yeah, you know, the way other people bring beer.”

  “What poison?”

  Her told her about Myra’s request, about Mary Alice and the moles. She leaned her head on her typewriter, looking at him. “What are you going to do?”

  Nelson sighed. “I’m not going to kill my mother, Rox. Let her call what’s-his-name, that Dr. Death guy. Did he retire or something?”

  “In a way, though, it’s her last wish. It’s the last thing you could do for her. Giving her an easy death isn’t such a bad thing, Nelson.”

  “Don’t even start that.”

  She pulled her long braid across her shoulder, fingering it. “You talked to her doctors. You know what’s in store. It takes a long time, Nelson, and someday she won’t be able to chew. Won’t be able to talk or move or swallow.”

  Nelson held a bite of fried chicken in his mouth until the saliva pooling around it threatened to choke him.

  “At least go to her party,” Roxie said.

  “Her party.” Nelson shook his head. “You weren’t there for the first one. She went around telling everybody she’d rather have Babe Ruth’s disease, so she’d only have to deal with getting fat and drinking a lot.”

  Roxie smiled.

  “That’s not funny,” Nelson said.

  “Well, it isn’t and it is,” she said. “You can’t stop her from dying, honey.”

  That was the part he knew, that she would die, and that all she wanted with the mistletoe berries or the Hemlock Society or the books she read was a way to speed things up and make it happen sooner. But it was just wrong, somehow. He saw this early on in his business, when he first had the truck, how he tried to impress everybody by making deliveries early, but only messed everybody up. They couldn’t put the carpet down until the floors were finished, or had no place to stack bottles until the steel shelving was up. He learned to wait until it was time. Maybe tragedy had its own time, its own schedule, and to hurry it up would do nothing but compound it. Maybe something wasn’t ready, maybe Myra herself, or some eleventh-hour cure some doctor might happen upon, or maybe…something. As for God, heaven, souls…it was hard for him to think of it, and Myra had given all that up when Nelson’s father died, as though she had worn out her faith or just let it go. He looked at Roxie, her hands striped with ink from the new ribbon.

  “I don’t know about any of this,” he said.

  “You don’t have to decide right away,�
�� she said. She wiped her hands on crumbled-up paper and turned back to her work. She typed, then stopped. “How does this sound? ‘Relax in durable comfort.’”

  Nelson shook his head. “Can’t imagine that there is such a thing.”

  That night, his hand resting on the curve of Roxie’s hip as she slept beside him, Nelson slipped into half dreams of walking, he and his father, in the bone cold of winter that came to the Ozarks after an eye blink of autumn. Early December, his father crunching through drifts in stiff rubber boots to a field behind Singleton’s Tire Shop, where a forty-foot oak threw gnarled shadows across Davidson Street. His father smoked a cheap, sweet-smelling cigar and carried a shotgun crooked under his arm. Other men gathered there, smoking, drinking from Thermoses or Dixie cups. One at a time they loaded paper shells into their guns, took sloppy aim, and fired into the upper branches of the oak. Early morning or early evening, he couldn’t remember, the sky marbled, sparse cars slipping on the road behind them. With no word the next took aim at the tree and fired, then came the nudge of his daddy’s thumb against his shoulder and Nelson ran to gather the clumps of mistletoe that had fallen, separating them from the broken branches cut through white and brittle, flecked with shotgun pellets. He stuffed the green leaves and white berries into grocery sacks, and at home his mother and the other men’s wives would wire together small bundles tied off with red ribbon and slipped into plastic sandwich bags. A dollar each, sold in the grocery store and the card store, or by Nelson door to door. They did this every Christmas.

  Once, while he was gathering bundles, one of the men raised his gun and fired without waiting for Nelson to retreat back to their group. All the other men shouted, some of them laughing, the pellets falling like finger thumps along the top of Nelson’s skull. He pressed back against the tree trunk and watched his father grab the gun barrel and twist it upward. Above him a few stray pellets tapped like rain through the tree branches, and as Nelson listened he felt only a kind of assurance. He was nine years old. He would grow up. He would be an adult with a life as full and troubled and real as his father’s or his father’s friends. He would have a wife someday, kids (he’d been wrong on that part), his life would continue on and was not about to be ended by some shotgun accident notable mainly for its stupidity. It wouldn’t happen that way. Now, at forty-nine, lying in the dark beside Roxie, what did his life have left in the way of assurances? A job that never changed, a woman who needed him only in ways. None like he had at nine, knowing that no threat could touch him, and none like those he carried into adulthood, the belief that someone, somewhere, would find you and love you completely, that your life would turn out to be something rather than just things. He lifted his fingers from under the sheet and toward the darkened ceiling. What thing might be left to hold in your hands? What might be left to know?

  The next morning, while he picked up a load of peat moss at Scott Seed, he asked the man working there about the best way to get rid of moles.

  “Mothballs,” the man said. He rubbed a cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe. “Shove them down the tunnels and wait.”

  Nelson shook his head. “No poison. Dogs might dig it up.”

  The man scratched his head, looked at his cold cigarette butt. “Flooding them out can work, kind of a Noah’s Ark trick. Or this.” He walked over to a display and lifted a pair of bright plastic daisies, pinwheels made to spin on wire posts. “You stick ‘em in the ground and the wind makes them turn. Supposed to drive the moles crazy. Doesn’t look to me like it’d work worth a damn. Some things are just hard to kill.”

  Nelson nodded, picked up one of the daisies, and turned it with his finger. The salesman left for a minute then returned, handed Nelson a plastic-wrapped package.

  “Here’s the latest thing,” he said. “Snake.” He opened the package and unfurled a six-foot section of vinyl, one end with a plastic valve like a beach ball. The snake was brown and gold, patterned to look like a copperhead. The salesman blew, red-faced, inflating the snake to a puffy S.

  He closed the valve and handed the snake to Nelson. “If we can’t drive them crazy, we’ll give them heart attacks.”

  Nelson turned it over in his hands. It smelled like a shower curtain. “This works?”

  “I don’t know if it works. Snakes are natural enemies of most rodents, most birds. Couldn’t hurt, I figure.”

  Nelson left the store with half a dozen of the daisies and the snake, the air let out of it. He drove to Mary Alice’s house, placed the windmills around the weedy yard, and with loops of baling wire from the truck anchored the snake to the packed dirt beneath the tree. With every other step the earth caved in and he fell ankle deep into the mole tunnels. He finished his work, looked at the strange sproutings around him, the bright, over-large flowers motionless without a breeze. The Chihuahuas edged up to the snake and sniffed it, ran in a circle then sniffed some more.

  “You mutts better watch out,” he said to them. “You’re dealing with a natural enemy.” He edged under the oak and looked up at the dark patches of mistletoe, the tiny white berries. His hand smoothed along the trunk and slid up the first branch. He gripped it, pulled until his arms began to shake. It had been too long since he’d tried to climb trees. But he could get it. One way or another he could bring the mistletoe down and hold it in his hands and carry with him all its poison and promise of quick death. A parasite, feeding off the fear of a disease named for some long-dead baseball player. The whole thing was strange, this chain of connections that wound somehow around and through Nelson. He looked up, tossed a rock at the mistletoe, watched it bounce in the parking lot of the car wash next door. What he would give Myra for her party, he decided, was the refusal to help her die. To hold in his hands the leaves and white berries and to not give it, make a show of not giving it, of not poisoning her, of not letting her take herself from this life.

  He stepped onto the porch and knocked on the door.

  “Ma’am?” he shouted through the door. “I think I took care of your moles.” He bent to peer inside. “Mary Alice?” He saw only her shadow moving along the kitchen wall, sliding up it dark and liquid, heard the squeak and bang of kitchen cabinets, the rasp of her shuffle, the thin clang of stove pans.

  After lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and descriptions of a vacuum extender and a full-page magnifier, he drove to the Laundromat. There he found Myra sitting in a plastic chair next to a magazine rack and crying. Around her scattered everywhere on the floor were dimes and quarters, change for the machines which she’d spilled from her apron pocket. Nelson bent to help pick them up, along with a woman in a sweatsuit and gold bracelets, and Earl, the small boy with the doll. Earl kept filling his hands, dumping the money back into Myra’s apron.

  “Look at these,” Myra said to Nelson, flexing her hands. “Just useless.” They quivered as she tried to bunch them into fists. Her short hair shifted color in the light. Nelson found the last of her dimes and gave it to Earl. The Laundromat was decorated for tomorrow’s party, which she had decided to have there instead of her tiny apartment. This had always been more her home anyway, she said. The walls rippled with hanging strips of crepe paper, the ceiling fans with plastic champagne glasses suspended from fish line. Along the back wall a large banner read BON VOYAGEin bright red letters surrounded by drawings of confetti and noise makers. Two of Myra’s friends stood on step ladders, hanging a poster: 25 REASONS TO EMBRACE YOUR JOY OF BLESSING. They smiled at each other as they worked, spoke in quiet voices under the hum of washers and dryers. Reason six was, “The Earth Is Your Path to Expanding Illumination.”

  Myra kept quietly crying, hands held in her lap as if someone had dropped them there. Nelson knelt and took her hands in his. Earl stood beside her chair, patting her on the shoulder.

  “Do you see now that you have to let the doctors help you?” Nelson said. “They have medicine to make you feel better. The interferon treatment. They said they can stabilize the disease.”

  She shook her head. “Ju
st listen to yourself, Nelson. Stabilize my disease. My dis-ease. No thanks.” She stood, wiped her face, smoothed her slacks out along her thighs, jingled the coins in her apron. She looked around at the decorations. “Are you coming to my party tomorrow?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Her face, suddenly alive, turned up at him. “And my mistletoe?”

  “Are you really going to use that, when the time comes?” This was their phrase, the way they had of talking around it. At first, Myra had always referred to it as her “rebirth,” and made jokes about becoming a born again, or about coming back as one of her own double-load machines. Finally Nelson had asked her to stop making jokes.

  “My midwife thinks it’s a good choice. We’re still negotiating this. I don’t want any method that anyone is going to have to clean up.”

  “For godsakes, Myra.” Nelson shook his head, looked away from her. The women were hanging a big photo of a sunset beside the 25 Reasons poster. Reason seventeen was, “You Are the Master of Your Own Ascension.”

  “Get me the mistletoe, Nelson, and maybe I won’t strike you from the will.” She put her hand on the back of his wrist, tiny tremors carried inside her fingers. “It would mean something to me. I don’t plan on falling into a lot of weepy sentiment about this. I don’t have the energy, or the time. But you should know, it will mean something to me.”

  “You want my blessing. You want me to just let you take yourself out when you might have years left. When you could be stabilized.” Behind the Coke machine was a small door to the basement incinerator, long unused. He saw himself opening the door, tossing the clump of mistletoe down the dark chute as the women stood watching him, silent, champagne glasses in their hands. He felt for a moment the weight of meanness in what he would do, along with the twin weight of seriousness. Let them know that death is not a party, that loss is not an occasion for fun, that the heft of life could not be contained in some goddamn feel-good poster. He was doing them all a favor.