Don't You Ever

by Mary Carter Bishop

  * * *

  BACK AT THE hospital, I’d encouraged his talk of us traveling together up in the mountains. Now, when he proposed doing just that, I froze and didn’t say anything. I felt ungenerous, but the thought of being stuck alone with him in the wilderness filled me with dread. I felt I should be trying to help my brother have whatever fun he could, but he was a burden. Now I doubted I’d ever write about him. I’d have to confess to all this, and I was too ashamed.

  He saved me from the mountain camping trips because in late July, after he’d been home two months, Ronnie began to smile again. He’d just reopened the barbershop.

  16

  Losses, Gains, Losses

  The last driver’s license photo taken of Ronnie, a few weeks before his death.

  With late summer’s undulating cicada buzz screeching in our ears, Ronnie, Max, and I returned to something like our usual lives. Each of us basked in our reclaimed freedoms. Once again, unrealistically and for my own selfish reasons, I fantasized that Ronnie was going to be all right.

  He was in the best spirits I’d ever seen when I took a New York friend by the shop to meet him. For a kid’s buzz cut, Ronnie covered the top of the boy’s head with his hand and twisted it as surely as the lid on a pickle jar brimming with juice. My friend ran a Southern-flavored club in Chelsea. Ronnie was captivated by stories of Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen dropping by to see new acts. Ronnie’d always wanted to see Manhattan. He’d heard there was a store there with an entire floor of candy.

  On August 27, a Monday, Ronnie was turning fifty-five. Max and I excitedly cooked up plans for a surprise party. I had to be in Richmond for a story that day, so we’d have the party the next day. That way, Ronnie would be even more surprised. I’d get the cake; Max, the ice cream. I invited Thelma, who lived across the valley, and six other members of the Booth family from neighboring houses along Halliahurst Avenue.

  Tuesday morning, I bought the cake, birthday plates, and napkins. I called Max but got no answer. She must be out buying the ice cream. Ronnie, unaware of the party, asked me to pick him up at the barbershop at five o’clock to try out a new pizza place as a birthday celebration. Midafternoon, I went by Max’s. No answer at the door. I was sleepy from long workdays, so I curled up on the porch in a yellow secondhand recliner Max bought for Ronnie while he was in the hospital. Her car was in the driveway. She must be down the street.

  Alpha, Max’s cousin next door, had been trying for hours to reach Max. She’d called Thelma, who didn’t know where she was. Alpha brought a house key and disappeared inside. In a bit, she called down, alarmed. “Mary, come here! Quick!” Max, in a blue nightgown and nylon sleeping cap, was on her stomach in bed, her face mashed into her pillow. Her right foot was turning blue. I clapped my hands and shouted, “Max! Max!” No response.

  Alpha dialed the rescue squad. We decided not to turn Max over. The next twenty minutes were a blur of medics, a gurney, family members, phone calls. That sinking body lacked every measure of the girlish, joyful Max. She was dead, of a stroke.

  At the barbershop, Ronnie was in his barber’s chair reading one of his wrecked-car magazines. Days before, he’d been dreaming of us driving together to South Dakota to buy him one of those hot deals out in the Badlands. I was supposed to ride shotgun. I stepped in the door and sat down. “Slim, I got some bad news.” He looked up and waited. He wasn’t expecting anything this bad, but I went on, “Max is dead.”

  We sat nearly three hours as he absorbed it. “Well,” he finally said, solemnly, “I probably just lost the best friend I ever had.” She’d even offered to pay for his pituitary surgery. When he went home that night, he found clues that she’d tried to start her day. A cereal bowl he’d left in the sink before heading to work had been washed. The toilet seat upstairs was down. He thought she must have felt bad, so she crawled back into bed.

  We went together to the night-before-the-funeral visitation at a Vinton funeral home. Then we sat on the porch at Max’s and talked about her. Four months earlier, after the Vinton medics raced Ronnie to the hospital, Max sent them a note of thanks and a hundred-dollar donation. I recalled her remorse when she accidentally stepped on an ant. I’d known Max only a few months, and I missed her already.

  She’d told Ronnie many times that she’d named him as the beneficiary of a $100,000 life insurance policy and that her will would state that he could live out his days in her house. We went together to her funeral. He sent a dozen red roses, her favorites. He wore his best shirt and tie, and because it was a hot August day, he carried his classiest sport coat, a tan suede, on his arm.

  That September, between out-of-town newspaper assignments, I dropped by the shop. He rehashed friends’ promises of long ago, and not just Max’s. A customer had vowed to bequeath his Land Rover to Ronnie, who loved to fancy himself a dude with money and a jazzy car. I figured these promises were mere mentions that grew in Ronnie’s imagination and were quickly forgotten by the speakers. But Ronnie was counting on these pledges. They gave him things to look forward to.

  Thelma was already saying Max had left no will, so the lifetime home was out, though he could stay indefinitely. Ronnie was still counting on the life insurance. He said Max had taken out a policy for the same amount for Thelma. He’d seen the paperwork for his policy, with his name and Social Security number on it.

  But where would he live? Max’s survivors would eventually sell the house. They had comfortable homes already and were too old to move. How could this sick man, this resister of change, so burdened with medical debts, cope with the nineties economy? Other than modest bills incurred at his barbershop, he hadn’t paid rent or utilities for years, and back when he rented his rooms, they were only ten bucks a week. Even in low-cost Vinton, the tiniest studio apartment would go for at least $300 a month. Ronnie insisted he couldn’t afford that.

  He was nervous in the house at night. He’d heard something one evening just before I called. He poked a loaded shotgun out the front door. Young kids were carrying on in the street. Alpha’s daughter, next door, kept bringing home-cooked meals over and letting herself in with a key. Ronnie’s anxiety and stockpile of weapons led me to imagine tragic scenarios.

  Soon Ronnie hinted he wanted to move in with me. He said it twice. If the Booths tossed him out, he’d come knocking on my door and ask to rent my attic room. I tried to imagine my quiet, solitary house, my sanctuary from work and stress—my refuge from Ronnie—with him living in it. He’d be thundering around upstairs. We’d be sharing my one and only bathroom. I’d just hosted a Dutch journalist for five days while he was working in our part of Virginia. Even that guy violated my sense of peace and retreat, and he was low-key and undemanding. I didn’t respond to Ronnie. I did say that I’d help him find an apartment and that I’d help him pay for it.

  I’d won a fellowship for eugenics research at a Charlottesville humanities center for the following spring semester. If Ronnie moved into my house, I wouldn’t be there to look after him. Could I count on him to make the right judgments on sick cats, nosy neighbors, and home maintenance? I’d planned to come home on weekends to decompress. With Ronnie there, he’d command those days, and it wouldn’t be my house anymore. Mom said it would kill her if he moved in. She’d feel as though she’d ruined my life. “Mary Carter, don’t let him do it.” I heard agitation, fear, and regret in her voice. Her first kid had been nothing but trouble, and now he was threatening her favorite one.

  * * *

  EARLY THAT OCTOBER, while I was at work, Ronnie drove himself to a checkup with Will Truslow, the young doctor who’d made the house call over the summer. Ronnie’s blood pressure was 240/150. Will wanted to put him in the hospital. Ronnie refused, so nurses fed him pills all afternoon to get the pressure down before letting him return to his shop. Will called to let me know.

  I rushed to the barbershop. Ronnie was reading another issue of Wheels and Deals and obsessing about the money coming his way. Any fixation like this would consume his eve
ry waking hour. What was taking so long with his goddamned windfall? He rolled up the car magazine and angrily whapped it on his leg, then the barber chair, then the palm of his other hand. Whap! Whap! Whap!

  His latest idea was to buy a trailer near Vinton. Thank God he’d decided my house was too far a drive from the barbershop. When I’d see him that fall, he’d be lighthearted sometimes, morose others. When I was home from trips out of town, I’d go over and describe my experiences, such as a visit to New York to see that Chelsea nightclub. Ronnie tried to comprehend New York as I talked about the skyscrapers and the fact that even at three o’clock in the morning, the low muffled roar of trucks, trains, planes, and heating systems never ceased. When Ronnie took on something beyond his imagining, the skin crawled slowly over his giant frowning brow. He was one man whose thinking was actually visible.

  I dropped by the house another time after work in late October. His cars were out back, so I thought he must be home. He didn’t come to the door. I went to a house down the street and called. No answer. I got nervous. It was looking like a replay of the day Max died, so I ran for Alpha and the house key. Just as she was unlocking the door, Ronnie appeared and let us in.

  Nighttime temperatures were at freezing, but Ronnie hadn’t turned on the furnace—because Thelma hadn’t called to give him permission. He was running two kerosene heaters and contemplating a third. Alpha and I warned him about the dangers of that and urged him to turn on the central heat. Surely Thelma assumed he would. She wouldn’t think it necessary to tell him. He didn’t even feel entitled to warmth.

  I rode with him in his Ramcharger for a takeout fish dinner. From the back seat I watched him crawl through the passenger door, get settled behind the wheel, and drag his bad right leg, about four feet long, across the front seat. It was easier for him to get in the car that way.

  He returned a hunting film to a video store and laughed at how the young guy there was always pitching what Ronnie called screw movies. Ronnie wasn’t interested in sex anymore. He thought it was due to his age. The acromegaly literature listed loss of libido as one of the most common symptoms.

  Parked in back of the house as he gobbled his flounder and french fries, Ronnie told me he was keeping the barbershop open later. He was putting in extra hours to pay his medical bills. He belched loudly and guzzled a bottle of Mylanta between bites of fish. He pulled on his nostrils. He cracked his knuckles, first finger by finger, then all his fingers bent back in a chorus of popping joints. Acromegaly caused every one of those behaviors.

  Mom and Daddy were coming for Thanksgiving lunch and wanted to see him too. No, he said. Once again, he mentioned burning down the big house at Bridlespur, and once again, I said it would break my heart.

  * * *

  HE WAS IN surprisingly good spirits when I’d go by the barbershop that fall. I’d listen to his colorful language—cars were “chines,” pronounced “sheens.” I wished like hell I could record him, but he wouldn’t allow it. What a writer Ronnie might have been. His language was blunt, economical, Dashiell Hammett–like. No waste, no fat from those fat lips.

  At Thanksgiving, I told Mom I wished she’d apologize to Ronnie. “Apologize for what?” she snarled. “Just tell him you’re sorry his life turned out to be so hard.” She rolled her eyes. She had always had trouble with apologies. I’d never heard her deliver a sincere one to me or to anybody, even when she was clearly in the wrong. Instead, she’d spit out, “Well, I’m sorry,” in an angry, defensive tone. That would hurt Ronnie all the more. After my folks left, I drove over. He was on the porch speaking again of suicide.

  Thelma had just told him that Max had changed her beneficiaries a few days before her death. Max’s brother would receive the insurance money earmarked for Ronnie. Years later, Thelma’s boyfriend, a trustworthy source in my newspaper work, confirmed that after Ronnie cursed Max that summer, Max had indeed taken his name off the policy. It was probably when he cursed her because she couldn’t pull those support hose over his big feet.

  I drove Ronnie around the valley, along the Roanoke River, and all around, trying to get his mind off his disappointments. He was lower than ever, and when he was low, he was hateful. As we rode through a park, he said he used to walk there until “the coons” started dealing drugs there. I dropped him off at his house just before bedtime. “I’ll sit here ’til you get inside. In case somebody pops you in the head.”

  “Naw,” he said wearily, wrestling his long legs out the car door. “Nobody’s gonna get me. Nobody wants me.” Of all the painful things he ever said, that is the one that replays in my head all these years since. Nobody did want Ronnie. I was trying to. But it was hard.

  * * *

  FOR WEEKS HE brooded over what he saw as Max’s betrayal. She could have at least left him one of her little rental houses. Her reneging on her promise, he told me, made him understand why people kill in anger. “Like maybe the criminal isn’t so bad after all.”

  I invited him out to see Dances with Wolves. Western history, American Indians, settlers—of all the movies from that era, this was the one for him. No, he needed to go home and keep the water pipes from freezing. “Or they’ll kick my ass out.”

  * * *

  SOON MY FOLKS were near Vinton for a cousin’s funeral. After, they went by the shop to invite Ronnie to lunch. The shop door was locked. Ronnie usually latched it at lunchtime, even if he remained inside. Through the plate glass of the door and in the mirror behind Ronnie, they watched him in the barber chair, holding up a newspaper that shielded his face from theirs. “Ronnie? Ronnie!” Mom called out. “Please, Ronnie. We just want to see you.” She tapped her lipstick tube on the glass. He never lowered the paper. They gave up and drove away.

  * * *

  THAT CHRISTMAS OF 1990, Ronnie had rarely been so gloomy. He was belching furiously. He cursed everybody. He rammed his finger into a waxy ear and lamented to me the long list of wrongs committed against him. He smelled as if he hadn’t showered in many days. I now linked our common odor to our sad, sour mother.

  He was angriest with doctors. An anesthesiologist had sent a bill for $800. “Right at Christmas,” Ronnie said indignantly. His doctors were hanging out in their fine offices over there in Roanoke, chortling over how they were fleecing poor old Ronnie Overstreet. He was even mad at the women who ran the home-cooking place around the corner from his shop that had been his lunch place for decades. He was sure it was their fried chow that upset his gut. The female cooks and waitresses were trying to distract him from their greasy food with their tight pants and “big titties.”

  Why did I keep thinking I was going to make Ronnie a cheerful, unwounded, trusting soul? I couldn’t do that if I quit my job, emptied my savings, and devoted the rest of my life to it. I was too late. I was dealing with a rupture more than a half century old and with an illness whose head-to-toe disruptions hurt him thoroughly and confounded his simple understanding of the body’s workings. I wanted to ask if I could write about him eventually, but I knew he would turn the idea over in his mind a thousand times, and it would just be another stressor. Did I have the right to tell his story? I’m still not sure.

  * * *

  THAT CHRISTMAS, PEOPLE were fixated by my stories about a baby found barely alive in a dumpster near downtown Roanoke. On December 19, an unemployed construction worker digging for aluminum cans heard what he thought was a sick cat or a crying doll. He upended a plastic garbage bag and out slid a cardboard box containing a fully developed newborn boy, six pounds, eight ounces, wrapped in a yellow-flowered blanket.

  The baby suffered cardiovascular collapse and brain damage from exposure to overnight temperatures in the forties. Named Isaiah by intensive care nurses, he died on Christmas Eve. Four hundred strangers flocked to his little casket and surrounded his tiny body with stuffed animals. When I wasn’t writing about Isaiah, I was watching Ronnie descend into a deep darkness.

  * * *

  FOR CHRISTMAS I got him a hunting book and a video-sto
re gift certificate. Through me, Mom sent thirty dollars in cash. He gave me two twenty-dollar bills in an envelope on which he touchingly wrote “Pie.” He had little to say. I’d take him on drives, but he remained hopeless. He didn’t say it, but his disappointment with Max must have felt like the many times Mom let him down. He was burping and swigging antacid.

  By New Year’s, I wondered if he was passing blood or if his eyesight might be fading because he was paler, more lumbering. He said only that he was tired. In the final stages of acromegaly, muscle weakness and congestive heart failure are common. Hunched over, with his head hung low as he perched on his stool, his arms draped over the empty barber chair, he resembled a vulture. When I heard Ronnie, ever the diplomat as a barber, snarling at longtime customers, I knew for sure that he’d given up.

  He refused to see Will Truslow for checkups. Behind the scenes, Will was rushing to arrange free surgery for Ronnie. An endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was offering a free operation. NIH would pay for Ronnie’s travel. I laid it out, but Ronnie said no way. I offered to drive him to Bethesda for a consult. “Don’t you think you ought to at least see about this?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, as he sat forlornly in his shop, staring out the window at the street scene. “And I ought to be president of that bank over there, and I ought to have a home and a loving wife, and I ought to have gotten my inheritance from Max.”

  * * *

  IN MID-JANUARY, MY cat Rural Earl was hit by a car in front of my house. For days I rushed home each lunch break to syringe liquid food through a stomach tube in his neck. Earl, in pain from a broken jaw, growled at me as I helped him. I was getting nothing but flak from the two crotchety males in my life.

  The NIH doctor called me with details. Ronnie would receive $100,000 worth of free treatment—exactly the amount, oddly, he’d counted on from Max. Then he’d follow a strict regimen: Every day for six weeks he’d drive himself to radiation at a Roanoke medical office. And for five years, he’d inject himself with hormones three or four times a day. I didn’t tell Ronnie any of the postoperative stuff. It was a deal breaker. I couldn’t imagine him trusting doctors enough, or caring about himself enough, to do any of that.