Corpus Christi

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For not gunning for treatment. I appreciate it.”

  Another slow, defeated nod as he turned to peer out the sliding glass doors to the deck. Already she felt herself acclimating to this last experience of her life, succumbing, like someone who after days of treading water finally goes under without surprise or regret. Again she thought of Lee’s talent show, pictured him alone on stage making her scarves disappear, then for the grand finale, bringing them back.

  After another cigarette, she said, “I’ve got more news.”

  “Okay,” he said, guardedly.

  “I won the Hawaii trip.”

  What else could he have said: “I’m sorry.”

  AFTER HIS MOTHER DRIFTED TO SLEEP, LEE WENT through the house turning off lights. He felt as if he’d duped her. Perhaps a shred of that feeling stemmed from not telling her, but most of the guilt seethed in a less identifiable place. He realized he’d had more hope than he’d admitted; he realized this because now it was gone.

  When he returned to the den, she was still asleep in the recliner. The glow of the television illuminated the room. Pictures of himself lined the walls, photos that seemed disconnected from him now, boys he’d never known. Hanging slightly askew among them was the Avon plaque. He almost reached to straighten it, but just then he was loath to disturb anything she’d touched; those chores would come. He watched her sleep, and her every breath seemed a sheaf of life itself. He wondered if would feel anything when she passed, some alarm or rupture or seizing up in his body. Your mother has died, he thought—even allowed the words to take shape in his mouth, tasting how they would hollow and shamefully exhilarate him. He thought of Moira Jarrett, imagined how over the next months he would lose the wherewithal to rebuke himself and would surrender to the whim of her memory without apology. He imagined wrapping the Avon plaque in a towel, packing it with the pictures. What else would he keep, what would get sold? Despite himself, he would start assessing her effects this way, categorizing them in terms of Sell, Donate, Trash. At breakfast tomorrow he would appraise the table and chairs, the dishes and cutlery, her robe, slippers and rings. And what would he find that he’d not known about? Love letters from his father, a diary? A childhood drawing he’d made for her, newspaper clippings about his graduations and meager achievements? Or would other, more innocuous things crush him? Half-finished crossword puzzles or a stash of chocolate, a postcard he’d sent her or a cut-out recipe. He began wondering what she had kept from him because now it seemed he’d kept everything from her.

  MINNIE HADN’T SEEN OR SPOKEN TO DR. WOOD. Still, she knew the news as surely as if she’d sat in the doctor’s office and studied the test results herself. For days she’d bided her time, considered how to approach Lee. She thought the strategy she had finally chosen would prove less taxing, less painful for both of them. Get it over with, pull the bandage off quick.

  She pieced together how he had come to know of the metastasis, but had she not suspected it already, she would not have recognized its clues. She had sensed the presence in her body just as a young mother can sense her child long before learning she’s pregnant. She regretted Lee’s dwelling on the news alone, and anger welled inside her—maybe where hope had been—toward herself and toward the new doctor who must have disclosed the information. She considered calling his superior, thought of suing the hospital, a lawsuit that would outlive her but one that might yield good money for Lee. Swiftly, though, the idea lost air. She realized Rama might make a fine doctor, one who only wanted his patients to get the care they needed. In time she would forgive herself, too, or at least forget what she’d ever thought she’d done wrong.

  And she reaccustomed herself to the idea of dying. Her remission had lasted almost five months, and she regarded the time as a vacation, as a brief though pleasurable stint on an island. But now she found herself home again, returned to a familiar routine. Fear returned too, of course, and moments came when it hammered her, struck so hard that she felt nothing else and had to sit to save herself from falling. But fear had come with the remission as well—who would understand this?—the terror of relapse, and a different terror, of living another twenty years, another thirty. Lee stayed on. She unpacked the box she’d intended to have waiting in Missouri; she gave him the contents one by one, when she remembered. If she knew he was away, picking up a prescription or grabbing dinner when neither of them felt like cooking, she let herself cry. She wept for all she had lost, all she had taken and would take from her son, and for all she would lose before, at last, she herself was relieved.

  Before drifting off on the night she had confronted Lee, Minnie said, “I’ll keep working as long as I can. The money helps.”

  He nodded, though probably he suspected she would start staying home more, as she did.

  “Who knows,” she said, “maybe we’ll make it to Hawaii after all. Or somewhere else. I’d like to get out of Texas for a while.”

  “Sure. Anywhere you want.”

  “That’s our next project, a much-needed vacation. We’ll keep our chins up. This doesn’t have to mean the end of the world.”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t have to mean that at all.”

  She could have said more, but a comfortable silence settled over them and Minnie closed her eyes. There would be time to talk tomorrow and the next day and the next. For the moment, she liked the quiet and felt neither scared nor in pain; she was just tired, and only wanted Lee to sit with her as she went to sleep. Really, as with us all, that was all she’d ever wanted, someone to watch over her, someone who would lie and tell her not to be afraid, someone who would always, always say, Don’t worry, I’m here.

  In the Tall Grass

  MY FATHER IS REMOVING HIS RINGS. WE ARE outside of Corpus Christi, Texas, on a ranch owned by a man named Edwin Butler. A busted gate hangs open behind us, and the odor of mud and horses seeps into the cab of our small truck. This is 1979, a year when my mother’s spirits remained low and I was fourteen and my father wore three rings. He has not been arrested yet, and while that comes soon enough, he is already gone from me, as distant as the ice-blue snow of my dreams.

  George Kelley, my father, had slender hands; on another man, his trimmed nails and long fingers might have been good for playing the piano. He worked at the Naval Air Station, building ship engines, and although most men in his shop were enlisted, his was a civilian job that he’d lucked into after serving in the Coast Guard down in Mississippi, where he was born. My father left for work early, when our floors were cold and the house and morning were without light. Often the sounds of his getting up woke me too, though I soon slipped back to sleep, after hearing him shave and dress and say “I love you” to my mother.

  They’d met in 1964. My mother was waitressing at the Esquire Club, where my father enjoyed eating dinner and playing cards. Her name was Price then, Marie Price, because she was waiting for a man in Boston to sign annulment papers— his name was also George. My father was twenty-five, himself divorced from a woman in Mississippi; my mother was nineteen. Within a month she’d moved into his apartment, and a year later a judge married them and they honeymooned in Mexico. A black-and-white photo someone had taken of her hung on their bedroom wall, my mother wading in the Gulf, looking young and delicate and happy.

  But my mother also suffered from depression and often refused to leave her room for days at a time. She took pills to raise her mood, but sometimes those failed and my father called her boss and she stayed in bed. Occasionally, my parents spoke of an operation, a hysterectomy, which a doctor had suggested, but they distrusted that procedure and talked of it only, I thought, to reassure themselves that they agreed about not having it. During these days my mother lived on Cokes and cigarettes and chocolate, and she liked me to sit beside her and talk. The lights in her room remained off, and always before I entered, I knocked to warn her, to allow her time to compose herself or cover her head with the pillow.r />
  We discussed programs she’d watched on television. Or my days at school. Or she examined me in the dim light and noted how I had my father’s posture but her skin and eyes, attributes that girls would eventually find beautiful. Sometimes I answered questions she’d thought up earlier in the day. How did I picture myself in ten years? Twenty? Had I kissed girls? Had I drunk alcohol or smoked cigarettes? Usually I spoke honestly, but sometimes I embellished or contrived answers to make her smile or, with luck, laugh.

  In the spring of 1979 my father was a shift supervisor, and wore ties and slacks instead of coveralls. My mother worked at the high school I would attend that fall; she was the principal’s secretary. The previous year someone from my father’s shop had given us two horses because he needed space on his property and didn’t want to hassle with selling them. My father had handled horses before and knew my mother had enjoyed riding lessons as a girl, so he arranged two stalls at Edwin Butler’s ranch and drove four hours south to Mexico for cheap blankets and saddles.

  My mother’s horse was named Lady, a black thorough-bred, fourteen hands high, and too big for her to ride with any control. On her back, my mother looked like a child. Mine was a brown-and-white gelding that I named Colonel because of a white star on his shoulder. He’d won trophies for running barrels in the past and that excited me because I longed for a trophy then and lacked any skills to earn one.

  Because my father arrived at the naval base early, most afternoons he left in time to pick me up at school and drive to the stables. We usually arrived earlier than the other owners, and sometimes in those hours before my mother met us there or before Edwin Butler unlocked the steel gate to give trucks access to the stable area, my father saddled Lady and we rode together. Horses responded to my father, obeyed his commands in ways they didn’t for other men. Although his belly rolled over his belt, my father could swing himself onto a horse in a single swift, graceful motion. He rode fast and hard. When he dug his heels into Lady’s sides and hollered for her to come on, she exploded into a run so loud and strong and gorgeous that it made you gasp. Leaning close to her mane, he held the reins with one hand and clapped her backside with the other; they were nothing but run. Colonel struggled to follow, but Lady’s legs powered ahead until we fell back and could only listen to them ride.

  It was on a day when I hoped we might ride together that trouble came about. We had not ridden much that week; a storm in the Gulf had soaked Butler’s corral. And my mother’s spirits had been low—her mood usually suffered in bad weather. Men from my father’s shop were being laid off, friends of his who had worked there longer than he had, and he’d been taking overtime, having me catch the bus from school. So it surprised me to see him that afternoon, parked outside in his little Toyota truck. But I liked finding him there, and remember thinking he looked pleased.

  “Was today a good day?” he asked as I ducked into the cab. He wore a lavender tie and gray slacks and musky cologne. His boots were shined, though I don’t know if I noticed that in the truck or later. His lunch box sat on the floorboard, a thermos rattling as the engine idled. My father smiled. He was growing a beard. “Are you smarter than you were yesterday?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It was okay.”

  “And math? How was that old bear?”

  Math had given me trouble that year, and every evening after returning from the stables, my father worked equations with me, hoping I wouldn’t have to repeat the course in the fall. “Better,” I said. “We review on Fridays.”

  “Say, Benny, did I ever tell you what my favorite math problem was when I was in grade school?” We were waiting to exit the parking lot and he was watching traffic, staring away from me. “Seven times seven,” he said, accelerating onto the street. “I remembered that today. It’s a strange thing to recall, I guess. Maybe I liked the symmetry of it.”

  And although he was talking in an unusual way, using too many words, I understood him. My father enjoyed numbers because they were absolute, and linked with money and credit, words that in our family carried the weight of religion.

  We turned into South Shore Estates, a neighborhood of two- and three-story homes, all surrounded by a brick wall. It was a route we had not taken before. Sailboats occupied many of the driveways, and a golf course fanned out behind the houses. I could smell the ocean.

  “Do you wish you lived in a house like these?” he asked.

  I did wish that, and wished it often, but I said, “No,” and when my father made no response, I added, “Not at all.” We lived in a two-bedroom wood-frame house on the corner of Longcommon Road, across from a mechanic’s garage.

  “Your mother used to live this way.” He ran his fingers through his hair, which was dark and combed straight back. “I’m sure she misses it, too.”

  My father eased off the gas and slowed enough that I thought he was listening for something in the engine. He lowered his window and craned his neck outside. All of the girls I liked from school lived in South Shore, and although I felt guilty for it, I hoped they wouldn’t see me with my father in their neighborhood. He steered with one hand and the truck veered to the wrong side of the street.

  Then he raised his window and gave the engine some gas. “There’s a small problem at the stables.” My father opened his hands and stretched his fingers so only his palms rested on the steering wheel, then he tightened his grip. “Not with the horses, don’t worry on that. It’s a misunderstanding with our man Butler.” He pushed the clutch and went to shift gears, but the transmission was already in fourth, so he had nowhere to go and let it alone. “He called your mother today, claimed we missed this month’s rent. She says she paid it, but we’ll hear him out. There’s time for that.”

  We curved onto Yorktown Road, which would take us to Butler’s ranch, and began heading south. My father passed cars traveling slower than us. An unfinished house, just a skeleton of studs on a foundation, stood in a hay field to our left, a snarl of mesquite branches stacked by the road.

  “Do you know,” my father said suddenly, “what I’ve seen your mother doing these last few nights?”

  “No,” I said. “What?”

  “Feeding ants.” He chuckled and shifted his eyes to me, shaking his head. “They’re rebuilding their mound beside the house, but the rain keeps catching them. She slips out there and sprinkles popcorn over them.”

  I remembered seeing the anthill and could picture my mother crouching beside it. “Was she sad?”

  “No.” He straightened himself on the seat. “No, she smiles and is content to feed those ants. It’s a relief to her, I guess.”

  A sign marking the city limits stood to our left and my father snapped his fingers and pointed at it. “We’re free men.” His voice came out flat, though it sounded like a joke to me.

  The road narrowed to two lanes and ran alongside shallow ditches, where weeds extended from brackish water. My father loosened his tie, removed it, and folded it on the seat between us. “We should buckle our seat belts,” he said, so we did that. We rode beside a cornfield and I watched the rows of soil tick by, trying to focus on the point where they converged at the horizon. My father rolled down his window again and extended his arm outside, the air slicing around it, creating the illusion of wind.

  “A person can care too much.” He raised his voice. “Does that make sense to you right now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It does.”

  “You’re smarter than me,” he said, then laughed. I faced him and laughed, too, because he did. He squeezed my shoulder. And I thought of my father as a boy, something I could do easily then. It was my habit to compare his youth to my own and question the ways our lives already differed. The images lacked any colors except black and white, and it seemed a time when things moved faster, not slower, as you might guess, but like an old movie where the film speeds from frame to frame without sound or pause.

  LIKE MOST MEN, EDWIN BUTLER STOOD TALLER than my father but limped from a knee operation that kept him from wo
rking. He collected checks from the government, and when they arrived, he went to bet on the dogs in Annaville. His wife was a long-haired woman named Deidra who bred Dalmatians for a living, but I’d seen other women step out of Edwin Butler’s house trailer. A plywood sign stood in their little yard—a cowboy riding a whale under the words SEAHORSE RANCH. The property was only ten miles from the ocean, maybe less than that, but out there you couldn’t smell the water or know that you were close to it at all.

  “No one’s here yet,” my father said.

  In a pen beside Butler’s trailer, two Dalmatians rose and watched through their fence as my father steered into the parking area. Horses and a few cows grazed in the pasture, their legs and bellies caked with mud, and Lady stood in her stall, flipping her tail at the gnats and mosquitoes that always appeared after rain.

  Instead of parking close to our stalls, my father cut the tires toward the house trailer and angled the truck back toward the street. He braked. I asked what was wrong, but he said nothing and I picked up the faint murmur of voices on the radio, which I hadn’t realized was playing. We rolled forward, then stopped and my father shifted gears, unbuckled his seat belt, and twisted to look through the back window. And suddenly he punched the gas. The truck gunned backward—it felt as though we were in a free fall—and we slammed into Edwin Butler’s steel gate. My safety belt locked across my chest; the gate rattled. A low, thin pitch rang in the air. I saw, or felt, horses spook in their stalls, retreat to opposite corners with their ears pinned back. The Dalmatians froze, their heads cocked toward the sky. And although I was staring at my father, he never looked at me but just shifted gears and accelerated forward, then stopped and reversed into the gate again, busting the lock and swinging it open.