by Tom Franklin
“I just came from the hospital,” she said. “Dad shot himself last night.”
“He all right?”
“He was cleaning that damn .22 revolver of his,” she said. “He forgot to unload it first. I flew in as soon as I got the call from the hospital.” She removed her plaid-lined parka from the car hood. “The bullet only got his ear.”
“Shit,” I said. “Should’ve called.”
She tumbled the set of keys around her finger. “Wasn’t so bad he couldn’t drive himself to the hospital. They’re keeping him there another night. I came by to get him a change of clothes.”
Erin invited me inside. A short, lopsided pyramid of empty beer cans squatted next to the garbage bin. Towers of newspapers and dirty plates had been erected on the dining room table when the kitchen sink had refused further occupancy. Erin reheated the leftover coffee in the carafe on the burner while we rinsed the dishes in the sink and sorted them into the dishwasher. Erin had always been attractively one diet away from what might be considered thick or hungry, filled out her jeans as if she’d been dipped up to her waist in a vat of liquid denim and left to air dry. Considering she’d flown into Memphis the night before and had immediately driven two hours south to the North Mississippi Medical Center in Gum Pond, twenty-five miles east of Bodock, and slept all night in a hospital room because her father had grazed a bullet off his head, she looked pretty damn good.
The first thread of steam rose from the coffee. Erin poured two cups and leaned against the counter. She grimaced at the stale, scorched Folgers. Said she needed a favor.
I smirked. “You wanna get remarried? Want me to be Lafayette’s emergency contact?”
Erin fingered some coffee off the edge of her lips and said, “Found Lafayette a donor.”
* * *
The night Betty was shot, Lafayette had ambled into their house after work to find a pair of men jacked up on methamphetamine holding her at gunpoint in their living room while robbing the place. Lafayette startled the man training the .357 on Betty into pulling the trigger. The other one, a black guy, managed to make the back door, but the ol’ boy who put a bullet into Betty’s sternum tripped and fell. Lafayette had just enough time to retrieve the revolver and put a round through the back of the man’s skull as he scrambled away. Lafayette chased the other meth head down two backyards over, lodged a bullet in his spine while he climbed over a limestone retaining wall I’d installed for Gray Sherman, the neighborhood queer, the summer before. The man fell unarmed and off Lafayette’s property. Before the trial was over, the black one died in ICU at the hospital, which elevated the case from attempted murder or manslaughter, to committed. Lafayette probably would’ve won against either charge given the circumstantial grounds of his case and his standing in the community. He stunned everyone when he insisted on a plea bargain, took two years for involuntary manslaughter. The best most of us could figure was Lafayette just wanted to move past the ordeal.
Erin and I were already three years into our divorce when Lafayette was admitted to the minimum-security wing at Parchman. A little over six months into his two-year sentence he nearly keeled over during a physical. His blackout led to a biopsy and the diagnosis that sarcoidosis had completely scarred his upper respiratory system. Lafayette’s sentence was commuted to probation by Governor Fordice, courtesy of the urging of Judge Polk, who’d played football with Lafayette at Ole Miss. The convenience mattered little: as a seventy-year-old felon still technically serving out a manslaughter sentence, Lafayette had a lung allocation score—determined by a number of variables set forth by the United Network for Organ Sharing—that was too low for any viable shot of finding a donor in the seven months the doctors gave him to live.
Erin sipped her coffee and explained how she had discovered this loophole called the Good Samaritan clause, which allowed a donor to bypass any UNOS regulations and choose whatever nonfamily recipient he or she wanted at her own discretion. In Lafayette’s case, that donor was a Pentecostal preacher dying of liver disease. The preacher’s church had burned down last year. Erin had set all this up over the phone from Stillwater. Said the man was crazy, obsessed with all the old martyrs or something, had agreed to donate his lung to Lafayette on the grounds he turn over the deed to his house to the First Pentecostal Church of Bodock so that the ministry could continue in his absence.
“Huh.” I nodded at the rest of the house. “So this place is going to be filled with snake-handlers this time next year?”
“They’re not those kind of Pentecostals.”
“So you want Lafayette to trade his house for a lung,” I said, “and you explained all this to Lafayette over the phone yesterday morning, after which he shot himself in the head?”
“It was his ear.” Erin considered the window above the sink, the white oak limb framed there like a pillar of cigar ash. “What am I supposed to do, sit on my fat ass and do nothing? He’s all I’ve got.”
Our marriage had not so much dissolved as imploded after a streak of impulsivity landed me between the thighs of a stripper named Sugartits one night a month shy of our five-year anniversary. We’d married young, while she was still studying elementary education at Ole Miss, a compromise I wasn’t aware of until she enrolled at OSU. I was still building pinewood couch frames then at National Furniture out on Highway 54. We weren’t living hand-to-mouth, but I’d lost out on a supervisor promotion one Friday afternoon to a man I still regard to this day as a fundamental douche bag. Because I was young and dumb-ass enough back then to think Lafayette was the barometer by which Erin measured me, I said hell with it and drove a few counties over to DeWerks La’Rey—spelled backward: Yer Al Skrewed—and spent a good chunk of my paycheck crafting a dollar-bill hula skirt out of Sugartits’s thong. Got drunk and self-deprecated enough for it to seem perfectly justified to hand over what was left of my paycheck if Sugartits would just accompany me to a nearby motel.
Erin explained her favor. There was no guarantee she would be granted enough of a heads-up to fly back in time. I assured her I’d see that Lafayette made it to the transplant center two hours north of here.
Sometime later we ended up on the kitchen floor, our clothes on to protect against the cold brown linoleum. It wasn’t the first time since the divorce: every couple of months or so when she came back home we’d get together to fulfill the more carnal of marital conditions that somehow manage to slip through the cracks of a divorce.
“Have you thought about starting a landscaping business?” she asked. “You’ve done a hell of a job on my father’s yard. Seriously.”
I told her I hadn’t.
Erin stayed at Lafayette’s through the weekend to get everything squared away with the preacher, make sure things with Lafayette were settled down. Monday morning she headed back to Stillwater to teach her evening composition class. The class canceled on account of some arctic front from Canada pairing up with a wet weather system before sweeping through and shutting down the whole state of Oklahoma, delaying all incoming and outgoing flights. The storm then wound its way southeastward, gathering strength the entire time.
The preacher went into a coma Wednesday evening about the time the storm reached Mississippi and dumped six inches of ice and knocked power out across the Mid-South. Hospitals would retain electricity but the Pentecostal preacher had a living will instructing not to put him on life support. The preacher lasted thirty-six hours before he suffocated early Friday morning. The Memphis International Airport was closed when the lung was harvested a little after eight a.m.
* * *
When I wheeled into Lafayette’s yard Friday morning his lung was hurling through the air in a helicopter a few thousand feet above us. Lafayette was standing on his roof in a pair of Clorox-stained boxers, a loosely knotted noose around his neck, the end of the rope tied to a branch of the sweet gum stretching its bare, knotty limbs out over the front of the house. His wrists were cuffed behind his back. Gumballs from the tree overcrowded the gutters and piled up the s
lanted roof, accumulated around his bare feet. The tree had largely survived the storm but the branch he’d tied the rope to had sustained substantial damage. Probably Lafayette would take the branch with him to the ground and fracture a hip instead of stopping midair and snapping his neck in that pivotal moment when the rope and gravity became acquainted. Well goddamn, I thought. Lafayette’s efforts to mount the roof had pulled loose the stitches in his ear; skinny swirls of blood colored the white bandage like a peppermint. I stepped out of the truck and asked him what the shit it was he thought he was doing.
“Had been contemplating killing myself,” he said.
“Yeah, I gathered that much. You forget about us fishing?”
“Nah,” he said. His breath pulsed like a chimney pipe in the chilly morning air. This was the dead of February, when fish hunkered down at lake bottoms, barely moving in their dormancy. But Erin had insisted on the fishing euphemism, something about perceived reality and helping her father to feel as comfortable as possible about not riding with her to his transplant surgery. Last night, I went over to check on Lafayette after the hospital pager Erin had given me alerted us that the next page would mean the lung had been harvested. Instead of sticking around after a supper of hot dogs roasted on clothes hangers over the gas heater in his living room, I headed home to bed. Did not give thought to leaving the old man unsupervised and fending for himself in a powerless house, only the specter of his murdered wife for company.
“Nah, guess not,” Lafayette said again. “Suppose we can go fishing now.”
Lafayette’s operation was scheduled for noon. He was due in Olive Branch at 11:15 to get prepped for surgery: blood tests conducted to determine the type and strength of anesthesia, a tissue test to make sure his body wouldn’t reject the lung. It was 8:45 now. I’d filled the gas tank that morning on a generator-run pump at a buddy’s farm, which left Lafayette and me plenty of time to make the hour-and-a-half haul up US 78 to the transplant clinic just outside Memphis. I called up to Lafayette to get a move on then. He stepped forward and twirled his fingers to remind me of the predicament he’d gotten himself into. “Be right up,” I said.
I retrieved the ladder lying out in the front yard and propped it against the house. When I reached Lafayette he had his head down. The plow lines of his gray comb-over revealed freckled sections of scalp. Erin could write a thesis on the number of tales her father contributed to the community mythos, like when he very nearly pummeled the testicles of an unfortunate rival while in a dog pile on the thirty-yard line during the county football jamboree. Rode through pharmacy school at Ole Miss on an athletic scholarship, played for the legendary Johnny Vaught. Returned to our good town after graduation to open Bodock’s second drugstore. That was all before I was born, thirty years ago about. But Lafayette wasn’t indomitable. The inflammatory lung disease and his wife’s murder and six months in a low-security prison wing had left him a pathetic reflection of the man he used to be.
When I removed the noose from his neck and asked what pocket the handcuffs key was in, it was hard not to show my frustration when he raised his head and said, “The yard, somewhere.”
“You not think to tell me that before I got up here?”
“Shit, Topher. This ain’t exactly one of my best days.”
The key had landed on some plastic sheeting I’d covered the hedges with when news of the possible storm first reached Bodock. After I got him off the roof, I brushed the asphalt grit from my hands on the legs of my jeans and looked at him bent over in the lawn. The scar on his calf from when he last went hunting and his bare feet positioned on the spiny gumballs. Chest heaving whatever was left of his lungs.
When he was finished coughing, I said, “You ready to go?”
Lafayette Cummings, standing straight as he could in the front yard, wiped a spot of blood from the corner of his mouth on his boxers and said, “Been waiting on you.”
* * *
While Lafayette was in the house getting dressed, I waited out in the truck, honked the horn once, rested my arm on the Igloo cooler I had forgotten to unload.
It wasn’t quite nine o’clock, but I appreciated the obvious sense of urgency lent to the task of escorting a transplant patient. I honked again.
Gave it exactly two minutes. Then honked a third time.
Lafayette appeared on the front porch then. He wore a denim jacket over an Old Milwaukee T-shirt tucked into his beltless jeans and a pair of sunglasses draped around his neck by a red Croakie. Boat shoes on his feet. I retired the cooler to the backseat. In one hand Lafayette had a Shakespeare rod and reel he set in the truck bed. In his other hand was a half-case of Old Milwaukee which, when he tucked the box between his feet on the floorboard, I saw held only four bottles.
“Lafayette.” I nodded my head as I turned over the ignition.
He inspected the cab as I backed downhill out the long drive. Just the walk from the house had spent him. What the hell sort of adrenaline had to have pumped through his old arteries this morning, allowing him to climb up on his roof without keeling over?
“Notice you ain’t brought any fishing gear with you,” he said. “Don’t you think it would’ve helped the illusion some if you’d at least put a fishing pole in the back there? A tackle box at least?”
I forced a laugh. “I think you got the imagination for it, Lafayette.”
“Shit. You got the cooler though, I see. I guess that could work. Coolers’re essential for a day on the lake.”
At the end of his street I threw the truck in park. “You want, I can go back and get my damn fishing gear, Lafayette.”
“Nah,” he said and winked. “I’m just yanking that rod and reel you did bring with you.”
I shifted back to drive. “You was easier to get along with on the roof.”
I made a left out of the neighborhood and then hung a right, which put us northbound on Highway 54. Lafayette cracked open a beer, the bottle sneezed. He cleared the neck and said, “Want one?”
“They ain’t going to use anesthesia on you if you’re drunk.”
He bent down and handed me a beer. “So help me drink ’em then.”
I imagined the shit storm of arriving in Olive Branch only to have Lafayette denied for surgery because I didn’t deny him a preop beer, a mock-fishing-trip beer. Figured I should be less worried with whatever condition he arrived in so long as I got him to the surgery. Besides, there were all the stories of Lafayette’s drinking exploits before a pregnant Betty ultimatumed him into sobering up. Hauling ass down back roads with a fifth of Evan Williams between his legs, the green cap discarded out the window miles behind him as a sort of insurance the bottle would be emptied in that single sitting. Usually it was. That kind of tolerance doesn’t desert a man. Further, he only had four beers on him—two if we split them—which I reckoned would leave plenty of time in the next couple of hours or so for him to piss it all out before surgery.
I nursed the Old Milwaukee and we rode up Highway 54 in silence except for the news station out of Memphis and something between a wheeze and a growl from Lafayette’s chest. According to the news lady’s voice, power had been restored in Nashville and parts of Memphis that morning, and some of the larger towns in north Mississippi: Corinth, Gum Pond, Oxford. We hit the US 78 on-ramp in New Albany at 9:15, which would take us north all the way to Olive Branch. Out on the four-lane we saw not one wooded acre that had been spared. Many hardwoods—oaks and hickories, some of the older, more resilient gums—were still standing, but even their spread had diminished some. The bright wood of their exposed flesh marked their shed poundage, a pallet of broken trunks and branches carrying for miles across the roll of ridges. Besides the occasional eighteen-wheeler, there wasn’t much traffic. Cleanup crews were set up every ten miles or so, removing branches or the occasional utility pole that had fallen onto the highway.
“Be better if we could keep them beers cold,” Lafayette said at some point, and nodded toward the backseat. “There ice in that cooler?�
�
I told him no.
“Too bad we couldn’t transport the lung ourselves. Would’ve appreciated seeing what a Pentecostal lung looks like.”
“Perhaps they’ll let you look at it just before surgery.”
Lafayette gulped the last of his first beer as we passed a group of orange vests catapulting branches into a dump truck. Then northbound US 78 relaxed back into two lanes and Lafayette rolled down his window and sailed the empty beer bottle at the Myrtle corporate limit sign. The bottle missed high, swallowed up by the kudzu spilling from the tree line, where some of the more flexible pines made top-heavy by the ice collected in their branches were bowed over toward the highway like the Pentecostals who’d soon be congregating in Lafayette’s living room. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and coughed violently into it, wiped his mouth, and folded the handkerchief back behind his wallet.
“Be too drugged up then to remember.”
* * *
The .357 that drilled Betty’s chest belonged to Lafayette. He wore the piece everywhere as if it were a nickel-plated watch: Sitting in the concrete stands during high school football games, depositing his pharmacy’s weekly cash flow at the Peoples Bank. Fighting off sleep in the back pew at Bodock Baptist where Betty dragged him. He even pulled the hand cannon on a customer once for being generally disruptive because the man didn’t want to wait five minutes over the estimated hour for his prescription to be filled on account he was a distant cousin of Mayor Duff’s.
But Lafayette would leave the gun at the house that morning, probably for the first time in years. That evening two unarmed men, high on crank and thinking the house vacant, would break in. A kitchen light sparking to life, perhaps, Betty’s voice addressing whom she assumed was Lafayette home from work. And instead of abandoning their mission, one of the men would see an opportunity in Lafayette’s pistol on the side table next to the recliner.