by Bruce Jones
But the TV quote—from what Allie referred to as their “Animal Channels”—had stuck with Richard as he navigated furniture on his way to the phone call that would change his life. Strangely, especially considering he was a writer, the idea had never occurred to him before. Maybe because it was so obvious. Of course humans alone among animals were aware of their own mortality—because they alone were able to reason and think logically. Of course science was finding out new things daily about the intelligence of dolphins, and even sharks and pigs were pretty smart in their own way and there was that thing elephants did, scattering the bones of their own dead around in that peculiar fashion. But probably they didn’t give a lot of thought to living and dying as they scoured the savannah for trees to strip and shit them back in the grass for the dung beetles to roll in. Only man did that. And, it further occurred to Richard, it was a kind of mixed blessing and curse. The blessing being you knew if you didn’t get off your ass, get your act together and accomplish something in this life, it would be over soon enough, way too soon enough for most. The curse being that the very finality of that made one question the whole purpose of the damn thing in the first place. Get your shit together and accomplish things for what? Richard shrugged to himself on the way to the phone. For future generations, he supposed. So they could scour and strip and shit back into the soil, rather like an elephant.
It was Bobby Maser on the phone. Doctor Bobby Maser now, all grown up.
The cancer had spread.
Just for a moment Richard thought maybe he’d put his bad ear to the phone by mistake. He did that sometimes, but not often, and not this time. That was just wishful thinking, he supposed later.
“It’s spread, Rich,” Maser said again, just in case Richard wasn’t sufficiently crushed as a stepped-on bug the first time.
“Well,” Richard replied into the mouthpiece, a little croaky because his throat was suddenly a little tight, a little dry, “I’ll be frugged.”
Maser was quiet on the other end a moment, then breathed an ironic “Yeah...”
Another long quiet followed for both men, a quiet that was thunderous with the sound of memories of a million past conversations, and a million days together from second grade until now. A lifetime of shared and mostly happy moments and a few sad ones but none, very probably, as sad as the moment at hand.
Richard stood there in the kitchen looking at the travel calendar Allie had bought and the three Norman Rockwell kids leaping cheerfully naked into a painted swimming hole in a painted pasture on a painted summer day. The painting for January, he remembered, was the same three kids cheerfully building a snowman. Rockwell tended toward the cheerfully ironic, apparently what a World War II Saturday Evening Post reading public wanted to see in those days. Funny how it still seemed to ring true now even though kids that age almost never used swimming holes anymore (certainly not naked –“s’matter, you queer?”), rarely built snowmen or even hung out together as a group all that much except during online X-Box sessions. Not like his childhood. He and his boyhood friends had ridden their bikes all over town without even telling anyone where they’d gone. And neither mom nor dad had cared. Long as they were home in time for supper. Miss supper, it was your ass…
Rich—?”
“I thought,” Richard said, coming back to the present, “I thought that’s why we shot that stuff into my prostate. To stop the cancer.” He felt simultaneously chagrinned and ironically satisfied; chagrinned at his just-learned fate, certainly, and somehow mollified that even the vaunted medical profession and his childhood friend (and now rich adult doctor friend who was always smarter than Richard, always right about everything) could be wrong. Dead wrong. And Richard smiled despite himself because it sounded so much like something Richard Denning the late actor might have said in Target Earth or The Creature With The Atom Brain or a million other stupid Saturday afternoon B flicks; insipid dialog, vapid acting, lousy special effects. Oh baby, when did they stop making movies like that?
“It was,” Dr. Bobby Maser countered lamely.
“Was what--?” Richard blinked into the phone, having almost forgotten Maze on the other end.
“The reason we shot the stuff into your prostate, boyo.”
“Yeah,” Richard nodded, coming back to the present again and not liking the feeling a bit, “and I thought that killed it,” he added, not letting Maser off the hook but also, strangely, feeling a little sorry for his old friend. Sorry because he wouldn’t want to be giving Bobby this news if the shoe were on the other foot. Or the prostate on the other asshole, he thought, and almost laughed.
“It did. But it was too late—it had already spread…” Maser told him wearily. He was sounding more and more weary of late. Professional stress? Better watch that, Maze, Richard thought, give you a heart attack, kill you. And he found himself grinning again. Why the hell was everything so fruggin’ funny all of a sudden? Was this shock?
Maser sighed in the receiver. “Rich…it happens. We watched you like a hawk. You know that.”
“Not quite as sharp as a hawk, apparently,” Richard countered, sticking it to Bobby harder than he’d meant to, feeling bad for that but doing it anyway while thinking: hawks not only detect minute things from great distances but also are blissfully unaware of their own mortality. Superior documenting, Nature Channel, and fuck you very much.
“We did everything, Rich—“
“Okay. All right. I’m being an asshole. Where’s it spread to, Bobby?
“Well—“
“Oh fuck it,” Richard sighed, “fuck all that shit. How much time I got?”
Maser was quiet for a moment, as if he was actually pondering this studiously, when Richard knew perfectly well he wasn’t.
“It’s hard to be precise, Rich—“
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“Asshole.”
“A week, a month—what, Maze?”
“Six months, maybe. Maybe longer.”
“And maybe shorter. I noticed you didn’t mention chemo.”
Another metallic sigh. “Afraid we’re past that.”
Richard nodded silently into the receiver, aware he was watching Allie’s slim back and sunflower blouse through the living room French doors. She was waiting there for him on the patio, blissfully unaware of this bleak conversation with Maser, serenely awaiting the encroaching darkness. He found himself smiling faintly at the back of her beautiful blonde head. Awaiting the encroaching darkness.
“You still at work, Bob?” he asked the phone.
He heard an affirmative grunt.
“You should go home,” Richard told him. “Have a drink and look up at the sky. It’s a fine summer evening out. Really fine.”
Maser’s voice throttled down a gear or two and Richard was afraid he might actually be about to cry. And he didn’t want that. Didn’t want it so much it almost made him angry.
“Is it, Rich?” Bobby Maser asked with a touch of suspicion. “Really fine? You sure?”
Richard smiled into the receiver. “Yeah, I’m sure, Bobby. Really fine.”
Maser’s cleared his throat huskily. “That’s good, Rich. That’s good. And I think I’ll take you up on your advice.”
“Me too. So long, buddy.”
“Listen—there’s going to be—
“Pain. I know.”
“I can give you some stuff. But—“
“Cross that bridge when it comes, Bobby, thanks. And thanks for everything else too. Sorry about the sarcasm earlier...”
“Forget it.”
“Okay. Long as you promise not to give me that five-step Kubler-Ross bullshit.”
Bobby chuckled. “Deal. Go get drunk, Rich. With Allie.”
“Rather have sex. Haven’t managed that since you removed the tumor, you know it? Are there any pills for that? Or are you geniuses still working on that one?”
“There’s always Viagra.”
“We tried that, Einstein, remember?”
“Hey, fuck you.�
��
“Take anything I can get,” Richard said and hung up.
He stood there by the phone for as long as he thought he could get away with it before navigating his way back through the living room to the French doors and the patio beyond to tell his wife the good news. And he thought a strange thing. “Deadenders never lie. Deadenders never die…”
It had been their motto, his and the rest of the old Topeka gang.
And he knew it was true, but not for the reasons he’d known back then. He knew Deadenders never die now, because they live on in the hearts and minds of those left behind. He shook his head. What a great bunch of guys they were. What a great life he’d had, young and full of aspiration and the certainty that anything was possible, anything attainable. Before he uprooted himself and went west and got caught up in all that Hollywood sewage. You could have been a good writer, Richo…maybe even a great one. But you lacked the courage. Not the talent, the courage. That’s why you wasted all those years out there in Holly-weird.
Maybe, he answered himself. And maybe I could have a trunk full of unsold novels instead of unsold screenplays.
Even Hemmingway left unsold manuscripts behind.
Richard made a rueful sound, nodding. Maybe. Whatever the case, it was a little late in the day now…
On his way back through the living room to the patio he reached out to turn off the still yakking TV. There was, he noticed absently, an ad playing for a local funeral home. The serenely sympathetic voiceover was giving the details of their finest line of deluxe burial accommodations. “Jesus,” Richard said out loud to the TV, “that’s highway robbery.” And then he laughed.
And maybe it was that--just the fact that he could still laugh about it, about all of it, that he may have just been give a death sentence but he was still alive now, at this moment, and it was a lovely June evening and he was back in his old childhood home with his dear Allie, and if he had to die, well, there were certainly worse places—maybe it was that fact alone that changed his mind.
Made him decide not to tell Allie about the phone call, or who it was from.
A wrong number. That’s all she needed to know. At least for now. At least for this beautiful summer twilight when the whole world seemed alive with hope and replenishment. At least for tonight: one of their last nights together.
He joined her back on the patio, and reached across between their twin lawn chairs and took hold of her small hand. They sat that way silently and watched the sun turn the sky bloody, then purple, then, inevitably…dark.
* * *
Later they watched the evening news, like always, and afterward he lay beside her, like always wishing he could make love to her but finding just enough solace in the warmth of her against him.
Around two in the morning, he woke up. He’d feared he might.
People who know they’re about to die do that, he’d read somewhere. It was a normal, early reaction to a sudden growing awareness of one’s own mortality; not fear exactly, just that with so little time left, you didn’t want to waste it sleeping.
He crept downstairs as he always did on nights when for whatever reason he couldn’t find the doorway to sleep. He sat in his favorite easy chair and put on the old 45’s saved from his youth, with all their glorious pops and hiss and static crackles, and he stuck the headphones on so as not to awaken Allie and he leaned back and listened to the familiar strains of a young Elvis, still calling plaintively to a younger Richard.
Somewhere in the middle of it, he opened his eyes and sat up.
Richard sat that way for several sharply intensive seconds there in the darkened living room in his pajamas, his head cocked slightly to port like a listening robin on the front lawn.
Elvis was crooning as usual, an early mono number, probably from his Sun Records days.
Only something was wrong. And it wasn’t with Elvis.
He—Elvis--was singing through both sides of Richard’s earphone cups. Both. Including the cup covering his deaf ear!
Richard vaulted forward on the rug and pulled the phones from his head.
He reached up and tapped his deaf ear lightly with his index finger. He heard the tapping noise. He placed the finger inside his ear, and heard the rushing sound of the blood from his distant heart.
He sat there open-mouthed, staring into the dark for nearly a full minute. Is this what happens with cancer? You get your hearing back before you die?
“Well!” he announced to the empty room around him but thinking very much at that moment not of a late night horror flick but of one starring a young Jimmy Stewart and an elderly angel trying to earn his wings.
“Well! I’ll be frugged!”
TWO
--he was waking up in his bedroom, his real bedroom, the one he’d occupied the first eighteen years of his life, and when Richard looked down at himself he realized that his body had regressed during his sleep, that he was a teenager again and it was late morning on a hot summer day and his mom and dad were at church and the sheet was tented out with that first morning hard-on, something he hadn’t experienced in months, but then, he was used to being a middle-aged man with prostate problems, not the hard-muscled youth he was now—
--and the door opened and Laurie stood there, Laurie Seasons the girl next door his first love his obsession before she’d moved away to Virginia and he’d moved on to college and there she was now in all her black-haired glory with her face glowing with desire, shutting the door carefully behind her carefully and coming toward him, her clothes dropping away magically as he stared and felt himself throb and finally took her into his arms again—
--and it was perfect, just like the first time, perfect as her perfect porcelain skin, perfect as her husky sighs, as perfect as it could possibly be, he was almost ready to come, until he heard the sound the shuffling sound behind his door out in the hallway and he thought Mom and Dad are home, I’m going to get caught—
--and suddenly there was the smell, the horrible smell, the graveyard smell of dank humus and decay, and Laurie pulled away from him with wonder in her eyes and he looked down at himself and he was middle-aged again, going thick at the waist and thin on the head and whatever was behind the door started scratching at it scratching like an animal and Laurie let out a scream as the Thing broke down the door and came into the room, reeking and filthy and dark and she kept on screaming and screaming as it approached them and Richard could just make it out in the dark barely see it shambling toward him and her scream was shrill and insistent and--
* * *
“…answer the phone, Richard…”
Blinking up from the dream now…still in his pajama bottoms, still in his bedroom…only not his childhood bedroom—
”Richard? Honey?” Allie pleading sleepily beside him. “Answer the phone, huh?”
--but his parents’ old bedroom, the master bedroom, and not Laurie his true love beside him, but Allie—in Topeka Kansas--
--where he lived now. His parents dead. With his real wife, Allie. Not with Laurie Seasons, his first love…and not with a hard-on…
Richard pushed up now, up and away from still-clinging tendrils of dream, heel of one hand wiping grits of sleep from his gluey eyes, the other flopping out blindly for the nightstand, knocking something over, finally connecting with the receiver and cutting off the awful, strident screaming—no, ringing. Some distant laboring part of his brain told him: another day. It’s another day. One more day. And you’re still alive. Ole man cancer ain’t got ya yet.
“—hello?
“Shit, you were sleeping.”
It was Maser. And he sounded, even at this early morning hour, like the Bobby Maser of old, not the Dr. Robert Maser of today.
“S’okay,” Richard slurred, fighting a yawn, “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway…” One of their shared gags from the old days--one of about twenty million they’d tossed back and forth like ping pong balls. He could almost see The Maze grinning on the other end.
“Guess
you forgot, huh Sport?”
Richard gazed about himself with logy incomprehension (he’d never get used to the new furniture arrangement of their little Topeka bedroom—his inner mind still in luxurious Sherman Oaks), finally located the nightstand clock he’d just knocked over and tried to reach for it, trapped by the covers. “What time is it, Bobby?”
“Time for the ninth fairway, old buddy. Or the eighteenth, if you’re…up for it.”
Golf. Christ. Yes. Saturday. He’d forgotten to set the alarm.
“Why wouldn’t I be up—“ Then he remembered. Oh, that’s right!! You’ve got cancer, Sport! You’re one-on-one with the Big C!
“Go back to sleep, Rich,” Maser said in his ear, “we’ll survive without you this time.”
Richard felt himself bridle even in the knowledge Bobby was just trying to be solicitous, poor choice of words notwithstanding. “You’ll survive just fine with me, too, Maze. Call the other guys. Tell them eight-thirty instead of eight. Just let me get down a cup of coffee.”
“You sure, Rich?”
“And maybe a quick piece of ass.”
“We can do this next week, you know,” Maser stalled stubbornly, solicitation becoming irritation in Richard’s ear.
“Hey,” Richard started curtly, “I’m not—“he was going to say “dead yet”--realized Allie might not have gone back to sleep next to him, and lowered his voice an octave, “—I’m feeling just fine. Meet you at the clubhouse in half an hour.” Started to hang up without saying “good-bye” and jerked the handset back to his ear again. “—Maze?”
“Yeah?”
Richard turned as far away from his wife’s pink back as he could without seeming obvious and cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. Now that he was waking up, remembering things, he also switched the earpiece to his bad ear just to check. “That…thing we discussed? It’s just—for now—it’s just between us, ‘kay?”