“Oh, Tom.”
Doc came in the room. “Henry, you aren’t going to be able to carry those books. Give them to Kristen; she’s got a bag.”
“Why, what am I carrying?”
“You and I are carrying Tom here, young man, can’t you figure that out? Does he look like someone ready to walk across the valley?”
I thought Tom would hit him for that, but he didn’t. He just looked morose and tired and said, “I wasn’t aware you owned a stretcher, Ernest.”
“I don’t. We’ll use one of your chairs.”
“Ah. Well, that sounds like hard work.” He walked into the big room. “This one by the window is the lightest.” He carried it out of the house himself, then sat in it.
“Put those books in Kristen’s bag,” said Doc.
“Ooof,” Kristen said as I piled them in. I went to help Kathryn find Tom’s shirts. Curiously I checked the photograph Tom had been looking at; it was a woman’s face. Kathryn lifted an armful of clothes, and we went outside. The old man was staring at the sea. It was getting blustery, and halfway to the horizon a few whitecaps appeared and disappeared.
“Ready?” Doc asked.
Tom nodded, not looking at us. Doc and I got on either side of him and lifted the chair by its arms and bottom. Tom craned around to look back at his house as we stepped slowly down the ridge trail. Mouth turned down he said, “I am the last American.”
“The hell you are,” I said. “The hell you are.” And he chuckled, faintly.
It was tricky getting down the ridge path, but on the valley floor he seemed heavier. “Change places with me,” Kathryn said to Doc. We put the chair down; Tom sat there with his eyes closed and never said a word. So strange, to have the old man quiet! Though the wind was brisk, there was sweat beading on his forehead.
Kathryn and I lifted him. She was a lot stronger than Doc, so I had less to carry. Into the forest shade we went.
“Am I heavy?” Tom asked. He opened his eyes and looked up at Kathryn. Her thick freckled arms came together at the elbows, pinning her breasts together in front of his face. He mimicked a bite at them.
She laughed. “No more than a chairful of rocks,” she said.
At the bridge we stopped for a rest, and watched the clouds roll over us, talking as if we were on a normal outing. But with Tom in the chair it wasn’t natural. On the bank upstream a group of kids splashed in the water; they stopped to watch us as we got across the bridge, which was narrow enough to force me to lead, walking backwards. Tom stared mournfully at the naked brats as they pointed and shrieked. Kathryn saw the look on his face and she squinted at me unhappily. Fat gray clouds lowered over us, the wind tossed our hair, it was cold, and getting darker.… Miserably I tried to find a way to distract Tom.
“I still don’t see what I’m going to do with that blank book,” I said. “You better keep it, Tom, you might want to do some writing in it up at Doc’s.”
“Nope. It’s yours.”
“But—but what am I going to do with it?”
“Write in it. That’s why I’m giving it to you. Write your own story in it.”
“But I don’t have a story.”
“Sure you do. ‘An American at Home.’”
“But that’s nothing. Besides, I wouldn’t know how.”
“Just do it. Write the way you talk. Tell the truth.”
“What truth?”
After a long pause, he said, “You’ll figure that out. That’s what the book is for.”
He lost me there, but by that time we were working our way up the path to the Costas’, and were almost to the little cleared terrace in the hillside that it sat on. I looked at Kathryn and she thanked me for distracting him with a quick smile. We hefted him up the last steps.
The Costas’ house gleamed black against the trees and clouds. Mando came out and greeted us. “How are you, Tom?” he said brightly. Without answering Tom tried to stand up and walk through the door into their house. He couldn’t do it, and Kathryn and I carried him in. Mando led us to the corner room that they called the hospital. Its two outer walls were oil drums; there were two beds, a stove, an overhead trap door to let sun and air in, and a smooth wood floor. We put Tom on the corner bed. He lay there with a faint frown turning his mouth. We went into the kitchen and let Doc look at him.
“He’s real sick, huh?” said Mando.
“Your dad says it’s pneumonia,” Kathryn said.
“I’m glad he’s here, then. Have a seat, Henry, you look bushed.”
“I am.” While I sat Mando got us cups of water. He was always a conscientious host, and when Mando and Kristen weren’t looking, Kathryn and I smiled a little to see him. But not much; we were glum. Mando and Kristen talked on and on, and Mando got out some of his animal drawings to show her.
“Did you really see that bear, Armando?”
“Yes, I sure did—Del can tell you, he was with me.”
Kathryn jerked her head at the door. “Let’s go outside,” she said to me.
We sat on the cut log bench in the Costas’ garden. Kathryn heaved a sigh. For a long time we sat together without saying a word.
Mando and Kristen came out. “Pa says we should find Steve, and get him to come up and read from that book,” Mando said. “He said Tom would like that.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Kathryn said.
“I think he’ll be at his house,” I told them. “Or down the cliff right by the house, you know the place.”
“Yeah. We’ll try there.” They walked on down the path, hand in hand. We watched them till they were out of sight, then sat silently again.
Abruptly Kathryn slapped at a fly. “He’s too old for this.”
“Well, he’s gotten sick before.” But I could tell this time was different.
She didn’t answer. Her wild hair lifted and fell in the nippy onshore wind. Under the growing clouds the valley’s forest was intensely green. All that life …
“I think of him as ageless,” I said. “Old, but—you know—unchanging.”
“I know.”
“It scares me when he gets sick like this!”
“I know.”
“At his age. Why, he’s ancient.”
“Over a hundred.” Kathryn shook her head. “Incredible.”
“I wonder why we get old at all. Sometimes it doesn’t seem … natural.”
I felt her shrug more than saw it. “That’s life.”
Which wasn’t much of an answer, as far as I was concerned. The deeper the question the shallower the answer—until the deepest questions have no answers at all. Why are things the way they are, Kath? A sigh, arms touching, curled hairs floating across one’s face, the wind, the clouds overhead. What more answer than that? I felt choked, as if oceans of clouds filled me to bursting. A strand of Kathryn’s hair rolled up and down my nose, and I watched it fiercely, noted its every kink and curl, every streak of red in the brown, as a way to hold myself all in … as a way to grab the world to me with my senses, to hold it against me so it couldn’t slip away.
Time passed. (So all our ways fail.) Kathryn said, “Steve is so tense these days I’m afraid he’s going to break. Like a twenty-pound bowstring on a sixty-pound bow. Fighting with his pa. And all that shit about the resistance. If I don’t agree with every word he says, he starts a fight with me. I’m getting so sick of it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Couldn’t you talk to him about it, Henry? Couldn’t you discourage him about this resistance thing somehow?”
I shook my head. “Since I got back, he won’t let me argue with him.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that. But in some other way. Even if you’re for the resistance yourself, you know there’s no reason to go crazy over it.”
I nodded.
“Something other than arguing with him. You’re good with words, Henry, you could find some way to dampen his enthusiasm for all that.”
“I guess.” What about my enthusiasm, I wanted to s
ay; but looking at her I couldn’t. Didn’t I have doubts, anyway?
“Please, Henry.” She put her hand on my arm again. “It’s only making him unhappy, and me miserable. If I knew you were working on him to calm him down, I’d feel better.”
“Oh Kath, I don’t know.” But her hand tightened around my upper arm, and her eyes were damp. With her hand touching me I felt connected with all this world that rushed over us, so chill and so beautiful. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you. No matter what you say, he listens to you more than anybody else.”
That surprised me. “I’d think he’d listen to you most.”
She pursed her lips, and her hand returned to her lap. “We aren’t getting along so well, like I said. Because of all this.”
“Ah.” And I had agreed to help her there (I would always agree to help her if she asked, I realized) at the same time that I was conspiring with Steve in every spare moment to take the San Diegans into Orange County! What was I doing? When I thought about what I had just done it made me feel sick. All my connection with the green and white and the sea smell and the trees’ voices disappeared, and I almost said to Kathryn I can’t do it, I’m with Steve on this. But I didn’t. I felt a knot tie inside me, over my stomach.
Steve appeared on the path below, leading Mando and Kristen and Gabby, carrying the book in one hand and waving with the other. Mando and Kristen had to jog to keep up with him.
“Halloo!” he cried cheerfully. “Ahoy up there!”
We stood and met them at the Costas’ door.
“So Doc brought him here, eh?” Steve said.
“He thinks he has pneumonia,” said Kathryn.
Steve winced and shook his head. Under his thick black hair has brow was wrinkled with worry. “Let’s go keep him company, then.”
Once inside I began to lose the knot, and when Steve and Tom went into their usual act I laughed with the others.
“What are you doing in the hospital, you old layabout? Have you bit any nurses yet?”
“Only to discourage them when they’re washing my body,” Tom said with a faint smile.
“Sure, sure. And is the food terrible? And the what d’you call thems, the bedpans is it?”
“Watch it, boy, or I’ll turn a bedpan over your head. Bedpan indeed—”
And by the time they were done tussling and pounding each other, Steve had Tom up in his bed and leaning back against the oildrums. The rest of us crowded into the hospital and sat on the other bed, or the floor, and laughed like we were at one of Tom’s bonfire parties. Steve could do that for us. Even Kathryn was laughing. Only Doc stayed serious through it all, his eye on Tom. Over here Tom was his responsibility, and already you could see the strain on him. I don’t think Doc liked being our doctor. He’d rather have stuck to gardening, if he’d had his way. But the custom was that he did the doctoring in the valley, and though he had trained Kathryn to assist him, and swore she knew everything he did, only he was trusted with the care of our sick. He was the one with the knowledge from the old time, and it was his job. But even in the mildest cases I could see he didn’t like it; and now, with his best friend in his care, he looked truly distressed.
Mando was wild about An American Around the World, even worse than Steve, and now he clamored for it. Steve sat on the bed at Tom’s feet, and Kathryn sat on the floor beside his legs. Gabby and Doc and I sat on chairs brought in from the kitchen, and Mando and Kristen took the empty bed, holding hands again.
The first chapter Steve read was Chapter Sixteen, “A Vengeance Symbolic Is Better Than None.” By this time Baum was in Moscow, and on the day of the big May parade, when all the tyrants of the Kremlin came out to review Russia’s military might, Baum smuggled a packet of fireworks—the strongest explosives he could get his hands on—into a trash can in Red Square. At the best part of the parade the fireworks went off, spewing red, white and blue sparks, and sending the entire government under their chairs. This prank, a tiny echo of what Russia had done to America, gave Baum as much pleasure as the tornado had. But he also had to hightail it out of the capital, as the search for the culprit was intense. The things he had to do in the next chapter to make it to Istanbul would have tired a horse. It was one adventure after another. Doc rolled his eyes and actually began to chuckle in some places, like when Baum stole a hydrofoil boat in the Crimea, and piloted it over the Black Sea pursued by gunboats. Baum was in mortal danger, but Doc kept on giggling.
“Now why are you laughing?” Steve stopped to demand of Doc, annoyed that his reading of Baum’s desperate last-chance flight into the Bosporus had been marred.
“Oh no reason, no reason,” Doc was quick to say. “It’s just his style. He’s so cool when he tells about it all, you know.”
But in the next chapter, “Sunken Venice,” Doc laughed again. Steve scowled and stopped reading.
“Now wait a minute,” Doc said, anticipating Steve’s censure. “He’s saying the water level is thirty feet higher there than it used to be. But anyone can see right out here that the water level is the same as ever. In fact it may be lower.”
“It’s the same,” Tom said, smiling at the exchange.
“Okay, but if so, it should be the same in Venice.”
“Maybe things are different there,” Mando said indignantly.
Doc cracked up again. “All the oceans are connected,” he told Mando. “It’s all one ocean, with one sea level.”
“You’re saying this Glen Baum is a liar,” Kathryn said with interest. She didn’t look at all displeased by the idea, and I knew why. “The whole book is made up!”
“It is not!” Steve cried angrily, and Mando echoed him.
Doc waved a hand. “I’m not saying that. I don’t know what all is true in there. Maybe a few stretchers, to liven things up, though.”
“He says Venice sank,” Steve said coldly, and read the passage again. “The islands sank, and they had to build shacks on the roofs to stay above the water. So the sea level didn’t have to rise.” He looked peevishly at Doc. “It sounds likely to me.”
“Could be, could be,” Doc said with a straight face. Steve’s jaw was tight, his face flushed.
“Let’s go on reading,” I said. “I want to know what happens.”
Steve read again, his voice harsh and rapid. Baum’s adventures picked up their pace. He was in as much danger as ever, but somehow it wasn’t the same. In the chapter called “Far Tortuga,” when he parachuted from a falling plane into the Caribbean, with several others who then inflated a raft, Doc left the hospital and went into the kitchen, his face averted to conceal a wide grin from Steve and Mando. The men on the inflatable raft, by the way, perished one by one, victims of thirst and giant turtle attacks, until only Baum was left to land on the jungle beach in Central America. It should have been pretty dramatic, and sad, but when Baum met up with a jungle headhunter Tom went “heee, heee, heee, heee,” from his bed, and we could hear Doc busting up in the kitchen, and Kathryn started laughing too, and Steve slammed the book shut and nearly stomped on Kathryn as he stood up.
“I ain’t reading for you folks any more,” he cried. “You’ve got no respect for literature!”
Which made Tom laugh so hard he started to cough again. So Doc came in and kicked us all out, and the reading session was done.
But we came back the next night, and Steve agreed sullenly to read again. Soon enough An American Around the World was done, which was probably just as well, and we went on to Great Expectations, and took the parts to read in Much Ado About Nothing, and tried some other books as well. It was all good fun. But Tom kept coughing, and he got quieter, and thinner, and paler. The days passed in a slow sameness, and I didn’t feel like joining in the joking on the boats, or memorizing my readings, or even reading them. Nothing seemed interesting or good to me, and Tom got sicker as day followed day, until on some evenings I couldn’t bear to look at him, lying on his back hardly aware of us, a
nd each day I woke up with that knot over my stomach, afraid that it might be the last day he could hold on to this life.
17
Mornings I got up at dawn before the boats went out, and went up to check on him. Most mornings he was asleep. The nights were hard, Doc said. He got sicker and sicker, right up to the edge of death—I had to admit it—and there he hovered, refusing to pass on. One morning he was half awake and his bloodshot eyes stared at me defiantly. Don’t write me off yet, they said. He hadn’t slept that night, Mando told me. Now he didn’t feel up to talking. He just stared. I pressed his hand—his skin was damp, his hand limp and fleshless—and left, shaking my head at his tenacity. Living a hundred years wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to live forever. That look in his eyes told me, and I smiled a little, hoping he could do it. But the visit scared me. I hustled down the hill to the boats as if I was running from the Reaper himself.
Another morning I noticed it was aging Doc to care for him. Doc was over seventy himself; in most towns he would have been the oldest one. Pretty soon he might be ours. One morning after a hard night I sat with Mando and Doc at the kitchen table. They’d been up through the small hours trying to ease Tom’s coughing, which had lost power but was more constant. All Doc’s wrinkles were red and deep, and there were rings under his eyes. Mando let his head rest on the table, mouth open like a fish’s. I got up and stoked their fire, got some water on, made them some tea and hot cereal. “You’re going to miss the boat,” Doc said, but smiled his thanks with one corner of his mouth. His hand trembled his tea mug. Mando roused at the smell of corn and scraped his face off the table. We laughed at him and ate. I trudged down the hill with the knot over my stomach.
* * *
That was Saturday. Sunday I went to church. There were people there who (like me) hardly ever went to church: Rafael, Gabby, Kathryn, and hiding at the back, Steve. Carmen knew why we were there, and at the end of her final prayer she said, “And Lord, please return our Tom to health.” Her voice had such power and calmness, to hear it was like being touched, being held. Her voice knew everything would be right. The amens were loud, and we walked out of the church like one big family.
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