Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Patsy’s eyes were wide, but the tape had held on her mouth. The wire around her ankles had cut into the flesh, but not too far, and they held well, strung around the frame of the rocker. She’d exhausted herself all night rocking back and forth, trying to get over to the window; he’d had to pick her up twice between eleven and two when she’d spilled forward and slammed her head into the parquet. He’d wiped the blood from her nose, and kissed at her tears, and used his heart to try and unscramble a message to her, to help explain what he was doing and why he had to, but she was too busy listening to talk radio. She never got the messages he sent from his heart, but he always followed his heart and tried to get her to understand the direction it took him. It was no use talking to her, because she only understood normal everyday problems and emotions, not the kind that made a man do what he had to do, a place beyond words, a territory of pure obligation.

  Maybe if she still went to her job downtown, she wouldn’t have even noticed.

  But she, too, had retired; the retirement party had taken place at the Sportsman’s Lodge down on Edison and Fourth the previous Friday night. He was going to wait until she went to run some errands—and maybe if she hadn’t given up liquor so suddenly, and gotten religion in one lightning bolt of revelation, maybe she would’ve missed what he did.

  What he’d been doing for twenty-five years.

  He remembered his mother’s words, so many years back, on her deathbed. Her advice, her comfort. He repeated them, whispering, although Patsy would not hear them, she would hear the radio, radio, nothing but radio. “I know it’s terrible to watch your mother die like this, Cal. But far worse is it for me to go to my glory without knowing that you are taken care of. I want you to be happy, but I know the pain life brings. We’ve all had it visited upon us. Happy is the man who buries his own children, for in his pain, in his burden, is the care and comfort that he laid them to rest before their spirits could be crushed.”

  The sunlight burned the windowsill, beneath the translucent shade, and he heard old Vix whining from the kitchen—still chewing that lemon.

  Patsy smelled, and her face glowed with sweat.

  Nine children in twenty-five years.

  Someone was bound to find out, one day, but he never imagined it would be his wife. She had used the soap, she had used the candles, she had blown on the whistle he made out of bone, the whistle with the little sparrow carved into the side, the whistle like ivory. She had stood by him when he spoke with the police about each one running away, about the troubles boys and girls like that faced, not feeling that their biological parents had claimed them, not feeling at home, not feeling safe.

  Not feeling cared for.

  On the radio, a teenaged girl giggled and talked about not having her first period until she was sixteen.

  He had promised Patsy, too, that he would care for her until death. Perhaps this was Providence stepping in and making sure he was as good as his word, although he didn’t believe in fate or God or karma.

  Soon, he’d have to stop old Vix’s breath, too, for what would a dog do if his master were to die?

  I’ve been dying for years, Patsy, his heart said, and I’ve cared for my own.

  It wasn’t fun, never, he wasn’t one of those who enjoyed doing his duty. It was like being a soldier, shooting his brother, but the weight of his obligation was great.

  His mother, too, he had taken care of her in her last moments.

  He had no choice back then, when he was sixteen, because she had been the one with the gun in her hand, and it had taken a good half hour to wrestle it from her.

  Mother was trying to take care of him, but Cal had known, even then, that it was a man’s job. He knew he was damned, but it was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of proposition when you came into this world.

  Patsy’s eyes were bulging, and he never liked to see her worried or in pain, but he had wanted to give her time to think it over and make her peace. Life is meant to work out the way it works itself out, and maybe Patsy, maybe she would die within the next decade anyway, and if something happened to him, who would care for her?

  The weight of duty was heavy, for sure.

  The Radio Lady said, “We are given free choice when it comes to our own behavior, and we can only change someone else insofar as we can change ourselves, you know?”

  He looked around for her needles, the long thick ones.

  He didn’t like to prolong pain, and he remembered how peaceful his mother had been, how the gasp from her bosom, and the stench, and the relief in the act itself, were like opening a sewer pipe of flesh to release gas and what was trapped inside the gutter of the body.

  It was noon before her heart stopped, and nearly one when he’d taken her down to his woodshop. He laid her across the bench, her neck in a vise because it helped keep the rest of the body stable if the spine held.

  Then he went to work, and he cried, as he always did, and he drowned out the sound of talk radio with his instruments.

  The sky clouded over by two-thirty. The children were let out of school, and he had to wait until the last yellow bus took off, and the last child had finished walking home, peeking over the wall to taunt Vix into barking, before he could go out and dig some more. He went to the mulch pile, which was still moist and humid with dead grass and sour milk and the fish heads from Tuesday’s supper. Vix lay down beside him and let a lemon roll from his mouth. The old dog looked at the lemon and pawed it. Cal noticed there were ants crawling across it. He bent over, his back hurt, picked it up, was about to toss the rotting, chewed, ant-cursed lemon into Fat Broad’s yard, when he figured, what the hell, and dumped it down beside him. Then he pitched the shovel in deep, trying to keep in mind where he’d buried the pigtailly girl from two years back. When he felt he had dug down far enough, he went and got several of Patsy’s parcels, and plopped them in, and then checked the wall for a spy, saw no one, and went and got the rest.

  Vix sniffed the hole he’d dug, but the dog was more attached to lemons than anything else out in the yard. “Find another one, Vix, this one,” Cal nudged the rotting lemon by his foot, “this one’s all wormy. Good boy.”

  He took the radio, too, shut it off, finally, and dropped it in, kicked in the wormy lemon and some fish heads, and covered the whole mess up.

  Then he went into the kitchen, sat at the small glass table, and actually missed the sound of talk radio for once in his life. He went and turned on the little radio he’d bought for Patsy, the one she’d never used. He turned it to the talk radio station and kept the volume up.

  “I just loved that last call—didn’t you?” the Radio Lady said. “It’s a day brightener to hear something like that in these times. Imagine, rescuing a cat and someone’s grandmother in the same hour. Gosh, sometimes life is difficult, but it’s always fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Cal looked at the telephone hanging from the wall.

  At the radio.

  Wonder if Patsy ever called in.

  She wasn’t one for discussing her life.

  Miss her, even so.

  The Radio Lady announced the number to call in, and Cal went and dialed it.

  After seven rings, a man picked up, and Cal hung up quickly.

  Then he dialed again, got the man who mentioned he was screening calls, and asked Cal what his problem was.

  “It’s about my wife and kids. I have trouble, sometimes, taking care of them.”

  The man on the phone told him he’d be on in about two minutes.

  Two minutes turned to four, when the Radio Lady came on. Cal had to turn the radio down to hear her. “What can I help you with?”

  “Well,” he said, then thought he might hang up.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said.

  “I’ve been listening to you for a long time. Years.”

  “Well, I’ve been here four years so far, so thanks for the compliment.”

  “Hmm. I thought it was longer. Well, it’s about my wife and my kids.”r />
  “Is it good or bad?”

  “Neither. Just about life. What I’ve learned. I’m sixty-three, you know.”

  “Congratulations. Hey, isn’t it great that you people still call in?”

  “My wife, I miss her, and the kids. Most of the kids.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Nine.”

  “Holy cow, nine kids. And you raised them all?”

  “I cared for each and every last one of them to the best of my ability.”

  “Well, you deserve a pat on the back for that. These days, too many people are abandoning their children.”

  “That’s right,” Cal said, “most of my kids were like that. Foster kids. But my wife and I took them in. Loved them. Gave them a home. And I fulfilled my obligation to them, too.”

  “I wish I could meet a man like you,” the Radio Lady said. “I’ll bet a lot of women in my audience would. So what are you calling about, you catch?”

  Cal paused. “I’m tired of burying them. I miss them.”

  The Radio Lady said nothing.

  Cal said, “Oh, they live on, in things, in day-to-day objects, when I wash sometimes, I can smell their skin. Fresh. So fresh, the way only a child can smell.”

  The Radio Lady said nothing.

  And then Cal realized why.

  She was crying. “Oh, you poor wonderful man. God bless you, God bless you.”

  “Thank you,” Cal said, and hung up.

  He went and turned off the radio. He couldn’t cry anymore. Except for taking care of Vix, he had fulfilled his obligations. He just couldn’t take care of Vix, not yet.

  In the morning, the roses needed hosing down because he had been hoping it would rain and had left them dry for days. He washed with the sunken-eyed boy soap, and remembered the tight little curl to the child’s fingers (although he couldn’t for the life of him remember names much anymore). Then he went outside, turned the hose on, and sprayed down Vix while he flooded the roses. Ants came out from the soaked earth, and crawled up the garden wall. Fat Broad emerged in her yard wearing a muumuu and barbed-wire curlers with her Yorkshire terrier, getting the ball of stringy fur to yap, yap. Before he could take cover, she’d spotted him and called out, “Your wife—is she all right?”

  Cal pretended not to hear.

  She thinks I’m ancient, so being deaf isn’t much of a stretch.

  Fat Broad and her Yorkie toddled over to the wall, and he smiled and then dropped the smile.

  She said, “I don’t hear the radio. The talk shows.”

  “Radio broke. Wife won’t listen to any other radio. She’s a peculiar woman. Thirty-five years of marriage.”

  “I’m not surprised it broke. Good heavens, she played it night and day. You must be happy it broke.”

  He scrunched up his face angrily. “Not at all, woman. I was used to it.”

  “Well, it’s nice to have the quiet so I can hear my wind chimes.”

  “Doesn’t get too windy,” Cal said, stepping as far from the wall as he could without getting too muddy in the puddles he’d created with the garden hose. Vix put his forepaws up on the wall and began barking at Fat Broad and her Yorkie, so the neighbor retreated.

  He went and checked the bougainvillea, which hadn’t been growing well this year, although the trumpet vine was in full bloom, with hummingbirds darting in and out of its blossoms.

  I take care of my own. My family, my garden.

  My obligations.

  Oh, but he missed them, their kisses, their hands, their love.

  Even his mother, with that friendship of blood that transcended all others.

  It’s over, he thought. It’s done.

  Someone, in another yard, somewhere, he thought, just beyond Fat Broad’s, turned up their radio loud as if to fill the void left by Patsy’s blaster.

  He could faintly hear the Radio Lady say, “You’re on the air, caller? You’re on the air.” A child’s voice said, “Hi… um… I don’t know if I’m s’posed to call you … but I listen to you all the time.”

  The Radio Lady said something, although Cal couldn’t quite hear it.

  The boy said, “I ain’t—I mean, I guess, I haven’t ever called in. Not like this.”

  Another voice, a girl’s said, “Hello? Wow. This is cool. Hello? Is someone there?”

  “You’re talking with the Radio Lady,” the other voice said, and although faint, Cal recognized it. It was Patsy.

  He went and called Fat Broad back over to the wall. She came over, shuffling like she was all bound up inside that oversized dress, and curled up her nose at him like he stank.

  “You hear that?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Listen.” He held a finger to his lips.

  Fat Broad was silent for a moment, cocking her head to the side like she was trying to roll that last marble right out from her eardrum.

  Another boy, about six, said, “I scared.”

  The girl, the pig-tailly girl, Cal was sure, said, “Don’t be scared. We’re all taken care of. Aren’t we?”

  Fat Broad interrupted Cal’s listening. “I don’t hear nothing. Is it a siren or something? If you tell me what I’m listening for, maybe I can hear it.”

  Cal was angry that she was talking so much while the talk radio was going on. “No,” he said. “I won’t tell you. If you don’t hear it, I won’t.”

  “I hear things sometimes,” Fat Broad said, nodding. “Maybe you’re hearing a ghost.”

  Cal looked at her sharply. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t mean that kind, I mean like on TV when you have a ghost image. Or now that your wife’s radio broke, you’re so used to hearing it that you still think it’s playing.” But the woman saw that Cal was paying no attention to her, so she tramped across her own pansy bed to reprimand her son for leaving his bicycle out in the driveway.

  Cal listened, and noticed that Vix, covered with mud in the garden, seemed to be listening, too.

  He couldn’t fall asleep. He went to Patsy’s room and rocked back and forth in the chair, smelling her smell. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out at the backyard. The radio had gotten louder, just a bit, but still not to the volume it had been up to when Patsy had been around. He listened to each of his nine children talk with their mother, and he listened to her words of comfort, but he was still very sad.

  At least I have one comfort, he thought, at least I can hear them.

  And then, around three a.m., just as he was nodding off, he heard a voice on the radio that did not belong to any of his children, nor to his wife.

  It was a woman with such an impediment to her speech, it sounded like a toad was sitting beneath her tongue. “Ca-hoo, Ca-hoo, heh-up mee, Ca-hoo.”

  He got out of the rocker and went to the window. He rolled the side windows open wider.

  “Mother?” he asked, peering out into the dark.

  “Cay-uh, cay-uh,” she said, and then was lost in the static of the radio.

  She had said “care,” he was sure.

  Even though she wasn’t buried in the yard, but in a cemetery twenty-five miles away, she had traveled through the ground waves, through the sewage pipes of the dead, to speak to him.

  He knew why her voice was strange, because of what he’d had to do to her mouth.

  He wished now he hadn’t. He would like to understand her better, for she was a person of enormous wisdom.

  He watched the darkness, listening for her voice again on the radio, but all was silence.

  He drank several shots of whiskey, not his style at all, and slept late. He dreamed of the sound of machines roaring and dogs barking, and awoke at nine-thirty when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  He smelled mud and flowers, and looked into the empty eyes of his mother, her face dripping with mud and sewage. She opened her scarred mouth, the one that had burned so well when he stretched the electric cord across her lips, between her teeth, and switched on the juice. The scars t
ook the form of a star pattern, and when she parted her lips, dry leaves and dead grass dropped out.

  She took his hand and led him to the woodshop, where the sound of talk radio drowned out the other sounds, the sounds of the care one human being shows for another.

  The Hurting Season

  1

  The wind had a taste to it. Leona hung out the wash on the rope strung between the willow and the sapling, down by the river, with the smell of shad, dead on the water’s surface from running, and the clean of soap powder and bleach; the Sack was strung up and bounced with each windblow; and Mama was boiling meat in back before the flies would be up to bother her; and it was a rough wind, a March wind even in late April, coming ahead of a storm.

  The river was high, threatening flooding if the storms kept up, which they were wont to do, but Theron had done all the clearing, and the chairs and table from the levee were already in the springhouse, the old springhouse that no longer flooded, and he was almost to the shed now, because the horses were kicking at the stall.

  The sky was its own secret blue, unnatural, with blue clouds and blue winds and blue sun, all signaling a squall coming down from off-island. Theron could see the oyster boats rocking across the bay, two miles from the house, just like mosquito larvae wriggling, and he wondered how it was on Tangier, and what about that girl he met at Winter Festival—he was fourteen, and she was nearly seventeen, but he had seen it in her eyes, those flatland island dull eyes, a flicker of what could only have been fire when she had let him touch her the way Daddy touched Mama.

  The horses, prophesying storm, kicked the wood, and the shed trembled. Mama cried out at the noise, surprised, but Leona, in her earthly wisdom, just kept hanging sheets and shirts as if the impending storm mattered not one whit, for it would come and go quickly, a final rinse for the laundry. Theron kept buttoning his shirt; the screen door banged with the wind; the blue sky turned indigo and then gray, with flashes of lightning between. First drops of rain, sweet and cold.

  He ran like a horse himself, back to the shed, for he loved the horses and could not bear their distress. The ground was damp but not muddy, and he galloped across it barefoot in spite of the biting chill. He could feel the rain spitting at his back as he got there, to the door, which he drew back. The smells of the horses, the manure, the cats, too, for they roamed among the piles and hay for mice and snakes, strong but not unbearable.