Traci, an aide, stops on the way to the parking lot, speaks to Emily. Mr. Rhodes starts toward his car.
Emily is saying something to Traci about the brain’s being like an onion. Carl decides he’ll do what Flowers does—listen in for a song idea. He sits down in a rocker, close enough to hear.
“It starts to wither more or less from the outside,” says Emily, “and so the inside is preserved and you can remember from way back, but because the outside is damaged from lack of oxygen and all, you can’t remember some of what happened the day before, or in the last hour or few seconds. She’s repeating right bad.”
Mrs. Talbert rolls her wheelchair over and asks the nephew, “What did she say?” This man has the nicest pair of lace-up shoes, and he’s such a loyal visitor.
“Wither. Something starts to wither in your brain.” This is the first time Carl remembers seeing her away from the door.
“Something’s withering about me too. My legs burn all the time, down toward my ankles.”
I certainly can’t get anything from this, thinks Carl—for a song. And I don’t know if I even should.
“You ever tried Cetaphil?” Emily asks Mrs. Talbert.
“No. They don’t make nothing for the skin that’s any good anymore. Not since Palmer’s. I don’t think they can do any more for my legs. And that osteoporosis is not something that gets better. I got it all over the place.” She holds up her hands. “I got it in my fingers.”
Carl wants to get back to work. He looks at his watch, stands, then sees Mrs. Satterwhite—Beatrice—pushing her three-wheeler out through the door. He sits back down.
“What’s ‘dot-com’?” Beatrice asks Emily. “They keep saying it on television.”
“It’s like an address—it’s part of an address. Did you know you can send a letter through a computer now? That’s all it is, part of an address. It’s like, well, the E-mail comes through a telephone line, and a telephone line these days can transfer writing and pictures.”
“I don’t see how they get it in there,” says Beatrice.
“It’s a quandary,” says Mrs. Talbert.
“It’s a quandary,” thinks Carl. That’s a line—a title. He tries it. Then something about the laundry? No. No good.
“Not really,” says Emily. “The lines carry electrical impulses. A line can be one hundredth the width of a single hair, and it’s not paper that it carries, it’s electrical impulses, which get translated into letters—words and letters.”
Carl stands.
“It has to do with electric current and the speed of light,” says Emily. “All this is moving so fast it—”
“Have you ever thought about this?” says Beatrice. “There’s a buildup, buildup, buildup, of electricity. It just keeps building up and building up and building up.”
Carl sits again.
Beatrice turns and looks at Carl. “And it’s all going to just explode, ka-wham, and that’s going to be the end of the world. Late at night when I cut off the TV, I can see a little flicker in there—after the TV has already been cut off. There it is—a little flicker of electricity in there—but the thing is already cut off. That stuff is building up, building up, building up. All over the place.”
“Cars are so complicated now, nobody knows how to fix them,” says Traci.
Out rolls L. Ray. He nods to Carl, “Hey, buddy.”
“Howdy.” Carl checks his watch again. He’ll leave the song-title-getting to L. Ray. He needs to go to work. He stands.
“My car broke down yesterday,” says Emily, “and within five minutes a wrecker drove by with the nicest black man driving, and he took me and my car straight to my mechanic and I don’t think he even charged me the full fee. God was there for me in my time of need. He hasn’t failed me yet.”
L. Ray says, “You know, Emily, I used to think that very same thing. I used to preach that very same thing, until I read about a child dying of leukemia and I got to thinking and I . . .”
Carl sits back down, picks up a newspaper, and pretends to read.
“I tried to summon up God, and I realized all of a sudden that every time God is helping me, some little child or baby is dying somewhere on earth, a bunch of them, as a matter of simple fact—guiltless children, frightened children, children dying with that fright still in their eyes. I mean death hits, bam, while a little baby is still scared, bam, Mr. Death, that is, Mr. Prince of Darkness, Mr. Void, Mr. Finality, Mr. That’s All She Wrote. He—now forget about the baby, think right here—he’s practically always corridored behind these doors at Rosehaven, or worse still, down at Shady Rest, lurking, waiting for a chance to barajarum in through a door and grab up somebody. Swoosh in lightly. Whoosh out bearing that heavy soul bound for the fiery internal void of boundless hollow black space, and sometimes that slack-jawed sore-gummed seventy-nine-pound very old lady is awake before she dies, with her eyes saying, Save me save me save me—her eyes darting from you to the somebody standing back there behind you. Then back to you. And sometimes they unconscious, sometimes they be thrashing around, done thrashed outen they clothes like a woman hit on a motorcycle leaving her shoes, and you wonder how she can be hit hard enough to leave her shoes at the wreck while she be way over yonder in the woods. And then that final long fifty seconds or two minutes or one or two hours that little lady be laying there on the sheets, laying on her final sheet change, her final sheet with ‘Hall 3’ marked on a sheet corner in black Magic Marker, and doing her dead-level best to get one last, last . . . one last breath. Then finally a breath do not come and the last one is the very, the ultimate, the last squeaked in, the puff, the sputter, the oh-my-this-is-it last one forever, sister. No, no, no. All that is normal death. I’m talking about that same Mr. Death, Mr. Void, Mr. Prince of Darkness, taking a little helpless baby who’s never thought nothing wrong, nothing bad, nothing sinful, never done nothing but breathed, and so I, personally . . .”
Carl is embarrassed by the emotion of the message-giving. He looks from his newspaper without moving his head. L. Ray is staring up at Emily, fingers of one hand resting against his chest, talking with his other hand, and kind of twitching around in his seat.
“. . . I just can’t make all that work together—the stuff you just said, the stuff about God looking after somebody personally with all the bad stuff that’s going on everywhere. I think it’s sad that fundamentalists—you pick the religion—have got the one true track to God, the one and only true track of all the ways of worship on earth. No fundamentalist is tolerant.” He keeps looking at Emily. “That I know of.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Mr. Flowers. I’m not sure you have much ground to stand on.” Emily turns to Mrs. Olive’s nephew, now looking up at her. “I believe in a personal God. Don’t you?” she says to him. She feels desperate, angry, and knows her face is flushed. She needs some support, some backup from this normal man.
Carl answers, “Well, I guess. I believe in the Bible and God and Jesus and all the things I grew up with, and I do like the old hymns.” He can’t give her exactly what she wants, he knows. He isn’t even sure what he believes in. He can’t remember being asked.
L. Ray asks Emily, “Do you go to Listre Baptist?”
“Yes, I do.” She glares at him.
“You all have missionary families going to England and Alaska and South Africa, don’t you?”
“We have partnerships with Baptists in other countries and we try to—”
“It seems like church members often have a desperate need to be unaware of the local needs of the local wrecks of local women stacked along the local grim halls of local nursing homes, places in conditions far sadder than merry Rosehaven—places like Shady Rest. I read about lay missionaries off to Alaska, where paid church workers are already on station.”
“I am a—”
“Off to Alaska,” Flowers sings. “You’re off to Alaska to see some other Baptists. It blows my mind. WWJD? Why, yes, he’d go to Alaska.”
He is ranting a
gain. Carl looks at his watch.
“I’m a caretaker, Mr. Flowers,” says Emily. “My aunt is up here. And in my church we have people assigned to elderly people, to help them, and—”
“You know what, Mrs. . . . I’m sorry.”
“McPherson. Emily McPherson.”
“Mrs. McPherson, I am very sorry. I apologize. I need to stop lecturing. I am forever turning good people against me. I know you’re doing what you can for the Lord, and the fact that you’re even doing anything, whether we agree about it or not, is a kind of miracle in itself. I’m sorry.”
Emily stands, staring at L. Ray. She opens her mouth, closes it, looks at Carl, looks back to L. Ray, and says, “You sick redneck. Riding your high horse . . . You Unitarian.”
“Them are a poor excuse for shoes, if you ask me,” says Mrs. Talbert to Emily.
“Excuse me?”
But Mrs. Talbert is on the way back to her spot by the door.
Emily turns—her clay jewelry jangles—and heads for the parking lot.
Carl decides he’ll try something with L. Ray. He’ll tell him what he’s thinking. “I don’t think the whole subject of God is something people are going to change their minds about. There’s just something about it that—”
“Well, they should.”
“Will you change your mind?”
“Most certainly. I have. I didn’t know you’d thought about all this.”
“I hadn’t till just now,” says Carl, “much. It’s too deep for me.”
“What do you suggest?”
Carl remembers a joke. “Did you hear about the grandson who went to see his grandma and she didn’t know who he was, and he said, ‘Grandma, I’m David, your daughter’s son.’ She says, ‘Who?’ He says, ‘You know your daughter, Betty, don’t you?’ And she says, ‘Yes.’ And he kind of points at himself and says, ‘Well, I’m David, her son, and that makes me your grandson.’ She looks at him a minute and says, ‘That’s too deep for me.’”
“Ah,” says L. Ray. “And that’s exactly one of my points.”
I don’t want to hear one of your points, thinks Carl.
“If it’s not obvious,” says L. Ray, “if it has something to do with something that’s not obvious, why talk about that, when there are all these grim halls and all this work and a surefire way to get it all started—when there’s all that work to talk about?”
“Well, that’s a good question. Speaking of that, I’ve got to get to work. I was trying to pick up a song idea, but nothing hit me.”
“I got one for you: ‘Fat from Shame.’ I was—”
“I heard about it already.”
Lunch at the Piccadilly
ON THE WAY TO Rosehaven to pick up his aunt Lil and Mrs. Cochran to take them to the Piccadilly for lunch, Carl gets the idea that he ought to look through Aunt Lil’s file box. It’s beside him on the front seat of the Taurus. He stops at Burley’s Exxon and sits for a minute with the air conditioner on and finishes listening to a song on the radio. Then he presses the button lock, and the box opens. Inside are manila folders labeled BANK, INSURANCE, PICTURES, and TAXES, and one that says PRIVATE. He figures he’ll just hand that one to her, but then he figures he can glance in. He pulls it out.
There are five or six letters in envelopes, it looks like, and something has been torn up and dropped in there. He grabs a piece of it: thick paper, nice, old paper, once torn up and balled up, then flattened out. Or balled up first, then torn up.
He gets out all the pieces, puts the file box in the floor-board, and starts fitting the pieces together on the seat, like a puzzle. He sees that it’s a certificate of marriage, Aunt Lil and Uncle Tad’s. What is this about? He puts the pieces back in their folder and closes the box. No need to bother anything. He’s not even sure why he’s looking in there.
CARL PULLS UP in the Rosehaven parking lot. A rescue squad van is parked under the roof at the porch entrance. As he gets out of his car, the van drives off.
Anna is in the lobby talking to a middle-aged couple, and when she sees him, she nods, and he knows it’s not his aunt Lil the rescue squad has come for.
When he gets to her room, Aunt Lil is standing by her window, looking out. A hammer lies on her bed. She turns and looks at Carl. She is dressed for the Piccadilly, except her wig is not on and her sparse hair stands out every which way.
“Hey, there,” he says, and puts the file box down by her La-Z-Boy.
She slowly sits down on the bed. “Time is the strangest thing. It pulls up into a little bunch and just sits there, not even spread out anymore, and all the people you’ve ever known—mothers you remember from way, way back, and their babies, babies you remember, babies becoming mothers and then grandmothers—all of it gets wrapped up in a little bunch that seems about a year or two old, and it’s all right there behind you. It just stops being all stretched out for some reason. Beatrice got carried to the hospital today. She had a stroke, and it made me start thinking back over things, start trying to think back over things.”
Carl pictures Beatrice sitting on that seat in her three-wheeled walker, touching her gold pin. “I’m sorry to hear that. You know, one thing I’ve wondered—where do you think she got all that about Walter Cronkite and her son?”
“I guess it happened.”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just . . . Do you still want to go to the Piccadilly?”
“Yep.” She stands slowly and, in front of the mirror, holds her wig above her head, pulls it on, straightens it, then reaches for her walker. “But let me tell you what I did. I had that picture of me and the business-school girls to put up, so they brought me a hammer and I tried to nail that little hook thing into the back of the picture frame . . . I was trying to get it to work, and I kept saying to myself, Something’s not right.”
“I see. Yeah, that wouldn’t work all that well.”
“So I finally just went out and found Anna, and she sent Roman down here to hang it up. Doesn’t it look nice?”
“It does.”
“Now, what did you just ask me?”
“Do you still want to go to the Piccadilly?”
“Yes. Clara’s going. And I invited Mr. Flowers to go along.”
“To the Piccadilly?”
“Yes, he’s had some bad luck. Somebody says they’re running him out, and I can’t imagine why. I tried to ask Anna, but she wouldn’t talk about it.”
In a few minutes, Carl opens the door to L. Ray’s room. Straight ahead are double windows with Venetian blinds closed against a bright sun. L. Ray sits in his wheelchair with his back to the windows. He wears a navy blue T-shirt. The room has been completely rearranged; earlier, the bed was by the windows. “Hey there,” says Carl. “I’m sorry about your bad luck. I’m getting ready to take Aunt Lil up to the Piccadilly and she asked me to come get you, but don’t feel obliged if you’re not in a notion to go.”
L. Ray smiles. “With you and Mrs. Olive and Mrs. Cochran to the Piccadilly? Of course. I’ll meet you in the lobby. I guess you heard about Beatrice—Mrs. Satter-white?”
“I heard.”
“It’s sad. She’s a main supporter. Rhodes is saying I’ve exposed myself to somebody up here, and that’s all the information I can get. I don’t understand. And please don’t tell the ladies.”
“Damn.” What in the world? Would he do that?
“But they can’t keep me from visiting, from coming back, without some kind of restraining order. From keeping things rolling. And we’ll keep playing music for the ladies. It’s a free country—unless you’re old and in the way.”
“Well . . .” Carl can’t think of a thing to say. “Do you know that song, ‘Old and In the Way’?”
“Great song. Jerry Garcia.”
“I think David Grisman wrote that one.”
“Maybe so. That would be a good one to learn, anyway.” L. Ray reaches for a shirt. “We’ll see you in the lobby in a few minutes.”
“Carl, this is Danny.”
“Howdy,” says Carl.
They shake hands.
“My pleasure. Are you a relative of Mr. Flowers’s?”
“No. Just a friend.”
“Danny’s here on business,” says Anna. “He’s delivering a, uh . . . an eviction notice to Mr. Flowers. Mr. Rhodes gave him a week.”
“Where’d they get this exposing himself stuff?” He glances at the policeman, then back at Anna.
“I’m not supposed to say,” says Anna. “Nor is Danny.”
• • •
RIDING TO THE PICCADILLY, they pass a badly crushed automobile that has not been towed from the accident site. Carl thinks about the conversation he needs to have with Aunt Lil, once and for all. Not now, though. She’s in back with Mrs. Cochran. L. Ray is up front with him.
“Mr. Flowers,” says Aunt Lil, “did they ask you to leave?”
“Oh, no. My time is up. My leg is about well. I’ll be heading home in the next week or so. But I’ll be coming back to visit you ladies. We can’t desert our movement.”
“I’ll say not,” says Mrs. Cochran.
Along about the Triple A Rent-All, Aunt Lil says, “When do you think it might be time to travel some?”
“It shouldn’t be too long. Once we get the news out there, get some financing, we’ll be on the road.”
“Lil,” says Mrs. Cochran, “you can drive the van.”
“That’d be fun,” says Lil.
She’d do it, thinks Carl.
“You’d run all the red lights between here and Florida,” says Mrs. Cochran, “and they’d put us in prison—which reminds me, I want you all to listen to this: My husband, Martin, heard from a prison guard one time this story about a prisoner who somehow had the whole bottom half of his face torn off, from just below his eyes. I think it was some kind of farm machine he got caught in, or something blew up in his face or something, you know, where they work on the farm—the prisoners. They fixed him up in the prison hospital as good as they could.”
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 13