by James Tate
A month from now we will be sucking marrow from the turkey bones. And then we will be eyeing one another carefully. We will listen in our beds at night for who among us will initiate the treachery.
Last night I dreamed again of the deer, tearing his ankles as he punched through the hard crust of the snow. I could feel his spirit weakening, his will to live faltering as the screech of constant pain roared through his body to his brain. There is not much meat on his bones this winter, but I rise from the bed and, still dreaming—I cannot let the dream blow out for one second—I find my boots and parka and penetrate the thick darkness and desolate cold, still holding on to the dream; and it is as though I am following tiny, high-pitched screams, as though I have some kind of radar that is leading me inexorably toward the spot where the deer willingly surrenders his thin, wracked body to me, as though I were performing some act of mercy for which he is grateful. But it is a long journey, and it is excruciatingly cold, and there is some question as to whether or not I can find my way home since the radar is no longer in effect. My son is shrinking before my eyes. He was on the school football team, quite good for a while, but now Jenny has made him quit for fear his bones are too brittle. He is listless and irritable and no longer calls me “Dad.” In fact, I don’t believe he addresses me directly anymore. He asks his sister to ask me to pass the salt. He was always such a hard worker, mowing lawns in the summer, delivering newspapers, babysitting. Neighbors don’t seem to trust him now; they don’t like him looking at what they have. They all seem to be doing so well, and John is angry, he doesn’t like what he sees. We used to be very close, John and I. I taught him everything I know, and now I don’t seem to know anything.
Jenny resents having to work. She was happy being a home-maker. She liked watching her children grow. Now it’s my job to stay home and watch them shrink. Missy, my daughter, I love her with all my life, I would lay down my life for her if that would buy her a future of love and allow her to blossom into the beautiful person she should be. But my life buys nothing today and I see the beginnings of a rancid insolence take root in her young body, and she speaks to me with contumely in her once mellifluous voice. Oh my Missy, my Missy, you too are drifting away, away from me, away from the future I wanted for you.
I am a ghost, smoking in the basement, smoking my last cigarette. I am not a part of this home any longer. I am a tiny thing created by indifferent scientists. I am an experiment, a mechanical bee placed near the hive. The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives.
THE JOURNEY WEST
Babe had been sick for two months, but she wouldn’t go to the doctor. She said they were vampires, sucked your blood until not even a miracle could save you. She knew of several cases personally. And she did believe in miracles, though she wasn’t religious.
I tried to help out around the house, make her a little dinner, bring her water, make her laugh, I always thought she would get better. And she did too for a while. We made some plans. We planned this big trip out West—Colorado, Wyoming, Montana—driving the back roads, stopping in those dusty, miserable towns. When you don’t have to live in them they’re great. People look at you like you’re crazy to even bother getting out of your car. They look you over to see if you’ve got anything they might want, or if you offend them. Some of those people take offense real easily. If you’ve got your hat on at the wrong angle they might want to kill you.
It seems as if I’ve known Babe my whole life and we’ve never taken a trip together. She’s gone on trips to visit various family members, and I’ve gone on my own, but we somehow just never got around to taking off together. Which seems too bad because we like the same sorts of things—Prairie Dog Towns, Reptile Gardens, two-headed anything, houses covered with old license plates, good steaks and good bourbon. Well, that’s a poor list. The truth is we’re both pretty easy to please. Neither one of us liked shopping malls or big discount stores. I just like her company.
But then she started to let go on me. Regarding the trip, she said one day, “You’ll have just as much fun if you go by yourself.”
“That’s not funny,” I said, sterner than I ever meant to sound, “We’re going on that trip. You’re going to be fine, Babe.” I don’t know how much I believed either of those statements at that time. I know it took all the strength I had to keep from rolling up into a ball on the floor and crying myself blind. But I didn’t want her to see me that way, or any way but strong and reliable, though, in fact, I was coming up shorter and shorter in each of those departments these days.
Babe could barely walk. She could make it to the bathroom and back to bed. But even then sometimes she needed some help. She had dizzy spells, fainting spells. She had a fever most of the time. But it was her eyes that I turned to for the real status report. It seems like such a short time ago I loved their dark, penetrating, feisty, concerned, kindly play. Now I see them saying to me, “Just let me go. It’s best if you stop loving me now. It will hurt you less. It will hurt me less. There’s nothing more we can do.” And I wanted to scream or whisper back to them: “Don’t go. You can’t go. You can’t leave me, you can’t leave this world yet. The world won’t let you go. Please, please, please!”
“Samantha would go with you,” Babe said another time. “You always have a good time with her.” She still made these little attempts at humor.
“Can you imagine sitting in a car 10 hours a day with Samantha? Or trying to sleep in a bed beside her? My God, I’d be suicidal or, worse, homicidal by the second day. That woman doesn’t know the meaning of silence. I can take her in 2 or 3 hour doses, and even enjoy her wild stories, her nonstop verbal cascades. But at some point I need to escape her presence immediately. I have left her mid-sentence on more occasions than I care to remember.”
Babe was laughing, holding her stomach, which I knew caused her very real pain. But sometimes it was worth the pain to let herself laugh.
“Once we get to Hygiene, Wyoming you’ll be feeling just fine. I bet they’ll have a nice bar there called The Germ Farm or something.” Babe had stopped laughing. My jokes had missed their mark. Her eyes had watered up at the thought, I guess, of not sitting at the bar with me in Hygiene. I held her hand tight and tried to smile. I called several doctors who had been recommended to me by various friends and tried to pry diagnoses from them after describing Babe’s symptoms as accurately as I could. But there was nothing in it for them except imagined legal suits. I even visited some homeopathy nuts out in the countryside, but their idiocy left me in despair. I called Samantha, who had worked part-time as an E.M.T., an Emergency Medical Technician, and she advised me to make sure Babe drank lots of water and lay still for as long as possible. I felt truly helpless. Babe wouldn’t talk on the phone any longer. She didn’t open her mail. I paid her bills and watered her plants. We hugged and kissed a lot in the early weeks of her illness, but all that had long since ceased. It was as if our bodies, our senses, had become mere annoyances. I respected her wishes in this regard, but not without enormous pain. Holding her hand or touching her brow occasionally was the sole reminder that we were not already floating in the spirit realm.
Luckily I had accumulated a lot of sick leave days at the Fire Department, where I had worked for more than 10 years. The Chief, Warren Palmer, was pretty understanding. “Sick is sick,” was all he said, and I’d try to show up one or two days a week, though often I left early even on those days, beset with worry.
Some days I just sat on a chair beside her bed and we wouldn’t say more than a couple of words for fourteen hours or so. I didn’t feel ill myself, but I did feel that I was dying, that all that had amused me, engaged me, entertained me and fascinated me for the whole of my life, was no longer of any consequence.
“There’s a town called Bar Nunn, in western Wyoming. I don’t suppose I could interest you in that? Great antelope steaks, I’m told.”
Babe was struggling for breath, and
I felt lowlier than a toadstool for even mentioning anything connected to this life. But I felt I had to. I no longer had any interest in taking a trip. I could feel my own level of resignation accelerating. When driving to the store for supplies, it’s not that my mind would drift, it would completely shut down. I had no thoughts at all for unknown stretches of time. But then I would come out of it and force myself to practice mental exercises, like picturing Babe before she became ill. I struggle to see her in shorts and a halter bending over in her garden, sitting on the patio with a bottle of beer cracking jokes with friends, or stirring a pot of chili in her kitchen talking to Samantha on the phone. I can’t hold on to these images for more than a few precious seconds. They are replaced by darkness, fever, sweat, sheets, bedclothes, rasping noises and then silence. And then a sort of grinding in the earth, which dogs my attempts at sleep.
She wouldn’t let me call anyone. And I respected this wish of hers because that was how we had always been with one another. I knew if the shoe were on the other foot she would do the same, even if my request were illegal or weird, she would abide by it.
I sat out on the front stoop one night and tried to count the stars. There weren’t that many. It was June and there were a couple of fireflies. I tracked what appeared to be a satellite for a while. The information it gathered, would it help one soul in Hygiene, Wyoming? Would it prolong Babe’s life even one moment? I had lived long enough, I had seen what I needed to see. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t an ugly mess the way some people said. I smoked a cigarette, savored it, and mentioned to myself that we had probably done the best we could.
Babe had been born in Edwards, Missouri some forty-three years before. And my folks didn’t even know where we had come from.
Babe was coughing in the bedroom. It wasn’t a normal cough, but something that came up from the depths of creation and turned on itself, and that had its own beauty and righteousness, like certain fires that defy man’s best efforts to control them. I was beginning to think that there was another realm where death had its own health plan, its roles for success and prosperity. Babe was no longer just an attractive waitress with a fair share of wit and intelligence, but now she was becoming a CEO of an underground stock exchange where commodities of unimaginable value quietly faded in and out of view. Those of us still living on schedule and following some kind of inept plan would never be able to afford even a glimpse of one share.
I was caught in a dream. “Jack,” she said to me, “Let’s take off in the morning. I’ll get myself together. We’ll pack some things. I’ll navigate if you’ll drive. Those little back roads and shrinking hamlets don’t know what they’ve been missing. Get on your traveling shoes, Jackie, my love, cause we’re going to dismantle the West.”
CAPTURED
Mr. Roth had chartered a specially equipped ambulance jet to fly his son home after his nearly successful suicide attempt. This was the culmination of years of struggle between father and son. Bernard Roth had married money and gone on with indomitable will to build an empire in construction and real estate. He was used to getting his way. He knew men of power and wealth from coast to coast, but he could not make his only son conform to his ideals. Richard admired his father’s drive and his old-fashioned sense of decorum and family honor, but at the same time he wanted different things for himself and had to fight every day of his life for his right to pursue his own interest. And Mr. Roth was hurt and angry at his son’s refusal to accept partnership in the family business. There were few souls indeed who did not bend to the iron fist of Bernard Roth’s will. Presidents asked his advice and yet he could not reach his only son. Nor could Richard ever truly escape his father’s long arm. They were locked in a lifelong struggle, where the very real love they could not help but feel for one another was the cruelest weapon of all.
As the private jet touched down on the runway, Mrs. Roth, so small and delicate beside the imposing form of her husband, had to summon great reserves of strength to keep Bernard from collapsing. He was making horrible, involuntary animal sounds as though he were choking and gasping for air. His face, once so supremely confident, was soaked with tears. She had never once in thirty-two years seen him so irrational; control was a virtue he prized among the highest.
“I should have sent him more money, that was it, but I thought he had to learn to make it on his own, I wanted him to become strong, I tried to reach him, I don’t know what he wanted, I didn’t understand why he chose to live like that, Richard just wouldn’t listen to me, I don’t know what I should have done, more money, I didn’t mind the money, I just wanted him to be strong . . .”
The sight of Richard being unloaded from the jet strapped to the stretcher caused Mr. Roth to quake and tremble until Mrs. Roth insisted that he sit down and breathe deeply.
“You can’t blame yourself, father,”—she had never liked the name Bernard and had taken to calling Mr. Roth father shortly after Richard’s birth—“Richard was always different. It’s not your fault. You did everything you could. You offered him a job, you supported him . . .”
Mr. Roth interrupted her impatiently: “We’ll get the best neurologist in the country. I’ll call the Surgeon General tonight. I’ve already hired a private nurse, did I tell you? The best. We’re going to get that boy back if it takes every cent I’ve got.”
Mrs. Roth already knew her husband would stop at nothing to reverse the hideous damage he had inflicted on himself. Richard had taken a massive overdose of methadone and the first report concluded that he suffered brain death. Mr. Roth’s response to those words when they were spoken to him on the long-distance phone call by the resident neurologist had been one of fury laced with threats of punishment. A Roth does not suffer brain death. The incompetent doctor should have his license to practice revoked!
Richard’s face was badly discolored, a ghastly purple and black, the result of oxygen deprivation during the thirty-six hours he lay undiscovered. Mr. and Mrs. Roth shuddered and clung to one another, and for a moment the tatter of hope was yanked from their grip and they floated helplessly in the blackness of space with no comfort anywhere in the vast and lonely universe. A team of doctors and nurses scurried about the stretcher adjusting tubes in their son’s nostrils and mouth and pushing the I.V. into place and other machines with which the parents were as yet unfamiliar. In all, they were shocked at the sheer tonnage of the machinery it required to keep their son just barely alive. And yet there was not one machine that could arouse him from his deep sleep.
In the weeks and months that followed, Mr. and Mrs. Roth fell into a routine that varied only superficially from day to day. They generally spent eight hours a day at the hospital. Specialists were flown in from the best hospitals in the country. Doctors were replaced several times because of disagreements with Mr. Roth. Setbacks alternated with minor improvements. Infection was finally rooted out of Richard’s body, and the low-grade fever that had worried and baffled the team of physicians was finally eradicated. And when Richard opened his eyes some four months after his suicide attempt, the Roth family could not help but rekindle the ashes of their hope. His eyes followed them around the room, and they said things to one another, such as “He’s in there, I just know it, Richard is in there.” And they would talk excitedly all through dinner that night, new thoughts, new theories, perhaps a psychologist, perhaps they should ask Richard’s friends to make tapes so he could hear their voices, anything that might awaken the brain. There was no way of knowing how much damage was irreversible. Neurologists were cautious, but most of them did not entirely discourage the idea that “miracles” can occur with the brain. It was still a young science, comparatively. And Richard had been an exceptionally intelligent young man. He was special.
In fact, he had become something of a celebrity on the sixth floor of Mt. Sinai. He had a steady stream of visitors, obviously wealthy, important people. And Mr. Roth, while imperious, was also capable of gallantry and generosity when a service has been rendered to his satisfaction. And
after his temper had exploded over some imagined or real misdeed, Mrs. Roth was generally there to pick up the pieces and console the wounded victim. Their presence had transformed the intensive care wing into something nearly glamorous.
Richard suffered seizures from time to time, and they were horrible to watch. His face contorted into inexpressible pain, and foam spilled out of the corners of his mouth—his parents were shattered at these times to be of no help at all. Mrs. Roth would bathe his head while Mr. Roth clenched and unclenched his fists and bit his lip. On several of these occasions, the attending physician would force Mr. Roth to accept injections of strong sedatives. They were worried about his health as well. For all his towering force as a man, he was quite visibly deeply shattered. His empire meant little or nothing to him now.
In the evenings Mr. Roth sometimes made long, rambling phone calls to some of Richard’s friends around the country. The friends were sympathetic; they knew of Richard’s long-standing contest with his father, but none of that seemed to matter now. Mr. Roth was what he was, a broken giant, and they tried to answer most of his questions as honestly as they could, while still protecting him from some of the more unsavory details of Richard’s decline.
Mr. Roth at first assumed that all Richard’s friends came from wealthy families like himself; and when he was finally disabused of that notion, he felt more confused than ever, and he had to drink himself to sleep, a weakness he would have never tolerated in himself before. Who was Richard Roth? The note Richard had left said simply: Mom and Dad, I’m sorry. I love you, Richard.
Mr. and Mrs. Roth considered themselves quite fortunate in their choice of the full-time private nurse they had hired. Angel Montez cared for Richard with single-minded devotion. She even took over some of the duties—such as shaving Richard each morning and washing his hair every other day—that properly belonged to the hospital orderlies. The Roths were moved by her devotion and brought her small gifts of chocolates from time to time. Mr. Roth even presented her with a pair of gold earrings on her birthday.