Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  “But this one isn’t?” I said.

  Blix said “What does that mean?”

  “You said she was in trouble when we turned in last night, and then you proceeded to do about an hour of demolition on her. I was stunned to see her able to walk this morning.”

  Blix pulled at his coffee. “She won’t much longer.”

  “Won’t what?”

  “Walk.”

  “Meaning what?” I said.

  “Her trouble is multiple sclerosis.”

  “Since when?” I said.

  “Since yesterday. The doctor told her then—they’d been testing for weeks. She had stopped in to tell me just before you came.”

  “No wonder you met me like a sack of dead babies.”

  “Sorry,” Blix said. “I’d hoped to cheer you up.”

  “It’s incurable?”

  “She knows that.”

  “What will she do now?”

  “Stay here and die.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Years. Who knows?”

  “What will you do?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you ready for the next thrill? I had to have a physical myself last week—I’m suspected of having a touch of TB.” He gave a little Garbo cough, laughed a little.

  But I reached out and stopped him, pressing his wrist. I begged him, “Stay with her.” Tears instantly poured. “Don’t leave her now.”

  Blix jerked his wrist free, stared wide-eyed at me as though I were lethal, had powers, could force him. Then he said—aloud at last: the waitress looked up—“Oh Jesus, I’m all but cured already!” Then he burst into laughter that seemed so nearly the last thing we shared, so necessary, that I joined him helpless.

  The rest of this morning and the early afternoon, we did good deeds. Or tried to do them. Or tried to discover what deeds needed doing, then wheedle the numerous permissions to do them. Someone had told Blix the day before that an Indian named Atso had been sick in bed for over a week and needed food and firewood. Blix had waited till this morning, he said (I asked), for several reasons—he’d been told after dark and didn’t want to risk getting snowbound with his truck (four-wheel drive though it is) three miles off the highway up a steep arroyo; this Atso was a drunk, that was his trouble (a weeklong drunk) and Blix was sick of running taxi service for hopeless winos. His aims had been higher. This morning the problem was sun—a thaw. The washes would be mud.

  But we made it very slowly, up a ditch deep in mud between pink cliffs, all bare as the moon and so beautiful, profuse, as to be unnoticeable—an occasional plant neither of us could name, odd strips of barbed wire surrounding nothing and the standard-issue dead coyote (defrosting, collapsing inward on himself but grinning to the last). Then the Atsos—my first hogan. Round, of mud and logs, a domed roof cut by a stove pipe dissolving in rust, it seemed a low but immortal growth implored from the ground by protracted bellowings (hunching gyrations, gashings, blood) from the wretched of the earth—the only gift they would ever receive, except cur dogs (three groveled at the door) and their adamant faces. And government food—the yard was strewn with cans of white man’s food they would only feed to dogs: string beans, dried milk. And our little grudging visit, mine and Blix’s.

  Blix went in, through the barking dogs, past the dwarf oblivious grandmother spreading quilts on a line (quilts made of dirt).

  I waited in the truck. Blix had said it would be hard enough doing business without me along, a fresh white stranger. So to pass the time, I filled out a form for a Carte Blanche credit card (I mean—I’ll need—to make a lot more trips). Then—no sign of Blix, just me and the dogs, the mud and the quilts, pinyon and snow and sandstone cliffs—I defaced the application by writing lines on the clean backside:

  Ten yards to my left an Indian man—

  age 30, alcoholic, Navajo—

  lies locked in unknown illness, silence, calm.

  My friend—whose job it is—yearns patiently

  to comprehend, heal ancient various wounds;

  gives solemn smiles, shows new-grown neck-length curls.

  I stay outside beside the truck’s strong heater,

  complete my application for Carte Blanche—

  Income? I write in Thirty thousand dollars,

  growl at the Indian’s dog, begin this poem.

  I’m cheating, you’ll say—“You were thinking then, alone there and idle.” What was I thinking? Do I have human feelings?—his wife freshly dead and he two thousand miles from home at Christmas on an Indian reservation the size of West Virginia (and twice as miserable), his only two companions struck with maybe fatal diseases? If you’ve followed me this far, you’ll be grumbling for such answers. And a good many more—why did she do it? Wait; please, wait. Remember, Tolstoy tells you only two or three facts about the life of Anna before the book’s present. I’m struggling to tread the waters of the present. Tread with me or sink (or swim back out—simply shut the book). The present is my story. The rest is waiting.

  In fact, at the time, I wasn’t thinking. The manual labor (application, poem) took care of conscious thought—analysis, self-pity. In its own way, each gesture now is desperate, each step a kind of busy-work. The unconscious was whirring away, no doubt—because, by the end of the poem, I was feeling. The inside of my skin was rapidly furring (a sick child’s tongue) with unfocused misery; and I was considering disobeying orders—entering the hogan. At least I’d have sights, new grist for the eyes.

  But Blix appeared, fast and furious. He tore the door open, climbed in, gripped the steering wheel and shook it as though he were tetanizing. No glance at me, no word.

  “All dead?” I asked.

  Another siege of spasms, a long wait—“Yes, goddammit.”

  I was ready to think he had cut their throats. “Be serious.”

  He laughed. “No, but everybody’s sick as dogs—except the dogs and that old woman. Atso’s not drunk—sober as you—but he and three kids are baking with fever and nobody can—or will—speak two words of English. They don’t trust me so there’s no chance of hauling them all to Gallup. They want a medicine ceremony—they haven’t got ten cents to buy dry beans—and I, being me, don’t even own an aspirin. Dr. Cunningham.” By then he had calmed. He was galvanized, onstage, a clear duty at hand. He sat awhile longer, then said, “I’m sorry. We’ve got to do this—I’ll go to Window Rock to get a tribal nurse. If I try to phone her, she’ll never find the place. With the roads this muddy, that’ll take four hours. But will you wait here?—at my place, I mean? I’m supposed to be visited sometime today by the thinly disguised regional spy from VISTA. YOU can tell him I’m at work, saving lives Hell for leather—you’ll even have a share in this glorious work. Then, as reward, when I get back and we’ve stocked the Atsos’ pantry, we can go in to Gallup for a gourmet meal—cold grease tacos—and an AnnMargret movie.”

  “Click heels,” I said and smiled; but as we drove off, I rushed into dread. Had I run all this way to turn now and make my stand among cold debris (half a cherry pie) in a 6’ × 8’ abandoned tourist court in the Arizona desert?

  I had. Yes.

  Blix barely stopped but handed me the key and, over the loud engine, said, “There’s lots of books and records. If you’ll clean house, you’ll find them.”

  I cleaned as though they were the walls of my head—the two wrecked rooms—as though every misplaced letter, sock, can, were a clot of contagion that could kill if not forced into place at once. (Kill by a kind of sympathetic magic—by forcing my head to acknowledge its own mess. Seductive and true but avoidable.) Well, I fired the stove and then I forced it into place—the two rooms’ freight of junk, every disordered atom. Half the battle was finding the places—Blix had no sense of any object’s place—so I ruthlessly defined all his space as to function. All clothing, shoes, birthcontrol apparel in the inner room (where I made Blix’s bed—no sheets; he had none—by smoothing the blanket on the mattress stiff with waste).
All scrap wood and paper in the corner by the stove. All unopened cans, cereal boxes, two mugs in an opposite corner. All records, books, letters and magazines by the two usable chairs in the center of the room where I had slept. Then I scoured the wash basin, poured Clorox in the John. Then I swept all the floors (several pints of mouse turds). Then I thought of scrubbing. No wet mop or brush or bucket for water. (All the place had been scrubbed of was medical equipment—not an aspirin, as he’d said; no trace of his mammoth delicate training, his former purpose pursued with a force that drills bedrock, in which he’d paused.)

  But by then—an hour—I was calmer, safer. When the VISTA spy came, he’d find sanity, space. I could take a little walk, still in sight of the road; but the sun shone on, only deepening the mud and I had no boots, only suede ankleshoes. I’d buy real boots tonight in Gallup. I was safe enough to sit now, hear music, rest and read. Leontyne Price again, lobbing great silver spinning frisbees into air, each note above A more curative than the last, but vanishing. And Kluckhohn and Leighton’s book The Navaho. I skimmed the tragic history (all the Trails of Tears) and economics and settled more slowly into Chapter 5, “The Supernatural: Power and Danger.” By the time I reached the subheading “Ghosts,” I was reading—consuming—every word:

  The Navahos seem to have no belief in a glorious immortality. Existence in the hereafter appears to be only a shadowy and uninviting thing. The afterworld is a place like this earth, located to the north and below the earth’s surface. It is approached by a trail down a hill or cliff, and there is a sandpile at the bottom. Deceased kinfolk, who look as they did when last seen alive, come to guide the dying to the afterworld during a journey that takes four days. At he entrance to the afterworld, old guardians apply tests to see if death has really occurred.

  Death and everything connected with it are horrible to The People …

  Most of the dead may return as ghosts to plague the living. Only those who die of old age, the stillborn, and infants who do not live long enough to utter a cry or sound do not produce ghosts, and for them the four days of mourning after burial need not be observed, since they will not be injurious to the living. Otherwise, any dead person, no matter how friendly or affectionate his attitude while he was living, is a potential danger.

  A ghost is the malignant part of a dead person. It returns to avenge some neglect or offense …

  I broke off there, turned to the index—Suicide. Two references—the first unnourishing: a man had shot the witches who killed his children, then had killed himself. The second though was this:

  Indeed, except for the (by no means universally accepted) view that witches and suicides live apart in the afterworld, there is no belief that the way one lives on earth has anything to do with his fate after death.

  I am twenty-eight years old, a well-trained teacher of college English, a would-be poet and novelist who has not been to church (Episcopal) since age nineteen; but I said then—aloud, I’m sure aloud—“They do, they should.” And I felt the need to know how far apart, in what kind of place, and how are they punished? Maybe the wretched Navajo have learned what I know, what all of Virgil, Aquinas and Florence couldn’t teach Dante who discovers suicides in the Seventh Circle only (as brown, stooped and fruitless trees that exude poison, or blood if torn). The Ninth, the Ninth Circle! Sealed, up-ended in perpetual ice—as “Traitors to Their Kin,” even gnashed forever in the triple mouths of Satan as “Traitors to Their Lords and Benefactors.” Judas, Brutus, Cassius had the kindness at least to kill their lords, not leave them behind alive, abandoned, dumb with guilt and mystery, unable to answer the final indictment flung at the living by a suicide.

  But I read every word on witches and ghosts and found nothing else to my need or purpose. Blix would not be back for maybe two hours. I fed the stove again, came back to the stack of tattered books I’d arranged, glanced through them again, then took up the only thing I wanted—the pack of letters which, oddly, Blix had kept together, neatly rubberbanded. His news from outside, proofs of another life, answers. I sorted them furtively. The top half-dozen were clearly Christmas cards, two letters from his mother, mine announcing the death and my arrival. I had not read a word yet, beyond the postmarks—not even my own (there were six or eight; I’m a good correspondent). If I’d read my most recent you’d have known the bare facts by now—so soon!—but I didn’t, not because I was already shaping my day as a Work of Art—a Joan Crawford movie: Joan reads us a letter, voice-over, leaves blowing—but because I was sparing myself all I could. Sparing!—two-thirds through the stack, my wife’s hand. The standard rotund upright hand of the 1940s American girl—but hers without a doubt, her heavyweight blue paper, our postmark, November.

  I set the other letters down (I’d yet to read one) and studied hers (the envelope, the object). Blix had opened it neatly, top-edge, with a knife; most others he’d torn open any crude way. And it had not been crushed, as most others had, by a full day’s work in his Levi hip-pocket. It was fresh and clearly valued, like an invitation, a girl’s souvenir. Personal property. I was calmer then than I’d been in days, maybe since the day. I’m sure I felt no trace of suspicion—that the letter contained secret news; she and Blix had hardly met. Nor of pity for her, myself—nor Blix, Dora, the sick Mr. Atso and his hungry children. Only anger, disgust—all as cold and contained as this room could make them; maybe 40°—and curiosity. How could they do it? Any one of them, not to mention the twos?

  The music had stopped and I set her letter down, on top of the others, and began to stand. More music. Price again—“Summertime.” (Hear it, if you haven’t, in an unheated shack in late December; you’ll have heard it at last.) But I knew I could neither return and read her letter nor replace it unread in Blix’s little pack, not at the edge of the music. I sat back and read it.

  Dear Blix,

  This is meant to bring light to your life. Your letter seemed so lost that I’ve thought of you all morning as our man on the moon, or in some satellite gone out of control and circling, perfect but irretrievable.

  You can come back if you want to, though. Life’s a plane-ride away. Familiar life. If you want it, come back. But you left because you didn’t. You’re old enough to know. So am I. Don’t think of it as quitting. Do what you need to do and if no one understands, so what? forever. I’ll understand—and still so what?—

  That was her last whole sentence. I saw it had a close, a perfunctory “Love” and her name. I couldn’t look at those, can’t yet take her name but must treat it for now (for my own clear reasons) as my personal Tetragrammaton—the name of unspecified punishment, permanent damage; not love. I listened to the room, the road outside—not a sound; I’d raided Blix’s mail in secret.

  For what? Not a gram of revelation. A girl at the lip of suicide writes a letter that might have come from—Eleanor Roosevelt, sensible, bland, a little sententious. And yet, to my knowledge, the last page of writing she ever did, beyond grocery memos, checks. But no note—to me or the lethal world at large. What would I have wanted? If she’d asked me to draft a final message, from her to me, what would I have said?—I’m as sorry as you need me to be. All debts canceled. So what? she said to Blix. Can I say it to her? So what?—nothing adds up to a suicide, nothing leads down from it. Apart in the afterworld—Amen.

  Someone knocked at the door. The VISTA spy. Good. Another event; he’d be good for half an hour. But I opened on Dora, ten yards away, already leaving.

  At my sound, she stopped and turned and faced me broadside—a girl five-foot-two in a boy’s thin poplin windbreaker, tan skirt, white sneakers, white socks, grave as the gymnasts her get-up resembled. And as tense and reluctant.

  And powerful—I could not simply say Blix was gone and let her leave (she was on foot, in snow and mud, no sign of her truck). I called her by name and said “Come in.”

  She stood on awhile, serious as before, her sneakers blotting up dirty water. She was studying me.