She helped me fix up the house, she cleaned with me, together we moved things around. And outside, too, she wanted to landscape the yard, she is not as committed as I am to preserving wilderness. She cleared a little rectangle of land, for a vegetable garden, we’ve eaten cucumbers and tomatoes from it, it’s surprisingly satisfying to grow your own food, but the rest of the land remains wild, remains a patch of wilderness. Your mother lost the battle of the wilderness, as she calls it, but she won the battle of your grandfather’s room, which wasn’t exactly a battle, but I had locked the door to his room and had thereby declared it off limits to any cleaning or rearranging. But once the rest of the house was done, and after the garden was planted, your mother pointed out that we couldn’t leave the room locked forever. At that time I was still sleeping on my bed, and your mother was sleeping on the sofa downstairs, which was where she said she felt most comfortable. Emptying your grandfather’s bedroom of all his things was like emptying the container that had held him my whole life. I took many breaks to breathe my own air, Juan-George, and your mother let me. She let me, then she’d come find me and tell me to get back to work, she couldn’t move everything on her own. Finally one day the room was clean and empty, just some walls and windows and a floor and ceiling, and it seemed as though no one had ever lived in it. Like Tupperware that had just come out of the dishwasher, no sign of leftovers. Which was when Carmen declared that the room could use a bed, a brand-new bed. We went all the way to Fresno, we took her car. At the mattress store, she lay down on mattress after mattress until she found one she liked. I checked to see that it was long enough for me, which it was. She argued with the salesman for a long time about the price, until neither of them seemed happy, and then we paid. The bed was delivered the next day, and we put fresh sheets and pillows on it. That night, we slept in the bed, together, we slept in that room for the first time. We slept in it every night after. We did all this without talking about it, without discussion, which is like when mosquitoes synchronize their wings, which is a symptom of love.
We walked together in town, your mother and I, we liked to take walks around Madera, and I noticed right away that the atmosphere was not the same awkward and lonely atmosphere it had been right after I had buried your grandfather the first time, no, the atmosphere was friendly, and welcoming, everyone said that they had missed having me around. I think your mother had something to do with it, I don’t know, she won’t talk about it. We must have been quite a sight, Juan-George, I am much taller than your mother, she is much shorter and rounder than I am, I wore my regular T-shirts with Madera businesses on them and she wore the clothing she’d always worn, nothing wrong with showing off her assets, her words, and yet nobody made jokes, I’d expected jokes, but nobody greeted us with anything but warmth. It was strange, I was no longer exactly a shield, I was something else, and your mother was something else too. I wondered, I remember wondering, if that something else was a man of the world, if people looked at me now and saw a man of the world. I had gone, and I had returned. They asked about my travels, I told them about Panorama City. And I realized that despite all the missteps and unintended consequences my plan had come to fruition. The proof was in the fact that everyone called me Oppen, not Mayor. Or almost everyone, the Alvarez brothers were still in the habit of calling me Mayor, as was Greg Yerkovich, but we were such old friends I could understand it.
Then something happened that we hadn’t planned, exactly, but not planned against either. By which I mean that we found out your mother was pregnant with you. We laughed at our good fortune, she can tell you about how excited we were to find out you were coming, she had always assumed that she would never be a mother, could never be a mother, maybe she thought she was too old, I don’t know, she had her reasons. As soon as we found out, we began the process of converting my old room into your new room. You will be a boy where I was a boy, Juan-George. Which reminds me, in the back of the garage there is a bicycle, I have set it aside, it has training wheels, when you are big enough you can learn to ride it. There are also several acceptable bicycles for when you are older, Carmen knows where they are, and Wilfredo can tell you everything about riding them. Maybe one of those bicycles will become to you like my blue-flake three-speed was to me, not just a mode of transport, not just a way to get from A to B to C, as they say, but an extension of yourself, a tool so familiar and comfortable that it seems almost a part of you, so that its presence goes unnoticed, what they call second nature, when using it becomes so natural you hardly know you’re using it at all, like a shoe that fits.
You were present at your grandfather’s third burial, you were in your mother’s womb, it was still too soon to know whether you’d be a girl or a boy, we hadn’t named you yet, but you were there. First, we had to go into Madera. Or actually, first, we had to navigate oceans of paperwork, with the help of Officer Mary, help your mother didn’t think we needed but which turned out to be instrumental in getting your grandfather out from the ground between the Kutchinskis and the Browns. The makeshift coffin I’d made for him ended up going straight into the crematorium. The mortuary worker wore a permanent look of sadness and sympathy on his face but couldn’t seem to keep the details straight, his mind was elsewhere, it was a mask, he had landed himself in the wrong job. When we were done signing and paying he handed us a cardboard box containing your grandfather’s ashes. I opened the box immediately, I don’t know why, and looked inside. I’m not sure what I expected to see, I think something about the worker hadn’t made me feel confident, and I wanted to make sure it really was your grandfather. Of course, I knew I would only see fine gray powder, like at the bottom of a fireplace that hasn’t been cleaned out. There was fine powder, but there were also bits of white stuff, which the mortuary worker said was bone, and some longer narrow blackened pieces, which, he explained, were the nails that had held together the makeshift coffin.
We returned from the crematorium to find Freddy at the house, Freddy my friend from Madera with one leg shorter than the other, he had taken the day off and brought his mini-excavator with him. And Wilfredo was there, too, I recognized his truck as we pulled into the driveway so it wasn’t a total surprise. He had made a marker for your grandfather’s grave, along with two others, he and Freddy had installed them. In a row, in polished granite: Ajax, Atlas, George Porter. When I saw the markers for your grandfather and his hunting dogs I couldn’t contain my feelings, your mother put her arms around me, she wrapped her arms around me and leaned her head against my chest, against the side of my chest, against my ribs, it was better than breathing my own air. Freddy had already dug the grave, he had already made a hole for your grandfather’s final resting place, he had made the hole as big as the hole I’d made the day I first buried your grandfather, nobody had told him about the cremation, nobody had told him we wouldn’t be burying a coffin but only a small cardboard box.
You were there, Freddy was there, Wilfredo, your mother and I, Officer Mary, a few others. When everyone was ready I went to put the box into your grandfather’s grave. But the hole was too deep, I couldn’t reach the bottom, and I didn’t want to drop it in. I lay the box on the ground and climbed into the hole. Someone gasped but nobody tried to stop me. I took the box and deposited it at my feet, and as I crouched down to do so my eyes came level with the earth and then below it into shadow. Packed dirt, near black and crisscrossed with roots. An earthworm going about his day. Your grandfather would have liked to see that. And then I stood and came back into the light, past the level of the earth, and I was looking at everyone’s shoes. I lifted myself out, I took hold of the shovel, the same shovel I’d used to bury your grandfather the first time, and I scooped some dirt into the hole, onto the box. We took turns shoveling the dirt back into your grandfather’s grave, it took a long time, but it didn’t seem right for Freddy to use the mini-excavator for that. When we were finished, we stood over the disturbed earth and looked at it, nobody talked. It was quiet, what they call a nonevent. I wanted it th
at way, this was not fireworks, this was everything finally clicking into place, no more unintended consequences, only peace. And then from some nearby bushes a half dozen birds took off. Everybody looked over, I can’t say for sure but I think they were all thinking the same thing, there went your grandfather, there went George Porter, his spirit free now that his wishes had finally been respected, now that he’d been buried where he’d always wanted. Everyone turned their faces to the sky, to follow the birds flying up and away, but my eyes stayed on the bushes, it was like something told me to keep my eyes on the bushes. A moment later a lean gray fox popped out and licked his chops, yolk dripping from his chin.
REPRIEVE
C: The doctors are doing their rounds.
O: I can hear them.
C: Dr. Singh won’t be happy to hear you’ve been up all night.
O: He’ll be stunned I’m still alive.
C: So dramatic.
O: You’ll see, mi amor, it’s a miracle I’m alive, he’ll think so too.
There’s more to the accident, there’s more to what happened. Just before the terminus, before death, I must call it death, on the threshold of death, the scene of the accident is coming back to me, one second at a time, it is like someone is taking the dominoes and standing them back up in my head, I must tell you about it now, before I am gone.
I remember the day more clearly now, I was riding into town, I was riding my blue-flake three-speed Schwinn into Madera for the first time in a long while, I was enjoying being back on my bicycle. You see, Juan-George, your mother and I had been going into town together, we had been doing everything together, making up for lost time, as they say, and so I had spent most of the past months in the passenger seat of her Hyundai, not on the seat of a bicycle. I had talked with her about the possibility of a tandem bicycle, of talking to Wilfredo to see if we could get one, but she has never been a strong cyclist, her words, and it didn’t seem safe to start trying now that you were growing inside her. So the other day when your mother was too tired to go into town, and we had run out of milk and a few other necessities, I decided to take my bicycle. The soft burring sound of tires on asphalt, the gentle breeze in my face, the world going by at the ideal speed. I thought, I remember thinking, I am a father-to-be, riding into town to get groceries for the mother of my child, I marveled at how much my life had changed. Then, in the distance, coming toward me down the road, I saw the Alvarez brothers’ pickup truck.
As I mentioned, the Alvarez brothers, along with Greg Yerkovich, were the only people in Madera who still called me Mayor. I hadn’t thought too much about it, Juan-George, and to tell you the truth it didn’t bother me, I figured they just wanted to keep the name going, as a sort of reminder that we’d been friends for so long. But when I saw the Alvarez brothers’ pickup truck cross that yellow line into my lane, I experienced the same sensation I’d felt upon rising from my bed that first day back in Madera, a sort of trench appeared in my thinking, we had been here before, the Alvarez brothers and I, we had done this before, many, many times. But while I had gone down to the so-called real world and experienced many experiences, they had not changed at all, they could not change, they would always be the Alvarez brothers, always driving down the same road, always pointing their pickup truck at me. I could see clearly what I had been unable to see before, which was that they were a fixture, a permanent fixture in Madera, the Alvarez brothers were like a statue in the center of town. And, I now saw, they wanted me to remain a fixture, too, so that the two fixtures could be locked in mutual orbit, so that they were always the people who drove at me on the road and I was always the person who rode his bicycle into the ditch.
Unless one of us swerved to the side a head-on collision was imminent, meaning of course unless I rode the bicycle into the ditch. All of this came to me in a flash, and I wondered something I had never wondered before, which was whether riding my bicycle into the ditch was my only choice. I asked myself, these were the words that came back to me this morning, from the accident, that allowed me to unspool and unpack all of these realizations, I asked myself how a man of the world, a true man of the world, should react to the Alvarez brothers’ pickup truck speeding at him. I considered the situation from all sides, or from several sides, I imagined what a picture of this scene would look like, I wondered what I could say about this man on this bicycle, about this father-to-be, playing chicken with a pickup truck, I had started to consider the situation from all sides when my thinking was interrupted, or cut off abruptly, I should say, by the truck.
C: As soon as you are out of here, my Oppen, I am going to give Hector and Michael a piece of my mind, those two running you down like that, they’re lucky I got rid of my gun.
O: You never told me about a gun.
C: A woman has to protect herself.
O: From what? From who?
C: It was a different life, Oppen, I don’t want to talk about it, it’s far away now.
[Tapping on glass.]
C: It’s the doctor.
O: Dr. Singh is here.
C: Good morning, Doctor.
O: Oh, Juan-George, I wish you could see the look on his face right now.
Dr. Singh [presumably]: What is this now?
O: He’s shocked to see me alive.
[Shuffling. Tape clicks.]
O [distorted]: Wrong button.
[Tape clicks.]
They are gone. I asked Dr. Singh how much longer I could expect to live, I asked him because I wanted to know what I should say to you next, whether I should begin my goodbyes or share with you more of my experience, I begged him to be honest with me. He said that the reason he looked surprised when he saw me just now was that he hadn’t expected to find me talking into a tape recorder. Then he said that as long as I don’t step out in front of any more moving vehicles, he didn’t see why I shouldn’t expect to live a long and healthy life. I told him he didn’t have to spare my feelings, I’d already heard the nurses discussing my case, I could take it, I asked him to please be honest with me, it didn’t make it easier not to know the truth. He shrugged and said he was speaking the truth, God’s-honest.
I am a slow absorber, Juan-George.
The nurses, when I had heard the nurses talking before, I had attached their words to an idea already in my head, that I was dying, that I wasn’t going to make it through the night, an idea that was like a vacuum cleaner in my head, sucking everything toward it, preventing me from seeing what was obvious, what should have been obvious, namely, that they were talking about my next-room neighbor Mr. Pierce, he was eighty-eight years old.
I laughed, my chest felt like it was on fire, but I had to laugh. Your mother shook her head and rolled her eyes. I told Dr. Singh I couldn’t believe my luck, and he said he wouldn’t go that far. I had come in with a collapsed lung, a broken hip, dozens of lacerations, a fractured forearm, and multiple fractures in my left leg. I had many weeks of immobility to look forward to, and pain management, followed by physical therapy, he wasn’t going to lie to me, I was in for a grueling year, I was in for the greatest physical challenge of my life, people with my types of injuries likened it to climbing K2, his words. But you’re not going to die, he said, or at least you’re not going to die as a result of this accident. Which is the thing about the terminus, Juan-George, it can never be escaped, it can only be postponed, there is no more preposterous expression in the world than saving lives, Paul Renfro’s words, because every life reaches its terminus eventually. The expression should be, the expression attached to firemen and doctors and other sorts of caregivers should be postponing death. I can assure you, Juan-George, that I am confident, that despite my not being able to predict future events I feel confident I will be able to climb K2, whatever that is, and recover fully, and leave this hospital behind, leave the Madera Community Hospital behind completely. Or almost completely, I should say, we’ll be back, your mother and I will be coming back soon, not for any terminus but for your arrival. It will be your mother in this b
ed, and then your mother and you.
Panorama City Page 21