step – step – step
He superstitiously tried to place his feet in the open area of each square where he stepped
(step on a crack, break your father’s back)
and felt stupid for doing it.
David hadn’t seen his father much since leaving for college. Escaping, more like, he thought to himself. He didn’t send cards on birthdays or holidays, but then neither did his father. About every six months, David worked up the courage to go home, perhaps driven by the masochistic need to see the old man again, for what reason he couldn’t fathom. But deep down David knew: It was mandated. You had to love your family no matter what, even when you hated them, when you told yourself you didn’t need them or couldn’t love them. None of that mattered. It was in The Rules. The price of admission to the wonderful world Louis Armstrong used to sing about.
step-step-step
He would usually drive down on a Friday evening after classes and pull into the driveway of the old house
(seems smaller now, doesn’t it)
and ring the front doorbell. His father would greet him with a smile, which didn’t seem as forced now that he was older, and they would shake hands, because that’s what men did. They would retire to the kitchen table, where his father had a small television running constantly set to Fox News, as if he were afraid of too much silence. His father would ask how school was and David would say fine, and David would ask how retirement was and his father would say fine. The uncomfortable non-conversation, with a subdued game show or comedy rerun usually droning in the background, would give way to discussions of whatever Houston sports team had its season at that time. When that topic dried up, the weather would come along, or something exciting would happen on the television to elicit a shared giggle from the two men. During commercials, his father would ask him if he wanted a beer. Sometimes David would say yes, sometimes no.
This was their ritual.
stepstepstep
The visit would last until David couldn’t stand it anymore, which varied between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, and he would drive back to Texas A&M feeling for the hundredth time as if he’d just been paroled. And then it would occur all over again in another six months or so.
He reached his father’s room and stood outside the door, not really wanting to go in but knowing he had to. David thought of the old woman lying sprawled in her bed like a drunk. Maybe he should have brought flowers or something. He had the devilish thought of running back and stealing hers, since she wouldn’t notice
(you’ll go to hell for that)
and then, smiling at his own deviousness, decided his father wouldn’t want them anyway. Flowers weren’t a man’s gift.
He pushed the door open.
The television was on, of course. It was midday on Tuesday, and watching Wheel of Fortune was his father’s favorite pastime these days. David opened the door quietly, not sure if the old man was asleep or not. It was a semi-private room, but the second bed, the one nearest the door, was empty for now. From the door he could see his father was snoozing, so he walked in quietly between the two beds and sat on the empty one. He was vaguely aware of hospital policy and that, specifically, this bed was to be kept neat and clean at all times in case a second patient needed it. So he made a mental note to smooth the covers back out before he left so they wouldn’t give the old man a hard time about it.
David looked at his father’s face. His thinning wisps of gray hair splayed out on the pillow under his head, uncombed. His head was cocked to the left, as if looking at David from behind closed lids. His mouth was open slightly, the way the body does when it’s providing a contingency plan in case the sinuses fill up. His skin looked like it might crack open, a dry, clay reservoir after a week of constant, baking sunlight. His cheeks were sallow, his color very pale. His hands grasped the thin, gritty sheets of the hospital bed at the top of his chest, as if warding off Death itself. The lumpy form beneath didn’t move. If not for the chart at the foot of the bed, David wouldn’t have recognized his father. He was an emaciated form of the man David remembered his father having been. Older now, of course, but also withered. Time had bleached the life out of him.
David reached over and picked up the TV remote, noticing it controlled an old-fashioned cathode-ray set. Of course it did. Hospitals didn’t have the money to invest in higher-end flat-screens, much less 3-D TVs like the one Larry’s father had bought him. Hell, hospitals didn’t even have the money to make beds in real time, when they were needed, right? They had to send the bed leprechauns around to do it in the wee-wee hours of the morning, laddybuck, for when those emergency patients—all those drunken old people who couldn’t wait for the nurse to make the bed—needed a place to fall that was soft and non-liable.
He turned down the volume, and the lack of noise immediately woke his father.
“Who’s there?” the old man asked. It was the weakest David had ever heard his voice. It sounded like an old steam engine that lacked the pressure to start. Instead of lungs driving the sound, it was like the voice was hitching a ride on some ragged breath that just happened to be passing through. David had heard of the “death rattle” before, and now he’d actually heard it, coming out of his father. Where’s your bluster and blow now, old man? he thought and immediately regretted thinking it. It was disrespectful somehow. Not to his father. To the natural order of things. To God. To the way he knew he ought to feel about the old man but didn’t.
“It’s me, Dad.”
“David?” The old man worked his eyes. You could see it. He was trying to focus.
“Yes.”
“Hello, son,” he wheezed.
“Howdy.”
“It was good of you to come down. I know you’re busy with school and all.”
David felt guilty for lambasting his father for being sick during finals. And anger quickly followed that feeling. Anger at whom or what he wasn’t sure.
“That’s okay, Dad. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” his father said, his eyes going to the TV and only finding a commercial there.
“Where are you on the list?”
“List?”
“The donor’s list, Dad.” Though he’d just turned twenty-one, a bit of the know-it-all sixteen-year-old crept back into David’s voice. The donor’s list, dumbass, his tone said.
“Oh, that don’t matter anymore,” his father said.
“What do you mean?”
“They tell me I wouldn’t get one anyway. Drunks don’t get new livers. It’s in The Rules.”
David knew that was reality, but he’d made sure his father was on the list just the same.
“It’s all right,” the old man was saying. “I won’t be around much longer anyhow. I don’t need anything from those fuckers.”
David heard the words and, perversely, almost burst out laughing. Even now, his father’s disdain for the rest of the human race trumped his common sense. Then again, there wasn’t much to be done, truth be told. What bothered David the most was how definitive the old man’s voice sounded. Like they were in a meeting and it was on the agenda in black and white. Next action item: Death.
“No, Dad, that’s not what we agreed on.”
“We?” said his father. “Since when do we make decisions for me, boy?”
“I . . .” David decided not to take the bait for the argument. “I just think it’s too soon to be talking about—”
“Nobody’s talking about nothing.” The old man’s voice was weak again. He had used up his reserves staking out his position on the subject. He picked at the sheet, looking for a tighter grip. “This is just the way it is.”
David’s inner voice raged, Let the old fucker die! The sooner the better! Let the old fucker poison his own blood the way he’s done yours! Idiot! But another part of him, the part that felt like it had a debt yet to pay for his two-way ticket into this world, wanted nothing more than to keep his father alive. At any cost. No matter what. He struggled with what
to say, trying to climb over the years of walls he’d built. But the old man was asleep again, snoring softly and evenly above the muted celebration of the TV’s studio audience.
Then his father’s lips began moving. David could hear the tired mutterings of a conversation. The old man seemed to be speaking to David in his sleep, perhaps dreaming of a conversation the two of them had had once, or had never had. David moved closer to catch the words.
“. . . anything else . . .”
Snatches only, partial sentences. And one line, whispered between breaths, came out very clear. “I lost everything—everything I ever loved—when you were born.”
David recoiled, as if he’d just seen a snake in his father’s bed. He bumped into the second bed, knocking it out of its perfect alignment. He stared at the pasty flesh of the near-corpse clasping the bedcovers to its chest. The open mouth
(so like Old Suzie’s now, old and soured with hospital food)
spitting its venom at him, even from sleep.
There, see? Told you so, you bleeding-heart idiot!
David leaned backward on the bed and stared at the old man dying as the TV crowd clapped and cheered without a sound. The flesh might have been hardly recognizable, but the sheer delight the old man apparently took in torturing him—even now—was as telling as a fingerprint. A heartprint, David thought. A black heartprint.
He turned and fled the room, never looking back. His father died exactly one week later, alone in the hospital bed. Wheel of Fortune was on TV. It was a Tuesday. The empty bed next to the old man was perfectly made.
Standing at the graveside after the dozen or so locals had left, David stared down at the headstone. It had the standard name and life dates on it, then simply “Beloved Father.”
“Well, it’s half-right,” David slurred. He’d slammed three beers just before the service, so he swayed a little. But this was one of those times when people forgave that kind of behavior. He was in mourning after all, so it was acceptable to be a little tipsy in public today.
An exception to The Rules.
His conscience attacked him then, the part of him that hadn’t wanted to let his father go. Be respectful to the dead, it said. Else they come back to haunt you. That made David laugh out loud.
The minister, who hadn’t known his father and who had to be reminded once of the deceased’s first name during the actual service, stopped and looked back. He shrugged his shoulders and opened the door to his Cadillac.
But the voice of his conscience had been the old man’s.
What do you mean “come back” to haunt me? David replied to the voice. You think I can forget him anytime soon? Ever?
His conscience seemed to mimic the minister’s shrug. The other voice in his head merely rolled its eyes in disgust. Idiot. A burp tried to come up and brought up partially digested beer and stomach acid. The heartburn spread through David’s chest. He grimaced, and it began to recede slowly back into his gut.
He looked in his paper bag. There were still three beers there. Shiner Bock, a local Texas favorite. Brown and rough and less sweet than Guinness. He pulled the first bottle out and twisted off the cap. He slammed it, nearly choking himself.
And then the second.
And then the third.
He was drunk all right, but he wasn’t stupid. He looked around several times, almost making himself dizzy. No one was around now that the minister had driven off. Fuck The Rules anyway, he thought. Out loud, he chortled the old joke, “Y’know, you only ever really rent beer.”
Slowly, deliberately, he unzipped his fly. His bladder was so full it took no time at all for the flow to come. He watched it splatter, yellow on the fresh mud—brown, white, and foamy as gravity did its work. It formed a little river, charting a course of primordial liquid, carving out a tiny yellow canal in the dark earth. By the time he’d finished, his urine had made a small pool of rented, processed beer near the tombstone, helping to pack down the earth there.
“See, old man?” he sobbed. “You can take it with you.”
Part 3
(15 years from now)
You’ve got to be successful
Just to be all right.
Lest the old man’s ghost come walkin’
In the middle of the night.
—James McMurtry,
“Stancliff’s Lament”
I’m not from here, but people tell me,
It’s not like it used to be.
They say I should’ve been here,
Back about ten years,
Before it got ruined by folks like me.
—James McMurtry
“I’m Not from Here”
Chapter 15
“Hello?”
Elizabeth half-whispered the word.
It was the only breath she had. Her lungs were hitched. Her hands felt wet and cold. She readied herself to rise and run, placing her palms flat on the floor. They picked up the dusty decay on the floor like magnets.
“Mom won’t like that,” her 3V voice smirked at her dirty hands.
Shut up.
Elizabeth’s mouth hung open. Her eyes sought the dog in the depths of the parlor, where the voice had come from.
“Hello.” The word croaked into existence. It was rough, the shade of a voice that hadn’t spoken in years. As if air, breathing through the house, had created sound.
She was truly frightened now. Before the frog-voice had spoken a second time, Elizabeth had hoped that hearing it was her mind playing tricks on her; her 3V voice tickling her fears with a memory from her nightmare. Or maybe an echo from the past had slipped from the walls around her. An old ghost, scary but harmless. But then the voice had croaked its second hello, and Elizabeth knew she wasn’t alone.
“D-dog?”
Pant-pant.
“She’s here,” said the man. The shadow had taken shape. A thick, tired form. “She brought you to me.” He sounded happy about that.
I know! Elizabeth wanted to scream. Bad, bad dog!
“Don’t be such a baby,” her 3V voice said, mimicking Michael.
“Where are you?” she whispered. She had pushed herself up onto her knees now, not quite to her feet. Elizabeth wanted to look around for the roaches, but something inside countermanded the order. Somehow, a roach crawling on her had become less fearsome than just a few moments ago.
“Here,” answered the man.
She had one leg under her now. Her hands felt grimy. “That’s not a very good answer,” she said quietly. “I can’t see you.”
The house seemed to relax around her.
“Don’t mean I’m not here.” It was strange. If Elizabeth could have heard a smile through the darkness, she thought she might have just heard one.
Her eyes began to adjust to the room’s low light. She saw the silhouette of an old man sitting in an old chair.
(Old Suzie’s chair)
Watching her.
(watching her shows)
Elizabeth had both feet under her now and stood up. She felt a single drop of sweat trail down her left calf. She shuddered as the house breathed a chill across it.
He motioned toward her. She thought of the old wizards from her fantasy stories. Perhaps the old man was casting a spell on her. She had seen news reports. She knew what could happen to little girls. He would paralyze her and then . . .
The dog padded over to her slowly, tongue drooping, mouth pulled back in a dog-smile. She stopped in front of Elizabeth, her eyes gazing up, flounder-like, at her. Elizabeth took her eyes off the old man and looked down. I don’t like you anymore! she projected.
The dog saw the anger in her eyes and closed her mouth. Elizabeth was afraid the animal would growl at her, but instead the dog just lowered her ears and inched forward a bit more to nuzzle Elizabeth’s hand. Oh no. No you don’t. But the dog wasn’t looking at her anymore, so didn’t see the anger that remained. She moved her head around in Elizabeth’s hand.
Elizabeth suddenly realized she hadn’t been watchi
ng the old man. Maybe he’d moved.
Maybe he’d moved toward her.
Slowly, reaching inward again for Elsbyth’s strength, she looked back at the chair. There he sat, motionless. Again, and strangely, she felt more than saw that he was smiling at her.
“I have to go home now,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
The old man breathed out slowly. She’d decided to name him that—old man. The croak of his deep voice, the wheezing of his breathing told her that’s what he was. “There’s still sunshine,” he said. “Not much, I admit, but some.”
The dog was panting again. Elizabeth was unconsciously scratching her furry head. “Mom taught me never to talk to strangers,” she said.
“Well, she’s right. My name’s Rocky. Now we ain’t strangers.”
Elizabeth was silent. She didn’t want to talk to this man. She didn’t want to share anything with him at all, not even words. She realized she’d bent over to more easily scratch the dog’s head and stood up again abruptly.
“Dog has a way of putting you off your guard, doesn’t she?” teased her 3V voice.
“Did your mother teach you manners as well?” asked the old man.
“Oh, sorry,” said Elizabeth, an automatic response to an adult’s correction. “I’m Elizabeth.” She was immediately upset with herself for falling for such an old trick.
“Maybe he’ll offer you candy next,” her 3V voice poked at her.
Shut up.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said, prying his arms from the chair as he spread them wide around him. “Welcome to my house.”
The girl cocked her head to one side. “This isn’t your house. It’s Old Suzie’s. And she’s dead.”
She felt the smile coming again from him. “You’re right on both counts. But dead people don’t own nothin.”
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