by Craig Nova
Everything about her was large, not in the sense of size but something else, as though every conceivable gift had come down through the ages to her. She was an athlete, and when she was home from school, we went out on the Charles River, each of us in a single. She rowed beautifully, as though it wasn’t a boat but a violin. I had taught her, and she had taken to it in the same way she had to everything else, with a variety of soothing exuberance as though her excitement was something that she passed over to me: it was a thrill to be there, in that water like something out of a painting by Monet, all little chips of light, tinted with green from the grass along the bank. She had perfect catches, the blades cutting into the water like it was a solid, like butter. When she was fourteen and fifteen, we rowed together, but by the time she was seventeen I had trouble keeping up and soon she blew right by me, her hair bright in the sun, her breathing hardly noticeable, her long legs pushing against the stretchers.
She resisted the overly civilizing effect of the boarding school we sent her to, and it left her with a variety of grace. Her vitality had its own imperative, its own dignity, which no amount of crypto snobbery could injure. She enjoyed, for instance, the summer she worked at a drive-in restaurant outside of Cambridge, next to a low-income project. The men who lived in the project worked in the last factories around Boston, on the waterfront and as plumbers. Her frankness with them when they came to the drive-in, her smile, her genuine interest, beguiled them, and soon they were on her side, wishing her the best. In those days before she went away to college we’d argue or discuss those things she was curious about and which she understood better than I did.
Fermat’s theorem, for instance. She said, “Because there are an infinite number of equations, and an infinite number of possible values for x, y, and z, the proof has to prove that no solutions exist within this infinity of infinities.” She said this and smiled at me. It was her smile that really made her deadly: a full, large mouth that turned up at the corners when she smiled. It was like turning up the thermostat on a cold morning. “Don’t you see, Dad? It’s pretty obvious why German mathematical academics spent so much time on this when you get down to cases . . . ”
We had gone every now and then, on a weekend when she was in school, to that piece of land my father owned on the Delaware River, or the five hundred acres that were left after he had sold the thousand acres to the Girls Club.
On a trip there a year or so ago, ten months before my father died (the clock was already ticking), Pia and I had our one really bitter argument. As bitter as the taste of ashes in the spring after they had been left in a fireplace all winter. We did our best to pretend that it had never taken place, but it fits here, too, and I guess was part of her license to behave the way she did.
This fight had been coming for a long time, and, in fact, it had been building with the same, perfect cadence that drove her from being a girl to a young woman. This, of course, meant that she slowly stopped considering the prospect of having children as an abstract and distant if not impossible circumstance to one that was as real as a stone. We argued about what she called the Mackinnon stain. Mixed in with this bitter fight was the fact that she was the end of the line. I would die. That left just her. If she didn’t have children, that was the end of all of us, the living and the dead. No future. Nothing but entropy. And she wondered at my fury.
We went the usual way, out through Hartford and then on 84 to the Delaware Valley, which you could see from above Port Jervis and which had, on this trip, a blue mist that hung in the ridges. We were going to stay in that stone house that my father still owned and hated, and which I liked to go to, if only to have a little time alone with Pia so we could talk and hike, and go down into the stream on the land, Trout Cabin, where we used to see the copperheads coiling on the rocks.
On the place where Trout Cabin ran into the Delaware, it flowed through a piece of flat land, a couple of acres that my grandfather and grandmother had, as nearly as I could tell, given to my cousin. Or someone my grandmother and father had told me was a cousin, a poor one, I guess, whom they had taken in and raised. About fifteen years younger than my father. This, I guess, is one of those places where secrets live. Or where I should have been aware enough to know that a secret was here, but why should I have doubted my grandparents?
Here, on that flat land, my cousin had built a place from hoods of cars that he got from a junkyard, pieces of plywood he had picked up after dark at construction sites along the river, and some corrugated roofing material you see in Mexican border towns. He had a Coleman stove he cooked on, although he had power, too, and a laptop computer that he used to watch the Nature Channel and clips of alligators and snakes, zebras and sharks. One time, he made me watch a lion eat a zebra in large, shredded chunks.
On the afternoon of that bitter fight, we stopped at my cousin’s house. The place was empty, although the door was unlocked. At one side he had a pile of sardine cans, which he was saving, I guess, to make a new roof. He existed mostly on sardines. The pile of them looked like an enormous mound of fish scales.
“Guess he’s not here,” said Pia.
“Wait,” I said.
Upstream, in the Delaware, something came through the water that went around the rocks where big fish waited. Still, that creature emerged from the glare, which finally lifted like the sides of a circus tent. That is if the tent was made of foil. Jerry emerged from it, and we came down to the river to meet him. He stood in about a foot of water, in a patched pair of waders, but he wasn’t fishing. Just looking around. Maybe he had set an eel trap.
Jerry’s shirt was sun-bleached, a blue that was the color of a piece of glass from a milk of magnesium bottle that has washed up on the beach, and it perfectly matched his eyes. His hair was straight, and even though he was balding, he left it long. Still, he smiled with a sincerity that was as intense as the stars.
Now, he said, his lips moist, his hair slick with sweat and his own personal oil, “Well, hell, hell, hell, hell . . . ”
“Hello,” I said.
“No. No. Don’t say that. I can say it. Don’t do that. Don’t. I hate it.”
I swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Just let me be . . . ,” said Jerry. He swallowed. “Cousin Frank. How are you?”
“Hi, Jerry, how are you?” I said.
“Well, you know me. I’ll fight till the last dog dies,” he said. “And look who you’ve got with you. Why it’s Pia. My favorite cousin. How the hell are you, Pia?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Well, you know what, that’s fucking-A great.”
“You better fucking believe it,” said Pia.
“Come on,” said Jerry. “Let’s do our drill.”
“Some other time,” said Pia.
“No, no, no,” said Jerry. “It’s how we say hello. Like some handshake at Yale. Look into my eye.”
Pia stood opposite him, nose to nose.
“You see it?” he said. “You see the brown part in my eye? Like a quarter of a pie? Just like yours.”
“Yes,” said Pia.
“We’re like two peas in a pod,” said Jerry.
Cars went by on the highway with that ripping sound, like something that arrived not by speed but violence.
“I see you’re still driving that Audi,” said Jerry to me. “Der Grauer Geist, your dad calls it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You want to hear the other German I know?” he said. “Schießen Sie sie in der Rückseite des Ansatzes. Your dad taught it to me when we used to drink together.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It means ‘Shoot them in the back of the neck,’” said Jerry.
Jerry’s skin was red from the suntan dope that he cooked in the back of the shack made from those hoods of cars and with that solar panel to watch the nature movies on his computer, which, I think, he bought from a man in Matamoras, just across the river, who had passed through here a couple of years ago, o
ne jump ahead of the police.
“Yeah. That’s one thing your father told me . . . He had some other things to say about Russians. You want to hear them?”
“I think I’ve heard his war stories,” I said.
It was a misty afternoon, but not the kind that leads to a thunderstorm. Just that silver water in the river because of the mist.
“Looks like we’re going to get a storm,” said Jerry. “See?”
“See what?” I said.
“Sort of purple over there,” he said. “Like we’re going to get lightning.”
Pia stood there, light in light.
“What’s the storm look like?” she said.
“Can’t you see it?” said Jerry. “Getting darker, like smoke, like some chemical is burning . . . the color of an iris. Or something that grows at night.”
He bit his lip and looked around as though he was in the midst of vertigo, or that the entire landscape had begun to swirl around like water going down the drain.
“Everything is turning purple. Blue . . . ,” he said.
Jerry blinked at the distance: the sky was clear, blue, as clean as a baby from the bath.
“Building a little,” he said. “Funny. Can’t you see it?”
“Yes,” said Pia.
“Frank,” said Jerry. “You remember what you read to me?”
“I remember,” I said.
“God’s grandeur flashes out, like a dapp-dapp-dappled dawn dawn—drawn . . . ”
“Falcon,” said Pia. “Falcon.”
She stepped forward and behind him.
Jerry’s eyes rolled back in his head and he went stiff. He seemed to resist it, like a deer just hit by a car, but it was just too big. The tremors already swept his arms and legs. He fell backwards, an ironing board slapping the water. His head went under and his feet kicked, but even so, in bubbles and in sheer volume, he clearly said, “ah, ah, ah, ah.” Dawn drawn, I thought, dawn drawn . . . The bubbles of his voice rose and burst, the surface of them smeared with a rainbow. It appeared that we had an enormous fish and that it thrashed as it tried to get away. I reached down and Pia did, too, our fingers touching under Jerry’s back, and as we pulled him up, Jerry’s convulsions quickened. Like an increasing earthquake: if we had been in a house all the dishes and glasses would be rattling. Although in the rattling, I felt the ebb and flow, the waves of them, each one becoming stronger than the next, as though that half-hidden malice in the landscape had rolled down to the river and into this man.
Silvery moisture, part drool, part river water, came out of Jerry’s mouth.
His legs kicked into the dry weeds on the shore, and he jerked harder, as though he knew he was on hard ground, and made that sound, which was the worst part, that “ah, ah, ah.” Jerry banged his head on the stones in the weeds, and I took off my jacket and put that under his head, but his blood was already seeping into the cloth and on the ground, surprisingly red on the dry grass of summer. It made a sleek line through weeds until it mixed with the water of the Delaware.
His bridgework came out when I put my handkerchief into his mouth, and so I pried open his mouth to get the teeth before he choked on them. Pia picked up the imitation teeth and put them into her shirt pocket with an infinite, considerate gentleness. I put my hand into the pinkish foam of Jerry’s mouth and the teeth he had left cut me.
The “ah, ah, ah” came out as an infantile burbling, a choking and perfect cry of surprise and horror.
Pia used her phone to call the local rescue, and as she said “Just down river from where Trout Cabin comes into the Delaware,” Jerry stopped breathing.
With my ear on his chest I could hear nothing but the river, the cars on the road, Pia’s clear, calm voice as she explained exactly where we were. The artery in Jerry’s neck made a faint and irregular pulse, but then my fingers, where he had bitten me, were bleeding, and maybe it was just the throb of my own heart. I put my head on his chest again. The river seemed blue beyond the grass. Even the current seemed slow and sluggish, but obviously wearing down those stones in the middle, which had been there for thousands of years but which the river would reduce to dust.
“Dad? Dad?” said Pia.
Jerry’s nose had a bulb, and I squeezed it with one hand and held his mouth open with the other.
“Clear the vomit,” she said. “Turn him to the side to make sure it isn’t blocking the airway.”
We turned his head into the light and his mouth was a conglomeration of slime, of red flesh, of his tongue that was a color I had never seen before. It was warm and wet, and yet I didn’t want to press too hard, to do anything that was going to make it worse. Then I turned his head back, relieved to see that he was still bleeding from his scalp. But maybe less than before. Did that mean he had bled out from an interior wound? Was his blood pressure falling? I held his nose and put my lips against his, into the sheen from his drooling, as bright as the river. Then I blew into him, still holding the nose, once, then waiting, and then again, the chest rising and falling. The blood from my fingers ran down his cheeks and into his mouth. I used my handkerchief to wipe it off his mouth, but the cloth was filled with grit, and then Pia pushed my hand out of the way and said, “I’ll do it.”
She brushed away the slime and the blood from my hand and took Jerry’s nose the way that one touches a newborn. She squeezed Jerry’s nose, not quite so hard as I had done, more as though she knew precisely what she was doing. She took a deep breath, put her lips against Jerry’s, held the odd-looking nose with her thumb and first finger, and breathed into Jerry’s lungs. The chest rose. The breath came out with a gurgling wet sound, a sort of bubbling that made me think Jerry had swallowed some of the Delaware, but then it seemed possible this was a death rattle, river-like but still having that same, wet horrifying quality, all the worse for being in the sun and that silver glare.
Pia’s lips were covered with blood and slime and she shook her head, as though she knew what I was thinking after all. No, she seemed to say, No. I don’t think he’s dead. Then with that same, infinitely gentle movement she put her lips against Jerry’s again, squeezed that nose that looked like an old rubber bulb, and breathed in, not too hard, not too soft. The chest rose and fell with a quality that was at once regular and yet frightening.
We sat face to face, covered with the slime and blood. An occasional gurgle came from Jerry’s throat. Up the river from the next town, Pond Eddy, came the siren with its ululating whine. I managed to get the handkerchief around my fingers enough to keep them from bleeding, and as Pia sat up, I reached down and took the nose, Pia letting it go not because she was reluctant to go ahead, but because of something else: a gentle suggestion that said, All right, all right. It’s going to be all right. Or, at least, if he is going to die, it is going to be in the ambulance, not on our hands, not with us demonstrating our incompetence.
The siren came along the river, but the ambulance passed us, went a quarter of a mile down river, stopped, turned around and came back. It was an old Ford van that had been outfitted with a used siren and a cheap light.
Jerry’s eyes opened. He breathed on his own.
I let go of his nose and rocked back on my heels, and as Pia and I faced each other the second wave of the seizure hit with a power that made us both flinch: Jerry stiffened again, like some new, previously unknown material. He touched ground in just two places, like a yogi, just the back of his head and his heels, his back and legs completely free of the ground. You could have run your fist under there without touching his back. The seizure came in earnest, trembling, shaking, and the odd voice of it was like a prayer, or an expression of fear.
One man and one woman in uniforms that must have been at one time jumpsuits for a gas station, the kind that had Bob or Sam stitched on the front, now came through the dry grass, which in the sun appeared with filaments of red, like a toaster. Jerry’s cry was constant, so articulate and yet so meaningless.
The woman was Mary Drucker.
“I’
ll bet he stopped taking his pills,” said Mary. Then she opened his shirt pocket and took out a pharmacy bottle, an iodine-colored one, and held it up. Then she read the number of the pills, the date, shook it again. “Look. Look. You see that?”
The man opened his bag and removed a syringe, took off the top that protected the needle, and put it into Jerry’s arm, the plunger coming down with a slow, soothing movement, the silver liquid, as bright as the glare, disappearing into Jerry’s arm.
The seizure stopped.
Then they checked to see if he was able to breathe, if the airway was clear, and when they were satisfied that Jerry was breathing, they went up to the ambulance and brought down the stretcher on wheels. Pia and I sat back, our faces bloody and covered with slime.
The stretcher bounced through the dry grass and rock, looking for all the world like a small boat afloat on a dry sea. Mary Drucker and the man loaded Jerry onto it, tied him down, covered him, and took him up to the road, where they slipped the gurney into the back of the cheap ambulance and slammed the door.
Mary turned to me and said, “Nice to see you Frank. Where you been keeping yourself?”
“Boston,” I said.
She shrugged. As though that was all there was to say about anyone who abandoned a small town along the Delaware for a place like that. Then she shrugged and said over her shoulder, “I told Jerry if he doesn’t take the phenobarbital, this is going to happen. I told him.”
“I mentioned it to him,” I said.
“Mentioned?” she said. “Well, the only way he is going to listen is if you mention it with a two-by-four.” She turned to the man who had given Jerry the shot. “Mentioned? Did you hear that?”
“I called the hospital in Port Jervis,” said the man. “They’re waiting. He doesn’t like the way the pills make him feel.”
“What the hell does that have to do with the price of bread?” said Mary. “What does feeling have to do with things like that? You do it or you don’t. Don’t talk to me about feelings.” She turned to me. “Isn’t that right, Frank?”