Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  The town and the world, she thought. How could she ever understand it? And standing here in the frozen park and thinking of the town, and trying to get the feel of life and the feel of living, and the feel of the living past, she felt a blind, desperate, throat-choking pride and hope and exultation. She thought of Sandburg’s immortal line: The People, Yes.

  But she. What could she do?

  She thought of the sixteen-year-old boy who stole the car and the Dutchman who planted the turnip seeds. In the community of their desire to be loved and wanted, they were tragic heroes. And yet what could she do? How could she bring such people the love they needed, and how unbetray the dead?

  Bettyann walked on more slowly now. Increasingly she dreaded her destination. She detoured by the Masonic Temple, she cut across a vacant lot. Old man Starke’s house squatted blunt and somber to the right. She was afraid. She looked away from it.

  She crossed the street in the middle of the block and walked slowly down a broad alley. The ground was frozen. Her feet were icy. Without being consciously aware of it, she speeded the circulation of her blood and brought the warm currents nearer to the surface of her skin. Her feet were no longer cold.

  Again she made and threw a snowball.

  Suppose . . . suppose . . .

  I can do tricks, she thought with sudden bitterness. I can always do tricks.

  On her left was an apartment building. Its second-story rear porch jutted out over the alley, and beneath it, between its supporting timbers and the wall, there was a section of concrete running the length of the building. Because of this, the ally was narrrower here than elsewhere. At the far end of the concrete there was a small wooden storeroom. Once it had been a barrier and a shield behind which a man, desperate with heart disease and numbered days, had clutched a gun. Sweat, cold and unnoticed, had doubtless beaded his upper lip and the palms of his hands. He had killed a man in a bar less than two blocks away. The sun was hot and the police were coming. He wished they would let him alone. He wished they would leave him to die slowly and in peace. He was not going to stand trial, so why did they bother him? His heart was beating irregularly. Adrenalin fired his blood. “I’m not coming out!” he cried at the policemen. There were two of them. They scattered at his voice. The man, his name was Bill, wished he could apologize to his ex-partner, whom he had just killed. They had once owned an insurance business jointly, and although that had been years ago, Bill had never out-lived the bitterness, until now, he bore his ex-partner for swindling him out of his half of the enterprise. Looking back on it from the perspective of death, he realized the futility of vengeance. And although it was too late, he at last admitted to himself that, had his own secret and unconscious conspiracies succeeded long ago, he, instead of his ex-partner, would have been the sole owner. And in the knowledge of mutual hypocrisy, he concluded that one dishonest man should always lose gracefully to his partner’s more successful dishonesty and never hold his partner accountable for greater nobility of action than he is prepared, himself, to exercise.

  Of the two policemen at the opposite end of the alley, one was his friend. His friend called, “Come out, Bill!”

  “No! Let me alone!”

  “I’m coming down there to get you. You’re under arrest. Give up, now. Don’t make me come get you.”

  “I’ll—I’ll . . . You keep away, hear me! Keep away from me!”

  And the policeman came, walking down the middle of the alley. Gun in hand. Talking. “Come on, Bill. Come on out. You know me, Bill.” Law had placed friend against friend and there were confused and transcendent loyalties, and later the policeman admitted that he did not actually believe that Bill would shoot him. Bill saw him, blue-clad and inexorable, beneath his wavering sights. He cried wordlessly, afraid to shoot, afraid not to shoot. And then, to equalize the contest, he stepped from his shelter, and they stood fifty feet apart, in the alley, facing each other. He fired, but his aim was bad. He fired again before the policeman who was his friend (and the policeman concealed near the mouth of the alley) began to shoot. When it was over, he was dead, and the policeman who was his friend was trying to cover a bleeding chest wound with his hand.

  Bettyann thought that life must sometimes be composed of paradox and terror. She wondered if there was still blood on the concrete beside the wooden shed. She walked on. She thought that the world was composed of discrete and different lives, and that maybe, if she could only understand just one of them, she could hold it up and cry, Here! Here it is! Look at it! and if everybody could understand it, the world might be different—that perhaps, seeking to understand, any life might serve.

  If only, she thought, I could get it down in paint—the policeman walking stubbornly forward to kill his friend.

  She was at the end of the alley now. She felt a sudden pulse of strength and courage. Her despair had vanished. From far away she heard or imagined she heard the tuneless melody of Whistling Red floating out across the town.

  She stood on old man Starke’s porch. She rang the bell and waited. After what seemed a long time, she heard footsteps echoing hollowly from the back of the house. Life seemed to have departed it, and the windows were sightless. The footfalls were ghost sounds.

  The door opened. A starched white nurse stood before her.

  “Hello,” the woman said.

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Starke.”

  “That’s very kind.” Her thin lips belied her words and seemed to label Bettyann as a member of the morbidly curious world of strangers, “But I’m afraid . . .”

  “Please! I must!”

  “He wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “I must,” she said intently. Her face was white and her body was taut.

  The nurse shook her head.

  “Please phone Dr. Wing. He’ll tell you it’s all right.”

  The nurse hesitated. Then: “Come in, if you must.”

  Bettyann followed her.

  Old man Starke lay seemingly asleep. The room smelled of the terrible odor of cancer and of death that antiseptics could not conceal. He was shriveled and almost transparently pale. There seemed no more than a wrinkled handful of him against the pillow. His breathing was labored, and as she came nearer, she saw with mounting horror the silver pipe in his throat pulsing faintly, in and out, to the rhythm of his heartbeats. The nurse turned away and left her standing motionless.

  Old man Starke was no longer the friendly merchant who kept candy suckers behind the counter to give to children when their parents made purchases, with a gesture more complex than necessary to establish good business relationships. (“My, how she’s grown, Dave, and I think I have just the thing for her sweet tooth today”—always as if this generosity were not his usual practice, but something highly special just for you.) When Dr. Wing—not trusting his own findings, received the report on the bottled tissue from the laboratory that verified them—told the old man that it was cancer and tried to put him on the next train for a Kansas City surgeon, the old man said, “Take it out yourself; hell, you’ve been taking care of me for—what?—ten or fifteen years. I’d rather you do it, Jerry.” Showing fear not of the disease but of—strangers? “I can’t do it, Mr. Starke.” “Nonsense, damn it, I’d trust you a hell of a lot farther than one of those K.C. big shots.” Cursing now because he was afraid and refused to show it. “I just can’t do it.” Whereupon there was a futile argument, during the course of which the old man learned—learned deeply, if at first he could not completely believe—that the diagnosis had come too late, that there would be a period of waiting, which surgery could prolong, and then there would be death. Terrified, then, old man Starke said (hacking almost continually in his excitement), “You can do it; you can fix me up better than anyone! I’m counting on you, Jerry.” And Dr. Wing—not without sympathy for the view, having seen the long and hopeless hospitalization, the ceaseless and finally useless surgery—said, “I’ll treat the symptoms as they occur.” And, taking the old man’s arm, “There won’t be any pain
. I promise you that. You’ve got a year, maybe more, and after that, when the pain—we’ll see there won’t be any pain . . .”

  Then, throughout the months of waiting, he put his affairs in order, he sold his store, he walked the streets—straight and stubborn—and talked to his friends, giving the appearance, by word and gesture, that he was always on business, always alert, always going somewhere and accomplishing something. “I’ve got to hurry on, now,” was the last thing he had said to Dave, after they had talked quietly of the town’s affairs on the street one Sunday afternoon. “I’ve got to hurry on,” he said, proud and stubborn and rejecting sympathy, squaring his old, sunken shoulders as if to say, I am, after all, a man.

  He hacked restlessly and his irregular breathing stopped and then began again.

  Bettyann was by his side, looking down into his face. Her whole being was ill.

  She reached out to touch him. Her hand fluttered over his face and down to his swollen throat. She wanted to close her eyes. Tissue damaged beyond repair, morphine-ridden and insensitive to the pain, dying, starving, clinging persistently to life, old, stubborn . . .

  Impulse? Instinct? Her hand changed. She looked away and shuddered. There was the feel of oversized cells, and her nerves were too heavy, and there was cellular transmission in the lymph glands of his body and great blackness and redness and horror. There was a growth hormone and a twisting of molecules. She felt the healthy and the diseased tissue, and she had no words or symbols for what was happening.

  No hand; no wrist—fluidity—

  She was conscious only of a sickening red nightmare and an awful odor.

  And then she stood looking down at him again. She turned and stumbled from the room. She fled from the house.

  She walked a block, almost unseeing, unthinking, numb. Mercifully, there was a taxi cab.

  She collapsed into the back seat.

  When she arrived home, her body was heavy with exhaustion.

  Even involuntary movements seemed to take place with infinite weariness. Her heart delayed each beat, resting.

  She could no longer control the chamber of her brain containing the reserve, alien part of herself. Her very personality seemed divorced from her body; between the two there hung a pink mist of fatigue.

  She knew what had happened, but she held the knowledge before her as a distant and objective fact containing no imperative to action. She had reached into old man Starke’s body. A part of herself had dissolved and spread until it surrounded the malignancy, and then, through that part she had focused all the energy stored in her being and fired it in a colossal burst at the diseased cells.

  With an effort that seemed impossible she fumbled for the money and paid the cab driver. The door to the cab was open. She was beyond it. She saw the world as through a reversed telescope. Distances expanded; objects shrank. She walked toward the house. She walked with slow, straight dignity. She wanted more than anything else in the world to collapse there on the snow and sleep forever. The porch steps were an infinite distance away. Her skin was cold. She was trembling. The air clawed at her thighs and restrained her moving legs.

  She struggled with the steps. She wanted to sink to her knees and crawl.

  She was in the house. Warmth was around her. She was drowsy. The sofa, soft and waiting, invited her into the living room. She was too exhausted to yawn.

  She continued past the living room. She leaned against the doorway to the kitchen. There was so little energy left anywhere in her body. How much easier to lie down and let it all bleed away, to sleep, to sleep.

  She was at the cupboard. The doors fell open beneath her heavy hands.

  The sugar tin slipped from her leaden fingers and crashed to the floor.

  Jane would come to investigate. She was glad of that. She needed help.

  The house was silent.

  Jane had gone.

  She sank down beside the spilled sugar. She ate a handful of it. She lay on the floor, eating sugar.

  Time passed. Her body converted the sugar into energy. She felt strength return slowly.

  Carefully standing, still weak and trembling with exhaustion, she saw the broom. She went to it. She swept the remaining sugar into the dust pan. The linoleum was still gritty underfoot. She emptied the contents of the dust pan into the waste basket. She ate the rest of the sugar in the now nearly empty can. She returned the can to the shelf, stumbled to her room, and fully clothed, fell into a dreamless sleep.

  When she awoke, a nearly hysterical Jane was undressing her. Dave was on the way home from work. Dr. Wing had just left his office . . .

  She lay inert between soft, cool sheets. Dr. Wing was standing over her with a stethoscope, searching across her chest.

  She smiled faintly at him. She wanted to ask him to go see old man Starke. He’s got to live, she wanted to say. You see, he’s got to. I’m not helpless; he’ll live; and he’ll prove I’m not helpless and that I can do something.

  She heard Jane and Dave whispering in the background. I love you, she wanted to say to them. Someday I’ll make everything up to you. I’ll show you I’m a good daughter; that I didn’t leave you. I guess maybe I never intended to, maybe I just put it off to the last minute.

  She was drifting to sleep. She felt content. Through her half-opened eyes she could see the puzzled face of Dr. Wing peering down at her. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I’m just a little tired.” Her eyes closed completely. “I love you,” she whispered.

  Sleep came to her beneath a blanket of muttering voices. The dream came. She was at a band concert in the park, and it was summer. The high full moon rode the blank sky. Later the moon would fall away and a million-million stars would come out, scattered across the sky by a celestial hand like dice, determining human fate. But now the park was a fairyland of pale moths and moonlight. The band was playing—Oberon? Egmont? Poet and Peasant? —an overture to something. She could not place the music.

  The air smelled of hyacinth and honeysuckle. She was a girl—no, a woman now—yes, a woman, and there was a child. There was a young boy, four years old. He was holding his mother’s (her) hand and listening quietly to the music while Dr. Wing—while Jerry—sat beside her. No, not beside her. On the other side of the boy with an arm extending across behind the bleacher seat, around her shoulder. The child—what an odd child, half alien—no, all human (but perhaps with . . . talents . . .). He looked like Jerry; he would be a great musician; and he was listening intently now to the overture to something, the beginning of something.

  Jerry was still only faintly gray at the temples. There was gray in her hair, also. She had grown into full womanhood. She had two arms. The arms were for holding him, for loving him, for sweeping away the sadness and disappointment, for caressing the handsome and half-boyish face, for saying in their own solid way: You have me, I’ll make up for everything; you will forget—no, not forget—love still, but be loved again. I should have liked your . . . other wife. I love you. Listen to the drums, the snare, the brass, and the reedy call of the clarinet. And see how high the moon is now, and the fleecy clouds. They’re playing something by Cole Porter, and Jerry—Jerry, I love you, and when it’s over, you and I and Jerry, Junior, we’ll walk downtown to the square, we’ll stop and have Coca-Colas, and . . .

  When she awoke she was aware that someone was in the room with her. Out of the darkness there was whispered breathing. “Mom?”

  “No,” Dave said. “Just me. Mom’s gone to bed. You all right?”

  “Yes . . . Only.”

  “Only?”

  “I’m practically starved, Dad.”

  “Well, you must be feeling better.” She could hear him stand. The chair creaked. “Here goes the light, hold on.”

  The room was bright, and they both blinked.

  “There,” he said. He came to her bed and felt her forehead. “The fever’s broken.” Relief was on his face. “Steak, potatoes, eggs, cereal, milk?”

  She laughed. “I’ll get up and fix
something.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

  Jane called: “Something wrong, Dave?”

  “No, no. Go back to sleep. She’s fine. Just hungry.”

  “I’ll get up,” Jane called.

  “You stay in bed now!” He looked at Bettyann and winked.

  Jane was in the doorway. “What do you want to eat, dear?”

  Bettyann said, “I wish you wouldn’t bother. I’m fine. Honestly I am. I can get up.”

  “Oh, no, you can’t!” Jane said. “I’ll go down and help your father.”

  “It will not be necessary,” Dave said. “I am not incompetent with a skillet, I assure you.”

  Following him out, Jane said, “I won’t have you ruining my skillets.”

  After Bettyann had eaten, she insisted that they both go to bed.

  “I’m not going to sleep again if you don’t. I’ll sit up and talk. I won’t get any rest. Please, Dad. Now, please. Both of you.”

  “If you’re sure . . .” Jane said uncertainly.

  “If you need anything, call. We’ll hear you, just call us.”

  And the light was out, the house was silent, and she slept.

  When she awoke again, it was light. Dr. Wing and Jane were in the room.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s at work.”

  “Mom! He shouldn’t have stayed up last night.”

  “That’s all right. Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Well, how are you?” Dr. Wing asked.

  “I’m recovered,” she said. “I must look like a mess, though.” She glanced at the mirror across the room. “My hair, my face . . . Oooooo.” She shook her head. “And I’m hungry again, too.”

  “I told you what she ate at three o’clock this morning?” Jane said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Wing said. “Where do you put it, girl?”

  Bettyann felt fine.

  “You’ll go to fat. You’ll spread. You’ll get three axe handles broad across the fanny.”

  She sat up, laughing. She yawned. “It’s a beautiful day! I can’t wait to get up!” She rolled her shoulders. “Get up! Get up!” she instructed herself.