by Landon Houle
They ought to. They ought to if they know what’s good.
What’s good is letting people live and leaving them alone.
You were alone. Look how that turned out.
Jill glared down the counter, but a muscle twitched under her eye. Something about that flinching put Cathy in mind of a lightning strike, the way the sky will light up just before it pours.
Boone here, Jill said, thinks he’s gonna turn himself into a preacher.
And Jill thinks she’s gonna turn herself into an angel.
Jill looked at Cathy. Sorry. She pressed a button on the register, told Cathy what she owed.
Cathy opened her checkbook and started writing. She didn’t like the way the boy was talking, the way he stared at her. She needed to get back home. If she could just get the compressor and go.
Is there somebody helping you? Jill asked.
Cathy was writing the check, and for a minute, what Jill said was all tied up with numbers. It must have shown on her face because Jill said, With the pool.
Cathy looked at Jill, at the little scar just under the woman’s eye. It was an old cut and wouldn’t have been visible in some lights.
It goes quicker with two people, Jill said.
Cathy went back to the check. She signed her name, tore it out, handed it over. I’ve got time.
Jill took the check. Maybe it’s on your side, she said and she looked at Boone, and it seemed to Cathy like she was trying to make a joke, but it was hard to say what, if anything, was funny.
Cathy did what Jill said. That is, she drove up close to where she had the pool spread out across the dirt. She plugged the compressor into the lighter. She shoved the other end of the tube into the pool and flipped the switch.
Next door, they were still working on the trees, but the bucket truck was in another part of the yard, and Cathy could barely hear the saw over the roar of the compressor.
It was slow going, three rings, and each had to be filled separately. The instructions said to squeeze the base of the valve stem to open an internal check valve while inflating. Cathy sat on the ground and held the valve. She studied the pictures. They’d sprung for a real photograph on the outside of the box, but the manual only had drawings. A grown-up watching a child with what looked like, thanks to the lines following his sight, laser vision. This beside the cartoon of a person jumping head first and cracking her skull, a little explosion at the point of impact.
Cathy held the valve, and the motor ran, and she felt her eyes going dry. The muscles in her arm were hard knots. Wally said people used to think epilepsy was some kind of religious experience. When you had a seizure, he said, they thought you saw God.
Cathy had been stocking the cigarettes, Seneca soft packs in particular. She’d been holding a pack. She’d been squeezing them so hard she could feel the cigarettes like bones, like fingers, like a hand she was holding. She asked Wally what happened when he had a seizure. She said, What do you see?
Wally put his hand in his hair, and when he pulled it back, his face seemed bigger, like he wasn’t so far away, but then he was pulling his bangs down again. He was covering up one eye and most of the other in the way that he liked. Maybe I don’t remember, he said.
When the first two rings were done, Cathy brought out the water hose and turned on the faucet. She wasn’t sure if this was okay, to fill the pool with the water before she’d aired up the whole thing, but it was past six now. It was almost seven.
Cathy was holding the hose when the car pulled up, and before her mind could catch up, she thought it might be Bev.
But it wasn’t. The car was blue instead of brown, and when Cathy squinted against the sun, she could see the driver, the red hair.
Jill cut the engine, got out of the car, and walked over to where Cathy was. Nice work, she said, and she had to yell to be heard over the compressor.
Part of Cathy was surprised to see Jill, but in ways Cathy couldn’t explain, Jill being there didn’t seem strange at all. The pool was holding water. The pool was perfectly level.
You’ve almost got it, Jill hollered.
Several minutes passed, and the compressor worked, and Cathy and Jill didn’t talk at all. They just stood there looking down at the pool, at the air and the water that was slowly filling it. They studied as people study a river or a fire or anything that is bigger than them and moves of its own volition.
When the third ring was full of air, it was Jill who switched off the compressor, and because she was closer, because it was—as Jill and the man in the bucket said it would be—easier with two people—it was Jill who got in the Mountaineer and unplugged the compressor and backed up away from the pool and cut the engine. She moved with a kind of efficiency that suggested confidence and experience.
She got out and tossed the keys back to Cathy, and without the compressor, without the running engine, things were suddenly very quiet. Cathy listened for the saws but didn’t hear them. She said, How’d you know where I lived?
The store, Jill said. The check.
Oh, right. She held the water hose. She moved it around even though she didn’t need to. She felt the spray of it on her leg. Nobody writes checks anymore.
Jill rolled her shoulder. Sometimes we just want things to stay the same.
Cathy kept her head down, but she was watching Jill. She was studying that scar, more like a split Cathy saw now. I keep thinking about all those dead animals, Cathy said.
Don’t ask me.
I thought you had to cut their heads off. Snakes.
Jill bent down and picked up the pool manual. You do, she said.
So they sew the head back on when they stuff it?
I guess. People do all sorts of things.
Cathy looked back at the water. The pool was almost full. Everybody’s been trying to help, she said.
Jill kept her head down. She flipped to the drawings. Maybe you look like you need it.
Next door, a truck was backing up.
I don’t know why, Cathy said.
Jill closed the manual. She stuck it under a rock to keep it from blowing anywhere. Good luck with the pool. And she was walking backward now. She was making her way toward her car. I think he got that snake off the internet. They probably made it in China.
Cathy looked up and said, Be careful! She meant the heat, the way it made people do things.
Jill stuck her hand up in the air. It was something you’d do if you were too far away, if someone couldn’t hear you, but Cathy wasn’t that far. She was just close enough.
By eight that night, Bev still wasn’t home. Maybe this time, Mozelle really was dying. There’d been scares in the past, but maybe this was it. When Cathy imagined it, when she looked at the pool but saw beyond it, she saw a head, severed and still snapping. The body a live wire.
She stood in the yard wearing Bev’s red bathing suit. The material strained in the middle and hung loose in the nubby seat.
You better get in, the man said. He was still in the bucket, and he’d swung back around over the yard. It’s getting late.
You’re still working, Cathy said.
Yeah, the man said. Emergencies.
He stared down at her and said, Watch out for storms. Then the bucket moved up and around, and Cathy watched him go. Cathy watched until he was on the other side of the house and out of sight.
The water was colder than she expected, and she had to force herself to put both feet in, to sit down. She tried to relax like the family on the box. She was right about them, the way they were cut and pasted from elsewhere. No way could so many people fit in a space so small.
This was the time of year when even the nights were hot, and although the water did provide some relief, it was almost too much. Cathy shivered in it, as people do when they are cold or burned or especially afraid. Shock, the cops called it.
Tomorrow, she would get up and work the same shift. She would stock the cigarettes. She’d clean the tubes in the soda machine. She’d tell Bev she loved
her.
Cathy looked down. She looked for herself in the water. She tried to see what everyone else saw, what she was missing.
She’d thought about being a fireman, maybe even a cop. She could be out there with them, eating peanuts and drinking coffee and generally keeping folks from killing each other. Maybe she could make some kind of difference. She and Wally had talked some about it. She’d said that someday she might like to do something different. She’d meant school and work but she’d meant other things, too, and Wally said, I’m just trying to make it. I’m just trying to stay alive.
But Wally was saving up for cosmetology school. He’d talked about doing makeup, maybe even masks for movies. There were people, he said, who did that.
There was just enough water in the pool. Just enough so that Cathy could float. She couldn’t see herself. She couldn’t see what she needed, but for the first time, she felt what wasn’t there. If the man in the bucket were here now, if he were to look down at her, he would see that a person is shaped like a star. Maybe people, like stars, can be gone before anyone sees the flash, the pulse of distant collapse and subsequent release.
The sun was back behind the trees now, and because she was wet, Cathy was colder outside of the water than underneath it. She ducked under. She heard the sounds of the world as if they were so many miles away. She pressed her head against the bottom of the pool. She opened her mouth. When the skull is cracked or the head is severed, the body still moves as if by a current, as if by the same charge that, against the dark, creates one small point of light.
LIVING THINGS
Lewis and Mozelle were making finger whoopee again.
That’s what Lewis told Bev, anyway. Bev didn’t know where he’d come up with this term, finger whoopee. Maybe a relic from his own youth. It was too sweet, after all, too innocent to have come from Natalie and the other girls. Bev was sure they would call it something else, something a lot nastier.
All right, Bev said. She yanked up the blinds. Then, in that brightness, she pointed at Lewis and said, Get out of here.
To his credit, Lewis tried to hustle, but he was slow in sitting up, in pushing himself off the bed. He was eighty-six years old. Mozelle was eighty-five. Both of them were in their underwear, which because they were lying in bed together, was against regulation. When Lewis bent over for his pants, Bev saw the ugly scar on his leg. It looked like something that would happen in a war, but Bev knew it was from Lewis’s hip replacement.
Mozelle pulled the thin sheet up around her chin. She started to whimper. Sorry, she said over her bottom lip. We didn’t mean to.
Lewis fumbled with his zipper. Speak for yourself.
Lewis, Bev said, Please.
Lewis couldn’t get a hold of the zipper pull. Bev watched him grabbing at nothing. He said, She meant what she was doing plenty enough a minute ago.
I’m sure she did.
You need a contract these days, a voice said. Signed, sealed, and delivered.
Bev knew Natalie’s hoarse twang, heard it sometimes even when she wasn’t at Twilight, but when Natalie came around the corner and into the room, it took Bev a minute to register the new hair, a dramatic red curl that Natalie pushed back with a long green fingernail.
Better ask for an ID, too, Natalie said, patting Lewis on the back. We don’t want you getting yourself on the registry.
Natalie, Bev said.
Natalie bent to zip up Lewis’s pants. Come on, Mr. Lewis. They’re about to spin the big wheel.
Bev could hear the television in the day room, the announcer describing every detail of a brand new Harley Davidson. Find your open road! Then the indiscernible voices in the crowd. They could have been yelling about anything.
I’ve told you about those nails, Bev said. Natalie and Lewis were nearly out of the room, and Bev’s words tumbled out in a rush. She meant to sound authoritative, but even to her own ears, there was the warble of panic. You’ll scratch the residents, she yelled after them.
Natalie had Lewis by the elbow. I think somebody’s winning big today, Natalie said. I feel it.
Mozelle’s crying had gotten worse. She was breaking into all-out sobs. She and Bev were alone now. It’s all right, Bev said. It’s okay.
I didn’t know what he was gonna do, Mozelle said. We were just going to the show.
I know. Let’s get you cleaned up.
She helped Mozelle out of her bra and underwear and got her situated on the plastic stool they kept in the shower. Natalie and the other girls used the orange antibacterial hand soap for baths, for shampooing, for everything, and they didn’t seem to notice how it dried out the skin. Bev, though, brought her own shower kit, and soon the air smelled like vanilla.
Mozelle did some of the work, and Bev helped her wash the soap from under her arms and breasts. When Bev first started this job, nearly twenty years ago, she felt a little uncomfortable with the exposure, the touching, the intimacy. But it didn’t bother her anymore. She didn’t really think about it. Even bathing herself had become a chore, something like washing a dog or a car.
When it was done, Bev turned off the water and helped Mozelle stand up. Slow down. Easy, she said, she always said, as Mozelle took that dangerous step from the ceramic tile to the rug.
Mozelle kept her balance. Water dripped from her hair and down her face. She licked it from her lips, and if she was still crying, Bev couldn’t tell. With the towel, Bev wiped Mozelle’s face first and then worked her way down. She was careful not to press too hard. An old person’s skin was like paper and any old thing could cause Mozelle to bleed.
Smells good, Mozelle said. Like birthday cake.
Bev smiled. She was drying Mozelle’s feet now. She noticed fungus growing around Mozelle’s big toe. It’s got a silly name, Bev said. She meant the soap. A Thousand Wishes it’s called. Isn’t that stupid?
A Thousand Wishes, Mozelle said.
Here you go, Bev said. She held out a fresh pair of blue underwear.
Mozelle braced herself and stepped in one hole and then the other. Bev pulled up the elastic band and made sure it wasn’t twisted around Mozelle’s waist, which was still amazingly narrow. Mozelle had been Miss Sweet Potato 1952. She kept a photo of herself by her bed. There she was in her crown and sash, her very own sweetheart.
I’d settle for one wish, Mozelle said.
Oh yeah? Bev buttoned Mozelle’s shirt. It was a lightweight denim poorly painted with lopsided jack-o-lanterns and black blobs meant to be cats with their hair standing on end. It came in the mail for Mozelle, a gift from a granddaughter she’d never met.
Mozelle closed her eyes like she was praying, and she said, I wish me and Henry would have gone to see that monkey like we were supposed to. I wish we hadn’t done what we done.
That sounds like two wishes, Bev said.
Mozelle opened her eyes. She looked straight at Bev. For a minute, there was no sound at all save for the television in the other room, and there with them, the showerhead leaking. Bev thought Mozelle would say something, but instead, Mozelle took a deep breath and blew in Bev’s face, as if what she saw was the smallest of flames, a lick of fire that twisted and flickered before it would go out completely.
Later, at the front desk, Natalie and another girl, Trish, were filing their nails and flipping through a magazine. It was true that for some, the job came with a lot of down time, but Bev always found something else to do: a form to fill, a pan to empty, a gown to change. Her mother said she had busy hands. Busy hands, Bev said and repeated, a mantra to anyone that was around. Busy hands made the day go faster, but no one ever agreed or said otherwise. It seemed like no one was ever really listening.
Natalie and Trish were talking about a new music video they’d seen, a rapper with a name Bev didn’t catch.
That one girl, Natalie said, on the car?
Total skank, Trish said and turned the page. Hoe if I say so.
People were always bringing magazines to Twilight. Sometimes there were boxes stacked
taller than Bev outside the door. They must have thought that’s all the old people did—sit around looking at Popular Mechanics and Sports Illustrated and OK! As if being in a nursing home was like waiting in a permanent doctor’s office. But really, the residents hardly ever looked at the magazines. The girls looked at them, and then their kids cut them up for art projects. Trish’s son was working his way through twelve years of National Geographic. Trish said he was going to be a scientist.
But Baby D, Natalie said, he’s looking good!
Know what I’m saying? Trish said, and she thrust her hips back and forth so that the chair rolled against the counter. She and Natalie doubled over laughing, and then they saw that Bev was watching.
Trish looked back down at the magazine, but Natalie said, That’s your problem, Bev. You don’t have enough Baby D in your life.
Bev held her pen with both hands like she was afraid somebody was after every little thing she had. What’s Baby D?
Trish snorted.
Danger, Natalie said like it was obvious.
And love, Trish said.
Well, Natalie said, not love exactly.
Then what exactly? Bev whined.
That was the truth. While everyone else was laughing, Bev was whining. Bev felt like she didn’t know what people were saying anymore. She couldn’t follow the track of things, but it didn’t matter. The girls were already on to something else.
They were talking about Iva, a resident who apparently had a full-blown orgasm during physical therapy.
I said get her up off that table, Natalie said. Let that therapist put his magic hands on me.
Bev felt a rising heat coming up from her neck. She often broke out in hives, great red splotches that caught people’s attention. She lowered her chin, pulled at the collar of her shirt.
It was getting toward midday. Lunch would be soon. In the dayroom, the game shows had faded into soap operas. It was the men who really dialed in to Young and the Restless and especially Days of Our Lives. The women all nodded off or stared out the big glass door as if they’d had enough romantic drama for one lifetime.