But the car slowed and began circling acres of parked cars. The mall, he guessed. The girls were arguing about what do with him. “We can’t walk in with him, I mean, God.”
“Well, we can’t just dump him out either, come on. They have, like, security cameras.”
“I think he’s got some kind of, like, condition.”
In the end they pulled up to an entrance and one of the girls helped him out of the car and trotted him through the doors. “You okay, mister? Look, you probably ought to put your money away now.”
Hurley realized he still had the wad of bills in one fist, and shoved his hand into his pants pocket. He watched the girl’s tight little behind as she ran out the door. He guessed he was what they called a dirty old man. It didn’t seem like such a bad line of work.
The mall wasn’t any place Hurley got excited about. Claudine used to try and drag him here, turn him into one of those tame husbands loaded down with handbags and packages. But now he felt giddy with possibilities. It wasn’t that crowded, but it was more people than he’d seen in one place in a long long how long and all the lights and all the things for sale and first he was going to get himself one of those scooter carts that people zipped around in. And then maybe sit in one of the massaging chairs and get a pretzel and a cup of coffee and a hamburger.
Once or twice he thought he saw, at a distance, the girls from the car, or maybe they were other girls. Even if he didn’t find them, he figured he could pay somebody else for a ride home or just stay here until everything closed and then somebody else would have to figure out what to do with him. Meanwhile, he was having quite a time. He bought a number of small items, after judicious examinations and considerations. A roll of peppermint Life Savers. A new wallet for his money. A package of bandana handkerchiefs. A hamburger in a paper wrapper that could have been better but so what. And best of all, he scoot scooted into what at first he took for a ladies’ place, a beauty whatsit, then, seeing men go in also, made so bold as to request (in a process lasting some little time, utilizing gesture as well as strangled words), a haircut and beard trim.
And though he would have preferred a proper barber instead of a girl—ah, the universe of girls!—she was so deft and respectful of him, her butterfly hands so light and skilled, Hurley had to make an effort to avoid ignoble weeping.
She handed him a mirror to inspect his newly shorn and clipped self. Hurley held it in his good hand. His beard, trimmed and tamed, gave him the air of a sea captain. His skin was pink and fragrant. He looked, by God, like a whole man, no matter what kind of ruin he was inside. He gave her what he hoped was a big tip.
After that he bought a pretzel, a big soft one dripping with cheese, and negotiated, with difficulty, the public restroom. He found a spot by a giant potted palm to park the scooter. Struggling against sleep, and losing, he wished it would end right here for him, Hurley’s Last Stand, without fuss or fretting or anyone telling him what he couldn’t do for his own good.
No such luck. Someone was joggling his shoulder. “Sir? Sir?” Hurley swam up to the surface of waking, saw a man’s face peering down at him, another man nearby, the police but not the police, the shopping mall kind, anyway, whoever was in charge of old men falling asleep after closing hours.
Hurley tried to tell them his name but he didn’t try very hard, and then there was his brand-new wallet, which identified him as absolutely nobody. He sat in the guards’ office, watching a boxing match on their little black-and-white television while they called around, trying to find somebody to take charge of him. Hurley gathered, from their conversation—nobody ever thought he could hear!—that they believed someone might have abandoned him, like a baby left on a doorstep. Maybe Claudine wouldn’t report him missing. His picture in the newspaper, Do You Know This Man? A houseful of softhearted girls would adopt him, take him home with them to be their honorary grandfather.
No such luck. The real police arrived and gave him a ride home in a squad car. Marched him up to his own front door and rang the bell.
Hurley could tell that they had their suspicions of Claudine. “If you didn’t take him there, ma’am, how do you think he ended up at the mall?”
Claudine said she had no idea, and that he was brain-affected, prone to wandering off, in spite of her vigilance. She tried to look all kinds of concerned and weepy, but the evil light was in her eyes. Hurley clung to the policeman’s arm, gibbering. “Please,” he tried to say. “Take me me me me.” Name of God, couldn’t they see her for who she was? “Hellelel.” Hellcat.
They might have believed him, but they didn’t know what to do about it. They told Claudine to call if she needed any further assistance, and they backed the squad car down the driveway and accelerated out of sight. Hurley’s Last Hope.
Claudine faced him down. Her lipstick was smeared in one corner, as if she had been eating something bloody. “The police! Now you brought the police out here, to shame me in front of everybody! I will not live this way!”
Hurley leered at her. Or attempted to; he wasn’t always sure what his face was doing, and anyway her vampire mouth unnerved him. He stomped out to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and stood there, bathed in its chilly light. He wasn’t hungry. It just seemed like a good place to ignore Claudine.
She followed him. She started talking. Hurley opened the freezer compartment and stuck his head in. The motor kicked on, humming. Cold noise enveloped him. He thought, This is what it will be like to be dead. All the moving parts of you, frozen. No more thought than a package of corn. He was aware of Claudine behind him, beating on him, pulling at him. I Will Not. Live This Way. I Will Not. Not Live.
The next day phone calls were made. Hurley sensed them rather than heard them. A current of whispers. His breakfast and lunch were left, cold, on the kitchen table. In the basement, laundry machines thundered. Claudine was everywhere and nowhere, like a gas. She had done something to the windows and he couldn’t get them open. Doors too. Maybe he’d already died without noticing it and this was hell. Locked in the house with Claudine’s pissed-off ghost.
Then the suitcases came. Or rather, they came and went, since once Hurley spotted them (at the bottom of the stairs, in the pantry, nudging out of the coat closet), they disappeared again. He heard Claudine yanking drawers open and slamming them shut. He feared the worst. He tried to remember Moz-art, but the notes got jumbled in his head and came out brassy. He couldn’t find the new bandana handkerchiefs he’d bought. He dreamed about the blue pills, woke, and scrabbled around under the bed until he found the matchbox.
He caught a suitcase sneaking up on him outside his bedroom door. Hurley kicked and dragged it inside the room, heaved it up on the bed and wrestled it open. Shirtsleeves waved at him. His socks, rolled into balls, spilled out and bounced across the floor. Here was the bathrobe he’d missed. Layers and layers of his clothes. It turned him cold.
Hurley dumped out the suitcase and went looking for Claudine. He heard her in the bathroom, flushing. He parked himself outside the door, leaning into it, and shuffled his feet. He heard her go still, then draw her breath in with a hiss.
“Get out the way, old man!” Her voice was shrill. The door lock snicked shut.
Hurley put his mouth up against the crack in the door. “Where I don’t go.”
“Oh yes you will. Tomorrow morning I am taking you to the VA Hospital in Danville. They can keep track of you from now on. They’re going to put you in the demented ward so you can talk to the other crazy people.”
Hurley shook the doorknob and heaved his shoulder against the wood. “Bitch whore!”
“Go right ahead, act as ugly as you want. I guess you can talk just fine when you got something nasty to say.” Claudine’s voice gained altitude and assurance. “I can have the police here in two seconds. I can have the crazy people ambulance haul you off. Don’t think I won’t.”
“———!” There was some word word word he wanted to call her, the worst and most poisonous word ever, but h
e couldn’t think of it or maybe it hadn’t been invented yet.
“So you might as well come along with me peaceable. Because what is there left of you? You used to have some pride. I’ll give you that much. Now you drag yourself around like an old dog. What difference does it make if you rot away here or someplace else? At least at the hospital you’ll be among your own kind. They won’t take as much notice of you. Now get out of my way. Somebody around here has to do a day’s work.”
Hurley stepped aside. After a little while the door opened and Claudine came out. She looked at Hurley as if trying to decide on one more thing to say, but then, seeing that she had already defeated him, she sniffed and headed downstairs.
There was no more escape, unless it was from his old dog’s body. Show some spunk, Hurley. He thought he’d had a pretty good life, except for the Claudine part, and he’d worked around that as best he could. There were things he’d miss and things he wouldn’t. That seemed fair. All divvied up. He wished he could make a speech, put everything together like the last scene of a movie. Hurley, The End. Dead Dog.
There were a lot of blue pills. He decided to wait until morning so he would at least have the ride to enjoy. Get out of the house for a last sniff of fresh air, as well as stick Claudine with the embarrassment of arriving with his dead self. He took apart the blue capsules, emptied out their chalky insides, scraped them together into a corner of his handkerchief. His hands shook worse than usual. It was hard to believe something so small, some little bit of powder, was enough to kill you. But then, the clot that made his brain bleed and his body seize up was small too. The world was full of things that made no sense. Maybe that could be his exit line.
The next morning, even as Claudine was fussing with the car, smacking his suitcases around, he panicked, thinking the blue pills might not be enough to get the job done, or maybe because it was really going to happen. In the bathroom he rummaged through any other pills he could find, pills for forgotten maladies, pills for all the ailments he and Claudine had between them, hoping that something in the mix would bubble up inside of him like a cartoon chemistry experiment.
He thought about writing a note, or maybe a will, except of course his writing was as bad as his speech, nothing landing on the page right. I, Hurley, being of sound mind and unsound body, do give and bequeath my wife of too many years, my brand-new corpse, may it stink up the place.
Claudine had his breakfast set out. Coffee, orange juice, cereal, bacon, toast. The condemned man eats a hearty last meal. The phone rang and Claudine went to answer it. Hurley braced himself against the wall, took out the handkerchief and dumped the mess of powder into his orange juice. It made a little heap in the bottom of the glass. He poked at it, stirred it up with a spoon, trying to be quiet, but his idiot hands made a bad job of it, the very last thing he ever had to do and he couldn’t do it right, his chickenshit body betraying him one more time. The glass clanked and rattled like something caught in an earthquake, and here was Claudine charging back into the room.
“If you’re just going to play with that food, I’ll throw it out.” She snatched the glass from his hand and set it on the counter.
“Back!”
“No, sir. You can have a plastic cup, like a baby.” She reached into the refrigerator for the juice. “There now. Drink that and try not to make a dribbling mess of yourself.”
“Back me!” Hurley lunged forward in his chair, took a wild swipe at her. Claudine sidestepped him, picked up the juice glass from the counter, and, with a slick little smile, drank it down.
“Now then,” she said. “You decide you don’t want that bacon, I’ll take it off your hands.”
Hurley ate the bacon. He was trying to work out what he might say. I. You. Juice.
J’s were especially hard for him. They always came out sounding like he had a mouth full of glue. He put extra sugar on his cereal, spooned it up and chewed thoughtfully. “Hurry up,” Claudine told him, shoving the last of his suitcases out the back door. “I haven’t got all day.”
No, she probably didn’t. He got up from the table and set his dishes in the sink. There was the rolling noise of the garage door and then the car’s engine, VOOM. Claudine always hit the accelerator starting up and fed it too much gas. He figured he’d finally get his chance at driving. It was time to go. He took a last sip of coffee. Killer Hurley, ready for the world.
The Woman at the Well
Of course they had Bible Study in prison. It was important that you take to heart the notions of sin and redemption. They made you sing, and not just church hymns, but “Rock-A My Soul” and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” songs you could move around to, clap and sway. You sang, “Jesus Met The Woman At the Well.”
Jesus met the woman at the we-ell
Jesus met the woman at the we-ell
Jesus met the woman at the we-eh-eh-ll
And He told her everything she ever done
It was a small group today, only six of them in the Activity Room. Five inmates and Janice, the volunteer minister. Janice was with the Disciples of Christ. She was nice, though once you figured out she was nice to everybody all the time, it took some of the shine off it. Janice was fifty or maybe sixty. She was homely, she had a face built for that word, homely, and so it was hard to tell age. A long, bony face. Glasses on a chain, a little frizz of gray-blond hair. Janice wore turtlenecks even now, in the middle of summer, baggy cotton pants, and Hush Puppies. She never seemed to feel the heat, while the rest of them choked on it night and day. Even the air in prison was locked up. Maybe Janice didn’t have enough juice in her to sweat. She was married to a Disciples of Christ minister. Homely didn’t seem to matter much to a minister.
That was not a Christian thought. It was the sign of a hardened heart. Anyway, you knew that nobody young or pretty or dressed or made-up nicely would ever come into this place. And, the sly, secret part of you whispered, even if they did you would hate and envy them like poison. Still, you would have liked to rest your eyes on something stylish for a change.
He said, Wo-man, wo-man
Where is your husband?
Most weeks the Bible Study meeting was bigger, because after all it was something to do, and the Activity Room was better than the Dayroom any way you looked at it. But then people found out it was too much like Group, where you had to talk about how worthless and pitiful you were, except here it went by different names, For all had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you actually had to read the Bible. So many of them couldn’t read, just flat-out couldn’t, it was amazing. If they’d ever spent a day in school, it was impossible to tell. It was sad, really, to hear them struggle over Bible words like salvation or humble.
It was un-Christian to look down on them, but you couldn’t help it, they were stupid. Stupid, and black, most of them, and poor, and crack-addled, and while you knew that none of it was really their fault, well maybe the drugs, knew that they had been treated viciously, beaten and raped and whored and kicked in the head again and again, still, it did not seem possible to love them in a Christian way.
Christ was perfect love and perfect forgiveness. Of course it was discouraging when you fell short of that. You prayed for God’s help in becoming more Christlike, although it was understood that you would always fall short. That was where humble came in. You were supposed to make a real point of not measuring up. The whispering part of you said, Why bother if you’d never get it right, and religion was just another prison sentence, a lifetime sentence, and only a fool would love everybody or want to. Love skinny, dried-up Janice, who smiled so hard her gums showed, smiled and smiled when nothing was funny so she could get you to believe in God? Love big fat mouth-breathing Bunny with her permanent yellow crescents of underarm sweat? Or mean-mouthed Jameelah, or scary, epileptic Crystal, or any of the warthog guards who by accidents of fate or circumstance had been granted absolute power over you . . .
“Teresa?”
Janice was smiling at you, that big, crucified smi
le. Bible Study was about the only place you were ever called by your given name. It was your turn to read and you hadn’t been paying attention. You smoothed your Bible and pretended to hunt for the verse.
“Matthew 5:45,” said Janice helpfully, as you hoped she would. You cleared your throat and read:
That you may be the children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
“Thank you, Teresa,” said Janice. You were a good reader and you knew Janice called on you more often because of it. You had always done well at school things.
“Let’s talk about this,” said Janice, folding her hands in her lap and leaning forward to include them all in the beam of her attention. “First, let’s break it down, see what it’s saying. Who has questions? Questions are what we’re here for, so don’t be shy.”
Nobody wanted to say the wrong thing, so there was silence. And you had just finished reading, so speaking up right away would have been showing off. It wasn’t good for a white girl to be seen as showing off. Janice measured the silence, and when it went on for too long she said, “I like the part about the rain. I think about a big crowd of people walking along under umbrellas, and nobody looking at them would have any idea which ones were good or bad.”
You had to wonder what would happen if Janice ever allowed a silence to die a natural death. Or maybe she knew what she was doing, because Bunny spoke up:
“There’s people who take one look at you and right away they’re acting like they’re way better than you are.”
Everybody nodded. They all knew what she meant. Even if it was true, in your own case, that you’d been pretty and had done your share of looking down on others. It took prison to let everybody think they were better than you.
Janice said, “But that’s not how God sees us. I know it’s hard for us to imagine. Somebody who doesn’t care about our outsides, only what’s in our hearts. God is beyond our imaginings. That’s where faith comes in.”
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