Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  The figure halts. I see a body bend, look in. I note how creased the face. Moon-cracked, it fills my window. The head cocks. I see an expression half-known. If I’d only somehow stayed this man’s familiar.

  “Bill here, Doc. No sweat. Crawl in. Boy, have I missed you. Remember when we were like brothers? Remember Dad’s dying, trusting us like that? Just me here, your Bill, sir. Needin’ help for sure. See, nobody knows the trouble or what to do with me these days. —Ideas, pal?”

  I POINT AT my own pounding chest. He looks. Doc really looks. Then my right hand shoots his way, “Put her there, pardner!” Stupid thing to try. Trick him into touching me once more.

  He swings back, skull hitting window-frame. I’d just been hoping for a final borrowed spark.

  Traffic passes. Where are they all going? My paw feels cold, exposed in air between us. Sunset keeps candy-tinting everything. He gapes at my extended hand.

  Then I see him notice: recent dark lesions biting into its back. He appears, if not concerned, at least still scientific.

  “Well, look at you.” A dry old voice husks Roper’s deeper wetter first one. His hands have both lost weight: now spindles, needles, sinew. He says directly to my hand, “Bill’s liver spots . . . more sunken now.”

  Doc bows through open car window, the stick propped outside. My beloved helper touches me. In that touch I swear I feel a father’s card-sense, the Mom’s Chopin, and Yale. He turns my wrist his way. He scans whatever one hand’s backside shows. From his palm’s heat I get the smallest splash.

  My doctor, best on earth, is reading me alive again! Imagine. He studies newer dents. He’s judging how blue veins now weave to the surface. In golden light Doc shifts the old mitt, reaches down along its wrist. Fingertips seeking my pulse. Tickles. I cannot explain the relief. Just to have been touched. Interest is healing.

  Doc’s lips move. He’s counting beats, my vital signs. His eyes slide west where they can linger, tally, private. Traffic whizzes wide of us. Wind keeps moving his crazed hair. Eyes narrow their pouches. He gazes my way, but as if across some vast marsh. Roper’s eyes, always a strong blue, appear electrocuted several shades brighter. Leery. Senile only? Maybe burned clear back to his startled bartering youth.

  “This ole Bill I’m seeing? Is, right? Bit confused here. That still you, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But where’d you go, ‘Mondays, six forty-five a.m.’? Started out our weeks right, ’member? But, there was a flood, you know. Is this really Red’s Billy? Looks like time’s messed you up pretty good, huh? Tough deal all-round. As for your having pulse, son . . . ?”

  I simply nod, eyebrows up as invitation.

  “Well, hell, Bill, boy. Nobody’s been taking care of you. Probably said I would. But, being up this age, I keep tellin’ ’em—just can’t do it all anymore.”

  “But you, Doc, you’re still moving!”

  “Hopping, more like. Frog legs in the skillet. No. For all practical purposes, professionally-speaking, son? the two of us we’re dead! Hate to be the one telling you. No, maybe best it’s me. Fact is you got no vital signs to mention. Reflexes’re all that’s left us. Surprised she even let you have the car. Goners, the both of us.”

  “Well, thank you. See, nobody would tell me. You know, all along I felt we . . . I always wished we could’ve . . . But, didn’t we have fun?”

  “Had the what?” His hearing’s shot. Doc releases my hand, all but throws it back at me. Everything cools further. The man ducks out backward. He’s already upright, moving, his staff fast-forwarding along more ditch, crackling weeds ahead. Again he has forgotten me. No backward-sideways glance. But that’s okay.

  Now I can lower my right hand, right? Can simply press it to my slamming rib cage. I finally know. I’ve heard it from the best. If I breathe now it is to count the few breaths he predicted. Very big adventure slated incoming, sir.

  Car ignition purrs as I direct my front-tires a foot more off tarmac but overshoot. With one thudding metal shriek-thud, my whole front seat topples right.

  Car’s tipped pretty good into the drainage-ditch. Sun keeps sinking over our second-best mall. Sunset’s going nowhere fast. Looks like skyline there wants only to go back toward perfect wilderness again. Before golf, pre-farms, prior to people, even Tuscarora ones, when creatures lived here unmonitored and whole. That’s what I want and where I seek. Any minute now. The rest.

  I note my blinkers going. Cocked off-road here, help’s unlikely. Falls? all new people. Gone those days when any kid falling off his bike brought Band-Aid strangers out of beautiful homes. Half now from Mexico City, the rest pure Jersey City, nice-enough total-strangers. Among the Fallen who chose to stay, few my age have managed staying put. Nobody to recognize my car. No one to know my fluky heart, my true friend, my Red, my country club connection, my loves, love . . .

  Still, we did just talk. Among our best conversations, at least our most efficient. And he was telling me . . . ? oh yes, that “we must remember to be dead now.” Houston? Phase III achieved at last. Note to self: High-time you hightail it, Ducktail.

  Once he swore, “I’ve got you, Bill.” Now, not. Catch-and-release. We’re all wildlife. Basically, it’s all catch-and-release.

  JAN WILL WAKE over her needlework, phone the cops. “He’s out again, boys.” Still, that gives me time aplenty to take care of business, leave the building. I’ve got this ugly plastic dog tag at my throat. Aren’t necklaces effeminate? Punch its red button, they’ll swarm in on me. But no, at last I have the needed information. From the only one on earth who’d know then tell. So few such men. To be recognized, diagnosed, dismissed, and nearly-blessed. Who’d dare ask more?

  That single young male wood duck is still Doc’s finest. Something about its cockiness, crest. My wished last mission: collecting that. Doc and I, we never needed to say much. Between buddies, a whole whole lot went understood.

  —Pleased to now go drifting. Safe from any sternum-busting code-blue. Didn’t crash her car into a perfect young family. Promised Janet that, at least. We’re up-to-date, God bless her long patience with me. Shouldn’t have monopolized someone so good. Could’ve run any multinational, that one.

  Hammocked here behind safety belt, I will want to go and hunt the boy-one naturally. Woody the Wood Duck, son of Red. A flotation device I myself could not have carved. His masterpiece, a sort of portrait of me, know it or not. He always saw so much in me. Too much?

  (“Hardly a pulse,” he said. You know, I thought there was a problem.)

  I TRUST SEATBELT to hold me half up. Nodding, I hear his sensible order, “Align. Head. Please.” Obeying, I feel clarity return. Soon I’m finding a horizon I’ve kept aiming for since farm life. Car’s not even needed now (some larval stage abandoned). Now my old gray space opens to more liquid time. I seem on-water, am Tomothy Timothy Bixby–amphibious. Alone and somehow setting out by rowboat, so . . . gunwales creak, two battered oars. Ocean current’s basically in charge. Evening alone on the water. Fine by me, though chill. Should’ve brought my windbreaker. Out here somewhere, just offshore, my simple stand-in bobs. Daring me to find him, teasing.

  His carver knew me pretty well. I want art’s findings now and have come to collect. This was my own long ago, and how can that be wrong? I somehow sense my trophy just ahead. So much dark water, little ruddering’s now possible. Day is giving way. Passing the little docks, I see lamps switching on in beachfront family homes. Sunset wicks up all the blues into one red soon turned thorough black. Shadows keeping mashing down on darkness even blacker. And over water, over me, stars brighten till they each have fur. Male, most stars. The search is long and I have lost one oar but, among yet another brace of reeds, touch alone tells me I am near it.

  Here, now, this. Finally my very own one, actually my first. For keeps, too. How easily and wet it comes to me. Un-shy if silver-cold to touch. Darkness helps me feel its sides’ engraving, every feather’s cut as strict as Bible braille. Not one mistake, no faking. It
bulks here in my hands. Made just for me, made almost as me. Since I’ve lacked my own fuller version, I’ll trust his one of me just that much more.

  Tonight its weight feels excellent, exact as the mystery of being male. It rests safe here in my lap. Air’s turned colder, salted. But thanks to this loss returned, I swear I feel sum-totaled. Fear no evil in me, ever. Oh I know this is just a carving. Not an actual life. (But, did I even half-deserve another person, a whole splendid extra one of those and just for me?)

  BOY, BUT NIGHT comes down so hard around our little boat.

  I cling to this object, man-made. Still, I knew the man made it. Seems, what? Confused. There’s just one thing I’ve forgot to do. What? But wasn’t that the agreement? I was either meant to be or love him . . . Cannot for the life of me remember which. At least he kindly sent me out with this. Sure seemed to think the world of me. And yet, I . . . what? I go.

  A man accompanied. A man one certain other worthy man described.

  See, that is why I value this.

  See, that is why I’ve waited.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WRITERS NEED READERS while the inkjet lettering’s still warm. I am honored to thank my own responsive, candid friends: Jane Holding, Elizabeth Spencer, Diana Ricketts, Paul Taylor, Joanne Meschery, Cecil Wooten, Danny Kaiser, Erica Eisdorfer, David Deming, Shirley Drechsel, Chuck Adams, Charles Millard, Alan Shapiro, Mona Simpson, Sam Stephenson, Will Menaker, Katie Adams, Dave Cole, Ret. District Court Judge Patricia Devine, therapist Bob Vaillancourt, computer therapist Paul Rosenberg, Nancy Demorest and Bruce Gurganus. Dr. Jess Peter, cardiac advisor to certain of my characters, helped me diagnose the imaginary.

  My agent, Amanda Urban, has shown both loving discernment and rare patience with my perfectionism or whatever it is.

  I am especially happy to acknowledge my new editor, Robert Weil. His affectionate respect for my work first brought me to Liveright. May this be the first of many books to emerge under Bob Weil’s scrupulous, imaginative care.

  Time is the greatest gift. For that, I stand indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Lannan Foundation and the Corporation of Yaddo each took me in, offering a block of clear time. This book is the byproduct of gratitude.

  Thank you, friends. And thank you, readers.

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2013 by Allan Gurganus

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  “The Man with the Blue Guitar” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation,

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  Book design by JAM Design

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gurganus, Allan, 1947–

  [Novellas. Selections]

  Local souls : novellas / Allan Gurganus. — First edition.

  pages ; cm.

  ISBN 978-0-87140-379-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-87140-727-6 (e-book)

  I. Gurganus, Allan, 1947– Fear not. II. Gurganus, Allan, 1947– Saints have mothers.

  III. Gurganus, Allan, 1947– Decoy. IV. Title.

  PS3557.U814A6 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2013016662

  Liveright Publishing Corporation, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

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  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  ALSO BY ALLAN GURGANUS

  The Practical Heart

  Plays Well with Others

  White People

  Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All