Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  The first slo-mo drip of liquid poison drops from the plastic bag, and I’m thinking how the physical reality of the chemo itself seems hardly the stuff of nightmares. Just clear liquid and a needle.

  Tina glances behind her chair at the bag. Her cheeks are rosy, and I remember what Justin and Marsala said about this being a symptom of the lung cancer. But this time they look rosier than ever, which makes me think the cancer is even more pissed off because the chemo is already beginning to kick its ass.

  “Are you okay?” I say, kneeling in front of her.

  She nods.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Tina shakes her head no.

  “Great.” I take a moment to chase out all the loathing I’m presently feeling for the way this business of living, loving, and dying is set up. “Do you mind if I lead us in a proactive spiritual exercise?” I say, citing one of Justin and Marsala’s New Ageisms.

  I get a weak smile from Tina as I put my arm behind her, closing my eyes, unsure how to begin.

  “God?” I say, opening my eyes, unsatisfied with my paltry beginning. Glancing back at the bag hanging over my mother’s head, feeling the weight of all that lies before us, I shut my eyes tight. This time I feel some indescribable endowment from the control freak deities. “GOD! We thank you for this beautiful waterfall of healing, heavenly light which is now making its way through Tina’s body like a blowtorch of living energy completely annihilating any signs of cancerous growth in its thunderous path.”

  I search Tina’s face for some sign of approval. “Are you all right?”

  She nods and smiles.

  I move closer like a quarterback in huddle, this time carefully coaxing, using words from an affirmation collection I’d found on my bedside table at the Village. “We realize the sentence of death is within ourselves. Which is why, in this moment, we choose—” I catch myself. “No. We gratefully accept light and life. Amen.”

  Glancing silently about the room, I notice what can only be a large puddle of pee in front of the easy chair by the door. Probably the last patient’s knee-jerk reaction to some life-altering news. I make a mental note to lead Rose O’Sharon right through it on our way out.

  * * *

  Although I came away from that day with a great deal more than I started out with, I had something taken away from me at the same time: my cavalier attitude towards germs.

  The signs are instantaneous. It starts with doorknobs.

  Tina and I exit the Lincoln and make our way through the carport. Pointing to the door, I make sure she understands the critical importance of Rose O’Sharon’s warning. “Now. The door to the Little House will always be opened with one’s shirttail.” I demonstrate before we head to the entrance. “The gate to the breezeway,” I say, “with the underside of the forearm.”

  Proceeding to the sunroom, I sense a bit of playfulness is called for at the French doors since Tina is becoming more befuddled with every instruction. “French doorknob?” I say in my worst Parisian accent, “back of ze hand.” Turning around, I open the door backward. Tina laughs as we proceed up the three steps. “The last door to the mudroom?” I say in a high-pitched, crazy voice. “SHIRTTAIL AGAIN!”

  Garrett pokes his head around the corner and makes a face full of vinegar.

  “You think I’m kidding?” I say, spinning around.

  Garrett narrows his eyes, and I grab Tina’s hand, pulling her quickly into the house.

  * * *

  Tina knocks and enters at the same time. “Anybody home?”

  I close my laptop and motion her into my bedroom.

  “What are you working on? Tap, tap, tap. Like a woodpecker.”

  “Just emails and stuff.”

  “You know, I feel frightfully good,” she says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Isn’t that crazy? I think that extra dose of seaweed and miso Justin and Marsala prescribed did the trick. I mean, I think I’ll still take the nausea pills, but—” She looks at me with wide-eyed disbelief. “Boy, you sure came a long way just for me. Thank you for reading all those books. And for all those prayers today. If I’d been a cancer cell anywhere near you I would have tucked my tail and run.” She sits quietly for a moment, biting a nail.

  “Hey, punkin. You know what?” Garrett stops just outside my bedroom door. He pushes the door open and leans into the jamb, holding up a powder blue invoice of some sort, squinting through his bifocals. “That chemo you’re gonna be taking will be costing upwards of three thousand dollars a month. ’Course it’s not gonna cost us a dime with that old insurance policy I still carry on you. In fact, like I said, they’ll be paying us a pretty penny on top of everything they reimburse, but still…crazy, right?” Garrett winks and goes back down the hall.

  Tina glances up at the ceiling. “Well, I always wanted to be a financial contributor to this household. I just thought there were easier ways to go about it,” she says. “But look at me,” she says ironically, running a finger over the bandage from her chemo injection. “I’m a cash cow!” She giggles and shakes her head.

  “Well, thank God somebody is,” I say, taking her hand.

  “Oh, which reminds me, your father left a book of checks in your top desk drawer over there, so at the beginning of every month, you can just send whatever you need out to your bank in California.”

  For a moment I’m sure I’ve heard her wrong. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Your father said since you’re not working, and you’re helping us out, he thought he’d help you out. So.” Tina looks at me like I have no reason to be surprised. And in truth, I don’t. My parents have helped me out financially many times before. But the last time I was home, they finally said it was time I go down a different path. In fact, Tina had said tearfully, “I’ve seen you go through so much rejection, I wonder how much more my body and soul can take.” It was one of the worst moments of my life, that time when those closest to you finally throw in the towel. Tina’s words came back to haunt me after her diagnosis. Did my life as a loser give my mother cancer?

  The cell phone vibrates on my bedside table, and Tina pats me on the knee. “You go on and get your phone call. It may be Frances.” She walks over to the door. “See you in the funny papers.” I still laugh every time she says it, just like when I was four.

  16

  The pool water feels like warm, wet cotton around my feet. My legs swing back and forth at the edge, where I’ve sprawled in the boxers and T-shirt I planned to crash in before I decided I was too wired to sleep. I can just make out the Seven Sisters over the Tombigbee as I pretend every high-pitched “and” coming through my phone is another drop of much-needed rain instead of one more rambling bullet point from my self-involved boss.

  “And I told Piper she needs to keep better records. I mean, how can I possibly keep up with what I talked about on Letterman over, what, two years ago?”

  “Right.”

  “So, did you think I looked skinny?”

  “Hmm?” I say, stifling a yawn.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  Leaning up to take a sip of organic beer, I can just make out a yellow flicker of light through the hollow from one of the blank window spaces in Joe Tischman’s parents’ house.

  “Phillip? Listen, I don’t pay you to not listen to me.”

  “You’re not paying me much of anything right now.”

  “One of my implants is crooked,” Frances says.

  “Wow. Well. Not what I expected to hear at eleven o’clock at night.”

  “You can see it. Crooked as hell.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Would these be new implants?”

  “Yes. God, you’ve been gone so long I’ve already been through another set.”

  How long have I been gone, a month? No, wait, six?

  All I can think of is how badly I wanna jump in the pool and wash off every ounce of juju from this batshit narcissist. “Is this normal?”

  “My surgeon says it’s not. But sometimes he says i
t’s like when you get a crown on your tooth, you have to go back in to get it adjusted.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a very good surgeon.”

  “Oh, God, why did you say that? Now you’ve got me worried.”

  “I just mean, comparing breasts to teeth? That’s not—”

  “Oh, who asked you?”

  “I gotta go, Frances. I’m sorry about your—things. I’ll call you later.”

  I press the End button and close the phone, an act of rebellion that makes my heart stop cold for a moment. Shaking off the residue of Frances’s late night panic, I toss my phone on the concrete and fall face forward into the warm, dark water.

  * * *

  I’d always found comfort in the fact that rattlesnakes sleep at night, especially since I climbed out my bedroom window more than a few times as a kid to traverse the creek banks without so much as a thought to what might lay under my feet. But presently I am recalling an Animal Planet special I’d stumbled across one sleepless night in L.A. that proved, via night vision camerawork, that darkness was their favorite time to move about and hunt. My second beer had given me a strong dose of curiosity, not to mention the courage to move about myself in the surrounding woods. I had to agree with the rattlesnakes. What better time to gather information than in darkness?

  Walking cautiously through the bottom of the pitch-black hollow and across the grounds at the back of the Tischman house, I put my hand in front of my face to see if I can see it. For a moment, I can’t. Moving past the dark, lifeless tent near the tiny patch of creek beach, I take another sip of beer before climbing the sloping lawn to the rear of the site.

  An electric lantern hangs from the ceiling of one of the upstairs rooms. Sizing up the giant aluminum ladder positioned to the left of the window space, I take another sip of liquid courage and begin to climb. I realize how crazy it is and how buzzed I am as soon as I start up.

  Peering from below the ledge into what appears to be the skeleton of the master bedroom, I can just make out Joe’s bare feet suspended from the area between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floor. As his unseen hand hammers loudly on some second-floor surface, his dangling, muscular legs keep his balance, matching every blow from above with a pigeon-toed thrust.

  Taking another sip of beer, I attempt to ignore the irritating buzz of a mosquito’s wings rising in pitch like a dentist’s drill in my ear. Joe’s hammering stops for a moment, and I’m almost positive I can hear him sob. One quick outburst of grief before the hammering resumes, but the blows come even faster this time. Grabbing the ladder with the same hand my beer is in, I take a swat at the skeeter with my free hand.

  I feel my footing give way a split second before it does. The rung of the ladder sings out a dull, tinny ping as I fall, ass over tit, into the pittosporum bushes below.

  Even though it was a drop from only three measly rungs, what feels like a good-sized oyster shell lodged in the small of my back tells me not to move. The sound of Joe’s feet landing with a thud stops my heart dead. I hear him scuttle across the wooden terrace beside me, and I am suddenly overcome with the smell of myself, soaked to the skin in Jake’s Hearty Farms Micro Beer. From the corner of my eye, I can see Joe’s shadow as he stops in the doorless rear entrance of the house.

  “Shit,” he says, diving out of the house like a paratrooper. He kneels next to me and sets the lantern down by my head. This is going to be worse than I thought. “Are you okay?”

  A shrill wheeze whistles from some place in my lungs that brings to mind my father rocking me on the edge of the tub during a bout with the croup.

  Joe looks up at the skewed ladder. “Can you breathe?”

  I cough. Joe sits back on his haunches, watching me closely with raised eyebrows. He nods and I nod back.

  “How we doin’?”

  I nod again. “I’m…”

  “I’ve got some things in the tent.”

  “What? No, I just—”

  Joe holds up a hand. “I got some stuff, you’ll be fine. Just stay put.” He hops up and goes down to the tent. I pull my hands up behind my head to open up my chest, pondering all the awkwardness that comes with allowing yourself to be nurtured, even for the briefest time. A quick gust of summer wind pushes a bat trolling for bugs off its erratic course over the creek below. The cicadas in the surrounding pines take a big collective breath before jumping into their creekside hymn once again, like an animated bug conductor waved his wand from a nearby stump.

  “Can I ask you what the hell you were doing?” Joe has already returned from the tent, arms filled with pillows and blankets.

  My ears grow fiery hot. “What?”

  Joe situates a pillow behind my head and a blanket over my body. “The ladder.”

  “I was just—I thought I would—I heard you working—” I say, praying for him to interrupt me before I try again. Unable to come up with any respectable pretense, I stifle a nervous laugh. Behind Joe’s shoulder, the biggest full moon one is never able to see from foggy Santa Monica has risen over the outline of the house. “Wow,” I say at the moon, hoping the looming orb will take some of the focus off me. Joe twists around, studying it. He looks back at me, brushes off his hands, and takes a seat in the grass nearby.

  “I need to go,” I say, coming to my wobbly knees before a wheeze sits me down again.

  “Okay, brother?” he says.

  I nod, pulling the blanket over me like a squirmy toddler.

  Joe whispers something I can’t make out and lies down. He carefully positions a tiny foam pillow underneath his head, watching the sky for a moment before closing his eyes and exhaling a low, tentative groan like a dog somebody let in on a cold, damp night.

  He would be in the same position when I went home quietly at dawn.

  17

  “This is fucking scary,” Sis reports from the back seat of the pickup. I had cajoled Garrett into letting me borrow his newest, a crimson Ford F-150, by claiming I needed to help Patience move some furniture. A pickup, even a brand-new one, would blend in far more easily with the dodgy surroundings than Tina’s Lincoln.

  “It is what it is,” Patience tells Sis from the passenger seat next to me, checking a map in her lap and eyeballing the dirty, diminutive house situated literally across the railroad tracks.

  The last time I patronized this so-called place of business, I was a senior in high school taking a bet I could make the long walk unaccompanied from Patience’s car door to the open service window around back. There, a hostile African American girl would sell you a nickel bag of inferior weed, but only after an older man, a paraplegic who looked just like Morgan Freeman, gave her the okay from his daybed.

  Tracing my steps twenty years later, the most I can cough up as the Bahama window is punched open is, “Hi. Um. I need.”

  The girl, now a cruelly overweight woman with cavernous creases in her face, studies my partners in crime behind me. Patience smiles and nods in encouragement while Sis pops her gum, digging in her ear with her free hand.

  “You police?” the woman says.

  The door behind the woman blasts open as the old man, lying sideways on a gurney, pulls himself through the door and down the wall like a spider. “You a narc?” he says.

  Spotting the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun protruding from under his housecoat, I move back a step. “No. We’re just…” I glance back at Patience, who winks from some blond Zen state I’ve never been privy to. Turning back to the window, I smile like someone running for office. I lean on the windowsill, knowing I’m taking my life in my own hands. “I need some hash. Not a lot, like a dime bag, maybe?” I turn to Patience, who nudges me along with a raised eyebrow. “It’s for baking.”

  “Baking?” the woman asks incredulously. She turns to the old man, who offers up a half laugh. “Dime bag?”

  “I don’t think they have those anymore,” Sis whispers, “so why don’t you hop into the twentieth century before you get us all killed.” I look to Patience, who shrugs, mumbling
something about inflation.

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, whatever—wherever—you start. On the hash. Hish.”

  The woman turns to the old man, who gives her the nod. As if out of thin air, the woman drops a tiny brown paper bag on the shelf on her side of the sill. “One hundred.”

  “One hundred,” I say obediently, like a first grade spelling student.

  “ONE HUNDRED!” she screams. The old man watches me close, steadying himself on the squeaky gurney.

  I turn to Sis. “I’ve only got sixty-five.”

  She rolls her eyes. “My purse is in the truck.”

  * * *

  Perusing The Macrobiotic Way, the recipe for Adzuki Bean Brownies would have screamed inedible in every way possible. But, oddly enough, the addition of one special ingredient took the dish to a whole other dimension. Especially on a third serving.

  “These are really good.” Tina’s front teeth are blacked out by the goopy treats, a sight she would find objectionable. “I don’t even feel like I’ve had chemo. It’s more like…it’s more like…” She reclines farther back on the king-sized bed, watching the fingers of her right hand dance a playful jig above her head. “I want another one.”

  Taking the knife from the cake plate between us, I cut one of the delectables in half. “I tell you what, I’ll split one with you.”

  Tina sits up, glancing at a snoring Sis on the floor next to the bathroom door. “Shh, don’t wake the sleeping bear,” she says, giggling and clapping her hands once before she stops herself. She licks some brownie off her fingers and giggles some more.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Tina and I sit up straight as we can at Garrett’s intrusion. Holding the baggie above his head, he waits for an answer like he’s Moses just back with the tablets.

  Tina points at me through another blacked-out smile. “He made brownies.” She kicks me in the side, and I lay the knife back down on the plate, trying not to laugh.