* * *
“Looking good!” I kneel next to the swimming pool with a stopwatch in my hand as Tina finishes another lightning-speed lap. Frances buzzes my ear bud with news of dyspeptic producers and reshoots.
“I slept with the director during rehearsals. I didn’t fake it, if you know what I mean, so he got upset.”
“Did nobody tell you that you don’t have to sleep with the director once you have the job?”
“But I think I replaced someone else. I wanted to make sure he was happy with the choice.”
“Atta girl.”
“I feel twenty years younger,” Tina calls as she swims to the edge of the pool.
“Do you think I should get veneers?” Frances asks.
“Frances, I have to go and get my mother her medicine.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, all about me. How is your mother? Is she still doing well?”
“No, she’s not doing well at all.”
Tina gets out and I hand her a towel. “Will you be a dear and spot me on some bench presses?” she says, heading for the basement. “I wanna try out some of those free weights of yours.”
“Free weights?” I ask, not sure what I’ve heard.
“Yes, free weights.”
“Are you sure?”
Tina calls out over her shoulder, “Sure, I’m sure!”
I am struck by the overwhelming evidence that our path of doom and destruction has taken a turn of almost biblical proportions.
THE DIXIE
April 17, 2000
Community
Alcohol Regulations Put Into Place
In response to the citizens of Jackson voting to permit the sale of alcohol within the city limits, the City Council is now approving a lengthy ordinance governing the regulation of alcohol beverage sales and distribution. Details of the ordinance will be printed in The Dixie as they become available. Those reading the ordinance in its entirety are forewarned that it contains explicit language:
1. It shall be unlawful for any person or their associations to permit the following on any licensed premises:
Topless or bottomless waitresses, waiters, dancers or cashiers.
Acts, or simulated acts, of caressing or fondling of the breasts, buttocks, anus or genitals.
Acts, or simulated acts, of sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation or any sexual acts which are prohibited by law.
Acts involving the displaying of the anus, vulva or genitals.
The showing of any visual reproductions depicting scenes wherein artificial devices or inanimate objects are employed to depict any of the prohibited activities described above in this section.
Next week: Open Containers and What They Mean to You
22
Sipping a beer on my parents’ pool steps, I lean back on my elbows, taking in the sight of Joe swimming laps like an Olympic champ.
“I forgot how much I love to swim in the dark. When are you coming in?” he says, stopping in front of me to catch his breath.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“What, the crawl?”
“I always wanted to swim like that.”
“But you can swim,” he says.
“Of course I can swim, but it’s an ugly swim. Nothing special.”
“I think you’re something special,” he says, crawling up a couple of steps and planting his face in the crotch of my swimsuit.
“Whoa. I don’t think this is acceptable behavior in the bylaws of the official games.”
Joe sticks his face up the leg of my shorts and sniffs.
“What’s going on down there?” I say, gasping and laughing as he tickles the inside of my thigh with his tongue.
He pulls back, looks up. “Put down the beer.”
“I will in a second. So, when did your folks learn you liked guys?”
“Oh. Well.” Joe grabs a beach ball and floats on it. “My mother found a magazine under my bed when she was cleaning. It was the worst magazine she could have found. Orgies, flying body fluids, you name it.”
“So what did she do?”
“She left it on my bed with a pamphlet on AIDS and a box of condoms.”
“No way,” I say.
“Jewish mothers, you gotta love ’em.”
“Indeed.”
Joe tosses the ball into the deep end. “So, are you gonna put down the beer now?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, taking one last slug.
He shimmies out of his trunks and tosses them on the side of the pool. “Now you.”
“You’re certainly giving out the instructions this evening.” I peel off my trunks. “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Here we go.” Grabbing me by the waist, Joe pulls me off the steps into the water. He sits cross-legged on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool and situates me on top of him. He places my hands around the back of his neck. “Do you like me?”
“Of course I like you. Can’t you tell?” I say, placing his hand on my cock.
“Well, I know you like me like that,” Joe says with a grin. “I mean, who wouldn’t?”
Who wouldn’t, indeed, I think, laughing out loud.
“Shh. We don’t wanna wake your folks.”
“Right, no.”
“Thank you for inviting me over,” Joe says, taking in the surroundings. “I like it back here. Do y’all not have a pool light?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Just as well for tonight, I guess. It feels like we’re in high school,” he says, running his fingernails lightly down my back. “Fooling around in the parents’ pool. With beer.”
“It does,” I say, feeling not a day over sixteen.
“So, I’m gonna ask you again.”
“What’s that?”
Joe whispers softly in my ear. “Do you like me?”
“We’ve already covered this.”
“Not like that,” he says, resting his head on my shoulder like a child.
The vulnerability in his voice startles me. It takes me a moment to find my bearings. I can hear the water gurgling through the skimmer behind us. “I like you,” I whisper.
After a moment, Joe pulls away from me and looks into my eyes with a face of relief and contentment. It’s such a switch from the sexy, gregarious man I’ve come to know, it brings to mind Sis’s stories about his supposed mental issues. But in the same moment, I’m wondering why it is that he has to be crazy just because he attempted to express his true feelings for me.
In an effort to take us back to where we were, I reach between Joe’s legs and take his now-soft penis in my hand. I realize the events of the last few minutes had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a handsome carpenter who has come to depend on me. Glancing down at Joe’s head, still on my shoulder, I kiss him lightly on the cheek. “You okay?” I ask.
“I’m good,” he says quietly. I’m thinking of that first night when I fell off the stepladder at his place, and he watched over me until I was able to go home.
This time, I’m thinking, was his time to fall.
* * *
Things couldn’t have been going better. I was giddy with pride and gratitude. I began to pace, and I didn’t know why. I’m not talking ten or fifteen minutes of minor league pacing, I’m talking feverish pacing. Most nights I’d pace two, three hours or more from the sunroom, to the kitchen, to the living room, to the den. I felt like I was on coke. Justin and Marsala said the pacing was a discharge from all those years of eating dairy and sugar, and that it would take a while to release it from my nervous system.
“That’s not the only discharge,” Justin warned. “Since the carboplatin is so tough on the kidneys, the macrobiotic diet will begin to discharge the chemo from a place on the back of Tina’s right leg.”
And it did. Kid you not. Big, itchy red splotch on the back of her right leg.
Marsala weighed in as well. “The seemingly incurable fungus Tina’s had on her
toenail for the past thirty years will soon be a thing of the past.”
Gone. In weeks. Feet like a Miss American contestant.
And that’s not all. Justin and Marsala pooh-poohed the taking of vitamins. Your healing was meant to take place solely from the foods you eat, not from something with the potential to throw your body out of balance. And the foods Justin and Marsala were prescribing left Tina practically free of any side effects from the chemo. No fatigue or hair loss, and her white blood count remained high, something virtually unheard of with this drug. Tina looked twenty years younger, and she was swimming over a hundred laps mornings after treatments. Her cough was gone and, eventually, so were the splotches.
Our road to success would be paved with the residue of any negative energy I could put behind us. When Tina, an avid reader, had a particularly unpleasant experience with a soul-killing Book of the Month choice, I decided to take control of all literature that came into the house. Anything she put on her list, I found, read the book jackets and grilled the librarians, making sure I read at least two chapters myself, just in case there was a passage about someone dying a gruesome death from cancer.
I pushed Emerson and Thoreau over Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I scavenged for nightly devotionals about people who scaled heights of insurmountable obstacles and read them aloud at my parents’ bedside. But when it came to pure entertainment, nothing could beat the weekly headlines in the local paper. The widespread panic attributed the continuing Great Southeastern Drought was bringing out the truly bizarre in Clarke County.
THE DIXIE
July 21, 2000
Crime Scene
More Nakedness
Area officers combed Grove Hill Friday morning for a man who had escaped while in transit to the county jail. Eric Welch, who is said to be double jointed, was able to bring his hands, which were cuffed behind him, to his front, accidentally pulling his pants off in the process. He then managed to get the car window down, reach for the outside handle and open the door at the intersection of Jackson and Cobb Streets. At some point, he got into an old vehicle parked near Victory Paint & Body Shop and hid on the floor of the back seat until Grove Hill Police Officer Buster Hough found him. At press time it was still not known how the events occurred without the transporting officer’s knowledge.
23
For someone who had lived with disappointment and failure longer than anyone who hadn’t given up and hung themselves from a moldy shower rod, I had become a tender of miracles, struggling to keep up with all my good fortune. The old folks called it living at the foot of the cross, and for the first time I felt it: the hot red blood tickling the back of my neck like sweet salvation.
If anyone were to ask me, I’d say the most egregious practice in medicine today would have to be hands-down the unconscionable habit of sequestering the patient in those tiny cells called rooms after the nurse escorts them in.
“The doctor will see you momentarily.” Of course, that can be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half, a long time to sit with your thoughts and fears when you’ve got a cold, much less stage four lung cancer.
Per my instructions, the nurses from now on were to leave the door open until the doctor’s arrival. This practice provoked a curious glance from every health care worker who passed. On this day in late August, Tina is seated in the swervy cushioned chair where the doctor usually sits, Garrett and Sis are perched on the exam table, and I am on a stool an orderly dragged in from the nurse’s station.
“Well, well. The gang’s all here.” The physician we call Spielberg due to an uncanny resemblance and easygoing demeanor studies the X-rays on the wall behind us, something none of us had gathered the courage to do any sooner.
Garrett strokes Sis’s shoulder. “We’re a close-knit group, Doc. You got news, we wanna hear it.”
Like a poisonous gas in the room, everyone afraid to breathe.
The doctor leans against the wall, Tina’s chart across his chest. “Well, I’ve got some good news. The tumor is shrinking.” I notice he actually scratches his head. “It’s shrinking quite a bit, in a relatively short period of time.”
Tina slumps. “It’s…”
Spielberg takes another peek over his shoulder at the pictures. “A damned near remarkable improvement, I’d say.”
Tina looks at the doctor like it’s not sinking in. “So…”
Garrett leans over, taking Tina’s hand. “It’s good news, doll. It’s—”
“Right,” Tina interrupts, the truth finally registering. “Good news.”
Sis takes Tina’s other hand and looks into her eyes with a nod. Suddenly unable to contain her excitement, Tina stands and walks behind me, her hands around my shoulders. “This is my son, Doctor. He’s a big deal out in Hollywood.”
I am certain this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. “I’m not a big anything, Tina. I’m too old to be anything big.”
“Hollywood.” Spielberg studies me like I’m something fuzzy in a petri dish. “You’re a long ways from home.”
I decide I will give up cussing in honor of our news. It only seems appropriate. With whatever is happening, I want to meet it halfway with some sort of acknowledgment. It seems to fit.
“I want to stop the treatments.”
“I’m sorry?”
Tina takes her hands from my shoulders, glances around at the rest of the Stalworths, then looks back to the doctor. She speaks slower this time, like she’s talking to a child. “I want to stop the treatments.”
Clearly, this is news to everyone, including me.
“Tina, you’re doing so well. But you’re not out of the woods.” Spielberg taps the file in his hands with a finger. “You have stage four cancer. The tumor has shrunk, but it’s not gone.”
“It’s my final decision.” She nods quickly in my direction, as if that puts a period on the thing.
“Well,” Spielberg says, “you know radiation has the potential to extend one’s lifespan in many of these cases.”
Tina picks up her purse, perusing the contents as if she’s preparing to go. “If it doesn’t come from a plant, I’m not interested. That’s it, and I don’t want to hear another word about it,” she says, making eye contact with everyone in the room. “This cash cow is closed for business.”
Unbeknownst to any of us, Rose O’Sharon has stuck her head in the door. “Seizure in room four, Doctor.”
Spielberg continues staring at Tina for an explanation he’s not going to get. She holds her purse in front of her, smiling at the doctor and cocking her head like it’s a dare.
Spielberg drops his chin to his chest, takes his chart, and exits.
Rose O’Sharon squints at the X-rays on the wall across the room before looking at Tina. “Careful,” she says, before leaving. Garrett looks at Tina and shakes his head before he and Sis take their leave as well.
Tina looks at the floor for a few moments before she goes out the door and into the reception area. Rose O’Sharon stands by the desk, peering down at a clipboard before glancing up at Tina, who appears to be trying to get up her gumption to say something. Instead, my mother locks eyes with Rose O’Sharon, grabs the clipboard off the reception desk, and drops it dramatically on the floor. She grabs my hand and whisks me away like we’ve just left a robbery note.
We call Justin and Marsala from the car to share our news with them, putting them on speaker so Garrett and Sis can hear. They remind us to remember to chew at least fifty times before swallowing, saying they can already tell by the timbre in Tina’s voice that she’s improving, that she is the luckiest mom in the world to have a son like me, and her complete healing is only a matter of time.
Amidst all the excitement, Garrett and Sis can’t find one sour note to play on their bitter bassoons. It’s all for one and one for all, and it finally feels good to be alive again.
* * *
The heck with stretching—the rumor of fall teases its way across the Gulf Coast. My chest fills with the scent of d
irt and pine needles as I blast out the carport door and past Jewel Ann’s driveway. The doctor’s warning still rolls about my head, but the sound of Tina’s voice as she staked her claim in his office buzzed louder. She had given us an earful on our way home.
“All he has is his medicine. But between the diet and visualization, chanting, prayer, and so many things I can’t even wrap my head around, who’s gonna win this thing? And if he thinks he’s gonna let his radiation burn up all the good I’ve done on my body, he’s got another think coming!”
As if out of thin air, a temporarily energized Puffy is snapping at my heels, foam flying from her minuscule jaws.
I kick into high gear, leaning into the hill in front of me. “Can’t catch me anymore, mangy mutt. RUNNIN’ TOO FAST FOR YOU NOW, MEAT-EATING MONGREL—YEE-HAAAWWW!”
Puffy stops breathless by the side of Blue Cove Road. Twirling around, I wave goodbye to the hateful little terrier with both hands, running backward over the crest until she finally disappears from my field of vision.
THE DIXIE
November 8, 2000
Religion
Church Lock-In
Following last month’s successful missions trip to Alabama Raceway Ministries in Talladega, the Fairweather Baptist Church will host on Friday night its first ever youth interfaith lock-in, with screenings of the films Left Behind and The Omega Code. The Reverend Al Tate will conclude with a sermon, Making The Decision To Wait. The festivities start at six p.m. and a hot dog supper will be served in Fellowship Hall.
24
There’s a thing about tending miracles. You may have done nothing at all to manifest them; you just wake up one day and they’re there, all bright and shiny and concrete in their permanence. And it’s part of every human’s natural inclination to keep watch over them night and day, because someone or something is usually waiting in the wings to make those miracles that much harder to tend. But watch we must, as the only other alternative is to simply let things take their own course.
Counting for Thunder Page 12