Retribution (5 page)

“Oh Christ,” Dave said. He removed her hand and reminded her, almost yelling now, that his bother Luke had been dead for years. This made his mother moody, and she sat up in her chair and asked to speak to a woman named Jamie.

“Damn it, Mother,” Dave said now, his face going scarlet. “Jamie's gone. Six months ago, remember? Gone.” He spelled it out to her. “G-o-n-e.”

“Jesus,” I said to him. His coppery pate had just gone an unnatural color of white. “You don't look good, Dave.”

“I'm okay,” he said.

“You're not okay, man.”

“I'm okay. I'm okay.” He was holding on to his water glass and the chalky water at the bottom of it was shaking.

I got up and walked over to where Ruby was sitting. The waitress had finally gone, and Ruby was playing in her dinner salad, building soggy green piles on her plate. “I think we've got an emergency over here. I think someone is having an attack.”

“What?” she said. She slowly got to her feet and stood there wobbling.

“Hey, miss.” I flagged the waitress down and we met back at Dave's table.

“Look at him,” I said. “He's not well.”

But his face had recovered some of its normal color. “I'm fine,” he said. “I just need to take a little bathroom break is all.” He stood up to go, then collapsed over the table, his face landing in his daughter's dinner plate. French fries flew into the air and he made a sound like air going out of something for the last time. The waitress screamed and ran into the kitchen. The little girl had pulled her knees up beneath her chin and was crying. The old woman craned her head in no particular direction and felt the air with her hands. “My boy,” she said. “What's happening to my boy?”

His body slid from the table to the floor of the restaurant, where he lay on his back now, the white balls of his eyes showing in a way that said he was dead. The waitress came out of the kitchen with the cook, her large breasts shifting with panic. A lighted cigarette stuck out of the cook's mouth and his long blond hair was gathered in a net. He was just a kid—maybe eighteen. “Shit,” he said. “Do something, man. Pound on his chest or something.”

“Yeah, Gordon,” Ruby said. “You can't just do nothing.”

“I don't know how,” I said. But I did, kind of. I had taken a first-aid course six months ago, which the bosses at Tommy Tom's required of their managers and which I had not done so well in. I knelt down, pried his mouth open with my hands, plugged his nose up, and breathed into him the way I sort of knew it was done. Then I moved down and pumped on his chest with my fists. His weight felt solid and reinforced, like the weight, I guess, of a dead thing.

“Goddamn,” the cook said. “He knows what he's doing. You know what you're doing, man.” I kept working on him, pumping and breathing for him and thinking, for that moment, that maybe I could do this for another person, maybe I could save a life.

“He's dead, Gordon. Leave him alone now,” Ruby said.

“The hell he is,” I said. When I felt his tongue shoot into my mouth, I sat up.

“He's fucking breathing,” the cook said, lighting himself another cigarette. “You saved his life.”

Dave started coughing up his meal and I rolled him on his side and looked out the window at the blurry racks of red and blue lights whirling from the hoods of emergency vehicles.

“All right, guy, up we go.” Someone lifted me to my feet. It was the ambulance people. They had descended on him and began performing complicated, painful-looking procedures. Somebody took me by the arm and walked me into a dark corner of the restaurant, away from everything.

I returned. “Hey!” I said. “You can't do this to me. I kept him from dying.”

Ruby grabbed me and we faced each other. But I no longer knew what was appropriate between us, what to say and how to talk to her. “What you did was exciting.” She was still drunk. “Let's find a place where we can go, Gordon.”

I said, “Ruby, something important happened here.” I put the keys to my Camaro in her hand. “I'm going with him. Maybe you should go ahead and take yourself back to Boise.”

The family had deserted their table. I searched the restaurant until I found a group of emergency people and then walked into their tight circle. “My family,” I said. “Where are they?”

“Sir … sir?” A woman in uniform restrained me. They had hooked him up to little bottles of liquid and were rolling him on a gurney into the purple evening now.

“Please. I'm his brother,” I said.

“Then you ride in the car with your family.” She pointed to where the mother and daughter sat in the back of a police car.

“No,” I said. “You don't understand. He could die.” I walked past her, somehow found the open doors of the ambulance, and climbed in. The light in there was a brilliant orange, as if I'd come to the hot core of something. I saw Dave's stocking feet—they had taken his shoes off—sticking over the gurney's edge and heard a machine helping him breathe.

“Hey, you can't do that. I'm sorry.” Two paramedics crouched over Dave. The skinnier one, who had just talked to me, was about to poke a needle—so large, you didn't want to see it—into Dave's fat arm.

“Just let him sit,” his partner said. “I'm not sure our guy is going to make it.” He held Dave's wrist in his hand, taking his pulse.

“We can't let you ride with us, sir.”

“Just let him sit, all right?” his partner said again. He took me by the arm and buckled me into a little seat in the back. “Sit tight, buddy.”

The siren screamed. I cracked the curtain and saw the interstate falling away behind us and the last minutes of day burning out. We passed a station wagon full of children pointing at us as the mix of blue and red flashing lights fell on them and discolored their faces. I felt good. I sat at the tightening knot of disaster, of frantic speed and light and screaming. There was not much time now. This was an emergency. Something valuable was dying. Life mattered. Outside the light was finally dead. My face stared back at itself in the black window. It looked shocked and pale, ghostlike in the glass, and it scared me a little. I thought it might start talking to me, telling me things I didn't want to hear. I could see only the constricted holes of car headlights on the other side of the window, gouging at the dark and burning through the picture of my sick face, and I didn't feel so well anymore.

A man with a bloody towel pressed to his forehead had just been rushed into a swinging door when I arrived at the hospital. I stood in front of the old woman and the little girl in a white hallway. A fat woman dressed in a pink sweatsuit and taking up two plastic waiting room chairs was the only other person there. I couldn't see what her emergency was and wondered if there was something wrong inside of her, at the center of her huge pink body. I hoped for it, because we began to seem like the only emergency in Idaho. I wanted there to be more injured people, a small mob of desperation and bright hysteria, anything to keep this strange blur of urgency going. A woman doctor sprinted by in sneakers, the wings of her lab coat flapping as she turned the corner and disappeared in white light. I looked for some softer color and found the little girl's yellow dress. But when I walked up to her, she turned away to talk to her doll in a space that was safe from me.

“Luke … Luke?” The old woman's head pivoted. She was lost and I wanted to help her find herself. I wanted her to know I was there.

“Here I am.”

Her face saw me, then pulled away. “I don't know you,” she said.

I headed toward the glass doors of the exit at the other end of the hall. But it seemed like a very long walk. On the way, a doctor stopped me. He was dressed in the green fatigues of a surgeon and was wiping his hands and forehead with a cloth so white, it seemed to burn with a fluorescent, chemical heat.

“I'm very sorry, Mr.”—and he called me by a surname that I decided to forget forever. “I'm very sorry.”

Outside the night was close around me and pressed down on the road where I walked. Toward morning, the sky turned a deep blue—like a huge feeling that I could not see the end of—until I began to think that I was at the bottom of it, making the universe pulse and ache. I thought about praying and almost called out the name of God—but what name would that be?—when Ruby pulled over and I saw, in the purple morning air, the red Camaro, which really was, when you thought about it, as good as anything else to call your own. Ruby leaned over, opened the door for me, and I climbed out of the cold morning and into her arms. Yes, I told her. He would be just fine. They were transferring him to his hometown hospital and he would live on for some years more. The sun rose like a piece of smashed fruit as Ruby began the six-hour drive to Reno. “You're all right, Gordon,” she said. And later that day, my fourth marriage happened, a little longer and a little better than the other ones.

R
OSE

On her seventy-seventh birthday, Rose's husband for fifty-nine years, Maj. Riggs Glover, who hadn't done much for the last two decades but take long walks when the weather was good and carve pieces of wood into angels and statues of his favorite presidents—George Washington and Ronald Reagan—surprised her terribly by beginning, much more gently and suddenly than she had ever expected, to die across from her at a table in her favorite restaurant. Her immediate response was, “How dare you, Riggs Glover! Not on my birthday!” It was just like him to crush her heart in a season of joy, when she felt like coddling and nesting on the little things in life that brought her pleasure. He could be so tragic, casting shadows in her sunshine, as when, almost fifty years ago, she received on Easter Sunday a hand-delivered telegram from a colored soldier, anxious and embarrassed by the bad news he bore, informing her that her husband, Lt. L. R. Riggs Glover, air force pilot, had been downed in a region of the world whose name was terrible, foreign, and Communist-sounding to her, impossible even to pronounce as she felt her heart turn to the soft, muddy place where her husband's grave would dig itself even on Easter, when everybody in Springfield, Tennessee, nodded at one another in the blue morning wash of sun to say, “Hallelujah, Christ has risen!” For weeks, women friends brought her the sad cakes they had baked and drove her to church, where the congregation began to treat her, as a new widow, with an unpleasant and distant respect because her quiet pain scared so many women whose husbands were also in Korea. And sometimes, to her shame, she did wish it: She wished all their husbands dead if only she could have Riggs back. Seven weeks later, they found him naked in the Communist wilderness, eating roots, insects, worms, and the meat of whatever he could kill. So they brought him back to Springfield, skinny and nearly mute with fear, where he spent the rest of his nights in Rose's bed, sometimes screaming out of his dark dreams because of all the soul scars that killing other men had given him, and she cared for him, woke him, and turned on the bedside lamp—because the dark scared him now—and whispered love into his blank face, even though she had not always been the kind of woman who could comfort the weakness in men. Instead, as an attractive young woman, she had been demanding of her admirers, feeling in herself only a limited amount of mother love—that indiscriminate, swollen affection for frail things. She had met Riggs at eighteen, attracted by his uniform, his boastfulness, and the way he seemed to dedicate all his masculine power to the respect of women … to her as a woman. He was a pilot, and she imagined him in his element—the purity of air—while she, Rose Waters, knew only the long brown busted-open fields of Tennessee—the dirty earth where her life had happened. He called her “my flower,” and his idea of sex was clean, literary, flattering to her. “I could only ever love a woman whose name was a flower name, whose name was yours, Rose,” he told her. Not that she didn't make him struggle. Poor Riggs struggled, pleaded six months for the final gift of her virginity, a gift that Pleasant Grove Baptist Church had taught her to give only in matrimony, forcing him to say, “With us, Rose, it will be holy, I promise. How could such a love ever soil us?” Of course she'd been a virgin then, at least sort of, there being only one other small incident, which she chose to forget now that she was seventy-seven and Riggs had left her. For an old woman has rights against her own history, Rose thought. So yes, she'd been a virgin until one afternoon the way he sectioned an orange at Plower's Field—something about his delicious fingers gently dividing the fruit from its tight, greedy bundle of light and sugar to feed slice after slice to her open mouth—tempted her and they rolled away from their picnic, Riggs wriggling and slipping off her, stupid as a dying fish, wearing, even in the blush of their first sex together, his air force beret, his hat, because Riggs could do nothing in the world, even this, without a hat on his head. Then she knew, by the way he quickly spilled the mess of his pleasure outside her, that he was the true virgin. Poor Riggs. Afterward, he apologized, though he could barely speak, and she saw for the first time something small and perishable in his eyes—something frightened of the world's harsh light—that taught her that she, a woman, had at least enough mother love for her sad pretender, a large man, an air force pilot, with something tiny and terrified inside him, whom Rose Waters married at eighteen. Then, as soon as the children came, they died. The first one turned to sadness and spilled out of her, though it felt to Rose as if it were her heart that had burst out from between her legs and exited forever. The next two lived just long enough to be named, their small lives exploding quietly in the night, silencing the names that Rose would, in her latest years, choose to forget because an old woman alone in the world should be allowed to spare herself a certain amount of pain. Next, the war came and went, and perhaps it was better never to have been successful with children now that she had the nightmares of her husband to care for. But those, too, passed, because time smothers things slowly—everything—and they bought a store in the Springfield town square and called it Glovers, and though they would never be rich, they would always have enough, which Rose's women friends with children told her to be grateful for. And Rose was grateful. During all this, time did not exactly pass, but stood still and expanded, allowing more and more small, unimportant things to happen and fill the widening spaces of Rose's life. Riggs took long walks by himself and began to carve—at first ducks and geese and other North American fowl, then his favorite American presidents, and finally, as he worked less and less at the store and politics no longer mattered to him, angels of all sorts—fat Italian cherubs as well as powerful-looking adult angels, angels of revelation and retribution. He set his chestnut and oak figures everywhere around their little house, as if for protection. So carving became his art and Riggs became an artist, and Rose never pried into this quietest part of her husband, never asked, Why angels, Riggs? Are you afraid of something? though she knew that he and she and everyone was. She volunteered at the school board and spent time with her friends in the afternoons and even taught English, evenings, at the Latino Cultural Center in Nashville, driving the forty miles into the city in their boatlike Pontiac. She always felt like there were things to do—little adventures of charity and grace. She helped friends die and read for blind people and told how the spring bloomed outside to people too sick and immobilized to see for themselves. And as time expanded, Riggs's and her love grew small and constant. The endearments they called each other became names of favorite foods. She called him “sweetcakes” and “dumplings” and he called her “my apple,” which she much preferred to “my flower,” because what man called his wife “my apple” save for her Riggs? So time had made him more original in his love. And then finally, all of Rose's history, all of her life in Springfield, as well as in the other small towns where Riggs's short air force career had taken them, seemed to arrive at the beginning of her seventy-eighth year, when Riggs surprised her and gave her her last great pain by dying on her birthday, for which Fae Marney, her best friend for fifty-five years, came all the way from Knoxville, and Rose's two living brothers, Burton and William Waters, came from Georgia, and even some of Riggs's kin—his sisters, Margaret and Ethel, and their husbands—drove long distances just to celebrate and share in her joy, God bless them. Altogether, they made a motorcade of four large cars driving to Mow's, her and Riggs's favorite catfish and fried-chicken restaurant. And there, in the orange evening sun of late spring that shone through the windows and made Riggs's wrinkled face appear molten and oddly soft, he insisted on wearing his fishing cap crowned with the dark barbs of hooks and complained of feeling unwell before he could even take a bite of his favorite slaw, made with vinaigrette instead of mayonnaise dressing, just the way he liked it, when his right hand—the one holding the fork—fell into the large helping of mashed potatoes and gravy on his plate and he said, “Oh God, Rose. My hand … my hand.” Not only the hand he ate with but also the hand her poor pretender, her poor Riggs, carved his angels with. He teetered then and seemed, in his last moments, afraid, clumsy, and virginal again, as on the day he'd made a mess of their first love together, before the stroke rose up and destroyed the little bit of water that was the rest of his soul on earth and knocked him to the floor of Mow's, leaving Rose, at the beginning of her newest and oldest year, to be nobody's apple. Oh Riggs … dear Riggs.