A Parallel Life (15 page)

“You're so right, sister,” Chuck agreed.

“I think all this good news is giving me a headache,” Ben said. “There's this throbbing here.” In the rearview mirror I saw him touch his temple.

“Me too,” Verna moaned. “Throbbing and humming . . . a buzzing sound. I'm sure it's them.” Her head rolled back and she got ready to receive like a crystal set. Chuck
meanwhile was scanning the skies, his forehead pressed against the windshield, his large head swiveling, a regular radar screen.

We drove on. And on.

“How did you learn about this projected arrival?” I asked Chuck. Ben had been vague about this.

“We have our ways, Carol, but since you're a friend of Ben's, I'll tell you. The aliens have sent some of their number amongst us. They look just like me and you. One of them phoned me just last week and told me to assemble people I could trust. Let me tell you it was hard getting that newsletter out in time! I've got over a thousand names on my mailing list!”

“Phoned you?” I asked.

“Turn here,” Chuck said. I turned right through an open gate onto a narrow road.

“Phoned you?” A jackrabbit ran in front of my headlights, the only thing moving on the horizon.

“Yes. A man, an alien known to me only as Roy, called. We'd met before. He's one of them.”

“They're coming,” Verna muttered.

“Hot dog! What a night!” Chuck whooped.

At last we came to the edge of a vast paved area. “Used to be a World War Two landing strip,” Chuck said. My lights picked up the gleam of chrome, lacquer, and aluminum as we passed perhaps forty or fifty cars, trailers, motor homes, and pickups, some towing boats, all facing east. “There's a line just like this on the other side,” Chuck told us proudly. “When Roy gets the signal that they're going to land, we'll all turn on our headlights—sort of a welcome mat. That's Roy's motor home there.
He's saving a space for us. You'll like him, Ben. He's a good old boy. Pull right in there.” I followed directions. “Yes sir,” Chuck continued, “when these aliens get here, they're going to solve all of our problems. Hey, Verna, wake up! We're here. Yes, Ben, old buddy, from this night on, your ass is saved! Saved! Saved! Saved!” With that, Chuck bolted out of the car and began pumping Roy's hand.

Roy, for an alien, really had done a great job of disguising himself. He looked like a cousin of mine who worked in Seattle—the same lank hair, wiry body, even the same sort of J.C. Penney sport shirt and Hush Puppies. He was followed out of the motor home by a fat redhead wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt and stretch pants.

Verna appeared to be snoozing, a slight snore coming from her flared nostrils. I let her be.

“Hey, Carol,” Ben said, grabbing my arm a little unsteadily. Even in the dim light from the open door of Roy's motor home, I could see that his color was bad—sort of greasy gray.

“Carol,” he said, trying to smile. “I guess I'm just overcome. Being here is too much. Great night . . . historic . . .” he gasped, stumbling toward Chuck.

“Sit down, Ben,” I said.

“They're going to save us, Carol.”

“Ben!”

He lurched forward, falling on his face. I knelt by him. He was breathing, but moaning with pain.

“Call an ambulance,” I said to no one in particular.

“I'll get one on the CB,” a man in the gathering crowd said.

“Can't have that,” said Chuck, coming forward. “This meeting is supposed to be secret. Can't have ambulances, police all over the place.”

“Secret! There're probably a couple of hundred people here!” I shouted, spinning up to face him.

“Oh, no,” said the alien in a high raspy voice. “I just know they won't land if the police are here.”

We compromised. Somebody radioed an ambulance to meet us at the gate. I drove there with Ben laboring for air and clutching his left arm, his eyes on the sky all the way. Finally, a light appeared on the horizon coming out of the south. “It's them,” he said. “At last.”

“I hope the hell it is,” I said. Then we heard the siren.

I'd had five cups of machine-made coffee. All bad. I was starting on my sixth. The empty cups were lined up on the table in front of me. Out of the one window a strip of light like pale neon outlined the hills. Dawn.

Verna pushed open the door and came in. “I had Roy drop me off,” she said breathlessly. “I'm good at healing, too. Can I see him? I can tell a lot by his aura.”

“If he still has one,” I said. “Ask the nurse. He had a heart attack. He's not doing well.”

She slumped onto the seat beside me. “Got a safety pin?” she asked, pointing to a hole in her dress that gaped like a foolish mouth. “In the excitement I broke the zipper.” I didn't think I had a pin, but I looked. No pin.

“So what happened after we left?” I asked.

“Oh . . . a lot. I was in a trance, of course. They communicated telepathically with me and with Roy. They decided not to land. I guess we here on earth still aren't ready.” She sighed. I handed her my cup of coffee. She drank, making soft slurping sounds. “Chuck is trying to
deal with his anger with you and Ben. He blames you for the bad vibes.”

I shrugged. “Sneak past the nurse,” I said when she'd finished the coffee. “He's in Intensive Care in the last bed. Squeeze his hand if he's awake. He'll be glad to see you.”

“He seems like a nice man,” she said. I nodded and watched her walk off down the hall, a tall, tired woman with a broken zipper. Then I counted the six paper cups and remembered a game I'd played with my brother. We each put a string through the bottom of a paper cup, knotted it, then pulled it tight across a room. I talked into the cup. He held it to his ear. Then we switched. We were supposed to hear each other. It never worked.

“I'm in the desert in a hospital. The man who rents a room from me—a nice man—may be dying. He came here to be saved by people from outer space, but they canceled,” I said softly into the phone.

“Speak very slowly,” said the voice at the other end. “My English is not yet good, but I want to understand what you are saying.”

C
OOPER
'
S DOG
was dying. It didn't seem to be in agony, but Cooper knew it was time to call the vet. Yet he couldn't bring himself to pick up the phone. If Cooper's father had been alive, the man would have gone outside, taken a shovel to the earth, dug a grave, brought the dog out, looked it in the eye, muttered something to it, and then put a bullet in its head. Southerners like his father knew about the bond between men and dogs. They knew that part of being a dog's master meant taking on life and death responsibilities.

But Cooper didn't even own a gun. No one he knew hunted. And he was embarrassed to ask his friends if they had a gun to offer him because he had the sort of friends who wouldn't admit to owning guns even if they did.

Cooper and his former wife had attended his father as he wasted away from lung cancer. They had waited with his father as the man's flesh moved closer to the bone—waited, watching him pull in cigarette smoke and then cough it out. Cooper's father smoked his last days away—smoked and looked out of the bedroom window at the winter field and the woods beyond, at the monochromatic grays of overcast sky and leafless tree scaffolds, oak on the high side, cypress on the low.

They tried to get his father to eat chicken gumbo with okra, his favorite dish, cooked by Roseanna, the black woman from down the road who came in once a week to clean a little and cook gumbos, and
étouffées
, and bisques, and fried greens with salt pork, meals only
Cooper and Janet ate until there was no more and Roseanna appeared again.

Smells from the old wood-frame Louisiana house also came back to Cooper—smells of the spices of the food and the resinous pine and oak burned in the fireplaces because the gas heat made his father gasp for air. And with those, the background smell of urine. The dog seemed to hate his own incontinence as much as Cooper's father had hated his. Tic-Tok left small puddles halfway to the newspaper, and these puddles, which Cooper cleaned and then wiped with white vinegar, sent pungent salty urine signals that Cooper associated with things being not as they should.

Cooper and Janet had let the dogs in every day for a visit to his father, the spotted bird dogs, twisting and panting around the legs of the bed, always damp, smelling of the fields, the woods, the distant outdoor places his father studied from the remove of his bed. And Tic-Tok, who had been a spoiled house dog in California, had to stay outside with his father's dogs in Louisiana, because dogs belonged outside, and when he came in with the other dogs for the daily visit he hated having to go outside again.

Tic-Tok was a mutt with maybe some Labrador, some Shepherd, some Dalmatian—not the sort of dog his father would have had. Although Cooper's father had liked Tic-Tok well enough, had taken burrs and ticks from the dog's coat after they'd walked across the hills of Marin when his father came to visit that one time.

Now Tic-Tok, the dog he and Janet had gotten from a box outside of a supermarket fifteen years ago when they'd both been students in Berkeley, was dying.

And as things would have it, yesterday he'd run into Janet. Right on Telegraph Avenue. As if seven years hadn't passed. She'd put on a little weight—not much—and she looked pretty, and he had a hard time at first remembering that he'd been married to her once, that she wasn't just an old friend whom he'd come across and was happy to see. She'd moved back to California a year ago and was living near Carmel and was in Berkeley visiting friends that day, people Cooper barely recalled and never saw. After a bit, she asked about the dog, almost as an afterthought, and he had to tell her that Tic-Tok was dragging himself around, not spending much time away from the pile of blankets, that his eyes were almost blinded by cataracts, that his kidneys were shot, and that it was just a matter of time.

“Oh, my God!” she'd said. “Oh, poor Tic-Tok.” And then with the matter-of-factness he so often found disturbing in her but which had been comforting back when she changed his father's diapers, she said, “Pets outlive relationships, you know. They're usually a mistake. I left my dog with my parents when I went to school, and I left Tic-Tok with you. Just don't let him suffer.”

“No,” Cooper had said, suddenly shaky. “No. I won't.” And then he said, “Well, would you like to see him before . . . ?”

“I don't know if I should, you know. For myself, I mean. I don't want to feel bad about things I'd almost forgotten.”

“Well, he'll remember you. It might be nice to have a little whiff of you before he goes off to dog heaven.”

She'd given him a strange look, as if he had taken leave of his senses, which then changed to a look that said
that she should have remembered that Cooper was that sort of person. “Where do you live? I'll have some time tomorrow.”

“I took him to the vet last week,” Cooper said as soon as Janet entered. “He said Tic-Tok was going fast . . . and he offered to . . . you know, put him out of his misery. But I just couldn't. . . .” He stumbled and paused and felt that things should be clearly presented to Janet, but he didn't want to get into something emotional with her. He could feel her mind working as she looked around his cluttered, not-too-clean house, examining his paintings on the walls, the table where he had been doing watercolors—a medium he hadn't worked in when they'd been together.

“I'm teaching art in high school,” he said. “It's a terribly poor neighborhood, down by the tracks in flatland, but a few of the kids really respond.”

“Do you have time for your own work?”

“Not much. That's why I'm doing watercolors. Working wet on wet. I have to paint fast. They're a good thing for a person who doesn't have much time.”

“They're nice,” she said. She went over and looked. She touched the top painting, a misty Impressionistic landscape. She looked at the one under it, which was very much the same, a variation on the theme, and then didn't inspect more. He wasn't sure if she was incurious or being respectful of his privacy.

“He's in the bedroom.”

“Do you live alone?”

“Yes,” he said and then felt that she had gone too far, though it was a simple question. He began to wonder about having asked her here. She, as usual, had been
skeptical of this visit right off, but he hadn't realized all the potential land mines until she stepped through the door. “He spends most of his time on an old electric blanket. I don't know if he's cold, but he shivers a lot.”

“Oh, Tic-Tok,” she said and went into the bedroom and knelt by the dog who did seem to recognize her, pounding his tail against the floor, lifting his head, whimpering, and trying to get to his feet, his paws sliding out from under him, his nails trying to claw some purchase on the wood. “Oh, poor Tic-Tok,” she said, “poor old Tic-Tok.”

“I don't think he's really in pain,” Cooper said, kneeling beside Janet.

“No, but he's definitely failing. Why didn't you have the vet put him away? Why are you keeping him like this?”

“If my father were here, he'd shoot him.”

Janet leaned back, sat on her heels, and appeared to think about this. “That's what he'd do,” she said finally. “Well, you could do that.”

“I don't have a gun,” Cooper said. He stretched his hand out to the dog's tan shoulder. It made him uneasy talking like this in front of Tic-Tok. He wondered why he'd brought up the gun thing.

“I have a thirty-eight in the car. It's a short-barreled revolver. Very easy to use. You can borrow it.”

“You have a gun?” Cooper asked.

“My husband makes me carry it in the car,” she said. “He was in Vietnam. While we were marching around here protesting, he was getting shot at. He believes in self-defense.”