At the Jim Bridger: Stories (16 page)

There was nothing to do. He had always been close to his mother, shared her word games and her wavelength of humor, and had known that so much of his work with the city was done so that when his name was in the paper, she could show her Scrabble buddies and e-mail his aunts. Now he called the aunts and went down to the hospital. He put his hand on her forehead, which was not cold, and they gave him a little bag with her wedding ring and her dentures and such. Cooper’s father had already been gone fifteen years. His mother had called that morning. She was going to get a new dishwasher and asked Cooper what he thought of Days Appliance. He told her the store was where he and Libby had bought their fridge. She was doing her puzzle society newsletter and asked him which character in Shakespeare had the longest name. He didn’t know, but guessed, “Rosencrantz? Eleven letters.”

“Why did we send you to college?” she said. She always said this; it was their oldest joke. They made plans for the Thursday drive to the library, and when they hung up, she said, “There, I feel better.”

In the quiet room in the hospital, using two phones, Cooper made the arrangements: transfer, cremation, memorial service on Friday. Then he drove home light to light, avoiding the 101, and near home he finally said it aloud, “Your mother is dead.” His reaction was as he suspected; he didn’t believe it. He tried to say it again and couldn’t. At the house Libby came out to his car when she heard the garage door open. He got out and told her, “We’re all right.”

Trevor stood in the kitchen and gave Cooper a cursory hug, the way they’d always hugged. “Sorry about Grandma, Dad.”

Cooper fought through the sympathy and got to his desk. He didn’t even want a drink. He wrote the light-rail report in forty minutes, an ace job, which he faxed to the office after hours. In bed, Libby rolled to him and rubbed his back, but he felt hollow, and he held on to his pillow so he wouldn’t float away.

In the morning with a pencil on the patio, Cooper wrote his mother’s obituary, two short paragraphs in the customary manner, centering it with, “She had a head for puzzles and a heart for people.” He wanted to write, “She sent me to college and never got to ride the train.”

He wanted to write about all the people she had cared for. He’d grown up across the street from a ragtag sandlot, where all his buddies came to play ball. Afternoons in the summer time, his mother would sit out in the shadow of their house in a canvas lawn chair and do her cryptograms and puzzles and talk to his friends. It stunned him that he’d be out in center field and look over to see Danny Lopez or Robert Polad sitting on the lawm by her, just talking things over. At the various
reunions he and libby had gone to over the years, people always asked about his mother, and told him how important she had been to them.

While he was faxmg the obituary to the newspaper, the phone rang and it was the mayor herself calling about the rail proposal. She loved it; they were going to use great portions in the ad campaign. “You’re so good at this, Peter. Let’s get together tomorrow for strategy. Now the fun begins.” Then she added, “And I want to meet your mother. She sounds wonderful.”

“She’s something,” he said.

Cooper had met his wife when they were in high school. He had been president of the Civics Club and a tall, quiet kid the teachers liked. He initiated a program wherein the club cleaned up bus stops, and he met Libby literally while painting a bench sky blue. They still knew the bench, the corner (as did Trevor, who used it in much of his humor), and they’d painted it twice in the last ten years, late at night both times, on their anniversary.

When they met, Libby had suggested they attend the fall dance, since the Civics Club was one of the sponsors. It had not occurred to Cooper to go to a dance. Girls had not actually occurred to Cooper. In the old gymnasium, where the decorating committee had made six bus stops around the perimeter with benches and lampposts, and a big blue cardboard bus circled the dancers, Cooper woke to his new world. Libby was a wry girl who wore a vintage brown silk dress run with a single line of black beads that climbed her in a spiral. She started their longtime game on that first night when she asked him if he knew what dancing was. Before them the shiny floor was filled with their classmates, embraced and shuffling to “Moon River.”

“I don’t know,” he told her truly.

“It’s a simple space-saving activity. See how neat they fit on the dance floor?”

He looked at her.

“Here,” she went on. “It’s like holding hands.” She clasped his hand and lifted it before them. “See?” Then she threaded her fingers between his and he felt an actual naked shock. No one had touched him that way, but when she folded her hand shut on his, he did the same to her.

“Now we’re saving space,” she said. “Let’s try to dance.”

She came carefully into his arms for the first time, floating delicately against his tweed sport coat. “Moon River” was waning fast, but they stepped slowly in their little circle, her forehead just against his temple. The music stopped, and still they stood. He could feel the line of beads under his fingers. He knew something had happened because they did not move. When the small combo began the next number, “Chances Are,” they danced further into the old gym.

Later, in college when he’d visit, they’d twist together on her roommate’s couch, every adjustment meant to save space, and the second summer in a beach motel for some reason called Tumble Inn, in a bed that would have been a better hammock, she looked him in the eye as they made a last adjustment.

They were at schools four hundred miles apart and saw each other every weekend their senior year. In one letter, she said, “I feel at every moment that there is a good chance I am wasting space up here. Being engaged is a colossal waste of space! Where are you?”

After their first date, the fall dance, Cooper told Libby he was taking her to a small Italian place he knew. The custom was for couples to go to fancy restaurants after dances, and Cooper drove down Main Street for a while and then cut right for his house. His mother had a red-checked tablecloth on a round table in the basement and his father had melted candles into a Coke bottle, and the ambience was complete. Libby,
of course, picked it up at once, and said she’d heard this place was the best Italian in the state.

“Which state is that?” his mother had said, and they’d started in laughing. Cooper, who had agreed to this dinner plan because he didn’t exactly know the customs of his classmates, was slightly embarrassed; he was always slightly embarrassed. He watched Libby and his mother hit it off as if this had been their plan, and he felt that feeling he’d had when as a boy in center field he’d seen his friends sitting on his lawn, talking to his mother, and he knew for the first time, the feeling was a kind of happiness.

Condolence flowers started arriving the next day. Cooper worked at home in the morning and the doorbell rang every forty minutes. He had to go across town to the funeral home as a formality. The law required that he identify her there before the cremation. He used the thought to do all the ugly work on his desk, filing and turgid phone calls, stale business with his various clients, going down the list like a man cutting dry weeds with a scythe.

At the bottom of his sheet, he had written
Police
, and he couldn’t figure it out for a moment. Then he looked up the local station number and dialed. A woman answered, Officer Betty Dodd, and he explained that this was no emergency, but that he just wanted some simple information on a potato gun; had she heard of potato guns?

“What, kind of gun is this, sir?” Officer Dodd asked.

“It’s a kind of a glorified toy; it shoots potatoes. Is there someone there who I could ask about it?”

“You’re speaking to me,” she said. “Is it a toy gun?”

“I don’t know. My son has constructed this potato gun and-”

“Is this a school-sponsored project?”

“No, it’s not,” Cooper said, immediately wishing he’d said
yes, yes indeed. “It’s just a home project that we’re moving along with. It’ll be fine. I’ll call you back when we get close. Thank you for your assistance.” He hung up the receiver. Cooper was an effusive thanker. When people told him to have a nice day, he thanked them. His mother always responded to “Have a nice day” with, “Shoot, I’ve got other plans.”

In the kitchen Libby had her next semester’s plan spread over the table in three-by-five cards. The red cards were music projects, the blue cards were lectures, and the white cards were rehearsals. She was a scrupulous planner, and after these years of teaching, she wrote each class as if inventing it. She was the mentor for the first-year teachers. “Do you want me to drive with you?” she asked her husband.

“No, I can make it. The traffic won’t be bad.” If he could keep it all business, he could handle it. There had been moments when his mother’s death rushed him, and breath gone, he’d have to lean against something. This feeling of void was not in his vocabulary. The closest he could come was remembering when they’d taken nine-year-old Trevor to Hoover Dam, and walked the curved sidewalk along the top. There with the other citizens it looked like a promenade, the two art deco towers standing calmly in the massive blue lake. They ate ice cream and Trevor explained hydroelectricity. But Cooper couldn’t help working to the other edge, leaning over the stone rail and having the deep gorge suck the blood out of his head until he saw spots. Then when he was back with his family, a dropped napkin was right there to be picked up, the sidewalk solid, his son’s voice constant. Cooper thought, Behind me four feet is the true nothingness, but if I don’t look, we’ll make it across.

Now his mother’s death was that open canyon, waiting to be considered, waiting for all of him. He rippled with a shudder, and shook it off. He wouldn’t cry now. Libby stood him up with a huģ, her lips against his cheek.

The phone rang and Libby answered with a puzzled look, handing it to Cooper. It was Sergeant Meager with the police. As soon as he said, “Mr. Cooper,” Cooper stepped in the game. They had his name and number, for Pete’s sakes. He was good at this, especially on the telephone. “Have you got some problem with a gun?”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant. What is it?”

“The referral says potato gun.”

“Potato
bug”
Cooper said, his eyes on libby. He was mad and now he’d stay controlled and win this. “I called a minute ago about these bugs. We have got a genuine infestation. But I also just called the etymologist at Natural Resources, and she’s going to call me back.” There was a pause on the line, and Cooper went on: “I told the receptionist—-”

“Officer Dodd.”

“I told Officer Dodd this wasn’t an emergency. I sure appreciate you getting back to me, though. You don’t have them, do you? I’m not even sure they’re potato bugs. They may be this white bug or white fly, whatever it is.”

“Have a nice day,” Sergeant Meager said.

Cooper put the phone down and said to his wife, “Case closed.”

The last time Cooper saw his mother was in a small curtained room near the back of the funeral home. She was swaddled in a white cotton blanket and looked comfortable. Her gray hair was combed straight back, which was a way she never wore it, but was the way that Cooper did, and he saw his face in her again. Her forehead was cool now, and he put his fingers on her cheek and said the word “Good-bye.”

Cooper’s 1956 Chevrolet was a four-door Bel Air like new. It was the actual car that his father had bought in the fall of 1955. It had been the family car, then Cooper had taken it to
college. Later it was sold to a neighbor and gone for five years. Cooper’s father had tracked it down in San Diego and restored the car, bit by bit.

Now Cooper pulled the cloth cover off the vehicle. He pushed it out of the garage and dusted it generally with his soft brush. He poured red fluid into the transmission; it always lost a little when parked for a month or two. The ignition key was worn smooth, but when he turned it, the car cranked twice and fired to life. He fed fuel for a moment and then let the vehicle settle into its purring idle. “Like a sewing machine,” his father always said. While the engine warmed up, Cooper walked around the car with his cloth, dusting and polishing. The prom was in two hours.

Helping Trevor with the bow tie for his tux ten minutes before, Cooper had said, “This is a new record for ties in a week.” He’d stood behind his son the day before and formed a Windsor knot in a blue stripe tie, which Trevor then pulled apart and redid, saying, “That’s clever how it cinches.” In one minute the boy had mastered ties. That tie had been for the memorial service, which had filled the little chapel. They had all been people his mother had talked to, counseled over the years, a collection of her puzzle buddies, the neighbors, her nieces and nephews. Cooper had given the eulogy, stepping through the stages of his mother’s life by keeping his back to the canyon, not letting his mind look over the edge.

Now Trevor came out of the house walking stiffly in his tuxedo, carrying a little corsage in a plastic box with both hands.

The car was running beautifully. First they picked up Justin on the other side of the high school. Cooper tried to imagine where in the house they hid the potato gun, where
they shot it. Justin got in the car and saw Trevor’s corsage and ran back into the house for the one he’d forgotten.

Both girls, Alison and Deanie, were at Alison’s house, and there was an extended photo session in the living room. The girls were in satin spaghetti-strapped gowns, one dark blue and one light blue, and the comedy of five parents, two corsages, and one little sister played for ten minutes before Cooper was able to ascertain that Alison was Trevor’s date. She was a tall, beautiful girl, and with her brown hair up, she was taller than Trevor. She had a mole beside her nose that Cooper thought might have been makeup, a touch, and she wore large glasses that actually looked wonderful on her smooth face. There was some talk about the eyewear, Alison’s mother admitting to Cooper that she could have contacts anytime she wanted. To this Alison had smiled and said to Cooper, “Contacts? When I can wear these?”