Everything (12 page)

One of the girls, Joy, it turned out she had a congenital heart defect. There was no way anybody could have known, it was just, one day on the playground at school, that was that. Trudy never really got over it. Not all the way. How would you?

Now Dorris lies in a bed by the window in his daughter’s house in Missoula, a metal invalid bed with a back that inclines and reclines electrically. His hands lie on the white bedspread like stumps of wood, brown and weathered, liver spotted and lumpy. Since the stroke they do not work as well. There’s a TV at the foot of the bed, but it’s not usually on. Dorris was never around them enough to get used to the racket. He would watch a little baseball once in a while but now the Series is over and if there’s one thing he can’t stand it’s football. His granddaughter is in and out after middle school, and she’s the thing that’s keeping him alive still. Dorris can’t believe that she and he are flesh and blood, little Greta, a quarter Blackfoot Indian. She pleases him no end. He just can’t get over her, with her black hair and her red lips and her twenty earrings. The things her mother lets her get away with. The clothes! Sometimes Dorris has to look away, just to keep from seeing his granddaughter’s little tits.

* * *

Most days it’s pretty quiet in the back room. Lisa, his daughter, is away at the title company where she works. Greta’s in school. Greta’s dad is pushing up sand in Saudi Arabia. The great wide world is bustling by outside. Lisa thinks he ought to have somebody home with him all the time, but Dorris doesn’t want this. He likes these hours alone, him and the squirrels. He watches them against the gray sky, walking on the telephone lines, chasing each other up and down the big maple tree out back. The time to just sit and watch squirrels. Dorris won’t last the winter.

He’s all right with that.

One of these good old days, when everybody’s at work or at school or otherwise hurrying through their day, when the fire trucks are rushing off to save somebody and the grocery drivers are backing their semis up to the loading dock of the Food Farm a block away, one of these days when Greta’s sitting in social studies and the kids from the U are talking about whatever the hell they talk about over cups of coffee in Bernice’s—whatever it is, it means a lot to them—and the carpenters are pounding nails on a roof in the half-assed snow, when the new loaves of bread are coming out of the oven and bankers are stealing and the people on the city council are out taking bribes, sometimes he thinks it might be in the afternoon but he’s pretty sure it’ll be in the morning, right when everybody’s getting a good push on the day, hitching up their britches and getting to work, Dorris is just going to lie on back in the bed and that will be that.

He can already feel it, like something he’s done a thousand times before. Pound a nail or tie a trucker’s hitch.

* * *

June, the gal from the hospice, brought him a tape of the angel music and she says it’ll make things easier, but Dorris doubts it. It would just be contrary to his luck. He would put the tape on, he could just see it, and lie on back in the bed. And then forty-five minutes later the tape would be over and he would just be lying there with his thumb up his ass.

No thanks. He’ll take his chances.

The thing Dorris likes these days are the squirrels. The bed is set up in the back room on the alleyway, and it’s quiet back here. He’s got names for them and all, nothing too original. The one with the black markings around his nose, for instance, Dorris calls him Blackie. But you just look at them, you quit taking them for granted for a change, and these squirrels are pretty amazing. The death-defying way they walk across a telephone line. The high-speed fights across the fence tops and off into the trees! Dorris can’t tell if they’re fighting for real or just playing. Blackie and Karen, Spot and Leroy and Ferdinand—Dorris calls him Ferdinand because he’s the bull squirrel, the one that’s always chasing after the others. Tough life, Dorris thinks, being the badass squirrel. Bigger balls and more nuts than any of the other squirrels. Dorris has known a few people like that.

He gets restless sometimes, and when he does, he cleans his guns. He laughs at himself sometimes to think of it. Cleanest guns in western Montana. And what the hell is he going to do with them? The only thing he could shoot from here was the squirrels and Dorris isn’t about to start hunting squirrels. Still, he gets the brushes out and the gun oil and he disassembles them slowly with shaking hands: his service revolver, the 30.06 with the good scope, the 45–70 buffalo gun that he got from his father. It would about knock
him down to fire the thing even when he was good to go. A beast of a gun. Who would ever use it again? The girls were scattered from here to San Diego, and the two boys among the grandkids were soft little suburban kids. Dorris loved them as much as any of the rest, but he couldn’t help wishing they were different, wishing they were
interested
. He took them out killing gophers a few years back, when they were nine and ten, took them to a hayfield on the old Lindbergh place that was nothing but gopher holes from one end to the other and gave them each a .22 rifle and a box of shells and both of them quit before that first box ran out. A kid who didn’t like killing gophers. Dorris didn’t even want to understand.

A patch of quick sunlight
raced across the brown grass, a sudden outburst, bright and blinding, and with it an upwelling of spring. He knew in his dark place that she would live to see the green grass and feel the sunlight, a little secret of hope in the dark of December. It was just a small chance, but a small chance was all she needed if it worked. And if she was right—and RL thought she was crazy but that didn’t mean he couldn’t go along with her—if she was right and it was all about the positive mental energy, then maybe his small little glimmer of positive energy would be enough to put the whole business over the top. He wanted her to live. He was surprised how much.

There was one place where the grass was still green for some reason and when the sunlight hit that, it just exploded into green light.

* * *

He was smoking a little Swiss cigar and waiting for her to come out of the oncologist’s, leaning up against a bench, watching a frozen waterfall, under a big No Smoking Within 50 Feet of Building sign. Invisible speakers were piping the local country station into the courtyard. In principle RL was in favor of country music, but in practice it all sounded the same. Much of his life seemed to be like this: a thing he ought to want but really didn’t.

He was thinking about mayflies, the way some of them are born without even mouths. They live their day in the sun and they breed and they fall back as spinners to the water. Nothing sad about it.

Layla wakes up bolt upright
at three in the morning, covered in dreams. This time it’s June’s wedding, spring sunshine and white roses, an afternoon on the green, green grass. Who is this groom? Layla never quite sees his face, always turned away at the last moment, always with his back to her, though she’s curious enough. She sees his back in tuxedo black, leaning into a circle of men all in black like crows, and laughter and smoke coming out of the circle.

June is dressed like June exactly, a wedding dress in white and lace yet somehow still businesslike, her practical short hair and a cocktail-length skirt, if Layla has that right, which she imagines she doesn’t. June is running June’s wedding, fussing around, arranging, ordering her friends around just like herself. Her eyes keep scanning right by where Layla’s standing but she never seems to see her,
which makes Layla feel ghostly, invisible, creepy. When she was little, Layla used to imagine what it was like to be the ghost at your own funeral, watching all the people you knew and all the people you loved in their black clothes and tears, missing you gone and you right there but just unable to let them know, that invisible screen between one world and the next … but this was a happy time, or supposed to be. The thing that’s weird about the wedding is that Layla doesn’t seem to know anybody. They all look familiar enough, a little underdressed, a little sunburned, radiating good health and outdoor pursuits and stories of big fish and backcountry powder caches—these are the people Layla knows, their ways and morals, their habits and importancies, but while she knows these people well in general she doesn’t know any of these people in particular. June is getting married among strangers.

And Layla can’t find a way through to her. June’s eyes keep passing by her without recognition. Layla is a stranger here, and June is getting married among strangers, people who don’t know her and won’t take care of her as they ought to. Even now, even awake, Layla feels the sadness of it: the temporary home disbanded, scattered to the winds, and now this friendless place. The guests all
seem
like June’s friends, but they are not June’s friends, just people who look like them. People who look like me, Layla thinks. Where is my mother? I need my mother.

In her usual little bed, the rain dripping through the trees outside. No wonder she’s depressed! Also, she’s almost sure she’s pregnant. Her period—regular as Old Faithful in normal times—is three and a half weeks late, and she wants chocolate all the time. She wants to go back to sleep, back to that wedding if she can. Because strange as it is, foreign, she can still remember the sunlight on her skin, the look of soft grass and green leaves and little white
clouds scuffing along in the blue sky, a place of pleasure and warmth, the tables laden with good food and cold white wine, the laughter and murmur of friendly conversation. Only later, when she is half asleep again, does she remember the brown around the stems of the grapes, the petals already turning, the flies—one by one—in love with all that sugar, and all the spilled wine. They couldn’t stay away.

What they didn’t talk about
was everything, children, Roy, dirty dishes and the eve of chemotherapy. There was, at this point, no point. Her little unhappy face in the candlelight. Halfway through dinner he was ready for all this to stop, he’d had enough, too much: for all her trying, she could not conceal her entire lack of possibility. No straws to clutch at, no parachute on the burning airplane. The pope, a hippie, and Henry Kissinger …

What?

Nothing, RL said. He didn’t realize that he had said anything out loud. Maybe he hadn’t. Betsy was spooky that way.

I want to go to Hawaii, she said. Thailand, anyplace warm.

* * *

Orlando, RL said.

I’d settle for Orlando, she said. I don’t even know where this comes from. It’s like the way you suddenly want chocolate or something.

Or whiskey.

I’d settle for whiskey.

You might have to tonight, RL said. Supposed to snow all night. That airport is
closed
.

I don’t have any money anyway.

The waiter came and took their plates away, RL’s polished and empty—a rack of lamb which had been all tasty morsels and no real meat—and Betsy’s plate on which the food had been pushed around but only halfheartedly eaten. She wasn’t crazy about it. Or maybe she just didn’t like the idea of food. Maybe she was alive on some other kind of nutriment, the song of unseen angels or the mysterious radiation of the sun. Ashes, RL thought. Ashes and diamonds, diamonds and rust.

My boy Edgar is taking a group down to Bimini after the first of the year, he said. It’s almost enough to piss a guy off.

Why him and not you?

Oh, RL said. He was the one who hustled up the customers. I don’t even think he’ll end up getting paid for it. It’s just a free trip to Bimini.

* * *

Betsy looked up. It had been partly about her, why he hadn’t gone, and she knew it just by looking at him.

Plus, you know, he said. First of the year. Taxes and all.

I bet, she said.

OK, so she didn’t believe him. A little gleam of mischief. Still capable of laughter.

What? he said.

You are semitransparent, she said. You should come milk goats with me sometimes. You’d like the goats, I think. They’re a little unpredictable, always surprising, like cats and deer and daughters. I wasn’t ever meant for this.

She sweeps her arm around the restaurant, its small lights and murmured conversations. A table of drunk New West business types—sunglasses on little strings around their necks—goes off in laughter at somebody’s punch line.

You’re going to think this is crazy, Betsy said.

What?

Something, she said, a dog or maybe a coyote or even a wolf—Roy thought it might have been a wolf—anyway, something got into the goats one night while we were asleep. We keep them penned up, you know. It’s just to keep them together—there’s a little shed but it’s just a wire fence, nothing that would keep anything
out. We just woke up and there was this screaming—it sounded just like a baby screaming. You remember that sound?

Worst thing in the world.

Worst thing ever, she said. It goes right through you …. Whatever it was, was gone by the time Roy got his gun and made it out there, but Buck Henry was dead on the ground and two of the does were just standing there with their throats ripped out. I saw it. I came right behind him.

That sounds bad enough, RL said. Lucky it wasn’t a bear.

That’s what Roy said.

She picked up her glass of red wine and sipped at it and then drank from it more purposefully, a long draft.

This isn’t the time or place for a story like this, she said. I thought it was something else when I started.

What happened?

He shot them, Robert. Right while I was standing there watching. He says he had to, I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. I didn’t even have the chance to say good-bye, I just had to run back into the house and keep the kids from seeing that.

She was crying, tears standing in her eyes.

You see? It’s stupid, stupid. They were just goats, just animals. You buy them out of the paper for thirty dollars.

* * *

You loved them.

Yes, I did.