Going Down Fast (46 page)

The house was custard yellow with several cars already in back. The paint was peeling. Sparrows perched on the nylon clothesline. A birdbath stood in the circle of pastel stones near a bottomheavy snowman turning to slush. As they left the car a woman maybe forty opened the stormdoor on the second-floor porch and peered down. “How are you, George!” she called, giving it two syllables. “How's life treatin' you these days?”

He waved in answer and pushed her ahead through the kitchen door. She could have killed him. She didn't want to march in first with her nervous face hanging out. A sausage-shaped blonde powdered pink as a plastic baby sat at the table in a kelly green tasseled dress, her ringed hands spread flush on the tabletop and her mouth open. A tall hardbodied woman with irongray hair streaked with white chopped vegetables at the sink. She had to be his mother.

He introduced her by name without explanations. The blonde was his brother's wife, and his mother, who came from the sink wiping her hands on her apron, took Anna's hand in a wooden grip, abrasive and strong. “You made pretty good time,” she barked. She did not kiss Rowley but insisted on taking his coat and brushed it carefully as she went to hang it up. “Hope you didn't speed, but I know you better, don't I?”

The sausage was looking her over an inch at a time, but she had expected that. His mother looked in quick sideways glances, shyly. An atmosphere of funeral hung in the house, food and coffee were pressed on them with that ritual insistence, but the man in the posie-covered easychair was alive. His skin was ashen, his eyes bulged in his pitted face, the cords stood out in his hands. Yet his face was alert with an annoyance she recognized. His sandiness had sunk into his children without a trace, but his strength had come through. He was the wreck of a big tough man. At his feet lay an old retriever blinking out of looselidded red eyes and thumping his tail.

“Got you to run down, did they?” He squinted at Rowley, gave her a close, suspicious look. “Dropped everything and came flying. Well, you can fly back for all of me. I'm not going to the hospital no more. They cut me open enough times to air out my insides. Let them practice on puppydogs. Every time they lay a finger on you, another two hundred, five hundred bucks. Some racket.”

“Don't worry about the money. Hell with those excuses. Get done what you have to.”

“Don't worry!” he mimicked. “It's my body, and I'm holding on to it. They can keep their drugs and bottles. No more.” He pounded the arm of his chair. The dog gave a throaty bark and got up fatly to nose him.

She hung back at the archway beside Rowley's mother who twisted her apron in her hands. Rowley planted himself in front of the easychair. “What are you planning? Going to sit there till you get enough worse you have to go in? Then they cut even more?”

“Think I'm going to hang around your mother's neck, don't you?”

“Listen to him,” his mother said. “Listen to what that old loon thinks is an idea. He's lost his mind.”

“What idea?” Rowley crossed his thick arms, waiting.

“Stop bearing down on me. Go on, get over there, sit down. What did you bring her for?”

Rowley ambled over to sit on the doggy couch, motioning for her to follow. “Figured she might as well see how mean I'm likely to get, if I live long enough.”

“Tell them what you say you're going to do. Tell him, if you aren't ashamed in company,” Rowley's mother said from the archway.

“Going down to Brown County, that shack Hanson's got on Bean Blossom Creek. You recall, I used to take you hunting. Old Hanson, he don't get down much any more. He's tickled to have somebody to fix it up.”

“He's going off where nobody can take care of him and all I'll do night and day is worry. Oh, I always knew there was a lot of spite in you—”

“Would you be contented, woman, seeing me turn into a vegetable in the hospital? Into a yellow turnip?”

“Go down there and crawl into a hole like an old sick tomcat. Who'll know when you get the pains? Who'll know when you need help and what to do for you?”

“I'll get them to put in a telephone. There's doctors down there. I don't want nobody looking after me. I don't want nobody looking at me, period.”

“Tell him he can't do that.” His mother took a step past the archway, her eyes fixed on Rowley. “Make him see he can't.”

Rowley sat forward against the slope of the couch, his knees spread and his hands resting on them. He bit down on his teeth. His eyes were narrow and bright. “No, I can't say that.” Slowly he said through gritted teeth, “He's got a right to the kind of death he wants.”

The old man broke into a grin. His face was sucked hollow but the grin was broad.' He had his own dark yellow teeth. “They don't use that dirty word in the hospital. But I know I'm a loser. I like that country. They're spoiling it, but they're just getting started. It'll last me out. I'm square with my policy, and the union'll bury me. Got my plot paid for out at Mount of Olives. The papers are in the bottom drawer of my chifforobe, in a tin box. You can check them over. I'm all squared away.”

“Feeling proud of yourself, aren't you, mister!” His wife turned to walk out, then stopped to glare at Rowley. “You're two of a kind, if you can't see how wrong this all is. The blind leading the blind!” Two more steps and she turned again, jerking her head at Anna. “Come on, you can help me set the table for dinner.”

As soon as they were in the kitchen, his mother took her arm in a hard grip. “You talk to him. Make him see. Make him come back and tell his father he can't act that way!”

Mother stayed mad and he knew her well enough to guess that she would never entirely forgive him. Her feelings ran deep and sullenly, down in some tunnel where she could neither enjoy nor exhaust them. He pitied them both. Harry arrived at mealtime and started yapping at the old man. In the meantime Mother managed to catch him outside the bathroom. “Are you going to marry her?”

“Maybe.”

“Figured you wouldn't have brought her otherwise.”

“You didn't blink an eye. Sam told you, uh?”

“I don't know what gets into that girl. Course I'd be nice to your girlfriend.”

“Were you nice to Gino?”

“He's not a bad boy. Your father can't stand him, but he shoveled the walk without my asking.” She looked at the wall, the imprint of former wallpaper wearing through paint thinned by scrubbing. She was a fierce scrubber. “She doesn't look very Jewish.”

He laughed then, leaning against the shut door in the bathroom, laughed till his ribs ached. Her sharp suspicious eyes brooded on him, her mouth turned in. He saw himself bringing Vera, and would mother have said, She doesn't look very colored? For a moment he felt winded and sad through and through. “It suits me.”

“Well, I suppose so.” She was bristling.

He gave her a pat on the shoulder. “She suits me. You know? That'll have to do.”

After an enormous meal, plain in the main dishes but fancy in the trimmings, they drove back. She felt worn out with paying attention, staring at everything indirectly and being stared at, not indirectly. She felt numb in her ears and eyes and facial muscles. All the way back she sat in a mild stupor. She hadn't even noticed where they were, except that they were almost, almost home, when he said, “Look, they started.”

The crane stood beside her building with neck bowed and suppliant, head resting on the ground. Her old rooms lay open. The outer wall and circlet of windows were gone to dust. The pale blue walls of her bedroom, the white wall of her kitchen were nude to the passerby. She felt a dart of shame. Only the poor were blatantly exposed, her walls with their personal stains and bumps, the rub marks of her bed, the smudge over the radiator, the Che poster and the lamp he'd not thought worth taking.

The crane rose and leaned into the building. “Wait,” she said to him. “Park. I want to see.” Rowley pulled over just past the traffic light and she hopped out to watch as the crane's teeth ate into her floor, her walls, and the pale blue cracked and splintered, a rain of loose plaster dribbled from the teeth, and where she had slept was space. Five, six minutes and her rooms vanished and had never been. She got back into the car and they looked at each other. “Didn't take long, did it?”

“Come on,” he said, “you can vaporize a man in two seconds, what do you want?”

“Your mother asked me to talk to you.”

“The old man's okay. Cancer won't pin on a blue ribbon for endurance. And if you go the hospital route there's a point where you stop being human, but no point where they stop making money off your carcass. I expect him to have an accident some time in the spring. He'll wait for the spring-it's pretty in Brown County.”

“Why does he have to get away from her? That's what hurts her.”

“That's the way they are together. I'm sorry for her. But I can't change the way they've been chipping at each other all these years. Can only try to do a little better myself.”

“I'll remind you of that.”

“Not too often.”

As he pulled into their street, she said, “I have to send Marcia my new address.” Yes, because Marcia would be pleased for her, Marcia would understand and be pleased.

When the phone rang after supper he hurried to answer it, thinking it was the girl who wanted him to back her up calling with the recording date: electric this time and so was she, a sloe-eyed part Oglala Sioux with a smoky voice. It was Paul, though, with news. He stumbled over words. When he stopped they both listened to the line static. Then he called Sheldon Lederman from whom he got nothing: not even anger. Then he called the station lawyer for background. At last, reluctantly, he came over to Anna. “That was Paul.”

“Does he want to talk to me?” She started to get up.

“No. Listen, Anna—”

“Is he ever going to be friends again?” She grimaced, shoved the evening paper at him. “Know what? Sheldon Lederman is out. Reasons of private business and lots of eulogies. His replacement is Tom Lovis. I think you know him, which reminds me—”

“Listen to me. Leon's been committed by his family.”

“What? Committed what?”

“Sheldon committed him to an asylum.”

Her face folded on itself. “No!” she said loudly. “No!” It was a long time before she would admit that she believed him. She paced, she argued. “We have to get him out. Don't say it's impossible! Don't you care?”

For a long time she proposed tricks for getting Leon out. Finally she began to cry.

He could not touch her at first. He felt awkward, cut off. “It was that scene he put on in the shopping plaza. How the hell did he ever get the money for the equipment?”

“I gave it to him.” She sat in a chair weeping, huddled. “I gave him the money.”

Because she saw him. Burned by electroshock, yes, and swollen with the white thunder of insulin and bloated. Worse, she saw him surviving, she saw him settling in The lion would have his cage. The world would be a room, oh a big one with lawns and gardens and pingpong and tennis courts. He would get fat and diet, he would intrigue and push against the rules to see how far they gave. He would find his constituency and his opposition. Perhaps they would let him make films, or perhaps he would experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of psychodrama. He sat on a bench hunched with heavy shoulders, his orange head bowed and his eyes milky and only half open looking into himself, and then he let out that slash of grin and got ready to rasp a challenge, ready to push outward so that he might feel someone pushing back. He sat on a gray bench. His eyes met hers but did not see her. He and the bench were embedded in a shroud of cotton batting. They were systematized. They were digested. Something in his stance said that he believed a little less in connection, that he knew a little better what they could do to him. It was a good institution, simpler than the society and with the lines of control just as taut but more visible.

Her anger did not surprise him. Nor her clumsy vague schemes. But he was surprised by how long she cried.

“I loved him!” she said passionately into his chest. “I loved him but he couldn't love me.”

“It's over now.” He stroked her hair. Neither he nor Leon had taken each other's ideas as real but written them off as life style. They had had no dialogue. They had failed each other. Only she might have been a bridge, but he did not think that would happen now.

When the phone began to ring again he felt afraid and did not want to answer it.

“Rowley?” The voice was deep, peremptory. For a moment he did not recognize it.

“Yeah, speaking.”

“It's me. After all.”

“How are you?” What people say in shock. He cursed his clumsiness. “I mean I'm glad to hear from you. Where are you?”

“In a payphone. Where I'm staying the phone's tapped. Got the check and used it.”

“Fine.”

“Money is one thing we can really use.”

“That was meant more like a letter than a check. I won't be having extra money. I'm quitting the station.”

“How come?”

“Because I can't fool myself I'm doing anything to change the system in that job, and I can't fool myself any more that I haven't been fucked by the system too. Shaped, channeled, mutilated, dehumanized, squeezed by the balls. And I can't see myself happy as a concerned honky.”

“The whole Black Belt's going to blow this summer, don't you know that? You got anything more real?”

“Not yet. But I better have. I start with the fact that I'm cut off from my own roots, powerless to save what was my community, cut off by a wall from a woman I loved and her wasted, burned, my music gone dead and useless, mocked where I've tried most to say something, turned into a commodity to be advertised and used up like any other. I start with that. I start with those busy kids who made me so pissed. I start with where I'm trying to live.”