Men in the Making (12 page)

 

Terence was upright in bed, watching TV. His baseball cap sat on the tray table and his short hair was molded into a rumpled crown. "You ready for me?" Raymond asked.

Terence extended his arms, palms up, and pressed his lips together, exhaling audibly through his nose. "I don't know. You ready for me?"

"We could play this game all day, I guess," Raymond said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "And really, it'd suit me fine, but why don't you cut to the chase and try me."

"Well, how's this? I haven't taken a crap in two days."

"That's direct enough, I guess. Did you tell the nurse? I'm sure they could give you something to—"

"It's not
that.
I mean, I
need
to go." He raised his arms and the curved splints shaped his hands into claws. Talons. "I just can't ask my mom, you know? Or one of the nurses? I'm twenty years old, for chrissakes. It wouldn't be right." He dropped his hands to the sheets. "Look, I'm not having some woman wipe my ass, okay?"

Raymond smiled as he stood, holding an arm toward the adjoining bathroom. "Okay by me," he said. "But make it a good one, my friend. I know those nurses. We make this a habit and rumors will fly around this place."

Laughing, Terence swung his legs out of bed and walked stiffly into the bathroom. It was surprising, but the kid didn't seem embarrassed when Raymond lifted his gown and pulled his boxer shorts down. Once, when he'd worked evenings, Raymond had helped a nurse insert a catheter in an elderly man the night before his bypass. Raymond held the man's withered penis while the nurse inserted the tube, and the old guy wouldn't stop talking. He kept apologizing, going on and on about how it used to be bigger. But Terence didn't flinch. He waited until Raymond was done with the boxers and he lowered himself slowly.

"I can handle this next part," he said, and Raymond smiled, closing the door behind him.

While he waited, Raymond smoothed the sheets on the bed, tucked them in on the edges. He paced the room and pulled open the drapes, watched the traffic on Lamar and the steam rising from the asphalt parking lot below. He turned the TV off, then on again—Jerry Springer was shaking his head, the audience jeering at a teenage girl with pink hair and black lipstick. When Terence called from the bathroom, swinging the door open, Raymond closed the drapes.

"Sorry about this," Terence said, leaning forward.

"Oh, well," Raymond said. "No reason to be sorry. It could be worse."

"Yeah? Not much."

Raymond gripped the boy's left shoulder and moved the wadded paper down between his buttocks. As he continued, pulling paper from the roll on the wall and feeling Terence's muscles tense when a thumb grazed his skin, Raymond felt something jump in his stomach, a flutter so warm and abrupt that he almost laughed. Or cried—he couldn't tell which, but his eyes itched with the rise of tears and his toes curled in his shoes, and when he was finished, after he'd helped Terence up with his boxers and flushed the toilet and gave him a hand getting back into bed, Raymond stood still near the door, looking around the room.

"Those drapes okay?" he said.

Terence turned his head, then looked back at the door.

"They're fine," he said.

"Okay then, mission accomplished, I guess."

A short woman with blue eyeshadow and black pinned-up curls stood with a tray of food behind Raymond in the doorway. "Me-meep," she said, and Raymond stepped out of her way. "That roadrunner, he kills me." She smiled and strolled to the far side of the bed. "Here you go, partner. And from what this card says, I get to feed you, too." She set the food on the table tray and smoothed her blue smock.

Terence winked at Raymond. "Out with the old and in with the new, I guess."

"Looks that way," Raymond said, but he thought of his child
—in with the new
—and he couldn't bring himself to smile.

 

Melody was screaming, throwing her head back and forth and clinging to her mother's neck as Nurse Taylor and Raymond lifted her onto the padded stretcher. They wheeled her slowly to the door, and in the hallway the screams bounced fierce and high off the antiseptic walls. Mrs. Lane stood outside her door with her arms folded tightly across her chest, her jaw set tight with resentment. From their station, the nurses filed charts and shuffled papers, trying not to look as Melody kicked the stretcher with her bandaged legs, clawing wildly at Raymond's arms and pulling her mother's hair. Dr. Dutch turned from the doorway and walked slowly into the debridement room as they approached, and when they wheeled her in, the girl grabbed the doorjamb, and for a few seconds everything stopped.

She looked at Raymond, her face wet, flushed with panic, her mouth open, waiting. Raymond reached toward the door and met her mother's hand on the child's arms. The back of her hand was moist and he held it, covering it softly with his palm. He wanted the woman to let him do it, to let him be the bad guy, the monster who pried the girl's hands from the wall, but the woman wouldn't let go. Melody watched them, her arms outstretched, fingernails digging into white paint, and Raymond stood looking at the woman, his pulse wild in his wrists, everything else as quiet and still as the ICU waiting room at midnight. It was a silence he recognized. White lights, the steps of the nurses' padded soles on the delivery room floor, something metal shining in the doctor's wet hands. Their daughter smeared in the white film of birth, the cord cut, now limp and harmless on her wrinkled stomach. And not a fucking sound. Just the nurse with the blanket and uncertain eyes. And then he's holding her, touching the cool, slick skin of her cheek, tracing the web of blue veins under her eyes, and Tammy is reaching out, looking up, her hands meeting his on the tiny, sunken chest of their child. The nurses just stand there, staring, another sad day's work. Then Tammy is screaming:
Aren't you even going to wash her!

Raymond imagined tiny blue fingers reaching up in the liquid swirl of the womb, grasping overhead in the dark, unable to take hold of the cord, and now he pulled hard, prying Melody's fingers from the door and holding her wrists together in one hand. Her mother stepped back, arms at her sides. The girl was screaming again, rearing back, unable to free herself, and Raymond's ears were ablaze, thumping inside with the noise and the rage of it all. Dr. Dutch cut the bandages from her legs, his thick fingers pinched in the rings of the scissors. "I hate you," she shouted, her voice raw, but strong. Nurse Taylor was flinching, moving back from the stretcher while Raymond, a strange calm settling in his stomach, held Melody under the arms, lifting.

His hands cupping her ribs, Raymond felt the swell of her lungs, the contraction of her chest pushing the words into the room—"
I hate you!
"—and he thought he could hold her like this forever. He loved her. When he lowered her into the water, Raymond knew that he loved her, hoped she would scream until plaster fell from the walls, until silence no longer seemed possible. Go on, he thought. Let it out, goddammit. Scream.

Y
OU'RE HOT, YOU
say, from the drive, so you fill a glass with ice from the cooler and pull a bottle of Zinfandel from the paper sack by the bed. You do that Houdini trick with your bra—a few sighing, beneath-the-blouse contortions and you're free, pulling the thing from your sleeve. You down your drink, clink the ice around in the glass, and then you're in the shower.

When the cell phone rings, I know it's my wife. Before I pick it up. I can hear you talking to yourself in there above the noise of you coming clean—motel water slapping motel tile, words awash in the steam—so I close the bathroom door before I pick up.

Of course, she's crying. "You've been gone so long," she says.

"Honey," I say, "get hold of yourself. I only left at four."

I imagine that, back in Houston, she's sitting just where I left her, the oversized recliner in the den, her bathrobe bunched up high around her next-to-nothing hips.

"But where is everybody?" she says. "Where's Samantha?"

"I left her with Grandma," I say. "She's fine, honey. Did you take your pill?"

Then all I hear is the TV, the one she hasn't turned off in months. I go, "Honey?" but there's nothing but canned laughter from some sitcom. She's taken her meds, I think, and I'm wondering if maybe I should have hidden the bottle. The stuff makes her worse sometimes. She's like that—forgets she's had one and pops another. Sad, but I've seen her cry after downing enough Paxil to cheer up the whole of death row in Huntsville.

"You there?" I say, but it seems she's through with talking. I pull the phone away and look at the receiver. I think, Roaming charges, fifty cents a minute, and when I hang up there's that undertow of guilt I get in my guts, an ugly pull of regret at work beneath breaking waves of relief.

The water's off now, but you're still talking in there, asking questions, and in your voice is the kind of muffled uncertainty that always reminds me of hospital waiting rooms. Nights spent in lumpy vinyl chairs. A loved one gone from bad to worse. I lie back on the bed and stare at the cheap painting on the wall above the TV. There's this cowboy camped out somewhere on the prairie. The sun's going down, the horizon an eruption of western red, and he's stirring a pot over the campfire. Beans, I'm thinking. They always ate beans. What's strange, though: there's not even a horse. He's just sitting out there by his lonesome. Cooking. Waiting for nightfall. Not so much as an animal to keep him company.

"Baby?" you call from the bathroom. "Would you go for more ice? The cooler's about dry."

 

Outside, headlights flash and westbound rigs blast the motel with gusts of hot, diesel-laced air. A highway breeze. A woman laughs in the room next door. Through thin drapes, television blue washes onto the window and a man makes jokes in a pack-a-day voice, bringing up phlegm between one-liners. I stop to listen, but the window unit kicks on and drowns him out. I walk barefoot to the ice machine and press the bucket against the lever. The parking lot is almost empty. No one stops out here, halfway between Houston and Austin. I'm watching high clouds race each other east when ice starts falling over the rim of the bucket to my feet. I'm wondering why we drive seventy miles to spend the night together, why, when we're in the car, this little dive with its hand-painted Truckers Welcome sign and gravel drive is the earliest stop I can persuade myself to make.

 

Inside, you're wrapped in a towel on the bed. Two towels. You do that turban thing with one. You're asking, Did she call? Am I okay? I'm nodding and pouring wine and thinking of how my wife used to look after a bath. I'm remembering things you'd want to know—who she was, wet hair falling dark over flushed skin. White towels. The smiles of unwrapping. The faint birthmark high on the back of her thigh I used to kiss.

Later, you pull me onto the bed and feed me wine. We make hard, roadside love. You put your ear to my chest and listen to what's going on inside. Then you wait in the dark for me to say something, and when I don't, you whisper, "Penny for your thoughts."

I take a deep breath so you know I've heard. I touch your shoulder and shake my head and I think, No, they're still worth more than that.

W
HEN I WAS
ten, after my mother left Dad and me and flew off to Europe, Kevin, the five-year-old next door, got run down in front of our house. He was chasing a cat, and after his body hit the pavement and slid into the grass near the Houston Lighting and Power substation across the road, neighbors say a bearded man in overalls stumbled down from the truck, put a hand on the sideview mirror to keep his balance, and took a leak right there in the street, beer cans falling from the cab to his feet. Later, we heard that Kevin's aorta had burst, that he probably hadn't felt the asphalt peeling his skin or the dark green cool of the grass where he'd come to a crumpled stop.

I didn't really know Kevin—he was so much younger than I was—but his sister and I were inseparable. Patty was the only kid in the fifth grade who could whip me at air hockey. She'd block my shots easily, humming along with the community center jukebox all the while, pressing her lips into a tight smile while she played, swirling her paddle in slow circles in front of her goal. Luring me off-guard with quick flicks of her tiny wrist, a teasing series of stops and false starts. Then she'd fire, launching a plastic streak of red into my goal so often that I accused her, under my breath, of cheating. Even now I can't honestly say if it was because her game impressed me, or because she sometimes let me cop a feel between her legs, but we acted in those days like conspirators, close and trusting, a little nervous nonetheless.

This was all in 1979, and Patty's long gone now. Just before junior high, when the bottom fell out of the Houston oil business, her father lost his job at Exxon and moved the family up north. Detroit, I think. After working my way through college, I landed a good job as an outside salesman, driving from one refinery to the next pitching high-dollar hose and couplings to men who wear tool belts and turn wrenches for a living, men like my father. Coming up fast on forty, I'm a long haul from childhood, but still the memories come. Sometimes when I'm on the road making sales calls, I'll find myself at the wheel of my truck, ten miles past my exit on the highway, nothing but steaming asphalt and thoughts of Patty in my wake, thoughts of the girl with sad black eyes and a tiny, upturned nose. The girl who loved me after Mom left.

***

Until that spring, Patty and I had been little more than neighbors, and though we walked together as we made our way to school or past the fire station to the community swimming pool, it was only because our mothers insisted. There was power in numbers, they said. Safety. And one, I'd heard Mom sing sometimes, was the loneliest number. "Besides," she said one morning before school, "little girls can't be walking around all by their lonesome like that. And I imagine you'd feel just awful if something happened to her, wouldn't you?"