Oxygen (23 page)

“How was the flight?
No close brushes with death?”

“Of course not. You have no faith in aerodynamics, Marie.” Joe swings his battered leather satchel over his shoulder and pushes open the double glass doors exiting one of Hobby airport’s fixed-base operator lobbies.

“No, I have no faith in humans. At least within the margin of error for flight.”

“It was fine once I crossed the mountains. Clear skies all the way.”

I haven’t seen him since the night he slept with me, a few weeks and a lifetime ago; haven’t seen him since I fell asleep in his arms and woke up to an empty bed. The memory of it twists and leaves me tongue-tied. He holds the lobby doors open for me and we walk out into the wavy heat toward the parking lot. At the car he leans forward to toss his bag onto the backseat and then turns toward me. Cupping his hand around the curve of my neck, he bends to kiss me, lightly, ambiguously. Still, the physical contact of his lips relaxes, somewhat, the unsettled status of our companionship.

“I looped down over Galveston Bay on the way in. It’s nice out there, with the jetties going out into the water. We should fly over tomorrow. I could teach you to do some dives.”

I laugh. “Be happy with getting me to fly at all, Joe. Sometimes I wonder how well you really know me!”

“To know someone is to try to change someone, isn’t it?”

“That, Joe, may be why you’ve never married.”

I shut the door after he slides in and walk around to the driver’s side. “I made you a reservation at the Sheraton, near Dad’s house. Is that OK?”

“Sure. Whatever. I can stay with you at your Dad’s place, if you want me to.”

“It’s a mess over there—smells kind of funky. I don’t even know where you’d sleep. Well, you’ll see. I was going to pick up some barbecue and take it back there for lunch if you want to come. He’s expecting to meet you. Besides, you can’t fly all the way to Texas and not have barbecue.”

“Arkansas has barbecue.” Joe angles the air-conditioning vent upward so that it blows his sandy red hair away from his face, a tangled, freeform breeziness that suits him. A small gold stud glints in his earlobe. Thankfully, Dad’s vision is too far gone for him to notice it.

“Maybe after he gets settled tonight we can go out for a while. How much time have you spent in Houston? I can’t remember.”

“I interviewed at the Texas Medical Center—Methodist. I was thinking about a cardiac fellowship. They run quite a show down here, don’t they? I changed my mind when I saw the giant bronze statue of Michael DeBakey’s hands—a little too godlike for my tastes.”

“I’d forgotten you considered cardiac. You’re not stuffy enough for cardiac.”

“I had a great case yesterday—guy who’d had laryngeal cancer and I had to do a retrograde intubation over a cardiac catheter wire.”

“Wow, I haven’t done one of those since my residency.” I rev the engine up the access ramp and onto the freeway, capturing a rare space between speeding vehicles. “So, any special requests while you’re here? Any famous Houston landmarks you can’t fly back without seeing?”

“What can you offer me?”

“Let’s see. NASA? Neiman Marcus? The Astrodome? Lone Star Cafe?”

“Can’t do Lone Star—didn’t bring my cowboy boots. Take me to Astroworld.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious, Marie. You know that.” Around us cars and pickups and eighteen-wheelers ricochet around hundreds of miles of looping intersections and concrete ramps and construction barriers, driven with the brazen blind trust of contemporary frontiersmen. Joe sucks in his breath when a van cuts in front of me. He adjusts the sun visor and rolls the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms, reaches across the cracking vinyl of the Buick’s bench seat as if he might take my hand, then pulls away to scratch the nape of his neck.

I feel him look over at me but don’t look back. He asks, “How’ve you been, since you got here?”

I keep my eyes fixed on the traffic. “I don’t know. Distracted, at least. I’m too busy cleaning my dad’s house to think about my own problems. He didn’t even keep it up when he was younger—sort of the absentminded professor type. He ought to just sell the place so somebody can tear it down—the land is worth a lot these days. He could afford an extended-care apartment for as long as he needs.”

“Have you talked to him about that?”

“I’m not a masochist, Joe. Or a hypnotist—which is what it would take to convince him to move. Oh, let’s get off here.” I grip the steering wheel with both hands and whip into the right lane between two cars with a bumper’s width of room between us.

“Jesus, Marie.” Joe braces himself against the dashboard. “You’re starting to drive like these people. Slow down.”

“You should have your seat belt buckled,” I say. He looks agitated and pulls out a cigarette. “I’m worried you have a secret death wish, Joe. Seat belts, cigarettes, private planes…There’s a great barbecue place down this block, if they haven’t torn it down.”

He cracks the window so the silvery trail of smoke snakes up and out over the top of the car. “I’ll take a plane over these freeways any day.”

“What for? Traveling or dying?”

“Either.” He draws on the cigarette and exhales the smoke like a visible sigh. “Either one.”

The freeway dumps us into a nest of prewar bungalows huddling below the glass and metal giants of downtown. The houses are painted in the vivid Easter egg yellows and blues and lavenders my mother always associated with the Mexican barrios that percolate up through the soul of all Texas cities like boiling springs, their mariachis and jalapeños and Spanish seared into our cultural palate.

It’s still here, unchanged from my nights as a medical resident when we would draw numbers to see who got to break away from the emergency room or intensive care unit to haul in greasy sacks of ribs and cornbread. I pull the car up over the sidewalk onto the packed dirt of a makeshift parking lot. Washboards of pork and beef ribs and whole, brown-basted chickens are smoking in pipe-vented, half-barrel cookers lined up behind a clapboard shack. A massive elm cuts the sun, its sooty umbrella of boughs as cured and aromatic as the smoking meat.

“Dad and I both love this stuff. Clogs your arteries even to smell it. Best barbecue in Houston. What do you want?”

“Baby backs.” He crouches down to scratch the chin of a ragged-looking cat with swollen teats. “How is your dad’s eyesight?”

“He can get around the house. He hasn’t tried to drive since I got here—that’s another conversation we’re putting off. He doesn’t want me to talk to his ophthalmologist.”

“Can’t you call him anyway?”

“Not while he’s competent—you know the laws on that.”

Joe sits down at the nearest picnic table; the cat twines between his legs and then jumps into his lap. He rakes it back to the ground and it slinks across the dirt to a bank of garbage cans.

“Joe, don’t hurt her! She must have kittens somewhere.”

“Damn cat clawed me.”

A young boy in barbecue-stained overalls comes out of the house with two large grocery bags stapled across the top. Joe stretches out one leg and digs into his jeans pocket. “I’ll get this. Hey,
niño, aquí. No, no. Todo es para usted,
” he tells the boy, folding a fifty-dollar bill into his hand.

He’s appeasing me now, about the cat. He opens a corner of one of the bags and peels off a shred of chicken that he tosses into the shrubs where she is crouched and she pounces on it, starved. The car is even quieter on the drive home. I point out landmarks; he comments on the weather. I turn on the radio to fill the silence. We are both wondering why he is here.

“Dad?” Joe follows me into the living room and drops his duffle on the end of the sofa; dust motes spiral up from the cushion. “He must be in the bedroom. Wait here a minute.”

When I come back he is leaning over the TV cabinet studying a photograph of my mother. “She looks like you.”

“No, I look like her. Dad’s just getting up from a nap. He’ll be out in a minute. Want some tea? Coffee?”

“Beer?”

“Don’t have any.” He waves away the offer and roams through the living and dining rooms.

“This is just how I’d imagined it,” he says.

“And how is that?”

“Oh, a history professor’s home. Shades drawn, solid, practical furniture. Books and books and more books. How old were you when you lived here?”

“They moved here from Dallas when I was in eleventh grade. I hardly lived here at all.”

“Doesn’t look like it was a home that ever held kids.”

“I guess our house in Dallas didn’t ever really look like any kids lived in it, either. I think my parents sort of expected us to be adults a few months after we got out of diapers. My father, at least.”

“Oh, oh, oh. Now look at this.” Joe slides back the door of a battered wooden cabinet beside the fireplace. Inside it is the stereo my father bought at Millard’s Hi-Fi on Lovers Lane when I was in seventh grade, infuriating my mother, who was coping with a flooded washing machine at the time and scraping nickels together for repairs.

He squats down to look at the records standing on the bottom shelf. “He’s got an original Burl Ives in here. I wonder if that’s collectable.”

“Don’t tease him, Joe.”

“Who’s teasing? You can sell anything on eBay. My God, and
The Best of Lawrence Welk
!”

“Diamond needle on that. Weighs less than one gram,” my father says from the doorway. He stands in his undershirt and loose trousers watching Joe leaf back the albums beneath the turntable. “No computerized, digitized music can match that for resonance.”

“Dad, this is Joe Hillary.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Heaton.” He rises and walks over to shake Dad’s hand. How funny to hear the address of “Dr. Heaton” directed at someone other than myself—I wonder if anyone has called him that since he stopped teaching.

“Tall son of a gun, aren’t you?” my father says.

“Joe’s flying back to Seattle from New Orleans, Dad. He’s a pilot.”

My father studies Joe frankly, scanning his features, unconcerned with the social graces of smiles or small talk. “Which carrier do you work for?”

“No, Dad, Joe’s a doctor—an anesthesiologist, at my hospital. Remember? He’s an amateur pilot, I guess I should have said. He flew his own plane down.”

“That’s quite a haul, Houston to Seattle. You can run into to some weather over the Rockies. What do you fly?”

“Piper Navajo, twin engine. I can make it in a little over eight hours if conditions are good. I stopped overnight in Salt Lake on my way to New Orleans, just to break it up. Do you know planes?”

“Had a brother that flew the F-86 in Korea. Took me up one time in a T-33 trainer.”

Joe lights up at this. “Now the F-86 was a plane I would have fought to fly.”

“Well, that’s what he thought, too. Didn’t make it through to the end, though.” He stares up at Joe, his mouth partially open and his brows low over the top of his glasses.

Joe slips his hands back in his pockets. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Long time ago now.” Dad waves the memory away as if it were a gnat buzzing around his face. “Well, make yourself at home. I’m headed out to the store, so Marie can get you settled in.”

“Joe’s staying downtown, Dad. I’m gonna run him over to his hotel later. Why don’t I do your shopping for you after that? Then you don’t have to go out.”

“I want to go out.” Dad looks from me back up at Joe. “She wants me to stop driving. Probably told you that already. How about a beer—always good on a hot day.” He heads off into the kitchen, leaving us to follow or fend for ourselves.

“I brought back some barbecue for lunch,” I call after him. “I don’t think we have any beer.”

“Doesn’t want me to drink, either. All right. How about some barbecue and water?”

Joe shrugs his shoulders at me and follows Dad out through the dining room into the kitchen.

“So you have to fly IFR to get here? Got your instrument rating?” Dad is filling glasses at the sink and Joe is peeling cardboard lids back from the tinfoil pans of ribs and chicken and sauce. The smell of barbecue beats back vague odors of bacon grease and bruised bananas and a dank wisp of mold rising from the graying sink sponge.

“Yeah, they require IFR over the mountains. We have enough cloudy weather in Seattle I decided to go for instrument training after I moved up there. Marie tells me you were a history professor at Rice.”

“I taught there until 1987.”

“What was your concentration?”

“Medieval European history, leaving me little enough in common with my doctor daughter here. Marie, sit down and eat, would you? It’s ruining my appetite to watch you sterilizing the counters. We’re not going to be operating on anybody in here today.”

“Fine, Dad. I’m just trying to be helpful.”

He scrapes the wooden legs of his chair around on the linoleum floor to face Joe. “Haven’t seen her in three years—all she wants to do is clean. Do you get much opportunity to fly? Frederick—my brother—used to say doctors made lousy pilots. Said they were always too busy to put in enough hours, and too cocky to know when to get the hell out of the sky.”

I’m cringing at this but Joe laughs. “He was right, your brother. We tend to have more money than common sense, I guess. I get to fly three or four times a month. That’s another good reason to take long trips like this one—to keep my skills up.”

Dad purses his lips, unabashedly judging Joe, sizing him up. Joe is unfazed, smiling back at him as if he welcomed the appraisal. “Well, Lordy. Must cost you as much as a ticket to fuel that plane this far.”

“Yes sir,” he says, slipping easily into the courtesies of his Southern upbringing. “More actually. Maybe my funds outpace my own common sense. So did your brother get to fly the P-51 in Korea?”

“No, they only flew those in the earliest part of that war. There was one on his base up there at Bergstrom, though. Back when it was still military. I would have been over there with him but for my eyesight—even back then I needed Coke bottle glasses. Too much reading. You from Texas?”

“Arkansas. We just sound like we’re from Texas. I grew up on a farm outside of Little Rock.”