Sorrow Floats (31 page)

The screen door banged and Marcella came out to stand next to me and watch Andrew climb the birdbath. She was wearing a sweater, which is what people from warm climates do when the temperature dips below seventy. Somehow, Andrew had gotten his feet up in the basin and was hanging upside down by his heels, hollering for help. Neither one of us took it seriously enough to leave the porch.

“The doctor is still with Shane,” Marcella said.

“How’s it look?”

She used her hands to pull her hair behind her ears. “You know doctors, they won’t tell you anything until they’re ready. Shane’s awake, anyway, he’s not delirious anymore.”

Some kind of cricket or locust or something we don’t have back home started buzz sawing in the trees. That’s the kind of noise, if you’re raised on it, you find comforting, but if you’re not, it gives you the willies. Marcella hugged her elbows with her hands and stared up the road toward the tracks. I turned to check out what she was watching and saw the Oldsmobile.

“Let him come in,” I said.

Marcella rocked back a few inches. “Are you sure?”

“It’s time to forgive. Hugo’s had enough.”

“But you said throw him out on his ass.”

It was my turn to be taken back. “Marcella, I’m amazed. A week ago you’d have choked if you tried to say
ass
.”

She blushed from the neck. “You said never forgive a man who fools around.”

“I changed my mind.”

“One of the reasons I’ve been so strong with him is because I’m trying to be more like you.”

“Oh, Lord, Marcella, don’t do that.”

Andrew fell off the birdbath on his head. He rolled over and got up shaky, then he kicked the stone, which hurt his foot so he had to sit down again.

“You think it can ever be the same between me and Hugo?” Marcella asked.

Watching Andrew and being sober made me ache for Auburn more than ever. “It can’t be the same, but you can make it okay.”

Marcella walked across the yard and lifted Andrew onto the birdbath. He stood with a foot on each side of the rim, his arms held high, and shouted, “
King of the mountain
.”

Marcella looked back at me and said, “About Armand. It wasn’t all your fault. He fooled me at first, too, and I wasn’t even drunk.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled, then turned and walked up the driveway toward the Oldsmobile.

Lloyd sat on a couch in the living room, watching television and eating frozen grapefruit juice from the can with a spoon. It was odd, seeing him on regular furniture, watching regular television. I’d never connected Lloyd to normal things people do.

“It’s called
Bridget Loves Bernie
,” he said, gesturing at the TV with his spoon. “One’s Jewish and one’s Catholic, and their parents can’t adjust.”

I sat in an antique rocker that would have been great for nursing babies. It creaked gently as I leaned back. “Which one is Jewish?”

“Bernie, I think. That’s more a Jewish name.”

“Only Jewish kid I knew growing up was named Pete. Once a year he passed out crackers to everyone in class.”

Bridget wore her hair the way I did before I went crazy and attacked myself with the scissors.

“Will Shane die?” I asked.

The spoon stopped moving. “I think so.”

Bernie’s mother yammered at Bridget a mile a minute in real condescending tones. If I’d been Bridget, I would have said, “Go fuck yourself, bitch.”

“Should I stop drinking?”

Lloyd glanced at me, then back at the TV. I’ve noticed most people do best in serious conversations if you don’t look at them and they don’t have to look at you. “That’s your decision. If you do stop, I’ll be here to help.”

“The way Shane helped you in Mexico City?”

His eyes clouded, I suppose thinking of those days in Mexico City. “Yes.”

I leaned forward, toward Lloyd, looking right at him. “But you’re going off to Florida.”

On the television, a cartoon penguin urged us to smoke Kool menthol cigarettes. He wore a green stocking cap and glissaded down a chunk of ice. “I’ll stay with you till you don’t need me anymore,” Lloyd said.

“Shane stayed with you three years.”

“You won’t need me three years.”

“How do you know?”

Still without looking at me, he said, “If you do, we’ll look for Sharon together.”

That would be an odd way to live, driving around the countryside, partners with a man searching for his wife. A permanent Moby Dick trip. I studied Lloyd’s face with its web of lines and crucified eyes. He slid a spoonful of frozen juice between his lips, swished it around, and swallowed. Had I missed something, or had we just sworn to a major commitment?

***

Dr. Keller came through the living room after he left Shane. The doctor wore a suit vest but no coat. His glasses were the kind without ear pieces that hang from your pocket by a ribbon. They clipped on his nose and made his forehead wrinkle when he focused on something. People in Agatha Christie books wore weird glasses like these, but no one I’d ever seen or heard of in real life did. Maybe the doctor read too much Agatha Christie and became one of her characters. I’ve known cowboys to do that with Louis L’Amour.

“Granma gave orders I was to look at you before leaving the house,” Dr. Keller said.

“She did?”

“Hold your face to the light.”

The doctor inspected my chin and burned hand, then felt the knot on the back of my head. He had me lean forward while he poked at my lower back, asking, “Does this hurt? Does this hurt? How about here?”

I answered, “Yes, yes, yes,” but he didn’t seem impressed.

He had me unbutton my top two shirt buttons and breathe deeply while he listened for gurgles in my lungs.

“How is Shane?” Lloyd asked.

The doctor slid the cold stethoscope across my chest. “Mr. Rinesfoos might live through the night. I wouldn’t bet on tomorrow.”

“He’s dying?” I asked.

As he listened to my chest, the doctor cocked his head to one side, like a bird. “Oh, yes, he’s dying all right.”

“Shouldn’t we take him to a hospital?”

“I have done everything possible to make him comfortable. There is no real point to admitting him, and, evidently, he wants to die at home.” Dr. Keller gave a soft chuckle. “The man has quite a forceful personality, you know. Not unlike his grandmother.”

He finished and put away his doctor tools. “No broken bones or internal bleeding. That cut on your face should have been stitched, but it’s too late now. Better to leave it open, let it breathe. I’m afraid you’ll have a rather nasty scar.”

“You think it would help my back if I don’t pick strawberries tomorrow?”

The chuckle came again. “Oh, no, work is the best thing—keep you from stiffening up.” He snapped his black bag shut. “You’re the woman Mr. Rinesfoos rescued, aren’t you?”

“I’m the woman.”

“I wouldn’t feel too badly if I were you. He would have died in another year or two anyway.”

***

Too tired to sleep. Desperate to sleep. Granma or someone equally sadistic would bang on the door at dawn to drag my ass into the strawberry fields. Panic sets in—knowing you’re exhausted beyond human endurance yet you must be back on your feet in so many hours makes every moment of rest too precious to waste lying there wishing you could sleep.

I stared up from my bunk bed at the bottom of the top bunk bed. This was Shane’s very own room from God knows how long ago when he was a boy. Those were Shane’s hangers in the closet and Shane’s chest of drawers with the framed black-and-white photographs of Shane, upright, in a graduation gown and funny hat. Those stains on the box springs two feet above my nose were no doubt made forty-five or fifty years ago when a thinner Shane, who was Andrew then, lay right where I was now and whacked himself off in the dark. It staggers the imagination to picture people of an older generation masturbating.

Sounds of
Gunsmoke
drifted up through the floor. Lloyd and Brad were down there in the living room, held captive by Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty. Did Matthew and Miss Kitty hump? That was the crucial question of an entire decade of American history. First there was the atomic bomb, then the Cold War, and finally Matt Dillon’s sex life. And why bunk beds? Had there been another Shane, a brother who died or didn’t die or what? If Granma really was his granma—which was debatable since everyone from the doctor to the black guy in the field called her Granma—then that implied a middle generation, a Mom and Dad. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. I was going crazy.

I rolled over facedown with my arms tucked at my sides, then back over with both hands clasped on my belly, like a laid-out corpse. Nothing worked. I didn’t need a newspaper to tell me Granma was one of those hated fanatics who claim it’s a sin to sleep past sunrise. Which I wouldn’t mind if they kept it to themselves, but in my sleepless heart I knew Granma accepted no internal clock but her own. Sunrise—get up. Sunset—sleep. Do it my way or else. That’s how grouchy people get to be so old while pleasant people who don’t bother anyone die young.

“It’s no bother.” Those were Dad’s last words to me. He’d called to see if I wanted some gourds they’d picked up at a farmers market in Idaho. Auburn was two months old and I said I couldn’t drive out to the ranch until Thursday, and Dad said he’d bring them in after he rounded up a couple of cows the next day. I said, “Don’t make a special trip to town,” and Dad said, “It’s no bother.” I should have told him I loved him or would miss him or something, but, Jeeze, you can’t walk around every day thinking, What if my loved ones die before I see them again? You’d go nuts.

If Shane died in the next hour, his last words to me would be “My rod’s hot as a firecracker.” He probably planned it that way.

The last time I saw Sam’s grandfather, before he died, I’d flown to Greensboro for Christmas my sophomore year at UW. It was right after the Park heartbreak thing, and I thought Sam and Shannon would help me find sanity. Sam’s grandfather Caspar had already suffered a couple of mini-strokes, and he wasn’t in great shape. Christmas morning he leaned on his cane next to the tree and recited Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” I read the directions while Sam and Shannon tried to assemble a L’il Miss Doll House. No one paid any attention to Caspar. Two weeks later, he was dead.

When lightning killed Molly, my whole world was devastated. If I ever go to a shrink, I think I’ll tell her that was the moment the happy part of my life ended. I still mourn that horse, and the deal is even more complicated because I mourn her in a way I don’t mourn Dad. So I feel guilty that my grief for Dad isn’t as pure as my grief for my horse. When Molly died, I felt horrible; when Dad died all I felt was hollow. And to prove I really loved Dad the way you’re supposed to, I adopted self-destruction as a personal style—made myself ugly by cutting my hair and stupid by staying drunk.

Let’s cut to the crux of all this sleep-avoidance mishmash: My mistakes ended someone else’s life. Shane would die because I screwed up. I didn’t want to ever forget that.

A knock so gentle it had to be Marcella came at the door. “Maurey, are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

She cracked open the door. “Shane is asking to see you.”

I rolled over on my side to consider what that meant. Accusations? A deathbed forgiveness scene? Shane had squeezed drama from every situation in his life, no reason to think he would stop at this point.

Marcella slipped through the light into the room. “He said to wake you on account of he’d probably die before morning.”

“I’d have come without extortion.”

“Shane wanted to be certain.”

When I cut through the living room Lloyd and Brad looked up from the couch but didn’t say anything. Merle lay curled in a fur ball, asleep in Brad’s lap. From the rocker, Hugo Sr. smiled through his rectangular glasses. He nodded at the TV and said, “I liked Festus better.”

On
Gunsmoke
a cowboy named Newley or Muley or something like that helped an overdressed lady into a stagecoach. I said, “Everyone likes Festus better.”

Hugo Sr.’s box head bobbed up and down. “Ain’t it the truth.”

***

Granma sat under a semicircle of light at a rolltop desk doing whatever paperwork people who run farms do. She one-finger-punched her calculator with the force of punching out eyeballs, then scowled through bifocal wire rims at whatever results the calculator had the audacity to cough up. So far as I could tell, the bifocals were Granma’s only admission that time touched her body or mind.

“I was just thinking about Mary Beth,” Shane said. “She was such a lovely, energetic girl. I wonder if there’s not something we could do to help her.”

“Who?” Shane’s side of the room was so dark it took a few seconds to locate him under the massive quilt that must have been passed down from the Civil War.

“Mary Beth. Critter. She’s much too vivacious to attach herself to that manipulative snake with the ridiculous name.”

Shane’s forehead and upper lip glistened with sweat. Drops collected on all three chins and ran into the creases in his neck. His eyes glittered like purple lights on a Christmas tree, but they seemed to be withdrawing into the flesh beneath his eyebrows. I slid into a chair still warm from Marcella and picked a damp washrag from a bowl on the nightstand. I guess it’s an automatic response to wipe sweat off sick people’s brows.

“Critter was wonderfully happy and curious when I met her. One look and I knew she was the one to make me feel young again. I wish I could have kept her. You probably are unaware that she loves strawberries. Of all my women, I recall Critter most vividly.”

“I guess you always remember the last one most vividly.”

“Critter was not the last woman I slept with, you know.”

I wasn’t sure if that meant he didn’t sleep with her or he’d slept with someone since. I held his hand. “Tell me about the last one.”

He gave my fingers a weak squeeze. “She was a confused girl with a raging fire inside that had been so insulated by her fear of love, no warmth came to the surface.”

Didn’t take any idiot to tell he was talking about me. “That was first aid, Shane. Don’t go around saying we’ve slept together.”

“When I am in heaven and called up to testify before God concerning the many beautiful breasts I’ve taken comfort between, yours shall lead the list. You should see Maurey’s tits, Granma. Show Granma your tits.”

Granma glared at me with blatant hostility. You’d have a monumental battle if you threw her hawk eyes up against Lloyd’s Jesus look. Could he absorb anger faster than she fired it out? Would her drive to judge saturate his capacity to accept? Las Vegas could lay out the odds.

“I love women.” Shane made a sound like a sigh interrupted by a dry heave. It didn’t seem to bother him or alarm Granma, so I pretended not to notice.

“God, I love women,” Shane repeated. “Did you ever watch a woman apply makeup? Or stockings—I nearly cry when I see a woman sliding stockings over her legs.”

“I generally don’t wear makeup or stockings.”

“It’s not so much the sexual act, although that is wonderful. I still get chills up my back when I recall a blow job given me by Dessie DuBose in 1953. My God, what a mouth on that woman.” He kind of drifted off for a while, reliving a pleasant moment from 1953. I mopped his forehead again and squeezed the washrag into the bowl. Shane’s lips parted as he tried to breathe, and I could see his yellow-pink tongue on his bottom teeth. What would I relive as I lay dying? Bathing my babies, maybe, or one spring day when I took off my clothes and sat in Miner Creek feeling the water on my legs and sunshine on my shoulders.

“It’s not so much the sexual act.” Shane took up where he left off. “What I’ll miss is putting my face against a woman’s neck and falling asleep. The smell is delicious. I hope heaven smells like a female’s collarbone.”

“Maybe you better get some sleep now,” I said.

His eyes shifted and landed on me. “Why? I’ll be gone soon enough. Why can’t I spend my last hours of consciousness conscious? Did you know I once jammed with Son House? Son said ‘Take it, white boy,’ and God, did I take it. I was in heaven that day.”

“Sounds nice,” I said, even though I’d never heard of Son House.

“I’m going to miss my harmonica almost as much as women.”

Later he added, “And Oreo cookies.”

Back in the eighth grade I read every death-of-a-major-character book in Teton County Library—
Little Women
,
Charlotte’s Web
,
Daisy Miller
,
Bambi
, I devoured Dickens—searching for a clue as to what happens next. Eternal blankness was impossible to understand, but all the other theories struck me as silly. What happens next is the most important question there is, but no one knows the answer, and the only way to have any semblance of a life is to ignore the question.

Through college and into the drunk years, I got caught up in my personal life and managed to ignore the question easily, but sitting in a dark room next to a dying man made the deal hard to beg.

All the individuals I trusted deflected the unspeakable stuff with jokes. Lydia Callahan once told me that when I commit secret, disgusting acts—like ditching gum under a chair or peeing in a swimming pool—an alarm goes off in heaven and the angels gather to laugh at my social blunder. In Lydia’s world, religion and proper douching go hand in hand.

Dad said when people die they go to San Francisco, which makes as much sense as pearly gates and streets of gold. At least San Francisco is real.

“And Jimmy Stewart movies,” Shane said. “The westerns, not the ones where he plays Charles Lindbergh or the guy who went to Washington.”

“What’s that?”

He held up his hand to show me four fingers. “Women, my harmonica, Oreos, and Jimmy Stewart westerns.”

“How about horses?”

“No, I won’t miss horses.”

“My most favorite thing is the sound geese make when they fly over the house in fall.”

“I like campfires,” Shane said.

We were silent awhile, thinking of things we would miss if we died. My list was theoretical.

Shane cleared his throat. He dug under the quilt for a handkerchief, which he spit into, then he folded the handkerchief over whatever he spit and slipped it back under the quilt. The doctor had done something to stop the coughing, but not coughing scared me more than coughing because I could picture his lungs filling with blood.

“Let us review Maurey’s last few weeks,” Shane said.

“Oh, no, surely there’s a better way to spend your time.”

He did the four fingers thing again. “You drove a car with your baby on the roof, you attempted suicide, you got yourself beat to smithereens, not to mention almost raped and murdered, and you killed me.”

“Shane.”

“Frankness is expected from a dying man. It’s the only time in life when honesty goes unpunished.”

“Wouldn’t you rather conserve your strength than talk about this?”

His chins jiggled, causing rivulets of sweat to run onto the quilt. “Do you know why all these disasters happened?” he asked.

I looked at my feet. “Alcohol.”

“Correct. Now, since you caused my demise, I have the right to demand a promise.”

I kept my eyes on the hardwood floor and didn’t say anything. Whatever atonement he had in mind would be brutal. Shane wasn’t the type to ask for small favors.

“Do you agree you owe me a promise?”

“I agree already.”

“I want you to promise you won’t take another drink until I am dead.”

I exhaled. I’d been expecting a dry-for-life pledge. This was short-term enough to deal with. “I was planning to quit forever, Shane.”

His smile made him look ghoulish. The man was melting before my eyes. “Quite admirable, and I hope you follow through,” he said, “but what I demand is a solemn oath—cross your heart and hope to die—that you won’t touch a drop of alcohol while I am alive. If you honor the vow, I shall forgive you for killing me and, even better, give you permission to forgive yourself.”

I looked over at Granma, who was furiously writing in a ledger. She didn’t care if I promised. Shane watched me from sparkly eyes that seemed to be sinking into his flesh. Normally, I don’t care for commitments, but the guy was dying, and it was my fault.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?” he asked.

“I solemnly swear not to touch a drop of alcohol while Shane Rinesfoos lives.”

He nodded. “Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“Don’t you think we’re a little old—”

“Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“Okay. I cross my heart and hope to die.” Interesting phrase for someone who recently attempted suicide.

Shane took my hand again. “Send Lloyd in. Opportunities such as this are rare.”

Feeling dismissed, I stood up. His hand tightened on mine. “Good-bye, Maurey, take care of them.”

“Take care of who?”

“Lloyd and Brad. Marcella and Andrew. They’d be in big trouble without you.”

How was I supposed to take that? “I’ll look in on you later.”

He squeezed my hand one more time. “Life is lovely, Maurey. Don’t forget.”