The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (10 page)

Cyril was quite adamant that I get all this right, as if he were filling in a great gap in my mind. And yes, I have committed it to memory—and can already feel my life . . . improving. This is far better than hearing someone complain about how their feet hurt. Cyril has an obscure brio which beguiles me.

After our walks, I am worn out by the time we reach my door. But I will take more walks with him. I must figure out a way to return the favor of his constant flow of information. Perhaps I can quiet him down long enough to read him some poetry or show him some pictures or play some music for him, perhaps put some essence behind all those facts he holds in his head about poets, artists, saints, composers, movie stars . . . and old football players, and obscure medieval women, and jazz musicians, and decadent politicians, and opera singers, and . . .

I requested that the staff of the care home help me bring more of my art books from the farm along with a small standing bookcase shelf that would accommodate them. The books make my room warmer, but also smaller.

These little rooms. We try to disguise them in our various ways with our possessions—but they are what they are—holding cells for the doomed. Sometimes we vacate them suddenly, and sometimes we linger a long while in them as we slowly, slowly empty. The staff removes hard-edged or sharp things from our rooms so that we cannot injure ourselves or worse. Things disappear from our minds into the abyss as we sit in these rooms by ourselves—textures are removed, layers are stripped away, our essences are changed and peeled off—leaving strange traces, a sort of melancholy pentimento, until we are down to our true substance, and our final mission: the movement toward the great void.

That is why I will take walks with Cyril and sit with him at meals—because I want to help him hold on to the fascinating things he has put into his head. He is unique, has spent his whole life gathering lives. So many remembered lives—so much better than one lonely death, or a million lost or vacant lives.

C
HAPTER
9

Cyril

E
very night before I go down to the dining hall to sit with Louise for dinner, I watch the evening news on television for an hour. Louise refers to this as my “evening waltz with death,” and I often appear in the hall for dinner looking like an undertaker. It is an old habit, I’ve done this for years: I watch the news because I’m looking for
lives
—but it is a kind of penance, too, and I don’t often find lives that I want to keep.

Here I am, this lucky guy who has lived in these wooded, driftless hills for many years. All I have to do is go out in the morning—winter, summer, spring or fall—and turn my head just slightly in any direction, and see something beautiful. But on the news there are helpless people all over the world stuck in scabby, blasted places, who can’t get away and are being chewed up and murdered, millions of them, year after year, their lives pulverized before they can even grow up, cheated and deluded by their leaders, governments, and neighbors, drowned, blown up, shot, raped, buried alive, robbed and forgotten by the cunning idiots they have elected to take care of them, doomed by their poorness, remoteness or religion, they’ve got no lives to do anything with except try to find ways to exist and maybe find something to eat once a day. They can’t go to school or play in their blasted streets. They’re afraid to go to the market. They can’t go to church to pray because it is forbidden. They can’t sit three at their café tables, because it is forbidden for more than two people to be conversing at one time in public.

I could tell you the lives of most of them in one long sentence: They’re born, they scramble for water and food every day, they feel more hunger; maybe they are given enough time to produce a child who will also be hungry; finally they are killed, dead and alone, by some bullet or a painful disease, or maybe an explosion vaporizes them, some few relatives mourn and cry out for them, wrap their bodies in dirty cloths, place them in ditches, shovel on dirt, and forget them in a few days. Are these potential scholars, scientists, poets, humanitarians? Lives I would want to collect? Who could say? They are gone forever.

Essentially, this is the news, and these are the lives. The only “notable” lives are bozo dictators and politicians, who dither and blow off, fill their personal coffers, and primp for the crowds. The “good” politicians are so busy hustling for votes, being on the take and staving off the opposition that they completely forget how to be constructive. These are not the kinds of lives I want to remember or keep, but sometimes they seem to be the only lives being lived.

Once or twice a month pictures are broadcast on the news program of the lost young people who’ve died in our American wars—gone before they have any light in their eyes, down they go into body bags, into the ground as if they’d never existed in this world, mourned only by some remote family and a small group of friends. Why do I watch this without expectation night after night? Perhaps I think it is my duty as an informed citizen. After watching this, it is such a relief to go sit at dinner with Louise, but sometimes I am not very good company.

Louise ignores the news and counts on it for nothing; she has other things on her mind. Louise is a quick study. Right away she sized up this care home and recognized it as nothing more than a staging area for advanced crones and codgers. You can either make the best of this when you come here, or wither away in your own elemental sadness like a stricken elm.

Louise is determined not to start sucking her thumb, and she won’t allow me to feel sad or sorry for myself either. I admire her attitude, so I am always anxious to see her when I go down for dinner after my waltz with death, and afterward, if the weather is nice, take an evening constitutional with her around the grassy islands in the parking lot.

But this night I’m a bit late as I step into the dining area and I see there is a man sitting at our table with her. They are in conversation. I back out of the room again, almost falling over someone’s wheelchair, and catch my breath.

I recognize this guy. His name is Danderman, and he’d been a couple of years ahead of me in high school all those years ago. He was one of the athletic hotdogs, quarterback on the football team, a jaunty shortstop/pitcher type; later I think he ran some insurance agency in Readstown, became a councilman and school board member. A small town civic leader whose tenth-tier life wasn’t worth keeping track of—but there he is in his old age, leaning toward my new friend, Louise, like the world’s biggest pooh-bah. And she is listening to him.

My chilblains start itching, my chopped sirloin nose is running. Is this jealousy I’m feeling? I guess so. I consider not going into the dining room. The singer is standing with her fingertips on the table and singing “Twilight Time.” She’s all over the place with the tune.

Finally I suck it up—Cyril, I say to myself, what kind of a chicken shit are you? Get in there! And so I step back into the dining room, tapping my canes loudly as I walk toward the table where Louise and Danderman are sitting. I would have been clicking my heels, too, but I’d forgotten to change from my slippers.

Louise looks up, happy to see me, and smiles her beautiful smile. “Good evening, Cyril,” she says, as she always does. “Have you met Mr. Danderman?”

Danderman gazes at me coldly, not acknowledging the introduction. “You look like you need to sit down,” he says to me, and gestures to the chair beside him. But I shuffle around and sit on the other side of Louise.

I don’t recall that I’ve ever exchanged a word with Danderman over the many years we both have lived in this same little area. He’s always been too important to acknowledge my existence. I remember that he would occasionally buffalo me aside in the halls of the high school, but he never deigned to speak to me, except perhaps once or twice a jaunty nod and passing “Whadayasay.” He always had a bimbo on his arm. Now he measures me carefully. Is he planning to move in on Louise?

Not by the few gray hairs of
my
chinny chin chin!

What has he really done with himself over all this time? Not much after a few years of high school glory—but he’d managed to make those moments last all his life. I was pretty sure that Louise would not be impressed, although I have to admit that Danderman
looks
a hell of a lot better than I do. He’s kept most of his hair—I notice he’s touched it up with brown coloring—and is only a little puffy around the middle. All I have going for me are my bandages that Louise has painted with small flowers, and my skin that looks like rancid bacon.

Danderman looks a little like Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian World War II traitor, and I’m about to tell him this when he, in his quick, assertive manner, asks: “You having a good time here?” His eyes are like chilled plastic ice cubes and his mouth is slack. I think right then that I sure as hell am not going to give Danderman a life to identify with—not even Quisling’s.

“I’m getting through the days,” I answer him. “Nights are a little tricky sometimes.”

He’s looking at my bandages, my nose, and where my missing ear should be. “What the hell hit you, man—a double Peterbilt?”

“I got mugged by a polar bear,” I tell him.

Louise has a pleasant chuckle at this. I can usually make her laugh—and she likes that.

Danderman seems flustered that she thinks my remark is clever. He’s a veteran libertine, not used to being one-upped, especially by a corpus delicti. He shifts in his plastic chair and gives me a patronizing smile as he tries to stare me down. I hold his gaze. We sit in silence for a while. Finally Danderman asks, “What have you been doing with yourself since high school?”

“That was a long time ago. I kept to myself. I had jobs in town over the years.”

More silence. I gnaw on my rubbery chicken. The singing lady is doing “The Little White Cloud That Cried” now. It’s pretty bad.

“Somebody should shoot that old bag,” Danderman says.

“She’ll die singing,” Louise says. “There are worse ways to go. She’s determined to entertain us. I think it’s very generous of her.”

“She ruins my digestion.” Danderman grinds in his chair.

I chew another bite of chicken. “What did you do with yourself after high school?” I ask him after a while. “I know you had an insurance agency. You probably played golf.”

“Yeah, I was a golfer. Still can hit a few. I played slow-pitch softball until I was in my early fifties.” He’s looking at Louise like he would like to eat her with a spoon.

“You look a lot like Donkey Thomas,” I say suddenly.

Here I go! Now I’ve done it. I guess I just can’t help myself—I’m going to give this pissant a life anyway.

Danderman is surprised and sits up in his chair, looking challenged. “Who was Donkey Thomas?” He puts both of his big hands on the table.

“He was an outfielder/first baseman for a lot of major league teams. Not the Hall of Famer Frank Thomas who played for the White Sox, but he was Frank ‘the Donkey’ Thomas, a big strong, white guy, mean as hell, he hit double-figure home runs eight times, but he struck out a lot. He pulled the ball and hit some of the longest foul balls in major league history. Strong guy—not the smartest. He had a standing bet with anyone that he could take their hardest throw with his bare hands, so you can imagine what a dope he was. It used to drive his managers crazy, but he’d dare people and never lost the bet; he even took Willie Mays’s best shot with his bare hands. And he’d stick his skinny nose in anyone’s face. One time the Phillies traded for him, and the first day he got into a fist fight with their star, Dick Allen, and they placed him on waivers the next day.”

There—I’d given Danderman a life, despite myself. I’m not sure he liked it, but I enjoyed it. I even elaborated and embroidered the tale now, just for my delectation: “Donkey Thomas played seven years for Pittsburgh, then bounced around with eight other teams in half a dozen years. Managers couldn’t stand him—nobody could stand him—so they kept moving him on. The new teams kept hoping he’d at least hit a few home runs and win a game or two for them.

“One of his managers was mad at him one time and commented to sportswriters, ‘He needs to change his deodorant.’ Donkey Thomas could not be managed, but if they had a little extra room on their roster, they wanted his power. He was all muscle, but the muscle ran into his head as well. You look like him.”

Danderman looked as if he’d swallowed a baby alligator. We all sit quietly at the table for a few moments, listening to the singer struggling now through “Ebb Tide.” I nibble at my cold peas.

“What really happened to you?” Danderman asks after a while. “You run your electric cart into a display of canned peaches at Walmart, or something?”

“I got abducted by a criminal and he left me out to die in a snowstorm. I was lucky the sheriff found me. What happened to you?” I asked him. I was pretty worked up by now. “You look like you got old, too. Were you surprised? Did you finally get your bare ass snapped with the biggest wet towel in the locker room?”

“Gentlemen,” Louise says after some moments of white silence, “please. You must excuse me. I have some things to attend to.” She stands, and Danderman and I struggle to our feet.

“I’ll walk you to your room,” I offer quickly.

“That won’t be necessary tonight, Cyril,” she says. “You’ve not finished your meal yet.”

“Allow me,” Danderman says.

“You sit with Cyril,” she tells him. “He’s just been in the hospital for a while and doesn’t know too many people.” She’s off with her cane tap-tapping quicker than I’ve ever seen her move, escaping us both.

Danderman watches her walk away. “Pretty foxy lady,” he comments. “Nice legs.” He turns to me.

“Listen, junior, you keep trying to show me up like that, you’ll be wishing the cops hadn’t found you in that blizzard.” His demeanor has changed. He’s edged forward and is leaning on me like Danderman the tough jock.

“Here now!” I say. “Aren’t we a bit old to be talking tough to each other?”

“You started it, Mr. Frosty. What kind of jobs did you have? Cleaning up the toilets at the VFW? I could have hired you to mow my lawns, except you probably wouldn’t have got the lines straight.”