“Good luck, kids,” Will said and wheeled out.
“You work here,” Louisa said.
“Yes,
we
do,” I said, giving the jug three more hearty shakes and setting it on the counter. “Would you like a glass of fresh milk?”
“Powdered milk?” She frowned.
“I’ve got a quart of the real stuff set aside. How about a cup of that or some Kool-Aid and toast?”
She nodded. “What is this place?”
“The Blue Mesa Boarding Home.”
“These are
old people!
”
“Mostly. How are you?”
She rose and went to the door. “Come here,” she whispered. I went and looked, as she did, down the hall. I’d seen it before. The residents coming our way looked at us with what seemed to be faint alarm; it was a look of fear and incredulity, which I later learned, came with the knowledge that they could be hit for something their bodies had done. Naps seized those in the wheelchairs at will, and made them look as if their heads were not attached correctly. From around the corner in the recreation room came the low eternal: “Naw law! Naw Laaw!” sung again and again. The whole scene in the everlasting sepia twilight of indoors was a tableau from a horror film, but what made the vision real was the odor. The warm stale hallway waved with the sweet sick smell of vomit and rancid diapers, which added as much as the seven layers of carpet on the floor to the claustrophobic effect.
I took Louisa’s arm and sat her back at the kitchen table, opening the window wider. I set the toast before her and poured her a glass of milk. When in doubt, do things.
Outside the window, an old man, Alexander, sat in the middle of a sagebrush on a broken, rotting sofa. He never came indoors. He couldn’t negotiate any of the stairs, and the rough, precipitous wheelchair ramps had no handrails. His head was arched back, mouth open to the sky, asleep. There was a magazine in his lap. Seventy miles behind him the blue mountains held their treasures.
Louisa looked at him once and then covered her hands with her eyes. “I can’t take this,” she said.
“Nothing to it. Part-time work. Might as well be a service station or the Quartzite Café.”
“Bullshit!” she said. “Come here.” She dragged me back into the hallway, down to the recreation room. “Look around!” She pointed at a brown stain on the gray carpet. It was the shape of Africa. “That’s blood,” she said. “Somebody probably died right there.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Could be.”
She pointed at the two sunken easy chairs. The cushions sagged. “See those,” she said. “Those are fart prints; old men sit in those all day and fart.”
I worked her back into the kitchen. She turned in my arms once: “No, Collin! No way! You stay. This is too much!”
Back at the table, she was exhausted. She didn’t even stare at the toast with any authority. I went about my little tasks calmly, as if to show how ordinary things could be.
Then she started talking, not breaking the stare.
“It’s like Germany.” she began. “When my grandmother was sick, we went back to Germany. I must have been eight or nine. Eight. We were doing the circus outside of Montreal. It wasn’t much of an act. I rode on my father’s shoulders across a series of narrow rafts strung across one of the rivers. My father wanted to have part of the center raft on fire, but my mother wouldn’t let him. Finally, to spite her, he drove off the rafts a couple of times and the crowds got larger. He broke his wrist and his cheekbone, I think. When we’d go off, he’d throw me clear and say, ‘Swim, you little shit!’ Her eyes came back, and she smiled at me. ‘Swim.’
“Then mother came with the news about my grandmother and there was a family conference, and it was decided that Ring and I would go. His mother was dying, but we only had money for two of us, and I was a cheap fare or something. I think he knew my mother would be gone when we came back. I knew my two brothers were sick of the act, sick of motorcycles. They were … fifteen and sixteen.
“Then my father and I went to Germany. My grandmother lived in a … a place for old people. They were so short. She was so damn short. They’d taken her out of the hospital and put her back in this home, which was a brown-stone-like building in an old industrial part of the city. It smelled like
this
. She shared a room with someone, a goddamn corpse. She lay in her bed and her hair went up on one side and down on the other. Ring didn’t talk to her very much. He did talk to the director. A lot. He was making arrangements, I think. For the burial.
“One day when he was gone, she got up. Right up. She said something in German, the first thing I’d heard her say, and she slid off the bed and smiled at me. Like she knew me. She put her robe on and I helped her with her slippers and she took my hand and we went out. We walked down the street by some warehouses and every once in a while she said something to me in German. The buildings were big, no windows, and the street was dirty and empty. Her hand—she held my hand—was coated with those goddamn brown spots. We walked down the street like sisters, I guess; we were the same height. Her voice was … she was cheerful as hell. We walked around some of the buildings and her slippers were filthy. I remember it was late and I was scared, but her voice seemed easy, cheerful.”
I watched Louisa’s face. She stared unblinking, out across the desert at something I could not see. Alexander was up and talking to himself now. He was walking back and forth before the couch, like a man in a waiting room.
“Finally, we sat down against one of those white machines. An ice machine. We sat against this painting of a big blue ice block, and she showed me how to smooth her hair, the part that went up. So I stood beside her, pressing her stupid hair down with my hand. It was dirty there, and every once in a while the machine would hum and shake my grandmother and me. She talked for a while in a different voice, then she was quiet for a long while. It was almost dark when a man came for ice and found us.”
Louisa looked back at me in the kitchen. A moment later she took a bite of the toast.
“Touching, eh? My little story.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Ever been to Germany?”
“Don’t be this way. Don’t do this. It’s a good story.”
“What about Montreal … outside Montreal …?”
I slapped her, mostly missing and slapping the toast across the floor.
“Stop it!” I said. “I heard your story; I listened to the whole thing and I understand.”
“
Understand!
” she said it as if she was trying to make sense of the word, as if it were a German word. Then she left.
I wrapped up the rest of the toast and took the glass of milk, and hiked up to her room where I found her sitting on the bed.
“Here! Eat this toast. Thanks for talking to me.” I set the glass on the table. “Drink this milk. We’ll stay here long enough to get some money and then we’re gone. I don’t like it any more than you do.”
***************
I worked twice as hard the rest of the day, sweating, not thinking, creating a precedent by mopping the kitchen floor, and helping Leonard prepare the largest meatless meatloaf in Arizona, which we served with a powdered cream sauce that night for dinner. Not a vitamin or mineral in the entire thing. Our job was to pack the cart, and then Ardean came and rolled the whole mess away.
“When’s your friend going to give me a hand?” Ardean asked.
“Tomorrow, probably, she’s feeling a little better.”
“Good. We’re a little shorthanded.”
Leonard set Alexander’s steaming dishes on the sill, the way you feed a hobo or a cat, and we sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table and pushed creamed meatloaf around on our plates. From outside it might have looked like we were playing chess. We heard Alexander coming, delivering his most recent lecture on Purgatory. He had been an alcoholic Dante scholar at the University of Chicago, and his waking hours were spent addressing the desert about the fruits of compulsive love and the dreadful features of the worlds beneath us. It was hard to tell how old Alexander was; the alcohol had left a massive footprint on his face which made him appear ninety-nine, but I think he was about seventy-five.
“Gentlemen,” Alexander said, interrupting his discourse. His head only was visible through the window, and he nodded our way and disappeared with the dinner.
Later, we could hear him muttering, coming back. I caught a few words, “… Constantinople, Istanbul, it’s the same thing …” and we braced ourselves for the clatter his dishes would create as he tossed them back through the window. Leonard always gave Alexander the unbreakable plates, a small set with Davey Crockett painted on each. They made a pretty good racket rolling around the floor, and as they settled like dimes under the table, I could hear Alexander saying, “On the other hand you have the Romantics …,” as he walked back to his home on the sofa.
The next morning I was in the kitchen before Leonard, and I used the opportunity to tour the cupboards. They kept all the food in one long closet. There were bulk quantities of powdered milk, powdered eggs, powdered beans and shelves full of huge army-green canisters of powdered this and that left over from World War I. The stenciled abbreviations were hard to read, but I think there was a lot of dried corn beef and tons of powdered apricots.
Then I heard the extended guttural song of Leonard clearing his throat, an endless task really, and I jumped out just in time. He and I stirred up the pastiest powdered omelet in the tri-state region, and racked it up on Ardean’s cart. It was a great deal like serving caulking compound, and as we ladled it onto the off-white plates I asked Leonard how often they served powdered eggs.
“Every goddamned thing we cook is powdered.”
“Is it any good?”
“You wanna take a big bite?” he asked, bringing the ladle up to my face.
Ardean marched in and rolled the cart out. She was one of the most graceful large women I have ever met; she had the hips of a strong, smooth horse, but she glided everywhere in those small white shoes.
Leonard moved to his little cupboard withdrawing his little tin coffee pot, and he made his coffee in a careful ritualistic manner. When he placed it on the burner, he looked at me and asked, “You want some coffee?” It wasn’t exactly, “I accept you,” but it was close.
“Sure,” I said, “that’d be good, Leonard.” He added another careful measure of the coffee. “Don’t the residents get any coffee?”
“Nope.”
“Why is that?”
Leonard cleared his throat hard, until something gave. The process sounded like a shovel on cement.
“Why is that?” he repeated. “Why is that? Because they don’t get any. The same way I won’t get any when he puts me in. The nephew.” Here Leonard coiled his already gnarled face, and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.
“Money?”
Leonard sidled over and spat out the window.
“Jay seems like a nice enough guy,” I went on.
At this Leonard’s face went slack, a sign that he’d given up on me for now, and he poured the coffee.
Later I went up to check on Louisa. I was afraid she’d flown this coop. The glimpse we’d shared of death’s hallway had shaken me as well; she could have run.
But Ardean intercepted me on the stairway and asked me for some help. I followed her—down again into the bowels of the Blue Mesa Boarding Home, past the recreation room where the old Indian woman sang “Naw Law! Naw Law!”. The ancient black man, the Mayor, sat watching, his hands clasped as if he were at a private conference.
Some trick of gravity had pulled nine sleeping residents into a thorny wheelchair tangle just outside the broom closet Ardean used as a nurse’s station; we pulled them all apart and lined them against the wall as was the custom.
I followed Ardean down “Hallway B” (the only other corridor on the main floor) and into the glassed-in carport which was referred to as the sunroom. There were still two long obscene oil stains on the cement floor where automobiles had once spent the night. Across one of the stains lay the curled body of an old bald man. The room smelled like something left out of the fridge for ten years.
“Is he dead?”
“No. Just down. I can’t lift him,” Ardean said. “Help me get him back in his wheelchair.” She placed the rusty chair behind him, and I noticed that its wheels were not the same size; a bicycle tire on one side forced the chair over ten degrees. Ardean’s attitude, I already knew, was “do what we can with what we’ve got.”
I grabbed the old guy under the arms and lugged. He was heavy as a desk; I could barely believe it. We really just threw him against the chair, which, having only one brake, spiraled away. To keep from dropping him and creating the third stain on the floor, I leaped to get under him, and I think my back did
pop
allowing my spinal fluid to quit work and go to the beach.
Finally, I gave it everything I had, and lifted him full length in the closest hug I have ever given anyone, and his knuckles came around to pelt my kidneys. Ardean ran the chair under us both, and when I stood up again, he was in the slanted vehicle. She quickly strapped him in, using an old belt, and we both collapsed on the wicker settee in the room.
“That’s Boyd, the Boxer,” Ardean said. “He once beat Gene Fulmer.”
“I can understand that,” I said looking around.
The room was furnished in thirteenth-century wicker, off white—like everything else. There was a little ratty wicker coffee table on the cement bearing a capacity burden of thirty small pamphlet magazines:
Daily Bread, Sinner’s Hope
, and
Rewards of Prayer
, among others.
In one corner, arched also nearly out of his reclining wheelchair, was a kid a few years older than me. His head was twisted back against the far wood wall as if for air. His arms came down from his mis-buttoned sports shirt to fold strangely on the towel that covered his lap. His legs were bare and too skinny, and two black high-top basketball shoes covered his socklegs and pigeon-toed feet. I looked at him a long time while my breath returned.
“Nursing’s not what you expected?” Ardean asked me.
“What’s he doing here?”