“Motorcycle accident.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Jimmy’s in a coma.”
I looked at the kid, his black hair all greasy and sticking around. There was still some ruddiness in his cheeks, but his arms and feet crossed that way reminded me of everybody else at Blue Mesa; they were all folding up. It was a posture of embarrassment, cover.
So that’s what we do: fold up
. I stretched my arms and sat up straight.
Ardean got up and smoothed the boy’s hair saying, “How do you feel, Jimmy? Better? Are you about ready for lunch?”
I then realized the soft rattling of bad plumbing I had been hearing since we’d been in the sunroom was coming from the boy’s long throat. I cleared my own.
The Boxer, Boyd, nodded, his head shuddering up from his shoulder. He looked at us, scared but lucid, with a glance I’d seen Steele give me on mornings after some debauch:
what did I do last night?
How would you like to wake up every fourth day and wonder what you’d been up to? Especially if you were an ex-boxer?
“Howdy,” Ardean said. “How are you, Boyd?”
“Goodgood,” he said, rotating his chin experimentally. “I’m good.” He was utterly embarrassed. “What, was I on the floor?”
“No problem.”
We got up to leave.
“Say, Ardean, I think the Phantom’s been in here.”
“I know, Boyd, I can smell it. But I can’t clean it up now. Why don’t you come out in the hall for lunch?”
She pushed the lopsided wheelchair out of the room and almost into the retangled wheelchairs in the hall. When we’d reparked everyone, I asked her: “Phantom?”
“We’ve got a shitter.” She saw my frown. “It’s not bad. It’s not the worst thing we’ve got.”
“But shouldn’t the sunroom be cleaned up?” I asked her. “I mean, aren’t there laws or rules or something? That oil on the floor. The unfinished walls.”
“Ask Jay,” she said. A man chugged past us carrying his walker, his pants around his ankles. “Amos,” she said as I left, “Amos, wait a minute.”
*************
That night, Louisa was feeling better and we went for a walk. In fact, we walked almost every night after that. The Blue Mesa Boarding Home era appears, when I consider those evenings, to be an extended battle of the sexes; and Louisa argued in such a way that I was sometimes uncertain which side I was on.
Louisa had to make last rounds with water and thermometers about nine, and she’d pick me up in the kitchen, where I usually played the World Series of Staring Contests with Leonard, waiting for him to finish his latest sentence. He was a peculiar guy; at first I thought:
watchout, he’s bizarre;
but slowly he spilled his peculiar beans, and as I learned about his loneliness and fear of old age, he seemed more and more simply an ancient version of myself.
And his fear of age was massive. He was sixty-six years of age, he said, and it wouldn’t be long. He said the “be long …” in a kind of chant.
“Listen, buddy,” he’d say, “listen …” Then he’d frown and wave his arms in front of his face as if he could erase the words. I’d have to coax him for ten minutes before he’d go on. “Well, listen, what’s the point, my working here? What is it? I work here until I’m too old to cut the mustard then the nephew puts me in the home so’s I can pass away. What’s the goddamned point?” Then he’d break and change voices inadvertently, coming down from the anger to a real fear: “I don’t want to pass away, buddy boy. I don’t want to pass anywhere. Goddammit!” And then while I’d watch, he’d act as if he just woke up and the words he’d yelled were part of someone else’s dream, and he’d wave those skinny white arms and shake his head, spitting out the window to seal the deal.
Louisa had taken to calling him Lenny. She’d come in and say, “Hiya Lenny!” and we’d all smile, but he would only nod at her, shy-like and retreat to his room behind the kitchen. No shirt, just an apron on, smeared with the day’s casualties. Leonard would go to his room.
Louisa and I walked every night. I’d dry my hands and drain the sink, wiping it clean, and we’d blast off the old porch onto the gravel road that tenuously linked this death house with the throttling minor metropolis of Kingman, Arizona.
“Fucking loony bin!” Louisa would say. “Let’s get out!”
It was important to get away, especially at night, as the random haunting cries flew out of the rooms. Every nightfall they’d start, like children afraid to go to bed, but the complaints would become prophesies and the prophesies would crumble into moaning.
“I can see the cars on the roof!” I remember hearing a voice call one night. “I can see you coming!”
And, if we stayed in the house, we became eavesdroppers on a dozen very private conversations between the residents and the dead. Mumbling imprecations and promises, questions and answers, they talked their crooked way to sleep.
“If you come here again, I’ll kill you.”
“Mother! Mother! Bring more string. And water!
Mother!
”
“The moon! The moon!”
“Lola! Lola! Lolalola!”
I was surprised that the residents became, in their ultra age, full-time swearers, rivaling Louisa.
One night I heard a voice, and thinking an old man needed a nurse, I went into his room. He was talking to his wrist.
“Oh, shit!” he said, startled. He squirmed to the wall. “I, oh, I talk to myself,” he said. “But, it’s no problem.” His face, bones and shadow, turned to me: “Because I never answer!”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry. I thought …”
“Oh, I don’t.” He went back to the wall. “It’s too late to worry.”
So it was important for Louisa and me to get away. Down the road a couple of hundred yards, two inmates had set up their own household. Walking, we’d pass this tin shack, Brent and Eleanor’s dreamhouse; sometimes a candle glowed in there. They weren’t married, just living together on their homestead. Their children wouldn’t allow them to marry. Ardean had told us that they had met in Blue Mesa after their spouses had died, and that their courtship had stirred up the home for a while. The Mayor had conducted a quasi-legal “marriage” ceremony before they’d moved out. One side of their new residence was a Foster’s Cupcake sign.
We’d walk past their home, under the strange ranch gate Jay had erected with “B.M.B.H.” burned into a pine board. I guess he thought it would make everything seem more like a dude ranch and a lot of fun.
Down the road half a mile a Jeep trail went off, and we’d walk up it to a private dump, the final resting place of some lazy entrepreneur’s trash. On the edge of this small valley of rubbish, we found three broken kitchen chairs and I twisted them into two that would serve an evening’s discussion. So we’d sit listening to the ambitious creatures crawling in the garbage, recycling bits and pieces in their own way. One night we even saw a coyote.
We’d sit and Louisa would count the imaginary money we were making.
“If that horny bastard deducts for meals, I’ll kill him!” was one of her budgetary credos. Another: “I figure we’ve got four (three, two) days to go and we’re out of here!”
Out of here
. My father saying
So this is Louisa
, as he places two turkey sandwiches in the microwave oven.
The first time we went up to the dump, I was taken with the vista, the night. The small light in Brent’s and Eleanor’s house, and the yellow checks of the window in the Blue Mesa Boarding Home glowed like homefires. You couldn’t hear the crying, the “Lola! Lola!” You couldn’t feel the ghosts or smell the Phantom. The structures showed light and they looked like homes.
“Why’d you bring me up here?” Louisa mocked.
“You want to stay inside?”
“You trying to get in my pants?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You trying what Jay’s trying?”
About here in the conversation I’d walk over to the edge of the pit and commence throwing stones. I have a great arm, and when I throw stones at night, many of them don’t come down. I threw some all the way across the Blue Mesa. After a while, she’d finish with me and begin bitching about the nursing, and the food, and then she’d ask me for a cigarette, calling me a simple shit, and we’d walk back.
Jay was an enigma. I did not trust him. I just hoped he would pay us when we were ready to leave. He wasn’t around very much. He came by to check the mail or holler at Leonard or play checkers with one of the residents, if his date had fallen through. I watched him at the checkers; he played to win. I don’t know the full magnitude of cruelty, but have you ever seen the look on a ninety-year-old woman as she’s being triple jumped?
Despite that, he was popular in a way with the residents. They all knew
Jay
, and seemed to like him. I was trying to figure out if they had a choice. He knew their families and their family names and the key words lodged last in the minds of the senile, and he used those names and words and was smiled at
a lot
. If something unpleasant came up, he’d hand it to the Mayor and the “residents committee.”
Ardean strictly would not talk about him.
I had watched him with Louisa, and as he talked to her, he always had a hand on her elbow. He’d kid her about the large dress and feel for where it ended (like a man reaching in a bag for an apple).
She dismissed him as being just another “horny guy,” but he had a squint that crossed his face during discussions which indicated, I came to know, that his greed had taken a new edge; it was the closed face of the super avaricious. And I’ve never trusted those guys who are constantly stroking their lips with a tube of chapstick or something the way Jay did; it seemed the act of an unreasonably hungry person.
Sometimes, when we’d stroll back from our evenings abroad, Louisa and I would see Jay through the kitchen window ransacking the fridge for the good food, entertaining a late date with a snack. His dates were always about sixteen, which bothered me, but not as much as the wayward look in their wayward eyes.
But most often, we’d pass sleeping Alexander on his sofa, and through the kitchen window Leonard and old white-haired Will would be playing cards and drinking coffee. It was nice that someone was still awake, the lights on, and I pretended always that they were staying up for us. After a while, we were not even surprised to return and find the Phantom had struck in Hallway A or in Hallway B.
*************
I came to know big Will better than any of the other residents. I told him, bit by bit, my history and what Louisa and I were up to. I related only a few small lies about the future and my father. Will and I and Leonard spent many nights talking in the kitchen, as I washed the final dishes, waiting for Louisa. Sometimes Will accompanied me when I read the papers to the bedridden (note that word), and we’d discuss the events of the day: whether baseball players should make that much money; whether today’s criminals displayed any ingenuity; whether there was a difference between “criminal” and “wrongdoer,” a word the papers were fond of. Will told me a dozen hunting epics, all tall tales, which featured him capturing blind deer by the tail and finding fish in sunken cars, smiling at him through the rolled-up windows.
As much as some of the residents who were ridden by beds liked to see me coming with the
Kingman Miner
open to the sports’ section, they liked Will more as he rolled into their rooms with his erroneous sagas of heroism. And he liked people; he drew them out of themselves. Between him and Ardean, the Blue Mesa Boarding Home was almost whole.
Will had been in the swimming-pool business in Salt Lake City, Utah. He explained the simple plumbing of pools to me in a way that made me feel I could do it. His son Robbie now operated the business out of Las Vegas, and Will recommended that I visit him sometime. I told Will it wasn’t in my itinerary right away, now knowing, like everything else I had an opinion on, I was wrong.
Louisa grew to like her work once she got her hands dirty. This is a lot to say. She hovered in nausea for two days servicing the old old people in her new care. Ardean showed her how to change a stroke victim’s pajamas and linen without moving him out of bed, and I think they both saw much of their nursing in the light of the word
nursery
, which was closest to the truth in many cases.
There were two guys in the home who were just like babies. I mean in every way. Louisa talked about them a lot. They had no hair, no teeth. They couldn’t talk. They slept. They weighed a ton. I’d already learned from the several times I’d helped Ardean lift people, that the expression “a bag of bones” really means “a very heavy bag full of very heavy bones.” Ardean told me that one of those bald guys had been a world-famous designer of women’s clothing. When I lifted him so Louisa could change the bed, I thought: there must have been days when he was the reason for New York City; days when this person in my arms was at the very center.
Lifting residents off the floor didn’t hurt my back as much as touching them intimately hurt my whole system. After lifting someone back into bed, I’d go sit in the kitchen and swear I could feel my bones getting older. Oh, it was a fragile time.
The stroke victims were the worst; they were young and old at the same time. Our two favorites were Dick and Cotton, two ornery men from Arkansas who shared a room with Billingsly, the spitting musician. They were both in their late fifties, but neither could get out of bed. Their mouths went down a little on the left side and each had an arm curling back up into a fetal gnarl. Everytime I went in their room they were fighting—huge, voluminous arguments—further complicated by the way they forgot each other’s names. They’d curse and curse and then stammer for a name to attach it all to, but nothing would come, so they’d start in again. The arguments were about nothing, about the fact that they were ornery, which is a folksy way (their way) of saying
bitter
. Bitter about being locked up in closing bodies, and being, in that sense, cellmates. Their greatest joy was seeing the turtle which appeared on an annual basis outside their window.
It was an infrequent occurrence (I never saw it during our time there), but they talked about it as if it happened every day. “And goddamned Cotton scared the little sonofabitch away!”