“You lying peckerhead; you didn’t even see it! You never seen it at all! You don’t even know what it looks like.”
“They’re proud of their roommate though,” Louisa told me.
And they were. Billingsly never spoke. He’d turn his head wherever he was and spit, and that was it. He walked erect, dressed nicely in Cotton’s shoes and Dick’s socks, could get out of bed by himself, but never spoke.
“He’s damn near a hundred and look at the bastard!” Cotton said one day.
“He can even go to the john; gets up in the middle of the goddamned night and everything!” Dick added, his jaw working like a puppet’s, the block of his creased chin going up and down.
Billingsly had been a piano player or a drummer in one of the big bands, but now he was deaf. He roamed the hallway of Blue Mesa, spitting. He was 96 years old.
“If you stay and talk to Dick and Cotton, they calm down,” Louisa said as we sat out one night. “They scream for a while, then they calm down and talk. It’s like their minds have to warm up. They’re both smart men. Cotton knows a lot about baseball. He and the Mayor bet on the games.”
“I know they’re intelligent by the way they throw their food on the floor,” I said. “It makes me want to take them all out for a burger.”
*************
That same night, Louisa and Ardean delivered treats. They took around a basket of peanut brittle which was a house favorite. It was served with warm washcloths so the toothless and infirm could work and soften it into palatable form. I sat in the recreation room watching an old movie about clairvoyance, alien visitors, and decapitation;
The Crawling Eye
. During the commercials, I wrote postcards to Steele and Rawlings.
Dear Raymond: Congratulations upon your impending graduation from the Noble Canyon Penitentiary and best wishes with your goals of the future etcetera. I am in California, learning to surf with my father. Many of the well-fed blond girls on the beach ask about you. Yours for a song, Collin Elder.
Dear Mike Rawlins (He would appreciate his full name): How are the Eye-Spy Rangers? Any new traffic signals? Good luck with everything when you leave the Home. Honest. California is a sunny place, bordered by an ocean. Keep your eyes open (and your dukes up). Later, Collin.
In
The Crawling Eye
, they found someone’s head in a knapsack; it’s the small details that make a film fine. Around me in the rec room, elderly citizens mouthed the melting peanut brittle. The Mayor, in his wheelchair, rolled up to me and asked if I wouldn’t mind turning the set off because there was going to be a short meeting. I obliged, figuring it was a good idea to keep the endings of the great cinema classics secret, so as not to spoil a future screening.
There were only about fifteen residents present, their wheelchairs cockeyed and mis-aimed, when the Mayor opened the meeting. He stood behind his chair for the occasion, a dark shadow barely visible, and when he commenced speaking in his sweet old pinched voice, several members of the audience had difficulty determining who was addressing them.
“It has come to the attention of the resident council that the Phantom continues to be a problem. Ardean has asked us to help. We just can’t have someone going to the bathroom any place he or she chooses.”
“It’s not me!” one old boxer yelled. “Ask Ardean!”
“We think we should all go to the bathroom in the bathroom. It makes it a nicer place to live.”
“Hear! Hear!”
“What about new magazines?” a woman asked. “What happened to getting new magazines?”
And the meeting spun away into ten monologues, some simultaneous, about issues, new and old, and even a few in support of the Phantom’s vile cavalcade.
The meeting was actually the best affair I’d ever witnessed in a recreation room. The main forms of recreation at Noble Canyon had been delivering insults to acquaintances and extinguishing cigarettes in the furniture. You show me a place where they’ve built a room especially for “recreation” and I’ll show you an empty, restive place full of vandals.
Time will never explain to me why the recreation room at the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls was never used for parental visits. Of all the crimes that room served scene for, the parental visits were the worst.
Few kids had parents who would visit at all. Steele’s mother had come only once. She sat in one of the wrecked chairs and explained to him that Steele’s father would not allow her to come, that he didn’t know she was here now, that—generally speaking—she wished Steele all the luck.
I had watched them: Steele lounged in his chair, smoking cigarettes, staring at his mother; his mother not looking his way at all, rigid in her edge-chair posture which made her seem even more alien. They did not appear to have anything in common. When she left, he didn’t move, just lit another cigarette from his last butt. I went over.
“What the hell,” he said. “What can a mother do? Keep a clean handkerchief in your pocket?”
From then on Steele became a kind of rancorous cheerleader during the other parent visits. Lots of kids would stop up Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when the visiting hours began, just to hang around. And, though they were for the most part humiliating festivities, they were all we had, and I found even myself vaguely hoping I might have an adult relative come to talk it over. Steele would lean against our ravaged, three-legged Ping-Pong table, his arms folded, his eyes lost in the ironic menace he used as a stare. Across the room, some poor and lucky kid would hunch across from his two hunching parents. They’d whisper and shrug in the perfect trio of guilt.
Some visiting afternoons no one would come, and Steele would do a routine: “Well, ah, Johnny, we’d a come sooner, but you know how it is … Ha Ha Ha. I mean with the family fortune and buying South America, we’ve been awfully busy. Busy, busy. Say, now son, why can’t you be good. We’d bring you home if you’d promise not to murder the rest of your cousins. No? Well, be good then.” And … Steele would wave his eyebrows and his cigarette here: “If you can’t be good, be careful!”
There’d be laughter, but there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t rather have been
home
.
And I was developing a deep suspicion about
visits. Pay a visit
. The word stinks.
Pay
a visit. How much were they? Too much. Little temporary crises. In a minor cinematic epiphany, I remembered the alien visitor, the Crawling Eye. Visits, it taught me, ended with people losing their heads, if not more, and the army called in.
At Blue Mesa, the Mayor’s meeting was called by sleep the same way ball games are called by rain. When I looked up again, I saw Will talking quietly with the Mayor and two other nonagenarians; they were the only four still awake in the world.
“We’ll just have to help Ardean more, if nobody is willing to turn in the Phantom,” Will was saying.
“Majority rules,” the Mayor said. “The people have had their say.”
**************
Jay asked me to drive the van. He was spread out over his desk in his office on the second floor, reading his fan mail and drooling on the government checks, when he called me in. “Could you handle the shopping trip this week?” he asked.
“Where to?”
“Gilman’s. Take the walkers over to Gilman’s, the little mall, and let them grope around for an hour or so this afternoon. You don’t have to stay with them. Just cart them back out here by four.” He tossed me the keys.
Behind him, there was an antelope head mounted on the paneled wall. This had probably been the miner’s den. He had a window cooler in the wall, and at first I wondered what I smelled until I realized it was nothing. The room did
not
smell.
“How long you and the girl going to stay?” he asked.
“Couple more days, I guess. We’ll need about a week’s pay each.”
“Well, you’ve been a help.”
Since he was being cordial, I was moved to ask: “How come we don’t have any coffee for the residents? I mean, some have asked.”
“Ho!” he began in a familiar poor-boy braggadocio. “This isn’t the Hilton.” It didn’t seem like an answer to me, but he went back to his mail.
When I was at the door, he added: “What do we want with coffee anyway? It would just wake a few of the oldsters up!” He laughed and slit another envelope ear to ear with the nude-woman Plexiglass stiletto in his hand.
Oldsters. Sters
. Those words. Youngsters, mobsters, lobsters. Oldsters.
Down the hall there was more hubbub in Cotton’s room and I could hear the full rasp of Dick’s voice. When I entered, Dick was hollering: “B.M. B.M.!”
“Hey Dick, what’s the matter?”
“B.M.! B.M.! Cotton shit his pants. The sonofabitch can’t even hold it. He’s shit all over the goddamn bed like a baby! B.M.! Nurses! Nurse! B.M.! I can’t stand it!”
The day before it had been Dick who had soiled his bed.
Cotton was crying, “Shoot the nurses! Shoot the nurses! Shoot every goddamn one of ’em!”
“Easy, Cotton, I’ll get Louisa.”
She was right behind me.
“Want to shoot me, eh Cotton?” She took a hold of his good hand. “Want to shoot me?”
“He shit his pants, nurse. Just like a baby.”
“We all do, don’t we, Dick?” she said. “You better be nice to your roommate.”
Billingsly, oblivious to the problem, turned and spat on my trousers.
Dick started to laugh. “Spits every goddamn place, that one. Walks and spits. Nearly one hundred years old. Wears
my
socks!”
Louisa had Cotton under control, so I told Dick I’d get the papers and read him the sports.
“Hotdamn, Cotton! He’s going to read us the sports!”
“Oh, boy!” Cotton yelled. “Oh, boy!”
When I returned with the
Miner
, Dick said to me, “Cotton surely loves the sports; he surely loves you to read to us.” It was a true thing he said, a kind thing about his friend.
I read them an article about a basketball star’s legal problems in changing teams for millions of dollars. Cotton was extremely alert. He knew which teams were in California and their names. He remembered seeing Billy Martin play for the Phoenix Senators one night in Miami, Arizona: “He lost his shoe trying for third!” Dick would get confused and mad every other day as I explained that Brooklyn and Milwaukee no longer had teams.
“Well, goddamn it! Why not?” he’d yell. “Why the hell not!”
Louisa was just good. I do not know exactly when the every-man-for-himself era drew to a close, but I suspect it may have been at that moment in Cotton’s room, as I watched her care for the stricken. It was a strange thing to think “We are now together,” but it was true. Around us, the lame, the halt, and the blind, senior citizens nearing graduation, led what lives they could and I knew I had given something to this girl in a borrowed dress thirty sizes too large. Something that validated all the bickering and risks to come.
After lunch—a broth gravy over mashed potatoes aplenty (all from powder)—I left Leonard with the dishes and climbed in the van. The ambulatory of Blue Mesa, three women, were already inside, each sitting on a different seat, not talking.
“Hello, Ladies, are we ready to go shopping?” I said in a voice meant to garner any available good will.
No one answered.
I motored the van carefully the two miles to Kingman and parked in a space marked “Handicapped” in front of the “Gilman Mall, Prescriptions Filled” sign. One woman came out of the van and teetered toward the door. She walked sideways as if bucking a serious head wind. The other two were asleep and each had to be helped out of the van and reminded where she was.
I watched them go; it was an interminable process. And, then, since I had nothing better to do, I followed them. Actually, I was worried that they might fall asleep in a shoe store or something and never be found again.
Sleep was their everpresent enemy, I was learning; it came calling frequently, at random, without even knocking. Old people, I thought, following the two old women in their print dresses: old people.
Old
. What a sad word it is, what a black rancid fearful cold word, full of the many arbitrary storms of senility: sleep arriving like a stroke, the pants wet in a moment, and the visiting tremors, Acts of God. I walked through the air-conditioned mall behind two women who were born in the last century, now caught in that quicksand of the mortal, morbid word:
Old
.
I looked at the other citizens out on shopping adventures; I checked the window displays. They sure weren’t advertising Old in any way. You can’t sell that. It all made me want to hurry that much more; to get our money from Jay at the end of our two weeks and fly to my father. And wanting to fly to my father just confused me in a digestive, stomachaching way.
I stopped in a little gift shop and bought Leonard a coffee cup with two pheasants on it in full feather. I purchased a small comb to go in Louisa’s hair. It had a silk violet attached. Here I was buying presents with nearly my last money; it made sense.
Outside the gift shop was the monolithic concrete store directory, so I killed time reading the entire thing. It was of some interest that upstairs was a Regional Office for the Aging. Because I was helplessly among the first ranks of the aging, and for other reasons, I decided to go up there. I wanted to ask one question about the legality of harboring the elderly in used carports.
I found the escalator in time to rescue a two-year-old girl in farmer overalls from imminent shredding. The grid had her cuff and was trying to grind her into thirty equal rashers, when I grabbed her arm. Typically, my timing was perfect. Just as I laid what I considered to be a saving hand on the tot, she screamed, turned red, writhed, jerked, and bit. Her mother, a woman about seventeen years old, then skipped back and rescued me, not failing to address a murderous glance my way.
Though I did recover and holler after her: “Glad to be of some help!” the lesson was not lost. Most of the things I try to fix do not turn to gold; most of my remedies escape from the lab overnight and chase villagers through the streets.