The Regional Office for the Aging was next door. It resembled a modest finance and loan company: the carpet, the steel desks, the four secretaries, the secretaries’ hair, and secretaries’ hairspray.
“Say,” I said to the most prominent of the quartet. “I’d like to find out something about these “boarding homes.”
She looked at me as if to say “Why would a shoplifter want to know?” and she said, “Boarding homes?”
“Maybe I better ask someone who knows.”
“Boarding homes are not covered by state regulations as of yet.”
I said, “Boarding homes are not covered by state regulations as of yet.”
She said, “Except for the governmental milk and meat allowance.”
I felt very much like repeating this as well, but I am a serious youth and so I said, “Yes, and what does that mean?”
“The government pays the monthly dairy-milk allowance and the state supplements each home on a per capita basis for meat protein …”
I wanted to ask her if World War II powdered corn beef qualified, but I did not want to appear sillier and/or younger than I was.
“Is there a reason you need this information?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really. We all go in soon enough. It won’t be long you know … I just want to be ready … know what I’m getting into.”
By the time I finished my sentence, she was typing again.
When I arrived back at the van, the lone woman was sitting inside alone, all the windows still up, two hundred and ten degrees inside. She was happy as a child.
“Look what I got!” she said holding up a bag. I frantically raced around lowering the windows, sweating.
“What is it?”
“A chicken! Cliff loves chicken. I’m going to cook it for dinner.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
Her eyes quavered and rose in the lids as if she were a slot machine and what I had said had hit the jackpot; I just didn’t want anything to come out of her mouth. There was enough of that going around.
Her mouth opened. “It’s his favorite!” she said.
I found the other two women arguing over a dress. One had it in her arms, and the other picked at it saying, “I saw it first!” The saleslady stood off a little way, scared.
“It goes with my hair!” the holder of the dress said. “It will go so nicely with the red in my hair.”
Both women had white-gray hair.
“It’s not half their size,” the saleslady said to me. “I found them arguing about it.”
I tried to reason with both of them, to argue them out of it on size, color, etcetera, but they wouldn’t listen. There was one dress in the world, and they both wanted it. I wanted to say: “You two fight it out,” but they were too ready to do that already. I’d seen children fight for less at the Home at Noble Canyon. The scene was accelerating and had potential of becoming a pretty serious retail tug of war.
“We’ve got to leave, right now!” I said to no effect. “If we leave right now, we’ll get some ice cream!” This diverted them a moment. “Besides,” I added in a desperate impromptu, “that dress is not made well at all. Look at it.”
So while I intoned a soft: “Ice cream, ice cream,” the two women turned the hem of the garment, finally turning the whole thing inside out, while they gradually turned upon the saleslady for foisting unworthy goods, and, in fact, being part of the vast plot that kept this world from being as good as it once was. For a moment, I was afraid they were going to throw the dress in her face, but they settled for letting it drop to the carpet.
By the time we were in the van, they had forgotten all about it (though they still maintained separate seats), and they would have forgotten about the ice cream if I hadn’t brought it up again, having no little interest in a double chocolate-chip cone myself.
The ice cream made our day. It took them ten minutes to decide, which was enough time for me to order a second cone, and then they complained about the quality of the ice cream and the help and the cleanliness of the floor, but I could tell by their eyes, and almost—I’ll say—their complexions, that the public encounter and buying their own ice-cream cones had made them feel like normal human beings again. In the van, they were asleep before I could shut all the doors.
Back at the Blue Mesa Dinge Mansion, I found Alexander dying. As I pulled the van around the back, Alexander, standing away from his couch, staggered before the vehicle, trying to clutch his throat and missing, crossing his hands on his breastbone when he went down.
I braked to a sizzle in the gravel drive, sending my three passengers into a trio lurch, and I jumped from the van. I caught Alexander on his first bounce.
His face was moving rapidly into the final gray curl. I could tell he was going to speak.
“Alexander?” I said. “Hey, Alex!”
“He bent over to tie his shoe!” An old woman ran-walked-shuffled to our side. “His shoe! And then he stood up and began … ooooohh! … falling!”
“Alex!” I said into the twisting face.
“I looked up,” he tried. “I looked up and saw—” his face squinted in a spasm of release. “The house fell on me.” He lifted his finger toward the mansion, but the hand went limp and something in his body quietly gave way.
The woman beside me stood up and walked into the Blue Mesa Boarding Home. I knelt in the lizard grass, holding Alexander on the outdoor sofa. I lifted him up in my arms, his head falling away like a skull on a string. Still, I held him. Then I was aware Jay was crossing the back lawn.
“Put it down!” he said. “Put it down until I can get the coroner.” Jay came up to me, leery.
“What?”
“Put it down right where you found it. The coroner will want to see it that way.” Jay was careful not to touch me.
I placed Alexander’s body back on the road. Rather than talk to Jay, I walked around and turned off the van.
The coroner came and pronounced Alexander dead and bagged the body as if Alexander were a casualty of war, which it seemed to me he was, and the coroner drove away with Alexander’s remains. I stayed out for the whole process. He pronounced Alexander dead. That got me: it takes the living to pronounce the dead dead. He had died in my arms. I hardly knew Alexander. He was a curiosity out my kitchen window, sleeping on a sofa in a sagebrush, occasionally reading magazines. And now he was pronounced dead.
I looked at the mansion: everyone’s aorta barnacled, lesioned, and bent to the limit, only holding until each leaned the wrong way. Hoses and valves, and the old dark chambers of that red muscle, the heart.
*************
Dinner that night was creamed tuna. Most of the tuna for this particular dish had been taken bodily from the ocean before the development of modern navigation. It smelled very much like the ghost of Christmas past, and it left the ladle only reluctantly after the third hearty bang of Leonard’s spoon.
Just after Ardean rolled the cart away, the woman who had purchased the chicken entered the kitchen, midscream in a debate with Jay. Offering no help, I watched him try to persuade the woman not to cook the chicken.
“It is absolutely against all our policies,” Jay said. You’ll have to take my word that he uttered such a statement, because, even I, in remembering it, feel it again as one of the top ten silly lies. What’s our
Chicken Policy?
“But I promised Cliff a chicken, and it
is
his favorite!” She was nearly crying … “I promised him
tonight!
”
“You can’t do it, Mrs. Berenson. If I let you cook a chicken then everybody will want to cook a chicken.”
I was afraid that the old lady was going to swallow that turd, but she kept on: “It’s Cliff’s favorite!” The tears in her eyes were the first frantic tears, pre-hysteria tears. Leonard and I stood by like the extras we were in this little drama.
“Mrs. Berenson!” Jay announced. “Mrs. Berenson, you cannot cook the chicken. Clifford is dead; he’s been dead for years.” Even I looked up again at this news and saw Mrs. Berenson’s face change—the way a person falls from a ladder, if it is a very tall, very old ladder. She shrank and her head crawled down onto her chest. She was about to retreat or disappear when Leonard said, “Let her cook the goddamned chicken, you cheap sonofabitch.”
Jay spun on Leonard, stunned. But Leonard, my partner, simply added, “It’s Cliff’s favorite, for chrissakes.”
Jay vanished. I remember a tight streak running across his forehead, and his nostrils flaring as if he were an angry horse. His disappearance brought air back into the room and left the three of us in the kitchen holding a chicken aloft as if it were an Academy Award we had just won, and we wondered who to thank.
After Mrs. Clifford Berenson had baked her prize chicken, creating at least one new aroma, she sat quietly and ate her fill: half a leg. Louisa stood by me in the doorway, and we watched Mrs. Berenson like tourists at the sacrament. Leonard had set the table for two. Finally, Mrs. Clifford Berenson yawned and smiled. As Leonard helped her from the table, she looked at him, suddenly, alarmed.
“What are you doing?” she scolded, and crept from the kitchen, lost and indignant. I wondered if she remembered where she was.
Leonard shrugged and cleaned up after her like a waiter, and then I watched him prepare a chicken sandwich and set it on the window sill.
Later, after we’d washed the creamed-tuna dishes, an activity very similar to reverse masonwork, and Louisa had finished her rounds, I gave Leonard his prize: the coffee cup. Louisa said, “Oh, Lenny!” in a genuine way, and the old presence himself did not say anything. He just turned the cup around and around in his hands, checking out the pheasants, counting all the pheasant feathers. Finally he stood and cleared the wet gravel in his throat and lobbed a mighty spit out the window.
By the porch light we could barely see Alexander’s sofa. It looked like the last set for the movie
Furniture from Outer Space
. Without Alexander, the couch in the bush was ridiculous, embarrassing—a piece of waste.
“I’ll leave this out here a while longer,” Leonard said, pointing at the sandwich on the sill. “You never know.”
I kept Louisa’s flower-comb in my pocket until the house anchored in the night and creaked toward settling. Louisa jumped off the porch and cried, “Shoot the nurses!”
“You’ve found your calling.”
“Quite a goddamned day, right?” she said as we passed Brent’s and Eleanor’s house. “In the bin.” She was trotting right along, glad to be in the air.
I was hyper with fatigue, run through with tight wires, confused, almost happy. I enjoyed having a present in my pocket. Louisa ran ahead of me, in and out of sight, talking to things.
By the time I reached the summit over the dump, she was already sitting in her chair, breathing hard and muttering. “God, I hate exercise,” she said. “But what can you do?” She combed her hair back with ten fingers and held it above her neck. I could see the shine of sweat on the delicate furrow of hair that ran into her scalp.
“Mrs. Berenson,” she said just as words. “She’s something.”
“Yeah.”
“She was married.”
“Yeah.”
“I think she must have been pretty once. Can you imagine it?”
“Everybody was pretty once,” I said.
“Oh, here we go.
Everybody was pretty once
. Was I?”
“You are pretty,” I said.
I loved having her off guard, out of character. I loved her, I guess, right then, and the day before, and the day I thought she had left me, and it all had little to do with the vision of her on a motorcycle wire or the vision of her white breasts; but just the same, I wanted her: desire is something you understand before you know the words.
In the second instinctual act of my life, I kissed her. I had to place my hand on her shoulder to keep from falling into the trash heap below us, and I kissed her. Again, it was an advanced kiss, one of those kisses which makes you think it might have been intended for someone else or rehearsed many times, but I stayed with it and did what I could.
It was right there, in that inspired state, of course, where I made my mistake. The hair-comb glowed in my pocket, and sitting up, I withdrew it and held it in front of her face.
“Look, I brought you this from town.”
She turned it in her fingers. She felt it carefully in the dark and then held it to her face, looking closely in slight starlight reflected off the garbage. She did not say anything. I watched her face, and I know she was touched.
I saw it
.
“Gets me a present, does he?” she said. And she slipped it into her hair which I had memorized, and she leaned and kissed me quick in a gesture which gave her back the lead in this scene.
“Well?”
“It’s nice,” I said.
She stood up. “Gets me a present.” She smiled. “You
are
trying to get into my pants, you horny bastard!”
Boy tears ears from head at abandoned landfill. World ends locally. Girl’s attitude slays dozens in interstate spree
.
When everything settled, I slumped in my old chair and just felt old. I could have risen and thrown stones until the feeling passed, but that activity, this time, would not do. There were not enough stones in Kingman, Arizona. Finally, I walked directly down the path, a stone in my stomach, my mouth stone-set.
“Hey!” she called. “Hey! Come on. You’re okay.”
I turned. “Don’t you tell me that I’m okay. Don’t you tell me anything now or later.”
She ran down to me and grabbed my arm.
“Don’t do that,” I told her.
“Come on. Don’t be a simple shit. I’m sorry.”
I went on walking. She came and got my arm again.
“Collin, I’m sorry. Come on.” She put her arms around my body and her face went to my neck, kissing me there. In a moment, I felt her hips rise on my legs, a growing pressure, as her face rose along my face. I had not moved.
“Come on, Collin. This is the shits. I’m lonely too.”
I pushed her away.
“I’m not lonely,” I told her. “It is not loneliness, you bitch. Leave me alone.” Even as I spoke I doubted my words, I hated myself: I could have let it go, pressed my hand inside the back of her levis. And I hated her for being right about me. I could feel where her mouth had been on my neck; it was wet and burned like acid.