Wheel into the lavatory and park before the tub and disrobe and haul that flabby ass into the swing set. Hold tight to the handlebars and double-check the legs are unimpeded. Everything looks to be clear, so push the rig away and punch a button on the machine’s remote. An earnest mechanical hum and now he’s being air-lifted in for a bath. The gadget is supposed to make the morning routine easier on Cecil’s shoulders and he supposes it does. Mounted into the wall studs beside the toilet, the thing acts like one of those Chair-O-Plane rides you see at the state fair, swinging him up and over the lip of the bathtub before lowering him slowly down into it for washing.
He’s thinking about that summer Dad had them build a fence around a five-acre plot he’d bought for growing soy and mung beans on. Cecil and Ben digging postholes and sinking stumps and stringing barbwire through the brain-boiling heat. Like to have lasted forever though it was probably only a couple-three weeks. But they did finally finish and when Ben runs to fetch him Dad moseys out and stands frowning down one measly corner of their new fence line.
“You’ll want to do it over,” he says, shaking that head under his hat. “And this time, make it straight.” Then turns on his boot heel and strolls back up to the house without another word.
It was one of Papa Porter’s more ruthless life lessons and it taught Cecil two things. One was to work, but to do it smart. The other was to fix your mistakes straightaway.
Cecil lathers up, feeling every part of his skin for bumps or scratches.
He didn’t know how to right this particular fuckup with Aura, but Cecil could still work. He got back to cracking on his stained glasses, comforted by the kaleidoscopic lilt of light across the workshop curtain, whistling through the finishing touches on that Sitting Bull pattern in under a day. Next morning though, when time came to decide his next design, Cecil drew a blank and it was the indecision that did him in. He started drinking too much. But he’d had no prior experience with true blue debauchery and there followed a spell where he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. A train would whistle him awake and the booze would keep him that way and he’d lay there in the sheets, tangled up in funk, waiting for her to arrive. Then the train harps again, a bent bluesy warble, and he remembers what he’s done and spends the rest of that night and next day trifling about house, trying to forget.
He tried phoning the service but Aura wouldn’t take his calls, and that’s when he understood she wasn’t coming back. Not today not tomorrow not ever. They sent a limp-wrist nurse in her stead but Cecil doesn’t trust him yet. The kid’s name is Ronald and he has a plump saggy face resembling a bulldog’s and can’t be very proficient at being a queer.
The inebriate lifestyle requires a powerful strong bladder and Cecil doesn’t have it. He doesn’t much cotton to the smell of his own piss whenever the catheter spills over, either, so partway into his three-day drunk Cecil decides to give Sputnik here a test drive. Clean as he’ll be, Cecil presses a different button on the remote control and the robot cranes him up from the bathtub. But his ride is only partially over when the machine starts squealing, a syncopated riff of chuck-chuck-uh-skrikk-uh-skreeeeing! There follows a polite poof of white smoke from the machine’s motor, then the lift gives out lifting altogether and now he’s stuck.
He’s perched a good three feet above ground. The rig is too far away to reach, and it’s not safe to try and lower down from on high. Not in this state. That new nurse should be here soon and so Cecil just waits there in the swing set, pitiful as a pluck-bird. Somehow he achieved sixty-three years, more than half of it living alone. He grew two more inches after the accident, in his rig. Yet now a day can’t go by without he needs someone’s assistance. He tries not to see his reflection in the vanity but it’s an unavoidable spectacle: nothing reflected in the mirror but the shriveled twist of his cock and the battle-scarred dangle of his legs. Look like empty britches strung drying from a clothesline.
Stark ball naked and toilet-ridden yet again, he hangs around patiently waiting for Ronald the roly-poly homosexual to come set him free.