CHAPTER TWELVE
The second week of December, Sara found me lying on the sofa, immobile as an Iguana at high noon, the tears in my eyes less from pain (I’d found an old codeine tablet and popped it) than from the feeling that something had happened, something important. It was there, like a word on the tip of my tongue, playing hide and seek across my cerebral cortex.
“What’s wrong, Alley?” Sara said, setting her history education textbooks on the old maple dining table the Tompsons had donated to our housekeeping. The table tilted on its shorter leg.
“I don’t know. Something has happened.”
She sat on the edge of the sofa.
“Be careful of my hip,” I said. “It hurts.”
Sara frowned, worried. “Do you want me to call the …?”
“Grandfather,” I said. The word slipped out of my mouth and hovered briefly in the air.
“What about him?”
“Damn it. I should’ve known,” I said, pushing her out of the way gently. “Where’s my address book?”
“What?” Sara said. “What is it?”
I limped over to the roll-top desk we shared and began pawing through the cubbyholes, looking for my book with telephone numbers in it.
“He’s dying,” I said. The pain in my hip vanished as quickly as it had come. “I know it.”
She didn’t ask how I knew it, as I thumbed through the book, looking for the number at the Ayawamat Trading Post.
“Oh, Alley,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, picking up the telephone, waiting for the dial tone. There wasn’t one. I pressed the buttons on the receiver’s cradle and let them up again. “It’s time,” I said.
“Hello?” It was Rachel.
“Rachel? Huh. I was just calling you. I must have picked up the receiver before the phone had a chance to ring.”
“Bert,” Rachel said. “I have some bad news.”
“Where is he?”
“You know, then?” Rachel asked. Her voice had relief in it, the relief of someone who’s been steeling herself for an unpleasant task only to have the task supererogated.
“Yes. Where is he?”
“In Our Lady of St. Julian Hospital. In Phoenix. Sanchez took Laura P. down there, today.”
“Good. So, what happened?”
As Rachel told me, I began to shake my head in suspended disbelief. Sara put her arms around my shoulders.
“Are you laughing or crying?” Sara asked, trying to decipher my face, after I hung up.
“The stubborn son of a bitch,” I said. “He broke his hip.”
“How?”
“Only he could be that stubborn. Willful. He rode the Killer Bike over the curb in front of the trading post. Instead of riding around to the ramp, he just up and decided to ride straight over the curb. The Raleigh tipped over and he broke his hip.”
The image of Grandfather lying on his side, the left rear wheel of the bike revolving slowly, inexorably grinding to a halt, his hands still gripping the handlebars and him staring straight ahead with the same concentration he had had the day I was born, intrigued with his newfound perspective on the horizon, made me smile.
“He probably just lay there, not even wondering at the pain in his hip or how he had come to be there,” I said to Sara, describing this image. I chuckled. Sara chuckled, tentatively at first, and then we began to laugh together, the chuckle blossoming like a cactus flower into one exquisite burst of laughter.
“Do me a favor?” I asked. “Phone Hughes Airwest and get me on the next flight to Phoenix, while I pack?”
“Two tickets, coming right up,” Sara said, beginning to look through the Yellow Pages.
“You’ve got exams,” I said.
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I need you to stay here and arrange for me to make them up.”
“What if they won’t let you?”
“They can fail me. You come out when you’re finished.”
“I want to go with you,” Sara said.
“Uh-uh. Later, not now. I want some time alone with him,” I said.
Sara phoned the airline while I threw some clothes into a suitcase and went into the bathroom to collect my shaving kit. The face reflected in the mirror over the sink was me and not me and for a few minutes I sat on the toilet lid and wept, briefly, my face in my hands—wept not out of sadness but because of that side of me which was incapable of feeling sad, out of a feeling that this was a change and an uncertainty of how great a change it would be.
“You’re on a flight in two hours,” Sara said, coming into the bathroom. “Oh, Alley, go ahead. You can cry in front of me. It must be hard …”
“It’s not hard,” I said, drying my eyes. “It’s just … different.” I began to smile, again. “Now everybody will think I’m nuts when I talk to Grandfather.”
“I won’t,” Sara said. “As long as you don’t mind if I talk to him, too.”
Despite the effects of several in-flight drinks, I was annoyed at the way the brand-spanking-new nurse led me with her gum-shoed display of sorrow to Grandfather’s room. He lay unconscious, a ridge of white sheets and pillows propping him up so that his eyes would have been staring straight at me if they’d been open. They were looking beyond my horizons to the place Grandfather wanted to go. Laura P. slumped in a chair in the darkest corner of the room, apparently asleep, her lips moving in fits and spurts as though she was praying for Grandfather’s journey to be short. At her feet, chained to the metal leg of the bed, dozed my old familiar Death. He looked small and wizened. I felt sorry for Him. “That’s what can happen,” I thought, “when people don’t take you seriously.”
“Mr. Hummingbird?” It was a doctor, clipboard in hand. He glanced about the room’s interior before stepping in and introducing himself. “I’m Doctor Gaines. “You must be … let’s see …,” he said, consulting his clipboard.
“Grandson. Alley.”
“Alley … Alley … Alley …,” he said abstractedly, running his mechanical pencil down the sheet on his clipboard.
“Oxen-free,” I said. The corners of his mustache twitched. “Albert,” I said.
“Bert?”
“Yeah,” I said. It must have been Sanchez who had filled out the list of family likely to show up.
“Right,” he said, ticking the sheet on the clipboard. He crossed to the bed, took up Grandfather’s wrist too quickly as though there were no resistance or weight, and checked his pulse, accidentally stepping on Death’s fingers.
“Ouch! Watch where you put your flat feet you silly S.O.B.,” Death whined, awakening and hunkering farther beneath the bed. He spotted me. “You!” He hissed, His eyes turning yellow with rage.
“Did you say something?” Dr. Gaines asked me.
“No,” I said. I was intrigued by the way the doctor was able to overhear Death and yet not see Him. Death clamped His mouth shut and huddled down into His rage, shaking, waiting for the doctor to finish his cursory examination of Grandfather and explain to me that Grandfather needed an operation to repair his broken hip. They couldn’t perform the operation because his heart was precariously weak.
“Until he’s stronger,” the doctor said, “all we can do is wait and see. I’ll be back. Let the nurses know if you need anything.”
As soon as he was gone, Death poked his head out from beneath the bed and began trying to get me to unlock the chain binding Him to Grandfather’s bed. At first He was obsequious, using the oily, hand-wringing grin of a moneylender (Member F.D.I.C.). To me, He looked like Happy out of Snow White, and I told Him so. Becoming angry, He ran through His entire stock of disguises, growing large and threatening and then shrinking down to the size of a normal human with two heads, their faces staring at each other, one lovingly and the other hatefully. Then He changed into the figure of a martial angel who has flown into a high-voltage power line and frazzled His feathers. Finally, He resorted to seeming a hissing mean little thing whose scaly eyes burned with the determination of His bite.
“It’s no use,” I said. “I don’t have the key.”
“In your Grandfather’s left hand,” He said.
Sure enough, Grandfather’s left hand was closed tight as though it was gripping something.
“When it’s time,” I said. “When his hand opens.”
He sighed, transforming into a shape I’d never seen before, a stone-faced little man in a three-piece suit, clutching a briefcase like a life ring after a shipwreck.
“I can make you a rich man,” He said. “Just get the key.” He offered me tips on the commodities market to prove to me that He was honest and could be trusted. “Silver,” He whispered. “Soybeans.”
“No,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
Even when Laura P. awoke and stood up, she didn’t seem to see anyone but Grandfather as she circled crab-like in the corner of the room, her lips still moving constantly. As the hours passed, her shuffling movement seemed to become a loose spiral around her right hip and I could see that as her own hip stiffened the radius of her walk would close like a draughtsman’s compass as though she were trying to drill her way into the underworld.
That night, I telephoned father to give him a status report, and then found myself a hospital’s imitation of an armchair and dragged it into the corner of Grandfather’s room by the curtained window, and slept.
The next day, Grandfather was conscious enough to let my uncle convince himself that his father was going to regain his strength and be able to have his hip repaired. Even the brand new nurse allowed her face to flirt with encouraging expressions when she came in to check Grandfather’s vital signs.
“It will probably cause you some discomfort,” uncle said to Grandfather. “But it’s better than living the rest of your life in a wheel-chair.”
My aunt, the woman I once had called the Vegomatic, knew as well as I did that Grandfather was not going to get better. Watching her face as we both listened to my uncle ramble hopefully on, it dawned on me what had made my uncle a bit mad. It had begun with those pilots, his six wartime friends. All uncle’s adult life he had clung to the belief that people didn’t die but only passed away and they not only could but would reappear as long as he refused to believe that they were simply and finally dead. He had it part right: They first have to die and journey through the Absence of Angels; then they could return. But uncle could do no other than believe that Grandfather was not dying. When I saw that, I saw in the eyes of my aunt that she had always known this, always understood this, and, in her own way, always forgiven it and found a way to live with it. She must have known, then, that for uncle to leave her and live with Karen Manowitz would have meant being fully alive, and in order to be alive, uncle would have had to recognize Death and admit to himself that his six friends had, on his orders, died. Observing the cool facade of her face, I was impressed by the immensity of what must have been her suffering. Especially when I considered how, raised on uncle’s notions about passing away, her only son had been reduced to little more than an agent of Death and without any sense of belonging in his heart or his life had fled the country, forever.
That evening I had dinner with my aunt and uncle, showered and changed at their motel room, and had them drop me back at the hospital. As Laura P. mumbled her way through sleep, Death intermittently wheezed, snored, awoke with a start and looked to be sure Grandfather was still there, and then fell back into His own profound sleep. I was unable to sleep; somehow, it seemed that I ought to watch him die. Maybe I would learn something. I thought about my aunt and uncle, my mother and father, about everyone I had ever known—some of whom had passed out of the circle of my existence and knowledge but for many of whom I still had affection. I thought about Grandfather, little more than a semiconscious lump on a bed in a place he didn’t want to be. When I thought about Death’s offer to make me a rich man, the clumsiness of His attempt at bribery made me incapable of anything but laughter. Taking out the blank book Sara had given me in the hospital, I wrote “Grandfather is dying” over and over and over, until a page had been filled. I tore that page out and threw it in the wastecan, and began again. “Death is a funny thing, yet I am grateful for Him,” I wrote, and, with the suddenness of an arrow, the vision I had had as I hovered on the treacherous but eloquent edge of life—like Grandfather at this very moment—came out as though not I but Grandfather was writing.
Somewhere down the corridor a clock chimed as I stopped writing, finished, exhausted. “You were not the first and neither will you be the last,” I said, as I went to telephone Sara. I felt like a constipated man who has discovered the gift of prunes.
“Alley?” Her voice was heavy with interrupted dreams. “What time is it?”
“Ooops.” I saw that it was only five a.m. “Sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t think about the time. I wanted to tell you.” I felt stupid, waking her on the morning she was scheduled to fly out to Phoenix anyway.
“What is it?” she asked. “Has your Grandfather …?”
“Not yet. He’s close. But he’s still breathing. No … I wanted to tell you I discovered a landscape, Sara, a place I can always go back to.”
“Phoenix?”
I laughed. “No. No, it’s inside, not outside. It’s that other voice I’ve always heard, the other piece Laura P. meant when she said it was a miracle I was still in two pieces. Only now it’s not confused. Even if it gets confused by what happens outside it won’t have to fight against the inside …”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s all right. Never mind. I’ll show you when you get here.”
“I should arrive by dinner time,” she said. “You want me to bring anything?”
“Just you,” I said. “Hurry up and get here.”
“I love you,” she called, before hanging up.
“Me, too. You,” I said. “I love you, too.”
Day passed toward evening. The room’s heavy olive curtains made the time seem to pass as though it were standing still. When I opened them a crack to peek out, the quality of the sun’s light seemed always the same and only the angle had changed, as though the sun was vigilant over the events in the room. I sat, posed beside the head of Grandfather’s bed, patiently watching his left hand, which was slowly losing its grip on the key.
In the hall, volunteers in pink candy stripes came and went, pushing gurneys piled with colorfully wrapped presents towards the children’s wing, decorating waiting areas, preparing for Christmas Eve and the arrival of Santa Claus in the morning. Passing the open door to Grandfather’s room, they seemed to hop a step, quickening their pace and keeping their eyes riveted straight down the hallway. It pleased me to see them as they passed.
Louis Applegate came in with Dr. Gaines.
“He says he’s family,” Dr. Gaines said.
I remembered the times I’d been visiting Grandfather and, looking out across the desert, we’d spotted Louis, little more than a speck of shadow in the summer’s dust; walking up the mesa, his footsteps were uncertain—it had been too long since he’d been home—and he held his head and eyes up as though he were not approaching the place but the place was approaching and entering him. I recalled all the silent times he and Grandfather had sat, Louis gulping gallons of the orange soda he consumed daily and Grandfather smoking the cigars he had refused to give up.
“He is,” I said to Dr. Gaines. Louis was a pleasant relief to the forced cheerfulness of the medical staff.
“His pulse is much stronger,” the doctor said, looking at Laura P., then at Louis, and finally at me.
I nodded and smiled. “It has to be, if he’s going to ascend into the Absence of Angels.”
The doctor’s mustache twittered. “If he wakes up, he’ll probably be hungry. I’ll tell you, if his heart keeps getting stronger, he’ll be able to eat a horse.”
“Half a horse, anyway,” I said. Louis grinned. The doctor looked at me, wondering if he’d heard me correctly, and then chuckled indecisively.
“I’ll have some food prepared for him. If he wakes up, press the call button and we’ll have it sent right up.”
When the doctor was gone, Louis surprised me by accusing Laura P. of chaining Death to Grandfather’s bed, his voice overflowing with the regrets of all his life. Laura P. only stared at Louis as though she didn’t recognize him. When she did stand, she walked over to Grandfather and laid her hand on his forehead, stroking the silver hair smooth over his temple, and even Louis could tell from her face that she loved Grandfather in a way that no longer existed in the world. Caught between this world and the next as she was, she didn’t hear him.
“She’ll follow him within the year,” he whispered to me. He bent down and examined the lock of the chain and then asked me where the key was. I pointed to Grandfather’s fist and Louis nodded, walked around the end of the bed, and gently opened the fingers and removed the key. He unlocked the lock and then poked Death in the ribs with his foot. Death awoke with a start and feeling Himself free began to bounce around the walls of the room like a cat stoned on catnip, and then vanished out the door.
“He’ll be back soon enough,” Louis said. “So. I’ll say goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Louis. Is there anything you want me to tell Grandfather if he wakes up?”
“What’s to tell,” he said. “See you.” He stopped without turning toward me. “Remember,” he said.
“I will. Take care, Louis.”
Father and Sara arrived together, having met in the Phoenix airport. Sara had recognized him by his resemblance to me.
“You’ll never be able to deny him,” Sara said, giving me a hug.
Grandfather awoke, his eyes travelling from Laura P. to father at the foot of the bed, to me and Sara. His eyes flared briefly when he looked at me. Father began to apologize for not coming sooner. Sara and I went for a walk to give them some time alone together. When we returned, we overheard Grandfather telling father that he would live until Christmas.
“That’s …,” father began, realizing that his father must know that Christmas was tomorrow. “Father,” he said. “Father …”
From the way he said it, I could tell he had many things he wanted to say. He was struggling not to become sentimental or maudlin, trying to find something funny in the situation to rescue all of us. While his heart felt the need for humor, his mind had been corroded by the uprootings of his corporate life, the price he had had to pay for it had been great—a price revealed in the struggle of this moment.
I tried to help him out. “Father,” I said, imitating the way he had said “father.” I figured we three could continue saying “father” over and over again until we tired of the litany.
Grandfather laughed, a breathy, weary laugh, what might be described a ghostly laugh. “Son,” he said, and when father looked to me and repeated “son,” the three of us were suspended in smiling. Then Grandfather closed his eyes and began to snore affectedly.
Sara and I remained behind as father decided to take Laura P. out of the room for a while and try to get her to eat something (I had not seen her eat since I’d arrived), using Laura P. as an excuse to go outside himself. It wasn’t that he was frightened by death as much as he was nonplussed by it and, a normally articulate man when he wasn’t trying to talk to me, being nonplussed frustrated him.
As soon as they left, Grandfather ceased snoring and his right eye opened and surveyed the room. Sara sat, trying to be unobtrusive, and he slowly rolled his head on the pillows and looked long at her. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and opened his other eye.
“What,” he demanded, “are you doing here?”
I knew what he was asking. “Just visiting,” I replied, and I knew that he knew that I meant I wasn’t there to see him die. I was only there to watch over his departure from this life and make sure that no one interfered with his leaving.
Grandfather said something that sounded like “Oy-yo-hey,” as though he were slapping his forehead and saying “What’s to be done with you?” He went on looking me over, carefully, as though he were memorizing my face, and then he let his eyes close and he fell asleep again. This time he didn’t snore; his breathing was calm though a little raspy. I took his wrist in my hand and laid my forehead in his open palm and closed my eyes. Sara went on reading while I felt Grandfather’s pulse grow weaker and weaker and weaker.
The official time of Grandfather’s death was 10:21 p.m. on Christmas Eve, his concentration having failed him by one hour and thirty-nine minutes. That wasn’t bad, all in all.
“It happens,” I remarked to Sara. “Anyone can make that mistake.”
She and I left father and Laura P. at the hospital, and went to telegraph Elanna. Father wanted to take care of the details alone and that seemed to me his right, just as it would be my right when he died. There weren’t many details to take care of, anyway. Grandfather was to be cremated, and Laura P., father, Sara, and I planned to scatter his ashes over a remote part of the Sonoran Desert.
Sara had rented a car at the airport and we drove first to Chosposi Mesa, where she watched as I picked the ancient lock on the shed beside Grandfather’s house. Finding a brass wind-chime with a tone as near to the one he’d sent me when Pamela had died, I used a hacksaw to make a thin cut near the bottom. Then we walked out into the night beneath the bright light of the moon, hearing but not seeing the unnumbered creatures that move about at night when the sun is on the other side of the world. The cactus loomed up like bandits, and every now and then an elf owl hooted.
Sara was a little afraid of the night desert, but willfully trusting my sense of place. “It feels like myth out here,” she said, finally, as we circled up a small box canyon formed by ridges from the mesa.
“It just is,” I said.
At the foot of the canyon wall, Sara waited while I dug a hole and buried the chime, and dragged a large flat rock over the disturbed earth.
“There,” I said, brushing off my hands.
As we retraced our steps, I could tell that Sara was bothered by something, perhaps by my apparent lack of emotion, and her hand kept squeezing mine with the pulse of whatever it was. A breeze had come up, making the clean desert air feel crisp and cold. Finally, she asked, “Are you really grateful for death?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a chill run down her arm and into my hand.
“Why? Do you want to die?”
“Of course not,” I said, smiling. “Without Death, though, love would not be a chance and chances wouldn’t matter. Life wouldn’t be interesting. Or mean anything. If we didn’t know we were going to die eventually, why would we try to do anything at all? Living forever would be like living at two o’clock in the afternoon on a mild and windless day without any hope of change. There’d be no reason to enjoy anything, to laugh or cry or to feel or think.”
She fell silent. A single cloud appeared in the sky and cut slowly across the bottom of the moon as we emerged from the canyon and hiked back towards the car. The rat-a-tat of a moonlighting woodpecker drifted down the wind and I imagined him, surprised by Mrs. Woodpecker having had triplets, hurrying to build a home to house them as soon as they could fly. I laughed.
“What?” Sara said. “What are you thinking?”
“How much fun being alive is.”
Sara gave my hand a squeeze.
Thinking about tomorrow or the day after when we would scatter Grandfather’s ashes across the desert, I stopped walking, looking around the outlines of my desert, barely visible in the moonlight. Beyond the moon, stars shone red and green and white, filling the Absence of Angels with expectant welcoming light.
“You know,” I said. “When I die …”
“Stop,” Sara said. “I don’t want to think about that.”
I grinned. “When I die, you can leave my body out for the garbage collectors in a three-ply Hefty. You’ll have to get someone to help drag it out to the curb, of course …”
“Stop it, Alley!” Sara cried. “I love you. I don’t want to hear about when you die. I won’t let you die.”
“Don’t be silly. You think our love will die just because I die? Do you think Grandfather won’t always be with me? I’ll remember him. That makes him immortal, in a way.”
“Please?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay,” I said. She sighed. “But promise to have my heart cut out. Bury it and plant a Saguaro over it. That way, at least once a year, it will blossom.”
Sara tried to cover my mouth with her hand. “Stop it, Alley. Stop, stop, stop!”
I was laughing harder. “I love you,” I said, ducking away from her hand.
“Why?” she asked, wanting to hear reasons, to be assured by them that I wasn’t planning to die very soon because I loved her.
“Because you make me laugh,” I said.