Sometimes Cortez in the summertime afternoons had dreams that weren’t really dreams but things his mind made up by itself. Not real. But they looked real to the inside part of his brain that made them up in the first place. They had color and light and texture and dialogue. And mood. Lots of mood. Sometimes it was blue lights and a smoky bar. Sometimes it was wood smoke and a campfire.
Another thing they had was sex. Sometimes in the afternoons, just before a nap took hold, somewhere between sleep and REM, before it officially became a nap, especially if he was on his old army cot on his back porch, screened in with a few flowers that needed watering in pots and a water-blistered coffee table, damp enough with mildew so that spiders were not a concern, some rags of raw cotton stuffed in a few holes in the screens, a slight breeze working its way through the leaves of the big pecans out back, he’d somehow wind up in a place that was about six feet above his body, on his back, and he would hover in the air there and would lift right through the roof and then roll over and start flying around. He could go way high, super fast. He could get to going so fast that he knew in some part of his brain that wasn’t totally awake that he was breaking some kind of speed barriers. Sometimes he was wrapped in sadness. Sometimes he was enveloped in elation. One time he saw that blue-and-white clouds were hurtling toward him, and they began to part and peel off to the side and swallow him, and he traveled through splotches of vivid orange blinking colors for what looked to be millions of miles at supersonic speeds to the center of a place where naked dancing-girl angels waited panting and ready on the mossy banks of a clean river, where the shade beneath the trees was deep and strong, and the lips of the young women who were pulling at his clothes sweet as the juice of a freshly picked peach.
But those were just half dreams. They didn’t have anything to do with his real life, which didn’t have any sex in it at all. None. Zero. Not even a hand job. Mostly his life was taking care of his wife and his cows and raising a garden in the summertime and shooting the deer when they came to get his peas and working on his tractor when it broke and mowing his grass with his little John Deere mower that he’d been using for nineteen years without any trouble except a new battery four times and two tires on the back, a cable, a carburetor, and watching each season pass and wondering which one would finally get him. He didn’t want to go in the spring because the fish were biting and the weather was too pretty. He didn’t want to go in the summer because of homegrown tomato sandwiches every day. He didn’t want to go in the fall because the leaves were turning and wood smoke was in the air and you could kill some squirrels. And in the winter, somebody had to feed these damn cows or they’d starve. As far as he could see, there wasn’t going to be any really convenient time to go. So he was hoping just to keep going.
But he wasn’t having a dream today. Today he wasn’t even going to sleep. He was lying on his cot and he could hear her TV programs going in there like always. They had more shit on TV than you could believe now. They had one of those satellite dishes on the roof now. They’d try to sell you anything. You could send off for videotapes of college girls pulling their shirts up and showing their bosoms, and he wanted one of those, but they didn’t have a VCR and he would have been scared to order it anyway because of his wife. She was in a wheelchair and was up all night, and the TV hardly ever went off, and he just kept his hearing aid turned down, and if she wanted something she just rapped on the floor with her cane that she never used anymore since she couldn’t get up anymore, and when he felt the vibration of the cane on the floor, he turned his hearing aid up and asked her what the hell she wanted now.
She was a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. She was a lot more trouble now than what she used to be, before she’d had the stroke. About the only way for him to get away out of her reach was to go outside and do something, and not look back toward the house, because if he was outside doing something and she decided she wanted something, she could pick up this police bullhorn she’d ordered from somewhere, probably the damn TV, and call him with that, and about the only way not to hear that was to be on the tractor with its loud muffler, and it helped to be some distance away from the house, too, like down by the creek where the pea patch was, where he had hell keeping the deer out of there, and had shot as many as six or seven a night. Probably have to do it again this summer, too. Always did. Every year. Never failed. Good thing the ammo was still easy to get.
Cortez Sharp lay there a while longer and tried to go to sleep, but he kept wondering how the dozer guy was going on the pond. He’d already been out there this morning to see how it was going and it looked like it was going pretty good, but he didn’t want to stop the dozer guy to ask him how it was going since he was getting fifty dollars an hour. Cortez preferred to go over during the dozer guy’s lunch break and ask him how it was going then. That way he figured it didn’t cost him anything. It was going to be a pretty big pond. The dozer guy had told him two days ago that he was moving over two hundred cubic yards of dirt, which didn’t mean anything to Cortez since he wasn’t a dirt man or a construction man. The dozer man had said that it was a shitload of dirt, but then, after he finished eating his fried chicken and what looked like a really well-made fried apple pie, he told Cortez that he usually took a nap after lunch, so Cortez left.
He raised his wrist and looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock. The dozer guy was probably back at work now. If the damn TV hadn’t been so loud in the living room, he could have turned his hearing aid up and would have probably been able to hear the diesel engine on the dozer running over there on the hill. Cortez could hardly stand to sit in the house while he knew the dozer guy was on the dozer moving dirt for the pond, kind of like the way people who are having a house built will come over every afternoon when the carpenters leave, for months, but, too, some people were funny about you watching them work, even if you were paying them, so Cortez didn’t want to just drive up and sit there in his pickup and watch the man work. But he could hardly stand not to.
So he sat up. He laced on his boots. Maybe he could walk over and sit down behind a tree and peek out from behind it once in a while.
He went into the living room where his wife was sitting in her wheel-chair watching the television. The volume was way up as usual. And it always seemed like it got louder during the commercials. His wife turned her head for a moment but she didn’t say anything. After another moment she turned it back. He wondered how long it was going to take her to die. She wasn’t able to cook anything. She wasn’t able to clean house either, but he had a woman come in a few days a week for that. She fixed things that could be kept in the refrigerator for a few days, or frozen, and taken out and thawed out, or microwaved. They had one of them now. Lucinda gave it to them two years ago. It would heat up dayold biscuits pretty good.
“What you doing?” he said. He thought he might cut the grass later.
“I ain’t doing nothing,” she said. “Watching TV.”
“Hmh,” he said. He didn’t know how she could watch so much TV. There didn’t seem like there was ever anything on it but bad news. Or some kind of sex stuff on those talk shows. Some woman almost as old as his wife had a show where folks called in and asked questions about sex problems they were having and she’d tell them about digital stimulation, and she talked about using jelly sometimes. One night he saw her tell the audience how to give somebody a blow job, using a rubber dick as a teaching aid. Rubbing her fingers all up and down it. He got pretty excited. His wife was asleep when he watched that one. He thought.
“I’m gonna go over and see how he’s doing,” he said.
“I don’t see why you don’t just let him alone and let him work.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said that. It was about the seventh or maybe eighth or ninth or tenth time she’d said that. He was getting about tired of her saying that. She wasn’t excited about the pond the way he was. She never had liked to fish anyway. Never had wanted Lucinda around any water very much. Always afraid she’d fall in and drown. In a foot of water. Even after she was over five years old. Even after she was ten years old. Like she wouldn’t be able to put her hands down on the bottom and push her head out of the water. She always stayed on her. She was the one who ran her off. Always telling her, Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t wade in up past your knees! Sit up straight! Keep your legs crossed, them boys’ll look up your dress! Stop picking your nose. Why don’t you go to the bathroom? Mash that zit! And now look where she was. Didn’t know how to swim and lived in Atlanta with a retard. Sleeping in the same bed with one. Acted like she just hated to have to come home for Christmas. Like coming home for Christmas was just too much shit to have to put up with. Cortez couldn’t understand why Lucinda didn’t have a regular boyfriend. Somebody who could do something besides make art. Oh, he paints, Lucinda said. Right. He’d seen some pictures of it, what he painted. Looked like what a chimpanzee could do with a brush and his own shit if he could shit in different colors. It didn’t seem right that she didn’t have somebody smart enough to make it through grammar school.
“I just want to go see how much he’s got done,” he said.
“I’m getting hungry,” his wife said.
“Eat them biscuits,” he said, and went out the door.
His truck was parked in back near a big chinaberry where his PTO post-hole digger hung on a rusty log chain. It was a hell of a lot easier to get it back on the tractor if he left it hanging on the chain, and he’d been doing it for years. It was getting to be just about too much for him now, since he was finally after all this time older and a little bit weaker, to take it off and put it back on, since it weighed over three hundred pounds, and was one dangerous son-of-a-bitching piece of machinery, almost as dangerous as a Bush Hog, and he was afraid he’d drop the damn thing on himself one day, and then where would he be with her in there watching those trashy people taking their clothes off and talking about how many people they’d screwed while they were married to some other damn fool who was sitting there in a chair listening to it in front of an audience? She’d never hear him yelling. It might take days for somebody to find him. It had been hanging there for seven months, ever since he’d finished putting that new two-hundred-foot section of fence in on the east side by the road. Close to where those people had that trailer and kept all those little bitty dogs. He wondered if those little dogs would tree squirrels. But he was going to have to put it on sometime. Almost that whole section down there by the creek was rotted and he’d need to dig some new holes for some of that. It was the oldest part and he knew some of those posts had been in there for forty years. He didn’t want to even think about what he’d been doing forty years ago. Damn sure not this. Living with an old woman you couldn’t stand to even talk to. Listening to her snoring at night. Putting up with all her shit. All her bitching. Getting her medicine from town. Fixing her something to eat. Having to help her get dressed. Damn, he got tired of it. He’d thought about hiring somebody to help around the house just with her. He didn’t know how much longer he could handle her by himself. She was four years older than him and he didn’t know why in hell he’d married her. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But sometimes things didn’t work out over time. Sometimes over time you found out that you’d messed up pretty bad. That’s how he felt most of the time. Most of the time he just wanted to be left alone. He couldn’t believe his only daughter was living with a retard in Atlanta. And didn’t even know how to swim.