ELIZABETH PASSED. SERVICE TUESDAY. COME WARM SPRINGS. – BILLY
It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Just a matter of time, really. Maybe for the best, when it came right down to it, because it wasn’t like she’d had much of a life. These were the kinds of things one told oneself, and it might have been true, even. Regardless, when Billy tries to make himself believe it, the words feel hollow.
He’d handed the form to the Western Union man, paying the fee without comment. Left, then, walking down the road to the crappy little tavern he frequents more and more these days. He never used to be much of a drinker, was afraid of what it would do to him and, yet, here he is, damn near whenever he can. It doesn’t appear to have done him much harm over the years, though, aside from this gut he carries around, the dugs that sag on his chest. He’s fat. Never thought to see that day, but here it is. Fat Billy Morgan.
The bartender gives him a nod, pulling up a mug of beer for him, scraping off the foam with a paddle. Billy nods back, acknowledging a couple of the other regulars, tired, shabby old fuckers like himself, and takes his beer back to his normal corner table. He’s a regular, too, but not a talker. The bar is just a place, fairly quiet, usually, where Billy can be alone with his thoughts. It’s mostly empty inside, the air thick and lazy with cigarette smoke and the low mutter of conversation, punctuated by the occasional cackle.
Billy takes a long, slow sip of his beer. He’s still in his orderly’s whites and, when he brings his arm up to light his cigarette, he sees the splash of blood brown-dark against his sleeve. The stain doesn’t want to come out. He shakes his head and sighs, pulling the smoke into his chest.
He’d been the one to find her, tucked away in one of the cow stalls. Sitting there leaned back against the wooden wall, a surprised, puzzled look on her face. The hay wet underneath her. Maybe the end is always a surprise, even when you bring it on yourself. Was there a moment, right there at the last, when she thought no wait even though, by then, it was too late? I take it back. More likely the look on her face is just pure physiology, the sag of muscles after the animating force has left. But, still, it almost looked like she was just sitting there, biding her time, waiting to get up, wondering why she couldn’t. Regardless of the reason, Billy just wishes that she’d looked more peaceful. Passed, he’d written. Such a quiet euphemism. As if she’d just gone somewhere. Which Billy supposes she has, not that he really believes that she’s anywhere now. It’s a pleasant fiction, though. She’s gone to her reward. She’s with the angels now. Called home.
It had taken him a while to write the text of the telegram, before settling on passed. Not that he would have used one of those more flowery phrases, particularly given who he was sending it to, but Elizabeth is dead seemed too harsh, too final, even to him. And he damn sure couldn’t have put down Your wife has finally cut her throat.
He takes another swallow of beer, smokes quietly for a while. How did she keep finding ways to hurt herself, he wonders. It was a mystery to him and all the other orderlies. After so many years at the hospital with her, Billy thought he knew all her little idiosyncrasies, could plan around them. But, sure enough, once or twice a year, he or one of the others would find her with a piece of broken glass, a kitchen knife, once an awl from the shop. The only thing that even made it remotely close to acceptable – which it wasn’t – was the fact that she would always cause some kind of drama, once she had the thing in her hand. Cry, scream, rage at them. As if, deep down, she wanted someone to stop her, to help her.
But not this time. For one reason or another she’d just taken a shard of glass, from wherever it was that she found it, gone into the barn and quietly laid her neck open. Died surprised and alone, surrounded by cowshit and hay that needed mucking.
Wait, I take it back.
Billy drains his beer and fetches another from the bar. It’s not your fault, Dr Rideout had said, squeezing him on the shoulder. You did everything you could. Wasn’t enough, though, was it? She was a tragic woman, really. He respected Dr Rideout mightily but, right then, he’d felt a flare of anger. Elizabeth Parker wasn’t a tragedy. Tragedy implied something had just happened to her. There was no responsibility in it, it said nothing had been done to her, when, really it had. More and more, Billy thinks that the terrible things that happen in his life are just because he, himself, is in it. That he’s poisoned it. Twisted everyone’s stories into his own, maybe, like his uncle had said, that time. Could be, if Billy had never known Sol, never met Elizabeth, she would have been just fine. The two of them would have raised up a baby into a man and did whatever it is that married people did after that. Dug a garden, maybe. Sang in the church choir on Sundays.
But even Billy knows that’s all bullshit. Sometimes his thoughts get away from him, though, which happens more and more these last years. Particularly when he’s feeling low. Some days it’s hard to even get out of bed, to crawl out from the weight of the blackness hanging over him. Other days it’s as if his mind reels out from itself, bringing him along to places he shouldn’t be going. Showing him thoughts he shouldn’t be having. He worries that he’s becoming like his father.
Billy isn’t crazy. He tells himself that, regardless of the things his uncle had said. The things his father had said, about seeing the world a little too truly. Even with the depression and the rages and that other side of things, when nothing looks quite right, not exactly, when things are just a shade out of kilter, he knows he isn’t crazy. He’s not like his father, not at all. But maybe he’s getting closer. Just maybe, some days. It would be a lie if he said he didn’t fret about it, which is why he’s stayed at the hospital all these years. The job is still as lousy as it always was, even more so, in some ways, now that there are so many more patients and the staffing hasn’t kept pace. Dr Rideout does everything he can, but funding and the board and all the rest of it. Being an orderly – head orderly, these days – is a shit job but Billy feels safer at the hospital. Just in case, just in case.
He never thinks about that other life he thought he once had. Tries not to, anyway. There have been times when he’s wanted to confide in Dr Rideout, tell him the story, his fears, but he’s never been able to bring himself to do so. So, instead, Billy just does his best to shrug his thoughts away from all that but, sometimes, it sneaks up on him, an echo of the person he once was. Thought he once was. A particular image, the sound of a voice, a smell. Another life. Or maybe Marked Face is right, after all.
These days, the person Billy wants to talk to the most is his uncle, but the old man has been gone for years. Gone back to wherever it is he goes, just up and vanished again. From time to time Billy heads back up to that little cabin but it’s always empty. No one around the rez claims to have seen him, the same way no one has seen Bad Bird in all the years since he disappeared. Billy still expects the telegram, though, the one that will begin REGRET TO INFORM YOU. Someone will have found the old man; one of those old men anyway. Gone to his reward. Called home. Passed. With each new year it’s more and more unlikely that either Marked Face or his father are still alive. After all, they’re old, they’ve been old Billy’s whole life and he’s north of thirty now himself.
A world without those old Indians seems somehow wrong, though. Lacking. They’ve always been there, those two, even when Billy barely saw them. Even when he hated them, feared them. Their very existence tethers him to his own. Their stories are twisted together with his. Without them he doesn’t have much. Dr Rideout, maybe, who is a colleague and a friend, but the doctor has his own family, his own anchors. The job? No. Maybe this shitty little bar and the cheap beer and his own fat belly hanging there over his belt. Is all that enough to hold him down to his life? Once, he’d had Sol as family but that was in that other life he didn’t like to think about, the one that never happened.
Billy wonders how Sol will take the news about Elizabeth. Grief? Relief? Indifference? Never once has Sol come to Warm Springs to see his wife, not in all this time. Twenty-five miles, all it is, but not once. Now that Sol is such a big man, or so Billy understands, there have been a number of large cash gifts to the hospital endowment, money to pay for this or that. Money for Sol Parker to buy off his conscience, Billy thinks, stunted though it may be. You can’t buy your way out of family, though, whatever Sol might believe.
He hasn’t seen Sol since their fight, years ago. Some days he thinks to go to Butte, to find him, but he never does.
Afternoon becomes evening and one beer becomes many until he finally stumbles out of the bar and begins making his way back. As he weaves blearily down the road, he looks for signs of his father, looks for Marked Face, but Billy is alone.