翅膀 英文中篇名著｜第4章

In bed KC lay next to Dench, staring at the ceiling, and smoking a cigarette, though they were not supposed to smoke inside. Cat lay on the quilt at the foot of the bed, doing his open-eyed fake-sleep. They were all carnies at the close of Labor Day. She stared at her Hammond keyboard, which right now had laundry piled and draped over it in angles. “What illness do you suppose Milt actually has?” Dench asked.

“Something quiet but wretched.”

“Early onset quelque chose?”

“Not that early. I don’t think I can go on visiting him anymore. I just can’t do it.”

Dench squeezed her thigh then caressed it. “Sure you can,” he said.

She stabbed out her cigarette in a coffee cup, then, turning, rubbed her hand down along Dench’s sinewy biceps and across his tightly muscled stomach, feeling hounded back into his arms, which she had never really left, and now his arms’ familiarity was her only joy. You could lose someone a little but they would still roam the earth. The end of love was one big zombie movie.

“Do you realize that if you smoke enough you will end up lowering your risk of uterine cancer?” she said.

“That’s a bad one,” said Dench. “The silent killer. Especially in men.”

“What did you do today?”

“I worked on some songs about my slavery-oppressed ancestors. I’m blaming the white man for my troubles.”

She thought of his father. “Well, in your case it’s definitely a white man.”

“For most people it is. That’s why we need more songs.”

“Life! It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it.”

“I wouldn’t have voted for it. I wouldn’t give it any stars. It’s like getting a book where the sexy passages are already underlined. Who wants that?”

She wasn’t sure what he meant. But she kissed him on his shoulder anyway. “Wouldn’t it be lovely just to fly out of here and live far away on a cloud together?”

“To be birds and see Gawwd!”

She had given up trying to determine his facetiousness level. She suspected it was all just habit and his true intent was unknown even to himself. “Yes! We could be birds in a little bird-house that had books and we could read them!” she exclaimed.

Dench turned his head quickly on the pillow to stare at her. “Perhaps we have that already,” he said. “But darlin, we ain’t seeing God.”

“Because God is off in some cybercafé, so tired from all those biblical escapades that now he just wants to sit back and Google himself all day.” She pulled her hand away from Dench since he had not reciprocated with his own. “If he’s not completely deaf to our cries, he’s certainly deaf in one ear.”

“For sure. Not just the hardware of the inner ear but the hairs and jelly further in: all shot.”

“You’re a strange boy.”

“You see? We’re getting past the glaze and right down to the factory paint here.”

She let a few days go by and then she resumed her stopping by at Milt’s on her coffee runs. Because summer had set in she was now bringing Dench iced coffee, but invariably the ice cubes would melt and she would just drink the whole thing herself. Milt still heated up his muffins but often needed her to drive him to doctors’ appointments as well as to other places, and so she ran his errands with him and watched him greet all the salespeople, the druggist, the dry-cleaning girl, all of whom he seemed to know. “I’m so glad my wife’s daughters are gone,” he said at one point as they were driving home. “I dread the house with them there. I’d rather just return to the cave of my own aloneness!”

“I know how you feel.”

“You have no idea,” he said and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek before he got out of the car. “They are as cold as they come. I mean, even the ice on Mars melts in springtime!”

Once she took the old man swimming. They went to a beach farther north on the lake, at a state park on a weekday, when there was no one there. “Don’t look!” he squealed as he took off his shirt and limp-jogged into the water, where he was safer than he was on land. He was not in bad shape, merely covered with liver spots, and his stomach was only slightly rounded and his breasts about the size of her own.

“How’s the water?” she called to him. A line of silver at the water’s edge sparkled in the sun. The sky was the deep belligerent blue of a hyacinth.

“Expect the unexpected!” he called back. She could see he’d once been a strong swimmer. His arms moved surely, bold, precise. Of course, when you expected the unexpected, it was no longer unexpected, and so you were not really following instructions. She admired his gameness. As she approached the water she saw that the silver line along the sand was the early die-off of the alewives: washed ashore gasping and still flipping on your foot as you walked. The dead lay in a shiny line upbeach, and if one of the smelt-like fish died closer to the waves it caught the light like the foil of a gum wrapper. Another putrid perplexity of the earth. She dove out anyway—to swim among the dying. She would pretend to be an aquarium act, floating among her trained, finned minions; if she imagined it any other way it was all too disgusting. She bobbed around a bit, letting the olive waves of the lake crest up and wash over her.

They picnicked back on shore. She had brought cheese sandwiches and club soda and difficult peaches: one had to bite sharply into the thick fuzzed skin of them to get to the juice. They sat huddled in their separate towels, on a blanket, everything sprinkled with sand, their feet coated in it like brown sugar.

“Too bad about the dead fish,” Milt said. “They’ll be gone next week but still. So may I!” He grinned.

Should she say “Don’t talk like that”? Should she in her bathing suit with her tattoos all showing feign a bourgeois squeamishness regarding conversations about death? “Please don’t talk like that,” she said, peach juice dripping down her chin.

“OK,” he said obediently. “I’m just saying: even Nature has her wickednesses.” He took out a flask she didn’t know he carried and poured her a little into a paper cup. “Here, have some gin. Goes in clean and straight—like German philosophy!” He smiled and looked out at the lake. “I was once a philosopher—just not a very good one.”

“Really?” The gin stung her lips.

“Terrible world. Great sky. That always seemed the gist.” He paused. “I also like bourbon—the particular parts of your brain it activates. Also good for philosophy.”

She thought about this. “It’s true. Bourbon hits a very different place than, say, wine.”

“Absolutely.”

“And actually, red wine hits a different place from white.” She sipped her gin. “Not that I’ve made an intense study of it.”

“No, of course not.” He smiled and rinsed gin around on his gums.

Back at his house he seemed to have caught a chill and she put a blanket around him and he grabbed her hand. “I have to go,” she said.

A sadness had overtaken him. He looked at KC then looked away. “Shortly before my wife died she sat up in bed and began to shout out the names of all the sick children who had died on her watch. I’d given her a brandy and she just began reciting the names of all the children she had failed to save. ‘Charlie Pepper,’ she cried, ‘and Lauren Cox and Barrett Bannon and Caitlin Page and Raymond Jackson and Tom DeFugio, and little Deanna Lamb.’ This went on for an hour.”

“I have to go—will you be OK?” He had taken his hand away and was just staring into space. “Here is my number,” she said, writing on a small scrap of paper. “Phone me if you need anything.”

When he did not reply she left anyway, ignoring any anguish, locking the door from the inside.

Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready. Life got you sad. And then blood started coming from where it didn’t used to come. People revisited the deaths of others, getting ready to meet them in the beyond. KC herself imagined dying would be full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done. Though all was never said and done. That was the other part about death.

“I had the dog all day,” complained Dench, “which was no picnic. No day at the beach.”

“Well, I had Milt. He’s no kiss for Christmas.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about all the time you spend with him.”

“According to you, you never know what to think.”

“It just seems to me that if things are going to take they shouldn’t take so long. By the way, I’ve found out what that odor is.”

“Really?”

The smell, even with the warm weather ostensibly drying things out, was still in the walls. There was the occasional scurrying of squirrels in the attic. It was surprising Cat didn’t jump up and start barking.

“The rot of a bad conscience.”

“I really doubt that.”

“Well, let me show you.” He opened the hatch to the crawl space that constituted the attic. He pulled down the folding ladder and motioned for her to climb it. “Take this flashlight and move it around and you’ll see.”

She expected to find a couple of flying squirrels, dead in each other’s caped arms. But when she poked her head into the crawl space and flashed her light around, she at first saw nothing but dust and boxes. Then her eyes fell on it: a pile of furry flesh with the intertwined tails of rats. They were a single creature like a wreath and flies buzzed around them and excrement bound them at the center while their bodies were arrayed like spokes. Only one of them still had a head that moved and it opened its mouth noiselessly.

“It’s a rat king,” said Dench. “They were born like that, with their tails attached, and could never get away.”

She scrambled down the ladder and shoved it back up. “That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.”

“They’re supposed to be bad luck.”

“Put the hatch door back down.”

“A surprise for Ian. I did phone the pest removal place, but they charge a thousand dollars. I said, ‘Where are you taking them to, Europe?’ We may just have to burn the house down. It’s completely haunted.”

“Really.”

“We could work up plausible deniability: What kerosene can? Or, Many people are known to go shopping while cooking pot-au-feu.”

She studied Dench’s face as if—once again—she had no idea who he was. Now having found the rat king, he seemed to be the star of a horror film. He was trying to be funny all the time and she no longer liked it, as if he were auditioning for something. Soon he might start telling Milt’s jokes: I keep thinking of the hereafter: I walk into a room and say, What am I here after? She only liked Dench’s Jesus jokes, since in them Jesus was kind of an asshole, which she thought was perhaps a strong possibility in real life, and so the jokes seemed true and didn’t have to be funny and so she didn’t have to laugh. “Don’t ever show me anything like that again,” she said.

Cat came up and started to hump Dench’s leg. “Sheesh,” said Dench, as KC turned to leave. “He’s had his balls cut off and he still wants to date.”

Summer warmed all the houses though most of them did not have air conditioners, Ian’s and Milt’s included. She took Milt one evening to a nearby café and they had to dine outside, at a wobbly metal table near the parking lot, since the air within was too slicing and cold. “I think I would have liked that cold air when I was about seventeen,” he said. “Now I feel heat is good for old bones.”

They ate slowly, and although the food clung to his teeth, KC did not alert him. What would be the point? At some point, good God, just let an old guy have food in his teeth! They ate squash soup with caramel corn on top—molar-wrecking.

“You know,” he said, chewing and looking around. “People get fired from the barbershop, a restaurant closes, this is a slow town and still things change too fast for me. It’s like those big-screen TVs: all the bars have them now. I can’t watch football on those—it feels like they’re running right at me.”

KC smiled but said nothing. At one point he said loudly of his custard, “The banana flavor doesn’t taste like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like.”

She glanced over at the next table. “I kind of know what you mean,” she said quietly.

“Of course old people are the stupidest. It’s the thing that keeps me from wanting to live in a whole facility full of them. Just listen to them talk: listen to me talk. It’s like: I’ve been walking around with the dumb thought for forty years and I’m still thinking it, so now I might as well say it over and over.” He then again sang the praises of his wife, her generosity and social commitment, and then turned his attention to KC. “You are not unlike her, in a way,” he said. Behind him the sun set in the striped hues of a rutabaga.

“I can’t imagine,” she said. Instead her mind was filled with wondering what the neighbors must think.

“Your faces are similar in a way. Especially when you smile!” He smiled at her when he said this and she returned it with a wan one of her own, her lips in a tight line.

When she walked him back to his house, the crickets had started in with their beautiful sawing. “Tinnitus!” Milt exclaimed.

But this time she didn’t laugh, and so he did what he often did when he was irritated: he walked with his most deaf ear toward her so that he could stew in peace. She noticed him weaving and knew that his balance was off. At one point he began to tilt and she quickly caught him. “An old guy like me should wear a helmet all the time,” he said. “Just get up in the morning and put it on.”

He then turned and peered through the dusk at her. “Sometimes at home I think the ringing in my ears might be the phone and I pick it up, hoping it might be you.”

She helped him into his house—he took the front stairs with greater difficulty than he used to. She turned on the lights. But he switched them off again and, grabbing her hand, sat in a chair. “Come here and sit on my lap,” he said, tugging her firmly. She fell awkwardly across his thin thighs, and when she tried to find her footing to stand again, he braced and embraced her with his arms and began to nuzzle her neck, the u and r of Decatur. His eyes were closed, and he offered his face up to her, his lips pursed but moving a little to find hers.

KC at first let him kiss her, letting their lips meet slightly—she had to be obliging, she had to work against herself and find a way—and then his rough and pointed tongue flicked quickly in and out and she jolted, flung herself away, stood, switched the lights back on, and turned to face him. “That’s it! You’ve gone off the deep end now!”

“What?” he asked. His eyes were barely open and his tongue only now stopped its animal darting. She swept her hair from her face. The room seemed to whirl. Life got you ready for dying. She had once caught a mouse in a mousetrap—she had heard the snap and when she looked it seemed merely to be a tea bag, a brown mushroomy thing with a tail, then it began flopping and flipping and she’d had to pick it up with a glove and put it in the freezer, trap and all, to die there.

It was time. “You’re completely crazy!” she said loudly. “And there’s nothing I can do at this point but call the hospice!” Words that had stayed in the wings now rushed into the crushed black box of her throat.

His face now bore the same blasted-apart look she’d seen when she first met him, except this time there was something mangled about the eyes, his mouth a gash, his body slumped in banishment. He began silently to cry. And then he spoke. “I looked him up on—what do you call it: Spacebook. His interests and his seekings.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Good luck,” he said. “Good luck to you and your young man—I wish you both the best.”

“It’s done.”

She sank against the door. She had waited all night for the hospice people to come and carry Milt off the next morning, and then she had signed some forms and promised to visit, promised to come help him with the crossword puzzle, and taking the keys of the house, she had locked it, then walked hurriedly home.

Dench was putting his cell phone away. He looked at her worriedly and she returned his gaze with a hard glare. He then stepped forward, perhaps to comfort her, but she shoved him off. “KC,” he said. And when he cocked his head as if puzzled and tried in forgiveness to step toward her again, she made a fist and struck him hard in the face.

Her life in the white-brick house was one of hostessing—and she poured into it all the milk of human kindness she possessed. There were five bedrooms and one suite turned entirely over to the families of children at the hospital whose new pediatric wing was now complete. She had painted the walls of every room either apricot or brown, and she kept the crown moldings white while she painted the ceilings a celestial blue. In summer she opened up the sleeping porches. Every morning she got up early and made breakfast, a ham-and-egg bake, which she served in a large casserole in the dining room, and although she made no other meals she made sure there were cookies in the front room and games for the siblings (who also played with the dog). She sometimes attempted music in the afternoons, sitting at the piano while people tried to smile at her. She wore high collars and long sleeves and necklaces of blue slag to hide her tattoos. She left magazines for people to read but not newspapers, which contained too much news. She maintained the book nook, stuffing it with mysteries. She watched the families as they went off in the morning, walking their way to the hospital to see their sick children. She never saw the sick children themselves—except at night, when they were ghosts in white nightgowns and would stand on the stairwell landings and recite their names and wave—as she roamed the house, thinking of them as “her children” and then not thinking of them at all, as she sleeplessly straightened up, but she would hear of their lives. “I missed the good parts,” the mothers would say, “and now there are no more good parts.” And she would give them more magazines for flipping through in the surgery lounge, in case they grew tired of watching a thriving aquarium of bright little fish.

Tears thickened her skin the way brine knitted and hardened the rind of a cheese. Her hair was still long but fuzzily linted with white, and she wore it up in a clip. There were times looking out the front windows, seeing the parents off on their dutiful, despairing visits, when she would think of Dench and again remember the day he had first auditioned raucously for their band, closing with some soft guitar, accompanied by his strong but inexpressive baritone, so the song had to carry the voice, like a river current moving a barge. She had forgotten now what song it was. But she remembered she had wondered whether it would be good to love him, and then she had gone broodingly to the window to look out at the street while he was singing and she had seen a very young woman waiting for him in his beat-up car. It had been winter with winter’s sparse afternoon stars, and the girl was wearing a fleece chin-strap cap that made her look like Dante and also like a baby bird. KC herself had been dressed like Hooker Barbie. Why had she put this memory out of her mind? The young woman had clearly driven him there—would she be tossed away? bequeathed? forgotten? given a new purpose by God, whose persistent mad humor was aimless as a gnat? She was waiting for him to come back with something they could use.