Eating Memories (28 page)

In life, more than just the climate changes. People either leave you, or you leave them. Pa’d spent his whole life losing people, like he was an old man with the palsy who was always dropping his keys. At that moment, I knew that I was going to grow up into the opposite type—the one who always walks out.

Walking out wasn’t going to be easy, though. The more I tried not to think about Teresa, or about Pa, the worse I felt, and the more my fingers twitched.

“Ain’t had a drink since you left,” he told me. “Don’t know why I’m bothering to quit. Ain’t much other joy to life.”

I’d been lied to enough that I couldn’t be suckered in no more. Right then I hated Pa and Teresa and their broken promises; but I couldn’t help loving them, too. There’s a kind of an addiction you get to people if you live with them long enough. I’d only had a few months with Teresa, but I’d had sixteen years of Pa. “Come on and go with me,” I said.

“Get out!” Pa’s shout spooked the cattle.

I raised the 30.06 and he frowned at it.

“There’s only one pickup,” I said.

Pa seemed surprised, but then, real quick, the surprise left, and a steadiness took its place. I flicked off the safety, cocked the rifle, and raised it to my shoulder.

The bang that rifle made shooed the chickens off their coop. Pa stepped back a pace, still staring at me kind of stupid. And behind Pa’s back, that Angus bull dropped to his knees, and then settled over on his side, as if he was climbing into bed. A pool of blood leaked from his forehead and spread out across the sand. Neat, clean, and quick. That’s the way you kill something.

I shot three longhorns before the rest of them got the idea and broke down the fence. They hightailed it out into the desert, where they belonged.

When all that was left of them longhorns was the dust they had raised. I took a last glance at the dead Angus and the three dead spotted cows. Then I threw my gear and the rifle into the bed of the pickup and climbed up in the cab.

I sat there and waited. The air in the cab was blistering. In a few minutes, Pa opened the door and climbed up to sit next to me.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Michigan?”

“Yeah.”

“Why
Michigan?”

“Just ’cause it’s somewheres else.” Just because the ghosts aren’t there, I thought. And because if you’re going to give up a habit, it’s best to get a good long ways from temptation.

He glanced over at the torn screen on the front door. “Think we
should lock up the house?”

“I don’t imagine anybody is gonna come calling.”

He sighed and settled back in his seat as I started the engine. “I don’t much, either,” he said.

Author’s Note:
When I recently read back over these short stories I was apprehensive. A writer’s craft naturally improves over time; and so I had worried I would find terrible errors: sloppy mistakes, overwritten and overblown prose.

In general, I’ve been pretty satisfied by these early efforts, although I have to admit that I winced several times during this one. Still, it’s a great deal of fun, being there as senile octogenarians relive the ’60s.

In
the rec room The Who were bragging they could see for miles and miles. Shuffling down the hall, keeping pace with Monique’s arthritic gait, Tammi decided she’d be happy just to be able to read a newspaper again.

Beyond the open doorway from which the music seeped, Mother Aerobics was leading the old folks in sit-down calisthenics. All over the room lumpy, pale arms were raised like deformed sheaves of wheat.

“Night of the Living Dead,”
Tammi said as they passed. Neither Monique nor Jeff turned around.

“The original, not the remake,” Tammi explained. “All black and white and grim. That’s what this damned place reminds me of.” She leaned to speak into Monique’s good ear. “I had the nightmare again last night,” she whispered.

Monique didn’t react. She kept walking, her back bent into a comma by the inescapable tonnage of time. In the years since her eightieth birthday, Monique had grown far too thin. Her face was a drear-expressioned skull, and her hair covered the cranium so skimpily that Tammi could see a pink sheen underneath the cloud of white. Glancing down to the padded grip of the automated walker, Tammi was shocked to notice how gnarled, how unfamiliar, her friend’s hands had become.

“You were in my dream,” Tammi told her. Gray light Ieaked from high windows, casting soft, pale bands on the carpeted floor. In one comer pouted an Australian pine, its back crippled as Monique’s. “Mike and Kevin were there.”

The wheels of the walker squeaked. Monique was doggedly shuffling the length of hallway as though the corridor were a horizontal Everest. Jeff, who had little else to do, seemed pulled along by the grappling ropes of her resolution.

Jeff’s lips flapped loosely a moment, a sign that speech was imminent. “I remember . . .” he said in a crepe-paper voice. The words had as much meaning as if they had come from a parakeet taught to echo a repetitive, banal phrase. Both women studiously ignored him.

“Why don’t you listen to me anymore?” Tammi snapped at Monique, her exasperation bubbling over into fury. The woman and walker never faltered stride. “I talk and talk and you never listen! I said I had the dream again.”

“I remember . . .” Jeff said, cocking his head as though he were repeating sounds broadcast in a frequency only he could hear. “I remember . . . the first time I heard the Beatles’ White Album.”

“Why do we hang around Jeff?” Tammi asked. “Is it because you always have to hold court? God. He goes on these memory binges, only we don’t know the people he talks about. When he’s not remembering people we never met, he still makes no sense. He’s white noise. Shit. If I was as senile as Jeff I’d kill myself.”

Or would I?
The thought was so surprising a thing it momentarily stopped her in her tracks. Would she know when or how to commit suicide if the time came? Maybe consciousness was a more subtle thing than she thought. Maybe holding onto it was like grasping a cloud of steam.

“I’d want to kill myself,” she amended doubtfully. “I know that. Wouldn’t you?”

Head down in determined concentration as though only force of will were moving her legs, Monique didn’t reply.

“Please listen to me,” Tammi persisted. “Please. There’s nobody else I can talk to. My dream scares me. I wake up, only I’m not really awake. It’s a strange feeling.” Monique was making slow headway. Slide-step-slide-step. Despite an appropriate sympathy, Tammi found the slow pace galling.

“In my dream I’m trying to get up out of bed, trying so hard,” Tammi went on, her voice fretful. “And I can see my feet hit the floor, but somehow I know my legs are still under the covers. There are voices in the hall.”

They reached the end of the corridor, and paused by the windows that looked out onto the retirement home’s acre of lawn. A few old folks were playing a slow, geriatric game of Twister under an awning in the pellucid glow of the overcast day.

In slow tandem, the three turned and headed back past the rec room. The walker came close to rolling over Tammi’s foot, and she had to stumble back to avoid it. “Watch that thing!” she shouted. “Can’t, you watch where you’re going?” Instantly chagrin shut her mouth, and they walked it while in silence, Tammi gathering her scattered thoughts.

“I remember. . .” Jeff said, his eyes clouded by the fog of memory. “We were dropping acid. Is it cold in here? Annette. Oh, man. Sounds of . . . like rain. Do you hear it? And then . . . and then . . .” His voice trailed off into disoriented silence, Jeff astray in his past.

Tammi shot him a look and picked up the thread of her story. “So anyway, in my dream I get up, only I don’t get up, not really. And I’m walking through my bedroom. Only instead of the hall, there’s this dark place. There’s a monster in the dark. I feel it—a sort of tangible malice.”

“John’s my favorite,” Jeff said in surprise, as though his clumsy feet had just stumbled over that discarded bit of information. “I like John.”

“John Lennon’s been dead fifty goddamned years,” Tammi said cruelly. “Get with the program.” She took a long, calming breath. The building smelled of lunch: chicken soup and peach cobbler.

“Okay. So. I go through the darkness, and in my dream you’re there,” Tammi went on, “standing in the breezeway to our old apartment in college. You’re just the way you were when you were nineteen, long stringy hair and all. And Mike’s still alive. And Kevin’s still angry at the system. Isn’t that funny?” Her voice failed under sorrow’s weight. In the rec room, The Who finished their song and “Mellow Yellow” began.

“Annette had long brown legs,” Jeff said, licking his lips. “Long brown legs and a tight ass. She freaked when a cop stopped a speeder in front of the house and flushed a whole half-pound of good home-grown.” A cackle issued from his mouth, staccato and humorless as machine gun fire. “We went to Chicago and protested Nixon and on the way home we fucked. We played the White Album a lot. Played it until the grooves wore out and it started skipping. I always liked John best.”

Monique suddenly looked up as though Tammi’s skin, her bones, were made of glass. The focus of her irked gaze peered through Tammi and locked on Jeff. “John’s dead,” she mumbled.

“You can talk to Jeff but you can’t talk to me?” Tammi tried to snare Monique’s brief and precious attention, but the other woman put her head down and shambled on. “We’ve been friends for a lifetime. Doesn’t that mean anything? Are you envious of me because I’m not crippled? Are you so goddamned old and so goddamned petty that relationships come second to your arthritis?”

Slide-step-slide-step. The automated chair spoke up in its tinny voice. “I can tell by your pulse rate that you’re tiring. Wouldn’t you care to sit down a moment?”

“Stuff it,” Monique replied.

“Please,” Tammi whispered. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. “I have to know, Monique. Think back on it. Do you remember being nineteen again, when you and Kevin and Mike were standing in our apartment breezeway? Do you remember an old lady being there?”

“I remember,” Jeff said brightly into the banded glow which made the hallway look like a stepladder to nowhere. “I remember I was young. I loved the Beatles’ White Album.”

* * *

Tammi drifted through the dark waters of sleep. Faintly and far away came the sound of laughter. I must wake up, she told herself firmly, but she couldn’t. She drifted like submerged flotsam in a deep current.

The voices from the breezeway beyond were muffled under pressure. Her mind tried willing her body out of bed, but only her mind obeyed. She got up, rising, like thick fog, never once feeling the touch of the blankets, not sensing the carpet or the ache of her sagging body on the weary bones of her feet.

In the next room was a buried-alive dark, a mud-thick blackness that clogged her nostrils. She paused, listening to the faint whoosh-whoosh of someone breathing near her shoulder.

A quicksilver fear wriggled through her. Turn, her fright whispered. Turn around and see what’s there.

She didn’t turn, though. She never did. Instead, as always, her terror and the Pied Piper music of the voices lured her on.

In the lighted breezeway the night air was cool and smelled of silt. Monique stood beneath a yellow bulb, her body straight and tanned and young. She was dressed in a hideous tie-dyed shirt and faded bell-bottoms, the flanged denim legs bedecked with flowers. Next to her lounged Mike, a Lazarus in cut-offs. And nearby Kevin stood smoking a joint.

“So I was like tripping out, you know?” Monique continued after giving Tammi an incurious glance. “So I was going to make breakfast, but I never did, because I started looking at this egg. It’s Iike everything that ever was was all closed up in this egg. And I was turning it
around and around and everything, where I could see all the little bumps and all, and it hit me, this kind of Carlos Castaneda thing, that the egg was the earth. It was like—Wow, I don’t know.”

Kevin hitched in a breath and passed the joint to Monique. Before she took a toke, she went on with her story. “So, anyway, I left the tie-dye in too long.” She gazed down at her shirt in wonder. “And it’s like there was this message left on the shirt, you know?”

“Heavy,” Mike agreed. He cast a longing glance at the joint. “You gonna take a hit or what?”

Monique pressed the dwindling roach to her lips and sucked in air with the smoke. Holding her breath, she passed it to Mike.

“Puke,” Tammi said, eyeing the tie-dye, pattern critically. “The message must be puke.”

Kevin’s voice was ugly in a way only a young person’s voice could be. “Who invites the old bitch, anyway? I mean she’s like got this Nazi Storm Trooper establishment crap she lays on us.”

In the breezeway the wind died and the sweet smell of pot was strong. Through the smoke and the river smell Tammi caught the sour odor of someone’s unwashed clothes. Who stank? she thought. Then she dug into her grab bag of memories and came up with the obvious answer: Mike. She wondered how his poor hygiene had fared in the army the short four months before his helicopter was shot down.

“I’m Tammi Whitehead,’” she told them. Turning to Monique, she pleaded, “Come on, Monique. You know I am.”

“You’re not Tammi.” The girl looked quickly and furtively away. “You’re too old. Besides, Tammi’s at the library.”

Library, Tammi thought without surprise. During college it seemed she had always been surrounded by books, while Monique had been surrounded by people.

“And if you were Tammi you’d know my name was Starlight. Nobody calls me Monique any more.”

Tammi laughed an old person’s derisive laugh. “They called you Starlight until 1973, and then you put your tie-dye away and came to your senses.”

“Oh, wow,” Monique said morosely, flipping her wayward bangs from her’ eyes. “She always says things like that, you know?”

Mike tweezered the joint between his dirty fingernails and passed it to Kevin. “So, what do you want to do tonight?”

“There’s a demonstration,” Kevin suggested.

Tammi spoke up. “You might want to study. Mike’s going to fail second semester of his junior year and be drafted. He’s going to die in Viet Nam.” Could the future be changed, she wondered? Would Mike escape war only to become a boring, Beamered yuppie like Kevin? Would he deify family like Monique, and become a worshipper of diapers and soured milk and report cards? She met their irate gazes.

“Mellow out,” Kevin said, holding the roach toward her face. “Have a toke.”

“We were so boring!” Tammi shouted. “All of us. So trivial. After seventy more years of living, the pinnacle of Monique’ s existence will be that she can make it down the hall of the old folks’ home more or less under her own power, Kevin will be down in Florida voting Republican, and Mike will be sixty-nine years in the grave. What’s the use?”

“I’m going to be a movie director!” Monique lifted a rebellious chin. “You don’t know shit! I’m going to direct documentaries about bigotry and racism!”

“No, you won’t, Monique,” Tammi said quietly. “You’ll get married and there won’t be time between the babies. After a while you’ll just forget. When you drop the burden because it’s too heavy, I’m the one who’ll pick it lip. I always have.”

Mike gave Tammi a lengthy, level stare. “I don’t know, man,” he said judiciously. “She just brings us down. That’s all she ever does. You got some more stuff on you, Kevin?”

Kevin set about rolling another joint.

“Kahlil Gibran says—” Monique began.

“Oh fuck Kahlil Gibran!” Tammi shouted. “Something important’s going on here! I think this is a dream, but sometimes I wonder. Do you remember my being here last night? Do you remember that?”

Monique’s face had shut down, and hard little lines had sprung up to either side of her mouth, lines that one day she would not be able to erase. She peered at Tammi through her long, blond bangs.