Nancy Culpepper (19 page)

In the car, the radio plays “Hearts on Fire” and he sings along with it. Then Phil Collins comes on. Spence can’t stand Phil Collins, with his high-pitched yapping, like a pup fastened up in a shed. He turns the radio down. When he drove to the hospital that morning, his head had been full of intolerable imaginings—a funeral in two days. Now his relief empties out his mind, and he drives all the way home as if in a dream.

At home, a loaf of homemade bread wrapped in tinfoil sits on the deck, with a note, “From Hattie Goebel.” It is still warm. He stuffs the loaf in a kitchen cabinet, then goes out and cranks up the push mower. He mows the patch around the orchard that he missed a few days before. The mower needs oiling. It keeps sputtering. He’s proud of the appearance of his place—well cared for and not trashy. The new siding on the house looks good. After mowing, he reads the newspaper and tries to take a nap, but he can’t get to sleep. He gets up and puts on his boots and heads for the back field with a tow sack and a bucket and a shovel.

“Come on, Oscar,” he says. “We’ve got work to do.”

For half an hour, he works at transplanting the marijuana plants from the corn row over to the back edge of Bill’s land across the creek. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the Frost boys. Maybe Bill thought he was being neighborly, telling Spence about the plants when he might need help with his hospital bills, but it makes Spence angry. He doesn’t want a handout. He has never borrowed, and he has always made good on his farm. But the plants in his corn have been bothering him—not the risk, so much. He doubts if the law would find these few plants; they go after major offenders, and he could always claim the seeds strayed from Bill’s crop. And it’s not that he is being especially virtuous. There’s just something about growing them that seems out of character for him. Instead of being an outlaw, he would actually be in fashion, and he never wanted to follow the crowd. It would be like borrowing to buy a combine, or spraying his fields, or getting a credit card, or mortgaging his house—getting in deeper and deeper, like everyone else. He felt helpless when Nancy lectured him about the plastic bottles, but at the moment he feels he can do something. He can imagine the whole farm planted in this stuff someday; it could take over, like jimsonweed and burdock. But not yet.

He waters the plants with buckets of water from the creek. He props a drooping plant against a cornstalk. Oscar, wet and muddy from splashing in the creek, flops down at Spence’s feet, spraying water on him.

“Oscar, you sure love to work, don’t you, boy?” Spence says, pulling a cocklebur from the dog’s shaggy chin.

Spence walks back to the barn in a state of suspension—the worst over but an air of uncertainty remaining, like waiting out a drought.

After feeding the calves, he eats a bowl of cereal and a piece of baloney and drinks a glass of milk. The news is on. He washes his teeth and runs the dishwasher. He waters the hanging plants on the deck. He feeds Abraham a can of turkey and giblets. Spence dreads calling the preacher.

When he returns to the hospital, Lee is waiting for him in the lounge.

“They moved her to the fourth floor, to the intensive care ward in the heart unit,” Lee says.

“What’s wrong with her heart?” His own heart somersets.

“Nothing. They just didn’t have enough beds in the main unit.”

“Oh. You liked to scared me there for a minute.”

They crowd into the elevator. There is a hush and a giggle when three more people squeeze in. “The limit’s sixteen!” cries a nervous woman in lime-green pants. “Reckon it’ll quit on us?” someone asks. Spence squirms. “We’ve got too many overweight folks in here!” another woman says cheerfully.

In the corridor, Spence asks Lee, “Could you do me a favor and call the preacher?”

“What for?”

“He wanted to know how she was.”

“Why can’t you call him?”

“He makes me nervous.”

The walls of the fourth floor are painted shades of pink, light tones of blood, like blood you spit out when brushing your teeth. As they walk down the hall, Spence says, “Preachers have this act they go into—one for the sick, one for the grief-stricken, one for weddings. They just switch from one to another like they was dialing a TV channel. And then the bull they start in on is like those get-well cards.”

“That’s their job,” says Lee.

Nancy was right. Spence should have taught Lee to farm. If he spent some time out in the fields, he might have a chance to think about things and he wouldn’t make so many excuses. Lee’s always taking up for the wrong people.

Nancy and Cat are already in the lounge. “She’s doing fine,” Nancy says. “A nurse just told us she’s awake.”

Cat’s hair is swept up on one side and fastened with an old-fashioned turtle-shell comb. “Did you eat supper?” Cat asks Spence.

“Some cereal and a piece of baloney.”

“We went to that new Italian restaurant by the mall,” Cat says, making a face at Spence’s supper. “It was real good.”

“I don’t like Italian food,” said Spence, wrinkling his nose back at her. “Pizza. Ugh!”

“Heartburn City,” says Lee to Spence with a grin.

“We didn’t have pizza,” says Cat. “We had calamari.”

“What’s that?”

“Squid,” Cat says, eyeing Lee. “I’m surprised I had the nerve to eat it, but I decided to go for it.”

The waiting room of the heart unit is large and pleasant, with comfortable chairs and a huge television—a thirty-six-inch, Spence guesses. There is probably more money in heart bypasses than other kinds of surgery, he realizes. People with money probably have more heart trouble because making money is so stressful. The people with stomach problems on the second floor seemed poorer than the people on the fourth floor. A nun slips past the door, almost a hallucination—a penguin. Spence has seen very few nuns, except on TV, but once he saw a nun driving a tractor along a main road, and he puzzled about that for years, inventing histories for her.

He sits there, the music from a rock-and-roll program on TV going through his veins. No one else is watching except him and Cat. If Lila had died during the operation, he thinks now, he would hear rock-and-roll at her funeral. It would be in his head. Lee laughs at him for listening to rock music, but Spence doesn’t care. He doesn’t really care what people think most of the time. Yet he knows he couldn’t have that music at her funeral because of what people would think. If she gets through this illness he might take her dancing again—if his back doesn’t act up.

Cat says, “I’ve got this record. This group is great.”

Some long-haired group is swinging bright-colored guitars flamboyantly.

“Their hair looks like they’ve been rolling around in cow mess,” says Spence. Nancy has plunged into her book again, oblivious. “Is your book good?” he asks.

She nods. “Uh-huh.”

He should read more, but reading gives him bad headaches. Since he got cable, though, watching TV is an education. When the news shows people in a foreign country, you can tell what the weather is like by what they are wearing. His favorite show is
National Geographic.
He gets to see places he’d never go to—the ocean floor, the North Pole, Siberia, Australia. He loves seeing unusual animals from all over the world. His grandchildren are smart because of all they are exposed to on TV. Sometimes he is flabbergasted by how much they know. They know about dinosaurs, the Japanese yen, satellite communications—the most unlikely subjects.

At nine o’clock a nurse says, “Two of you can go in for ten minutes and then the other two can go in.”

“Come on, Lee,” Cat says. “Let’s you and me go first.”

They follow the nurse, and Spence says to Nancy, “She’ll be half asleep, on them tubes. She won’t even know they’re there.”

A moment later he says, “You’re right. I should have learnt Lee to farm.”

When Nancy and Spence take Cat and Lee’s places at nine-fifteen, Lila is awake but too weak to raise her head. She smiles faintly.

“Get out of that bed and rattle them pots and pans!” Spence bellows at her. “We’ve got to go milk.”

“Oh, shoot! I ain’t about to get up and go milk,” she says. “I’ve milked enough cows in my time.”

She groans and he keeps teasing her, while Nancy places a washrag on Lila’s forehead and gives her some water to sip. Her hair is tousled, and she has on no makeup. Tubes are taped to her wrist, and down her neck is the fresh wound, a long slash clamped together with metal staples. The loose flesh under her chin is pulled tight.

Suddenly Cat rushes into the room. “You’re missing Mick and Tina!” she says, turning on the small TV that extends from the wall on a long metal neck. She pulls the set toward Lila’s bed. “Mick Jagger and Tina Turner!”

“Oh, you don’t want to miss Mick and Tina!” Spence says to Lila, clasping her arm.

On the flickering screen, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner are dancing a sexy dance, each singing to the other in a taunting but strangely loving way.

“Look at ’em!” Spence cries, excited by their movements.

“I can’t see.” As she turns, Lila’s tubes dangle before her face. Spence pushes the tubes aside and tilts the TV closer.

“Look at ’em go!” he says gleefully, watching Tina’s heavy black body—her big boobs and long legs and wide hips. She’s wearing a black leather skirt and fishnet tights. She stomps around in high heels, with her pelvis thrust out. She’s like a pickup truck, Spence thinks. Jagger, in contrast, is a lanky beanpole. His big rubbery lips remind Spence of a cow’s screw hole.

“Who are they?” says Lila groggily.

“Mick Jagger and Tina Turner,” says Nancy.

Spence has a sudden memory—dancing with Cat to Ike and Tina Turner and the Ikettes on the radio. Cat must have been no more than nine.

“How can she be so sexy?” Cat says. “She’s no taller than I am and look how wide her hips are.”

Tina Turner turns Spence on, the way Lila does—Lila’s large, warm, sexy body. Tina is wearing a crazy Halloween fright wig. Her boobs shaking on the screen make him want to cry.

“Hand me that water,” Lila says. “I can suck a little ice.” Spence pushes bits of crushed ice between her lips and she crunches it. Then her I.V. unit starts beeping. The fluid isn’t getting through the tubes. Nancy fiddles with the tubes, but the machine keeps beeping.

“Where’s the nurse?” Spence says impatiently.

Cat goes to look for her. If Lila were a heart patient and the beep signaled danger, she could be dead by now. Intensive care doesn’t mean what Spence thought it meant. The nurse ambles in, punches some buttons and jerks the tubes.

“Just two of you are supposed to be in here,” she says.

“I’m leaving,” Cat says, but her eyes are still stuck to the TV screen.

The amazing thing, Spence realizes now, is that Lila’s color has returned. Her face is rosy and full, lighting up every blemish of her complexion, each freckle and age mark and wrinkle. Her face is restored, the way raisins plump up in water.

“Your color looks good,” Spence says, holding her hand. She moans a little, a seductive moan, out of place here in the hospital. He is too happy to speak.

He takes the washrag from Nancy and lays it on Lila’s forehead. She gazes at the TV. “Who are they?” she says.

And then an incredible thing happens. Mick Jagger grabs Tina Turner’s skimpy black leather skirt and rips it off of her and throws it across the stage. There she is in her fishnet tights and black panties, still dancing as if nothing has fazed her. Spence’s mouth drops open. “Did you see that?” he says.

“Uh-huh,” Lila says. “A colored woman showing her butt.” She tries to laugh and her hand goes to her throat, to the ridge of stapled flesh down her neck.

Lila’s color looks so good, her face warm and full like a ripe peach. The blood is flowing to her face again. He keeps gazing at her, and she says, “I’ll be glad when I get home and don’t have everybody staring at me all the time.”

Her words sound right. She’s not paralyzed. The stuff didn’t flow to her brain and damage it.

The nurse reappears, her arm bent so that her watch faces them. “It’s been fifteen minutes,” she says.

Spence squeezes Lila’s hand, and he touches her face. “Your color looks good,” he says. The nurse switches off the TV. Mick and Tina have finished their wild dance, and Spence turns to go. “See you tomorrow,” he says happily to his wife.

21

The airplane rumbles and shakes, the propeller whisking the dirt from the airstrip along the edge of Bill’s pasture. Spence holds his ears as Bill urges him to climb in. Bill has an oil-stained satchel with him— probably tools to fix the airplane in case it conks out in midair.

“Buckle up, Spence.”

“A lot of good that’ll do!” yells Spence, fumbling with the seat belt. He’s sitting in front, just behind the nose, and Bill is in back, with the dashboard and controls. This is like horse-and-buggy days, with Spence as the horse.

The takeoff reminds Spence of the stock car races at the fairgrounds. Somewhere, Spence heard that certain racing cars were so fast they had to have a parachute in the back to help them brake, and Spence figured it also kept them from taking off into the air.

The airstrip is bumpy with stubble. The plane buck-jumps. “Shake, rattle and roll,” Spence sings to himself, feeling a new meaning in that song.

“Here we go!” Bill cries as he points the nose up.

Spence is out of his head to go up with Bill. But it’s a joyride. Lila is out of danger, and she will be home on Friday, two days from now. The inspiration came to Spence at 3 A.M. two nights ago. He was dreaming about flying. Enemy planes were spraying the whole ocean with a deadly poison to kill the ships. He was in a Navy fighter, having to decide in a split second whether to live or die. In the dream, he was brave, as fearless and determined as those pilots in the war. He woke up, shaking with the horror of it, but he thought if you knew you were going to die, you should soar. It’s true, he realized. We know we’re going to die—sooner or later. He felt he had to go up in Bill’s plane then, to prove he could face the possibility of death as bravely as Lila had. Of course, when Lila hears about this little adventure, she’ll kill him.