Nancy Culpepper (9 page)

Spence finishes the potatoes, gasses up the car, then drives to an auto-supply store to buy a windshield-wiper blade refill, but he can’t find the right length and he doesn’t want to buy a whole new wiper. He needs to get a tune-up, but he forgot to bring the coupon he clipped from the newspaper for a free one. He tries to calculate whether he would come out ahead if he went instead to that filling station offering the free case of Coke with a tune-up. But he doesn’t have time to fool with the car today anyway. Impatiently, he drives back to the hospital, the radio blasting out rock-and-roll. The music fits the urgency of his life. The music seems to organize all the noises of public places into something he can tolerate. The rhythm of driving blends with the music on the radio and the beat in his nervous system. Before the children were born, he and Lila used to go dancing at little places out in the country that people called “nigger juke joints.” They went to one across the country line where they could get beer. Lila never liked beer, but she loved to dance. He can imagine her long legs now, flashing white in the dark of the dance floor. He remembers a saxophone player and a blues singer as good as Joe Williams. The real music is always hidden somewhere, off in the country, back in his head, in his memory. There are occasional echoes of that raunchy old music he always loved in some of the rock songs on the radio.

At the hospital, he is forced to park in the last row. “Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones comes on the radio then, and he sits there and listens until it is finished. His family is busting out at the seams—like the music. He can’t keep track of what they are up to. When a plane crash is on the news, he’s afraid Nancy was on the plane. And Cat’s life is a mess. She married too young, and her husband had big ideas he couldn’t follow through on. He managed a hardware store, then opened his own waterbed outlet, but it failed. Spence told Cat the day Dan leased the store that waterbeds were filled with snake oil, not water, and she was mad at him for a long time for saying that. Lila tried to talk Cat into staying with Dan, but Spence is glad she got rid of him. Lila worries about Cat and the kids alone at night, with no man around the house, but Lila isn’t afraid to go gallivanting around the world herself.

When Spence’s mother died a few years ago, they were free to travel. By then, they had sold off the cows and weren’t tied down on the farm. Spence told Lila he was going to send her around the world. She begged him to go too, but he refused to go traveling with a bunch of old people, yammering about their ailments. “I ain’t that old,” he protested.

“But we couldn’t light out by ourselves,” she said. “We’d get knocked in the head and robbed. We’d get lost. On these tours, they take care of you.”

He was afraid for her to go off, but he wanted her to have the chance. Her first trip was to Hawaii, and at home alone he imagined her out on the Pacific, in a cruise boat that stopped at Pearl Harbor. When she came home from Hawaii, she brought a certificate for a hula-dancing course (three lessons) and some ceramic pineapples. “Did you get scared?” he asked. “Not a bit,” she said. “I slept good, had the biggest time of my life.” The airplane, she said, was big enough to play ball in. On her second trip, a bus tour out to the Badlands, she brought him a toy rabbit with antlers—a jackelope. It was a joke present, but she wouldn’t admit it, insisting she saw a jackelope cross the highway. After that, she went on two more trips, and when relatives commented snidely about how his wife was running around on him and spending all his money, it made him furious. He told them, “She took care of my mother for ten years, and she deserves to get out and have fun. If she wants to go to the moon, I’ll let her. I don’t care how much it costs.”

While she was away in Hawaii, his memories of the Pacific grew louder, more insistent. The sounds of the antiaircraft guns echoed and reverberated below deck, where he was an ammunition passer. Storms battled the ship relentlessly, slopping the decks and plunging and hurtling the ship like a carnival ride. In the dark, cramped quarters—stinking with B.O. and puke—he tried to sleep, but he thought about Lila, nursing the baby and helping his parents get the crops in. He could see her milking the few cows they had during the war, washing the milk cans. One calm, sunny day, he carried buckets of water to swab the deck and forgot momentarily where he was, imagining he was carrying buckets of milk from the barn to the house. Then a fighter plane zoomed down low over the destroyer to land on the aircraft carrier a few hundred yards off the port bow.

When Spence enters Lila’s room, the girls are reading magazines. The air-conditioning is cold. He’s in a short-sleeved shirt, but they are wrapped up in layers of clothes.

“We stole her cigarettes,” Cat says. “She had five packs at the bottom of her bag.”

Nancy seems smaller each time he sees her, while Cat fattens up like a Butterball turkey. Cat has on a wrinkled jumpsuit with buttons and zippers all over it, and a wide belt with three buckles, and several pounds of beads. Nancy has on a sweater and a jacket and baggy pants with buttons at the ankles. This is July.

“Where did y’all get them clothes?” he says. “The rag barrel?”

Cat lets out a giggle. “One of the doctors called us ‘honky Shiite terrorists.’ ”

Spence’s daughters have never acted their age, but in a way he doesn’t mind—they are still his little girls. He may burst into tears. Feeling a pang of heartburn, he sits down and grabs a section of the
Courier-Journal
from the floor. Too late, he thinks about the germs on the floor.

A nurse flies in and says to Nancy, “I’ll have to ask you to get off the bed, hon. It’s for the patient.”

“I was warming it up for her,” Nancy grumbles. She folds her reading glasses and slips them into a case.

“Y’all are always arguing with the doctors and nurses,” Spence says to his daughters after the nurse leaves. “Talking back to them.”

“Well, if we left it up to you, who knows what could happen to Mom!” Nancy says, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for her shoes. “She could get mutilated. A lot of doctors just want to operate because they’re enamored with their equipment.” Nancy situates herself on a spread-out newspaper on the floor. “Let me ask you one thing, Dad. If you were in the hospital hooked up to tubes and you weren’t even conscious, or maybe you were in excruciating pain—what would you want us to do?”

“I’m afraid of what y’all might have them doctors do to me.” Spence shudders.

“Well, maybe you ought to think about it,” Nancy says. “While you’re still in charge.”

“I’ll solve that one,” he says. “I just won’t go to doctors. You’re right about them anyway. They just want to work you over and take your money.” He folds the newspaper and drops it to the floor. He says to Cat, “I believe your mama is more worried about you than she is about this operation.”

“Well, I don’t know what to do about it. She didn’t see Scott laying on the ground that time. I thought he was dead!”

“He wasn’t hurt.”

“But Lee never should have let Scott ride that dumb three-wheeler. He was too little, and he didn’t have a helmet. Those things are dangerous, the way kids ride them all over creation.”

For a moment Spence sees Lila in his daughter. Lila swinging in a porch swing the night they married, her shoulder pads sticking out like scaffolding.

Cat goes on, “When I took Scott to the hospital, his fingers were numb—that’s a sign of concussion. There was a kid killed just last week on a three-wheeler. Didn’t you see that in the paper?”

Spence shakes his head in despair. It was an accident, and Lee was scared too. He says, “That’s not what I meant. Lila’s just worried about you—staying by yourself at night.”

“What does she want me to do—bring some guy home with me?”

The telephone trills just then and Cat snatches it up. “Yes. Yes.” She listens grimly.

“What is it?” Nancy says, motioning anxiously to Cat. “Is she O.K.?”

Cat nods. When she hangs up, she says, “The biopsy showed it was malignant, and he’s going ahead with the mastectomy.”

Spence’s stomach lurches. “Oh, no,” he says faintly. His heart is racing. Nancy says nothing. Cat picks at her nails.

“They won’t have her back up here till she gets out of the recovery room,” Cat says. “It could be hours.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Nancy says. “Let’s go do something.” She rolls her magazine and plunges it into her tote bag.

Cat, feeling for something in her purse, says, “I knew she had cancer when I saw her after she came back from Florida. I could see it in her face.”

Later, in the lounge, Spence spins through all the TV channels, but there are no ball games on today. The Cards are having a good season, especially with Joe Magrane, a Kentucky boy, pitching. Spence settles on a game show, but in his mind he sees her garden, with the corn growing full, and he sees her coming to the house early in the morning with buckets of vegetables. Her straw hat is set cockeyed on her head, and her blouse is damp. She bends over in the shade of the big oak and sorts through handfuls of shell beans, picking out some dried ones to save for seed. The cat twines himself around her ankles and she talks to him softly and sweetly, praising him for his morning’s exploits. Behind her, the soybeans stretch out like a dusty green rug. The soybeans have been invaded by grasshoppers, and Spence is afraid of losing the crop. He never had a problem with grasshoppers before he switched to one-crop farming. His neighbor, Bill Belton, promised to spray the beans soon. Bill has a little cropduster plane and won’t charge Spence much. He has been kidding Spence about going up in the plane with him, but Lila won’t hear of Spence going up. Spence has thought about it, though, imagining what it would be like to see the fields from up high, with the pond like a glass eye and the buildings like dollhouses. He has never been up in an airplane.

He goes to the rest room and washes his teeth. Some of the potato is under the upper plate and starting to irritate the roof of his mouth. Earlier, he was in such a hurry to get back to Lila’s room he didn’t wash his teeth. On the commode, he smokes half a cigarette. For the last several years, he has limited himself to two cigarettes a day. But he can’t stop Lila. She puffs away like the smokestack in the industrial park beyond the soybean fields. Sometimes he watches her puffing and sees the smokestack puffing simultaneously, and they are like coordinated events in his life, events he has no control over. He runs water at the sink over the cigarette butt and drops it in the waste can.

In the hall, he runs into Guy Samson, a man he sees often at the feed mill. Spence used to rent Guy’s bulls.

“Spence, have you got somebody here?” Guy asks.

“My wife,” Spence says, feeling himself tremble. “She’s being operated on. Breast cancer.”

“That’s tough, Spence,” Guy says, shaking his head worriedly. “My mother-in-law’s here now with cancer, and she’s real bad. She’s hooked up to them machines in intensive care.”

“They’re hooking everybody up these days.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Does your wife have to have cobalt?”

Spence shudders. “They haven’t said.” He knows that with cancer they will give her cobalt treatments, and he has tried to put this out of his mind.

“That cobalt is what I’d be afraid of,” Guy says, nodding his head sympathetically.

Spence is shivering in the cold.

“Take it easy, Spence,” says Guy as they part.

The word “cobalt” stung Spence to the quick. He has known people who had cobalt. Claudine Turrell lost her hair and was sick from radiation poisoning, like the Japanese after the bomb. Claudine finally died, after suffering for weeks. The same thing happened to Bob Miller and Clancy Stone. And Lila’s friend Reba died only last year, after several rounds of cobalt treatments. It occurs to Spence now that Lila has not even mentioned Reba, as if it would be bad luck to say her name. Lila visited Reba in the hospital and came home describing Reba’s bald head and skinny neck—a picked chicken, Lila said sadly.

The doctors would say, “These cobalt treatments might give her a little time.” There is no choice about it, really. There are no significant choices most of the time. You always have to do what has to be done. It’s like milking cows. When their bags are full, they have to be milked.

6

Lila feels a twitching on the back of her hand, like a fly that has landed, but she is unable to swat at it. Then she feels the tube hanging out of her hand. She eases open her eyes, sees blurred faces and machines with hoses—like the electric milkers they used to have for the cows. Her eyes close and she sees green beans setting on blooms again and okra poking up like hitchhikers’ thumbs. A volunteer sunflower has sprung up amidst the peppers. There is a burning in her chest, a smoldering fire in a woodstove. Something bulky is there, a heavy weight holding her down. She is too weak to bring her hand up to touch it. A TV set, somewhere near, seems to be playing a story about a woman’s best friend dying of cancer. The friend’s name is Reba, and they play cards and go fishing together. Reba is smart and has a giggle like a little girl. One day Reba finds a lump the size of a golf ball in her breast. She claims it came there overnight, but she is lying. Reba kept it a secret, hadn’t wanted to admit it was there. She had such tiny breasts, not like Lila’s large, knotty breasts. A golf ball could hide in Lila’s unnoticed. Reba’s hair falls out and she wastes away to nothing and disappears beyond the garden.

Someone wheels a cart into the room. Lila hears tinkling glass, the sucking of rubber soles, voices bubbling. The sound of the TV story has faded away. Outlines of people grow sharper, faces peering quizzically at her. Lila does not want them staring at her. She must look awful.

7

All the way to the hospital the next day, Spence listens to tapes of the Blasters and Fleetwood Mac that Nancy brought for him. The Fleetwood Mac tape doesn’t even sound like Fleetwood Mac. He wouldn’t have recognized the group. The Blasters remind him of Jerry Lee Lewis. Spence saw Jerry Lee Lewis on a special recently. He looked bad—old and worn out.

He dreads seeing Lila, so he has fooled around half the morning, delaying the trip to Paducah. In Paducah, before going to the hospital, he looks for a gallon of windshield-washer fluid and has to go to a couple of places to compare prices. He pays four dollars for it. Later, in the Wal-Mart, where he stops to look for that wiper-blade replacement, he spots the same brand of washer fluid on sale for two dollars. He has blown two bucks. It makes him mad. All the coffee makers and video games and electric ice-cream parlors in the Wal-Mart are depressing. People are buying so much junk, thinking it will make them happy. And then when they can’t even make a path across the floor through their possessions, they have a yard sale. Spence can’t stand to waste anything. His parents never wasted a scrap. “Always be saving,” Pap told his grandchildren. “Hard times might come.” Cat fought him, pitching a fit once over two shelly beans left on her plate. These days, with all the new money, everyone has gone wild. Around here, there is nowhere to go, so people either get drunk or go crazy—sometimes both. Spence knows a guy whose wife left him and ran off to Biloxi, Mississippi, with a prefab-home builder whom she later shot dead. After that, the guy had a nervous breakdown and was sent off to the asylum. The children went to foster homes. Spence can’t imagine what the world is coming to. Yesterday, the newspaper reported two burglaries in town—a holdup at an all-night food store and a break-in at an old widow’s house.