September Song (22 page)

Then there came Kelly.

He was in a wheelchair being pushed by an airline attendant. From the knee down his right leg was gone. Across the arms of the chair lay a pair of aluminum crutches.

A bit of surgery he had told me he would be having. “A bit,” he said. I knew he was a lifelong diabetic, but you don't have a leg amputated for that. Or so I thought.

My words then came back now to mock me.

“Come out and join me on the road,” I said, “when you're on your feet again.” What he was on—ha ha!—was his last leg. And that was not all. What was left of him was the color of death.

Imagine shipping yourself out to a friend in that condition! What had I let myself in for? One thing was certain: we were heading nonstop for home. His home. I wanted him off my hands. He looked perishable. And I had already made my haul on this trip.

I had steered us through the tangle of lanes leading from the airport when he said he was tired from the flight and wanted to lie down. I stopped by the side of the road so he could make his way to the bunks in the back. Before going he asked, “Do you know what acetone is?”

On top of the rest he was wandering in his mind. What the hell did that have to do with anything?

I humored him. I said yes, I knew what acetone was. I had used it often in refinishing furniture.

“But why?”

“If you should smell that smell,” he said, “it's me.”

“What!”

“Yes. And it's a bad sign. If I'm giving off that odor on my breath get me to a hospital.”

I kept thinking about that for the next hour, my worries mounting by the mile, until, reaching behind me and opening the door to the living quarters, I called, “Kelly?”

From out of there came fumes you could have stripped nail polish with. There was no answer to my call.

I got him to Parkland Hospital in Dallas where, after coming out of his coma, he spent the next three days in intensive care, then was discharged. Into my intensive care.

Once installed in the van, Kelly took it over. He gave me a list of the things he was permitted to eat and the things he was not permitted. The first list included just about all the things I don't like and the second one all the things I do. But I couldn't prepare different meals for the two of us so I had to share his. He didn't like his diet any more than I did, so a lot of thanks I got for cooking and serving it. A cook whose every meal is greeted with disgust and eaten with distaste cannot be an enthusiastic cook. I have got a sweet tooth but he was forbidden sweets and I couldn't bring myself to have dessert while the poor devil watched me. No, he didn't want a drink before dinner. Or rather, yes, he did want one but he wasn't permitted. Which meant I couldn't have one either. Television to while away the evening? Try watching television when the person supposed to be sharing your enjoyment is staring off into the next world.

On account of his leg Kelly got the lower bunk. That went without saying. But though it was unreasonable of me, the way he took it over without so much as a by-your-leave irked me. All night long he snored. He didn't purr like a cat; he growled like a car stuck in the mud and digging in deeper and deeper. He might have apologized for inconveniencing me. He might have thanked me for my care of him. Instead he took all I did for him for granted and demanded more. Being an invalid, and the only child of old parents, he had been spoiled all his life. I learned that only now because I had never before roomed with him. I had to admit that he was like me in this regard: an old bachelor used to having his own way. Rather than agreeable, he was cranky. He had a way of making me feel I was to blame for all that was wrong with him. I tried to be patient and to make allowances for him, but when I reminded myself that he was crippled and sick I had to ask myself why then had he put himself off on me.

I would just as soon have had him spend his time in the bunk while I drove, but no, he sat in the passenger's seat looking straight ahead. I suppose he thought that as my guest he owed me his company. Some company! Not only did he say nothing, my attempts at conversation seemed to weary him. Try making a comment on the passing scene or a little joke: in response a grunt. He would not have been interested in my story of the Arkansas Chelsea china.

He slept late and tired early, and those big camper vans pulling a trailer just inch along, so our days were shortened and our progress slow. But when, to keep up his spirits, I said on stopping for the night, “Well, friend, we made a hundred miles today,” he gave me a look as though what I had left unsaid was, “That much closer to getting rid of you.” Which was not altogether off the mark, though I did not enjoy having it thought what with all the trouble I was taking for him.

In short, he was—pardon the expression—a pain in the ass. But then I guess there comes a time in our lives when all of us are. I reckon I owe that lesson to Kelly. If so I owe him this one too: when my turn comes I hope at least I will show that I know I'm a pain in the ass. That's little enough to do by way of compensation.

He being my guest, Kelly got first call on the bathroom in the morning. My wait for my turn was long, for, being handicapped, he was slow at everything. On one of those mornings, in Oklahoma, he was slow even for him. I disliked drawing attention to his disability, but after a while, thinking he might be needing help, needing it badly, for when able he was not shy about asking for it, I rapped on the door and called to him. I made his name a question, as though to say, “You all right in there?” I got no answer. I rapped and called again. Still no answer. I cracked open the door, then I flung it open wide. He was seated on the toilet. Again there was that odor of acetone in the air, but this time he was not in a coma, he was dead.

My cargo was perishable, my disposal problem pressing, yet for much of that day I moved no further than Kelly did. Meanwhile, my thoughts ran as counter to each other as the opposite lanes of a road. I traveled up one and down the other. Impatient as I had been with him before, it goes without saying that I was sorry now for the poor fellow, but I confess I was annoyed with him for putting me in this predicament. “Damn you!” I said. “Couldn't you have waited just a few more days?” I had a suspicion that he had known he was about to die on my hands and had kept it from me.

Something that had happened a couple of days earlier, and which at the time had both puzzled and irritated me, sent me searching among the dead man's effects. I found what I had an inkling I would. But first I found something I was not looking for. My suspicion was doubly confirmed.

What I found first was two unused hypodermic needles along with two full ampules of insulin. What this meant was that for the last two days Kelly had quit taking his vital medicine. I knew this because three days before I had asked how he was fixed for it. I was as concerned as he was that we not run out. He replied that he had two days' supply left. Seeing his end approaching, he had given himself a last little holiday from that first-thing-in-the-morning jab with the needle.

The second thing I found explained this. On that same day we were passing through a town when Kelly said, “Stop.”

“What for?” I asked.

“There's a lawyer's office. I've got a piece of legal business to attend to. A small matter. It shouldn't take long.”

“What legal business?” I asked impatiently. To me the only business we had was to make miles, get him back where he belonged.

“It's personal,” he said, and I felt corrected. True, I had looked after him, put up with him, but that didn't mean I owned him, could treat him like a child.

I drove as near to the place as I could get and he hobbled to the door. While he was inside I sat at the wheel fuming over this delay.

A few miles farther down the road he said, apropos of nothing, “I haven't got any relatives.”

That angered me. I thought he was appealing for my pity, of which I felt I had shown enough already, letting me know there was nobody I could put him off on, that I was stuck with him. What was he to me? He was not my brother nor was I his keeper. Once I got him home, he was on his own. He could well afford to hire people to look after him.

What he had been thinking of was that last will and testament he had just made at the lawyer's office, and letting me know there would be nobody to contest it.

When I found it I was peeved. Taken together with his discontinuing his medicine it meant he had suspected he was about to die on my hands.

The envelope was inscribed with its contents and with specific instructions to me, “To be opened on my death.” I did so, and I learned that he had left all his worldly goods to me.

What have I done to deserve this? That question is usually asked as a complaint against misfortune. I asked it because I felt undeserving of my good fortune.

Which, however, did not keep me from enjoying it.

The shop of my own that I had always wanted and could never have afforded was mine. I could give up this life on the road I had lived for so long and settle down in a real home for my old age, and with Kelly's money—my money—hire help to keep it. From now on the pickers could come to me.

I broke out a bottle and toasted my benefactor.

“Don't think that just because he had no family he was obliged to leave anything to you,” I lectured myself. “He might have left it all to charity or to his old alma mater.” My gratitude grew, and with it grew a sense of self-satisfaction, of my being a better person than I gave myself credit for. Kelly had seen me for what I was. You might say he had seen through me.

I felt good too about a resolution forming in my mind.

Kelly had been born and raised and had lived all his life in his home town. His parents were buried in its cemetery. True, even there he would have nobody to come and lay wreaths on his grave, still it was his native place, and maybe the townspeople, visiting the graves of their kin, might for a few years yet to come say on reading his tombstone, “I remember him.” Nobody in Oklahoma would. Getting him home dead would be twice as hard as getting him there half dead, but he had counted on me. It was the least I could to to repay him for all he had done for me.

Lifting my glass in his direction, I said with a lump in my throat, “I'll get you back where you belong, old friend. Leave it to me.”

I sat at the table looking at the will and those needles and ampules. Together they constituted the fortune I had come into and the means by which I had come into it. Talk about finds!

However, another drink shone a different light on those items. Through narrowed lids I began to see them as others might. I saw them as evidence on a courtroom table, exhibits A and B. There was sure to be suspicion of foul play. There always is where money is involved. And with me no kin to him. An inquest. An autopsy. Charges maybe. A D.A. running for re-election in a crime-free rural county and needing a little publicity for his campaign. Never mind that the body would show no marks of violence. It would also show no trace of the insulin he had injected himself with every morning of his life until the last two. Him crippled, dependent on me, my prisoner in the van, I could have killed him by withholding from him the medicine on which his life depended and inherited his estate without waiting for nature to take its course. Who in this rotten world of ours would believe that I had looked after him out of the goodness of my heart? Many an innocent man languished in prison. To suspect me they needed a motive.

There it lay.

A fine old house, itself filled with precious antiques, the shop, the land, money in the bank: all that was what I was burning as I burned that will. What the hell! I had never owned anything immovable anyway. And I was not suited to sitting in a shop listening to lid-lifters say, “My grandmother had one just like this.”

But how I did curse Kelly! Raising my hopes one minute only to dash them the next. My boozy talk about getting him home to be laid to rest among his ancestors came back now to mock me. I would turn him over for disposal to the first undertaker I came to and go on my way.

Then I thought, whoa! Bury him off down here with only my word as to the manner of his death? Sitting in there on the throne was the most precious object of my career. I had to get him back not to claim my reward but so as not to have it look as though I had done him in.

Meanwhile I too had to do what Kelly had been doing when cut short. I left him in place—no tampering with that solid piece of evidence—reached around him and tore off a length of the paper.

“Shit or get off the pot,” I said, but not aloud.

Out of sight in the woods I bared my ass to the elements, feeling put upon, inconvenienced, turned out of my own home. But when I squatted a change of heart came over me. Kelly and I were at that moment both in the same posture. Between us was a vital difference, but that was only a matter of time. I would get him home, and without complaining about it. He would do as much for me. I could thank him that it was the other way round.

I rose feeling relieved in body and soul.

Time was passing, not just by the hour but by the minute, yet to avoid troopers, roadblocks, checkpoints, I kept to the byways. Not only did this slow me, so did mapping my route, and time and again I got lost and wound up miles off course. How many herds of dairy cows ambling to the barn at milking time, udders swaying, was I held up by! How many farmers in pickups I got stuck behind! While I was still only barely in sight the natives in some of those parts looked up at me from their outdoor occupations as though I was the first pioneer to go by since Dan'l Boone passed through going the other direction.

Pressed as I was, I minutely observed the speed limits, though they are meant to be broken. To trap tourists they lay out stretches of twenty-mile-per-hour zones like strips of flypaper down there. In those hole-in-the-road settlements where the main source of municipal revenue is fines, the out-of-state motorist is stopped for exceeding the limit by one m.p.h. The officer will then gauge the depth of your tire treads (the local garage will sell you a new set, though there may be a wait), test your windshield wiper blades (ditto), your directional signals, inspect your driver's license, your registration, your insurance, then—what I feared—search your vehicle for drugs—even for contraband liquor in dry counties.