The Liars' Club: A Memoir (43 page)

The next morning, I brought a stack of old
Life
magazines I found in the back closet. Sure enough, Daddy could name a B-17 fighter plane and an M-1 rifle. On the maps, he could tell Italy from Poland, and he placed a shaky finger on the thin face of General Montgomery when I asked who’d pinned the medal on him after the Battle of the Bulge. He frowned at General Patton—“Riding crop. Mean-assed. Bad.”

But when I tried to steer him from those glossy pages smoothed across his bed tray to naming the implements on that tray, he lost it. “What do you call this, Daddy?” I held up a fork. He mimed eating with his good hand. “That’s right. You eat with it, but what’s its name?” He looked off to the side, as if some invisible straight man there could confirm what a bonehead I was. After a second, though, his head’s machinery must have started to scramble. His eyes tilted up as if he were searching for the right word. Meanwhile, in my own skull I leaned hard on the right word—
fork fork fork
—like a mantra. His eyes flashed. The good side of his mouth warped up in a half smile. “Bacon!” he said, as if some switch had been thrown. In my best nursery school voice, I said bingo, Daddy.

Being in that hospital room for half an hour at a pop took all I could muster. Not that I did anything else of value. Crawfish season had ended. My typewriter’s machinery was a well of dust. I went on a few awkward dates to cowboy bars with fellows Lecia and David scared up for me.

After one such debacle, I lay awake with a wicked case of the whirlies induced by tequila, resolving to devote myself to Daddy all day, to by-God master whatever it took.

Next morning, I tried shaving him. With his own daddy’s old boar-bristle brush, I lathered up his neck, which was leathery as a Christmas turkey’s. But my hand shook holding the plastic razor. It felt light and insubstantial next to his throat cords. My first stroke nicked him deep enough to draw blood; a thick drop
cut through the white soap. Daddy didn’t flinch at this. His breathing pattern didn’t quicken. Still, Mother had to finish.

Afterwards, I held my moon-shaped compact up to his face. He ran his good hand over his smooth chin. “Purty,” he said. The left side of his mouth twisted up in a sharp half smile. With the other half drawn down, he turned into one of those split masks, comedy and tragedy. “Purty goo,” he said. I left the hospital to buy a quart of malt liquor in a paper bag. Inside the cavernous movie cineplex, I drank this fast, then watched three matinees in a row. I sneaked from one theater to another, never paying extra, half daring the pimply young usher to turn his flashlight on me and ask for a ticket stub.

A few days later, Dr. Boudreaux came to stand on our porch in the purple dusk. He held his brown Stetson formally in two hands like a suitor with a box of chocolates. He had on a short-sleeved blue shirt going dark at the armpits. The neighborhood kids broke up whatever loud game they’d been playing to stare gaggle-jawed at Dr. Boudreaux while he wiped his feet on the mat before stepping inside. A real doctor was a thing to witness. They stood at the end of our driveway even after he’d come inside.

Suddenly, I knew that Daddy was dead, knew it by the train sound rushing in my ears and by the way the room suddenly telescoped, so Mother and the doctor got little.

No, Dr. Boudreaux said. It wasn’t that. Some folks might call death a blessing. He didn’t believe that was so. But anyway, Daddy wasn’t any deader than he’d been at suppertime. That was the good news.

It’s the money, isn’t it, Mother said. The insurance from the new refinery won’t cover the hospital. Or home nursing after he gets home.

You know if it were up to me, Dr. Boudreaux said. He paused and hawked something from the back of his throat. His hands were small and girly. He folded them in his lap. He said the union lawyers might be a help.

But Mother didn’t seem to be listening. She’d moved to the
door to shoo the kids away from their staring. They scattered like buckshot. She stepped back in.

Dr. Boudreaux said it wasn’t his decision. Hell, he’d treated plenty of folks on credit, times when a strike drug on.

Outside the kids divided into two teams for a game. You take Barbara, and we get Bob, a voice said. No fair, if we take Barbara, we get Bob and Robbie too, the other voice said. You cheating sack of shit, the first voice said. Then I heard a slap and the sound of two small bodies falling on the grass to the cheers of other kids.

You’ll never get a bill from me, Charlie, Dr. Boudreaux said. And then the doctor’s white Buick backed away from us like an enormous ship.

Next morning, the hospital called to say an ambulance was hauling Daddy home. Somebody needed to come down and settle his bill. That set Mother’s sarcasm loose in the beige phone receiver. (Etymology:
sarkazein
, to tear flesh.) She told the phone that the fucking ambulance could deliver Daddy buck naked to the aluminum lounge chair in the front yard. As for paying, Mother wanted to point out that debtor’s prison had been abolished long ago. They couldn’t get blood from a stone.

I’ve heard it said that caring for an invalid is like caring for a baby. And I suppose it’s the same basic deal, but a baby rewards you each day with change, sprouting a tooth or discovering that the object randomly waggling before its eyes is, in fact, its own hand. But an invalid is a hole you pour yourself into. Every day he fixes you with a glance more gnawed-out tired than yours, more hurt. If life is suffering (as the Buddha says), some endless shit-eating contest, then the invalid always wins, hands down.

Maybe real nurses grow accustomed to a sick person’s pain. I tried to ignore Daddy’s uncircumcised penis lying swollen along his thigh, plugged with a cloudy tube and red from the steady irritation.

One day when Mother was turning him to change his sheets, she found small red spots on his heels where they’d rubbed the
sheet fabric too long. Days later, the spots were water blisters, which eventually broke and started to ooze. Over time, those bedsores ate oval holes into Daddy’s heels nearly half an inch deep. His very bones were trying to cut their way out of him. Or that’s how the visiting nurse put it. She showed Mother how to pack the wounds twice a day with wormlike strips of gauze soaked in antiseptic and tamped down in the sores gently as you could with the back end of a tweezer.

Other bedsores broke out not long after, on his bony lower back, at the winglike tips of the shoulder blades. Just keeping those wounds cleaned out and dressed, and feeding Daddy, and fighting by phone and mail with the insurance company for various reimbursements kept Mother busy like I’d never seen her. Plus he messed the bed a lot, so there was laundry by the bushel basket every day.

But his speechlessness was the battle I was least fit for. If you’d been able to tell me unequivocally that Daddy had no more brain wattage than an eggplant, it would have been easier. Instead, I tended to feel around in his aphasia for signs of the old self.

“That was Lecia on the phone,” I said.

“Purty goo,” Daddy came back.

“She’s worried sick about their taxes on their motels this year.”

“Loooo,” Daddy said.

“You want some of this ice cream? It’s vanilla.”

“Bad bad bad.”

“It’s not that bad, Daddy. Try some. I’ll fix you a dish.”

“Yamma,” he’d say.

“Yessir, Mama ate some too.”

I couldn’t go on this way too long without making up somewhere I needed to be. I wanted to treat him with dignity—needed to do so, even—but his circumstances defied the only forms of dignity I knew. Maybe I was suffering from a failure of imagination: I couldn’t make up new forms of dignity unrelated to articulate speech or the body’s force. Plus Daddy could pout like a two-year-old. If Mother were trying to roll him over to change
his bed, and he wanted sleep, he’d clamp hold to the bed railing with his good arm and fight her.

Sometimes it even seemed he shit the bed on purpose right after, to get even. Surely that can’t be true. Maybe the air on his butt only motivated his bowels those times. Still, she often had to clean him twice in a row, while he crossed his good arm across his thin chest and sulled up, refusing to help.

The speech therapist who came a few times was equally clueless about how cogent Daddy might be. “I tell you, Charlie,” Harold told Mother over coffee one morning, “you need to learn some equanimity, honey.” He was a soft-spoken black man who drank his Sanka real blond and wore a ring that opened up as if for magic powder. His cyanide ring, he called it.

“Equanimity, my ass,” Mother said. “I can’t tell if he’s in there or not.”

Neither could I, which ultimately made me a piss-poor nurse. The one time I fed him all by myself, I nearly killed him, albeit slowly, and with none of the double-barrel grandeur of a real mercy killing.

I’d brought him a pint carton of shrimp gumbo from the Farm Royale. Those days, Daddy was subsisting on milkshakes Mother cracked whole eggs into, and small plastic cups of chocolate pudding. But the gumbo worked some voodoo on his appetite. Once I’d lifted the plastic lid, a curl of garlicky steam rose up. The gravy was thick and brown as bayou water, with a few plump shrimp bobbing under the surface, and translucent scallion greens and nibbets of rice floating at the edges. I imagined that steam forming a misty and serpentine finger that rose to tease at Daddy’s nostrils. His mouth popped open—pink and naked as a baby bird’s, for we’d long since taken his dentures out.

For nearly an hour, I shoveled that gumbo into him. He’d grind away till I told him to swallow, which he did with effort, needing water through a bendy straw to wash it all back. Then he’d nod for the next mouthful. Getting him to eat felt like a moral triumph, the way having a strange dog come wagging up to you
can make you proud, or how a random toddler choosing your knees to climb at a party can seem some innocent and, therefore, final testament to your good character.

I was scraping the bottom of the carton when I noticed one side of Daddy’s jaw swollen up like a squirrel’s. He’d been stashing away the shrimp he couldn’t swallow. He’d leaned his far cheek into the pillow to hide it. The ragged gray wad of shrimp I spied between his lips was approaching the size of a golf ball. I cupped my palm under his lip and told him to spit it out. He’d choke falling asleep with that in there, and his eyelids had already drooped to half mast.

In fact, while I stood there saying
spit
, he corked off entirely. His mouth lolled open another notch. The chewed-up shrimp had only to shift sideways about three quarters of an inch before his windpipe blocked off. I shook his shoulder: nothing. “Daddy!” I yelled; his eyes stayed closed, glued, sealed. I finally took aim with my index finger at his mouth’s breathing slot. Maybe he’d stay asleep, I thought, if I poked gently enough across his tongue, which felt warm and foreign as a slug.

Then he bit me. Even before his eyes creaked open to thin slits, he clamped down with his slick gums hard enough to hold me by that finger. Like some terrier who’d caught me snitching his biscuit. We stood that way a minute—my finger in his mouth, his black eyes glaring out with no glimmer of recognition. And when I grasped that iron-boned jaw with my other hand as you might grab a horse’s to force it to take a bit, his good hand wrapped around my bicep so tight that in the morning I found the bruised imprint of each finger.

Also the next morning, I overheard the visiting nurse asking what in God’s name had Daddy got in his mouth. But he just gave a loose-shouldered shrug, all the while staring at the wall like she’d lost her mind while she scooped the old shrimp out with a tongue depressor.

The only other evening I spent alone with Daddy I had to get drunk for. Lecia and the Rice Baron had taken me to their country club summer dance, where I’d stomped through the Cotton-Eyed
Joe with various doctors and insurance salesmen, intermittently downing whole goblets of a sinister rum punch. A fellow I called Gomez finally drove me home in a convertible black as the Bat-mobile.

Daddy’s eyes lit up when I peeked in on him. “Hey, Pokey,” he said, his words clear as ice. Then, “You fun?”

Mother had left the TV on with the volume cranked down. Why I’ll never know, for that summer the local station played nothing after midnight but reruns of old dog races. The old tube spilled out an aquarium-blue light.

The whippets were pale and lizardy. Their spines sloped down from high haunches, which left the impression that they had spike heels on their back feet. They were being corralled into individual starting pens while I watched. It depressed me no end, I told Daddy. Not only did a whole slew of other people know the outcome of that race before we even saw the gate fly up, but the dogs themselves were probably long since dead. Daddy puckered his mouth into a sour pinch that said he knew exactly what I meant. Those dogs were deader than doornails, I told him, dead or else lying before somebody’s gas heater farting up a storm. He nodded his head like it made him tired to think.

Daddy’s face had shrunk. All his skull’s hollows—temple and jaw and cheekbone—held shadows the color of shale. Maybe I nodded off. Maybe I was woozy and drunk enough to hallucinate over Daddy’s face a death’s head, but for a split second that’s what I saw in his pillow’s trench. Then he sneezed, and I said bless you, and he was back to himself.

I pushed the button to shut the TV off. The picture shrank to a little blue star that hurtled backwards through the swampy dark.

Then I started shuffling through a shoebox of cassette tapes on the floor till I laid hold to the one with “Pete Karr” on the label in red Magic Marker. I wanted nothing so much as to hear Daddy tell a story, to unreel a story in my head like so much sheer, strong fishing line casting me back to times I’d never lived through and places I’d never been except courtesy of his voice.

I held that tape over the aluminum bed rail, in what I guessed was Daddy’s line of sight. “You remember this?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. He grinned on half his face and gave a sharp nod.

“Mind if I play it?”

“Gone,” he said, which I took to be “Go on,” as in, “Go on ahead, honey, and play it if you want.” I popped it in, then pressed the rectangular button so the brown tape started turning.