The Truth About Death (23 page)

Failure to claim prize will result in loss of your cash award. Company is not responsible for unclaimed cash awards. There is no entry fee or purchase necessary to claim your award.

But in fact they wanted him to buy some perfume, real perfume, not cologne or toilet water. Perfume that cost two hundred dollars an ounce in fine stores in New York and Paris, but which he could buy for only five dollars an ounce: Chanel No. 5, Opium, Melograno, Joy, Aramis. They came in
different-shaped bottles, but it was hard to tell how big they were. Zen was shaped like a bowling ball. Aramis looked like a pint of whiskey.
Aramis,
Rudy thought.
He was one of the three musketeers, wasn’t he?

You didn’t have to order any perfume to enter the sweepstakes, or claim your prize, but they made it very difficult for you if you didn’t. You had to cut out your computer-printed number from one place and paste it on a three-by-five card, and then you had to cut out other bits of information from other parts of the official form and paste them on different parts of the card. And you had to cut out the “
NO
” paragraph from the lower left-hand corner of the Grand Prize Claim Document and affix it to the card too. There wasn’t enough room; and if you didn’t have them arranged in a certain way, you would be disqualified. You were also disqualified if you used staples or cellophane tape. In the end Rudy decided to order some perfume: presents for his daughters, Meg and Molly and Margot; and one for Mrs. Johnson, the cleaning lady; one for Mrs. Lake and another for Miss Heckathorne, the secretaries at the Agostino Co. Anyone else? That was six bottles, all different: Joy, Opium, Seduction, Chanel No. 5, Aramis, Diva. He wrote out a check for thirty dollars and then had to tear it up because he hadn’t allowed for postage and handling, another $3.95, per bottle! What the hell!

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A quarter of a million dollars. What would he do? He wasn’t sure. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine. He could get to the feeling he’d have right after he’d opened the letter telling him he’d won, how he’d hold himself together, not tell anyone but the dogs for a few days, just riding high, till he’d gotten used to the idea. And then he’d tell Gus Agostino: “Gus,” he’d say, “looks like I’m going to be leaving.”

“Rudy, what’s the matter?” Gus would ask, concealing the extent of his interest behind a cloud of cigar smoke. “Where you going to go?”

“I was thinking about Florida, Gus, or Southern California, or maybe Texas; get myself a little spread of my own, maybe a hunderd acres, hunderd an’ fifty. Run things my way.”

“Rudy, that’s great. You won’t forget us, will you?”

“Of course not, Gus.”

Why should he forget Gus? Gus had given him a job when he’d needed one.

When he was a boy he used to have daydreams like this—waking fantasies—about women, about success, about how everyone would be forced to acknowledge how extraordinary he was. But he’d thought that when you got older, when you grew up, you wouldn’t do that anymore. Now here he was, no better than a kid. It wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years that his dad or his mom might have had thoughts like that. He could see his dad, standing in the door of the empty packing shed, looking out at the empty trees. Three years in a row they lost the entire peach crop during the Depression. What was his dad thinking to himself?

“Well,” he’d say, “looks like you and me can eat the whole crop again.” And they’d wander up and down the rows, looking, and find maybe three or four peaches. But what had he been thinking, imagining, dreaming?

And his mom, her hands up to the elbows in soapy water, looking out the kitchen window. What had she been looking at? The pump? The packing shed? Or something beyond? What had been
her
heart’s desire?

The letter from his nephew in Africa was a birthday card. “Dear Uncle Rudy,” it said,

I meant to get this off in time for your birthday but didn’t get around to it. Everything is chaotic, and in fact I’ve been down with a parasite found in the water here called Giardia, so now I drink bottled water only, which is a nuisance.

Deedee and I sold the house and moved to Switzerland for a year to learn French, and then to East Africa and who knows how long we’ll be here. Switzerland is beautiful, the natives are friendly, but it’s very expensive. One of the most expensive places to live in the whole world.

The way things are going it seems to me the Lord Jesus Christ is coming very soon, any minute. I fervently hope so. This is a very wicked world these days and I wonder at God’s patience with humanity.

I hope you had a nice birthday and will have a good year.

Lovingly,
Gary and Deedee

There was some literature from Gary and Deedee’s employer, the Christian Bible Institute, an international organization dedicated to the task of translating the Bible into every single language in the world, including Kikuyu, and a request for support. Rudy crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage, stepping down so hard on the pedal that the lid flew up into the air. There was a lifetime guarantee on the container, and this was the fourth one Rudy had gone through in two years, though the last time they just sent the little catch that’s supposed to keep the lid from flying into the air.

What kind of a birthday message was that?
The Lord Jesus Christ is coming soon, any minute
? What got into people?

Rudy didn’t give another thought to Gary’s letter till two weeks later when he woke up at three o’clock in the morning
in a motel room just outside of Mission, Texas. He had a hangover and couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d drunk too much Lone Star Beer and eaten too much chili at the diner across the highway from the motel. His head and his stomach were churning, like electric motors running at different speeds, pulling against each other, and there was a neon sign that made a loud buzzing noise like a giant wasp as it blinked on and off, on and off, outside his window. It made you realize why a lot of people preferred Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inns, where there were no surprises, no crumbling tiles in the bathroom, no smell of roach powder in the closets. He lay there in the dark thinking,
What am I doing here? What on earth am I doing here?

He’d flown down to look at some property, an avocado grove. That’s what he was doing there. It had seemed like a good idea back in Chicago, but it didn’t seem so hot right now. A man his age ought to be thinking about retiring, not raising avocados.

He reached over and turned on the clock radio on the stand next to the bed. He turned the dial but didn’t get anything except a lot of static. There was lots of space between stations down here. He finally picked up a talk show way down at the other end of the dial, on the right. He started back toward the left and then reversed. There was an urgency in the slow Texas voice he’d heard that spoke to his condition. Something was wrong, really wrong:

“What we’re telling people to do,” a woman’s voice was saying when he found the station again, “is to stay home with their families, to read their Bibles, and to pray. That’s about all you
can
do at this point. Bob and I will be leaving the station at five o’clock to join
our
families. Until then, we’re here to take your calls.” She gave the number.

“Should we go down into the basement?” the next caller wanted to know.

“No, we think you should stay right in your living room. Going down to the basement’s not going to help you.”

Rudy switched on the lamp and sat up in bed. Another missile crisis, or worse—only this time it would be
LBJ
climbing into the ring with Nikita. He’d seen something about it in the
Corpus Christi Daily Herald
that he’d looked at in the diner:

U Thant Predicts WW III if US Doesn’t Leave Vietnam

but he hadn’t read past the header. This could be it. His last night on earth. The missiles might be in the air already: Titans, Minuteman-Is, Soviet
SS
-8s.
NASA
facilities in Houston would be a prime target. Mission Control. He thought he heard a siren, but it was only the buzzing of the neon sign. That’s when he thought of Gary’s letter again:
The Lord Jesus Christ is coming soon, any minute. I wonder at God’s patience with humanity.
Could this be
it
? Christ himself pushing the button, all she wrote, end of story?

Rudy was wide-awake. He had to go to the bathroom, but he wanted to listen. It took him a while to figure out what Bob and Helen at
KORK
101 were talking about: not a nuclear attack but the Second Coming, so he’d been right after all, in a way.

Momentarily relieved, he slipped on the Italian silk robe that his wife—same name as the woman on the radio—had ordered for him shortly before her death, and which he never wore except when he was travelling, and sat down on the edge of the bed. A former computer scientist working as a janitor at
NASA
, he learned from a news update, had secretly programmed the
big computer—the one that was keeping Gemini 9 on course—to determine scientifically the date of the Second Coming, which was going to be tomorrow at sunrise in Jerusalem. Eleven twenty-five
A.M.
, Texas time. Rudy went outside and got a bottle of Dr Pepper from the pop machine.

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of stuff when you’re sitting at the kitchen table thumbing through the evening paper, but when you’re two thousand miles away from home and you’ve got three bowls of Texas chili from last night’s supper still sloshing around in your stomach—nothing but shredded meat and jalapeño peppers, no beans, no tomato sauce—along with seven or eight bottles of Lone Star Beer, and you were brought up in the Methodist Church—even though you haven’t been to church in twenty years, except for weddings and funerals—it can be pretty upsetting.

What were you supposed to do in the meantime? That’s what callers wanted to know. They wanted instructions. Practical advice. Just the idea of the Second Coming was upsetting. People shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast such nonsense. Rudy was annoyed. But he didn’t turn off the radio.

The next caller was a woman named Marge from Hidalgo with a message for her husband: “Gene, please come home.” She was on the edge of tears. “I’m sorry. If you can hear me, come back.” Someone else wanted to know what Bible passages would be good to concentrate on. Helen suggested John 3:16–21, “For God so loved the world …”; Bob voted for the parable of the vineyard, Matthew 21:28–41. And then a mother from Kingsville followed Marge’s lead by trying to reach her daughter, who’d run off with a Mexican farmworker: “Debbie, this is your mom. Your dad and I’ve been prayin’ for you every minute of every day and every night. Won’t you
please call us right away, before it’s too late? We love you so much.” Sobbing. There was a call from somewhere in Mexico. Bob and Helen spoke to the man in Spanish. Rudy couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the man started to sob too—masculine Mexican sobbing, which was different from anything he’d ever heard.

Rudy finished his Dr Pepper. The calls kept coming in: husbands and wives, moms and dads, children too, all reaching out with the same message: Come home, or if you’re too far away, call us before it’s too late. We want to talk to you once more before the end. We want to tell you we love you; we just want you to hear it one more time; we just want to hear your voice.

Who were these people? What were they doing up at three thirty in the morning? Then it hit him. They were people just like him, listening to the radio because they couldn’t sleep, because they were lonely. Did they know something he didn’t know?

He got to thinking: What if it
was
the world’s last night? What would he do? If he called the station, who would be listening? His daughters? They were all too far away, and they wouldn’t be listening anyway. Besides, if he wanted to call them, he’d call them at home; at least he could reach Meg at her home. But what about Helen?

It was a foolish impulse, but he yielded to it like a man yielding to a sudden and irresistible temptation. He picked up the phone, dialed 9, and then the number of the station. It rang four times and then someone answered—not Helen or Bob but an operator who was taking the calls. There were three people ahead of him, she said, could he hang on? She took his name and put him on hold and he started to hear music, a song he hadn’t heard in years:

Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river,

my home lies O-O-ver Jor-do-uh-uhn.

Dee-eee-ee-e-eep river, Looord;

I want to cross over into campground.

It was a song the men’s chorus used to sing at the campground in Berrien Springs, where he’d gone with his folks every summer when he was a kid. He was thinking about the campground—the wooden cabins, unpainted and sagging, and the white porcelain chamber pots, and the men’s deep voices—when the operator told him he was about to go on the air, and then he was on, and Bob was saying, “Hello? Rudy? Hello? Rudy, are you there?” And Rudy, suddenly finding himself short of breath, said, “I’ve got a message for my wife, Helen. Helen, this is Rudy, if you can hear me, please call me. I’m in Mission, Texas. The number is”—he had to look closely at the phone to get the number—“Cyprus 3-5926. I love you. Good-bye.”

He hung up the phone immediately. He’d heard his own voice on the radio just a fraction of a second or so after he spoke the words, as if someone else in the room had been repeating the words right after him, and then Bob was thanking him and taking the next call.

Rudy went to the bathroom again, tied the belt of his robe around his waist, and went out for another Dr Pepper, something to clear the cobwebs out of his throat. When he came back in he lay down on the bed and nursed the Dr Pepper as he listened to the calls that kept coming in. He could hear the phones ringing in the studio, and a couple of times, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he woke up with a start, thinking that the phone beside the bed was ringing, that someone was trying to reach him. But when he picked up the receiver, all he
got was a dial tone. By the time Bob and Helen signed off and went home to wait for the Second Coming with their families, he was fast asleep.