Truants (16 page)
**************
Sunday was visiting day and Jay was all over the place, all over everybody. The residents expecting visitors were wheeled onto the unfinished front porch, where, in the heat and fresh air, their relatives could breathe a bit easier about how salubrious Blue Mesa really was. Jay would roam around, touching everybody, his arm over a shoulder, smiling and saying nicknames. He’d kneel by the chairs and wave his hand at the beautiful and desolate distance, explaining his plans for finishing the railing on the porch and completing the cement work on the ramp. Then he’d move through his practiced frown about how expensive everything was. He would end with a beatific smile, while saying that
care
and not money came first and at least we had God’s world, God’s air, desert, sand, ten thousand sagebrushes, and four mountains in which to spend these Golden Hours.
During the visiting hours, Leonard and I stirred great quantities of cherry Kool-Aid to soothe the crowds. Actually, there was never a crowd. Three people received visitors. One of them was an old Indian woman, the woman who sang so much in the recreation room, and her entire family—young and old—came calling. They stood around the porch, her daughters stroking her hair, her grandchildren standing at her knees drinking the Kool-Aid, her sons-in-law waiting in their pickups for the hour to be over.
At noon every Sunday, Dick’s wife would come. These were the visits I dreaded. During the week in his lucid moments he would tell me there was someone he wanted me to meet, but Sunday he would half forget and get me on the porch, then forget me and forget his wife; the two of us would stand and smile idiotically at each other. Louisa was magnificent; she would kid Dick until he fired up. And if he didn’t know us, at least he knew how to bitch and moan, which seemed regular and made us all feel a lot better.
But when she’d leave, Dick would spend the rest of the day and a portion of the night, if he could hold up, crying: “Lola! Lola!” You could hear it all over the house, even up in my room.
You could also hear Cotton screaming, “Make the bastard shut up! Make the crying bastard shut up! Nurse!”
Diversions were no good when Dick was crying “Lola!” I tried reading the paper to him, and it would work for a paragraph or two, but he’d still cry.
We were all grateful when the cries would wind down to moans, as moans led directly to the troubled snoring, which meant Dick was sleeping his way toward another week. He’d start snoring, and Ardean would come in and wipe all the goober off his face the way you erase a blackboard. It was a wonderful gesture that meant to me that we’d all survived.
I only remember Jay being there once during the “Lola” session and he stormed in and out in a second, hollering for Ardean to give Dick a shot.
Our third and final Sunday at Blue Mesa, just after Dick’s wife left and he began his lament, I braved the interior of the recreation room, the site of the Phantom’s last sortie, mainly to lose myself in a high-volume television show.
Vampire Men of the Lost Planet
was on and I turned it way up and sat inches from the screen. As usual, no one else in the room noticed. It was, I grant, a peculiar form of solace.
Just as the U.S. rocket ship was landing on the lost planet, a wheelchair pulled alongside me. It was Will. He smiled at me as if he knew what kind of hiding I was up to.
“Lola! Oh, Lola!” came the cries. “Lolalolalo … la!”
“He must be awfully lonely,” Will said.
Keith Carradine leaped from the spacecraft into the jungle of the lost planet. The vampire-men bore a strong resemblance to roving groups of the unemployed.
“It’d be almost better to have no visitors at all,” I said. Will gave me an ironic look and turned his hand out to indicate the room. I looked around us. The old people sat in compressed postures throughout the room. Listing and twisted in their chairs, they seemed randomly arranged. But there was a common focus to the room; this was not a random sit-in at all. They all faced the door. The Boxer, Boyd, in his slanted chair which only ran in circles, leaned toward the door. Even the Mayor stared darkly at the door. In one way or another, they all knew it was Sunday. They all anticipated something. Someone.
Somebody might visit
.
The scene took the heart out of the vampire men and their lost planet, and I turned off the set.
Something is fundamentally wrong in a place where I am seeing only the beginning to all these movies
. I shook my old head.
“See,” Will said. “That man crying
Lola
right now is the luckiest man in the house.” He still smiled.
“Maybe,” I said. Then I looked in Will’s bright face, at the comb furrows in his thick white hair. “Why are you here?”
He looked at me, narrowing his eyes as if he were going to ask, “Doesn’t everyone have to be someplace?”
I changed my emphasis: “Why are
you
here?”
“I
forgot
,” he said. He was conning me, and the shadow of a smartass smile rose from his face.
“Come on.”
“No. I forgot. Where I was. After my wife, Elizabeth, died, I got lost twice driving home from work. Police. Robbie, my son. The whole joke. I couldn’t remember. Then one day I went out to plan a pool and I lost it all: my way, the car, my name. They found me—I’ve been told—two days later in a schoolyard. I don’t know. I didn’t really come back until I was at home, four, five weeks later. I don’t remember any of it. Frostbite.” He held up his left hand.
“Bruises. One shoe. The whole joke.” He laughed. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember the hospital.” The smile flew and he looked at me honestly: “If I could have remembered it, any of it, I would have held on. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair to the kids. They were calling all the time to see how I was, I mean at night. And I found Robbie following me to work. It wasn’t worth it. They’d say, ‘How ya doing?’ and it all meant: ‘Do you still know who you are?’
“The doctors said I have organic brain disease … periodic. So, I chose this … Meetings with the Mayor, cards with Leonard, advice to the kids.” He laughed again. “Oh, not this place first. I was formerly at
the
Camelot Manor, but since it doesn’t really matter, and since this place is so much more … economical, I came out here.” He nodded as his story ended and he snapped off a little affirmative smile.
“And now I remember everything.”
“So do I,” I said. “I remember wanting some coffee. You?”
“Good idea.” And then he added: “Organic Brain disease. At least it was organic.”
“At least it was your brain.” I started to wheel him into the kitchen, but he nodded me off and wheeled himself. He passed through the door ahead of me, and I turned to all those faces in the recreation room. Will went on ahead.
“There is no one coming,” I said into the room. No one moved. Before I could repeat myself, cupping my hands in a megaphone to announce:
Please, listen, there is no one coming to visit today
, I reconsidered. Sunday comes once a week. With hopes, they get only disappointment; without them they get nothing. And nothing is worse than nothing. If you follow. At the time I did, and I turned and followed Will into the kitchen.
*************
In the kitchen, Leonard was rinsing out the Kool-Aid vats.
“How’s the best cook in the Badlands?” Will said.
Leonard waved and went on with his work; they were old friends. Louisa and I had seen them talking in the kitchen late at night many times.
I made the coffee, only wanting to get away, only wanting Dick to stop his yelling. When we three were sitting at the table Will asked Leonard, “How about a spot?”
Leonard rose and pulled a bottle of Old Crow from under the sink and poured a generous dollop into Will’s coffee and his own. He looked at me and I accepted a shot as well.
“Through the day!” Will said softly as a toast, adding: “Preserve us.” We drank, the coffee darkly sweet, rising to my eyes instantly. The first heady thought I had was that we were 175 years old, three of us drinking Irish coffee in the desert.
The longer I sat there drinking cold coffee and warm whiskey, the more I wanted to drive the van into town and pick up a load of strangers and bring them out here to “visit” everybody. But then a better idea struck.
“Let’s go for a ride, Will. You ready?”
“Sure; anywhere … one way,” he laughed.
“No,” I said, getting up. “Get ready. We’re all going for a ride.”
I found Louisa with Cotton and Dick. Dick was still crying, singing “Lola!” and Cotton was fussing like a wrestler, trying to reach something so he could hit Dick. Louisa was wiping Dick’s face and talking to both men at once.
“Hey, everybody!” I said, loud enough for Dick to hear. “We’re going for a Sunday drive! Get dressed.” Louisa looked at me.
“We are,” I said to her. “The whole Blue Mesa is going out. You get these two guys ready, I’ll get the rest.”
So with only a few complaints we wheeled the residents out of the twilight zone and into the sunlight, loading them into the van. After we had lifted each inside, I folded the wheelchairs on top of the van in what was becoming a reasonable facsimile of a chromium dinosaur skeleton.
It was quite a busload. The passengers sat five to a seat, easily, their skinny rear-ends barely touching each other. We strapped them in, and I got into the driver’s seat. Ardean walked around the van making sure everyone was secure. Louisa sat between me and Leonard in the front, and Will sat between Dick and Cotton to prevent their quarrel from becoming physical.
As we eased out the drive, I turned to the assemblage and said, “Now behave, everybody. We are going to have fun.” Several people were looking out the windows.
During the whole process of overloading the van, Leonard had been whispering, “Lot of trouble, lot of trouble.” Yet I took it as a token statement because he seemed the most eager to go.
We drove through Kingman twice, which isn’t to say a lot, and finally selected a recently white-washed bar-café on the other side of town. What attracted me to it, besides the bright facade, were the words “Raul and Theresa” painted in a red arc over the door.
Unloading took a while, but we all helped each other, and soon one by one these new patrons of Raul’s and Theresa’s wheeled themselves through the door. There were only two cowboys in the place, so I hollered, “Drinks on me!”
Raul, I guessed, was behind the bar, and he emerged to watch the spectacle of our entrance. At first he looked worried, as if he’d been taken over by motorcycle gangs before, and he called a name in Spanish which I didn’t know. Soon we had Theresa, her black hair cut criminally short, moving through the traffic taking drink orders.
Raul and Theresa were brother and sister and the tavern was their fortune. Will and Raul talked at the bar a long time. Will knew a lot about the business of running a bar. Louisa had Leonard and some other folks in a pool game, and those in wheelchairs, it seemed, used their lower line of view to an advantage.
I had to keep a close eye on Dick. He’d had a few and his residual oats had risen. He scooted around in his chair for a while, copping a hundred feels with his good hand, grinning an irresistible half grin. Then he settled down and began smoking cigarettes with incendiary zest. I had to be alert to pinch the butts out before they guttered in his lip. Two did, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Brent and Eleanor sat in a booth alone. Dwarfed by the red Naugahyde in that dark room, they made a romantic picture. He drank brandy and soda, and she deferred like a school girl and sipped a Tab. Blatantly they were out on a date. When I saw the way Theresa fussed over them, I was glad to have selected this nightspot.
Later, I joined Will and Raul at the bar. “I was telling Raul about the time I took the Scouts fishing,” Will said.
“The Boy Scouts?” I asked, signaling Louisa to come listen.
“Cubs. The little guys. I volunteered to take the whole pack up in the mountains. This bottle of rye whiskey reminded me of it.”
“It was some trip. As we hiked up the trail one of the kids spotted my flask and asked what I had in my hip pocket. ‘Snake-bite medicine.’ I told them.”
Raul agreed. “Snake-bite medicine.”
“That’s right. Well, it was a rough trip, because every time we crossed the stream, one of the Scouts would dunk himself. We’d have to stop while he changed clothes. Then, when we finally got to the fishing, and I had them strung out along the bank, there was more gearing up and baiting hooks and fouled reels than I’ve ever seen.”
“It was frustrating,” Raul added.
“You bet. I took more than one nip! But the worst was yet to come. The Scout in charge of the worms tipped them all into the stream. Gone! Can you imagine. There must have been some well-fed fish downstream!”
Will sipped his drink and reached out to Raul’s shoulder.
“I sat on a rock and took another long slug on the bottle. One of the squirts asked me if I’d been bitten by a snake! They all wanted to know what we were going to do. So I told them to forage around the meadow and see if they could find any crickets or something for bait. I just wanted them out of my hair so I could pull on that flask.
“Well, Raul, a minute later a kid came running up all excited. Everybody gathered around. He had a small water snake with a frog in its mouth.”
“Bullshit!” Louisa said.
“No! He wanted to know if we could use the snake for bait. Well, you can’t use snake, but I told them we might be able to use the frog if we could get it away from the snake. But the little bugger wouldn’t let go. I was going to give the whole thing up when one of the kids said, ‘Use the snake-bite medicine!’
“Oh, boy, I opened the flask and splashed a shot onto the snake’s snout. I hated to waste that whiskey, but, Jesus! He spit that frog out and raced away. Well, we cut the frog up and had some dandy fishing.
“Then the kids wanted to find another frog, but I knew our chances of that were slim so late in the day.” Here Will frowned and shook his head. “Well, what do you know? Just then I felt a tap on my leg, and I looked down expecting one of the little guys to show me his haywire reel. But lo and behold, it was that little snake again!”
