The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  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 n
umber 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.

  The property Rudy had come to look at was an avocado grove about twenty miles outside of Mission. He picked up the real estate agent at an office on the edge of town and they followed the county highway to a place called Parrotville, where there was a general store and a couple of mobile homes and a fork in the road. The real estate agent, whose name was Barney, indicated the right fork, pointing with his whole arm, his hand held flat, vertical, as if he were giving himself directions. Barney was too big for the little Honda; his stomach rubbed against the dash; he had to spread out his knees and cross his feet over each other, and his head kept banging against the roof. But he didn’t complain. He filled the silence with his plans for golf courses, hospitals, retirement communities, condominiums—all the things Rudy was trying to get away from. But what bothered Rudy was that Barney seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what he, Rudy himself, wanted. He expressed himself in a quasi-poetic style: “It’s a great thing to live on the land,” he said. “There’s times of heartache and weariness, but there’s times of great satisfaction too. Be your own man, your own boss. Live your own life. See the sun come up in the morning, when everything’s still. Go out into the trees at night; hear them grow. See the fruit ripen. It’s like you’re part of nature, part of the great plan of things.” He spoke without looking at Rudy, who was looking in the rearview mirror at the trail of dust they were leaving behind them.

  Rudy had in fact felt some of these things, but he hadn’t put them into words. The words made him uncomfortable. Made the whole thing seem sad and pathetic, like putting a panther in a dirty little cage. Pretty soon the poor thing gets dispirited and just lies there. Something like that happened to Rudy. He was trying to recover the feeling that had led him to Texas in the first place, a feeling that he could only compare to spreading one’s wings, as if one were a bird preparing to take off and leave the world behind. But it was like trying to conjure up an erection when you’re tired and nervous and hungover and you ask yourself, What am I doing here? What on earth am I doing here? It really was pathetic, wasn’t it? An old man expecting that there was still some extraordinary happiness in store for him. And foolish. He had a job, a house, family, friends. His old life began to call out to him, to present itself to his imagination in warm, rich colors. Gus Agostino had been good to him. He would miss the South Water Street Market with its big awnings, the fruit and vegetables piled up on the sloping sidewalks, the hum of the rollers, the chuffing of the big trucks, the clatter of dice in Neumann’s Market Bar.

  He’d miss his house too, the polished parquetry—scratched by the dogs but still beautiful—of the dining room floor, with its shadow effects created by different kinds of wood; the butcher’s table in the kitchen; the eyebrow windows; the balcony; all the work he’d done—the new soil pipe, a downstairs bathroom, insulation, painting, the curved storm windows he’d built himself; Helen’s bookcases with their funny arches like the curve of some Italian bridge, he could never remember which; the bricks in the patio, which Helen called a terrazza; the grape arbor. All these things joined together and spoke in one voice: “You’ll never escape us. You’re rooted in this house. We’ll shelter you and your children and your children’s children. Love and work, that’s what we represent. Your history, your past is embedded here. This is where you belong. You can’t escape us now.”

  The previous owner of the avocado grove had died of a heart attack six months earlier, but his widow hadn’t cleaned out his office, which was at the back of the house. A window opened onto the grove, about three hundred acres. The advertisement had described the trees as “mature,” and Rudy had been afraid he’d find that they were past their prime, but they were in good shape, twenty-five to thirty feet high, alternating rows of Fuerte and Hass, well spaced. Rudy sat at the dead man’s desk, going over the records—irrigation, fertilization, crop production—which were kept in big cardboard boxes with orange backs with LETTERS printed on them. You sometimes see boxes like that in lawyers’ offices. Each one was marked NOV. 1—OCT. 31—the avocado calendar—followed by the year, starting in 1945.

  He could hear Barney talking to the widow, Mrs. Wilson, in the kitchen. They were drinking coffee, and she kept coming in to fill up his cup. Barney said she was considering several offers, but Rudy didn’t believe him. She looked anxious, eager to sell.

  Rudy had done his homework; he’d studied the Avocado Grower’s Handbook, gotten advice (much of it contradictory) from growers and shippers and brokers whom he’d done business with over the years. He’d brought a checklist with him, and he went down the list item by item: PCPs in the water supply, irrigation records, fertilization history, amount of allowable tipburn caused by the nitrogen in the fertilizer, production leaf analysis, chlorides and sodium in the irrigation water, the age and quality and type of irrigation system, the dollar returns per acre, market accessibility, labor, how much water was necessary to leach the salts out of the soil. He’d gotten a soil profile and a history of low-register thermometer readings in the winter from the Soil Conservation Service of the USDA.

  But neither the records of the grove nor the county agent nor the former owner’s widow could tell him what he really needed to know: would he be happy here?

  Out the window he could see a tractor pulling a wagon up the gentle slope of a hill; he could see the pickers on the ladders with their avocado shears; he could see the wagon silhouetted at the top of the slope. He put the boxes marked LETTERS back in order on the shelves, noticing, as he did so, a big Latin dictionary just like Helen’s.

  The county agent was talking to one of the pickers about halfway up the hill. He was pointing and gesturing. Rudy and Barney walked toward them, side by side. Barney was puffing. The county agent, who was collecting soil samples with a tube, was speaking in Spanish. Rudy listened. He thought he could almost make out what they were saying. But the soil samples weren’t necessary; he could feel the loose loamy soil under his feet. And he’d checked out the banks by the side o
f the road.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven seventeen. In eight minutes it would be sunrise in Jerusalem. He gave a little laugh that came out like a hiccup. He started to make a joke about the Second Coming. He wanted to tell somebody, anybody, about the letter from his nephew, about the radio program. But something stopped him, a counter-impulse. He turned and started to walk up the hill. “I got to take a leak,” he said. He wanted to wait it out alone. Not that he thought anything was going to happen. Not that at all. But he wanted to think for a minute by himself.

  From the top of the hill—not much of a hill, a kind of shallow bluff with a slight drop—he could see in the valley beneath him a river stretching from one horizon to another like a ribbon wrapped around the earth. A ribbon that hadn’t been pulled tight or that had worked itself loose. The Rio Grande. This was the Rio Grande Valley after all. The Rio Grande was the reason he wasn’t standing in the middle of a desert. But he hadn’t counted on it adjoining his property. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen. It was mud colored but shining too, a smooth surface reflecting the bright sunlight. He was so overwhelmed that he forgot for a moment that he had to take a leak. He looked at his watch again. Eleven twenty-one. If you were going to wait for the end of the world, where would you want to be? The radio hostess had advised people to stay in their living rooms, but Rudy thought he’d found a better vantage place. He unzipped his fly and watered the ground, tracing a big R, for Rudy. Eleven twenty-three. Two minutes. He watched the second hand on his watch, sweeping time before it, sweeping the seconds away, describing by its movement a mysterious dividing line between past and present. It was a long two minutes; it was like waiting for an egg to boil. You sometimes feel there’s time to write a letter or read a novel or go out and rake the yard. Come on. But you can’t do anything about it. What would it be like? he wondered. The Second Coming/nuclear holocaust. Which would be worse? He had forty seconds left to think about it. His mind suddenly started racing, traversing his whole life—his wedding day, the births of his children, the death of his wife. And that only took up two seconds. He had thirty-eight seconds to go, an eternity. He counted them: thirty-seven, thirty-six, thirty-five, but he was too impatient. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the rental car. They were there okay. His wallet was okay too, but it was too fat; there was too much junk in it. He took it out of his pocket and checked the hundred-dollar bill he’d folded up and stuck in the section behind his credit cards. Seven seconds to go. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand, seven! Eight. Nine. Ten. Rudy waited another minute, just to make sure, before heading back down the hill.