by Brad Barkley
SMOKE
BOTH envelopes dropped through the mail slot the same afternoon, just a day after I’d gone back to court to pay off an eighty-dollar fine I’d earned for collaring my exwife’s lawyer in the men’s room on the first day of our divorce hearing. I sat at the folding card table in my kitchen and opened the final notarized decree that made legal my broken-up marriage with Debbie. I took that paper and stuck it to the wall with a Bic pen stabbed in the sheetrock. During that time two years ago I was full of such acts, pretending for no one’s sake but my own that I could be a hard-ass, that none of it bothered me.
So here’s where I stood: I was thirty-five years old, coming off eight years of a marriage springing leaks I ignored until the whole thing was sinking, and as many years teaching geometry and woodshop to tenth-graders. I was done with school, didn’t care if the children could calculate isosceles triangles or build bookends, and so had made plans to abandon Winston-Salem, head south to Florida, and find a job wiring houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. In my heart this passed for a romantic gesture, which according to Debbie I lacked in abundance. I’ll show her, I thought, but really thought of a job that wouldn’t put me on disability if I could keep myself insulated and grounded. With that same Bic pen, I’d written on the wall, How much will bring her back? and beneath it kept a running tab of what I thought I could earn and what I might swing in the way of a house or a new car. I’d planned to just buy my way back into our old life.
The second envelope contained a quick note scrawled in pencil on a scrap of yellow paper, from Purvis Hoyt, my Uncle Eck’s roommate of seventeen years:
Your Uncle Eck has forgiven his cigarettes, Robert. This is not good, and I trust you’ll expedite a visit. Consummation begins when a man starts shelving old debts.
—PH
I had planned to visit the two of them before I left for Florida. Eck especially, as we hadn’t seen each other since my marriage began to crumble. Years before, on the day of my graduation from Konnoak Elementary School, my father tossed his clothes and golf clubs into the trunk of his Buick and left us, and a week later Eck moved in to help with the bills and keep the hedges trimmed. He practiced his fatherliness toward me like he was learning it through a correspondence course. He taught me to rebuild lawn mower engines and fishing reels, to smoke cigarettes the right way, to hold doors open for ladies. Evenings, we stayed in the basement of our house, playing poker. He filled those penny games with grand drama, calling himself Abdula the Turk, and me The Professor, for the tortoise-shell glasses I wore. I knew little about him that first year—other than he was my mother’s brother and he’d given up a job as a motorcycle cop to work in a factory—but growing to love him was easy enough that I didn’t have to think about it. He stayed with us until the year I started high school.
I read Purvis’s note again, and still it made no sense. I studied the neat ellipses of his handwriting. My Aunt Lily liked to call him a worn-out fop, and there was some truth to that, but I knew him, knew he wouldn’t lie to me where Eck was concerned. Before I went to see them, I picked up the phone and called Debbie.
“You again,” she said.
“I’m thinking of leaving,” I said. “Florida.”
“Last week it was Montana.”
“But I’m serious this time. I think I might really go.”
“That’s probably healthy for both of us,” she said.
“Especially for me. I hear the air is nice and clean down there.” Without meaning to, I put an edge on my words.
“You’re angry again.”
“Not again. Still.”
“Drop me a postcard,” she said.
“You could go with me, the two of us. Think about it for a minute.” She did, and then hung up.
Eck and Purvis lived in a cramped apartment at the Robert E. Lee Hotel, a room with browned window shades and a rusty sink, bars on the windows. The tables and shelves were covered with beanbag ashtrays, tiny globe banks, novelty soda bottles, and joke cigarette dispensers—dusty souvenirs that Purvis had collected during his years of traveling around wholesaling cardboard boxes. Old photographs were thumbtacked to the wall: Eck in his police uniform, standing in a snowstorm on the White House lawn, Purvis dressed for Halloween as Lawrence of Arabia. They’d been friends since the day Eck helped Purvis push his Dodge Dart out of a ditch.
“You come bearing your shield, Robert,” Purvis said as he let me in the door. “All debts paid, no shame in that.”
The smell of their apartment—cat food and boiled peanuts—erased the six months since my last visit. Eck’s ten-speed racing bike hung by its frame from coat hanger hooks looped over the curtain rod. Along the stained walls of the room leaned the knee-high stacks of books and magazines that Purvis collected—The Iliad, Popular Science, How To Win Friends and Influence People.
“You’re losing your hair,” Purvis said.
I laughed and ran my hand over my scalp. “My hair, my wife.” I wanted to be seen as the type who could joke about his troubles.
For his part Purvis looked the same, deep sun wrinkles and thick, white hair, eyes pale blue and bloodshot. He sported a tiny bow tie, and had about him the smell of cologne samples from magazines. He still wore the Empire State Building cufflinks on his yellowed shirt cuffs. I remembered when I would visit as a teenager, and he’d wink and point to one of the tiny windows, the fifty-fourth floor, where he said he once met Betty Grable on the elevator.
“Sorry to hear of your problems,” Purvis said.
“Where’s Eck?” I said. “What’s this about forgiving cigarettes?”
“Robert, I’ll ask you to sit down.” He took my elbow and led me to Eck’s army cot.
In the bedroom where Purvis slept, I heard Desdemona scrape against the door. Desdemona was Purvis’s pet goat, which he’d ordered out of a catalog. Purvis fed her cat food and beef jerky, the sugar cake he bought at Dewey’s Bakery. She was an oddball breed, a fainting goat. Startle her and she’d go down, her pink eyes shut tight. I took off my shoe and flung it against the wall and sure enough heard Desdemona slump to the floor on the other side.
“They’ve sequestered Eck in the hospital,” Purvis said. “His lungs.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Purvis?”
“Cancer. Black spot on the X-ray, black spot on your existence. Old story.”
Eck had smoked Camels since his days in Washington, where he had worked guarding President Roosevelt. During our basement poker games he taught me three rules for smoking: inhale deep, keep the tip dry, buy a new pack before the old one gives out. I remembered he would hold his pack of Camels up to the bathroom mirror to show me his favorite trick, how one of the words printed on the side, CHOICE, would not reverse itself in its reflection.
I put my shoe back on and paced around the room.
“How come nobody told me about this?” I said.
“Well, now, some might attribute that to kindness, not adding to your already substantial troubles.”
“Damn it, Purvis—”
He held up his hand. “Not my place. And his sisters would have skinned me.”
“So what are you telling me?” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Eck’s going to die?”
Purvis pulled at the edges of his silver hair. “That’s what he maintains. God help us, this family is genetically wired for pessimism.”
“I have to see him. He’s in Baptist?”
Purvis picked up a donkey cigarette dispenser and studied its mechanism.
“What we have to do,” he said, “is take him out of there. Duty, loyalty. Call it whatever you like.” He opened the door to let Desdemona out of the bedroom. She was smaller than I remembered, her yellowish coat neatly brushed. She came and lay across Purvis’s feet.
“What are you saying, Purvis? We can’t just take him out. He’s sick, for godsakes.”
Purvis nodded. “It’s your decision. You go see him, Robert. Then decide.”
When I got there
, the sisters—my aunts—had him surrounded. Eck looked thin in his bed, but this didn’t bother me much; he’d always been thin. What he’d lost was the wiriness that put a rubberband snap in even his smallest movements—drinking coffee, shifting gears. Lily and Ava and Cedelle were all there, looped like beads around the foot of the crank bed. My mother had been the youngest of them and had died first, five years earlier. Eck had an oxygen tube taped to his nose. With the bed set at half-tilt, he looked as if he’d caved in, buried at the bottom of all his sisters. They were talking of him, about him; no one spoke to him, and I worried he might be unconscious instead of just asleep. He stirred a little when I touched his foot through the blanket.
All conversation had ceased the moment I walked through the door, and then my aunts started in on me, saying how they missed my mother, how I looked older, as if I’d been away to junior college instead of living in exile from my old life. No one mentioned my divorce from Debbie or the rumors they must have heard, the months of late night phone calls, squealing tires, slammed doors. The noisiness of love unraveling.
They gave me hugs and patted my back, their charm bracelets jingling, hairdos stiff with spray. I had a ten-year-old’s urge to wipe away their kisses. They picked up where they had left off, discussing Eck’s assertion that he had slipped and fallen on the bathroom floor that morning. Tea-time chitchat, everyone talking, no one listening. Cedelle suggested that the pain drugs were doing things to Eck’s mind, that he had dreamed the whole thing.
“Like hell I did,” Eck said, his voice full of wheezing. He rose up on his elbows and saw me standing at the foot of his bed.
“Hey, look who’s here,” he said. “The family criminal. You beat up a lawyer, they ought to give you a medal.”
I laughed and hugged him, his grip on my shoulders still strong. “I didn’t exactly beat him up,” I said. His smell was a mix of ammonia and the lavender tonic he used to slick his hair.
“But not bad for a math teacher,” he said. “Tell me, Robert, what’s the capital of Siam?”
I grinned and shook my head, remembering the joke as an old leftover from his time at our house. A moment later, slower than he had been, Eck whispered “Bangkok” and tried to goose me in the groin. “When I blocked his arm with mine I saw him wince, a quick suck of air through his teeth. Lily told me to stop riling him up.
“You’re not feeling so well,” I said.
“Black coffee and a ten-miler would do me.”
“The coffee I can handle,” I said.
He nodded. “Always my favorite nephew.”
I found the vending machine in the snack bar downstairs. The coffee poured out into a paper cup with a hand of five-card draw poker printed on the side, a pair of tens, queen high. Without any thought, I knew how I’d play it—go safe, fold early, lowball somebody with some minor-league bluffing. Eck hated the timid way I played.
When I stepped into the room with the steaming cup, Lily grabbed it away from me and poured it down the sink. She spoke in a harsh whisper, mentioning diuretics, stomach acid, and free radicals (for a minute I thought she meant me). She asked if I were trying to kill him. I looked at Eck, deep asleep again and snoring. It seemed impossible then that anything, cancer or not, would be enough to end him.
Instead of the coffee, Lily opened a can of something called NutriSoy, which came with a little straw and a picture of a nursing mother on the label. She set it among the tissues and bedpans on the night table. For when he woke up, she said. The sisters started talking about various dead members of the family and how Eck looked so handsome in the dark suit he’d worn for his retirement. I thought of Purvis with his goat asleep on his feet, of my plans for leaving Winston. I thought of the day Debbie asked me to move out of our house, how final it all was for her, how she wouldn’t look at me the next day while I packed the car, and how I packed it trying to think back to some exact moment when things had gone wrong. Of course, there was no such moment; things go bad a little at a time. She stood in the doorway with her robe pulled tight around her, and I regretted that I hadn’t had one last look at her beneath the robe, that when we last slept together I hadn’t known it was the last. There in Eck’s room I felt the same pull I’d felt leaving our house that first time, like gravity along my spine. I felt as if some unnamed thing had been taken from me, and I craved it like water. I took a breath then, and decided Purvis was right, we had to get Eck out of there.
Eck’s bicycling shorts, racing jersey, and shoes were small enough to fit in the pockets of Purvis’s old-man slacks. The next day we walked into the hospital in the bright sunshine of a Saturday afternoon, and Purvis tossed the clothes across Eck’s bed. He looked at them, managed a weak smile, and without a word sat up and pulled the oxygen tube from his nose. He was still for a moment, not speaking.
“The fates aren’t here,” Purvis said.
Eck looked up. “Out to lunch. We better move.”
As Eck stood dressing himself, I noticed how his legs and fingers trembled. Purvis handed him a comb, and he wet his hair at the sink to slick it back, then carefully groomed his thin mustache. He was still enough of a cop to love crime (he told me once that if I ever wanted to rob something to head for a liquor store instead of a bank, and to wear a loud, ugly tie, which the victims would remember instead of my face), and he insisted on stuffing the bedclothes with his pillows to look like a body asleep. Then we made the elevator past the nurses’ station and were out the electric doors of Baptist Hospital.
Back at the Robert E. Lee, Eck pulled his ten-speed bike down from its hooks and mounted it in the center of the room, balancing on the thin tires. He bought the bike the same week he quit smoking cold turkey, two days after my mother died. At first he pedaled the bike through the streets of downtown Winston wearing his Sansabelts and tan Hushpuppies, wobbling around corners. By the time my troubles began he had graduated to slick black biking shorts, wraparound sunglasses, and a leather helmet. He was winning his age group in local road races and being written up on the sports page.
Purvis fed strips of beef jerky to Desdemona, after admonishing me to stop clapping my hands to make her faint. I couldn’t help myself; it was a neat trick. Purvis scratched her behind the ears.
“Well, Eck,” he said, “you’ve world enough and time, what do you propose?”
Eck winced as he dismounted the bike. “Bedsores,” he said to me. I learned he had been in the hospital not just a few days, as I imagined, but nearly two weeks. Long enough for his doctors to decide that his cancer was inoperable. When he coughed, the sound was like wringing water from a heavy sponge onto the sidewalk.
“Lily will find us here,” Eck said.
“Let her,” I said. “You have your rights. If you don’t want to go back, tell her to go to hell.”
“Well spoken,” Purvis said.
“You don’t understand, Robert,” Eck said. He walked across the room to look at the retirement photo of himself standing with Clay Williams, the chairman of Reynolds Tobacco. In 1947 Eck left the police force in Washington and moved south, to be near his sisters. He found a job with Reynolds, where for the next twenty-eight years he operated a Molins cigarette-making machine, days spent packing Camels and Winstons and Salems in the Number 12 plant downtown.
Eck turned and looked at us. “Lily hammered on me, boys,” he said. “I was doped up and sick, and I signed it all away. Wills and testaments, bank accounts, power of attorney, everything.” He hesitated. “She can make me go back.”
I shook my head. “And I’m saying I won’t let her do that.”
“Your place is here,” Purvis said, as if that settled the matter. He didn’t look up, but sat feeding handfuls of peanuts to Desdemona. “The question stands,” he said, “what do you want to do?”
“Everything,” Eck said. “But first I’d like to rest awhile.” He lay back on the cot and coughed as if his lungs would tear apart.
Purvis petted Desdemona and whispered into her ear: “Easy now, girl. I
t scares me too.”
Purvis and I watched his black and white TV, following the soap operas (a habit I’d picked up living alone) while Eck slept fitfully. The phone rang. When I answered it, Lily started in on me.
“I’m surprised at you, Robert. No wonder Deborah kicked you out.”
“Don’t start that,” I said.
“Is Purvis behind all this? You tell him it’s none of his business.” She hesitated, and I didn’t say anything. I realized as she said it that Purvis was behind all of this, that if it had been left to me, Eck would still be at the hospital.
“You’ll kill him doing this,” she said. “He’ll run out of his pain medicine. I’m coming down there.”
“Don’t do it, Lily. He wanted out. Leave him in that hospital and you’ll kill him sure enough.”
“I’ll call the police, Robert. I swear to God I will.”
Eck stirred and coughed. “I’m sorry, Lily,” I said, and hung up the phone, my hands shaking.
Twenty minutes later we were heading out of downtown in my Escort wagon, toward the highway. I kept watching in my rearview mirror. Eck said that he wanted to eat some real food for once and drink a beer and a cup of black coffee. He directed us to Harper’s Cafe, where we drank bottomless cups and ate something called Pork Midnight, which Purvis called manna from heaven.
Afterwards, Eck decided we should get our beer by way of the free tour at the Schlitz brewery. I felt like we were school kids on some vice-ridden field trip. I parked near the loading dock, where shiny, battered kegs sat stacked on pallets. On the roof of the Schlitz plant was a mechanical billboard, so high up I had to crane my neck to see it. We faced the back of it, the unpainted side, but I knew what was around front. I’d seen it a thousand times, the bright young man, straight out of 1950 with his starched white shirt and crewcut, his arm working up and down, lifting over and over to his smiling red mouth an enormous bottle of Schlitz. When I was a kid and we’d drive past on the highway, Eck would nudge me and point to the sign.
