by Brad Barkley
“That fella’s always thirsty,” he’d say. “Never gets enough.” That afternoon he’d forgotten to say it. I remembered bringing Debbie out along the highway to show her the billboard. I used Eck’s line, to try to pry a laugh out of her. This was nearing the end of our marriage, before the real trouble started, but bad enough that I felt awkward around her half the time, this woman I’d slept with for ten years. She said only that the sign was an eyesore, and they ought to tear it down. I told her she was probably right.
We toured the plant wearing hard hats they gave us, while a heavy-set man in short sleeves and a clip-on tie explained the workings of the stainless vats and the vacuum pumps and the capping machines that whirred and hissed in the huge room below us. Purvis began lecturing the man about the Egyptian origins of the brewer’s art. In the pale fluorescent light I noticed that Eck’s arms and legs were colored with bruises, the blood spreading under his skin. He stopped and leaned against the rail. All his life he’d had an affection for machinery—guns, motorcycles, power tools, and finally bicycles—but now I knew something was wrong. He drew deep breaths, his eyes closed, his hands gripping the rail. I thought that all of this was too much like the hospital: the tile floors, stainless steel polished to a cold shine, workers in white uniforms. I moved beside him and took his arm, ready to lead him out of there. He held his ground and pressed his hand against the small of my back.
“Smell that, Robert,” he said.
I imitated him, closing my eyes and opening my lungs to whatever he was smelling with his own ragged breaths. I hadn’t noticed before—everywhere, pushing at the walls and the high ceilings, was the heavy odor of fermenting yeast. I breathed again, the smell as fertile as a sweaty greenhouse, rank as damp sheets after sex. A seed tossed into that thick air might have taken root.
“That’s what we came here for,” Eck said.
“It’s nice,” I agreed.
He was quiet a minute, breathing. “So she’s gone for good?” he asked.
I almost laughed. “Yes,” I said. “This one’s pretty much over.”
He nodded. “She seemed like a good girl. I’m no expert at marriage.”
“I’ve always thought you and Purvis have a kind of marriage, a good one.”
His eyebrows drew together.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “You get along. You like each other.”
Eck nodded. “Never thought much about it, to tell you the truth. He’s honest, pays his half of the rent.” He seemed embarrassed, and for a moment I was jealous of the ease with which they’d carried out their twenty-year friendship.
“Women are a whole different ball game,” he said.
“Amen to that.”
At the end of the tour they gave us free samples of beer drawn from oak casks. Purvis sipped, swishing the beer in his mouth to taste it. Eck drank in gulps, the beer running out the edges of his mug down the front of his cycling shirt. We were silent awhile, drinking. Purvis read the pamphlets the man had given us, and he and Eck shared inside jokes and old drinking stories, their laughs echoing around us. Finally Eck wiped his mouth and looked at Purvis and me. “Don’t let them put me back,” he said.
By late afternoon Purvis was worried about Desdemona and took a taxi back to the hotel to feed her and change her litter box. He promised to play dumb if Lily called, and to meet up with us later. We decided we would be okay for a few hours at my place, the one house on a dead-end street near the bad part of town. The house sat in the shadow cast by the big screen of the X-rated drive-in. It had been leased to me for fifty bucks a month and the promise to bring the roof and foundation and plumbing up to code, which I had never much done. I moved in there the same day Debbie asked me to leave our house. At the time I imagined living in squalor as an act of revenge.
As we walked from the driveway to the house, Eck had to stop every few feet to rest. He would cough and spit blood, and push me away if I tried to help. He still wore his black biking shorts, and had his sunglasses sitting atop his head, in among the wet strands of his hair. I later found out he had refused chemotherapy, not wanting to lose his mustache. It seemed a worthy enough thing to hold onto.
Inside, he first noticed the wall of Bic pens, the separation papers and old letters stuck there, the dusty plaster powdering the floor.
“What the hell is all this, Robert?”
“Steam worked off,” I said.
He nodded. “Better than firing a gun. You going to be all right with this?”
“I am,” I said, though at that point I was still phoning Debbie nearly every night, sometimes just to hear her voice and then hang up while she said, “Damn it, Robert, I know it’s you.”
Eck noticed the column of figures I’d run, the account of all the money I lacked.
“This is no good,” he said.
“I know.”
“I mean if this is how you’re going about it, you’re lost.”
I nodded, knowing he was right, and knowing at the same time that I would still send to Debbie the sapphire necklace I’d bought for her birthday and that she would send it back unopened.
Eck fell asleep in my bed, and I sat on the porch sipping the good bourbon I’d done without for those months leading up to the divorce. An empty conciliatory gesture on my part, as if I could pour my problems down the drain or stop buying them at the drive-up window. Drink was not what was wrong, but you grab what ballast you can. I watched stray shafts of light spear over the top of the high movie screen. I pulled a Camel filter from the pack in my jeans pocket and lit it, pulling the first drag deep into my lungs. All day I’d been itchy for a cigarette, but had put it off. Behind me, Eck slept uneasily, moaning and grunting, his breath halting. I stubbed out my cigarette against my shoe and then said the word out loud: “Cancer.” I said it to the porch rail, to the moths that circled above me, then threw my whiskey glass out into the dark yard where the light didn’t reach.
A nighttime chill settled in, damp and airy. With my eyes closed, I could just make out the soundtrack carrying over from the drive-in, the moans of big-screen sex crackling out through tiny window speakers into the cars of those I imagined as lonely people. I thought of Debbie, incapable of loneliness. It had been two months now since I’d seen her, though as I say I still phoned her nearly every night. She would talk to me as if I’d called to sell her something, which in a way I had. On bad nights, after a few rounds of bourbon, I’d end up telling her I still loved her, and she got to sound superior and pitying, and I’d point that out and she would hang up. I heard from someone that she’d cut her hair.
The sound from the drive-in quit and the light ended, the nine o’clock show over. Darkness fell around me, and I wondered where all this dodging of the sisters was taking us, if finally Eck would have to go back even while hating it, his last wish not to. Lily had mentioned pain medication, and hearing Eck’s fitful sleep, I knew she’d been truthful about it, that he needed more than the pills he’d brought. Eck coughed and moaned. Across the way, I heard cars leaving the gravel lot of the drive-in, carrying people home. I went inside and phoned Debbie.
“These calls have to stop eventually,” she said. “You have to let go and embrace other possibilities.” She was seeing a therapist at the university.
“Eck’s sick,” I said. “He’s dying.”
“What’s wrong? Where is he?” It was good to again hear sympathy in place of the usual pity in her voice, to imagine part of it for me.
“He has cancer, and he’s here with me.”
“Shouldn’t he be in the hospital?”
“He was. I took him out.”
“God, Robert, can you do that?”
“Where would you rather be if you were dying?”
She was silent a moment. “Okay, I understand. But…well, do you need me to do anything?”
This seemed like an opening, a way for me to invent a reason for seeing her, for us to spend time together, drawn into his dying. But no pretext would come to me; there
was only Eck in my bed, his fits of painful coughing, and what time he had left.
“Thanks anyway,” I said.
Near midnight a taxi pulled up in front of the house, and Purvis stepped out. He walked into the yellow light of the porch wearing a hat with a tiny red feather stuck in the band. He was out of breath. At the kitchen table he downed half a cup of coffee before he spoke.
“Lily came by the hotel. She’s threatening legal intervention again. My guess is she’s serious.”
“We didn’t break any laws,” I said.
Eck swung his legs out of bed and slowly sat up. “She’ll draft her own laws and have them passed by Congress if she has to.”
“Power of attorney,” Purvis said. “She can get a court order tomorrow morning. She can have you committed if she wants to. ‘In the interest of your well-being’ was how she phrased it.”
“This is a bunch of damn foolishness,” Eck said, his breath raspy. “Robert, if you take me to one more place then I’ll call Lily and we’ll work something out.”
“Eck, you don’t have to go to the hospital,” I said.
Purvis nodded. “If need be, we’ll arm ourselves with an attorney.” He set his hat on the table.
“Damn right,” I said. “If there’s one thing I learned—”
“No.” Eck stood. “I have to go back.”
By this time, he said, he’d taken all his pills and had started on the handful of aspirin I kept in a shoebox in the bathroom. But he said that the aspirin was thinning his blood, that there was new bleeding in his bowels and in his cough.
“What’s the brave thing? Die at home?” he said. Purvis and I said nothing.
“This pain’s not getting any better,” Eck said. He looked at the floor, as if embarrassed to admit pain.
“So where’s this place you want to go?” I asked, thinking of Washington, the beat around Pennsylvania Avenue and Dupont Circle Eck had walked during the Depression, or even the White House, where he’d guarded Roosevelt and once played cribbage with the president in the Rose Garden. Those were the times out of which Eck brought the stories I remembered, the photographs he passed around and carried in his wallet. Washington was a six-hour drive away. I knew he would never make it. The pain of all those miles would be too much.
“I’d like to see the Reynolds Tobacco Company, Robert,” he said. “The Number 12 plant downtown.”
It had been eight years since Reynolds moved its corporate headquarters to Atlanta (the day the news hit the papers, Eck paced the hotel room shouting: “Bastards, bastards, bastards. You think they’ll rename their damn cigarettes ‘Atlantas’?”). The work of all the old factories moved to new computer-run facilities out in Tobaccoville and Clemmons. All of the red-brick plants had been left abandoned downtown.
“I thought you were going to tell me you wanted to see Washington,” I said.
Eck shook his head. “That job was like eating your dessert first. Riding around on a motorcycle, marching in parades.” He shook his head. Purvis nodded.
“But Reynolds is closed,” I said.
“I’d guess there’s a hundred ways in and out of that building. We used to call them coffee-break exits.” He smiled. “Trust me,” he said.
The chain link fence around Number 12 lay broken in half a dozen places, the NO TRESPASSING signs bent and rusted. Plywood boards had been cut to fit inside the brick window frames, and the front doors were chained and padlocked. The pavement around the building was spattered white with the droppings of pigeons that roosted in the exhaust grates of the ventilation fans. Eck pointed to a window beside the last platform of the fire escape. When I climbed up and pushed, the window pivoted open. I looked inside, at the factory lit here and there by shaded bulbs that hung down on long cords from the rafters. It smelled like someone’s attic. I was startled to see the machinery still in place. I eased through the window and found footing on a narrow ladder mounted on the wall, then climbed down and pried open one of the big delivery doors for Eck and Purvis.
“Never heard it so quiet,” Eck said. Our entry had stirred a layer of dust from the floor, swirling it into truncated cones around the shaded bulbs. The machines were covered with streaks of dust-filled oil and rust. I shouted hello to hear the echo.
Purvis cleared his throat. “It’s interesting that many trace the origins of the Industrial Revolution to the early perfection—” He glanced at Eck and was quiet.
Eck turned and stood a moment, then moved away from us, rubbing the back of his neck. We followed, not speaking. The gray machines filled the room, several hundred of them in neat rows, like pianos in a warehouse. Eck moved along the row of machines, touching each one as he came to it.
“Paul Holcomb, Mark Vernon, Lee Hines, Tim Lewey, Bill Tatum, J. T. Reid,” he said, naming the men who had run the machines. He stopped at the next-to-last one in the row and thumped it with his knuckles. “Eck Voight,” he said.
He walked around his machine three times, wincing as he bent to peer underneath. He fingered the gears and spit on the glass dials to wipe them clean with his thumb.
“A thousand smokes a minute,” he said. “How many is that times eight hours a day for twenty-eight years?” I could see Purvis doing the math in his head. Behind one machine was a wheeled canvas trolley, cut tobacco still left in the bottom. Eck lifted a clump of it, sniffed it and made a face, then dumped it into the hopper of the making machine.
“Fix those rusted parts, calibrate it, and this thing could work good as new,” he said. He tapped the machine with his fist. “Crank it up and roll a tray full. Wouldn’t that be something.”
“No cure for obsolescence,” Purvis said. Then he flushed and looked away for having said it.
I heard the cops before I saw them—the jingle of key rings, the squeak of leather holsters. I pulled Eck and Purvis by their arms and headed out of the light. Eck led us to a corner behind a brick furnace. We watched the two cops walk out of the next room, their radios squawking. In the dim light their badges glinted and the beams of their flashlights cut all around us.
Eck leaned toward me. “Sorry, Robert,” he whispered. “No run left in me.”
“They’ll assume we’re juveniles, that we’ve high-tailed it,” Purvis said. “You watch.” And we stood, waiting for what he said to come true. In the dark, Eck’s eyes shone; I heard Purvis breathing behind me. The cops tried the doors, shined their flashlights into the rafters, and then left. We heard them drive away.
We walked back into the faint light. “We’d better move along now,” Eck said.
“I think so,” Purvis answered.
“Hold it,” I said. I put my hand on the making machine, the pale green paint cool and slick. “You said you wanted to make a cigarette, I think you ought to make one.”
Eck shook his head. “First off, there’s no paper in the rollers, no blade in the cutter, and the moisteners are dried up.”
“Then we’ll just run the damn thing, for the sound of it.” I grabbed the red handle on the side of the machine and pulled the rusted switch to ON. Nothing.
“This plant went power off eight years ago, Robert,” Eck said. “You’re smarter than that.”
I worked the lever back and forth, then put my ear to the power box. I heard a faint hum, like a wasp trapped inside.
“It’s got juice,” I said. I leaned against the machine and slid my hands between the rollers under the hopper, trying to force them. My hands slipped out, black with oil and dust. I jimmied the switch again, banged it with my fist, then stretched fully across the line of rollers and wedged my hands in as far as I could, pulling until I shook, breathing the burned oil smell of the machine. My fingers began to slip, and then I felt Eck’s hands grip my shoulders and jerk me backward.
“What in hell is wrong with you, Robert? If that thing did crank up, you’d lose half your goddamn arm.”
I wiped my face on my sleeve.
“Just leave it alone,” Eck said. His voice echoed. I hadn’t seen him a
s angry since I was fifteen and he caught me cheating at poker. We stood there in the quiet.
Purvis cleared his throat. “Well,” he said.
My hands shook and I pushed them into the pockets of my jeans, nearly crushing my cigarettes.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I took the bent pack of Camel filters from my pocket, shook one out, and offered it to Eck.
“It’s an Atlanta cigarette,” I said. For a minute he looked at me, then he took the cigarette and studied it, held it familiarly between his two fingers where the nicotine stains had long since faded. He sniffed it, broke off the filter, and lifted the cigarette to his mouth.
“Fire it up,” he said.
I lit it for him, cupping the match the way he’d shown me twenty years earlier. The tip flared, the paper crackling and falling away in ash. Eck pulled deep and held it, suppressed a cough, then exhaled as fully as he could, the cloud of smoke twisting in rags.
“Good as the first one?” I asked.
“Better,” Eck said. “It’s the last one.”
He laughed, threw the cigarette to the concrete floor, and stamped it out.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. He lifted his arm around my shoulder, his motion scattering the last tatters of smoke like he’d chased them away.
Eight months after we buried Eck, I drove downtown to the Robert E. Lee and found Purvis, still the same, milking Desdemona. He answered the door with his shirt sleeves rolled up.
“Trying my hand at cheese making,” he said. “An ancient art, Robert. My eyes won’t let me read much anymore.” On the floor sat a copper bucket with an inch of the milk in the bottom. Desdemona stood sniffing the hot plate. Purvis moved around the room straightening piles of books, stuffing trash into his pockets. A fan rotated on top of the TV, the breeze from it slowly turning the front wheel of Eck’s bike, still suspended from the ceiling.
