The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  “Have another,” Dad said, so I did.

  We sat on the porch and drank a pitcher of brunch while the unseasonably warm morning turned into an unseasonably hot day. He read his paper and I read my fortune in the bumps on my tongue. We said nothing about what we said to each other the night before—actually, what I said and now regretted. He regretted nothing, except perhaps being my father. For the next few days we pretended it never happened, drank like a pair of old sailors on shore leave, sat up nights watching basketball on television. Pretending was how we got on with our lives without making them any better. I pretended to be trying to pull my life together and make something of myself, and he pretended to believe me. He wore a black armband any time he left the house or had visitors and I pretended to grieve with him, while he took his phone calls in the bedroom with the door closed and I pretended not to notice or care. If I were the suspicious kind, I might have suspected him of tumbling Mom down the stairs. But this was real life, not a movie.

  In the end he paid me to go home so he could stop pretending. He was anxious to get on with his widower lifestyle. I drove back to Memphis that afternoon and cashed his check.

  His money kept me from sleeping in my car a few more weeks. In the old days, which is to say about a year ago, I would have blown it on a bank of heroin taller than my head. They say it gets easier with time. They lie. It wasn’t getting any easier and I was still an addict. I hadn’t used in more than a year, yet I still wanted it every day, still thought about it all the time. I used to tell myself I wasn’t an addict, that I could quit anytime I wanted. If you can lie to yourself, you can lie to anybody.

  Speaking of liars, the preacher had told me it would be three weeks before I could start photographing his plantation house, which was about how long I calculated my dad’s money would last. Three weeks stretched into six and I stretched that money until the threads were showing, adding to it whenever I could, which wasn’t often. Times were hard. April and May were hot and dry, which made for fewer car accidents and fewer opportunities to make the pie higher.

  I called the preacher occasionally and left messages. He called me back less often and dropped excuses. For some reason, he never asked me why I skipped out that night at Jenny’s and I was happy enough not to offer an explanation. The house he had planned to salvage in New Orleans was on some list of historic homes. Never mind that it had flooded up to the Plimsoll mark during Hurricane Katrina and sat abandoned ever since, crack house and flophouse for every derelict and wretch in the area. He said it was easier to get a visa to North Korea than permits to dismantle and salvage whatever history the house had left in it. Then there were difficulties arranging the trucking, difficulties getting construction equipment. I was starting to think I’d never see a dime from his collection plate.

  Preston called one Tuesday in May and sent me out to Pleasant Acres Hospice to photograph a women who had caught a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with her face after it fell off a truck and smashed through her windshield. They said it was a miracle she hadn’t died. People have funny ideas about miracles. Now she was a twenty-seven-year-old potted plant who spent her days staring at whatever potted plant they planted her beside. God only knew if she had a thought in her head at all, or if she was screaming inside all day long. Her family had already collected on the accident. Now they were going after the nursing home for neglect. I hated working nursing homes, but I needed the money.

  Pleasant Acres wasn’t very pleasant, nor was it situated on any acres. The place was locked up like a maximum-security prison, fences topped with razor wire, mag-locked steel doors, and bulletproof glass around the nurses’ station.

  Nurse Ratched buzzed me in and met me in the lobby wearing faded paisley scrubs, white Jasco shoes and a Prozac smile. Her narrow brown eyes flicked across my camera as I told her the patient’s name. She looked for my name on her clipboard.

  I pointed at the video camera hanging from the ceiling above the exit. “What’s with all the security? Keeping people out, or keeping them in?”

  Her lips tugged themselves a wrinkle closer to her half-closed eyes and she asked, “Are you a member of the family?”

  “I’m here at their request.” They hadn’t called ahead because they didn’t want to give the staff time to clean their daughter up. They wanted pictures of the pool of piss under her bed. They wanted the jury to see the suppurating bedsores.

  “You’ll have to leave your camera at the front desk,” the nurse said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “We’ll take very good care of it.”

  “I’m sure you will, but I’m here to photograph the patient.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Glamour magazine.”

  She laughed softly, like a woman hiding a coat hanger behind her back. “I need to know what kind of pictures you will be taking.”

  “That’s not really any of your business, is it?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “Are you going to let me see her?”

  “I’ll have to call the family and obtain permission.”

  “You do that.”

  I sat in the corner beside a potted schefflera that had dropped most of its leaves. While I waited, a family of three and a couple of doctor-looking men in white coats were buzzed in without being questioned. I stepped outside and spotted a security video camera above the door. They had seen me coming from the parking lot and were ready for me. Next time, I’d make sure to hide my camera in a backpack instead of wearing it around my neck.

  I gave her about five minutes to call the family; then I hit the buzzer. When no one answered, I leaned on it until they did. Nurse Ratched came through the door like a horse out of a gate. “Please stop that!”

  “What did the family say?”

  “I’m afraid I was unable to reach them. I left a message. If you’d like to wait…”

  I handed her the letter Preston had given me.

  “What’s this?”

  “A demand, giving me permission to enter the facility and photograph the patient.”

  “Our lawyer will have to look at this.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m afraid he’s not here.”

  “Of course he isn’t.”

  “You can wait here while I call him.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  I pretended to sit, but as soon as she opened the door I bolted in behind her.

  Their lawyers had trained her well, because she didn’t lay a hand on me as I slipped by her. “Ma’am! You can’t come in here,” she said as she waved to a couple of big orderlies standing at the end of the hall, probably the guys they called in to wrestle with the paraplegics when they wouldn’t take their pills. “You have to wait in the waiting area.”

  “Thanks. I’ll find the patient while you call your lawyer.”

  The nurse ran off to fetch somebody important enough to ignore my letter. The orderlies started down the hall like a couple of bulls that had just spotted a Spaniard with a red neckerchief. I picked a hall at random, then cut through a laundry closet to try to lose them. The place was miles and miles of identical halls, identically carpeted and wallpapered. Apparently they let the more harmless inmates wander unsupervised, because I passed a couple of barely animate corpses gaping at the ten-dollar landscape paintings hanging between every cell.

  I didn’t know where to look. All the doors had numbers instead of names, and I was moving pretty fast to keep ahead of the orderlies. In the next hall, I met a finely dressed old woman sitting bolt upright in one of the hall chairs. With her pearls and her white gloves and her little black hat, she looked like she was ready to head out for a night on the town, about sixty years ago. She stopped me as I passed.

  “Have you seen my brother? He promised to take me to the party.”

  I fought the urge to pull away from her. Her hand on my arm was as light as a spider. I wondered how many years she had been waiting in this hall for a brother who was mostly like
ly dead. I said, “He just called. He’s on his way.”

  “Oh good. Thank you so much. He said he’d meet me here.” She settled back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, prepared to wait until the crack of doom.

  I heard shouting at the end of the hall, so I dove through a pair of double doors on the right. The change was abrupt, from soft lines and soothing colors to harsh metal and cold hospital tiles. The floor was beige and shined as though recently mopped. It reminded me of the killing room at the dog pound, designed for easy clean up. Two naked bodies lay on gurneys—two old women as small as children, as alike in their naked anonymity as twins. Somebody had parked them here and gone to lunch. Next to them stood a shrink-wrapped case of industrial kitchen-sized cans of lima beans, and beside that a pallet of bags of rice and a cart of soiled linens. I figured Preston would want to see this, so I started snapping pictures.

  The next door I opened brought me to the hall where they piled the human wreckage before it headed out to the loading dock. The smell hit me like a garbage truck. I choked down a full bore of gorge and continued snapping the shutter at everything I saw. There was an old lady bent almost double upon herself by osteoporosis, gazing and mumbling into her own crotch. An elderly pantless gentleman pushed himself slowly along by his only foot—the other leg ended in a raw, naked stump just above the ankle. There were people picking at bleeding sores, moaning or mumbling or softly weeping or just sitting, gape-mouthed, blank-eyed, staring into the horror or the nothingness that had blasted their minds.

  Suddenly, I was thankful Mom died the way she did—suddenly, with little or no warning, in her own home surrounded by everything she knew and loved, instead of spending months or years lost in a fog of cold piss and hopeless dementia.

  As I moved slowly along the corridor shooting pictures, an eight-foot tree of an orderly caught me from behind, spun me around and yanked the camera from my neck hard enough to break the strap. I felt my head dislodge and fall against his chest, which he seemed to enjoy because he kept it there, trapped in the crook of his rough arm.

  He twisted my elbow up around my ear and rooster-marched me back into the carpeted areas of the nursing home. “You keep dragging me around like this, you’re liable to scuff my shoes,” I said. I was wearing sandals.

  “Can’t let you run around like that.”

  “Afraid I’ll trip over a corpse?”

  “Something like that.” He had to stop and get his bearings for a moment. I was beginning to suspect they had built it like a maze to keep people from finding their way out.

  “Maybe you should have left a trail of breadcrumbs.”

  He said, “What?” Then started off, still swinging me along by one arm.

  “If you put me down, I promise not to run away.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “You’re not heavy at all.”

  When we reached the nurses’ station, the warden was just buzzing somebody in. The orderly handed Nurse Ratched my camera, then pushed me into a chair. He stood beside me, one hand on my shoulder, crushing me like an empty can.

  The nurse was all smiles again, smiles that didn’t touch her eyes, smiles that she wore like a name tag pinned to her face. I wondered if she took them off at night and kept them in a jewelry box on the dresser. “As you are employed by a lawyer, I’m sure you’ll understand that we can’t let people wander the halls unescorted. It’s a liability issue.”

  “Nobody’s escorting him,” I said, nodding at the man who had just entered. He glanced at me, then stopped, almost as surprised as I was. He was my lost preacher, Deacon Falgoust. I didn’t even know he was back in town.

  He was dressed in the same black suit I’d seen him in at Sam Loftin’s wake, same black shoes, same tie. The only thing different about him was the raggedy, dog-eared Bible in his hand. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “No problem,” I said. “These nice people are just trying to keep me from doing my job.” The orderly’s fingers tightened painfully on my shoulder. I shifted in the chair until my heel was crushing his pinky toe. He gritted his teeth and escalated our silent game of Uncle.

  “You trespassed into the facility,” Nurse Ratched said.

  “You were illegally denying me access. I have permission to be here.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t.”

  “You saw the letter. It was signed by the family.”

  “There’s no need for all this,” the preacher said to the nurse. “Mrs. Lyons is a friend of mine.”

  “Miss,” I corrected.

  “In fact, I asked her to meet me here. She is my guest.”

  Whatever it was she really wanted to say remained safely behind Nurse Ratched’s smile. She swallowed it with some difficulty, then cleared her throat. “Well, then, I suppose…”

  I shrugged off the orderly’s paw and stood up, shifting all my weight onto his toe for a second before stepping off. “That was fun,” he said. “I should take you dancing.”

  “So glad you could come,” Deacon said as he took my hand. “I’m sure this was all just a misunderstanding.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it was,” I said. “I was just looking for my friend here.”

  Nurse Ratched settled herself into a chair behind the nurses’ station. “Perfectly understandable.” Her face had resumed its usual catatonic composure. “But we do have our little rules to follow to keep the lawyers happy.”

  “Naturally. What about my camera?”

  “As the reverend’s guest, you are free to visit whomever you like. But you’ll have to leave your camera with me until I have permission for you to take photographs on the premises.” She locked it in a drawer under the desk. “It will be safe here until you return.”

  Before I could answer, the preacher pulled me down one of the few halls I hadn’t got around to exploring.

  11

  FIRST THING I NOTICED was the change in light. Gone were the fluorescent bulbs, replaced by lamps on tables in the interior hallways, giving off a warm yellow glow. The exterior halls had windows, and gardens outside the windows, and gardeners in the gardens mowing the lawn and bending over nasturtiums and buttercups. This was the cruise ship deck of the nursing home.

  The residents we met in the halls were, for the most part, not so wrecked and thrown upon the shore as the ones I’d seen elsewhere. Dr. Dementia made his daily rounds here as well, punctually and without fail, but his patients were better situated, with nicer furniture and smiling nurses to change their diapers. The pernicious stink of piss was gone, replaced by a wholesome smell, like bacon, with just a touch of rolls warming in an oven, which we soon tracked down to the dining room, where the old ladies dozed over their pudding while a concert piano in the corner played a rondoletto all by itself.

  We passed a group of old men who had gathered in a small sitting area, reading their papers or sleeping beneath them. One or two called out to the preacher, lifting their trembling hands in passing. He blessed them with his Bible, drawing crosses in the air. “I come around a couple of times a week to hold services in the chapel,” he explained.

  “You lied for me back there, preacher.”

  “Call me Deacon.”

  “What’s your church say about lying, Deacon?”

  “It’s no sin to lie to the devil,” he said. We turned a corner and nearly ran over a couple of elderly women, one pushing the other’s chair, both dressed in cashmere lounge robes and fuzzy slippers. They batted their eyes at the preacher and giggled when he told them how the Lord seemed to have blessed them with eternal youth. The one in the chair straightened her robe where it had fallen open in her excitement.

  “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

  “I only got in this morning. I came here to see Mrs. Ruth—Ruth Vardry—do you remember her?”

  “Sure. The crazy cat lady who lived in the woods. So this is where they stuck her.”

  “Mrs. Ruth is well taken care of here.”

  “Have you seen the rest of the place?�
��

  “Many times.” He stopped in front of a closed door. A white hand towel was draped across the doorknob, as though the occupant didn’t want to be disturbed in the midst of fornicating.

  “Since you’re back, does that mean I can finally start working?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  “You got everything straightened out in New Orleans?”

  “By the grace of God, yes.”

  Deacon softly knocked on the door. A woman’s voice answered almost immediately. “Come in.” He took the towel from the knob and opened the door.

  “I thought you had forgotten about me,” she said as we entered. The room beyond was as dark as dusk, with faint rose-colored light sifting through a red curtain hung over a far door. The room itself was spacious and no warmer than the belly of a Philistine idol. A single long silhouette lounged on the shadow of a divan, but my first impression was that the room was full of people.

  She pulled the jeweled chain on a Tiffany lamp. The dim light chased away the shadows and the shades—four and twenty ghostly blackbirds, a dim regiment of men who faded into the patterns in the wallpaper and were no more. The preacher didn’t notice them, but that didn’t surprise me. What surprised me is that Ruth did. A sad smile passed across her face; then she turned her bright, dark eyes upon me.

  “Preacher, you didn’t tell me you were bringing someone,” she pouted.

  I could see where Holly and Nathan got their looks. For a woman in her eighties, Ruth Vardry was still a striking figure. She wore a long gown of red satin. Her straight, smooth hair was still almost completely black, and not that fake boot-polish black you see on some old women. Hers spilled like a fall of water over the arm of the divan. Her face was long and narrow, with large wide-set eyes of a disconcerting color that never seemed quite the same each time you looked at her. Her nose was as straight and sharp as the blade of stiletto. Her worst feature was her mouth, which was slightly pinched, but perhaps that was due to the oxygen tube pressing her proud upper lip.