by Lee Durkee
It was a huge one, too, its shell the size of a dinner platter, plodding through the pecan shadows toward the distant garden. Noel waited until it passed the tree, then he stepped up onto the damp shell. The tortoise froze and seized itself inward. A moment later, though, the legs reemerged, then the nub head, and it began to lug Noel out of the shadows and into the moonlight.
Throughout this painfully slow ride, Noel watched himself as if through the windows of his neighbors’ homes, this tall and slender, almost feminine young man, monstrously aroused, forearms and biceps hieroglyphed with guitars and switchblades and UFOs, surfing across a moon-smoked lawn on the shell of a giant terrapin. After a few moments of this, the tortoise suddenly deflated again. Noel stepped down and carried it the rest of the way to the garden.
Even by starlight, the garden appeared too immaculate: beans sprouting under musical scales of twine, aluminum pie plates dangling from blueberry bushes, and tomatoes blooming inside spiral cages spray-painted white to match the staked ornamental fence. Noel took no pride in the garden even though he had done most of the work—everything but the actual seeding. Cucumber vines teased through the fence, and the tortoise began to chew the tiny yellow flowers there. Noel stepped over the fence and knelt beside his stepfather’s prized watermelon. The melon was almost three feet long, still yellow underneath but green on top. Noel turned it over and found a stick and punctured the watermelon, then he shoved two fingers deep inside the sugary pinkness and tasted them.
Repositioning himself with palms flat on the dirt, he straddled the melon and began to couple with it. A minute later he came devastatingly into the watermelon as if dying in waves of pleasure, terror, and humiliation. . . . These waves did not soon subside, his groin gulping like some desert animal at a spring. Eventually he pushed himself off and rolled over beneath a blueberry bush, its pie plates cupping the moonlight, and he opened his eyes upon the synapse of stars bearing down on him, letting their codes merge with his own, a meeting of incomprehensions.
The rest of the night was spent slumped on the toy box by his bedroom window staring numbly into the Polaroid. He had fucked a watermelon and his shame knew no bounds.
The next night he fucked it again.
After that, Ross Altman began to visit him nightly and there was no such thing as sleep. Two weeks of no sleep. For hours on end he would keep the sheets pulled over his head and listen to Ross sad-calling his name. To escape this fate, Noel started getting dressed and sneaking out of the house and taking long walks deep into the world of night. He stood alone in yards and spied into windows, longing to see something he could not yet put a name to. Full of hope and dread, he walked into the Jewish suburb, but night after night her bedroom light was off. Next he would circumambulate the hospital, where only a scattering of lights showed. Before going home, however, he would return past the Weisses’. Finally, one night, into his third week of no sleep, he was staring at the dark A-frame when suddenly a light shot on inside.
He followed the driveway around back and dropped to hands and knees and spidered across the backyard until he was sitting directly under her bedroom window. Traces of saxophone penetrated the glass. Trying to get up his nerve to spy inside, he sat there for almost an hour with his head inches below the windowsill, his back pressed against the peeling paint, his feet almost touching the window’s four-paned reflection on the grass. Twice her shadow passed across this green window.
Then the bedroom light went out, and the stars seemed to grow and flex. All Noel ever saw up there were dippers, hundreds of dippers. He sat there another ten minutes before crawling away and fleeing down the street. Feeling increasingly invisible, he backtracked to the hospital and began to stake out the emergency room. When an ambulance arrived, he slipped inside and made for the staircase then climbed to the seventh floor, where the stairwell window revealed a long, bright, empty hallway.
There are moments when the gestures of our dreams jar us awake. Noel seemed to awaken more with each footstep down the hallway—more panic, more adrenaline—and yet the dream never broke. He pushed open the door to Ross’s room. It was dark inside except for the television glow, the screen showing a test pattern. The circular TV light—like the reflection of a giant clock—fell upon the bed’s white sheets. Noel could make out the narrow mound of Ross’s body. It was a small private room, he knew, but the severe darkness along the walls made the room feel infinitely large. Tiny red and green lights formed dissolving lines behind the bed. Every few seconds there was a beep followed by a hydraulic sigh.
Though Noel did not realize it, he had begun to breathe along with the rhythm of the ventilator as he took two strides to the bed and gently removed the pillow from under Ross’s head. He placed the pillow over Ross’s face and pressed down hard with both hands. The pillow was thin enough that he could feel the shape of the mouth and nose. He could even feel the teeth. The body did not kick or groan or otherwise object, but the lungs kept inflating, no matter how hard Noel pushed down. After a few minutes, he splayed his left hand over Ross’s chest. The heartbeat was throbbing steadily against his palm when suddenly—as if separating itself from the pulse—there was the distinct clip-clip-clip of footsteps in the hallway. Noel ducked beside the bed. The footsteps passed, and after a while Noel quit hugging the pillow and stood, but as he did this his left arm became entangled in a plastic tube. He followed the tube with his hands until it slithered into Ross’s throat. Biting his lip, Noel crimped the tube around his index finger. The next time the machine sighed, the tube strangled his finger. After a minute of this, the machine began to make a series of faster beeps, loud enough to be heard from the hallway. Noel’s finger was throbbing, his lip bleeding. He wondered if there might be another alarm going off in the nurses’ station. Finally he leaned down and pressed his ear to Ross’s chest. There was no sound this time other than a hypnotic seashell-like hum.
The lights behind the bed continued to form short lines that dissolved and started over. The alarm continued to sound, and Noel knew he had to escape, but suddenly he felt too drained, too sleepy. He placed the pillow under Ross’s head and did his best to wipe fingerprints off the plastic tube. Then, after adjusting the sheets, as if tucking Ross in, he leaned down and whispered, “You’re supposed to go to the light. I read that somewhere.” After saying this, he turned away and stared up at the test pattern.
He would not remember leaving the room or walking down the hallway or even descending the seven flights of stairs. He came to himself at the ground floor and from there escaped through a side exit near the gift shop. The night felt cooler than he remembered it because he was covered with sweat. He walked home using shortcuts, and battling sleep. His own house was as dark as all the others, and he entered it through the back door he had left unlocked. As he walked upstairs, he had the strange impression he was already asleep on his bed. He turned on the bedside light, then shed his clothes and crawled under the sheets and fell instantly asleep with the lamplight on his face and he did not dream.
•••
Every Sunday before church, Roger cooked breakfast, black-scabbed French toast with slabs of black tangled bacon. Noel woke to the smell of burning bacon. He felt very peaceful until he remembered what he had done, and this new knowledge of what he was capable of made his own bedroom appear foreign to him, almost unrecognizable. The velvet black-light posters, the baseball trophies, the Sports Illustrated covers that his mother had wallpapered his room with years earlier . . . he felt like a trespasser here, a rested and hungry and potentially dangerous trespasser.
The kitchen was empty, and the door to the backyard had been left open. Noel sat alone at the table and had just swallowed the seven pills by his napkin when his mother called him into the back bedroom. He stood and walked down the hallway, looking at the photographs on the walls. The photographs had been hung chronologically, and as he walked down the hallway he moved from the realm of color to the re
alm of black and white. A new air conditioner hummed in the bedroom window, bright patriotic telltales streaming from its vents. The walls were painted such a soft shade of blue they appeared white in the morning light. His mother looked very beautiful and—like the photographs on the walls—not altogether recognizable. Wearing a beige slip and shaking earrings loose from her jewelry box, she smiled at him and told him that she had some bad news. Or maybe it wasn’t so bad.
“That boy Ross Altman’s heart quit beating last night,” she said softly, as if afraid of waking somebody.
Noel’s own heart stalled. Suddenly the bedroom held no sound. He watched his mother put away her jewelry box. She did this without taking her eyes off of him. The bed behind her had been stripped of sheets, a perfect yellow rectangle.
“He didn’t just die, Noel,” she continued. “He had some help. Someone snuck into his hospital room last night. Late last night someone did.”
“He’s dead?”
“He’s been dead. For years. Now his heart’s stopped beating is all.” She started stroking the sleeves of the hangered dresses, as if to coax them from the closet. “Whoever killed that boy did the world a favor.” Still touching the dresses, she told him that she’d found out something else too, that Ross’s parents had known about his brain condition before they signed him up for baseball. “There were pills he could have been taking, to relieve the pressure on his brain. But they wouldn’t let him take pills. Because they’re Christian Scientists. They don’t believe in pills.”
“Don’t believe in pills?”
“No. They think medicine’s a sin. They think it’s up to God to decide who dies. That’s why they hired lawyers to get Ross taken off those machines.”
Noel pushed his spine against the door latch and hooked an elbow behind each knob and leaned forward.
“How can you not believe in pills?”
She smirked, shook her head. “Don’t try and make sense of it. You can’t. Nobody can.”
Without lipstick, her mouth looked thin and dry and boyish. She selected four dresses and draped them onto the bed one atop the other, and she seemed to be staring at the bottom dress through the top three. As if speaking to the dresses, she said, “Aren’t you going to ask me who pulled his plug?”
“Pulled his plug?”
“Plugs, I guess. From what I heard, the whole room was unplugged, even the TV they kept running for him.” She shuffled the dresses. “Three years of television. Could hell be worse?”
When Noel asked who had done it, Alise picked up a red dress and held it in front of her and frowned at it. “They don’t know, yet.” Next she held up a green dress, shimmying it from the shoulders down, but her expression remained forbearing. “Noel, somebody saw you inside his hospital room a few weeks ago. Ross’s older sister saw you in there.”
“Who did?”
“His sister. Is that true?”
Noel nodded slowly.
“What were you doing in there?”
“I don’t know. I’d just never seen him before is all.”
“Do you know Miss Myrick? Old Miss Myrick from church?”
He continued his nod.
“She lives near the hospital. She saw you walking through her backyard two nights ago. She says it was after three in the morning she saw you. Where were you going, Noel?”
“Nowhere. I was just out walking.”
“At three in the morning?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I can’t ever sleep.”
“Miss Myrick lives near the hospital.”
“I know. You said that already.”
“Did you do it, Noel? Did you unplug that boy?”
“No.”
“Do you sleepwalk?”
“Sleepwalk? I don’t even sleep. How could I sleepwalk?”
“Well, it runs in our family. Both Carol and Betty did, when they were little. Maybe you’re doing it and don’t remember.”
“You think I killed him in my sleep?”
“No. I didn’t mean that. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“What if I did? What if I did kill him?”
“You didn’t. Everybody knows his family wanted him off those machines. There was even an article about it in the paper. It’s a shame, though, that somebody might go to jail for doing such a good deed.”
She turned her frown upon the air conditioner then one by one she plucked off the streaming telltales.
“What kind of scientists did you say they were?” he asked.
“Not any kind. They just call themselves scientists to sound something other than crazy.” She dropped the telltales in the wastebasket then picked up the black dress and folded it over the headboard. “We’re not going to the funeral,” she said. “We didn’t know them. Besides, I don’t want to see that boy’s mother. I’d scratch her eyes out.”
Noel asked if it was murder.
“Of course not.” After saying this, she added, “Well, that depends.” Finally, as if Noel were arguing the case, she conceded, “Okay, it is—legally.”
She kept staring through him the same way she had the dresses.
“What? Am I in trouble?”
“No. But the police want to talk to you. They called early this morning.”
“The police called?”
“Yes. They want to ask you some questions. About why you were in the hospital that day. Just tell them what you told me, but don’t mention anything about Miss Myrick’s yard unless they ask you.”
“Can I still spend the night at Tim’s Friday? You promised I could.”
“Is that all you’re worried about right now?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
The last thing she told him was, “Roger wants to talk to you after breakfast. I want you to practice on him like he’s the police.”
•••
By the time Noel rejoined the breakfast table, his two brothers were talking about going to the fair that night. He sat and half listened to them, then after a while he asked where his pills were. Roger, who was cooking French toast, answered, “You musta took them already.”
“No, I didn’t,” Noel replied. Studying the napkin ring, he began to wonder if something was wrong with his brain. He had no memory of unplugging the machines in Ross’s hospital room, and he began to wonder if he had a secret life, one he kept hidden from himself. Suddenly it occurred to him that he must have left fingerprints on the plugs, but even so he remained calm. He felt no apprehension, no need for strategy or alibi—he felt only a great certainty that he would be caught. He was still trying to remember unplugging the machines when Roger placed a cereal bowl in front of him. The bowl was filled with watermelon balls.
Noel stared first at the bowl, then at his brothers, both of whom were feasting on the watermelon balls with their fingers.
“Is this the watermelon?” he asked after a moment.
Roger turned from the stove and, all but blushing, he admitted, yes, this was the watermelon. “Had to harvest it a few days early,” he explained. “Snake got after him.”
“Him?”
Roger was sock-footed and wearing a white V-neck tucked into the front half of his brown slacks. His dress shirt, brown tie, and leather belt were hung over the ladder-back of his empty chair.
“That the best watermelon you ever tasted or what?” he asked Noel.
“I don’t like watermelon,” Noel said.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t like watermelon.”
“But you’re the one practically begged me to plant it in the first place.”
“I don’t like—”
“Noel! Everybody. Likes. Watermelon.”
With Roger standing over him Noel slowly broke o
pen one melon ball and examined its cross-section before placing half of it on his tongue and washing it down with orange juice. He had to swallow three more melon balls before Roger lost interest and sat across from him and went to work on his own bowl of watermelon. Roger had almost finished when he stopped eating and looked up and asked, “What’re you grinning at?”
“Nothing. You want some more? I’ll get it for you.”
Roger nodded and said, “That’d be wonderful, Noel.”
While Noel was topping off Roger’s bowl, Alise entered the kitchen. Her hair was tugged back by a comb of tarnished silver, and she was wearing the black dress.
“Serve your mother while you’re up.”
Noel served her the French toast with black bacon, but Roger cleared his throat and asked if Noel had forgotten something. Noel returned to the counter and filled another bowl with the watermelon balls. He placed the bowl in front of his mother, then sat down and took up a knife and started scraping the black scabs off his French toast.
“STOP!”
After shouting this, Roger pushed away his bowl, set down his fork. They had forgotten grace! And on a Sunday too! He asked whose turn it was. Both his brothers pointed at Noel.
“Noel, if you would.”
The family bowed heads, linked hands. Noel waited until everyone’s eyes were shut, then he whispered, “Bless this food to our use and thus to Thy service.”
•••
A woman police officer arrived shortly after lunch. She had long white-blond hair and she chain-smoked. She did not seem to think Noel guilty of anything, and she spent much of the time asking questions about his parents. “Your mom, now, I talked to her on the phone, I’d say she’s got some strong opinions about that boy being kept alive on machines. Did she ever go visit Ross?”
