by Lauren Groff
“Well,” he said, “that’s what happens when the infection spreads into the organs.”
“Oh, shit,” I breathed.
“Yes,” he said. “Luckily nothing irreversible has happened yet, but if she keeps refusing her therapy, it will. She’s been going to this Chinese quack woman who’s giving her herbs. Listen, when you talk tomorrow, can you please, please talk some reason into the girl? She won’t listen to me. There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do.” Sully’s breath was coming out in short jags, and I wondered if he was crying.
It was only then that I thought of Sully’s last months, waking up to Clarissa’s sickness, working fifteen hours a day at a firm he hated, coming home on the bus at dark, knowing that Clarissa was still there, still sick, needing his patience. Needing him to make what food she could eat, to deal with her, querulous and pouty from forced rest, when she had never been querulous or pouty in their entire lives together. I had one bright image of him in the elevator to their apartment, eyes closed, hair askew, rain slicking his sparse hair to the skull. His one brief moment of peace. Then he had to step into the hall, pause before the apartment, open the door, when all he really wanted was a glass of wine and a little bit of kindness for himself.
“Should I take a plane?” I said.
“What?” he said.
“I’ll drive to Albany right now. I’ll take the first plane I can find. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
Sully paused, and I heard his breath in the receiver. He cleared his throat. “You know,” he said. “I don’t need you tomorrow, just really soon. Willie, it’d mean so much to me if you could call Clarissa in the morning and see what she says. I mean, I’m just relieved that you’re willing to come. Thank you.” He thought some more and said, “Tell you what. If you work on her and convince her to go to her real doctors, do her psychotherapy and antibody therapy as well as whatever homeopathic shit she wants to do, I can hold out a while longer. But can you please, please, please come back whenever I need you? And, if you can, try to call every day. You have no idea how lonely it is. You’d think from the way her friends are acting that lupus is contagious. The people from the paper? Gone. Once in a while, someone stops by with flowers, but they’re always lilies, and Clarissa says lilies are for corpses, and throws them out the window. She’d never tell you because she knows you’re having your own problems, Willie. But I think Clarissa’s really sad.”
I listened for a moment to the wind in the receiver, the nighttime life of San Francisco, the constant traffic, the distant sirens, the low rumble of a plane overhead. I began to feel again the way I felt just before I left for Alaska; that every step I took was one breath more than that fragile, fault-ridden city could handle. Those months, I had to close my eyes sometimes, fight the rising panicked urge to get out fast, or see that whole beautiful city just crumble under the knuckle of some great and angry god. Sully made a noise, and I remembered he was there.
“Oh, Sully,” I said, “this is so incredibly hard for you, isn’t it.”
There was another long pause, and I listened as Sully’s breathing slowed. “I needed that,” he said, at long last. “Just to feel, I don’t know. Understood.”
“We’ll whup this lupus thing,” I said. “Just watch.”
He laughed and said, “I needed that, too. A little bit of feist in my life. Good to have you on board again, Willie.”
“Good to be back, Sully,” I said. “I’ll call Clarissa tomorrow.” And then the phone clicked. The ghost, which had been pulsing in the corner of my sight, listening to my conversation, faded until it was nothing, and from my window I watched the soapy blue-black fog skulk over the lake and up the lawn.
13
The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak Again
WE HAVE RUN though the dark orange days of July, run through the summer mornings soft as mouse fur, through the drizzle, through the baking heat, through the scent of wakening gardenia, under the wisteria draped on the covered bridge. By now we have run ourselves plumb into August, though this year has been hard on us. After the monster, the summer splintered apart. When we are together, we hold ourselves together, our old feet tapping on the Templeton pavement, our old hearts pounding in time. This is called solace, our morning run. When we have finished our coffee at the Cartwright Café, we drive away from one another, drive our old bones home to the messes we have made of our lives.
Big Tom’s meth-head kid is gone, run off. Two years ago, she was the hard-nosed captain of the debate team with purple-framed glasses and a dimpled smile. We do not know where she went, though we have looked, contacted the papers, searched all of upstate New York. Together, we made up the flyers, that black-and-white picture, the girl changed, we are sure, from that dear goofy girl in replicate from Tom’s office photocopier.
Little Thom’s heart has been acting up again, and he had to take a moment when he was leading grand rounds in the hospital to step into a supply closet and press down. He was pale and shaking when he came out. We tell him he should not run, but he looks at us. I’d rather die running, he says, and we let him run because we would rather die running, too.
Johann’s daughter’s not talking to him because of something he did when he was drunk after the Clarke girl’s wedding. Johann called his daughter in Memphis and said, in his slurred German accent, Honey, just so you know you didn’t ruin my life by being a dyke. I dought you did, but you vill grow out of it, and get married and seddle down and haff kids. Just so you know, I luff you anyvays.
Yikes! we said when we heard this on our morning run the next day, and he looked at us mournfully, hungover, wincing.
It’s dat bad? he said. He didn’t know, honestly.
Oh, Johann. It’s that bad, we said.
Sol’s third wife, the spinning instructor at the gym, has delivered the divorce papers to him via her new boyfriend’s sleek Harley. The kicker? Failure to provide children in the marriage: three marriages, three aging wombs, each time this the reason to find someone new. Alone of all of us, Sol has no children. He is silent when we talk of ours, all in college and beyond, sad-faced even when Big Tom talks of his meth-head girl. We see him blinking behind his sunglasses, we feel the weight of his silence. We sense he would take even Big Tom’s druggie at this point, he would take trouble, he would take a kid who hated him, like Johann’s girl. He would take anything, we believe.
Doug’s possibly facing prison time for nonpayment of overdue taxes. Sol has offered to help him out (the only time we ever really realize he’s so rich), but Doug scoffs: he’ll fight them to the end, he says. Whose end? we want to say, but don’t. He has a new girlfriend that his wife maybe knows about, an eighteen-year-old hostess at the wax museum who is paid to draw men inside the cool waxy place with her killer boobs and smile, to bring them inside that mausoleum where Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth begin to melt when the generator goes out. We are troubled more than he is by both jail and jailbait. He doesn’t think he will go to jail. He doesn’t think his wife knows about the girl. We feel certain about both, and shiver.
And, to top it off, Frankie has lost twenty pounds after his parents’ death, and his skin hangs loose and yellowing on him. He swings through manic to depressed five times a day. Yesterday, he told a joke so long and incoherent Johann had to interrupt with his own joke to save Frankie some face. After that, we ran silently back and didn’t linger over our coffee at the Cartwright Café as we usually do.
Templeton has become sad, we think. Templeton feels dark this summer. We have not had time to relax at the country club. We have not had time to play much golf. Crazy Piddle Smalley began foaming at the mouth and touched himself in front of a young girl, and his parents were forced to lock him in his room until his new meds kicked in. Secretly, in our deepest of our deep hearts, we think it is the monster’s fault. As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down.
Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowin
g that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you’ve run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.
14
Davey Shipman (aka Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Hawkeye, etc.)
I WOKE OLD on the morning of the pigeons. Joints hot, brain aching. Looked out over the gutted land, the charred stumps, the lake brown with mud. Long ago I felt it were my own kin, but it hadn’t been kin for a while. I should have left long before, pressed into the truer wilderness in the West, for I hated the settlers and their wasty ways. For their part, the settlers were confounded by me, a white hunter living like an Indian, past his prime, though still fearsome. Once, boys threw rocks from afar, calling me Ol’ Stink-stockings, and though I could have picked them off with my rifle in a second, easy as crows on a branch, I only growled at them. They lit away quick enough, never did do it again. As for me, I hung on to the land like a snapper whose severed head still bites, naught else to do with its waning life.
Boiling coffee, I turned to Sagamore in his red blanket, and was not surprised to see he looked as I felt, weary to the marrow. He groaned as he stood, then looked shamed about it. I knew what he felt, though, pretended not to hear. Mornings like those, I could hardly remember we were young once, that I was just eleven when his family took me in after I run off from my own. My father was an Anglican preacher, godly during the day and a devil at night, whipped me until I preferred the dark woods and whatever would eat me there. Half-starved, I stumbled one day into a Delaware camp and found a better family. Sagamore my blood brother, taking me hunting and fishing, teaching me such joy. But by the time Duke came to the lake, the Delaware were mostly dead, and last I heard of my father, he was rich, owned a gin mill, brought a preacher over to his church all the way from England. That’s how it went, the gentle ones died quiet while the mean ones thrived. Sickened me unto death all my life.
As my old friend took his morning piss down by the pines, I sawed off some meat and threw it in the kettle for a stew. Then we lit our pipes, spat. As Sagamore and me sat over our coffee, we scented the smoke of another parcel of forests on the wind, destruction, the particular blight of Marmaduke Temple. We’d lived together for years, and I knew what Sagamore was thinking. How it had only been a few years since we’d first seen Duke stumbling through the forest, muttering like an idiot or the war-mad soldiers from the French wars who once stood outside the forts, half-naked, begging, stumps bared. One even exposed his swollen genitals, three flesh-pumpkins, for he couldn’t fit in trousers, and refused a dress: mad, plain as day. Duke that day staggering up the mountain-side had the same stars in his eyes. We had stood, Sagamore and me, in the trees, a doe bleeding between us. Watched the giant stumble, fretting, up the hill. A man such as him, in his fine clothes, was so unbefitting in the woods that we gaped. We laughed, thinking we’d seen his tail.
But, like idiot hunters, we fell into our own traps. A man living in a place that doesn’t change doesn’t expect it ever will. This land, this lake, has shaken off all past tries at taming it, so we thought it always would. Long before us were the native tribes, the Iroquois, the six great nations of Haudenosaunee, who used this lake as a summer camp, planted beans and squash and maize in the river-bottom land. They still did when I came upon the lake as a stripling, and saw such beauty I thought my heart forgot how to beat. The land was me, slid into me, tongue-and-groove. And so I came back to this lake, kept coming back, even after the Mohawks met at the Council Rock and decided to join the French. A bad bet. They lost everything when the English won.
After the French war I made my cabin high above the lake, and for a time I was alone. Then I watched as Moses the Mohican set up his rough little academy on the southmost morsel of lakeland. But that winter was hard. He hadn’t stocked enough. When the ice thawed, some students were dead, some eaten. Moses never seen again. Probably eaten.
Then came the couple like animals in heat. A man and a woman, she lovely to look upon. I laughed, watching them, for they believed themselves unseen in such wilderness. Alone. Couldn’t look beyond one another to see the string of my smoke on the hill. Began walking about naked until one day there was a sudden blizzarding wind from the north and they were out gathering firewood, naked as babes, and lost their way. Froze in a solid blue block, laced together, forty feet from their cabin. Come spring, I buried them, still entwined, at the river’s lip.
And I watched from my cabin as another came, a mean German Lutheran minister. Hartwick. Espoused a free community, all vegetables and cold baths. Crossed his fingers at me as if I were the devil, just for the meat I hung in my smokehouse. His followers left one by one, and I watched. When they were all gone, he went to the lake and read the Bible to the fishes at high voice, in a great fury. I saw him peer down, see something, startle. Fell in and drowned. When I rowed out to find him, his body was gone. I think the great lake-beast took him, the one the Haudenosaunee call Old Sad Spirit in their tongue.
After him, during the revolution, came a troop of one hundred men under General Clinton, frozen in for the winter, beset by hostile natives. Rebels. Decided to build a dam on the river, let it carry them to Pennsylvania, come spring. I had Sagamore staying with me then. He’d broken with his son, Uncas, for marrying Colonel Munro’s daughter, Cora. Though brave, though she fought off many a Huron, Magua among them, she was not Delaware, unlike the squaw Sagamore had wanted for a daughter. She was white with a little brown within. So Sagamore, old fool, unblessed his son.
Sagamore and me lived together in our old badger’s hut, and watched the soldiers, too old to join another fight. Once, in war, I’d leave a Huron corpse to rot for every mile I’d go. But with the rebel effort against England, I just watched the men from my cabin. They shot my deer and frightened away the smarter beasts. Drank, cursed, did unspeakable things to each other in the blaze of bonfires. The lake pushed up until it lapped on my door. When they broke the dam down, they spun so fast downstream they could see Indian villages frozen under the water, like leaves in ice. Teepees still up. Dogs moving their legs. Babies nested on the backs of squaws. Fires not yet quenched, still burning under the water the boats crested on.
The end of it all was Duke Temple. Self-proclaimed first man to set foot on this land. Parceling up land as if serving a pie to his settlers. Tickling the hotel’s scullery maids in the pantry, I’d seen him, murmuring to the shoemaker’s daughter. He, a married man, taking what wasn’t his. And his settlers weren’t any better. They come, money-mad, greedy, eat their mothers if it’d earn them a penny or two. Though that’s a mite close to home; that first hard winter, horrid and long, there were people starving everywhere. In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle. But beyond that winter, it grew easier, and in later days, they only ate up the trees, all the fish from the lake, all the deer from the woods.
Only good thing Duke brought was his kind son Richard and frailish wife Elizabeth, who sent up to our hut a kilderkin of whiskey every Christmas, without fail, who once met me on the street and pressed my hand. When I pressed it back, it trembled in my own, so soft and delicate. Touched my very heart, it did.
So it was a surprise when, on the morning of the pigeons, I stepped from our hut to carve some more meat for the stew, and come upon the man himself. I thought he was a leftover dream, for it was not unknown to me to see him in them. I’d be gutting a dream-carp and its bulgy eye would turn to me, and I’d see I was gutting Duke. I’d be wrestling with a catamount and it’d roar and become Duke. I’d be with a woman and she’d turn to dust under my hand and I’d realize it was Duke’s wife Elizabeth, and then he’d step from the shadows with my trusty long-barrel gun in his hand. That morning, I thought he was a dream until he turned and I saw road mud upon his face.
I don’t believe I killed yer deer, Duke, said I. He thought me stupid, a mere squatter that he allowed on his land, so it behooved me sometimes to act such. And it be an honor, Duke, said I, to see the great man himself. Ye normally send your bootlicker lawyer Kent Peck or Richard to talk yer poaching talk to me.
Usually this was true. Peck I sent scuttling with a volley from my good old long-barreled rifle. Richard, Duke’s big hairy son, was a good soul, and so I’d serve him some venison stew, and he’d warn me, mildly, and pay the remittance from his own pocket.
But Duke was having none of it. My land, he said. My deer.
Nobody’s land. My shot, I said. My deer.
Now, though, Sagamore emerged from the hut, his face creased. Hear that? he said in Delaware, and I listened but said no. What is it? I said, but Duke had lost his angry face and was nodding respectfully to my friend. How do you do, Chief Chingachgook, he said, which was what the whites called Sagamore. Though I hated the man, I liked him a small bit for greeting my old friend with respect.
But Sagamore ignored him. He turned to me, his face softened almost into a smile. Pigeons, he said, and he laughed.
Then I heard it, the far whirring. I saw the black mass crest the far hill and then Sagamore and I began to run down into the town. Every dozen years, they came, a blessing, the passenger pigeons, in the tens of thousands. In that moment we were young hunters again, stalking Hurons, though we brought no weapons to kill these beautiful birds. Behind us, Duke shouted, What, in…and then seemed to understand, for his great bootsteps came crashing behind us, nearly catching us when we crossed the Susquehanna.
