Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  “How are you?” Anne says.

  She nods and closes her eyes.

  “Is the pain bothering you? Do you want the doctor?”

  “Are you going to move her up?”

  It’s the woman in the other bed.

  “She was wanting to be cranked up before you came. If you move her up you’ll need to call a nurse. You can’t move anyone unless you have a nurse.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gail answers. “Thank you very much.”

  Grandma’s eyes remain closed. Drops of sweat have broken out on her brow. She hasn’t answered Anne’s question. Her face under the fluorescent lighting is that of a tiny, old man. Gail begins wiping her brow. Anne bends and kisses her cheek. I touch her arm. The skin is warm and powdery, hanging off the bone. I squeeze her arm. Anne looks at me, indicating we should go. She looks back at Grandma. She bends to her again. I walk out into the hall. Gail comes out in a hurry, going by me down the hall for a doctor.

  We’re there the next night when she dies. Anne stands at her side, stroking her brow. Grandma lies in the same position as the night before, except this time her arms are folded across her chest and her head lies to the side on the pillow. The pink gloves are still on her hands. She hasn’t opened her eyes once, and we know it’s close. We’ve only just arrived, and we know it. I’m standing back against the wall by the door. I’m looking at Anne. Gail moves to take one of Grandma’s hands.

  For a second I look away, glancing up at the ceiling, and then I’m looking at Anne and Gail and at her, and something goes out of the room. That’s all. One second I’m looking up, and then we’re all looking at her and something goes out of the room.

  The Fortunes of the Day

  The next day not looking for her I saw her. I was doing laundry and there she was, outside, going by. I could let her walk past. It was up to me. I went out after her. She was stopped just past the window, looking at a notice put up by the ballet troupe class, her face wonderful looking, gray strands in her black hair, tan Boy Scout shirt, long Levi’s skirt, beat-up Lady Canada boots.

  I stepped around her, putting my hand on her side. She turned, looking up at me, not recognizing me. She looked stoned. Then she recognized me. I grabbed her and we hugged.

  “What,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Laundry,” I said, “I’m doing laundry.”

  She laughed that same laugh.

  “I’ll help.”

  We turned and went back into the laundromat. My clothes were already dry and she helped me fold the shirts and T-shirts and jeans and then the sheets. I saw the fastest way to do it, started to do it, she was still figuring it out. “No,” she said, “let’s do it this way.” I went along, feeling it made no difference. We folded the first one, then the others. We were finished and I put the box of fresh clothes under my arm.

  “Well,” she said, “don’t forget your book.”

  I saw I had forgotten it.

  She handed it to me.

  Going outside together, I said nothing. We walked to the corner and she said, “I guess we can still have our life together, it’s still there, there’s a lot of time.”

  We stood there on the corner.

  She said she had to find a bathroom, maybe into the Koffee Korral, but she didn’t want to spend any more money.

  She was looking up and down the Avenue.

  I waited, looking at her.

  She smiled, and put her face up gently for a kiss.

  I hardly touched her, then thought I should have really kissed her.

  The next day, though, having thought it through, I said, Like hell we can.

  Then later in the week, just before I left town, we ran into each other again. We had some Chinese food at Shi-Shan’s and she told me what was going on.

  I didn’t like what she was saying. The affairs she talked freely about were ones that were over with, and ugly to hear. The ones she hinted about were ones that weren’t finished. I didn’t want to listen. I just wanted to sit with her, something I’d never done, something she’d always wanted.

  She wanted me to talk. She kept giving me openings. Finally she asked if I was still with my new girl.

  I said, “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything, then, “Well, you still haven’t said anything about yourself.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You just don’t like to.”

  “No.”

  “You never did,” she said, “not to outsiders.”

  “Outsiders,” I said.

  She was smiling.

  “No, there isn’t anything to say. We both know everything. Let’s just sit here for a bit, okay?”

  “But we can’t, can we?”

  “No,” I said, “I guess not.”

  “I mean, we’re not free to be here, are we?”

  I looked at her.

  “Well, I’m not sorry it happened.”

  “No,” I said, “neither am I.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I am too.”

  “You don’t know what I went through. You have no idea.”

  “Well,” I said, “I think—”

  “You don’t know. You don’t. You know that ringing in your ears that you got? Well, I’ve got it now,” she said. She kept on talking for a while then slowly stopped . . .

  Faster Horses

  “I‘ve dropped sixty at Golden Gate Fields. Hitchhiking back to San Anselmo it begins lightly raining. A cowboy in a silver Dodge work van picks me up outside San Quentin. I’m thinking now I’m down to thirty. He’d gone to the track once. He’d tapped out by the seventh. The guy that took him didn’t want to leave until after the ninth. He told this guy he’d wait out in the car. He went out and after the ninth his friend comes out, breaks a two-by-four off one of the parking barricades, and starts in on the car with it. He’d jumped out, got hit, had his arm and jaw broke. He’s lying on the ground, near unconsciousness, when the police arrive, arrest him, and book him for willful assault on private property before taking him to Emergency. The friend isn’t arrested, saying, All I know is we both went broke but he left after the seventh and I just got out here. He musta gone crazy. At Bay Meadows, just before the end of the fall meet, leaning on the rail watching the horses being walked around in the saddling paddock before going out to post, the sixty-year-old man next to me, nicely dressed in a conservative gray suit and expensive-looking shoes, turns to me and quietly says, I lost it all, his face choked and sick. Hell, I tell him, it’s all right. You’ll make it back. No, he says, you don’t understand. I lost it all, all of it, everything. That’s what I’m thinking about while the cowboy tells me his story. Getting out in San Rafael, I start walking toward Fourth Street to hitch into San Anselmo. The only thing I can come up with to tell Carol is that I can’t trade off, well, whatever it is, right, you know what I’m talking about, for love and rent any longer. Or else not say anything, just get my gear and adios it. Maybe it’s just that easy. It probably is.”

  Friends

  “You think she’ll be back?”

  “Sure. She had me drive all over hell looking for him before she took off.”

  “She did?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s okay, then.”

  “Think so?”

  “You’re the one that thinks she’ll be back.”

  “That’s because she’s freaked out. He’s got the hammer on her. She’s the one that says, ‘Do you love me?’ not him, then, ‘I’m splitting,’ and he says, ‘Go,’ and means it. Then it’s her that writes and calls, not him.”

  “Well, he always takes her back.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Would you take her back? She’s a lovely girl.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He won’t take her back this time.”

  “Why?”

  “Not after this morning.”

  “No!”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  “You son of a bitch! You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Marshall, you asshole! What about Marsh?”

  “Marshall was being done a favor. He doesn’t need a chick like that. No one needs a chick like that.”

  “You’re a fool. She’ll tell him.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “What if she does?”

  “Then she does.”

  “She was just using you, man. To get back at him. To show him what she can do. She’ll tell him, and he’ll take her back.”

  “I don’t think so, but even so, so what?”

  “So you were just the patsy.”

  “So?”

  “So you’ve lost a friend, man.”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause if that’s what it takes to keep it together then they deserve each other. I don’t need to know any people like that.”

  Speed Limit

  In 1958, when I was seventeen, I was seriously injured in a nighttime truck accident, regaining consciousness on my back out in a field, several older men around me, one trying to get whiskey in my mouth.

  No, I told him, my body has been crushed and I’m hemorrhaging inside, the alcohol will dilate the blood vessels and speed the hemorrhaging, whiskey is the worst thing. Another man, his arm supporting my head, was telling me an ambulance would arrive soon.

  I couldn’t tell that I had pain, and I had seen my hips going off to the right in a strange angle with the right leg ballooned and turned wrong inside the pant leg and the right boot crushed flat, but I had been rational enough to talk the man into taking the whiskey bottle away so I knew my thinking was all right and, no longer wanting to look at myself, I turned my head to my left, looking out past the men into the darkness, and stopped thinking.

  Where I was was in the Moses Lake desert. This is flat, desolate country of only some cheatgrass and low clumps of sagebrush with no trees for miles in any direction save for back in the town of Moses Lake. I knew that, and I knew my back must be broken, and again there wasn’t any pain, and my last thought had been I hope I am not a paraplegic, and it was easy not to think, and it didn’t bother me that out there on the line where the darkness of the land met the lighter darkness of the sky was a stand of trees, large and dark, within an elliptical disc of a strange, brilliant green, the green first flaring up about the boles, moving up in bursts about the tops, then slowing, beginning to flow out around all of the stand, etching each tree in exact location, glowing about them with an intensity I could feel inside me, then not moving, holding, as I knew that was where I was going to go, and would.

  And not telling the men what I was seeing, lying there watching that light breaking, then steadying itself about those trees, I thought, So this is how it happens, well, it’s been a nice life, and only momentarily thought, No, it’s too soon, knowing immediately that it wasn’t, that for me it only went this far, that everything I was supposed to do was already done, and next awoke in an ambulance going at high speed toward Moses Lake and Moses Lake General Hospital.

  Years later, in a truck stop garage in Flagstaff, Arizona, I talked with a trucker from Memphis, Tennessee, while an all-night mechanic worked on the heater of a car I was driving east to New York City.

  This trucker, a large man in his late fifties, who introduced himself as Earl, had been in a Japanese POW camp on Luzon during 1942, ’43, and ’44. During his incarceration he contracted malaria and had it complicated by double pneumonia.

  He should have died, he said, but for some miracle he didn’t understand. He said due to the severity of the prison rations, as well as his illness, his body had been terribly racked by a lack of water. The crisis of the illness, he said, passed while he was hallucinating.

  In his hallucination he knew he was dying and he was desperate for water. He said he found himself crawling in a field that was the slope of a hill. It was nighttime, and what was eerie was that the field was bathed in an unearthly yellowish light that came not from the sky but from the ground, and on the crest of the slope was a series of water spigots. He said he could see himself crawling in that yellow light toward those spigots and the water he absolutely had to have. He said he crawled and crawled and almost reached one of the spigots. He said he was very glad he hadn’t because he knew if he had, that the moment he tasted that water he would be dead.

  I thought his story was remarkable and told him my story, pointing out the similarity of the eerie lights, and the fact that dying seemed to be a peaceful journey to a new place.

  He said, Perhaps, but he didn’t think so. He said from his experience it had been terrifying.

  I said in my experience it had not.

  He said, Well, and then told me how to drive across country the fastest way: by getting behind any semi that has an antenna on top of each of the outside rearview mirrors. Go fast when he goes fast, he said, and slow down when he does; those antennas mean he is two-way radio equipped and has all the latest information within at least a forty-to-sixty-mile radius of where all the police and speed traps are.

  I thanked him warmly.

  We shook hands and he left.

  Main Switch

  “Mickey, he’s so funny, he thinks he’s so hot! He comes over in the afternoon and sets there pulling at himself saying, Doesn’t that excite you, it excites the hell out of me, I know it excites you. I’ll say, God, Mickey, don’t be so crude! He thinks he’s got so much going for him! He says women are simply mad about his body, they crave it all the time. I say, Hell, Mickey, that’s no big deal, women crave lots of guys’ bodies, sex isn’t abnormal, you know, everybody does it. He’s got a white Cadillac. When he first got it he took me outside to look at it. Look at this, baby, he says, I bought it just for us. Look at the size of that backseat. Righteous, huh? Sure, Mickey, I say, you and some other chick get in back there and I’ll drive you guys around. But, damn, he is good, you know. He’s rough. And I like it. I like a guy who just grabs you and takes over. But then I want someone who’s nice, too. I guess I want it all. I’ve got this other guy who’s nuts about me, but he’s all moony about it, his brain is just mush. He’s something else. He wants me to come live with him. I think about it. ’Cause Mickey really isn’t that hot. All the girls that’re crazy about him are fat. Real fat. He doesn’t pick any foxes. So, of course they’re nuts about no place to live. I know I can’t stay there ’cause it’s her town, right, so I drive along the coast and end up here in the same fix, no job, no place to live, knowing no one, and even less money. Me and my dog slept in the van for a month, scuffling around, trying to get up enough money for a place to rent. Then I met Ted here and started working steady. Man, you don’t know how to relate to chicks, you know, you’ve been out of circulation so long you don’t know what to say to them. So I start going out and it starts coming back. And then about six months later, man, I’m doing good, got a hot new lady, a place, a few bucks in my pocket, things are looking up and bang, there’s a knock on my door! Out of the blue! It’s her! She wants to come back. Well, I don’t know, I’m not missing her so much, you know, I’m not so sure I want her back, but I let her in. She gets knocked up right away. We get married and now we’ve got a little son. It’s weird, but it seems like when you want them they don’t want anything to do with you, they only want you when you don’t want them. And another thing I’ve noticed, if you really want to score just slip a wedding band on. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been propositioned since we’ve gotten married. It never happened before. Right here at work, man, in this garage. Women are doing that to me all the time now.”

  “We were together three and a half years. I kept asking her to marry me. She said, No, ask me some time when you’re serious! What the hell, I was serious! Then one day for no reason she decides she wants to live alone W
hy? I ask her. It feels too close, she says. She thinks about me too much, she says, it takes too much of her time. What the hell, you know! Women are weird, they don’t know what the fuck they want. It wasn’t another guy, she said. I thought it was. So, anyway, I drove her down to Long Beach, her family and friends are there. So there I am in a strange town, eighty bucks in my pocket, no job, him. He can only have a girl once, he says. Once he’s had her, it’s all over, she doesn’t turn him on. A new chick a night, he says. He’s funny, all right. He’s fun to kid around with.”

  Romance

  We used to see them in the District when all the small-time dealers were working psychedelics on the Avenue. You would be sitting in the Hasty Tasty having a late-night coffee and you would see them glide by the windows like a ballet of luminous spectra. And sometimes their appearance would upset people.

  One night a young, long-haired guy in a leather coat stood up and challenged them. They had just come in, and this guy said, “Why do you do that?” He had been sitting down, relaxed, before they came in.

  “Do what?” the white-faced guy nearest him said.

  “Put that crap on your faces?”

  “What crap? What’s wrong with my face?”

  “The white stuff,” the longhair said.

  “White stuff? What white stuff?”

  “Ah, shit,” the longhair said. He sat down and stumbled.

  They laughed.

  “You’re all ridiculous,” the longhair said.

  “No,” a girl seated at a table in the corner said, “you’ve all been to a party, right?”

  “No,” said the Botticelli-looking girl of the two white-faced girls, “we’re out exploring, you see.” Her smile was genuine under the dusty white of her face, and I thought, Ah, Christ, look at her. She was right out of Children of Paradise, 1900 Paris, her beauty as precise and ethereal as that of the film, but one going even further back than that, past classical film, classical painting, past all education.