“This is my son,” Faith said to him.
He nodded. “I’m afraid there’s some bad news. We’ve had to rush him into surgery—the fever’s gone but he’s had a cerebral event. A hematoma.”
She took her son’s hand, and squeezed.
“We’re doing all we can.”
“So—this is—are you telling us—”
He seemed almost hangdog. “Well, we just have to wait and hope.” Then he leaned toward them, as if about to reveal a secret. “But I think you should prepare yourself.”
They watched him move off, past the white room with the gurney in it, the feet under the blanket.
“Jesus God.” Her son stared at the exit leading to the waiting room.
“Louie,” she said.
He turned.
“You know her?”
He shook his head, but muttered, “Yeah.”
“You knew.”
He did not respond.
“You can tell me now,” Faith went on. “You knew. That was what was between you. You—you caught him or something. Saw him. Tell me.”
“He kept saying it was over. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
Fifteen years old.
She put her arms around him again. “Oh, my boy. We have to be strong, now.”
His face was blank. And again she was aware of the hollowness of what she had said, and felt the need to ask forgiveness.
“Can you—”
But her son broke in. “Mom, I’m scared.”
They went back through to the waiting room. Janice was where she had been. The young woman had rested her head against the chair top, eyes closed.
They walked over to Janice. “Can you take Louie home?”
“No,” the boy said.
“Please, Son. There’s nothing you can do here now. It’s only waiting now.”
After a hesitation, he turned to Janice. “Can I come to your place?”
“I wouldn’t let you go anywhere else,” Janice told him.
Faith waited until they had gone, then turned and approached the young woman. The noise in the halls beyond where they were went on, and the young woman made a sound like trying to fight a cough. It took her what seemed a long time to feel Faith’s presence; but finally the red eyes opened, and widened.
“I’m Mrs. Hayes.”
“Oh.”
“Can I sit down?”
The other nodded. She slumped, hands between her knees. Faith saw the pulsing in the side of her neck.
“Tell me your name, please.”
“Tara.”
“Tara what?”
The other sobbed. “Olberman.”
“I’m Faith.”
“I know.”
“Where did you meet?”
The sobbing continued through her answer: “I was—it was—he put my kitchen—”
“Is his brother involved?”
The other sniffled. “What?”
“His brother. Did his brother know about it.”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“How long has it—” Faith stopped.
“Is he—is he—”
“Yes. He’s in surgery. But I’m to prepare myself.” She felt this as aggression, and for an instant she meant it that way. The other’s face whitened slightly, more pale than Faith could believe. “How long?” she asked. “How long has it…”
“Last fall…”
She saw the days and weeks and months since then, Thanksgiving—the trip to Nashville with Ben and Mallory and their two girls, and the tensions between Louie and them, the time relaxing with Mallory, and Mallory’s jokes about the boys as such boys, the hours up late, drinking wine and talking. She thought of Christmas, her happy insistence on opening the gifts in the morning, and making love the night before, and the morning in the living room with the paper scattered everywhere and Louie’s delight at the iPad Freddie had gotten for him, and the hope that they might finally begin to get along, her own happiness in the moment of lying down to sleep that night, Freddie already snoring lightly, turned to the wall, his big shoulder that she pulled the blanket over, and she patted it, feeling proprietary, motherly, glad of the chance to be tender, and New Year’s Eve, again with Ben and Mallory, and how the brothers laughed and teased each other and argued about the Titans and Roll Tide and Freddie worrying about his health, his unease about a little cough, “I’ve had this cough all winter,” and the gratitude she felt when Mallory chided him for being an alarmist, “We’ve all had the cough, Freddie.” Those days, and on into spring, the weekend in Smoky Mountains Park, seeing the black bear in the distance, standing so still, and Mallory wanting to run, though she’d always called Ben her baby bear and collected little porcelain bears, how Freddie had laughed at her for being such a coward. And the summer evenings, those hours, the idle talk into the dark, the nights and predawn mornings shaded with anxiety, always in the back of her mind, the tensions between Freddie and her son, who had turned all his scant, toddler memories of his real father into perfection, when the fact was that his real father was a bully who had very little time for him, or for Faith, and who went away, auf immer, he said, to his native Germany and died in a crash on the Autobahn…
All of this Faith saw in a flash of near dizziness, a rush of memory that hurt, and how could it be that during all those times, good days and weeks and months, her husband’s life was elsewhere? And Ben had known it. Maybe even Mallory knew it.
The room was too bright, the lightbulbs too fluorescent, all the colors wrong, the walls tightening, dull, off-white, the too-shiny linoleum floor with its black smears. She felt the light as a form of burning, and closed her eyes, and then opened them again. Here everything was. Now. This was the world, now. The broken place. For a few moments she sat despairing horribly in the electric light. Aware of it as electric, as the light of her time, the Memphis night coming on. The other woman gagged, and then sobbed, and Faith kept patting the thin shoulders, suddenly feeling something stir in her, a surging, a rush and release, and she understood that what she felt now was simple as a breath; it moved in her, searching through her blood. She turned to the girl, who really seemed like nothing more than a girl, with her stringy hair and her thin white face and her fright, the brown eyes wide and quick, looking at Faith and then at the room. Faith touched the side of the face.
The girl was still crying. “I’m so sorry.”
A nurse, not the doctor, came out and walked over. She seemed uncertain which of them to address. But the expression on her face told them what she had to say. “I’m afraid—” she began.
“I think we know,” Faith said.
The nurse nodded and managed to say how sorry she was.
Faith took the girl named Tara very gently into her arms. The sobbing went on.
“I didn’t know.” Tara coughed and caught her breath. “I didn’t think he was—sick in any way. I didn’t know he was—married.”
“Shhh,” Faith said.
“Well, I—I—”
“Don’t.”
“No, I did know. I did. But he—he said he was so unhappy.”
“There.”
“He did. He—didn’t want to—to hurt any feelings, you know. And he—”
“Don’t try to talk now.”
They sat there while two other people, a man and a woman, walked in and went to the window and came to sit a few chairs down. The man was limping badly.
“I’ll have to take care of some things here,” Faith said. “You should go now, please.”
The girl stood quickly. “I can’t—stop thinking about it. I’m so terribly sorry.”
“Aren’t we lucky to have known him,” Faith heard herself say.
The other did not seem to understand how to respond. She nodded vaguely and moved toward the sliding entranceway. The door opened upon her approach, and Faith had the thought that it was as though the building itself knew she was on her way out.
VETERANS NIGHT
Just past m
idnight, when it looked like things might get out of hand, Greer brought out the baseball bat he kept under the bar and, holding it cocked, edged toward the tall red-haired punk with the bad mouth and his two jerk friends. “Time to go home, boys,” he said.
“You better think, man,” the redhead said.
“You think. While you still got something to think with.”
The redhead and the two men with him backed out slowly. Greer watched them go, then closed the doors and locked everything up. He let his young friends Hines and Trent stay. They drank cognac, slow, for hours. Greer had a small stash of cocaine, too, that he had stolen from his ex-girlfriend, who kept coming around trying to make up. But she was always toasted and dull, he said. And though he wasn’t interested in that life anymore, he didn’t want her to get in more trouble than was already her lot in life. That was how Greer expressed himself. Phrases like lot in life and talking about fate and karma. He also used a kind of aural italics. “That girl is fucked up,” he said. “I don’t know what she thinks I can give her.”
He drank the cognac with them after the door was shut, and finally he brought out the Florida snow. They offset the cognac they had been drinking with that.
“We’ll get sober artificially,” Greer said.
“Clear our sinus cavities,” said Hines, who reached into his coat pocket and stopped. “Damn,” he said, low.
“What?” Trent asked.
“Nothing.” Hines turned to Greer. “Glad you didn’t have to use the bat.”
“Man’s a true friend,” said Trent, lifting his glass.
“Trash like that,” Greer said. “Never had to face anything. Spoiled bunch of materialistic shits. I’d’ve used the bat, too. I’d’ve hit a couple home runs on their asses. And they knew it, too.”
Hines held up his glass. “To all the owners of baseball bats and all the veterans of foreign wars.”
“To us and those like us,” Greer pronounced. He was old enough to be their father, and they liked him and looked up to him. Trent even tried sometimes to ape the way he talked. He had taken to using the word karma. Greer smiled whenever he heard him use it.
He let them stay until the predawn. He cleaned the place up around them and wouldn’t let them do anything to help. When the coke was exhausted, they each milked one more drink and had a coffee. Greer, laughing about the look on the redheaded punk’s face when the baseball bat came into play, got into a coughing fit, and felt woozy. They had to help him into the bathroom. But when he came out, he said he was fine. “Well, time to close,” he said.
Hines and Trent wanted to pay for the cognac, or sign for it, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He saw them out of the place, into the cold. Several times he’d remarked that he hadn’t done cocaine or cognac for years, and they were both worried about his bad heart. Especially Hines.
“Quit worrying, Tommy,” Greer said. “I’m golden.”
“Come on with us,” said Hines.
They lived close.
“Yeah,” Trent said. “We’ve got a little whiskey, too.”
Greer waved them off. “I got enough whiskey in here to wash a car, are you kidding? I could fill a gas truck with it. Gotta close up. Still some things to do. I’m fine. I’ll walk home. You guys go ahead.”
“We’ll walk you,” Tommy Hines offered.
“Nah. Go on.”
There were only the lamps up and down the long street, both ways, looking less bright in the grayness. They stood for a few moments as if confused about which direction to take. It was very cold, and there was a breeze that made it worse. They stamped and wrapped their arms around themselves, and Hines tried to light a cigarette with a match, but the matches wouldn’t stay lit. Trent ended up doing it with his lighter. They shared the cigarette. They called themselves brothers in arms. They had both served in Iraq and had come home to Memphis within a month of each other. Trent had been in the infantry. Hines had been assigned to the mail dispatch outfit in Baghdad. Trent was wounded by ambush, Hines by an insurgent bomb. Now they were no longer under the protection of Uncle, as Trent expressed it. They had been discharged, with what were called healed wounds, and they had lost any idea of what to do with themselves. They had a little payment each month for their service to the country, but it was not enough to live on. Things were as bad as they could be, really, for both of them. No family to speak of, nobody much they felt any attachment to. They had a small apartment together in Midtown. Five hundred dollars a month. Trent had a job taking deliveries for Buster’s Wine and Liquor. Hines was between jobs, which was a source of tension. There had been episodes. Heavy drinking, drunk driving, and petty theft. He had spent some time in the city jail. Trent was overprotective, and in fact the ruckus in Greer’s was about that, the tall redheaded punk getting specific about someone not making a salary and living off the land. The tall punk had had dealings with Hines before deployment, and he considered Hines a poor risk for loaning money. He was very loud expressing this. He had been looking for Hines. Trent understood Hines’s trouble and was sensitive about it. He wouldn’t brook criticism of his friend and brother.
He had ahold of the redheaded punk’s shirt, and then the two who were with the punk stepped in, pulling Trent back and holding him, and that’s when Greer brought out the baseball bat.
Hines and Trent were regulars, and the punk was somebody off the street. That was how Greer expressed it, but they knew he was only trying to preserve his air of hard-bitten toughness.
Greer was a good man.
“One of the best,” Hines said now, as if they had been talking about it.
“I think he’d have killed that guy,” said Trent.
They walked with the difficulty to which they were fairly accustomed up to the top of the street, and stood there. The ruin of what used to be the hospital where Elvis was pronounced dead lay before them on the other side of Union Avenue. A big pile of rubble.
“Wonder when they’ll get that cleaned up,” Hines said. “What’s it been, a year since they blew it up?”
“Year—yeah.”
“Damn, Stevie. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun.” Hines was experiencing repeated nightmares about getting blown up.
“I was here for it, you know,” Stevie Trent said. He had no use of his right arm, the nerves all severed there, the arm held to his side by a strap, and his left ankle joint was all calcified tissue. “You believe this? There were people crying in the crowd. Big crowd, too. Like he just died.”
“Elvis,” said Hines. “Damn.” The explosion he kept dreaming about was of course more memory than dream. It had caused nerve damage. You couldn’t see where the wounds were on his body. He walked with a lurch, like someone missing the necessary musculature to gain much momentum, but the real damage was interior. He suffered a deep fear of changing anything or moving from one spot to another. He had to overcome it with every step. Everything unnerved him and he was always expecting the worst.
“Imagine dying on the toilet,” Trent said.
“Let’s go on home.”
“See if Greer comes out.”
They waited. They could see the entrance of the bar, and the light still shining in the window. Farther down, some young men were jiving along, shoving one another and picking up debris and throwing it.
“Let’s go,” said Hines. “This ain’t no hour to be out here.”
“Worried about Greer.”
The sun was about to come spilling over the line of the horizon.
“We can check with him later today,” Hines said. “If I don’t lay down I’m gonna fall down.”
“You ever see him drink like that?”
“I think the trouble got to him more than he was showing.”
“Think he would’ve used that thing?”
“The bat?” Hines said. “Greer? Oh, he’d’ve used it all right.”
Greer was Vietnam. An old guy with a long history and he had seen a lot of things and done things. There was stuff he still felt guilty for
. Trent and Hines had played by the rules. They told Greer that was how it was for them. They had an idealistic way of seeing it all and they were not bitter and had served their country. They had volunteered.
Greer told them he loved them, with tears in his eyes.
That was Greer. “Look at you guys,” he said. “You’re boys. You don’t have a pot to piss in. I was just like you. I was exactly like you. Except I didn’t get blown up or shot.”
“But it was different for you,” Hines told him. “You didn’t have 9/11. You had riots and burning cities, man. And Johnson and the draft.”
“I was just like you,” Greer said.
Now, standing up at the corner looking down toward the bar, they saw the young men in the street stop and regard them. They were talking to one another, too far away to hear. Five of them.
“Come on,” Trent muttered. “Let’s get.”
The young men started again, looking stealthy, spreading out.
“Hey, boys,” Hines called to them. “You don’t want to mess with no war heroes.”
The tallest one was the one from earlier in the bar. The redheaded one. He wore his pants so far below his waist it looked funny.
“Hey,” said Trent. “You all right today?”
“Ain’t got no baseball bat.”
“You trying to look like a brother,” Hines said. “Why do you think you gotta do that.”
“I wouldn’t talk without a baseball bat.”
“Hey,” said Hines. “Don’t mess with us, okay? We don’t need a baseball bat.”
“Really.”
Trent said, “Come on, boys. No trouble.”
“You don’t want any part of us,” Hines said. “This could be the worst night of your lives, really.”
The boys were moving to make a circle around the two of them.
“Got these friends, Hines,” the redheaded one said.
“I see that,” said Hines. “Nice to have friends. I’ve got some, too.”
“Where’s your friend with the baseball bat?” one of the others said. And they all jumped. One of them pulled Trent down and another started kicking at him. The others, including the redhead, simply danced around Hines, hitting him and swiping at him with their caps. “Living way beyond your means,” the redheaded one said. “Ain’t that what they say? You got a big deficit, right?”
Living in the Weather of the World Page 8
