Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Well, you’re about to get one now,” he said, with a mordant chuckle.

  “That I am,” I said. “That I am.”

  The decision was cemented with a hug.

  As Jack–his spirits lifted!–got on his cell to book a flight I hiked across the lawn, up to the Main House to check out. Bruce and Susan wondered why I was checking out early, not staying the night. I told them that I was eager to get on the road, not wanting to disclose the whole imbroglio, Joy leaving and all the rest.

  With a palpable mutual sorrow, Jack and I packed up, got Mom secured in the back, and GPS-ed the Rampvan to Portland International. I double-parked at Alaska Airlines departures, switched the hazards on, then climbed out to help Jack with his luggage. We looked at each other for a pregnant moment, then he wrapped his arms around me. He held on to me for the longest moment. “Good luck, man,” he whispered, his scratchy beard pressed against my cheek.

  “Yeah, I’ll call you from the road, let you know how it’s going.”

  “Do that,” he said, reaching for his duffel bag. He smiled and nodded, a sadness creasing his face. “See you back in LA.” Then he turned and was swallowed up by the teeming terminal.

  I climbed back into the van, turned to my mother sitting in her wheelchair in the back. The vehicle looked, and felt, empty. Twin feelings, sadness and a sense of duty, possessed me. My stomach felt like a toilet with no water in the bowl, vainly trying to flush. “We’ve got a long way to go,” I said. I tried to do the voice of Barbara Stanwyck: “So, hold on to your bladder, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

  “Where’d Jack go?”

  “Where you’re headed, Mom. Home.”

  chapter 15

  From Portland International, my mother and I, on our own now, looped onto I-84 and headed in a northeasterly direction. In no time we were climbing through a riparian gorge, paralleling the wide, rushing Columbia River. Just before departure I had hit Google Maps on my laptop and computed that we could make the small town of Pasco by nightfall. I wanted desperately to get out of Oregon and away from all the wine–I had abandoned dozens of bottles back at the Brookside Inn, and that was after Jack’s pillaging all he could cram into his suitcase–and put as many miles behind us as possible.

  At first, my mother seemed nervous with just the two of us aboard, her nervousness manifesting in frequent requests to pull in at the various rest stops. Every stop involved my wheeling her into the woman’s bathroom, to be met with glares–even with a handicapped person in tow! And too often the handicapped toilet was occupied by some insensitive, perfectly able-bodied woman. There was no way I could effect the transfer in the regular stalls, so it was particularly galling to wait until some obese specimen waddled out of the handicapped accommodation, after having taken her sweet time.

  At the third pull-off where my mother exhorted me to stop, she couldn’t go. I scolded her for the false alarm. “We have a lot of driving still to do to get you to Wisconsin, Mom. These transfers are not easy. You can’t be asking me to stop all the time. You’ve got to try to learn to hold it, okay?”

  “I’ll try to be good,” she said, sounding as if she now sensed the gravity of the new situation. “But, I’m afraid.”

  “What of?”

  “You being able to take care of me.”

  “Well, I am, too. If that makes you feel any better. But, what’s the worst than can happen? We die, right?”

  “Oh, no,” my mother said, chuckling at my cynical humor.

  The landscape turned wooded, tall pines reaching for the fading light of the sky. Now and then our view was graced by a mountainside waterfall, spewing runoff from the snow-capped Cascades.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” my mother would exclaim as we climbed toward the crest of the range. The weather had grown mercifully cooler with our ascent. AC no longer needed, I switched it off.

  On the eastern side of the Cascades the landscape grew flatter and the forested terrain surrendered to sagebrush and wild grasses that the searing summer sun had parched a honey-colored brown. Here and there, harvested farmland dotted with bales of hay fled past as we continued east. The late afternoon sky turned a deeper and deeper blue as we rode on into twilight.

  My mother and I didn’t converse much on this first, short, leg of the journey to Wisconsin. When we did it was usually to negotiate her request to stop at a bathroom. I would ask if she could hold it and she would say she would try. Shortly thereafter, she would plead again that she needed to go. I don’t know if it was the sleepless night, my legs sapped of strength from making love with Natalie into the raw hours of morning, or the fact that I desperately needed a drink to quell the jimjams jangling my nerves, but I was finding myself growing unappeasably querulous. It was only two hundred-some miles to Pasco, but the next three days were going to be brutal without Jack as my co-pilot and Joy as my mother’s minder.

  In the tiny interstate-bound town of Umatilla, we looped onto I-82. Though it was nearing eight o’clock, now that we were out of the mountains and in the flatlands, the air had turned hot and dry. The neon sign of a Wells Fargo branch flashed “92°,” reminding us that it was still summer.

  It was a short distance to our day’s destination. Located on the inland side of the Cascades, Pasco, WA, is an arid, wind-swept town of fewer than 40,000, flanked to the west by the Columbia River, which hugged the I-82 almost all the way.

  I rolled my mother out of the Rampvan and into the Best Western Inn, a relatively new, three-story motel with a high-ceilinged lobby. The receptionist raised her eyebrows at my request for a single handicapped room–which I’d neglected to mention in making the reservation–but at the sight of my forlorn-looking mother slumped in her wheelchair, she nodded thoughtfully and started punching keys–and more keys, making me aggravated.

  “Could we kind of hurry it up? My mother’s really got to go to the bathroom. And, unfortunately, I’m in charge of that detail,” I added, my tone chafed with impatience. “Plus, I don’t think you’d like it if she pissed in your lobby.” (God, I was jonesing badly for a drink!)

  The receptionist hurried up and got us checked in.

  In the spacious, air-conditioned room I helped my mother go to the toilet. She must have been holding it, because she took one long rainstorm of a piss. When she was finished, I helped her up off the porcelain, pulled up her stretch pants and maneuvered her back into the wheelchair.

  Back in the main room I wordlessly handed her the remote. She switched the TV on, found a local news channel and zoned out to that while I went down to the Rampvan to fetch a bottle of wine. Halfway back to the entrance I realized my mother would demand some, but all I had retrieved was a bottle of St. Innocent Pinot, so I returned to the van and found a bottle of rosé made by the same winery–and that had better do or I’m going to flip out, I raged in my head. After baking in the heat of the van all afternoon it was warm to the touch. I tracked down an ice machine, filled a bucket and plunged the bottle in. One could almost hear it going ahh.

  “Where’d you go?” my mother implored as I came into the room.

  I held up my bottle and her bucket. “Out to get you some wine. I figured you could use a glass.”

  “I thought you had abandoned me,” she said.

  “Oh, and get myself arrested for filial neglect. Just what I need, Mom,” I said dismissively as I extracted the two corks. I grabbed the pair of plastic cups from the minibar, filled hers with ice and rosé and mine with the ‘08 St. Innocent Pinot White Rose Vineyard, a wine I’d never tried before, but which turned out to be astonishingly good.

  “It’s red,” my mother said circumspectly.

  “It’s a rosé, Mom. Try it.”

  She took a sip. “Hmm,” was all she said. Then she took another. And another.

  Thanks to the wine, my mom’s fears dissipated. I tried to hold back, but the strain of the drive and what still lay ahead hung over me like a gray June marine layer that refused to burn off.

  Holding out her c
up for a refill, my mother asked, “Where’re we going for dinner?”

  “If you’re hungry, I’ll order take-out. I’m too wiped for a restaurant.” I obliged the refill request, but pointed a cautionary finger at her.

  “How about pizza?” she suggested, downright perkily.

  “Mom, your arteries probably look like the sewers of Paris already. Do you really need such unwholesome food?”

  “I’m craving pizza,” she said in a rising tone, her sugar levels dipping.

  “All right. All right.” I got on the trusty iPhone and pulled down the maps app. I was soon on the phone to a take-out place called Sahara Pizza. After some debate we decided on The Ultimate Sahara, my mother’s choice and a grotesquely described monster of a pie.

  As we waited for the pizza, I asked, “Are you looking forward to seeing Alice?”

  She nodded introspectively, as if she had given the question less consideration than I had imagined. Sipping her wine, with the imminent reality of Wisconsin growing nearer, I couldn’t tell whether she was having doubts now or there was something else on her mind. In her innocent and post-stroke way it was possible she had just fantasized about getting out of Las Villas de Muerte and hadn’t weighed the repercussions of what it was going to be like to live at her sister’s in Sheboygan–for the rest of her life.

  Without looking at me, she asked, “Would you call to check up on Snapper?”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “They’re probably closed, Mom.”

  “Could you please phone them?”

  “All right!” I got up and went toward the door.

  “Where’re you going?” she bellowed.

  “I don’t want you to be privy to this call.” I slammed the door between us, fatigue fraying my nerves.

  Outside, the sun was dipping in the west. I scrolled through my recent call list, found the number for Lakeview Veterinary Hospital and tapped it. The receptionist answered. “Hi, this is Miles Raymond, the guy with the Yorkie who was HBC.”

  “You’re learning the lingo,” she said, remembering me.

  “Is Dr. Ariel in?”

  She put down the phone and went to check. Moments later, Dr. Ariel’s voice came on, sounding guarded. “This’d better not involve anyone’s tooth.”

  “No, no. That’s totally healed. Thank you so much. No, I was calling about Snapper.”

  She cleared her throat and the line briefly went dead. “Well, he was getting better. We had him stabilized. But I’m afraid the damage from the original injury was too extensive. There’s too much tissue death. It’s compromised the circulation to his right hind leg.” She paused.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The poor little guy’s toxic from that leg. I was going to call you as soon as I got a chance. If we don’t amputate soon,” she said matter-offactly, “he’ll die.”

  I exhaled a sigh and couldn’t respond right away, weighing a whole host of things–what to tell my mother? what decision to make? where the nearest gun store might be just in case.…

  “Mr. Raymond?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better just to put him down, Doctor? Amputation. Jesus.”

  “Dogs in general do really well on three legs,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? Could he jump into my mother’s lap?” I asked testily.

  “Maybe,” she fired back.

  I went mute.

  “It’s your call, Mr. Raymond, but I’m not going to be the one who puts him down. As an alternative, if you want to sign him over to us, I’ll perform the amputation on my own dime. And I know someone who’ll take him. Someone he’s grown very fond of.”

  “Yeah, who?”

  “Me.”

  Oh, fuck, I almost spoke into the phone. “If I agree to let you amputate, I’ll pay for it,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” she said, “but we’re going to need your mother’s consent.”

  In a rising tone, I said, “I’m not going to tell my mother that her dog is getting his leg amputated. She’ll bawl the rest of the way to Wisconsin and I’ll end up in a state mental hospital.” Clearly, I had descended a long way from that balcony at the Academy Awards a mere four months before.

  “She’s the rightful owner.”

  “I have power of attorney,” I said.

  “Okay, that makes things easier.”

  “So, if he survives, you’re willing to take him?”

  “Yes,” she said in a calm voice. “And if in the future your mother wants him back, she can have him.”

  “How am I supposed to get a three-legged Yorkie to Wisconsin?” I asked in exasperation.

  “Your mother’s dog is going to die if I don’t take off the gangrenous limb,” she hurried me along. “So, Mr. Raymond: Do I have your permission to remove Snapper’s leg?”

  I dragged a hand across my sticky, sweaty face. The pizza delivery car pulled into the lot. “All right, Doctor, you have my consent to do what’s necessary to save the dog as long as you’ll take him. I’m not going to tell my mother, though, he has to lose a leg. The image is too horrific.”

  “Just don’t lie to her and say he died,” she admonished.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You wrote a book where all the characters based on you and your friend do is lie. I presume you know something about the subject.”

  A mordant laugh momentarily convulsed me. “You’re right, Doctor. It’s all about lying.” I shook my head. I was getting flak from every side. “All right. Save the critter. I’ll check back in a few days and see how he’s doing.”

  “You made the right decision.”

  “No, you guilt-tripped me. Goodbye.”

  The delivery boy bounded up the steps, acned and monosyllabic. His meth-mouth smile at the $20 tip made me lose my appetite.

  Inside, I caught my mother refilling her cup. “Mom, what’re you doing?”

  “Just a smidgen more,” she said girlishly.

  “Mom, I can’t have you peeing like a racehorse all night. Who do you think I am? Florence Nightingale?” I set the pizza down on the nightstand. “Here’s your Sahara with the works.”

  My mother had me bring a towel from the bathroom to use as a bib. I wrapped it around her neck, pizza not being the preferred food given her loose-jointed mouth. Halfway through her second slice–sausage, bell peppers and tomatoes plopping onto the towel–she asked, “What’d they say about my Snapper?”

  “He’s doing fine, Mom.”

  “Will he be coming home?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think it’s unrealistic. And unfair to your sister Alice.”

  “Why?” she demanded.

  I nearly exploded. “How am I going to get him out there, Mom?”

  Her face hardened to granite streaked with red sauce. “I miss him.”

  I closed my eyes and held them shut, waiting for her mood to pass.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother reaching for the rosé. I grabbed it just before her greedy paw could claim it.

  “Mom, I’m the one who’s going to have to get up in the middle of the night and help you to the bathroom.”

  “Just a smidgen more. For your poor mother who raised you,” she pleaded.

  “No. You’ve had enough.”

  Her expression turned sullen. “You’re no good.”

  I sighed. Now I understood, first-hand, what Joy had suffered through. Not even a few more thousand could make her willing to stay. I rose from my chair. “Come on, Mom, let’s put you down.” I caught myself. Snapper. My mother? “I mean, let’s get you to bed.”

  “First my medications,” she said sharply, still indignant about my cutting her off. I knew the feeling.

  Next to the “Dear Miles” note Joy had left me I’d found the book-sized zippered pouch that contained my mother’s pills, with a separate note detailing the instructions on administering them. Coumadin, Lasix, Lanoxin, Cordarone, atenolol, aspirin, Ambien, ending with the applicat
ion of a nitroglycerine patch over her heart. Modern medicine is amazing, I thought. It’s regulating her heart, pumping her blood, thinning her blood, emptying her of excess water that’s dangerous for a non-ambulatory person, and sedating her all at once. Polypharmacology and curmudgeonlinesss were keeping her alive.

  “Now, my brace,” she instructed, when we had finished with the meds. I dutifully removed the brace from her lower left leg and set it aside.

  “Okay, now we’ll put you to bed.”

  “I want to go to the bathroom first.”

  “Jesus, Mom, you’re peeing like an incontinent dog.”

  “I’ve got to go!”

  I wheeled her back into the bathroom and went through the transfer routine, waited in the doorway with my back turned while she relieved herself, and hauled her back into the chair and back to the bed.

  “Now, undress me.”

  I closed my eyes and held my breath a moment. “Can’t you sleep in your clothes?” I asked.

  “No. Undress me.”

  With some difficulty, owing to the immobility of her paralyzed left arm, hanging like the trunk of a dead elephant, I pulled off her sweatshirt, trying all the while not to look at her naked body. But I couldn’t keep it entirely out of view, and glimpsed her drooping, wrinkled breasts. Next, I peeled her pants off. That left her stark naked. With both arms I hauled her legs up onto the queen bed and maneuvered her stocky frame until it was correctly aligned. I covered her up as quickly as I could.

  Helpless as a turtle on its back, she launched a barrage of admonitions. “You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not going out to drink?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Finishing the explosive Raptor Ridge I found myself reaching for the half bottle of rosé. I stopped myself at the thought that I had six hundred miles to cover the following day, doing all the driving myself.