The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  I sat on the wooden chair. The same mystical force allowing me to breathe oxygen pulled the cigarette smoke deep into my chest, releasing the whiteness ever so slowly until I could feel the nicotine reach the center of my mass. It had been a while since I’d smoked, and during the first three drags I remembered how much I loved it. Toward the end of the cigarette I realized how it always left me unfulfilled. The expectations too high and the results too average.

  But I lit another one right after the first anyway and sat alone thinking for hours about what I had done. Trying to figure out what part of me was responsible, and what part of me wasn’t.

  two

  Most of my suicide scenarios included a common theme. Apparently, subconsciously, I was concerned about offending the person who might find my body washed up on the beach, or bloated and smelly three days in the bed, or even lying peacefully in the backseat of my car in the garage. I’m not sure exactly what this means.

  I kept thinking about digging a hole. Finding a secluded place down on the beach about ten yards up from the water’s edge. Around noon I’d go out with a shovel, ice chest, and a few books. I’d begin digging a deep, deep hole, piling up the sand on the side of the hole facing the water. Between digging, I’d have a cold drink, lay out on the towel reading my favorite books, watch the seagulls and pelicans frolic along the shoreline.

  If anyone passed, walking along the beach, I’d keep my face in the book and pretend I didn’t speak English. I would intentionally select the day of the month with the highest tide, a full moon, I suppose.

  After the sun went down the water would begin to rise, creeping up the sand a little further with every breaking wave. When the waves began to touch the pile of sand in front of the six foot hole, I would remove the gun from the plastic bag inside the ice chest. The metal would be cold on my hands, and I’d be careful not to set the gun down in the sand.

  I’d throw the shovel, ice chest, and my favorite books down into the hole. Then I would position myself at the far end of the hole, standing upright, leaning slightly forward. The gun would be in my right hand. I would look one way and then the other down the beach, to make sure there were no flashlights. No families walking the beach, or young lovers, or people unprepared for the horrors of finding a dead body late at night.

  At that point, I’d be ready. Standing stiff, I would lean forward until my body, a victim of gravity, would begin to fall. In midair, the gun pointed at the side of my head, I’d pull the trigger, ending my life and allowing my body to end up in the very bottom of the hole next to the shovel, ice chest, my favorite books, and the gun.

  The moon would exert its strange force upon the water, pulling it upwards, opposite from the gravitational force plunging my body into the deep hole, and eventually the waves would push the pile of sand down into the hole on top of me, burying my dead body far below the surface of the pristine beach. I would be allowed to rot in peace, going back to the earth the way God intended.

  Maybe I’m not really concerned about those people who could find my lifeless body. Maybe it’s a control issue. I don’t like the idea of my body being flipped around, drained of fluid, dressed up and locked down in a dark, sealed casket.

  I spent so much time thinking about dying, I never considered the possibility of slowly falling apart. The doctor said the tingling sensation down my right arm was caused by the impingement of a nerve in my neck. The impingement was caused by the herniation of a disk, probably the result of the constant pounding of jogging, or maybe my insides were rotting for no reason.

  “You’re getting older,” he said. “You can put up with the pain, or we can replace the disk.”

  I tried to put up with the pain, but it just got worse. One morning I woke up with my head cocked to the side. Something had shifted inside my neck during the night and fire shot down my arm if I tried to straighten my head. It made me wonder how people in chronic pain coped before modern medicine. Did they pray every day for their chance to die? Did they spend hours thinking about killing themselves and ending the pain?

  Waiting for surgery, nearly naked with my head still cocked to the side, I felt the same loss of control a dead body might feel. The same lost feeling I had the day they told me my father died. The medicine began to drip and the warmth slowly rose through my pitiful limbs. For some reason, I started to tell a story that wasn’t true.

  “I hated my wife’s Yorkie. It was a pain in the ass. Bark, bark, bark. We lived out in the country on fifty acres, mostly woods. One night I was eating dinner and the damned dog just wouldn’t shut up. So you know what I did?”

  The overweight nurse said, “What?”

  The warmth had invaded my head. I don’t remember anything else. I woke up in a hospital room with Allen and Emily standing by the bed. The overweight nurse was busy in the room. I was convinced death was upon me. From the outside, I was sure I looked the way my mother looked the day she died.

  “That was a horrible story you told,” the nurse said.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. Maybe I’d recounted the excruciating details of the murder of Allen Kilborn, or my trip to Kansas City, or the time I thought I had herpes and it turned out to be a spider bite.

  “I love dogs,” she mumbled, her face tight like a ball of rubber bands.

  “What story did you tell?” Allen asked me.

  My mouth was dry. “I don’t know,” I managed to say.

  The nurse couldn’t leave it alone. “He told a story about his wife’s Yorkie, and how he hated it, and how one night at the dinner table, after his wife left the room, he rubbed gravy on the dog and put the poor thing outside in the woods so the coyotes would eat him alive.”

  Allen laughed. “I never heard that before.”

  I noticed Early, my grandson, my namesake, sitting off to the side. He was around five years old at the time, and he was listening to the story. His eyes were red.

  I gathered the energy to say, “It isn’t true. My wife never had a Yorkie. I’ve never even seen a coyote in my life.”

  The doctor entered the room.

  “Everything went well, Mr. Winwood. We ended up removing two disks. Just like we talked about, I scraped out the leftover material and replaced the disks with cadaver bone. We didn’t have any problems with the titanium brackets. I think the screws are secure.”

  After the doctor left, and the dog-lovin’ nurse closed the door, Early came over to give me a hug. He smelled all fresh and wonderful, and held me tight.

  “Grandpa,” he said, “what’s a cadaver bone?”

  Allen answered for me. “It’s the bone of a dead person. Sometimes the doctors use cadaver bones to help fix people who are hurt.”

  Early seemed to think about it for awhile. There was much to consider.

  “What dead person?” he asked.

  It was an interesting question. I hadn’t thought about it much.

  Allen said, “Well, we don’t know.”

  That night, with the morphine rolling steadily through my veins, I dreamed I was a black man named John Evans. The people in my dream knew who I was. They hugged me, and called me by name, but I didn’t recognize their faces.

  One woman in particular, an older woman, black as coal with a big smile, kept saying, “John, where’d you leave the key? I told you ten times not to take the key. Now where is it?”

  I looked down at my hands. They were the hands of a working man, like my grandfather’s, the hands of a carpenter. But I didn’t recognize them as my own. I’d never seen them before.

  I woke up several times in the hospital room, and each time slid gently back into the same dream, with the same people who recognized me, but I didn’t recognize them.

  I remember saying, “Why do you call me John?”

  And the woman in the dream raised her voice, “Don’t be a fool. Now give me the key, John Evans.”

  She was mad, but not really. The way old women sometimes act mad at their husbands, but it’s all just part of the rel
ationship. The anger is for show.

  The dreams continued for months. I started to wonder if maybe the dead man’s dreams were somehow trapped in his bones. I liked the idea of having a carpenter’s bones in my neck. It made me think about my grandfather, the same grandfather who saved me at the lake that day.

  Paw-Paw had a basement. In the basement he had a workshop full of tools, and saws, and pieces of wood. I can still smell it. The fresh-cut cedar. He built things like birdhouses and little cabinets, and everything in the basement was in a particular place. The place it belonged. I never saw the hammer anywhere except in my grandfather’s hand or on the wall hanging on the hammer hook.

  I loved the order. I loved the feeling of being in the basement, just me and my grandfather, making something no one else was making. No one else in the whole world.

  He would say, “Early, mark this spot right here with the pencil. This is exactly fourteen inches.”

  And I would mark the spot, watching his hands drift across the surface of the wood, imagining my grandfather could build just about anything in the world.

  Lying in the hospital bed, in my mind I began to draw a diagram of my grandparents’ house. Beginning at the front door, down the hallway, each of the bedrooms, and back to the kitchen. I was able to close my eyes and see the house exactly as it was so many years ago. A house now lived in by strangers, my grandparents long since buried in the ground. It occurred to me, with my death there would be no one with any true memories that my grandparents had ever lived at all, ever existed, and my mortality, lying alone in the hospital room, became unbelievably certain. I would die also, and be remembered, and then forgotten, like every person who ever lived.

  It was a turning point of sorts. Difficult to explain. Certain things became enormously important while others lost all value. I turned my attention to my grandson. Maybe it was for his sake, and maybe it was for mine. What difference does it make?

  Behind my rental house was an old building. At one time it may have been a garage. It was a perfect size for a woodworking shop, and I dedicated myself to the idea of creating a place like my grandfather’s basement. A place of simplicity, and order, with no telephones or televisions. A place filled with the smell of cut cedar.

  I took my grandson with me to the hardware store to buy all the tools, and saws, and pieces of wood. We picked out hammers and nails, screwdrivers and wire, a tape measure and a set of wrenches. We loaded up a cart, and then another cart, asking questions and settling on a plan to build a doghouse for a dog we didn’t have. It was Early’s idea, maybe as a way to equalize the imaginary murder of a certain Yorkie.

  The man at the cash register said, “You two sure did find a lot of stuff.”

  Early stood behind my legs, peeking around the edge of my pants at the man. He found the courage to move forward enough to see the items being scanned, one by one.

  “That your grandson?” the man asked.

  “It is,” I said.

  “I can see the resemblance.”

  I smiled and paid the man.

  We spent the whole weekend building the workshop. On the wall above the wooden table I hung a piece of plywood just like the piece of plywood above my grandfather’s wooden table. I made hooks for all the tools and tried to place them in the same order I remembered, the hammer on the far left, the hacksaw on the far right, a row of paintbrushes. Over the table hung a light, a single bulb with a switch at the base of the bulb. On the left edge of the table we secured a metal clamp designed to hold things tight so the piece of wood wouldn’t slip as the saw pulled back and forth.

  “Mark this with your pencil,” I told Early, and he did, exactly where I told him to make a mark, and we cut the wood at the line, the first board for the doghouse.

  There was one moment, one I remember, when Early looked at me the way I looked at my grandfather so many years earlier in the basement. His eyes seemed to understand and focus, etching the grooves of a memory to last his entire life. I reached out and touched my hand to his face, holding my fingers to his cheek, and he let me do it, without pulling away, like he knew how important it was for me. Like he was me, and I was him, and we were together in my grandfather’s basement, making something new.

  On Sunday, after Early went home, I laid on my couch. I wished I was Mike Stockton. I wished I could go outside and then come through the door and have someone waiting for me in the dark. I didn’t want to, but I started thinking about buying a small fishing boat. Taking the fishing boat up to the lake on a Monday morning. Bringing along fishing equipment, a cooler full of cold drinks, my favorite books, a cement block, a rope, and a pistol.

  I’d fish in the cool morning, watching the fog burn away in the rising sun. Catch a fish, maybe two or three. Nothing big. Little fish, bream, hold ’em in my hands, let ’em swim away back to wherever they lived. I’d have a drink, take off my shirt in the midday heat, maybe read a little if I wanted. And after the sun set beneath the tall pines to the west, I’d start making preparations.

  I’d sit on the side of the boat, careful to balance myself, the cooler and the tackle box placed on the far side of the boat to offset the weight. I’d tie one end of the rope to the cement cinder block and the other end around my waist, pulling the knots tight and tying double-knots. Then I’d lift the cinder block to my lap and let it rest across my upper thighs. It would be dark. I wouldn’t have a single light on the boat. My eyes would search the horizon to make sure no other boats were near. Then I’d cock the pistol, stick the barrel in my mouth, lean back slightly to the edge of tipping over, and pull the trigger.

  The force of the bullet would help the inertia of my body falling backward into the water, the cement block rushing to the bottom of the lake, and the rope pulling tight, carrying me down. The boat would drift through the night coming to rest the next morning on the muddy bank. The fish would eat my flesh and gnaw my rotten bones over the summer months until nothing remained except a cement block with a rope weaving in the current.

  three

  I knew it was a clean killing, if there’s such a thing. The man had a history of violence, a history of threats, and entered my home illegally. The neighbor corroborated my story. She heard Mike Stockton beat on my door. She saw him stalk around the house at two-thirty in the morning. There was no evidence I purchased a weapon in anticipation of killing. There was no witness to testify I’d bragged of my intentions to kill the man who beat my daughter. It was self-defense, and defense of Gretchen. A man’s house is still his castle, and no jury would convict me. I knew that, and so did Frank Rush, but it didn’t change our history. It didn’t change what we knew.

  My fiftieth birthday came and went without much fanfare. I was twice divorced, estranged, and living alone at the scene of a crime, more or less. I fell silently into a routine, occasionally interrupted.

  Keith Perkins worked in my office. He was a few years younger than me, and for the most part we didn’t pay much attention to each other. He was pleasant and bland, a forgettable combination. The man seemed to smile a lot for no identifiable reason, and sometimes I detected the slightest smell of alcohol around his person. Like maybe he kept a little silver flask in his desk drawer, and when nobody was looking, took tiny refreshing sips of warm vodka.

  One evening, out of sheer loneliness, we ended up together at a downtown bar after work. Over the course of several hours we both drank too much, and the conversation went from stilted to strange.

  “I don’t ask for much,” he said. “I really don’t. I work hard. I provide my wife and kids a nice house in a nice neighborhood. She’s got a closet full of shoes. How could anybody need seventy pairs of shoes?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We were quiet for a long time. Keith Perkins seemed to be wrestling with something. I really didn’t give a shit what it was, and truthfully I had no intention of listening to him unburden himself. I hoped he would wrestle with his problem and then decide to talk about the baseball game on the television
behind the bar.

  “I love baseball,” I said out loud to myself.

  “You know what?” he said. “I don’t need to feel guilty about anything. Why should I? Do you know how many hours I work every week? I don’t care about clothes or a fancy car. I don’t smoke pot or gamble.”

  Whatever it was he wanted to talk about was only a sip or two from sneaking out into the open. He turned and looked at me.

  “You’re a single man, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been married before, right?”

  “Twice.”

  “Well, then I’m sure you understand. Kids?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and finished my bourbon and water.

  “Let me get you another one,” he demanded, and I let him do it.

  Keith leaned toward me and said in a drunken whisper, “I’ve got this girl. A call girl, I guess. Whatever you want to call her.”

  He stopped talking. It was a little test to see how I’d react. I didn’t react at all, just stared at the baseball game.

  Keith moved his body back straight on his stool. I looked at the side of his face and saw something sad about him. I was nearly a stranger, and yet he needed to tell me something. Something he probably hadn’t told anyone else. Not his brother, or his parents, or his wife—nobody except me.

  “She’s beautiful,” I heard him say in a low voice, looking over the drink he held in both hands. “And she does things for me.”

  I was curious. “What kind of things?” I asked.

  He turned back to me like a puppy excited at the sound of my voice. “Anything you want. And she smiles while she does it. Smiles the whole time.”

  We were quiet again. The barroom around us was loud, glasses clinking together, the sound of pool balls slamming against each other. I wanted a cigarette.

  “It’s not like having an affair or something. I work hard. Last year I was only sick two days. Only two days. Did you know that?”