“You’re early,” he said. “Couldn’t stay away?”
“You don’t make it so pleasant.”
“Oh, I don’t? Why’d you come early? You want to leave early? Don’t worry, you’ll be rid of me soon enough.”
“Bruce, if you want me to stay, I’ll stay.” His eyes filled with tears, and he knew and loathed the fact that it was self-pity made him cry. Here he was, volunteering his presence and being cruelly rejected.
“What are you crying for?” Bruce said, with a triumphant smile. “You got a lot to cry about. It’s me ought to be crying. You’re a weak, sniveling bastard of a brother, aren’t you? I hurt your feelings? Tough shit!”
Bruce sat up straight, a certain joy evident in his expression; his eyes were opened wide, not at all sleepy from medication. He intently watched John’s effort to calm himself.
“I’m your brother,” John said.
“Jesus Christ! You a brother? You aren’t even a man. You never did a lick of work in your life. What the hell good are you?”
“I’ve worked.”
“Worked? You mean summers so you could have money to play with? Work? You don’t know what it means to work. You couldn’t work. That’s hard! You’d rather bum around Paris with the queers, polishing your ass on a bar stool, pretending you’re a hot-shot artist or some goddam thing. G.I. bill! You’re a bum! What the hell have you ever done?”
“Nothing,” John said, but this was a lie, or nearly a lie. He meant nothing he could tell at this moment to Bruce that might have meaning to Bruce, although he wondered at the same time if, perhaps, Bruce’s methods of evaluating “something” were not the valid ones. He himself had never managed to define, although he seemed always to be trying, the meaning of “something.”
He went to the low chair in the corner and sat far down in it. He felt that as long as he said nothing more, Bruce would not continue to jab and twist. Bruce was not very witty and needed a straight man. Anyway, Bruce looked very tired now with his eyes shut and the cigarette burning down toward his fingers.
All of John’s bad memories (the persistent memories were always bad) concerned things he had done. Weren’t these “something”? He had killed a man—but that was in the Army and didn’t count because he had no alternative to that. It didn’t count, so why should he have to remember it? It must have counted once, because he couldn’t eat meat for several weeks afterward. Why go into that? he asked his uncontrollable memory. Don’t go into that again. We’ve had that out…
But there he was looking up at the statue of Quezon by the Chinese cemetery. It was so hot! The sky was gray-blue and hazy, a stifling blanket, and the seven men stood around waiting for him to do something—Ben Nakano the interpreter, Parsons, Iwashita, the others. He couldn’t remember all the names, and that was good. Maybe someday the whole business would fade away as the names had. The men of his squad: he could still see their faces too well.
Parsons said, “Where the hell are the street signs? They ought to have street signs.”
“We’ll find the house O.K. There’s no hurry,” John said, and the others slouched around while he looked at the ridiculous map. “I guess it’s over there,” he said, and they followed him down the dusty street, looking around indifferently. It was all his responsibility, but what was so hard about finding a house in a city?
The number was still on the door of the four-story house. It stood alone, shored up by the rubble and occasional walls of the buildings that had stood on each side. The front door was partly open, and just as they were going up the front steps the old woman burst out and went through them, bumping and bouncing off one and then another with her head down as if she were a goat. She made the sidewalk and ran like hell in her long black dress and black shawl.
“Lookit her go!” Parsons said. “She must of broke the NCAA muh-fun mile!”
“Now they’ll all be nervous in there,” Nakano said. As he spoke: John pushed open the door. They all heard another door slam down the hall.
“Well,” John said, “Parsons, you take Cummins and Johnson and go around back and up the back stairs.”
Parsons and the other two ran around through the wreckage of the house on the side while John and the four others ran into the hall and stopped on the stairs to the second floor, where they could not be enfiladed. They had all run into doubtful buildings before. They could cover the hall from the stairs. John motioned to Nakano.
“Who the hell are they supposed to be?” Nakano asked.
“People from the Riken Company.”
“Come on out!” John yelled down the empty hall. “We won’t hurt you, but we’ve got to ask you some questions!”
Silence.
“Tell ’em in Tagalog,” John said to Nakano, and Nakano shouted the strange syllables down.
Silence.
“Tell ’em in Japanese,” John said, and Nakano shouted the Japanese. Still no answer.
“What the hell would they speak?” John asked. Parsons and the other two came up the back stairs.
“No other way out of the house,” Parsons said.
Just then they heard the muffled, flat pop, and a narrow strip of the hall door just to the right of the stairs peeled down and swung like a reed in the wind. Across the hall a flake of plaster fell to the floor.
“They shot, by God!” Parsons said.
“Stop that!” John yelled at the door. The answer was another pop. A larger piece of plaster fell from the opposite wall.
“Don’t be foolish!” John shouted down. He looked around at his men. At least four were wearing the hot, bulky pistol belts and holsters they had been issued. “Give me a gun,” he said. One of them handed him the big pistol. He hadn’t carried one because of the weight and because he didn’t like the feel of the pistol. The service automatic wasn’t a pistol; it was a cannon.
Nakano put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Maybe they speak Spanish,” he said.
“Naw. Hell, they’d know English,” Parsons said.
But none of them knew enough Spanish, so John went down the stairs, close against the wall. When he came as near as he could to the door he stopped.
“Come on out, now,” he said. “We don’t want to hurt you.” This time the gun inside the door was louder, and he looked at the door and saw three jagged holes in it. It was made of plywood and the outer layer of ply had split down in long strips. He reached around with the Colt in his left hand and put it to the door, then pulled the trigger four times. The Colt jumped around in his left hand and up, and the last hole was a foot higher than the others.
For a moment he let the sound die, and then a terrible screaming began behind the door. He kicked it open and rushed in.
The two women in black squatted screaming over the old man. Their mouths opened too wide and were red and black inside, and the screams blatted against his eardrums and whistled and blatted out again. Their black skirts were beaded with shiny blood, and the old man on the floor had taken all the slugs in his chest and neck and face. He looked a little like a wicker basket that had been full of strawberry jam, chopped by an ax; or like fresh red beef, chopped and cut. He had been peering through the bullet holes in the door, trying to see what was in the hall. An old nickel-plated revolver lay on the floor beside him, and in one corner of the room sat the reasons for his defiance of the law—four cartons of cigarettes and two one-gallon cans of Crisco. He and the women were not the people from Riken. They were awfully small-time black marketeers.
“What did you say?” Bruce asked, sitting up higher in order to see John in the low chair.
“Nothing,” John said again, and then looked more closely at Bruce. Bruce smiled at him, and the smile had no hard malice in it. It did not seem to belong to Bruce—as if he were wearing a mask.
“I guess they’re a little late,” Bruce said.
Gladys and William Cotter came into the room, the tall woman first, hurrying to her son’s bed. She stopped with both hands pressed upon his pillow.
&
nbsp; “How do you feel?” she asked.
“O.K. I don’t feel too bad,” Bruce said, “but they’re going easy on the dope today and tonight.” He winced at the sound of the last word. His mother pulled a straight chair over to the bed and sat leaning toward him, her long hands making nervous circles upon the sheet beside his pillow.
She wants to touch him, John thought. She wants to hold him and cure him with those nervous hands, but he won’t let her and never has. Neither of us ever has. I wonder why.
“How’s the Miller house coming?” Bruce said to his father.
“O.K., Bruce. The architect got mad as hell this morning when he saw that tin drip-edge, though.”
A moment of fearful expectancy.
“God damn it! I had that out with him before! Just because I’m not around, that sheeny son of a bitch! You tell him he agreed a month ago and if he don’t like the looks of it he can paint it. This isn’t Florida, for Christ’s sake!”
“O.K., Bruce, I’ll tell him.” William Cotter didn’t look up.
“Yeah, sure,” Bruce said in a low voice, staring at the top of his father’s head. “How’s the Waters’ house? How’s the roofing going on?”
“Good weather for it,” William Cotter said, “but a crazy thing happened the other day. Junior Stevens put the vent in upside down. I saw it before they had it boxed in.” There was some hesitant pride in his voice. He looked up and smiled.
“Put him back sawing slabs,” Bruce said. “He’ll never make a carpenter. How the hell did we ever get such a dumb bunch down there? Cotter’s playground for the mentally handicapped. We ought to get assistance from the state.”
Bruce reached for a cigarette, but his mother found one first, put. it in his mouth and lit it. She held the match up and he blew it out; then she smilled happily, turning around to John and William Cotter as if to say, “See? Did you see that?”
John shut his eyes. Baby tricks! When he was a child he thought that if he put his hands over his eyes his whole body was invisible. And now Bruce, blowing out the held match. See? Baby blew out the match! It was too goddam perplexing to figure Bruce; and then he had the horrible thought that if Bruce really let himself go to his mother, all the way, he would end up a plump, unshaven babe-in-arms, sucking a bottle or his thumb. And his mother would look around just as fondly and proudly as she cuddled him. Perhaps he and Bruce both knew that their mother had no limits, at least that they had never seen her stop, and that such needful love must be brutally curbed.
Gladys Cotter sat at her son’s bedside staring across the bed at the wall. Bruce smoked a cigarette and looked at the window. John smoked a cigarette that had no flavor, but a dry mechanical usefulness. His throat seemed like a flue and his teeth tasted like dry bones. His mother moved her hands, smoothing the sheet, and his father looked at a magazine with too much concentration, never looking up, never turning a page. The white window was hard to look at from the cool depths of the room.
Time moved, John knew, but he couldn’t look at his watch. Bruce might see that. He let himself fall into a dry, almost rigid position of waiting, thinking that he would not move at all until the afternoon was over and he could leave. He tried to hypnotize himself by staring at the light switch on the wall, but nothing worked for him. Time moved, he knew, and at least he had to do nothing to make it move. He was not responsible for that.
“More words,” Bruce said suddenly, “will be spoken at the funeral.”
“What? Why, Bruce!” his mother said.
“I mean everybody is pretty quiet,” Bruce said in an even voice. “But I can hear—well, look at him suffer!” He pointed at John. Gladys Cotter put a shy hand on Bruce’s arm and he quickly pulled away from her. Her hand went back with the other, to smooth the sheet by his pillow. “But I can hear,” he went on, “Reverend Bledsoe—the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bledsoe, the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bedsore—harping upon my wonderful qualities such as working my ass off and wondering how much the traffic can stand even at a funeral when he tries to say what a fine loving character I was. I can hear the old hypocrite now. I bet he’s got the speech all written already.”
“Oh, Bruce!”
“Bruce!” William Cotter said. He stood at the foot of the bed. “I’d think you’d have more…I’d think you’d not be so mean to your mother! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re damn’ mean and nasty. You act like they were going to kill you, when all they’re trying to do is help you and cure you!”
The big man stood tall and angry at the foot of the bed, and his smaller son stared back at him, half smiling. John had seen this happen before. In a second the fire went out of William Cotter, but it remained burning in Bruce’s eyes, his face thrust forward out of his weakness, vicious and conquering. He stared his father down and broke him back into his chair and into his magazine.
The silence came on again, and John knew that they would not look to him for any help or strength. He was even weaker than his father. Hollow and weak and good only for running. His father had never run away so far: his father had to come back day after day.
The afternoon went on in small noises and the long tired moans of the old man down the hall, bedspring creaks and sharp heel clicks. The wind flicked an aerial wire against the window frame. John ran out of cigarettes and couldn’t make himself borrow one from his father or Bruce. Outside, the cars ground in the gravel. The nurse came in and gave Bruce his mineral oil, but this time he said nothing to her, and she seemed to be in a hurry to pour it down his throat and leave. John rationed his trips to the bathroom, figuring that two and no more would not make Bruce think that he couldn’t stand to sit in the room. When the intern wheeled in the napkin-covered stand he found himself moving his lips, saying over and over, “Please make us go home. Tell us we have to go home.” He had no more feeling for Bruce; now it was self-preservation alone. He had to get out of the room. He had a headache and wondered in fear if he had a tumor. He could plainly see the tumor—it looked like a black walnut right in the back of his head, and he found his hand up there feeling around as if he might feel the bulge in his skull. My God! he thought. What if it was me? The intern spoke to Bruce in a low voice.
“I thought you might want them to go,” the intern said.
“Yes,” Bruce said, and then turned, smiling, to the others. “This is when I lose my hair, but don’t worry, they’ll save it for me.”
The intern was embarrassed. He fiddled with his equipment, and wouldn’t raise his head. Gladys Cotter stood up, and the intern said, “I’ll be back in a little while,” and left.
“We’ll come back after supper,” Gladys Cotter said.
“No. This is it,” Bruce said.
“But they aren’t going to operate now!”
“No. But they’re going to get me ready for morning.”
“What about your supper?”
“I don’t know about that. Goodbye.” Bruce smiled, his eyes triumphant, and John thought, If only he can hold on until we get out!
“Then we won’t see you until…afterward?” Gladys Cotter’s voice went high and out of control and she ran around the bed toward Bruce, but his eyes held her off.
“Goodbye,” he said in a level, taut voice, and deliberately took her hand, holding her away from him.
“I’ll see about the edging,” William Cotter said, “and tell you how it comes out.”
“Sure. Goodbye.”
John and his father both shook Bruce’s limp hand, so weak compared to the hard determination in his face.
John looked back, once the doorframe was past and Bruce’s room was at least a room he had left, as if it were in another dimension. He saw Bruce’s steady profile against the white window, one hand bringing a cigarette slowly up to the face. It was the face of the gut-shot hawk he had killed in the woods—cold, violent and brave.
The next morning they were summoned, with a certain amount of apology, to the hospital, where three neurosurgeons explained that the cancerous tissue in Bruce�
�s brain was too widespread to be removed completely. The patient lived, and might recover consciousness for a while. They would just have to wait and see.
Gladys Cotter had to be helped from the room, from the hospital, and into the car. She didn’t scream or cry, and after spending the day alone, in bed, she went back to the hospital to sit by Bruce’s bed.
CHAPTER 6
Michael Spinelli had been dead a week. Because of the long dry spell his grave had not begun to heal; the replaced blanket of sod was brown around the cut, and the flowers in pots were wilted and dying. Jane went twice to the Catholic cemetery with the Spinellis, Mrs. Spinelli humped and older in shiny black dress and veil, Cesare Spinelli dried up and silent as the faded flowers.
Jane knew she would now see the Spinellis only by chance, in Leah. She had moved to the farm the few things ten years of marriage had brought her; wedding presents such as unused silver and dishes, linen and a little radio. Mike’s motorcycle leaned against the wall in one of the farm sheds where Junior had put it after hauling it back from the accident.
Mrs. Pettibone, Sam Steven’s housekeeper, washed dishes. Jane wiped, taking the thick white plates from Mrs. Pettibone’s rough hand. Her grandfather and the two hired men were out behind the barn butchering an old horse for dog meat. She had heard the shot, an hour before, but had gone on wiping, glad that she had not seen the old gray gelding die. She had known the horse most of her life, had ridden the broad, warm back when he had been led out of his traces to his stable; a gentle, phlegmatic giant of an animal with great dignity and not too many brains. He had worked hard all his life pulling stoneboat and pulpwood, and in early spring the maple-sap sledge. But most things on the farm, animals included, were used completely—used in some way until nothing was left. Only dogs and people could die and have done with their usefulness.
Mrs. Pettibone scrubbed the dishes slowly, carefully, with the steady concentration she gave to all her work. In her small round face black eyes looked out of deep brown cavities. The color of her skin was pale ivory on forehead and cheekbones, turning to dark brown in all hollows and creases. Even the shallow concavities of her temples shaded perceptibly into unhealthy brown. Her few teeth were her own, but were widely separated and pointed almost straight out of her mouth. Although Jane could not remember a time when Mrs. Pettibone had been sick, she looked terribly unhealthy. Her black hair hung limply to her neck, and her back was slightly bent all the time. And yet she looked at her dishes now as she looked at all things and all people, with an eager, cheerful expression. She was always ready to say the pleasant, conciliatory words; to try to cure any pain, to end any disagreement. As she handed a gravy boat to Jane she smiled, keeping her mouth closed against the alarming flash of her malocclusion.
Town Burning Page 8
