Just After Sunset, Page 32

  At eighty, turned loose from the hospital, my somehow dangerously graceful father had become just another skeleton in pajamas (his had the Pirates logo on them). His eyes lurked beneath wild and bushy brows. He sweated steadily in spite of two fans, and the smell that rose from his damp skin reminded me of old wallpaper in a deserted house. His breath was black with the perfume of decomposition.

  Ralph and I were a long way from rich, but when we put a little of our money together with the remains of Doc's own savings, we had enough to hire a part-time private nurse and a housekeeper who came in five days a week. They did well at keeping the old man clean and changed, but by the day my sister-in-law said that Doc was ripe with it (I still prefer to think that was what she said), the Battle of the Smells was almost over. That scarred old pro shit was rounds ahead of the newcomer Johnson's baby powder; soon, I thought, the ref would stop the fight. Doc was no longer able to get to the toilet (which he invariably called "the can"), so he wore diapers and continence pants. He was still aware enough to know, and to be ashamed. Sometimes tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, and half-formed cries of desperate, disgusted amusement came from the throat that had once sent "Hey, Good Lookin'" out into the world.

  The pain settled in, first in the midsection and then radiating outward until he would complain that even his eyelids and fingertips hurt. The painkillers stopped working. The nurse could have given him more, but that might have killed him and she refused. I wanted to give him more even if it did kill him. And I might have, with support from Ruth, but my wife wasn't the sort to provide that kind of prop.

  "She'll know," Ruth said, meaning the nurse, "and then you'll be in trouble."

  "He's my dad!"

  "That won't stop her." Ruth had always been a glass-half-empty person. It wasn't the way she was raised; it was the way she was born. "She'll report it. You might go to jail."

  So I didn't kill him. None of us killed him. What we did was mark time. We read to him, not knowing how much he understood. We changed him and kept the medication chart on the wall updated. The days were viciously hot and we periodically changed the location of the two fans, hoping to create a cross draft. We watched the Pirates games on a little color TV that made the grass look purple, and we told him that the Pirates looked great this year. We talked to each other above his ever-sharpening profile. We watched him suffer and waited for him to die. And one day while he was sleeping and rattling snores, I looked up from Best American Poets of the Twentieth Century and saw a tall, heavyset black woman and a black girl in dark glasses standing at the bedroom door.

  That girl--I remember her as if it were this morning. I think she might have been seven, although extremely small for her age. Tiny, really. She was wearing a pink dress that stopped above her knobby knees. There was a Band-Aid printed with Warner Bros. cartoon characters on one equally knobby shin; I remember Yosemite Sam, with his long red mustache and a pistol in each hand. The dark glasses looked like a yard-sale consolation prize. They were far too big and had slid down to the end of the kid's snub nose, revealing eyes that were fixed, heavy-lidded, sheathed in blue-white film. Her hair was in cornrows. Over one arm was a pink plastic child's purse split down the side. On her feet were dirty sneakers. Her skin wasn't really black at all but a soapy gray. She was on her feet, but otherwise looked almost as sick as my father.

  The woman I remember less clearly, because the child so drew my attention. The woman could have been forty or sixty. She had a close-cropped afro and a serene aspect. Beyond that, I recall nothing--not even the color of her dress, if she was wearing a dress. I think she was, but it might have been slacks.

  "Who are you?" I asked. I sounded stupid, as if awakened from a doze rather than reading--although there is a similarity.

  Trudy appeared from behind them and said the same thing. She sounded wide awake. And from behind her, Ruth said in an oh-for-Pete's-sake voice: "The door must have come open, it won't ever stay on the latch. They must have walked right in."

  Ralph, standing beside Trudy, looked back over his shoulder. "It's shut now. They must have closed it behind them." As if that were a mark in their favor.

  "You can't come in here," Trudy told the woman. "We're busy. There's sickness here. I don't know what you want, but you have to go."

  "You can't just walk into a place, you know," Ralph added. The three of them were crowded together in the sickroom doorway.

  Ruth tapped the woman on the shoulder, and not gently. "Unless you want us to call the police, you have to go. Do you want us to do that?"

  The woman took no notice. She pushed the little girl forward and said, "Straight on. Four steps. There's a poley thing, mind you don't trip. Let me hear you count."

  The little girl counted like this: "One...two...free...four." She stepped over the metal feet of the IV pole on free without ever looking down--surely not looking at anything through the smeary lenses of her too-big yard-sale glasses. Not with those milky eyes. She passed close enough to me for the skirt of her dress to draw across my forearm like a thought. She smelled dirty and sweaty and--like Doc--sick. There were dark marks on both of her arms, not scabs but sores.

  "Stop her!" my brother said to me, but I didn't. All this happened very quickly. The little girl bent over the stubbly hollow of my father's cheek and kissed it. A big kiss, not a little one. A smacky kiss.

  Her little plastic purse swung lightly against the side of his head as she did it and my father opened his eyes. Later, both Trudy and Ruth said it was getting whacked with the purse that woke him. Ralph was less sure, and I didn't believe it at all. It didn't make a sound when it struck, not even a little one. There was nothing in that purse except maybe a Kleenex.

  "Who are you, kiddo?" my father asked in his raspy fixing-to-die voice.

  "Ayana," the child said.

  "I'm Doc." He looked up at her from those dark caves where he now lived, but with more comprehension than I'd seen in the two weeks we'd been in Ford City. He'd reached a point where not even a ninth-inning walk-off home run could do much to crack his deepening glaze.

  Trudy pushed past the woman and started to push past me, meaning to grab the child who had suddenly thrust herself into Doc's dying regard. I grabbed her wrist and stopped her. "Wait."

  "What do you mean, wait? They're trespassers!"

  "I'm sick, I have to go," the little girl said. Then she kissed him again and stepped back. This time she tripped over the feet of the IV pole, almost upending it and herself. Trudy grabbed the pole and I grabbed the child. There was nothing to her, only skin wrapped on a complex armature of bone. Her glasses fell off into my lap, and for a moment those milky eyes looked into mine.

  "You be all right," Ayana said, and touched my mouth with her tiny palm. It burned me like an ember, but I didn't pull away. "You be all right."

  "Ayana, come," the woman said. "We ought to leave these folks. Two steps. Let me hear you count."

  "One...two," Ayana said, putting her glasses on and then poking them up her nose, where they would not stay for long. The woman took her hand.

  "You folks have a blessed day, now," she said, and looked at me. "I'm sorry for you," she said, "but this child's dreams are over."

  They walked back across the living room, the woman holding the girl's hand. Ralph trailed after them like a sheepdog, I think to make sure neither of them stole anything. Ruth and Trudy were bent over Doc, whose eyes were still open.

  "Who was that child?" he asked.

  "I don't know, Dad," Trudy said. "Don't let it concern you."

  "I want her to come back," he said. "I want another kiss."

  Ruth turned to me, her lips sucked into her mouth. This was an unlovely expression she had perfected over the years. "She pulled his IV line halfway out...he's bleeding...and you just sat there."

  "I'll put it back," I said, and someone else seemed to be speaking. Inside myself was a man standing off to one side, silent and stunned. I could still feel the warm pressure of her palm on my mo
uth.

  "Oh, don't bother! I already did."

  Ralph came back. "They're gone," he said. "Walking down the street toward the bus stop." He turned to my wife. "Do you really want me to call the police, Ruth?"

  "No. We'd just be all day filling out forms and answering questions." She paused. "We might even have to testify in court."

  "Testify to what?" Ralph asked.

  "I don't know what, how should I know what? Will one of you get the adhesive tape so we can keep this christing needle still? It's on the kitchen counter, I think."

  "I want another kiss," my father said.

  "I'll go," I said, but first I went to the front door--which Ralph had locked as well as closed--and looked out. The little green plastic bus shelter was only a block down, but no one was standing by the pole or under the shelter's plastic roof. And the sidewalk was empty. Ayana and the woman--whether mother or minder--were gone. All I had was the kid's touch on my mouth, still warm but starting to fade.

  Now comes the miracle part. I'm not going to skimp it--if I'm going to tell this story, I'll try to tell it right--but I'm not going to dwell on it either. Miracle stories are always satisfying but rarely interesting, because they're all the same.

  We were staying at one of the motels on Ford City's main road, a Ramada Inn with thin walls. Ralph annoyed my wife by calling it the Rammit Inn. "If you keep doing that, you'll eventually forget and say it in front of a stranger," my wife said. "Then you'll have a red face."

  The walls were so thin that it was possible for us to hear Ralph and Trudy arguing next door about how long they could afford to stay. "He's my father," Ralph said, to which Trudy replied: "Try telling that to Connecticut Light and Power when the bill comes due. Or the state commissioner when your sick days run out."

  It was a little past seven on a hot August evening. Soon Ralph would be leaving for my father's, where the part-time nurse was on duty until eight P.M. I found the Pirates on TV and jacked the volume to drown out the depressing and predictable argument going on next door. Ruth was folding clothes and telling me the next time I bought cheap discount-store underwear, she was going to divorce me. Or shoot me for a stranger. The phone rang. It was Nurse Chloe. (This was what she called herself, as in "Drink a little more of this soup for Nurse Chloe.")

  She wasted no time on pleasantries. "I think you should come right away," she said. "Not just Ralph for the night shift. All of you."

  "Is he going?" I asked. Ruth stopped folding things and came over. She put a hand on my shoulder. We had been expecting this--hoping for it, really--but now that it was here, it was too absurd to hurt. Doc had taught me how to use a Bolo-Bouncer when I was a kid no older than that day's little blind intruder. He had caught me smoking under the grape arbor and had told me--not angrily but kindly--that it was a stupid habit, and I'd do well not to let it get a hold on me. The idea that he might not be alive when tomorrow's paper came? Absurd.

  "I don't think so," Nurse Chloe said. "He seems better." She paused. "I've never seen anything like it in my life."

  He was better. When we got there fifteen minutes later, he was sitting on the living-room sofa and watching the Pirates on the house's larger TV--no technological marvel, but at least colorfast. He was sipping a protein shake through a straw. He had some color. His cheeks seemed plumper, perhaps because he was freshly shaved. He had regained himself. That was what I thought then; the impression has only grown stronger with the passage of time. And one other thing, which we all agreed on--even the doubting Thomasina to whom I was married: the yellow smell that had hung around him like ether ever since the doctors sent him home to die was gone.

  He greeted us all by name, and told us that Willie Stargell had just hit a home run for the Buckos. Ralph and I looked at each other, as if to confirm we were actually there. Trudy sat on the couch beside Doc, only it was more of a whoomping down. Ruth went into the kitchen and got herself a beer. A miracle in itself.

  "I wouldn't mind one of those, Ruthie-doo," my father said, and then--probably misinterpreting my slack and flabbergasted face for an expression of disapproval: "I feel better. Gut hardly hurts at all."

  "No beer for you, I think," Nurse Chloe said. She was sitting in an easy chair across the room and showed no sign of gathering her things, a ritual that usually began twenty minutes before the end of her shift. Her annoying do-it-for-mommy authority seemed to have grown thin.

  "When did this start?" I asked, not even sure what I meant by this, because the changes for the better seemed so general. But if I had any specific thing in mind, I suppose it was the departure of the smell.

  "He was getting better when we left this afternoon," Trudy said. "I just didn't believe it."

  "Bolsheveky," Ruth said. It was as close as she allowed herself to cursing.

  Trudy paid no attention. "It was that little girl," she said.

  "Bolsheveky!" Ruth cried.

  "What little girl?" my father asked. It was between innings. On the television, a fellow with no hair, big teeth, and mad eyes was telling us the carpets at Juker's were so cheap they were almost free. And, dear God, no finance charges on layaway. Before any of us could reply to Ruth, Doc asked Nurse Chloe if he could have half a beer. She refused him. But Nurse Chloe's days of authority in that little house were almost over, and during the next four years--before a chunk of half-chewed meat stopped his throat forever--my father drank a great many beers. And enjoyed every one, I hope. Beer is a miracle in itself.

  It was that night, while lying sleepless in our hard Rammit Inn bed and listening to the air conditioner rattle, that Ruth told me to keep my mouth shut about the blind girl, whom she called not Ayana but "the magic negro child," speaking in a tone of ugly sarcasm that was very unlike her.

  "Besides," she said, "it won't last. Sometimes a light bulb will brighten up just before it burns out for good. I'm sure that happens to people too."

  Maybe, but Doc Gentry's miracle took. By the end of the week he was walking in his backyard with me or Ralph supporting him. After that, we all went home. I got a call from Nurse Chloe on our first night back.

  "We're not going, no matter how sick he is," Ruth said half-hysterically. "Tell her that."

  But Nurse Chloe only wanted to say that she'd happened to see Doc coming out of the Ford City Veterinary Clinic, where he had gone to consult with the young head of practice about a horse with the staggers. He had his cane, she said, but wasn't using it. Nurse Chloe said she'd never seen a man "of his years" who looked any better. "Bright-eyed and ring-tailed," she said. "I still don't believe it." A month later he was walking (caneless) around the block, and that winter he was swimming every day at the local Y. He looked like a man of sixty-five. Everyone said so.

  I talked to my father's entire medical team in the wake of his recovery. I did it because what had happened to him reminded me of the so-called miracle plays that were big in the sticksville burgs of Europe in medieval times. I told myself if I changed Dad's name (or perhaps just called him Mr. G.) it could make an interesting article for some journal or other. It might have even been true--sort of--but I never did write the article.

  It was Stan Sloan, Doc's family practice guy, who first raised the red flag. He had sent Doc to the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and so was able to blame the consequent misdiagnosis on Drs. Retif and Zamachowski, who were my dad's oncologists there. They in turn blamed the radiologists for sloppy imaging. Retif said the chief of radiology was an incompetent who didn't know a pancreas from a liver. He asked not to be quoted, but after twenty-five years, I am assuming the statute of limitations on that one has run out.

  Dr. Zamachowski said it was a simple case of organ malformation. "I was never comfortable with the original diagnosis," he confided. I talked to Retif on the phone, Zamachowski in person. He was wearing a white lab coat with a red T-shirt beneath that appeared to read I'D RATHER BE GOLFING. "I always thought it was Von Hippel-Lindau."

  "Wouldn't that also have killed him?" I asked.<
br />
  Zamachowski gave me the mysterious smile doctors reserve for clueless plumbers, housewives, and English teachers. Then he said he was late for an appointment.

  When I talked to the chief of radiology, he spread his hands. "Here we are responsible for photography, not interpretation," he said. "In another ten years, we will be using equipment that will make such misinterpretations as this one all but impossible. In the meantime, why not just be glad your pop is alive? Enjoy him."

  I did my best on that score. And during my brief investigation, which I of course called research, I learned an interesting thing: the medical definition of miracle is misdiagnosis.

  Nineteen eighty-three was my sabbatical year. I had a contract with a scholarly press for a book called Teaching the Unteachable: Strategies for Creative Writing, but like my miracle-play article it never got written. In July, while Ruth and I were making plans for a camping trip, my urine abruptly turned pink. The pain came after that, first deep in my left buttock, then growing stronger as it migrated to my groin. By the time I started to piss actual blood--this was I think four days after the first twinges, and while I was still playing that famous game known the world over as Maybe It Will Go Away on Its Own--the pain had passed from serious into the realm of excruciating.

  "I'm sure it's not cancer," Ruth said, which coming from her meant she was sure it was. The look in her eyes was even more alarming. She would deny this on her deathbed--her practicality was her pride--but I'm sure it occurred to her just then that the cancer that had left my father had battened on me.

  It wasn't cancer. It was kidney stones. My miracle was called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy, which--in tandem with diuretic pills--dissolved them. I told my doctor I had never felt such pain in my life.

  "I should think you never will again, even if you suffer a coronary," he said. "Women who've had stones compare the pain to that of childbirth. Difficult childbirth."