Beyond Deserving (26 page)

For a long time he thought that if he could help Fish, that would make her happy. He even said so in an AA meeting, but as soon as he spoke the idea out loud he knew what a fool he was being, and arrogant, too, thinking he had all that power. You can't deliver people, or save them, or make them “be good,” the way you want them to be. You have to look to yourself, and if you are humble and happy (and humble is important), other people can do what they need to do,
if they want to
. Even if it is your beloved son, and you can see plain as day the deep carved lines of pain and shame and hopelessness in his face, you can't take hold of it, you can't
tell
him. That is such a hard thing.
Help me accept
, you pray. He prays it in the morning and a hundred times a day. Oh how he prayed this past year, with Fish in jail! Help me accept. He doesn't pray for Fish. He prays for his own serenity. God will see to Fish. Eventually.

Geneva is another matter. She is his wife. She is there every morning with his coffee, with his meals and clean clothes and a house to live in, with her boxes of mementoes and rented movies and library books. He knows he has to do for her if he can. And he does try. He puts up new shelves, he trades his labor for a better washer at the lodge up the road. He sat down with her and humored her through that blasted anniversary “recipe” she wanted. He puts up with her sister. He admits he would never have lived this long without her. He brags about her. But she is a furious woman and he cannot fix that. It isn't in his power. It isn't his anger.

He cannot bring back Evelyn.

He does better with strangers than his own family. It was Dr. Jim who taught him to reach out, that it is the twelfth step that fuels all the rest. The doctor had his name down to be called, and the time came when Gully needed to talk. Getting Dr. Jim was sheer luck and God's intervention. They found they both loved to stomp around outdoors; the talk came easier that way. It is a hard thing to think of the doc gone, and not to know what happened. Well, now he is the one to offer a lifejacket now and then. The men are his own kind, except for the difference in luck. “I'll give you a ride, brother,” he'll say. “Let me tell you what I did a hundred times.” Or “What's on your mind?” Mostly the men slip away after getting warm and fed, after a little company, and sometimes a place to sleep at night, but sometimes they carry away an idea, the germ of their own salvation, because they learn that there are other people in the world, and those people care. Maybe they don't want to be sober yet, but they will know where to go when they do. “Now you remember,” he always tells them. “It isn't me you need, it's AA.” He doesn't say Higher Power, because it takes a while to get to that. He just wants them to know there is help, anywhere they go, even if it is jail, a flophouse, a detox ward. “Don't worry about what you'll do,” he'll say. “Worry about the first step.” Surrender, son.

He has never been able to make Geneva understand. Once he suggested that she go to an open meeting with him, and she just about died. “Me go listen to a bunch of drunks tell horror stories!” she cried. In fact she got good and mad. She said
he
didn't have any business going, either. He wasn't a drunk, and he didn't need a crutch.

“I'm not a drunk anymore, that's the truth, Geneva Fisher,” he said back, “but I sure am an alcoholic wretch, and that's never going to change until you lay me in my grave.”

Geneva retreated. “Never was as bad as that,” she muttered, but she knew it was. It was worse than she pretended to remember.

Maybe she has never forgiven him. You can do all you can to make amends to people, but you cannot make them forgive. No matter how many years he is sober, once he was a drunk. That will not go away between them until she lets it go. And what keeps it going is, she holds on. For some reason, she wants the new Gully, but she wants some of the old one too, no matter how many times she says he never really lived.

At six he drinks a full glass of water, and takes a can of orange juice out of the freezer to thaw. Twenty minutes later he stands outside Geneva's door, not knowing what he will hear. Often she sleeps all night with her radio on, but it isn't on now. He stays several minutes, and thinks he hears her turn over, so he goes back to the kitchen. The whole weekend must have worn her out. Both nights, he went to bed while she was still out in that RV thing with Ruby, so he doesn't know what hours they are keeping.

He will have to make his own coffee. Finding the pot is easy enough, because it is in the dish drain upside down in parts. He opens the cabinets in search of coffee. The first one is the wrong one, he should have remembered she has her Crisco there, and little tins of powders and dabs of this and that for sauces. On the second try he opens the right cabinet, but the coffee can has teabags in it. Next he takes down a Nestea jar full of rice, and behind that a Malto-Meal can with pinto beans in it. He sees baking powder and soda, salt and pepper, another jar of tea, and powders he can't identify and doesn't want anyway, but he cannot find the blasted coffee.

He puts his shoes on. He will do what he should have done in the first place, go out in the truck and get his Nescafe and make a cup from the tap.

He meets Ruby at the door. She has a pot of steaming coffee in her hand and Geneva right behind her. “Go on now and sit down. Sis says it's past time for your brew, Gulsvig.” He has no idea why she wants to call him by that name anymore, but he isn't going to make a fuss and give her pleasure. She will get tired of it too. It isn't even his name. He is Michael Fisher, though he once was Michael Gulsvig, till he took his stepfather's name, out of respect and gratitude to a decent man. But his mother called him Gully, and then so did everyone else, even on jobs where other men were called by their last names. Then, out of a long moment's sentimentality, wanting to keep something of history alive, when anybody knows it is only today that matters, they named the second twin for the blood grandfather, an undependable man who died young.

“I thought you'd died!” he blurts out to his wife.

“I slept in Ruby's camper,” Geneva says primly. She is wearing a blue and yellow striped robe that isn't hers, that makes her look like an Arab's concubine, and her tight new hair is bushy as Austin's dog Rowdy. Those pouches under her eyes that swell up every night are puffy and soft-looking, but she looks rested. She hasn't been turning over in her bed at all! And she sure didn't die.

“So you were worried, were you?” Ruby asks as she pours him a cup of coffee. He is grateful for it, even coming from her, and it is fine coffee, too. He says so, not being a man of mean spirit.

“It's a Mr. Coffee coffee-maker like I've been telling you I wanted for six Christmases in a row, Gully Fisher,” Geneva says loudly. She slams down a can of condensed milk in front of him. He has already taken one drink of coffee black, though it is not his preference, and now he stirs the milk in carefully, thinking how he seems to be in a spot without having done anything to bring it on.

“A coffee maker in a camper, think of that,” he says. He thinks he ought to do his part to keep the conversation moving. “That's nothing,” Geneva says. “She's got a microwave, a tv, a tiny vacuum cleaner, the most comfortable little let-down bed for a guest, and she's going to get an itty-bitty satellite dish as soon as she gets up to Portland, on the way home.”

Gully can't think why a person would want to haul things around that you don't need at home. People have too much stuff.

“That's nice,” he says, though. The coffee is perfect now that it has milk and sugar, and he is starting to get hungry.

“What has been going on in my kitchen!” exclaims Geneva when she turns around and sees all the cans and jars on her counter.

“I was looking for the coffee.”

“Oh you know perfectly well I keep it in the frig,” she says, and opens the refrigerator door and takes out of its recesses a yellow can with silly flowers all over it. “Coffee,” she announces, holding it practically in front of his face.

“Next time I'll know,” he says, though he knows he will never again wait more than fifteen minutes before going straight out to his truck or—this is perfectly possible—down to the diner on the riverfront highway, where there would be plenty of other old men up before their wives.

Geneva does some rummaging and comes up with three silly little doodads from the back of another cabinet.

“I'll soft-boil us some eggs,” she says, “and use those darling egg cups you gave me two Christmases ago, Ruby.” She sets up a clatter of pans.

Ruby sits down beside Gully to drink her own coffee. “You don't get a morning paper, I don't see how you can stand it.”

Gully shakes his head irritably. They have never used those cup things, and he is wondering how he is supposed to know what to do with one.

“I don't know how an egg would set on my stomach this morning,” he says. “I could use a piece of toast, though, and maybe some cereal.”

Geneva grabs a box of Wheaties and the milk carton and slams them down in front of Gully. He gets up and finds his own bowl. If he doesn't eat, he will be sick in an hour, but his stomach is a tight knot and he just wants to get out of there. He doesn't have to ask what is wrong with Geneva. She is always mad when Ruby is around. She compares herself and then blames him that he didn't die and leave her well-off, like Ruby's poor old Gordon. They sit around and talk about things that make them mad, and that is their idea of a good time.

He has already finished his cereal by the time Ruby takes a knife and neatly whacks her egg while Geneva watches. “Oh do mine,” he hears his wife say, as he heads for the door.

Geneva jumps up and grabs the door before it closes. “Where are you going today, Gully Fisher? I'm going to make plans of my own, you know.” She sounds downright nasty.

“I'm going to do some work on the truck,” he grumbles. Then, just thinking of it, he adds, “I'm going out to see Austin Melroy, he's been feeling bad lately. I'll be home for dinner. You have a good time.”

“We might not eat 'til six,” she says tersely, and goes back to her headless, neckless egg.

36

You can't see Austin Melroy's place from the road. It lies in a small creek bottom grown thick with alders and tall cotton-wood trees. The slopes are covered with oaks, and on two sides, his property is bordered by BLM land. Starting at his property lines, the blackberry bushes have grown so tall and thick that Melroy's one and a half acres wouldn't be more private on the moon.

The place has the look of a movie-set tenant farm, with heaps of scrap metal, a broken-down chicken coop and a few scrabbling chickens in the yard, and dirt, lots of dirt, that turns to mud in the winter rains. It smells bad.

Then there are the vehicles. He has a rusting butter-yellow '52 Buick that looks like it might have come with the place. It is the dogs' favorite place to sleep, and both front doors are always open. Melroy's red 1954 GMC pickup is the model that runs. It is parked behind some blackberry briers near the creek, as if it were being hidden. He has two other cars, an old two-tone Chevy, and the completely rusted hull of a vintage Willys that might be worth something in better condition. The two dilapidated cars are used to store items for Austin's flea market enterprise. A back seat overflows with pots and pans, the front seat with old kitchen appliances. The Willys is piled with Bibles, old dictionaries and encyclopedias, cookbooks, and the odd book of etiquette or aphorisms thrown in. The back of the pickup is piled with bicycles, and there are parts, pumps, and oil and paint cans on the trailer porch.

It is late morning, and the heat has already sent the dogs to shade. A huge animal, maybe part St. Bernard, lies under the trailer steps, its nose sticking out one end, its tail out the other. Two coon hounds sprawl near some blackberry bushes, one with its nose in the other's belly. Melroy has more than a dozen dogs, mostly mongrels he rescued from boredom or death at the pound, with a stray or two that wandered to his place as if the word were out. He and his dogs made the papers late last year when he rescued a Pomeranian stranded on an overpass. The dog had been trembling and defecating while folks drove by. It was not wearing a collar, so Melroy took it home with him. He was eager to find the owner—the dog was a blasted showdog type, nervous and yippy—so he called the radio stations, and the story made the evening paper. When the dog's owner, a banker's wife, came to collect her sweet pet, she was so outraged at the chaos and neglect she thought she saw, she went straight to the pound, and then, for good measure, to the district attorney's office. Officials at the pound knew Melroy and thought him an admirable character. Nevertheless they did investigate, making two visits, once with a reporter at their heels, and later, a cameraman for the late night tv news. The director of the pound appeared briefly to say that most of Melroy's dogs would be dead if he had not rescued them. He had to repeat his statement when the banker, goaded by his wife, insisted on a proper review in court. Over the course of the hearings, Melroy's dogs were taken to the pound and fed at taxpayer's expense. Three veterinarians came forth with offers of care for free, and a discount food store contributed a hundred pounds of generic dry food, which Melroy's dogs won't touch. The dogs' homecoming rated a quarter page spread in the “Lifestyles” section of the paper.

Melroy spends most of his time with his dogs, except for the time he spends foraging for their food in cafe and grocery store scraps, or catching small game. When good weather comes and he has to get to flea markets, he often takes a couple of dogs with him in the back of the truck.

You couldn't call the work he does with the dogs “training.” He doesn't use a leash or a chain. He talks his dogs into everything. He says he wouldn't force a dog any more than he would a child, and if you get him started he can talk on and on about the coercion and deceit, the fear, in child-raising and dog-training both. Melroy uses a beer can with beans in it to get his dogs' attention. It is his fiercest ploy for scolding bad behavior. Geneva was incensed, reading the articles about Melroy. “Just what business is it of BANKERS?” she raved, and Gully loved her like a girl again for her righteousness on a good man's behalf. Her affection soon faded, though. She resents Gully's visits with Melroy, and suspects the old man is smelly, wacky, and a drunk. She is more or less correct on all three counts, but neither her grumbling nor Melroy's bad habits can dissuade Gully from a friendship with him. He likes Melroy. Besides, he has taken him on. The old man is gray as a bird feather, feeding his dogs and neglecting himself, and Gully feels sure the moment is at hand when he can guide Melroy out of the thicket of his own making (what with rhubarb wine, home brew, cheap whiskey, and bad nutrition).