Round Rock (35 page)

Gabriel stepped down and Doc Perrin, weeping openly, came to the podium.

“I remember the day fourteen, fifteen years ago when this rank damn crippled newcomer says he wants to turn his estate into a drunk farm. A crazy fucking deal. Thing was, we needed a house. There wasn’t any kind of halfway facility anywhere around here, unless you count the Good Brothers Home, where they fed you oatmeal and Jesus at every meal. We’d send people out to Camarillo and Acton back then. They’d bounce back to us in a few months, worse than ever, livers shot, yellow as baby damn ducks.

“I said, ‘Red, you get a board of directors and a good lawyer and let’s go to work.’ Like Luke said, Red got sober with this farm. He grew up here. And everyone on the farm grew up with him. He took
whoever was here through all the phases of his own sobriety. Around two and a half years sober, he went spiritual on us. Hired a farm chaplain, mostly so he could have long, theological discussions with him. Is George here?”

A man waved from the center of the crowd.

“Well, you’ll remember,” Perrin said. “For months, maybe years, it was Meister Eckhart all the time. ‘God is neither this nor that’ … ‘God is the foundation without foundation.’ Remember how he was always quoting? ‘Flee and hide yourself before the storm of inner thoughts, for they create a lack of peace.’ Remember?

“Then he hooked up with this Jungian therapist, and all he wanted to talk about were dreams. He had these wild theories. He’d tell you his dreams and analyze yours. He was good at it, too. I used to call him up with dreams all the time and he’d say to me, ‘Is it right, Doc? ’Cause a dream isn’t interpreted until the dreamer says it is.’

“Next it was transcendental meditation. He’d pay out of his own pocket if anyone wanted to learn to do it. He put out hundreds of dollars getting people to meditate. He even got me to, only he made me pay my own way. He was generous, but he wasn’t a fool.

“Greatest thing that ever happened to me was Red asking me to be his sponsor. He’s kept me sober all these years—you know, the drunk’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility. If I slip, I thought, who’ll keep an eye on that crazy SOB and all you sorry drunks at the house?

“I’m gonna tell all of you hardheaded bastards something. You think you kick alcohol, you’re in the clear. But the other stuff is just sitting there, waiting to jump you. This disease moves sideways, right into cigarettes, coffee, sugar, food, gambling, women, adrenaline, you name it. So if you guys want to do something in memory to Red, throw away those damn cigarettes. Start drinking water.”

Before closing the meeting, Julie took a straw poll. “Just out of curiosity,” she said, “let’s see the hands of the people Red sponsored in this room.” About forty people, including Lewis, raised their hands, and then everybody else’s hands went up, too.

B
ARBARA AND
L
EWIS
drove to the hospital early, before he had to start lunch. They’d picked a large bouquet of roses, which Barbara
took up to Libby’s room. Lewis went to see Red’s body, but an orderly at the morgue told him Red had been sent to the coroner’s for an autopsy and after that would be cremated.

Lewis couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he’d seen him. Before leaving for Ventura, Red had come to get the food order. He told Lewis he was taking Libby to Yosemite in a few days. He seemed harried, distracted. “Oh, live it up, Redsy,” Lewis told him. “You guys deserve a break.”

Then that conversation on the phone—was he the last person to talk to Red?—and the revelation about Gustave. … Last night, before all the people poured in for the meeting, Lewis tied the dog to a tree and left him howling and baying his terrible cry.

After being turned away at the morgue, Lewis went up to the hospital’s third floor. He didn’t know if Libby would want to see him, so he waited outside her door for Barbara. Pacing the hall, peering into rooms, he saw extremely old people sprawled in their beds. Why Red? he thought. Why not these people already fragile as tissue?

When Barbara came out of Libby’s room, she was crying. Lewis held her, breathing through her crumpled curls. “She wants to see you,” Barbara said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “She’s
really
distraught, so just ride it out with her. It’s okay if you give in to it.”

Libby’s face was gray, her eyes sunken. She looked drugged and gaunt, and Lewis was frightened both for her and by her. An older, deeply tan woman with a cap of white hair sat in a chair close to the bed. “Mom?” Libby said, and the woman stood up on cue and moved toward the door.

“I’m Evelyn, Libby’s mother,” said the woman. She regarded Lewis with evident, probably chronic disapproval. “Please don’t stay long. She doesn’t need so many visitors, it’s getting her all worked up.”

“
Mom
,” Libby said.

“The doctor told you to stay quiet,” she said, then left before Lewis could introduce himself.

Libby motioned him to sit down in the now-empty chair. “I was hoping you’d come,” she said.

He sat there, not knowing what to say or do.

“Here,” she said, reaching out. She took his hand, smoothed it
flat, turned it over. “I remember this hand. Your yellowish skin. Long fingers.” She clasped it between her hands. “Red would always say to me, the two men he loved the most were you and Frank.”

“He saved my life,” Lewis said. “He knew I wanted to get sober even before I did. He saw that far inside me.”

“He saw inside a lot of people. But he got a kick out of you. He wanted me to lighten up toward you.” With hair matted against her head, Libby looked like her own ghost. “He asked me to cut you some slack, to stop being so mad.” She put the back of one hand to her mouth, holding Lewis’s hand fast with the other. “I was mad, but mostly I was playing around.” Libby bit her hand, trying not to sob. Tears coursed from her eyes. “I … I … I …” She kept trying to speak until the effort became spasmodic, like hiccups. Frightened, Lewis stood up, but she held on to him. It took every ounce of self-control for Lewis not to cry, too. He thought his throat and chest would split open from the effort. Not crying felt like swallowing a dagger sideways.

He took some deep breaths and Libby followed suit. Somehow, they both calmed down.

She managed to speak, finally, in a half-whisper. “He wanted you to come over for dinner, and I wouldn’t invite you. He wanted to spend more time with you. He wanted the three of us to pal around again. If I’d known
this
was going to happen, I would’ve had you over for dinner every night.” She put her hands over her face.

Lewis found a washcloth, wet it with cool water, and squeezed it out. Sponging Libby’s face, he said, “Don’t worry. Besides, I couldn’t have come every night. I had to cook dinner at the Blue House.” Warmth rose from her body. Her skin smelled familiar. Before he could stop them, his tears fell onto Libby’s chest. Then he got ahold of himself and again they calmed down.

In a normal, factual tone, Libby said she and Julie Swaggart were working on funeral arrangements. “We only want three people to speak. Otherwise, it could go on for a year. But we want you to speak, Lewis. You have to speak.” Her voice tightened again. “I wanted Billie to speak, too. She’s known him since he came here. But Julie called and Billie said no.” Libby put her hands over her face. “I called her yesterday—she was the first person I called after I found out, even before Joe. I got her machine. Mom called her again last night, but she
won’t pick up the phone. She hasn’t come to see me. Do you have any idea why she’s doing this?”

“Libby, Libby,” Lewis murmured. “Please don’t worry about all that now. Billie will come through, I’m sure she will.”

Libby curled up in obvious physical pain. Lewis went looking for her mother, for a nurse, for anyone who might know what to do.

T
HE FUNERAL
that took place the following Saturday was well organized, simple, and short. Too short. The drunks were stiff and awkward and restrained in St. Catherine’s sanctuary—or maybe numbness had set in. A lot of people looked as if they’d been crying for days. The room seemed to dwarf them, with its forty-foot ceiling and wide wooden beams. Statues of the saints lined the walls, interspersed with dark, clumsy oil paintings depicting the fourteen stations of the cross. Except for a gruesome, life-sized crucifix, the altar was spare.

Libby was still in the hospital. The doctors were going to let her attend the service, but when she got up to get dressed that morning, the bleeding started again. David stayed with her, and her parents arrived alone at the church. They sat in the front-right pew with Ernie Tola and Frank, who had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Lewis sat in the left-front pew between Doc Perrin and Joe, who was dry-eyed but trembling. On Joe’s other side was Yvette, a regal-looking woman with white hair.

Julie Swaggart sang “The Lord Is My Shepherd” in a rich, roomy voice. George, the former Round Rock chaplain, who had officiated at Red and Libby’s wedding, led everyone in the Lord’s Prayer and then read a passage from Meister Eckhart:

Doc Perrin spoke the main eulogy, and kept it clean and short for the lay audience: a list of awards and accomplishments. Luis Salazar gave a formal speech filled with hyperbole: “My great friend … the most God-loving man….” Lewis told how he and Red used to drive all over Ventura picking up supplies, and how long it took because Red fell into conversations at every stop. From the pulpit, Lewis spotted Billie Fitzgerald in a black suit sitting in the back bracketed by the Bills.

Libby’s father got up and said how happy Red had made his daughter, and conveyed Libby’s thanks to all their friends for coming as well as her request that any contributions be made to Round Rock’s residential financial aid fund.

All the speakers were so afraid of taking too long, they didn’t speak long enough. The funeral was over in thirty-five minutes.

Afterward, a lunch was held in the town park. Lewis stayed for a few minutes; then he and Barbara drove back to the Blue House and started making lasagna for dinner. It felt good to be doing something, anything, even browning meat and stirring a big vat of spattering sauce. Lewis couldn’t stop thinking or talking about Red. “I got a lift every time I saw him. He was so comfortable to be around. More comfortable than anyone, ever, in my family. He was always so even-tempered, so amused by life.”

Barbara let him talk. “Grief seems to be a form of obsession,” she said when he apologized for going on so. “You have to go over and over everything, if only to fully discover what you’ve lost.”

As soon as the men were served, Lewis and Barbara drove back to the hospital. Libby was sleeping, her mother said, and sedated. So far, there was no miscarriage. They were going to stitch her shut and she would have to spend the rest of her pregnancy in bed. “She’ll come home with us,” said Evelyn. “That’s best.”

Lewis and Barbara stayed with Libby so her parents could get some dinner. Lewis liked sitting in the dim, quiet room. At one point, when Barbara went out to call her boyfriend, he cried a little. He rinsed out another washcloth and held it to his own face until Libby spoke. “Lewis? Are you all right?”

He told her his version of the funeral. “The ceremony was a little short.”

She closed her eyes. Let out a long breath.

“I’m going to be okay, I think,” she said. “I’m going to carry this baby full-term and all of us are somehow going to be okay.”

Hearing this, Lewis’s chest started to jump. He couldn’t stop it. First, he made a high, soaring whine, then began to sob. He held the washcloth against his mouth as a kind of muffler—he didn’t want the whole hospital staff running in to see what all the racket was about. Libby looked on, tears streaming from her bright eyes. Lewis bent over, bellowed into his lap, and she touched his hair, his forehead, the edges of his arms, whatever part of him she could reach.

L
IBBY’
S
refusal to go home with her parents caused some bad feeling, especially between mother and daughter.

Initially, she wanted to go back to her house on her property, but David and Lewis suggested she move into Red’s bungalow on the farm so they could keep an eye on her. After some consideration, she agreed. This caused further ill will: Evelyn was convinced that staying at Red’s place would be gratuitously distressing, while David and Lewis argued that Libby wouldn’t feel so isolated, and also she could work there, from the bed, once she felt up to it.

Lewis spent Monday afternoon at Libby’s bungalow catching her two young cats, then set up a bedside desk at Red’s with her computer and telephone. The next afternoon, Libby came home from the hospital. When Lewis stopped in to see her, Evelyn was in the kitchen unpacking groceries. “It almost killed her to walk in here,” she told him in a harsh whisper.

Hot with shame, Lewis tapped on the bedroom door.

Libby smiled, though her eyes and nose were red and her cheeks were wet. The cats curled like round pillows on the bed, one black, one calico. “Great desk setup,” she said. “And these monsters …” She scratched the calico’s head. “You haven’t seen Billie, have you?”

Lewis gave a short laugh. “Billie and I don’t exactly hang out much.”

“Not even in town or driving around? I’m just curious to know if she’s here or gone.”

“Here, I guess, unless someone else is driving her truck.”

Libby pulled the sheets over her face and he could see her body quaking.

Evelyn came in behind him. “Oh, honey, you can’t keep this up….” She sighed and turned to Lewis. “I told her it would be too emotional for her to be here.”

Every time Libby collapsed, Evelyn blamed it on her being in Red’s house, and spoke in sharp, hurried tones, as if a week of grief were already excessive. After three or four days, there was a scene and Libby asked her mother to leave. Barbara came up for the next ten days and Libby still cried frequently, but was less prone to wild bouts of self-reproach.