The Bubble Reputation (19 page)

“She's an old woman, for crying out loud.”

“I know, Rosie. She's got brontosaurus bites on her shins.” Rosemary looked at the zeroes on her watch. Time was frozen. Time was zero.

“You need to move home soon, Uncle Bishop,” she said.

***

Rosemary stood on the front porch and breathed deep breaths to loosen the muscles in her stomach. Tension grew there daily now. Tension lived in her stomach. Like lichen, it had adapted easily to the membranous walls. It had a neat little nest in her gut. Miriam and Uncle Bishop. They were both up to no good in the house. She walked to the road and looked down the straight stretch she planned to run. She snapped a button on her watch. Time was going again. Time was reeling. And here she was, running down the dusty road to Bixley, dreamlike, running
with
time, speeding it up, heaving it forward. Miriam on her treadmill. Uncle Bishop in the kitchen. All's wrong with the world. When would the information she was sending these people, like old starlight, finally reach them?

The run released some of the tension. Concentration on her footfalls as they pattered out like raindrops beneath her feet kept her mind off the big problems. The home sprint left her heart pumping fast. She pressed fingers to her jugular vein. William had taught her how to take her pulse rate before her heart slowed down. Checking her watch, she counted the heartbeats for six seconds. Fifteen of them. She added a zero. One hundred fifty. Not bad for a quick run.
Fifteen
heartbeats, William. One for every step in the dangerous stairway.
Her heart might be broken, but it was still doing its job. Her nylon top was limp with perspiration. She pushed her sweatband up to wipe the sweat on her brow, then clicked the watch and looked at her time. Thirty-three minutes, forty seconds for the four-mile run. Not bad for hobby running.

Uncle Bishop was on the desk phone when Rosemary came in to pour a glass of water, then lean against the sink to drink it.

“And what did she do then?” he was asking the party on the other end of the line. “Well, you keep up the good work, Mrs. Stoneman. I'll see that you're rewarded for this trouble. You're a fine neighbor.” He flung the receiver back onto its cradle. “You old goat,” he said.

In the kitchen, he found Rosemary on a second glass of water.

“Mrs. Stoneman is my neighbor on the other side,” Uncle Bishop said. “She doesn't like Mrs. Abernathy either. She says if it weren't for all those bird feeders, her patio wouldn't be covered in birdshit.” Rosemary ignored him. She put the glass into the sink and turned to lean against the fridge, to stretch her leg muscles.

“Mrs. Stoneman says that if things
have
to fly around, she prefers butterflies,” Uncle Bishop went on. He put Rosemary's glass in the dishwasher. “Butterfly shit is tiny, like grains of sand.”

“I'm not interested in the texture, if you don't mind,” said Rosemary, and thrust her left leg up behind her and grasped it with her right hand. She applied steady pressure.

“Did you know,” Uncle Bishop asked, “that when I was a kid, I hated to lie on the beach when your grandma took us to southern Maine because I thought the beach was made up entirely of butterfly droppings?” He cocked his head to one side, like a large condor, and waited for a reply. But Rosemary said nothing. She might have asked, “Is that where the sand in your Datsun comes from? Do thousands of butterflies migrate in through an open window at night?” She could have said a lot of things.

Later, thinking back on ways she might have prevented the next terrifying minutes, she realized that words meant nothing anymore. They were empty, wingless and featherless, accumulating to nothing after thirty-three years. It was the sound of tires braking. Had she even heard the thud? She would never be sure. It may have been the thump of her own heart against its rib cage, a final kick to signify the end of a long run. She said it—she was positive later—she said it loudly: “Mugs!” And her insides rose up like a wave of spoiled water, the two glasses wanting to come back up, as though her throat were a pump, pumping.
Oh, please
, she thought,
if something has to die, if something
must
die, let it be something wild
.

The run to the road was a marathon.
So this is what I've been training for
, she thought, a foolish thought that flashed quickly through her mind.
This little sprint to the road, this little race with time
. She hated herself for wishing, in a guilty instant, that it would be Winston, the outdoor cat. But it was Mugs. She had known it would be Mugs. A car, station-wagonish and gray, still speeding, went on, taking the name and license plate number with it in an afternoon swirl of sun and dust. Mugs's stomach was split open, as though it had been sliced, and a part of the intestine protruded. He was half sitting in the road, trying to pull his dead bottom along with his front paws. His mouth was opening and closing, as though he were hovering above his bowl of cat food.

“Oh, Muggser,” Rosemary whispered, kneeling beside him. “Uncle Bishop, get a towel, quick, and the Datsun!”

He was leaning over her shoulder to get a glimpse of the cat. “Oh no,” she heard him say, the voice tinny, a Victrola's voice. In the years he was gone for the truck, Rosemary scratched lightly under Mugs's chin, knowing he felt no pleasure, knowing his last memories of earth would be of blood-crusted pain.

In the pickup she held the cat as best she could on her lap. Uncle Bishop flew down the road. He had taken Ralph on enough false emergency runs to know the exact location of the Bixley Veterinary Clinic. She shoved a bunching of the towel into Mugs's mouth and he bit on it gratefully as each painful spasm hit him, his back arching involuntarily, the terry cloth squeaking between the teeth, rending. His eyes were bright with pain.

“His spine is crushed,” Rosemary mumbled to Uncle Bishop, but she wasn't sure if the words came out of her throat or if she was merely thinking them. Words, she had come to realize in the kitchen, in that moment of calm foolishness before every tragedy, do nothing. Once, Mugs bit sharply when a cruel contortion shook him, and his bite went through the thickness of towel and grazed Rosemary's hand. It didn't hurt, but Mugs reached one paw up, gently, and placed it on her chest. An apology. Rosemary closed her eyes. Where was William now, the son of a bitch? Why was he always conveniently gone for the rough times? Maybe he could tell her some of the secrets he'd stumbled upon. Better yet, maybe he could tell her if it was all worth it. Maybe he could tell her—when the first slice split him open—if he was surprised at how warm and red the blood was, like the soft strings of yarn that go into the making of mittens.
Poor
little
kittens
have
lost
their
mittens.
Rosemary and Mugs rocked gently together in the pickup, as though they were a solid wave. Uncle Bishop was driving at his usual breakneck speed.

“They'll put him to sleep,” Rosemary heard herself say. “Then the pain will be over.”

“Hang on,” was Uncle Bishop's only reply.

Rosemary ran a hand over Mugs's thick smooth fur, now crumbly with blood. Was it just that William was too hopelessly injured? Beyond help, even hers? Had life become an ether-filled receptacle that he gladly dragged himself inside, doglike, to shut the door and die?
Tell me, you chicken son of a bitch
, Rosemary thought.
Give me some answers
.

***

“Rosemary, there isn't a chance,” the vet said. “I'm sorry.” This was Bruce Ashley, two years ahead of her in high school, pale and shy and dateless mostly. Bruce's was one of those sad faces forced to blend away from the in crowd. He had asked her once to go to a movie. Was he getting back at her now? Had he waited all those years?

“There's nothing we can do,” Bruce said. “I'm sure his lungs have collapsed.”

Rosemary looked at him vaguely.
I'll go out with you, Bruce
, she thought.
We'll go to any movie you want to see. All these years we've been waiting, like cripples, to dance. So put on your old soft shoe. You can dump me at dawn along some farmer's back road, drenched and trembling and bruised, so don't tell me there's nothing we can do
.

“Do it,” Rosemary said. She and Mugs had locked eyes. Both pairs were glazed, sealed with different kinds of pain.

“Maybe it'd be better if you waited outside,” said Bruce, still pale and shy and carrying the scars from those high school pimples.

“No,” Rosemary said. “I want to hold him.” She looked at Bruce and raised her eyebrows, a pleading look. “I want to hold him,” she said again. And she wanted to tell Bruce Ashley more. She wanted to tell Bruce Ashley that this was something William had denied her, this right, this need to be privy to the dying. He had denied her the honor of holding his winter-colored wrists while he went at them with a sickle. He hadn't given her even a tiny part to play in his bloody harvest. The chickenshit son of a bitch.

Uncle Bishop, large and pale, went out to the waiting room. Rosemary could hear his voice, high-pitched, shrill with emotion.

“Like one of the family,” he was saying, among other things she quit listening to hear. Mugs had another spasm and then lay still, unable to respond anymore to the pain. Dr. Ashley shaved a small square on the front leg, as though it were a white patch of garden.

“I love you, Muggser,” Rosemary said. The needle missed the vein. Mugs tried to pull his paw away, then decided against it. Blood came out of the puncture.
It's warm at first, William, did you notice?
Rosemary thought.
Warm as socks. And blunt red, like paint that has dried in its tube but was meant, once, to brighten hearts and roses and apples. You're the worst kind of coward, William.
The second stab hit a fat vein and went in easily enough. Mugs did not move. Instead his mouth opened and closed, visible only to those who loved him, the way wind might open the petals of wild flowers on some hillside. The vein took the pentobarbital and grew large with it.
The vena amoris, William, leads to the heart. But there are traffic jams sometimes, and hideous crashes and pileups. Sometimes, William, the vena amoris, like the spider's web, is an awful roadway.
Rosemary put a trembling finger beneath Mugs's chin and stroked as best she could. It would upset him to hear her, in his last seconds, crying. Crying, like words, could wait. Rosemary noticed that she should have clipped Mugs's claws. They had grown long, longer than he would ever need them now. Mugs's round yellow eyes, the pupils dilated to full black, looked questioningly into Rosemary's own. There was a sudden quick burst of bowel movement, accompanied by its smell. And that was all.
“Good-bye, Mugs.”

***

Nobody bothered her back at the house. Even Miriam and Uncle Bishop sat across from each other and spoke little, and then softly, the even treble that honors the dead. Lizzie hugged her roughly and began to cry.

“This is the tragedy of loving something, Lizzie,” Rosemary said, her words a monotone. “Unless we take it from ourselves first, it can one day be taken from us.” William had ta
ught her that.

“He was like your child, I know,” said Lizzie, wringing her hands as though they were something she was trying to fold and put away. “First William, and now this.” She waved a hand erratically.

Rosemary looked into Lizzie's eyes. “Dying is nothing, Lizzie,” she said. “Just ask our old friend William. Just ask the expert.”

“I would die,” Miriam whispered, “if anything happened to Oddkins Bodkins, much less hold him while, you know.”

Rosemary took two bottles of Louis Jadot and went out the back door. Outside in the garage, Winston slid his warm fur across her shins. A wave of longing went through her.

“Oh, Mugs,” she whispered. A sturdy brown box that said BOUNTY PAPER TOWELS sat quietly inside the garage door. It was the biggest box that Bruce Ashley had at his clinic. Nobody, not even Hallmark, makes DEAD CAT boxes. Rosemary stroked Winston quickly. It wasn't his fault that the humans had let their machines get away from them. She remembered the brakes from earlier. Now the only sound was a light wind in the trees. And the far-off crickets with their pagan music. And a distant buzz, another inland murmur, as Bixley bustled with life. Rosemary imagined library books being returned, pizzas ordered, TV channels clicking, children's voices rising one against the other in play.

Back up on the hillside, she paused to look skyward. The stars had flicked themselves on already, busy at their job of night-lighting. “Even the constellations aren't real,” William had told her. He hadn't left her much to believe in.

“Mugs, do you remember William?” Rosemary asked the silence on the hilltop. “William says the constellations are fakes. He says the constellations only appear to be hunters and lions and water bearers. It's from our fixed position in the universe that we give them design and meaning. They've been tricking us for years, Muggser. Even the stars that seem to be neighbors in the sky are not neighbors in reality. This goes for streets as well as skies. Consider Uncle Bishop and Mrs. Abernathy. Consider Alcor and Mizar, in the Big Dipper's handle. They're known as horse-and-rider, but they aren't close. And they sure as hell aren't riding. They're a hundred and twenty light-years apart, Mugs. So even the stars are phonies.” And Rosemary knew this was true of people, too, the way they got together sometimes, as she and William had, as Miriam had with all her husbands, not seeing the light-years between them, only feeling that unexplained pull.

The tent was warm, the flap having fallen back in place, trapping the day's heat inside. Rosemary fired up the Coleman and opened the wine. A mere two hours later the first bottle was gone, but in its place she had a plan. She opened the second bottle and took it with her down the hill. Uncle Bishop had brought a spade, as he'd promised on the quiet ride home from the clinic, and now it rested against the house. In the soft earth at the foot of the hill, where the dark line of willow trees began, Rosemary placed the flashlight on a rock and began to dig in its spray of light. Mugs's favorite toy had already gone into the box with him, a gray cloth mouse, full of catnip, with a bell on a string about its neck. When the hole was large enough, she lifted the cover of the box and shone her light inside. She gave Mugs a final, loving stroke. His fur was still soft and shiny. Beautiful Mugs, going where William had gone, where Father had gone, where the groundhog and the robin had gone, into the earth, into the cherries, into the mind's museum of someone who had loved him dearly.