The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (14 page)

To me Ed Stone appeared smaller all over, his shirt front loose as a sack, his spectacles perched on his nose precariously, his ankles, sheathed in dark socks, as thin as stilts
where they disappeared into his shoes. His features, in profile, seemed sallow and deflated as he stared down beneath the surface of the pond with his spotted hands trembling on his knees, chewing his gums laboriously. He had the seated posture of a man made delicately of powder, as though with the first good wind he would collapse into mist, like a puffball gone to seed, and float out over the pond in a cloud of dust, leaving his shirt and shoes and trousers heaped in the wheelchair. There was no pipe, and the teeth were missing, forgotten or useless; the entire lower portion of his face had caved in around the hole of his mouth. The veins in the temples looked flatter, darker, the face itself less stern and more preoccupied. He seemed accustomed to—though it was clear in the rigid line of his body not accepting of—moving through the world in a seated position, pushed from behind by a force that was not of his own making. Beneath the spectacles his eyes swam as nervously as minnows.

“We’ll have to get your rod down, Dad,” the son said heartily, locking his hand over the old man’s shoulder. “Plenty of bass in this pond.”

Mrs. Kennaugh stirred, wheezing, her breathing troubled briefly, and her head lolled down onto her left shoulder. An orderly from another unit passed wheeling a child, a girl of twelve or so who foamed at the mouth as she rolled down the path, gesticulating wildly and gibbering in some garbled, private language, cryptic and guttural, revolving her hands at the sun. They stopped twenty yards farther along the shoreline, and the orderly began to skip stones lightly over the surface of the pond. The girl, belted tightly, pale forearms beating furiously past her ears, cheered madly at each expert toss, driven by a secret beneficent rapture she alone
could comprehend. Across the pond a canvasback skittered over the surface of the lily pads, and ducking beneath the skin of the water—sleek, soundlessly—disappeared into the blackness.

At noon I brought the old man dinner in the room he’d come to share with Mr. Lloyd, near the end of the third-floor corridor. He sat alone, turned toward the shadowed light of his cell’s single window, as spare and plain and unmoving as the gray tubular bedsteads and the washstand and the squat bedside table where I saw now his pipe, his teeth at the bottom of a spotted waterglass, and a black case for his spectacles. Mr. Lloyd, poor eyes turned to the ceiling, lay in bed with the sheet pulled up to his chin, staring at nothing in particular and massaging the thick veins in his forehead with patient deliberation. Three or four flies hummed in a tight circle over him, but Mr. Lloyd seemed not to notice, and so even the flies became a part of the burden of stillness that had come to oppress their room.

“Is it breakfast?” Mr. Lloyd asked. “Too early for breakfast. Robert’s coming, I think. We’re going home.”

I folded back his sheets, lifted the catheter tube, and removed the bedpan.

“I’m bringing the washbasin,” I said. “Mr. Stone, do you need to use the lavatory before you eat?”

His head swiveled, quavering, and his eyes, red-rimmed in the gray light, flamed with sad recognition and with a pride distilled by my presence and by my question. His lips drew back toward a configuration of reproach—it was I who had trespassed last winter, after all—which was unattainable without teeth as a bulwark. Ed Stone pried his wheelchair around and faced me, then rolled over to the bedside table
and locked his teeth in snugly, carefully. “Lavatory,” he said, tugging on the front molars. “Lavatory? Is that what you’re askin’ about, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m going down there to empty this bedpan and you might as well come along if you need to.”

Mr. Lloyd raised his head off the pillow and said, “Is that Robert coming? I hear good, you know. Do you see this? I can ring for the nurse with this gadget. She’s a busy girl.”

I raised his catheter tube again, pressed it into the cinch at the edge of a fresh bedpan, and turned the sheets down.

“Thank you, kindly,” Mr. Lloyd said.

“You’re welcome.”

In the doorway I turned and looked over my shoulder.

“Coming?” I asked.

Ed Stone sat clutching the armrests of his wheelchair, and then his fingers edged to the wheel rims and he revolved himself studiously toward me, head down. “No, I’m not coming,” he answered from the foot of his bed, and wheeled to the single gray window again, where he halted, trembling, and stared out.

Mr. Lloyd let his head fall back and began to knead his blackened temples once more.

“Suit yourself, folks,” he said to the ceiling, to the flies spinning over him, to nobody and nothing in particular. “Everybody—suit yourself. Go right ahead. Feel free.”

Thunder bellowed in the distance—the west storm coming in from Connecticut. A robin lighted on the sill beyond the pane of glass. It shimmered, hopped twice, weightless and bobbing, head twitching fragilely not a foot from Ed Stone’s eyes, and then floated out among the pines.

*  *  *

In the morning they found him face up beneath the surface of Harrow’s Pond, bound in the marshweed, eyes wide and staring out into the sun and clouds. He’d left the wheelchair at the edge of the path, sometime in the night beneath stars that glistened after the storm had thundered by, and hobbled on crutches to the south shore, where he took his spectacles off and placed them under a sapling pine, folding them neatly on a bed of needles, and leaned his crutches up against the slender bole in the moonlight. Quietly he’d freed himself of his mackinaw, the one so identical to mine—I have it still, my son wears it fishing—and draped it over a low bough with his pipe and pouch in the breast pockets, and stood at the border of the grove with the pond before him, shivering because the night air closed him in. Barefoot—the black Hitchcocks, socks stuffed in their toes, left behind on the gravel—he’d crawled into the cold and swam with his bad leg dangling useless in the deeper water, pushing the surface back and making for the frigid heart of the pond. At last—and it was swift, and the old man felt breathless when it happened—he reached a place where there was no decision, the lights in the sky fell away and he was dropping effortless through a shroud, a womb, the surface receded before him impossibly, irrevocably, and yet it
receded
, it was as he had made it, it was farther away already while he noted it, and it was something like moving down a tunnel in a dream, with time, even, to note the sensation of thought without breath—the thought of no breath, how unacceptable and queer—and in a swirl that contained him bottomlessly he pondered what might be the right last thoughts to have and they were all of them, all of them, trivial, especially the pondering itself, and its triviality trivial even, and that was the last, from within his paralysis
of body he no longer noted anything, only that there was no light to speak of, or that everything, somehow, was brilliantly lit, the light and the darkness one, united—and finally even that disappeared.

Arcturus

A
t the Last Stop Grocery Carl James pulled over. “Will you look there?” he said to his wife.

Four teenagers were drinking beer and squatting against the Last Stop’s wall. They had a case of Hamm’s in front of them and they were smoking cigarettes and looking at the highway.

I know the score with these here fellows
, Carl said to himself.

“We need a couple things for tonight,” he told his wife, getting out and peering through the windowframe of their camper, then rubbing the small of his back with his fingertips because the drive from town had been a long one. “Do you want maybe anything in here?”

Louise set her knitting in her lap and answered, “I guess I packed what we need already. But why don’t you pick up some cookies, maybe? We can eat them tonight while we’re playing cards.”

A teenager with no shirt on, his chest muscles glowing, walked past them carrying a case of beer in his arms.

“Cookies,” Carl said to his wife. “Any special kind?”

“Nope,” Louise said.

“You sure?” Carl asked. “You don’t want your coconut ones?”

“Nope,” Louise insisted. “Surprise me this time.”

Carl said, “Will do. Wait right here.”

As he walked past the teenagers Carl heard himself say, “Don’t drink ’em all in one snort now, fellas. You’re liable to pass out doing that.”

He regretted it immediately. It was just the kind of thing, he knew, that he should never say to any young people.

“For sure,” one of the teenagers answered.

Carl walked around the Last Stop getting what he needed. By the time he made it to the rear of the store he had a large watermelon, a bag of Cheese Flips, a can of baked beans, and a half-case of beer in his cart. He planned to drink the beer along with a small flask of scotch he had hidden in his tackle box, to sit by himself on the bank of the Little Nelson River, listening to the water splash by and getting drunk one little piece at a time.

He went down the aisle toward the bakery goods, and that was when he saw Floyd Paxton—a red-faced fellow now, with a flowery Hawaiian shirt hanging over his belly like a curtain.
Floyd!
he almost said. But something stopped him. Floyd stood there panting a little and staring at the display of pies, cakes, tarts and doughnuts.

While Carl watched, Floyd scratched the red, bald crown of his head, cleared his throat in a thick rumble and picked out a boysenberry pie. He wore sandals and his toenails
looked rotted. When he burped silently his lips curled back, and Carl saw that his teeth had rotted too. Everything about Floyd was old, loused up and rusty. Still, it was Floyd all right. Carl understood that perfectly. It was Floyd after many, many years, was all. It was Floyd, a fat old man.

Jesus
, Carl said to himself. I don’t
want to see this. Jesus Christ.

Floyd stacked two pies on top of the boysenberry, then shuffled away toward the meat section of the Last Stop.

Jesus
, Carl said silently again.
No
.

He paid for his things and went outside. It was a hot afternoon, a Friday in August; more teenagers had arrived. Two of them drank beer in the cab of a pickup, rock music spilling from the windowframes.

“What’s up?” one of them said to him.

“Nothing much,” Carl answered, his voice wavering.

He stowed the bag of groceries, his beer and the watermelon. “I forgot your cookies,” Carl explained to Louise when he had their camper rolling again. “I’m sorry, but I just plain forgot is all.”

Louise had her knitting going good now. The needles were flashing in the sunlight coming through the windshield.

She said, “It’s all for the best. We didn’t need them anyway.”

“Not unless we want to become a couple of fat people,” said Carl.

“Isn’t it the truth?” Louise answered. “Except only we already
are
fat people. I am, leastwise, and you’re getting there, Carl.”

She poked a forefinger into the side of Carl’s gut. Carl slapped it away, laughing.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re not fat. You look fine, Louise.”

“Eat right, get plenty of exercise, and take Geritol,” Louise said seriously.

They both laughed then. They were entering the woods along the river. Carl saw the sign that said NORTH FORK CAMPGROUND 14 MILES.

Carl had helped build the forms one summer for the fire-pits at the North Fork Campground. He’d poured the concrete. He’d cleared the campsites. He’d helped dig the holes for the outhouses. Floyd, too.

They were only teenagers then, Floyd and himself, but they were working already, working in the woods, doing what they could to get along.

That summer they’d gotten on with a government work crew. They worked on Forest Service land—building stick piles and burning them, or digging fire line and laying hose on it—whatever the crew boss said, they did.

They’d worked along the banks of the Little Nelson sometimes.

After work they’d generally pulled over at the Last Stop for a few bottles of Blue Ribbon. They had a house, Floyd and Carl, at the edge of an old apple orchard at the foot of the mountains, and they would go there and eat bologna sandwiches for dinner. Sometimes they would swim in the Deer Pool on the Little Nelson, or they would sit in front of the Last Stop together, drinking beer in the sun, bothering the same girls they’d bothered at the high school, smoking cigarettes and watching the cars and logging trucks go past.

But this was all years ago, long before Carl moved away to Seattle and went to work at the Boeing Company. He’d done everything there. He’d been through a lot since then. He’d fought in two wars, for example. His daughters were
grown up, married, and had children. His first wife had died of cancer in her lymph nodes, and Carl had married Louise. He’d met her at the Food Circus—they ate tacos, then danced the polka. Her husband had died from a stroke, she told him. When they were engaged he sent Floyd Paxton an invitation, but Floyd had never written back or responded. Perhaps he was dead, Carl’d said to himself. So he forgot about Floyd Paxton. It had been a long, long time ago, really, and there was no point in always looking backward.

But now he remembered almost despite himself. On a Saturday back then they’d taken their inner tubes up and put them in the Little Nelson River. Carl drank his fifth beer of the day in water up to his thighs. Floyd was on his fifth beer, too. They stood there holding their tubes against the current, naked, with flat stomachs, drinking beer beneath a fragile blue sky.

“Here we come, river!” Floyd had yelled, lofting his beer bottle into the forest.

He took the remaining beers and laid them inside a burlap sack. He lashed the sack to his inner tube with a section of manila rope. It was a day of no wind, bright and hot, in high country, virgin forest, and the river ran along through there steep and recklessly.

“Five beers makes you immune to pain,” Floyd explained. “If you smash your head on a rock downriver you aren’t even going to notice it.”