Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish (7 page)

“Please don’t cry, Warren.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Grandma’ll be all right. She’s been to the hospital before. She’s had attacks before.”

“Not like this.”

He dried his cheeks with his hands and then wiped his hands on his shirt. “We’re supposed to come to the hospital on the bus. I wanted to go in the ambulance—” He began crying again—he couldn’t help it. “But they wouldn’t let me.”

“Honey, I don’t think they let people go in the ambulance. They work in there. They have oxygen and medicine, and half the time the people are better by the time they get to the—”

“They let Mrs. Oglesby ride up front,” he interrupted stubbornly. The need to be part of his grandmother’s illness swept over him again. If he could have gone with them, helped somehow, just handed them things—there had to be something he could have done.

“Warren, listen, we’ll go in the apartment and get some money. You wash your face.”

He nodded dumbly.

“Then we’ll go down and call Pepper—somebody ought to let her know—and then we’ll go to the hospital in a cab. We are not waiting for any bus.”

Warren sniffled loudly. He watched his sister with a grateful admiration as she went into the apartment. No, it was more than admiration. He felt close to Weezie for the first time in his life.

“The money’s in the green-bean box in the freezer,” he called after her.

“I know,” she answered.

He followed slowly. He went into the bathroom and dried his face on a towel. His grandmother only bought brown towels because they never showed dirt. “You never have to wash them unless you want to,” he could remember her saying as she hung them over the towel racks.

He felt the pinch of tears again, and he walked quickly into the living room. In the kitchen Weezie was slamming the freezer door, rattling paper. “Warren, you ready?” she called.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

She came out of the kitchen stuffing cold dollar bills into her purse. She pushed him through the open door and paused to lock it.

“Weezie?” he asked.

“What?” She put the key in her purse and looked up, pausing to see if she had forgotten anything.

“If Grandma dies—”

Her eyes sharpened as she glanced down at him. “Grandma won’t die.”

“If she does though—”

“She is not going to die.”

“But if, I’m just saying
if
!”

“All right, say it then. If what?” she asked, her voice rising in the empty hall.

“If she does die, will Mom come home?” he asked in a rush. Then he looked up at her, waiting, his eyes still bright from tears, his mouth open, for her answer. He did not even seem to be breathing.

“You never give up, do you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You
never
give up.”

He gritted his teeth. “All right, I never give up! So will she come?”

“No.”

“What makes you say no? I think she would. She would have to come home, wouldn’t she, to the funeral?” He was squinting now as if the light had suddenly gotten too bright.

“No.”

“She would!”

“No!”

“Well, maybe she wouldn’t be right out there in front, but she would have to at least be there somewhere, wouldn’t she? She would hear about the funeral. Somebody would tell her. And she would
have
to come. She couldn’t stop herself. All right, maybe we wouldn’t get to
talk
to her, but she would …”

Weezie was looking at him, shaking her head with such sadness that he trailed off.

“Come on, Warren,” she said, starting down the steps. “Let’s get to the hospital.”

“She would have to!” He threw the words at her back. He waited, but she did not even turn around. Head lowered, he followed her down the steps.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think something metal was coming down the stairs. Well, it’s probably nothing, but I’d better go check.”

F
ROM THE BACK, WARREN
thought, Aunt Pepper looked exactly like his mother. She was standing, peering into the square of glass on the door of the intensive care unit. Her long, reddish hair was pulled back with a barrette. Her foot was tapping impatiently on the worn tile floor.

The hospital was old. Warren glanced up. Across the high ceiling ran plumbing pipes, painted the same green as the walls and ceiling. Down the hall an elderly man was waiting in a wheelchair to be pushed to his room.

Warren and Weezie sat on straight chairs in the small waiting room. Weezie was holding a worn issue of
McCall’s,
but she had not opened it.

Warren was concentrating on not thinking about his grandmother, because every time he thought about her—he could not help it—his mind jumped straight to the graveside and her funeral.

He was genuinely glad no one could read his mind. They would be shocked to discover that while everyone else was worrying about his grandmother’s health and praying for her recovery, he was imagining meeting his mother at her funeral. He was shocked himself.

To change his thoughts he looked around the room. This hospital would not be a bad setting for a movie. Of course it would have to be abandoned, the halls unlighted, the small waiting room empty of furniture.

Perhaps some sort of radioactive creature could break into the deserted hospital, attracted by the pull of the old X-ray machines, needing a fix. It could be some sort of snakelike creature that would weave through the ceiling pipes and drop down on people.

The thought caused him to shudder, and instantly Weezie put her arm around him. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He shrugged off her comforting arm, which he knew he did not deserve.

“The doctor should be out soon.”

“Good.”

He rested his head on the back of the chair and looked up at the ceiling. Maybe the pipes themselves could come to life, he thought. That would be original.

Pipes coming alive didn’t seem likely, of course, but his friend Eddie claimed he had once seen a horror movie about a car. A car came alive and went around running people down! Eddie swore it was the truth.

Convinced he was on the right track, Warren continued. The pipes would have been activated by old radioactive waste material that hospital officials had been illegally disposing of for years through the plumbing. Not bad, he thought.

It would have to be a very quick thing, sort of catch the audience by surprise. First one pipe would began to quiver—this would be the beginning of the movie—and then one length of the pipe would crack and snap off and fall to the floor.

In a sort of metallic frenzy, like a fit—the viewer would just see a blur here—the pipe would undergo a transformation and grow a tail and a head. The mouth would be a zigzag line that snapped open and shut, the eyes would light up, and the tail would have rattles.

Killing these pipes would be next to impossible. Bullets would be out. Poisonous gas, useless. Dynamite would blast them into little pieces, but then the little pieces would activate and start snapping their jaws again. The best scientific brains in the nation would meet to—

But he was getting ahead of himself. Back to the beginning of the movie. One pipe would form into this snakelike creature, and then another and another until finally an army of pipe snakes would be upstairs in the hospital hall.

The night watchman would be the first to learn of their existence. He would be at his station, sipping a little booze, listening to the radio, when suddenly he would hear this terrible clattering noise echoing through the empty halls.

“If I didn’t know better,” he would mutter, getting slowly to his feet, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think something metal was coming down the stairs. Well, it’s probably nothing, but I’d better go check.”

There would be alternating shots of the old night watchman climbing up the stairs and the pipes coming down. With each shot of the night watchman, the noise would be louder.

“What
is
that?” he would ask, more and more puzzled. He would shine his flashlight up the stairs, peering into the darkness.

Then he would see them, the pipe snakes, their jagged mouths snapping open and shut as they came clattering into view.

“No! No!”

Dropping his flashlight, he would turn and start running down the steps. He would trip on the third step and tumble head over heels to the bottom. There he would crouch with his arms over his head for protection.

“No! Please! No! Noooooooo!”

But the pipe snakes wouldn’t kill the old man. Eating flesh wouldn’t be their thing. They would just clatter right over him and around him and on down the steps and out the front door of the hospital.

In the silence that followed, the old man would get up like a cowhand after a stampede. He would brush himself off, check his arms and legs for injuries, pick up his flashlight, shine it around the empty stairs. He would shake his head in disbelief.

Then he would go to his station, pick up his half empty bottle of booze, and drop it into the nearest trash can. “Never again,” he’d say.

Warren realized he was sitting there with a smile on his face. He looked around quickly to see if anyone had noticed. Aunt Pepper was still at the door. Weezie’s head was turned the other way. The old man in the wheelchair had fallen asleep.

Film critics would call the movie “original” and “powerful.” They would say, “Excellent special effects.” He would like to see the movie himself—that was the real test of one of his movies, when he himself would pay money to see it.

There were, of course, problems to work out. For example, why would everybody be scared of the pipes if they didn’t do anything but run around? Sure, nobody would want pipes running wild in the streets, cutting across yards, making holes in lawns. That would be a terrible nuisance.

Maybe the pipes could activate other pipes, make them leap right out of washing machines and toilets and join in the stampede. Housewives would see the pipes coming and go after them with brooms. “Stay away from my pipes!” POW! SWAT! ZONK!

Warren was smiling again. Quickly he put his hand over his mouth to hide his expression.

Weezie put her arm around him again. Her look was sympathetic. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.” He pulled away, shrugged off her arm, and settled back into his thoughts.

Suddenly Weezie’s look sharpened. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I would really like to know.”

“Nothing! I’m not thinking about anything. What makes you think I’m thinking about something?”

“You don’t have to be defensive.”

“I’m not being defensive. I just wasn’t thinking about anything. You want me to make something up? All right, I was thinking about school. Are you satisfied? Anyway, I was
not
daydreaming, if that’s what you were getting at.”

“You daydream too much.”

“I said I was
not
daydreaming.” He crossed his arms and sat back in his chair, his mouth set, his eyes dark. He began to kick his heels against the chair legs.

“I can always tell when you’re daydreaming because you have a sort of out-of-it look on your face. It’s very obvious. It’s like you’re on drugs or something.”

He snapped around and stared at her. “I suppose all your thoughts are perfect. I suppose you were sitting there thinking about world affairs!” He was so angry he was trembling.

“I was thinking about Grandma!”

“Sure you were!”

There was a pause and then Weezie said, “A little daydreaming is fine, Warren. It’s like a little food or a little wine. Only when it becomes the most important thing you do, when you gorge yourself with food … There’s a girl in my school who freaks out on food, and she’s bigger than somebody in a sideshow. She’s carried eating so far she can’t even lead a normal life. And you’re carrying daydreaming too far. You’re a daydream freak. You’re not in the world ninety-five percent of the time.”

“I am,” he sputtered. “I—It’s not the same.” The accusation was so unjust he could not find the right words. “You’re stupid, you know that! And anyway, nobody in the whole world is going to tell me what to do with my thoughts. My head’s mine, and—”

“Kids!” Aunt Pepper came over. “Be quiet. Honestly, you’re disturbing people. You’ve got to keep your voices down.”

“I wasn’t the one who was yelling,” Weezie said, adjusting a pleat in her skirt.

“You were the one who wasn’t minding her own business!” Warren yelled.

“Kids!”

Aunt Pepper watched the two of them for a moment. She looked from Weezie’s calm face to Warren’s scarlet one. When she apparently was satisfied that the argument was over, she turned and crossed the room to the door.

“Anyway,” Warren said through lips that barely moved, “did it ever occur to you that my thinking may turn out to be valuable? Did it ever occur to you that I might really make movies when I get big?” He swallowed. His eyes stung with tears of injustice. He had been creating a movie—he had been going to call it
Pipe Snakes!
—it was going to be a blockbuster. And his stupid sister had labeled that “daydreaming.”

“Nobody does anything by daydreaming about it,” she said. “You don’t see successful men sitting around looking like this.” She gazed down the hall with a blank look on her face. “There are people who like to do things and there are people who like to daydream about doing things. It’s—”

“Mind your own business, hear? Just shut up.”

“Kids!”

As Aunt Pepper moved toward them, the door behind her opened. “Mrs. Walker?” It was the doctor.

“I’m Mrs. Walker,” Aunt Pepper said, spinning around. Weezie got to her feet.

“Well, apparently your mother has had a stroke. We won’t know for a few days how much damage has been done. She’s awake now, if you want to see her.”

“I do.”

“Your mother’s a little confused, keeps calling for someone named Saffron—Saffee?” It was a question. He looked from one to the other.

It was Warren who answered. “Saffron’s my mother.”

“Well, perhaps she should come if she possibly can.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Warren said.

“Something is wrong.”

“There generally is when the cattle are found with two holes in the sides of their necks.”