A Burned-Over District by Charles Hibbard
Chapter 12
A couple of weeks of fruitless patrolling and gradually diminishing e-mail traffic came and went, and another Sunday rolled around, “It’s all right, you go this week,” Lu told me. “Take Albert. Antonio gave me an extra shift.” She actually seemed to enjoy hanging out at the PetroMall, although more in the winter than in the summer, when the buses extruded their boluses of tourists to mob the deli and crowd the displays of granola bars. “What do you do over there when there’s nobody coming in?” I asked her.
“Oh, I just hang with the high school girls and get the gossip, talk to Antonio, whatever.” Antonio was, in appearance, something of a male counterpart to Myrtle Bench, except with a baseball cap. Dark eyes with which he liked to rivet people, perpetual 3-day stubble (another example of my Cloud Theory of existence), glossy ponytail, a gold stud in one ear. He was a refugee from New York, where he’d been but one good cook among hundreds. Here in the mountains he was something of a phenom – his deli counter was a half-mile from Stirling’s, but the culinary separation was astronomical, or gastronomical I guess you’d have to say. He and Lu got along very well, and I occasionally titillated myself with the fear, not unalloyed with guilt over my own infidelity, that they were having a hot affair while I was handing out scantrons at Mildred High School or diapering Albert on Lu’s putative Wednesday church evenings. The thought was improbable enough to be mildly stimulating. But I could entertain it only by ignoring Lu’s devotion to Albert, her passionate involvement in the church, her total transparency, and her lack of imagination. In any case, Antonio had more of an eye for the high school girls, who revered him because of his looks, his age (he was just enough older than they were), and his awesome hipness.
I packed up Albert and all his gear, dropped Lu off with a kiss at the ‘Mall, and made the weekly drive along the mountains to Hathwell. The usual white cumulus with gray bottoms were stacking up in a blue sky over the Cones, and we passed several small flocks of morose crows idling on the thin layer of snow that now coated the desert, all of them facing north and warming their backs in the thin winter sunshine.
I was shocked by the change that had overtaken Janet in the week since I’d last seen her. She’d been thin, but now she was definitely gaunt, the result, I supposed, of eating basically nothing. She had family in Fetlock who were keeping an eye on the situation, but they, and Janet herself, had decided against pushing food at her too hard, so she was simply wasting away. She lay asleep and breathing through her mouth, propped up slightly on a pillow, her profile like a knife blade. I deposited Albert in his carrier in one chair and sat down in the other myself.
Albert was exercising all his limbs, as he usually did when he was awake, but doing it quite silently, as if he knew he shouldn’t wake Janet up. I sat there looking at her profile and listening to her slow breathing, trying to bridge the mental gap between this scene and a sort of generic afternoon in her bedroom. Beyond her window, the raggedy curtain of cottonwood leaves in sunlight, with silent mountains behind them, not very different from the scene framed in this window. To the guilt of my illicit liaison with her was now added the shame of recalling her plump little breasts and still feeling a helpless twinge of lust, even though one of them was now gone and the other was doubtless shriveled by starvation. Many years before, at the start of my teaching career, one of my instructors had kept harping on the pedagogical value of something called cognitive dissonance. The idea was to plant simultaneously in the kids’ minds two incompatible ideas. In theory, the low-grade mental inflammation thus created would force them to keep revisiting the subject, leading finally to some deeper insight. Here, I thought, was a real-life example, of a deadly serious kind. But even if I ever succeeded in superimposing the two contradictory visions, what would the lesson be?
Janet opened her eyes and focused on Albert without moving her head. Seeing her gaze fixed on him, he increased the pace of his kicking, and she smiled a little. “He looks like you today,” she said after a while. I hitched my chair closer, into her field of vision.
“You think so? I don’t really see it.” Actually, I did see it. There was definitely something mildly Simon-ish about Albert that came and went unpredictably with his changes in expression. What I meant was that I couldn’t figure out where the similarity came from. None of his features – eyes, ears, nose, mouth – really looked like mine, and yet he would turn a certain way and the likeness would flicker across his face for an instant, like a familiar chord in a new piece of music. At other times it was Lu I saw, rather than myself, or my mother, or even Lu’s father the Pennsylvania coal miner, whose dark features I knew only from a couple of old photos.
“Yup. Definite Simon,” she said, closing her eyes again. “He takes himself very seriously, just like you.” I couldn’t figure out where she was getting that, but I let it go.
“How is it today?” I asked her. She nodded, after a pause.
“It’s OK. Considering. They’ve got me all pumped up with morphine. I’m probably happier than I’ve ever been. If anything starts to hurt, I just push the magic button,” she said, fumbling in the sheets for the call button and lifting it up for me to see. “Then it’s happy time again. If the nurse shows up.” Her arm fell like a stone back to the bed. “Trouble is, I can’t think about much of anything.” After a pause she added, “I’m just trying to get used to the idea of being a terminal patient.” I watched her, not saying anything.
After a while she said “I never really liked that drug feeling.” I could believe that. Janet was always too level-headed and results-oriented to want to waste time wallowing in unproductive mental states, no matter how euphoric. Her fearless honesty and the directness of her involvement with the school kids had always shamed me. I was an adequate teacher, as far as the classroom was concerned, but Janet was more than that. She was passionate and determined, and she never doubted that the kids could accomplish great things. She was always pushing them, gently but relentlessly, not just to do their homework, but to pull the old tires out of the West Rapid and plant trees along the despoiled banks below the town; to organize a street fair to raise money for Afghan orphans; to start a club of kids who performed skits about tolerance to the classes in the high school, and later branched out into afternoon trips to take the same lessons to other schools. I never had any faith in my ability to channel the energy of a bunch of hormonally challenged kids into any kind of project that required focus and persistence. I could only see the obstacles. Janet instead focused on the result, and she always made it work, though never perfectly. That was her secret, in fact. She accepted imperfection as an inevitable product of the process, like exhaust, and it never stopped her.
“Lu couldn’t make it today,” I told her. “She had an extra shift at the PetroMall.”
“It’s OK,” she said. “I saw her earlier this week.”
“Oh?” I said.
She nodded. “She was down here on. . .” She thought for a minute. “Didn’t I see her earlier this week?” She looked at me with drooping eyelids.
“I don’t know. Maybe. She didn’t tell me she was coming down, but maybe she did.”
“I thought she did.” She closed her eyes. Morphine, I thought. The pain must be pretty bad for her to be willing to let herself be doped up like that. I think Janet, even knowing where she was headed, would have liked to be fully awake for the trip. I’d been hoping to talk to her about it, in fact, because I thought she wouldn’t mind and would have interesting things to say, without a lot of textbook emotion. It was a little frustrating to sit here watching the two of them, Janet and Albert, both in their different ways so near the boundary that fascinated me, and yet neither of them able to tell me about it. It appeared that the moment for that was already past with Janet, and by the time Albert could talk he’d be just like me – too deep into the funhouse to remember what it was like behind the mirrors.
“The whole town is still going bonkers over our so-called extraterrestrials,” I said, to
“Matt’s really going off the deep end,” I said, “and he’s pretty much got the whole town buying into it. No one even wants to consider the possibility that it was just something astronomical. We’ve got research committees, military training, prayer meetings . . . The Cowboys are the only voice of restraint, if you can imagine,” I said. “They’re still convinced it’s merely a diabolical plot of the EPA or maybe the BATF – they’re keeping their options open. They’re trying to get everyone in town to take up arms.”
I waited quite a long time for her to respond, but she didn’t say anything, just lay there with her eyes closed. I wondered if she was asleep, or in a stupor from the morphine. I hadn’t given up hope that she’d talk to me at least a little about what she was thinking, or feeling, being where she was. “You still with us?” I asked her softly.
She rolled her head toward me and stared at me unnervingly, without blinking. “Did you ever talk to Lu about those afternoons?” she said.
I was both taken aback at her bringing up a subject so far removed from the one I wanted to pursue and foolishly uncomfortable about discussing it in front of Albert, despite his primitive stage of development. I’m afraid I even worked my jaw a little bit, like a bad film actor, before I finally got out my “No.”
“I don’t really like having secrets from her,” I added, “but I’m not sure she could handle that.” Even though it was long over – I didn’t add the obvious. Lu was so literal-minded, so oblivious to the subtleties of human motivation. How could I ever explain to her the complex recipe of lust, advancing age, preening and insecurity, boredom, resentment, curiosity, scorekeeping, and the instinctive masculine inability to pass up an opportunity to get laid? And then give her the faded old line that it had just been sex anyway, and didn’t really mean anything. We were doing OK now. I wanted to leave it at that.
“She knows,” Janet said, after a long pause, during which she continued to stare at me.
“Why do you think that?” I asked her. “She’s never said anything. I mean, she probably knows something happened, we had a flirtation or whatever. I don’t think she knows how far it went. And I don’t really want to tell her.”
She looked at me a little longer, then closed her eyes and said, “Could you give me some of the red stuff? The nurse doesn’t always come when I ring.”
I went around to the other side of the bed and filled the eyedropper from the bottle. She opened her mouth obediently, and I squirted the red liquid onto her tongue. She swallowed and said “One more,” in a hoarse voice. I gave her the second dropper, then continued to stand above her, looking down at her frighteningly pale skin, through which I could clearly see the lace of blue veins, and the still beautiful curve of the lashes over her closed eyes. She opened them and gazed up at me without expression for a long time, before saying in a slur, “You should hang onto that.”
“I know. I’m planning to,” I said, defensively. I sat for a few minutes watching her, but once the morphine kicked in there was nothing doing. She lay silently, her breathing very slow and steady.
Obviously it was time to go, but I was reluctant to leave, given that it seemed possible that Janet wouldn’t be here the next time I came to visit. I looked over at Albert, who had also been suspiciously quiet. He was watching me and doing something odd with his mouth – it took me a second or two to realize that he was trying to mimic my expression. He was tensing his shiny red lips and pushing them out as far as he could. I could feel the corners of my own mouth drawn down like his, and my lips pushed out. I was sure my eyebrows were also lowered, but Albert didn’t have much control over those appendages as yet. I knew the expression very well, at least from the inside. To call it a pout may trivialize it, but that’s what it was. “You don’t have to work on that one, Pal, I told him,” picking up the carrier but not bothering to put it on my back, since we were just going to the car. “You’ll get plenty of practice on your own.”
I drove north faster than I should have, with the feeling of fighting my way upstream on a smooth and deceptively rapid current. In a way it was good that Lu had seen Janet earlier in the week. I didn’t have to say anything when I got home.