After the Plague

Rust

That was the sky up above, hot, with a fried egg of a sun stuck in the middle of it, and this was the ground down here, hard, with a layer of parched grass and a smell of dirt and leaf mold, and no matter how much he shouted there didn’t seem to be much else in between. What he could use was a glass of water. He’d been here, what — an hour, maybe? — and the sun hadn’t moved. Or not that he could see, anyway. His lips were dry, and he could feel all that ultraviolet radiation cooking the skin off his face, a piece of meat on the grill, turkey skin, crisp and oozing, peeling away in strips. But he wasn’t hungry — he was never hungry anymore. It was just an image, that was all. He could use a chair, though, and somebody to help him up and put him in it. And some shade. Some iced tea, maybe, beads of moisture sliding down the outside of the glass.

“Eunice!” he called out in a voice that withered in his throat. “Eunice, goddamnit, Eunice!” And then, because he was old and he was angry and he didn’t give a damn anymore, he cried out for help. “Help!” he croaked. “Help!”

But nobody was listening. The sky hung there like a tattered curtain, shreds of cloud draped over the high green crown of the pepper tree he’d planted forty years ago, the day his son was born, and he could hear the superamplified rumble of the TV from behind the shut and locked windows and the roar of the air conditioner, and where was the damn dog, anyway? That was it. He remembered now. The dog. He’d come out to look for the dog — she’d been gone too long, too long about her business, and Eunice had turned her parched old lampshade of a head away from the TV screen and said, “Where’s the dog?” He didn’t know where the dog was, though he knew where his first bourbon and water of the day was — right there on the TV tray in front of him — and it was 11:00 A.M. and plenty late enough for it. “How the hell would I know,” he’d said, “you were the one let her out,” and she’d come right back at him with something smart, like “Well you’d better just get yourself out there in the yard and see, hadn’t you?”

He hadn’t actually been out in the yard in a long while — years, it seemed — and when he went out the back door and down the steps he found himself gaping at the bushes all in flower, the trumpet vine smothering the back of the house, and he remembered a time when he cared about all that, about nature and flowers, steer manure and potting soil. Now the yard was as alien to him as the Gobi Desert. He didn’t give a damn for flowers or trees or the stucco peeling off the side of the house and all the trim destroyed with the blast of the sun or anything else. “Booters!” he’d called, angry suddenly, angry at he didn’t know what. “Booters! Here, girl!”

And that was when he fell.

Maybe the lawn dipped out from under him, maybe he stepped in a gopher hole or tripped over a sprinkler head — that must have been it — but the long and short of it was that he was here, on the grass, stretched out like a corpse under the pepper tree, and he couldn’t for the life of him seem to get up.

I’ve never wanted anybody more in my life, from the minute I came home from Rutgers and laid eyes on you, and I don’t care if you are my father’s wife, I don’t care about anything anymore…. Eunice sipped at her drink — vodka and soda, bland as all get-out, but juice gave her the runs — and nodded in complete surrender as the former underwear model — turned — actress fell into the arms of the clip-jawed actor with the ridge of glistening hair that stood up from his crown like a meat loaf just turned out of the pan. The screen faded for the briefest nanosecond before opening on a cheery ad for rectal suppositories, and she found herself drifting into a reverie about the first time Walt had ever taken her in his arms.

They were young then. Or younger. A whole lot younger. She was forty-three and childless, working the checkout desk at the library while her husband ran a slowly failing quick-printing business, and Walt, five years her junior and with the puffed-up chest and inflated arms of the inveterate body builder, taught phys ed at the local high school. She liked to stop in at the Miramar Hotel after work, just to see who was there and unwind a bit after a day of typing out three-by-fives for the card catalogue and collecting fifteen- and twenty-cent fines from born-nasty rich men’s wives with beauty parlor hair and too much time on their hands. One day she came in out of the flaming nimbus of the fog and there was Walt, sitting at the bar like some monument to manhood, his tie askew and the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up to reveal the squared-off blocks of his forearms. She sat at one of the tables, ordered a drink — it was vodka and grapefruit in those days, tall — and lit a cigarette. When she looked up, he was standing over her. “Don’t you know smoking’s bad for your health?”

She took her time, crossed her legs under the table and squirmed her bottom around till she was comfortable. She’d seen Ava Gardner in the movies. And Lauren Bacall too. “Tell me that,” she said, slow and languid, drawing it out with the smoke, “when I’m an old lady.”

Well, he laughed and sat down and they got to talking and before long he was meeting her there every afternoon at five while her husband moaned and fretted over last-minute rush jobs and his wife drank herself into oblivion in her own kitchen. And when that moment came — their first embrace — she reached out for his arms as if she were drowning.

But now the screen flickered and The Furious Hours gave way to Riddle Street and she eased back in her chair, the vodka and soda at her lips like recirculated blood flowing back into her, and watched as the heroine — one of the towering sluts of daytime television — carved up another man.

The funny thing was that nothing hurt, or not particularly or any more than usual, what with the arthritis in both knees and the unreconstructed hernia that felt as if some animal was living under his skin and clawing to get out — no, he hadn’t broken anything, he was pretty sure of that. But there was something wrong with him. Desperately wrong. Or why else would he be lying here on his back listening to the grass grow while the clouds became ghosts in winding sheets and fled away to nothing and the sun burned the skin right off his face?

Maybe he was dying, maybe that was it. The thought didn’t alarm him, not especially, not yet, but it was there, a hard little bolus of possibility lodged in his brain. He moved the fingers of his right hand, one by one, just to see if the signals still carried that far, and then he tried the other side, the left, and realized after a long moment that there was nothing there, nothing he could feel, anyway. Something whispered in his ear — a single word, stroke—and that was when he began to be afraid. He heard a car go by on the street out front of the house, the soughing of the tires, the clank of the undercarriage, the smooth fuel-injected suck of the engine. “Help!” he cried. “Somebody help!”

And then he was looking up into the lace of the pepper tree and remembering a moment on a bus forty-five years ago, some anonymous stop in Kansas or Nebraska, and he on his way to California for the first time and every good thing awaiting him. An old man got on, dazed and scrawny and with a long whittled pole of a neck and a tattered straw hat set way back on his head, and he just stood there in the middle of the aisle as if he didn’t know where he was. Walt was twenty-nine, he’d been in the service and college too, and he wasn’t acquainted with any old people or any dead people, either — not since the war, anyway. He lifted weights two hours every morning, rain or shine, hot or cold, sick or well, and the iron suffused him with its power like some magic potion.

He looked up at the old man and the old man looked right through him. That was when the driver, oblivious, put the bus in gear and the old man collapsed in his shiny worn suit like a puppet with the strings cut. No one seemed to know what to do, the mother with her mewling baby, the teenager with the oversized shoes, the two doughy old hens with the rolled-in-butter smiles fixed on their faces, but Walt came up out of his seat automatically and pulled the old man to his feet, and it was as if the old guy wasn’t even there, nothing more than a suit stuffed with wadding — he could have propped up ten old men, a hundred, because he was a product of iron and the iron flowed through his veins and swelled his muscles till there was nothing he couldn’t do.

Eunice refreshed her drink twice during Riddle Street, and then she sat through the next program with her eyes closed, not asleep — she couldn’t sleep anymore, sleep was a dream, a fantasy, the dimmest recollection out of an untroubled past — but in a state suspended somewhere between consciousness and its opposite. The sound of a voice, a strange voice, speaking right to her, brought her out of it—It was amazing, just as if she knew me and my whole life and she told me I was going to come into some money soon, and I did, and the very next day I met the man of my dreams—and the first thing she focused on was her husband’s empty chair. Now where had he got himself off to? Maybe he’d gone to lie down, maybe that was it. Or maybe he was in the kitchen, his big arms that always seemed to be bleeding pinioning the wings of the newspaper, a pencil in his big blunt fingers, his drink like liquid gold in the light through the window and the crossword all scratched over with his black, glistening scrawl. Those were skin cancers on his arms, she knew that, tiny dots of fresh wet blood stippling the places where his muscles used to be, but he wouldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t care. It was like his hernia. “I’m going to be dead soon, anyway,” he said, and that got her down, it did, that he should talk like that. “How can you talk like that?” she’d say, and he’d throw it right back at her. “Why not? What have I got to live for?” And she’d blink at him, trying desperately to focus, because if she couldn’t focus she couldn’t give him a look, all pouty and frowning, like Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again. “For me, baby,” she’d say. “For me.”

The idea of the kitchen sent her there, a little shaky on her feet after sitting so long, and her ankles weren’t helping, not at all — it felt as if somebody’d snuck in and wrapped truck tires around them while she sat watching her programs. The kitchen was glowing, the back windows glazed with sun, and all the clutter of their last few half-eaten meals invested with a purity and beauty that took her breath away and made her feel like crying, the caramel of the maple syrup bottle and the blue of the Windex and red of the ketchup as vibrant and natural there as flowers in a field. It was a pretty kitchen, the prettiest kitchen in the world. Or it had been once. They’d remodeled in ’66—or was it ’69? Double aluminum sink, self-cleaning oven, cabinets in solid oak and no cheap lamination, thank you very much. She’d loved that kitchen. It was a kitchen that made her feel loved in return, a place she could retreat to after all the personal nastiness and gossip at the library and wait for her man to come home from coaching football or basketball or whatever it was, depending on the season.

The thought came to her then — or not a thought, actually, but a feeling because feelings were what moved her now, not thoughts — that she ought to maybe fix a can of tomato soup for lunch, and wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to fix some for Walt too? Though she knew what his reaction would be. “I can’t eat that,” he’d say, “not with my stomach. What do you think, I’m still thirty-eight?”

Well, yes, she did, as a matter of fact. And when he was thirty-eight and he took her away from Stan Sadowsky and blackened both of his eyes for him when he tried to get rough about it, he’d eat anything she put down on the table in front of him, shrimp cocktail in horseradish sauce right out of the jar, pickled cherry peppers, her special Tex-Mex tamales with melted cheese and Tabasco. He loved her then too. Loved her like she’d never been loved before. His fingers — his fingers were magic, the fingers of a masseur, a man who knew what a deep rub was, who knew muscle and ligament and the finer points of erectile tissue and who could manipulate her till she was limp as a rag doll and tingling all over.

Sure, sure he could. But where in Lord’s name was he?

The sun had moved. No doubt about it. He’d been asleep, unconscious, delirious, dehydrated, sun-poisoned — pick an adjective — and now he was awake again and staring up at that yellow blot in the sky that went to deep blue and then black if you stared at it too long. He needed water. He needed bourbon. Aspirin. Ibuprofen. Two of those little white codeine tablets the doctor gave him for the pain in his knees. More than anything, though, he needed to get up off this damn lawn before the grass grew through the back of his head. Furious suddenly, raging, he gave it everything he had and managed to lift his right shoulder and the dead weight of his head from the ground — and hold it there, hold it there for a full five seconds, as if he were bench-pressing his own body — before he sank back down again. It wasn’t going to work, he could see that now, nothing was going to work, ever again, and he felt himself filling up with despair, a slow dark trickle of it leaking into the black pool that was already inside him.

With the despair came Jimmy. That was the way it always was. When he felt blue, when he felt that life was a disease and not worth the effort of drawing the next contaminated breath, Jimmy was there. Seven years, six months, and fourteen days old, sticks for legs, his head too big for his body and his hair like something you’d scour pans with. Jimmy. His son. The boy who grew up teething on a catcher’s mitt and was already the fastest kid in the second grade. Walt had been at school the day he was killed, spotting for the gymnastics club as they went through their paces on the parallel bars. Somebody said there was smoke up the street — the paint store was on fire, the whole block going up, maybe even the bank — and the vaulted cathedral of the gym went silent. Then they smelled the smoke, musty and sharp at the same time, and then they heard the sirens. By the time Walt got out to the street, his gymnasts leading the way in a blur of flying heels, the fire engine was skewed across the sidewalk in the oddest way, three blocks at least from the fire, and he remembered thinking they must have been drunk or blind, one or the other. When he got there, to where the fire company was, smoke crowding the sky in the distance and the taste of it, acid and bitter, on his tongue, he asked the first person he saw — Ed Bakey, the assistant principal — what was the matter. “One of the kids,” Ed said, and he was shaking so badly he could hardly get the words out, “one of the kids got hit by the truck.”

He drifted off again, mercifully, and when he came to this time the sun was playing peekaboo with the crown of the pepper tree, and the field of shade, healing redemptive shade, spread almost to his feet. What time was it, anyway? Three, at least. Maybe four. And where the hell was Eunice? Inside, that’s where she was, where time was meaningless, a series of half-hour slices carved out of the program guide, day melding into night, breakfast into dinner, the bright electrons dancing eternally across the screen. He dug his elbows into the lawn then, both of them, and yes, he could feel his left side all of a sudden and that was something, and he flexed every muscle in his body, pecs, delts, biceps, the long striated cords of his back and the lump of nothing that was his left leg, but he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t so much as put an inch between him and the flattened grass. That frustrated him. Made him angry. And he cried out again, the driest, faintest bleat of rage and bewilderment from the desert throat of a man who’d never asked anybody for anything.

She called him for lunch, went to the foot of the stairs and called out his name twice, but it was next to impossible to wake him once he went off, soundest sleeper in the world — you’d need a marching band just to get him to blink his eyes — so she heated the tomato soup, cleared a place at the table, and ate by herself. The soup was good, really hit the spot, but they put too much salt in it, they all did, didn’t matter which brand you bought. It made her thirsty, all that salt, and she got up to make herself a fresh vodka and soda — there was no sense in traipsing round the house looking for the other glass, which, as she knew from experience, could be anywhere. She couldn’t count the hours she’d spent shuffling through the bathroom, kitchen and living room on her feet that felt as if they’d been crimped in a vise, looking for one melted-down watery drink or another. So she took a fresh glass, and she poured, and she drank. Walt was up in the bedroom, that’s where he was, napping, and no other possibility crossed her mind, because there was none.

There was the usual ebb and flow of afternoon programming, the stupid fat people lined up on a stage bickering about their stupid fat lives and too stupid to know the whole country was laughing at them, the game shows and teenage dance shows and the Mexican shows stocked with people as fat and stupid as the Americans, only bickering in Spanish instead of English. Then it was evening. Then it was dusk. She was watching a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland picture on the classic movie channel when a dog began barking on the screen, and she was fooled, just for a second, into thinking it was Booters. That was when she noticed that Booters was gone. And Walt: whatever could he be doing all this time?

She went up the stairs, though each step seemed to rise up insidiously to snatch at her just as she lifted her foot, and saw that the bedroom was empty and that neither dog nor man was in the upstairs bathroom enjoying the monotonous drip-drip-drip of the faucet that never seemed to want to shut itself off. Twice more she went round the house, utterly bewildered, and she even looked in the pantry and the broom closet and the cabinet under the sink. It was nearly dark, the ice cubes of her latest vodka and soda tinkling like chimes in her hand, when she thought to look out back.

“Walt?” she called, thrusting her head out the door. “Booters?”

The frail bleating echo of her own voice came back to her, and then, slipping in underneath it, the faintest whisper of a sound, no louder than the hum of a mosquito’s wings or the muffled cry of a bird strangled in the dark. “Help!” she heard, or thought she heard, a sound so weak and constrained it barely registered.

“Walt?” she tried again.

And then: “Eunice, goddamnit, over here!”

She was so startled she dropped her drink, the glass exploding on the flagstones at her feet and anointing her ankles with vodka. The light was fading, and she didn’t see very well anymore, not without her glasses, anyway, and she was puzzled, truly puzzled, to hear her husband’s voice coming out of nowhere. “Walt?” she murmured, moving across the darkened lawn as through a minefield, and when she tripped, and fell, it wasn’t over a sprinkler head or gopher’s mound or a sudden rise in the lawn, it was over the long, attenuated shadow of her husband’s still and recumbent form.

Eunice cried out when she went down, a sharp rising exhalation of surprise, followed by an aquiescent grunt and the almost inevitable elision of some essential bone or joint giving way. He’d heard that sound before, too many times to count, on the football field, the baseball diamond, the basketball court, and he knew right away it was trouble. Or more trouble, if that was possible. “Eunice,” he croaked, and his face was cooked right down to the bone, “are you hurt?”

She was right there, right there beside him, one of her legs thrust awkwardly over his, her face all but planted in the turf. She was trying to move, to turn over, to right herself — all that he could feel, though he couldn’t for the life of him swivel his head to see — but she wasn’t having much success. When finally, after a protracted effort, she managed to drag her living leg across his dead one, she took what seemed like an hour to gulp at the air before her lips, tongue and mouth could form a response. “Walt,” she gasped, or moaned actually, that’s what it was, moaning, “my … I think … oh, oh, it hurts …”

He heard a car race up the street, the swift progress of life, places to go, people to meet. Somewhere a voice called out and a door slammed.

“My hip, I think it’s my hip—”

It was all he could do to keep from cursing, but he didn’t have the strength to curse, and there was no use in it, not now. He gritted his teeth. “Listen, I can’t move,” he said. “And I’ve been laying here all day waiting for somebody to notice, but do you think anybody’d even poke their damn head out the door to see if their husband was dead yet and fried up in the sun like a damn pork rind?”

She didn’t answer. The shadows thickened round them. The lawn went from gray to black, the color drained out of the treetops and the sky grew bigger by the minute, as if invisible forces were inflating it with the stuff of the universe. He was looking up at the emerging stars — he had no choice, short of closing his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d looked at the stars, indifferent to any space that didn’t have a roof over it, and he was strangely moved to see that they were all still there. Or most of them, anyway, but who was counting? He could hear Eunice sobbing in the dark just to the left of him, and for a long while she didn’t say anything, just sniffed and snuffled, gagging on every third or fourth breath. Finally her voice came at him out of the void: “You always blame me for everything.”

Well, there was truth in that, he supposed, but no sense in getting into it now. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Eunice,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, though his heart was hammering and he foresaw every disaster. “I can’t get up. I can’t even move. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

There was no response. A mosquito lighted on his lower eyelid, soft as a snowflake, and he didn’t have the power to brush it away. “Listen,” he said, speaking to the sky and all the spilled paint of the stars, “how bad are you? Can you — do you think you can crawl?”

“It hurts,” she gasped, “Walt, it hurts,” and then she was sobbing again, a broken dry nagging rasp that cut into him like the teeth of a saw.

He softened his voice. “It’s okay, Eunice. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”

It was then, just as the words passed his lips, that the familiar music of Booters’ jingling tags rang out ecstatically from the far corner of the yard, followed by a joyful woof and the delirious patter of approaching paws. “Booters!” they cried out simultaneously. “Good girl, Booters. Come here, come here, girl!”

Eunice was expecting a miracle, nothing less — she was an optimist, always was, always would be — and the minute she heard the dog she thought of all the times Lassie had come to the rescue, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, Buck, Toto and she didn’t know who else. She was lying face-down on the lawn, and her cheek had begun to itch where it was pressed into the grass and the grass made its snaking intaglio in the flesh, but she didn’t dare move because of the pain in her hip and lower back that made her feel as if she were being torn in two. She was scared, of course she was, for herself and for Walt, but when Booters stood over her and began to lick the side of her face, she felt a surge of hope. “That’s a girl,” she said. “Now speak, Booters, speak!”

Booters didn’t speak. She settled her too-big paws down in the grass beside Eunice’s head and whined in a soft, puppyish way. She wasn’t much more than a puppy, after all, a big lumpish stupid dog of indeterminate breed that couldn’t seem to resist soiling the carpet in the hallway no matter how many times she was punished for it. The last dog they’d had, Booters the First, the original Booters, now that was a dog. She was a border collie, her eyes bright with alertness and suspicion, and so smart you could have taught her the multiplication tables if you had a mind to. It was a sad day when they had to have her put down, fifteen years old and so stiff it was like she was walking on stilts, and Walt felt it as much as she did herself, but all he said was “You measure your life in dogs, and if you’re lucky you’ll get five or six of them,” and then he threw the dirt in the hole.

For the next hour, while the mosquitoes had a field day with her face and the back of her neck and her unprotected legs, Eunice kept trying. “Speak, girl!” she said. “Go get help. Get help! Speak!” At first, Walt did his part too, growling out one command after another, but all Booters did was whine through her slushy jowls and shift position to be near whichever one of them was exhorting her the most passionately. And when the automatic sprinklers came on with a hiss of air and the first sputtering release of subterranean pressure, the dog sprang up and trotted over to the porch, smart enough at least to come in out of the rain.

He was dozing when the sprinklers came on. He’d long since given up on the dog — what did Eunice expect her to do, flag down an ambulance? — and he was dreaming about nothing more complicated than his bed, his bed and a glass of water, half a glass, anything to soothe his throat, when the deluge began. It was a mixed blessing. He’d never been so thirsty in his life, baked and bleached under the sun till he felt mummified, and he opened his mouth reflexively. Unfortunately, none of the sprinklers had been adjusted to pinpoint the gaping maw of a supine old man stretched out in the middle of the lawn, and while the odd drop did manage to strike his lips and even his tongue, it did nothing to relieve his thirst, and he was soon soaked through to the skin and shivering. And yet still the water kept coming like some sort of Oriental water torture until finally the pipes heaved a sigh and the flow cut off as abruptly as it had begun.

He felt bad for Eunice, felt powerless and weak, felt dead, but he fought down the despair and tried to sit up again. Or his brain tried. The rest of him, aside from the sting of his sun-scorched face and the persistent ache of his knees and the shivers that shook him like a rag, seemed to belong to somebody else, some stranger he couldn’t communicate with. After a while, he gave it up and called out softly to his wife. There was no response. Then he was asleep, and the night came down to lie on him with all its crushing weight.

Toward morning he woke and saw that Eunice had managed to crawl a few feet away; if he rolled his eyes all the way to the left, he could just make her out, a huddled lump in the shining grass. He held his breath, fearing the worst, but then he heard her breathing — or snoring, actually — a soft glottal insuck of air followed by an even softer puff of exhalation. The birds started in then, recommencing their daily argument, and he saw that the sky had begun to grow light, a phenomenon he hadn’t witnessed in ages, not since he was in college and stayed up through the night bullshitting about women and metaphysics and gulping beer from the can.

He could shake it off then. Push himself up out of the damp grass, plow through ten flapjacks and half a dozen sausage links, and then go straight to class and after that to the gym to work out. He built himself up then, every day, with every repetition and every set, and there was the proof of it staring back at him in the weight-room mirror. But there was no building now, no collecting jazz albums and European novels, no worrying about brushing between meals or compound interest or life insurance or anything else. Now there was only this, the waiting, and whether you waited out here on the lawn like breakfast for the crows or in there in the recliner, it was all the same. Nothing mattered anymore but this. This was what it all came down to: the grass, the sky, the trumpet vine and the pepper tree, the wife with her bones shot full of air and her hip out of joint, the dog on the porch, the sun, the stars.

Stan Sadowsky had tried to block the door on him the day he came to take Eunice away, but he held his ground because he’d made up his mind and when he made up his mind he was immovable. “She doesn’t want to be with you anymore, Stan,” he said. “She’s not going to be with you.”

“Yeah?” Stan’s neck was corded with rage and his eyes leaped right out of his head. Walt didn’t hate him. He didn’t feel anything for him, one way or the other. But there behind him, in the soft light of the hall, was Eunice, her eyes scared and her jaw set, wearing a print dress that showed off everything she had. “Yeah?” Stan repeated, barking it like a dog. “And what the fuck do you know about it?”

“I know this,” Walt said, and he hit him so hard he went right through the screen door and sprawled out flat on his back in the hallway. And when he got up, Walt hit him again.

But now, now there was the sun to contend with, already burning through the trees. He smelled the rich wet chlorophyll of the grass and the morning air off the sea, immemorial smells, ancient as his life, and when he heard the soft annunciatory thump of the paper in the front drive, he called out suddenly, but his voice was so weak he could scarcely hear it himself. Eunice was silent. Still and silent. And that worried him, because he couldn’t hear her snoring anymore, and when he found his voice again, he whispered, “Eunice, honey, give me your hand. Can you give me your hand?”

He could have sworn he saw her lift her shoulder and swivel toward him, her face alive and glowing with the early light, but he must have been fooling himself. Because when he summoned everything he had left in him and somehow managed to reach out his hand, there was nothing there.