Assorted Fire Events: Stories

TAHORAH

HE WAS in the CCU and sick of all the barbaric grunts and cries coming from next door and out in the hallway. What name to pin them with he wasn’t sure, something foreign because the lingo they were speaking made no sense and got on his nerves almost as much as the crying and sobbing and all that, but he couldn’t do anything about it because he was soaking in morphine and wasn’t concerned about the details; he gave up on the details after the second heart attack, all that pain, big walls of it, like in the movies, groaning and trying to guide the truck over to the side; where was this? A hundred and fifty miles outside of Altoona? Almost home? Somewhere in Jersey? No one on the medical staff seemed to know, or care. The crunch of gravel on the breakdown lane, the smooth, low scrape as he hit the guardrail, the scream of plastic bumper stuff peeling off — and then skidding like that, rolling partway over, up on the side, his cab, deep crimson red, while the trailer ripped loose and flipped and tumbled down the hill. The babble of prayer — that’s what was coming from next door, he knew, at least some little part of him knew. Some of them were jawing away at it right outside his door. And here’s the guy Angela sent saying Our prayers are with you and talking, his lips close to his ear, Listerine breath, one of those huge brows — a real caveman, this preacher from the Bethel First Christ down in Rutherford, or near there. It’s Angela’s idea of a bad joke, a last hurrah, knowing damn well he wouldn’t want it, probably making up a long story about her ex-husband and guilt and how she felt he needed consolation and affirmation in what were surely to be his final hours. Now along with the carrying on in the hall there was the mumbling pious tones of this guy’s voice to contend with, too, talking something about the narrow way of Christ; funny that it was the only thing he knew, or felt like knowing, about his heart, the narrow closing of that artery clogged with too many donuts and too much coffee and long hours on the road popping crank, mixing vodka with whatever the hell he got his hands on the last few years doing transcon runs of whatever freight he could land. Hitch your cab to the trailer and ask no questions.

When they tried to get the shunt in, the artery collapsed on itself, final and for good, and he had a second coronary right on the table. Nothing to do now, the doctor said, except wait out the twenty-four-hour grace or lack of grace period, the rough time, and hope for the best, because no matter what, part of his heart was permanent dead matter. “If you’re gonna die,” the doc said, “it’s most likely gonna be in the next twenty-four hours.”

Now this dwarf priest or whatever lecturing him on Christ’s narrow way.

“What do you want, Father?” His lips would barely open, corrugated with dryness. His mouth had been dry all night, dry into the day, and was now dry in the afternoon no matter how many of the little plastic cups of cranberry juice he sucked down.

“Father?” the guy said, softly. Then he cleared his throat. “You don’t have to address me that way.”

“What are you doing here, Father?”

“I’d prefer Bill, if you don’t mind.”

“All right, Bill,” he said, his lips contorted around the words the way they do in a movie when the soundtrack is off slightly.

The preacher, or minister, or pastor seemed uncomfortable standing and went to get a chair, pulling it over with a loud screech, sitting up close to the bed, then leaning his arms on the rail and looking down at his charge.

“I’ve come to deliver unto you the word of God,” the guy said, speaking in what was mostly a mumble, hardly audible over the beeps and sighs of the machines; tubes and wires yanked on his chest and arms and legs. Just then, before the preacher could begin yapping again, there was a sudden, persistent beep. A nurse came in quickly and pulled the white cotton blanket down from his neck and exposed the deep, dark curls of chest hair and prodded it until that sustained beep stopped and only his heart rate was left, and the smooth gulps of the balloon machine, the aortic counter-pulsation device. Minister Bill moved his chair back and sat quietly during all this. All for the better. He was wading through the softness of the morphine, or whatever pain reliever he was on. The word of God could wait. But then the nurse left and the preacher pulled his chair back, picking it up this time, and leaned on the rail again and began talking about the way of God and Christ, the whole rigmarole, talking about how much Angela loved him even though the scag hadn’t been in touch since ’76, good old bicentennial: twenty years, he thought, and then it came to a dwarf priest blabbing about his favorite hymn, something like “O Worship the King, All Glorious Above,” and quoting it to him, his medicinal breath up close, taking advantage of his helplessness to get right in there, not even a half foot from his face, and even singing it a little bit — a kind of singsong lullaby, “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, in thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail,” and then he said to the dwarf priest, having to really dig to talk, “Father, do me a favor. Shut up. Or speak in tongues if you want. But if you sing any more, I’ll get out of this frickin’ bed and break your neck.”

It was down in Tennessee — on a run to Florida with a load of machine pans — that he saw the speaking-in-tongues church. Hooked up with a girl named Lauren, sweet girl, at a truck bar, ended up in her trailer screwing away and then the next day, Sunday, being dragged to her church and watching them blabbing in their snakelike tongues. He left the church, got his rig warmed up, and headed south, pronto. Now in the room, with Father Bill there in the chair sitting silently, he hears that sizzle of voices out in the hall, a whole family grieving over some loss, hacking away in their language, then bits of English, then their language again. Other times blending the two; all melded together into a hiss that seemed like the ones used by those speaking in tongues that morning down in whatever podunk state he happened to be in — Tennessee or Kentucky.

For a second he wants to ask this preacher about Angela, just how she’s doing, but he knows the guy, most likely sworn not to disclose anything, will just say Fine, fine, and leave it at that. What else was he going so say? That she was wallowing in shit, dirt poor, missing payments on that piece-of-crap house on Elmwood, or Shorthills? For all he knew she wasn’t there anymore, but he thought of it anyhow when he thought of her, with the kids, toiling away over a tub of dirty clothing and a washboard or something — nothing real. When he imagined it, that’s how it was, images out of someplace that never existed because he couldn’t remember what had existed. The house they owned in Rutherford. A simple clapboard number, a Sears catalog house. A nice weedy yard with one of those clothes-drying trees, and always laundry on it like a blooming white rose of sheets and underwear when he got home from work the one year he was working steady, providing, doing his bit; old preacher Bill wouldn’t admit, if asked, that she was bathing in pain like he was, maybe worse off, cancer of the brain, an invalid, or nuts, bedded full-time in some ward someplace. Of course she was fine, Bill would say. He tried to remember what she looked like and got a vision of her dark red hair, wide oval face, smooth very white skin, and her lively laugh. He got a vision of her at the cabin they rented upstate, down by the water, toking on hand-rolled smokes and drinking beer until they ended up in the bed, a rattling iron thing, with their clothing off and only that pale summer twilight, half there, half gone, making their skin smooth as whole milk; such wonderful smoothness, he recalled, especially at the flat of her belly going down, down to the pubis bone, the hard ridge on both sides, and with the breeze like that, not too hot or too cool coming through the screens.

When he woke it was night, pale green light from the screen overhead and hard orange parking-ramp lights in the window. From the hallway came a pure, downy, neon brilliance. Father Bill had vanished, his chair empty where he left it near the door. The light throb of the pump going; the faint pulse of the device in his chest cavity opening up with air and deflating next to his heart like a little bird nesting between his ribs.

How long he lay he didn’t know; hours, minutes. Just the machine and a few cries in the hall — Arabic or something, some little kid making wailing noises, the family still gathered out there but kind of quiet and silent now, maybe it was too late, asleep the lot of them out in the lounge with the others. There had to be plenty; a big hospital, overcrowded, lots of dying going on in the ICU and the CCI.

One of the docs came in looking over the charts and poking around and not talking much because he knew better, knew this old codger who’d been dragged in off the highway had a nasty temperament and didn’t care much for small talk. A few pokes and probes, a check of the data on the screen.

“We’re going to remove the balloon pump,” he said. “We’ve gone long enough now and it’s a pretty pricey hunk of machinery, and there’s a patient just coming out of emergency surgery who’s going to need it right off. The police might drive another one over from Newark, but I think you’re stabilized enough now.”

Strapped beneath his leg was a long plank to keep things flat and even, and in his leg, up near his crotch, was a hole about the size of a dime but feeling more like a quarter to him, a hole leading into the femoral artery. A hole in his frickin’ leg, he’d thought a few dozen times, and not a bullet hole. He’d thought that if he ever had a real hole in his leg — a genuine hole — it would’ve been from a bullet from one of the skags at the crappy bars he frequented en route from CA to NY. The nurses came in — a Hispanic girl, a bit on the plump side, but he’d take her anyhow if he had the heart — hardy har, har — and a large older women with blue-gray hair, and then a male nurse; all three held on to him, gripping different parts of him while the doc slowly drew the balloon out from against his heart, pulling the wire through the dime-sized hole, drawing it down his femoral artery where it shouldn’t have been and sure as fuck couldn’t fit because the pain was red-hot, explosive, convulsive, and he screwed up his face — all jawbone and sun-weathered crags — and screamed like a stuck pig: “Give me some fricking painkillers, you morons, you mooorrrrons,” while the doc jammed something that looked like a wine bottle opener over the hole and gave one last little tug and got it out, not a word, working silently except for a little murmur of directions to one of the nurses.

“Sorry.” The doc shrugged.

“I’ll bet you are.” He could barely speak. The pain was making bursts of sparks on the inside of his eyelids.

The nurses and doc exchanged glances, as if to say: This one’s a real nasty bastard, keep your distance; if we could we’d put a muzzle on him, costing the hospital money and the government money and the whole world bits of spirit; but the doc put his hand on the guy’s forehead and rubbed it there a little bit. He kept his hand there way too long to be any kind of test for fever or a thump to listen to something.

“What happened to preacher man?” he said.

“Excuse me,” Doc said.

“The pastor, the Bible-thumper, what happened to him?”

“Can’t help you there.”

Then they left him alone with the hard throb of the pain, or the remains of the pain, because that’s how it was, like a swish of chalk on a board or an imprint or something — a feeling all the way up his leg and into his empty chest, now without the little nesting bird, nothing but frickin’ air and his own heart bobbing away in there — a feeling of the pain of that thing being yanked down the inside of his leg by the moron doctor. A soft, faint beep from the machine indicating his pulse and him alone and the noise in the hall kind of getting louder with the babble and all that, more voices, the soft squeak of tennis sneakers on the waxed floor; another set of steps, more, and more.

In the hall, before he came out and placed his ghostly visage before them, hanging with tubes and in his flimsy gown, gasping for air, the family was bunched up to the side, praying, talking, crying — two little kids allowed on the unit only because it was the last few hours, if not minutes, of Tara’s life. A few days ago the doctors put her chances at slim to none — or they laid it out in some numbers, most likely, trying to keep it mathematical, the odds, because whenever you were talking about lost youth — death at an early age — you had to couch things as much as you could in figures. Tara’s father was wearing, and had been for two days, a dark brown tweed sports coat, penny loafers, a pair of Docker khakis, and had his head buried in his hands. He was slouched down against the wall, talking to himself, jouncing his heels against the floor. Next to him, seated on the floor listening, was Stanley, his brother, who, upon getting the news, had flown in directly from Israel; he was jet lagged and exhausted and felt himself floating in a bedazzling clean space of the hallway; he’d been there all afternoon, trying to soothe the soul of his poor brother, from whom he’d been estranged. All because of what? A bad shipment of goods he’d sent over, or lined up; nothing really his fault at all — he’d been nothing but the usual middleman, but the deal somehow wedged in between the men and, after a while, except for enough small pleasantries meant to keep at least an outward semblance of civility (mainly, it had to be admitted, for the women), the two rarely spoke; the bad deal became large over time — the sum of money lost debated — until everything else that had happened before that, all the way back to petty squabbles over marble games on the dirt tarmac outside their apartment in Israel, each tense moment, seemed prophetic. Flying out, for Stanley, who was fearful of elevators and tall buildings, had been a grand gesture, a great flourishing of his arms outward over the skies of Tel Aviv (as he saw it); a token of his true, deep love, a love that went beyond that bad deal (five thousand pipe wrenches; all of them forged with a wobbling claw); but of course what did one expect from a deeply grieving brother except this — this wagging of the body to the song of sorrow? this sniffing and depleted man at a loss as to what might, what can, what should be done? So all Stanley did was sit with his brother, listen, nod, murmur agreements, add a few comments now and then in Hebrew (presuming — perhaps wrongly — that it would help Howard just to hear the mother tongue). Behind them, in the room with Tara, the women were around the bed, resting the tips of their fingers on the bedding, brushing the hair back from her forehead. A car had gone through a stop sign in Hackensack — a Saturday afternoon, light traffic for that corner, an elderly man driving a pale green Buick Skylark with his blood level four times above the legal limit sped right through and broadsided her Toyota at seventy-five miles an hour.

When she got close to the end — and they could tell, or rather the nurses indicated it silently by nods of the head and slight eye movements — there was a quieting. Calls went out from the pay phone in the lounge, where people limp in their anxiety lay sprawled over huge, square-cut maroon chairs. To speak the words that he had to speak — not that she was dead but that she was, as they said (although he thought it was kind of a phony phrase) near death (as if death were an island, a vacation resort), Stanley found himself listening to his own voice: he was a dummy; some other guy was holding him, composed and serene and bearing terrible news, the ventriloquist, as he spoke he heard his own voice quiver — dry and husky from the long flight — beneath the weight of the news he had to offer up; at the same time, he was thinking of the old radio show routines he and Howard had loved so much as a kid.

With the pump removed from his chest, everything out in the hall became amplified by the silence. He didn’t know it, but the prayers were in Hebrew, mainly, although some were in English, and some of what he heard was just talking, and crying, and emotive phrases such as how can it be? and why why why and if only and oh God. And a rocking motion verbalized in a kind of cantorial singsong — and even a little actual singing from one of the really little kids who didn’t know what was going on, a rapturous little tune with senseless lyrics about a goat and a shoe and the Fourth of July.

Just before he dragged himself up, decided to shut them up out there, he remembered there had been a night right after that night upstate, with the wonderful breeze through the screen, when he and Angela had sat on the end of the dock drinking beers and watching the stars clarify and listening to the fish rise, splashing, mostly bluegills but some pretty good largemouth bass he was sure. (He’d spent that afternoon casting a huge spoon, loaded up with worms, to no avail.) Up and down the shore the fish were leaping like mad while behind Angela, in the thick darkness under the trees, firefly light was being exchanged in frantic waves up and down the beach.

“What’cha thinking?” he asked her.

“I’m just thinking, you know, about all we’re gonna do and how good it’s gonna be and all that,” she said. It was a song she was singing, her own little hymn to the portents the future held.

“Hummm,” he said, taking a huge slug of his beer, a sizzle down his throat.

“And what’cha thinkin’ yourself?”

“About nothing, nothing at all except being here and how good it is here, with you, now.” And he meant it. His middle brother Gary had died a year before working a roofing job, and shaking the grief of that loss, the recurrent image of the idiot slipping on a loose slate and falling two stories, breaking his neck, had until that very moment seemed impossible; now something was lifting, or at least that’s what he felt, recalling that night on the dock with Angela while he, in turn, lay flat on his back in the hospital with his blood pumped full of morphine; the same bright lifting, like he was flying up over the lake. Some kind of grace, a moment of it, on the end of the dock with the shore webbed in the light of fireflies.

One might hope for some kind of divine justice. An amazing feat how he got himself up and dragged himself into the hall to scream at them, considering the odds, the wires and tubes and warning beeps, the very low flow pressure his heart offered. He spoke his mind out there in the hall, shouting at them. If God had been just, he would’ve slammed him with an occlusion; a major, major infarct that locked his heart into a knot, a clench of fibers so tight, a fist in the center of his rib cage, a burst of blinding pain that sent him stumbling, gasping for the last. Instead he had a minor event — one he hardly felt at the time.

He did die. He died a few days later, alone, in the middle of the night, when a series of infarctions began and he went into a major arrest and the staff came in and performed heroic measures (because he said hell no to that living will crap. No way. No how am I gonna sign that? You’ll put me under for Christ’s sake. Why should I trust you morons after the way you jerked that fucking balloon out of my leg?), giving him a zap with the jelled electrodes, pumping him full of anticoagulants, working a sweat up over the guy.

Seven days of mourning without the hard leather of shoes, and during Shiva only once was the crazy guy mentioned; brought up by Stanley — who in his grief had gone downstairs twice, out onto the sidewalk along Riverside Drive to take in the fresh air off the Hudson and to sip single malt from one of those little bottles he’d bought on the flight over; he was on his third bottle. He was back inside the apartment, on the floor, talking softly with Saul, a buyer for the hardware chain, and in passing other subjects, sliding through them in his buzz, he sadly mentioned the Gentile who’d stumbled out into the hallway half alive, filling the air with his foul curses; it was the way he leaned into Saul; it was the way he tried to flatten his voice out from his Hebraic to an Ohio twang (and trying to whisper at the same time, too)—Shut the fuck up for Christ sake you babbling idiots; go back to where you came from. It was the form, not the content, that got the men laughing, just as Tara’s father came down the stairs, arm in arm with his wife.

Out the tall windows the Hudson glinted flecks of white light, and spread before them was a view embracing New Jersey across the river all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. When Tara died, the word went out via optical fibers, calls made to Israel, making sure everybody who had to mourn knew of her death so that no one would be called upon to begin mourning later, because from the moment the news was heard, those so obligated had to observe the laws and customs as set down in the Talmud. The ritual washing of the body, Tahorah, had been performed because none of her injuries, all internal and concussive, had drawn enough blood to soak her clothes, in which case she would have been buried in the bloodied garments. After the funeral they went to the cemetery, pausing the seven times to recite Psalm 91,

He that dewlleth in the secret place of the Most High

Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

before spreading the dirt over the coffin.

While Stanley recounted the story of the crazy man in the hosptial, upstairs in the bedroom her father had been been ripping up all of his ties, one by one, and piling them aside. He rent each one apart, yanking hard and wide, skinny narrow ones from back in the early eighties, wide ones from the sixties with huge stripes, and semi-wide ones from the nineties. He tore them down the middle, if he could, and he tore them apart from the center, opening them up, plying apart the silk backing and ripping down the sides. His hands were dry and cracked and caught the silk. When his wife went up to see where he was, he was nearly finished, seated on the side of the bed next to a jostled pile of twisted fabric spilling over the edge of the poplin bedspread, doing one last tie, a Calvin Klein with deep blue triangles set in a lighter blue background beset with swirls and splats à la Jackson Pollock that Tara had given him for the holidays two years ago. Pollock had been her favorite artist. Maybe once every couple of weeks, for a year, he wore it, and then put it aside in favor of ones he had picked out himself, more conservative patterns. He had performed the standard Qeri’ah at the funeral, rending the tiny strip of ribbon pinned to his left lapel, but apparently that act hadn’t been enough. Stop, his wife said. Stop. Stop. Stop. And he did, bowing his head into his palms and heaving out a long cry, kicking his heels into the carpet, cradling what was left of the tie up to his lips.

“Come downstairs with me,” she said, placing her hand along the curve of his neck.

“All right. For you, I’ll go downstairs,” he cleared his throat and got up and slowly lifted a few strands of neckties onto the bed.

The faces seemed to have answers for him as he walked down the spiral stairs into the Shiva; people hunched down talking softly, moving food up to their mouths; he would remember seeing each face in turn: the tight lips of Erma, his wife’s best friend, holding a sob; his business associates looking away, casting glances out over New Jersey; the kids obliviously playing with dolls near the entrance to the kitchen. But what he would remember the most, what he centered on later, was the strange, twisted smile on his brother’s face, a blessed smile that seemed to go way back to their childhood secrets; it was the way Stanley smiled when he was trying not to smile, the tightness in the corners of his mouth that led to two half-moon dimples; a wonderful grimace and smirk combined; and seeing it, something lifted slightly. It was only the first bit of weight off of his grief but it was significant in that it was the first; he went over and the two men held each other, tighter and tighter.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“The foolishness of the world,” Stanley said.

Out the windows the afternoon was waning. Beams of orange cut back between buildings in Jersey. The elongated shadows of buildings pressed behind the view.

It was never spoken of again, that scene, that moment in the hospital corridor. It didn’t go down in family lore. It didn’t go anywhere except for that moment into the smile on Stanley’s face, the thing Tara’s father saw when he entered back into the Shiva.