Ray

XVI

WESTY and I are hugging. The thrill goes all around the world. I seem to have made her pregnant. Westy is worried about having a retarded idiot at her age, and we have too many children already. But I want it, moron, imbecile, whatever’s in the cards.

Come forth! Take flight! Son or daughter of Ray and Westy!

When the day is done, I have seen ten patients and the sun is setting out over the trees. Westy sits on the bed crying, face in her hands. She doesn’t know what to do about the baby. She is scared of it. Another thing to fly and die.

Dr. Ray breaks into tears himself. He washes them away with cold water, but they flood again. The baby in Westy’s womb looms up like the huge fetus at the end of 2001. Our baby, our baby.

Two more days and it turns out she wasn’t pregnant, after all. My brain was in squalor and torment. But now it’s like another friend I lost in Nam.

“Edward, what you got?”

“I’ve got something, something on me!”

Then I saw it, the SAM missile go into his exhaust. It was a big white flower spraying in the night. There was Edward, lieutenant commander from St. Paul, Minnesota, a nigger who saved my life twice, falling to pieces. There he goes.

I should have delivered him. I should have been awaker.

Mr. Hooch was at the funeral, of course. Sister was lying all fixed up in the coffin. I couldn’t go by to see the body or smell the bank of flowers. Mr. Hooch is a strong man. His wife trembles and smokes. The Hooches have lived in CM (Constant Misery), and now their first claim to fame is dead.

I was shivering. Westy was holding me with her slim arms.

“You really loved her, didn’t you?” says Westy.

“Yeah. Westy, I’m sorry, but I did.”

“She was lovely. But don’t you think I’m lovelier?”

“Yes.”

“Is everything just sex and music?”

“No.”

“You’re awfully down.”

“I need more sex and music.”

Mr. Hooch shook my hand and said, “We almost had a success with Sister. I told Agnes, ‘What the Hooches can’t help, they can’t help. People born on a bad wind just ride and take it.’ ”

“That’s the thing to tell Agnes.”

“We’ve seen Sister in one way, and now we’re seeing her another way. My daughter fell in with the wrong crowd. We all make mistakes. We didn’t know everything about the preacher. He didn’t know everything about himself.”

I said, “My God, Mr. Hooch, that’s the way to talk.”

He said, “It’s my only goddamn talent. When I quit talking, I’ll be as dead as my daughter. Hold my arm, Doctor Ray. I’m about to fall down.”

We held each other, everything rushing around us from all corners.

Agnes Hooch has said nothing during the funeral. The heat in the cemetery is a hundred degrees and we go out to the hole in our suits and dresses, hats, sunglasses. The little Hooch twins have quiet, hallowed looks beyond grief. I see the maimed one hobbling on her artificial leg with the hot wind rumpling her dress. She is a vision of permanent agony. Toward the end of the ceremony Mrs. Hooch raises a dreadful animal wail of fearful, unknown, soprano lamentation. But the wooden Indian in the station wagon never batted an eye.