David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Billy stayed with his nephew for the time being; the nephew, Amber’s father, was a drunk whose wife had quit her job and walked out leaving him hard up for money, so he charged Billy fifty dollars a month. Amber got on the Internet and found Billy a bunch of Florida listings, but he didn’t like any of them, and when she dropped out of school and moved back up to live with her boyfriend over in Egdon, he got an efficiency in the senior housing complex there. He’d quit working by then, put the house money into CDs that didn’t pay shit—I told him not to—and started collecting Social Security. The first good day in spring he’d always be on the lake in his aluminum motorboat; Amber’s got a picture on her phone of him holding a largemouth bass that measured sixteen inches. He and Jesse used to go deer hunting—Jesse was a vet too; he’d been at Hamburger Hill in ’69—but when they went out last December Billy had so much trouble walking that they had to turn back after an hour. In February, Amber told me he was in the VA hospital down in Northampton, and they didn’t expect him to go home.

When I came into his room they had him sitting up in the chair next to his bed, in a white gown that showed his hairless shins. He had a few days of stubble.

“Hey, bub,” I said. “How you feelin’? You look pretty good.”

“Is that so.”

“What are the doctors saying?”

“Well, they don’t dance all around the mulberry bush like they used to. Get my affairs in order, that’s the quotation. Amber’s been helping me out on that.”

“Jesus, Billy. I’m sorry.”

“Not any sorrier than me, I’ll tell you that.”

“There anything I can do for you?” I said. “I bring you anything?”

“Not a thing.” Shook his head again. “Nope, I’m all set here.”

“How about music?” Billy would always have his heavy-duty Makita radio going while he was on a job. How many times in his life had he heard “Layla” and “Hot Blooded” and “Alison”? They weren’t even songs he grew up with.

“I don’t care about it. Amber asked me did I want to borrow her iPod, iPad I guess she’s got. Borrow . I don’t know why that tickled me.” He lifted his chin at the television that had women’s basketball on mute. “You ever watch these gals?” He ran a hand over his face “Come to think of it. It’s a funny thing to ask a man, but I got my razor in that drawer, and I don’t like these nurses fussing with me.”

I found a towel to put around his neck and when I was soaping up his face his stubble felt just like mine. He had the same problem place I do, the corners of the mouth, and I told him to stick his tongue up under. “Now you look handsome,” I said.

“Sure, handsome enough to go right into the box. What kind of a day is it out?”

“Cold. They’re calling for another six to ten inches overnight. And we got to start tearing out a house on Miller Brook Road where the guy let his pipes freeze. Boy, you want to see some water damage.”

“Then I guess you’ll have quite a time of it. I tell you Jesse was by? Said I better straighten up and fly right so we could get back in the woods. Nobody knows what the hell to say. He had his mind set on getting a minister to come around.”

“You think you might want that?”

“ Those birds? What I should’ve done, I should’ve just taken myself out in the goddamn woods. You want to think you’ll make up your mind to it tomorrow, and pretty soon they got you in this goddamn place. Guess I’ll know the next time.”

—

The lady I’d started seeing when Billy got sick taught at the community college in Greenfield. Amber had taken her for composition and said she was a bitch on wheels. This was before I ever met Kristin, but I can see how she might have come off like that. Back in the nineties she was studying to get her Ph.D. at BU when she got pregnant; she married the guy, which she said was the mistake of her life, moved with him to Stanford, where he’d landed some big teaching job, and now here she was in what she liked to call The Land Time Forgot, grading papers while her eighteen-year-old was bumming his way around Europe. I met her at a bar in Greenfield where I’d gone after freezing my ass all day at Miller Brook Road. I went over to her because she wasn’t so young that she would’ve blown me off from the get-go. I had a few years on her but I was in decent shape from working. She must have let me keep talking to her because she couldn’t quite figure me out—a guy in the construction business that wasn’t a Republican? She said she’d never asked a man home with her that she’d just met. It turned out she liked to play rough in bed, and of course I was up for that. I think both of us knew the deal, but we started hanging out and pretty soon it had turned into a thing where I was pretending that she needed to finish this book she was supposedly working on and she was pretending that I needed to get back to playing the guitar. She was a good drinker, and we were both tired of not having anybody in our lives.

Kristin didn’t know the people who worked for me—I doubt she would have remembered Amber—and that was how I liked to keep it. I’d see her two or three times a week, and other nights I’d go out drinking with Johnny, who was usually having trouble with his old lady. We’d ask Jesse along sometimes—his wife had given it a try up here, then went to live with her sister down in Queens—but we’d had a couple incidents. One night in North Adams, at a bar we should’ve known to stay out of, Johnny and I had to go over and straighten out some asshole and his buddy, Johnny lost his shit on the guy, I got into it, Jesse tried to pull Johnny away and old as he was he ended up getting into it. We spent overnight in jail because Johnny had put one of them in the hospital. So sometimes I’d just have him and Jesse come to my house, and Billy before he got sick. Billy could drink too—he had a saying, “Good for what ails ya, and if nothin’ ails ya, it’s good for that.” We’d sit around the kitchen table playing hearts and I’d put on music I thought they could tolerate. One thing, nobody had to worry about a DUI getting home, because the staties never patrolled up this way and the town constable knew our vehicles. Johnny said he wished he was me—pussy on demand and nobody waiting up. So when was he going to meet this lady?

Amber wanted to know about the new girlfriend too. When she realized who it was, she said I had to be fucking kidding, that Kristin was a stuck-up cunt who was probably just after me for whatever she could get, which wasn’t too flattering. But of course you had to know Amber. Her father was always broke and she’d never been any farther than Northampton to visit Billy, so she didn’t have much of a framework for anything. Whatever Kristin might have wanted from me, it wasn’t anything along the lines of houses, cars, vacations—what Amber would have thought of as the good life. Amber’s boyfriend was getting heavier into drugs and she was always talking about moving out. I said I’d help her anytime, but you could see it was one of those dramas that was just going to go on and on. She could have stayed at my house until she got shit figured out—I had all these rooms I wasn’t using—but that would have been misunderstood, by everybody. Amber, Johnny, Billy dying in the hospital, Myron with his chainsaw act, Asscrack Harrys coming and going: none of this was anything Kristin needed to be around.

So when she offered to come with me to Billy’s funeral, I said I’d be fine and nobody’d be expecting her to show up anyway. She said in that case she’d go to Boston for a few days; she could cancel her Monday and Tuesday classes, and she might see me Tuesday night. I couldn’t tell if she was bent out of shape or just glad she wouldn’t have to meet these characters. This was the end of March; the old-timers were sugaring, and the rich people were skiing up at Killington, or maybe tanning in the Caribbean. The snow had begun to melt, but it was supposed to turn cold again next week and the ground was still hard, so Jesse would have to hold off on going in with the backhoe to dig the grave. Amber said it was Billy’s wish to get buried here in town instead of the veterans’ cemetery down in Agawam.