David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

The boys were asleep. Upstairs he undressed in the dark and left his clothes on the floor. He didn’t brush his teeth. The cognac buzz was wearing off, and there was an aftertaste of dinner in his mouth. He lay and watched the dark shadow branches on the ceiling. There was a steady, hard wind. He kept his eyes open for as long as he could. When he closed them, he saw floating behind his eyelids the shadows from the videotape, half formed, Grace’s knees and the back of Ron’s thighs, blended through the light and the lens of that afternoon in Madrid; although he couldn’t precisely identify the sound, he could hear the buzz of the motorbikes winding through the narrow, ancient streets.

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.