David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

I have to imagine all this and leave it at that while Rondo, back in the dunes, screams my name through the wind and calls me a fuck and asks me to get up off my ass and get going because we have to get the tent down and get packed up and home so he can be there for the kickoff of the Notre Dame game. He keeps yelling, his voice fuzzed by the wind and the surf, and I just sit there and think about how I’ll have to come back here on my own, drive the four hours back after I drop them off, and find this same spot so I can commune with Sam, find a way to say I’m sorry. And I will, I think, I’ll come back here and sit and go over the whole thing; the moment I stood in the doorway to his room — not the person I am now, and not some heartfelt kid, but someone still dulled by the vast desolation of that room with the Matt Mason space station in the middle of it, the little slab of mattress in the corner, the flexing membrane of cardboard in the window reading the breath of cold winter air pulsing on that part of the city on that particular day.

Back on this spot, I’ll lament those two front teeth, which of course he was never able to have fixed or replaced. He died without them, swallowed whole by the earth one summer afternoon while his friends made moon-walk bounds down the side of the great dune, stretching their arms skyward, feeling relieved of gravity for a few seconds during each bound — stoned on bennies and acid and loneliness, the smoking cigarettes between their lips streaming tracer paths that zigzagged wildly against the blue sky.

LATE IN the afternoon Sloan thought he was having an allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, an instantaneous — in medical terms, although it might take twenty minutes to begin — violent reaction of the body’s defenses against the allergen; all-out attack, was how he thought of it, an immediate overdrive of the bodily functions causing severe muscular constriction — including, of course, the muscles around the throat. He’d been reading in the journals about such reactions. In truth, what he was really experiencing at that moment was ulcers in his throat, a reaction to a pain medication he was taking, containing a few similar symptomatic indicators. A whole different matter. Common stuff. No big deal. Just lower the dose or change over to Advil. It took him only a few seconds to make the proper diagnosis.

Twilight bled over the trees in his backyard. In the orchard, past the stone wall, a dog was barking, the bark wrapped in silence because the road through the trees — normally a busy hiss at this hour — was closed to traffic. His neighbor, Congers, was having his house moved; the old monstrosity lumbered down the center of the street, scraping the upper reaches of trees, at four miles an hour, the paper reported the next day, but Sloan figured it must’ve been three miles an hour because it took more than two hours to get the house to the new lot, which was six miles away. (There was a photo in the paper that showed the house in the center of the road, with an accompanying article that made the move sound glorious and profound, an attempt to salvage the past, when in truth it was an act of greed.) Congers was selling seventy-five acres of prime orchard land that had been deeded to his ancestors by George in, along with six hundred fruit-yielding trees, stone terracing, a rickety farm stand, several outbuildings, a hand-operated cider press that had been in service for over a hundred years, and a view of the valley down to the river — all this was to be subdivided into clumps of high-income housing for senior citizens. The orchard embraced the south and east side of Sloan’s five-acre parcel, financed by years of commuting the hundred-mile round trip to a hospital in the city. That practice had gone on for thirty years. Now he was running a small office just up the road, covering about two hundred patients, barely making it with the large insurance premiums, not making a profit at all, often living for months off early withdrawals on his retirement fund.

At the moment of panic, seated in a leather armchair, facing a view of dying trees falling against each other at odd, disjointed angles, he was thinking about Congers, who the morning before had come in for an exam, a complete physical, the works (to make sure he was able to handle the stress of the house-moving project), and had stood before him — as a million others had before — with his aged body, his flabby pectorals hanging limp, and his gullet, thick and long; not to mention the wide-ranging liver spots on forearms and hands.

You’re fit as a fiddle, he told Congers. Nothing at all to worry about. For a ninety-year-old you are in supreme shape, indeed. Except, perhaps — well, just perhaps, it’s not exactly certain, but I do see some indications — from what you’ve told me — that there might be a gallstone problem. As you inform me you’re having troubles digesting fish …

Sloan found it hard to divide the moment when he was first feeling the ulcer in his throat from his sudden awareness of the silence on the road.

It was a profound moment, indeed, he told Jenny, during dinner that evening, sitting at one of the restaurant’s outside tables.

And why was that?

Well, it was because I was thinking of Congers, or at least I think I was thinking about him, and his house was being moved, and at the same time I was feeling this sensation in my throat, and, I have to admit, beginning to panic, wondering if the pistachio I’d eaten — one of those red ones — had caused a reaction.

And the house was being moved.

Right, right, yeah, the house was being moved. My view was being destroyed. And our property was starting to lose its value.

So maybe that sparked the thought of Congers coming in for his physical.

You see, you see it’s the fact that I told him about the gallstone. It’s probably nothing. I mean nothing just because he can’t digest fats. Who can? He was at the Cape and ate one of those, you know, those fried fish dinners — little plaid red and white cardboard dish — and he felt funny, those are his words; typical, nothing exactly specific in that is there? Can’t tell you the hundreds of times I hear someone come in with a big complaint, but when I ask them to tell me what exactly feels funny, they can’t nail it. It’s just, something feels funny. I feel funny. Just funny. We all feel funny, I want to tell them. We all feel really, really funny.

So you told him? So what? She touched her hair, just in the back, neatened it up. Freshly cut. Still brunette but patchy gray along the ends.

Yeah, but you see, normally I wouldn’t have told him, just no point in it. Tests have to be done, and someone his age, normally I wouldn’t bother unless there were more indications, aside from having trouble with fats, and so on … but I come right out and say, Sit up Frank, sit a moment, and let me check, do you want a drink of water? I give him a drink from the sink and tell him not to worry, but he looks, well, Jenny, I have to say I could tell he was worried because tough as he is, tough as nails, he’s a worrier when it comes to his health (Probably why the old guy’s hanging in so long. Living alone in that monstrosity.) So I tell him, Look, Frank, I’m concerned about this fish dinner — it’s an indication perhaps that we have a gallstone problem, and who knows what else. I give him a prod, I make him lie back on the table and, well, poke the hell out of him, both sides, thump him all the way up, back, not for any good reason, see, but to make him, well, I don’t know, to make him think …

Jenny held her glass up and waved it. The point, the point, she said.

The point is I have to wonder if I was telling him, you know, just to get him, to throw him off.