Stanley Elkin - George Mills

He thought they would both be killed, but the Mexicans only drew further away from the car, their mood nervous and apprehensive and lined with a sort of amusement. A woman indicated the two Americans and shook her head. Then they all did, making the high signs and hand signals of aloof contempt, the shrugs and semaphores of all touch-temple allowance. “Help me back into the car,” she said, disappointed.

Mills was determined that they wouldn’t try that again.

Meanwhile she continued to avoid the treatments.

George drove her to the clinic each morning and called for her again at noon. It was she who sent him away. “There aren’t enough chairs,” she’d explain. “These people are waiting to see the doctors. You’d only be taking up the seat of someone terminally ill.” But when he returned he would find her sitting where he’d left her, or rummaging through a table of Mexican magazines. “Oh, Mills,” she said, “waiting rooms are the same all over the world. Only the names of the film stars in the periodicals are different, or the wall hangings in the legislative chambers. These hemlines are shorter, but I believe I saw this salad in the Sunday pictures section of the Post-Dispatch. ”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Oh, I haven’t seen the doctor yet. I was about to but this little girl — she couldn’t have been more than six — arrived with her parents. I gave them my place.”

She’d had her tests, the blood profiles and X-rays and urine analyses she had first had done in St. Louis, as well as a cancer immunological test which was not performed in the United States. It was patented, the Mexicans told her.

“Of course, I don’t really buy any of it,” she told him in the car. “But I believe that dreams come true.”

She suggested they go out again that night on another alms spree.

“You’re tired,” Mills said.

“Yes,” she admitted, “I’m very weak.”

“Look,” he said, “if it’s all that important to you I’ll go myself.”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t you trust me? You think I’d keep the money?”

“I trust you dandy. It wouldn’t mean much unless I went. All right,” she said, “we won’t plan anything. We’ll wait and see how I feel this evening.”

She felt terrible that evening. She couldn’t even get out of bed. Mills knew she’d made a mistake to bring him. He had no touch with pain. He had fears and misgivings about everything he did for her. At the height of her pain and nausea he thought she should try to eat something, that food might confuse the beast in her gut. He wasn’t sure but he thought it was probably a good idea. He wanted to phone the clinic but officially she hadn’t been assigned a doctor yet. He couldn’t remake her bed properly, and thought he should call Housekeeping to have them send someone while he carried her to the room’s other bed, but she objected to having anyone else in the room.

He spoke to her, but it took so much effort for her to talk he cringed when she answered. He said nothing, and she thought he’d left her. The pain had affected her vision. “I’m here,” he said, “I haven’t gone anywhere. You mustn’t talk,” he said. “You’ve got to save your strength.” He watched her thrash in the bed, the sheets and covers and pillows in such disarray he could not straighten them without causing her pain. He moved her back into the other bed. He wondered if he should call St. Louis. It was after two in the morning. They’d be alarmed. He knew they’d blame him for everything that happened. He was no nurse. He recalled how peacefully Mr. Mead had died, the old sailor slipping beneath his death as casually as one enters tepid water. He decided she should be in a hospital and said so. Groaning, she shook her head. “They’re equipped for this stuff,” he said.

“No good,” she managed. She’d already explained why. She was afraid they wouldn’t give her her pain pills when she wanted them, that they’d withhold them. She wanted Mills to give her a double dose now, two large, oddly shaped blocks of morphine like tiny bricks. It would have been the strongest dose she’d had yet. He broke a tablet in two and fed the halves past her impaired vision. He called the front desk and got on their caretaker service, although the caretaker had already left on his 2:00 A.M. rounds.

“You have only one?”

“The guests are either sleeping or already in the hospital this time of night.”

“Get in touch with him. Send him by.”

Suddenly she was worried about the expense. There was an extra charge for this amenity. It was the middle of the night, they had you over a barrel. “Shh,” George said. She wanted him to cancel the order, she became quite hysterical about it. He hadn’t, he told her, made one.

“I heard you.”

They lost each other in explanations.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and he told her that was a good sign, but he didn’t think he should give her anything too heavy. “Feed a cold and starve a cancer,” she said lucidly.

The morphine was beginning to ease her. She dozed off. The caretaker waked her when he knocked on the door. It was the kid from the parking lot, the one he’d given a dollar to watch the car.

The boy glanced at Mrs. Glazer. “She fine, man.” he said. “See joo in fifteen minuteses.”

Strangely, the boy seemed to have reassured her. “Ask him,” she said, “if he thinks I should have something to eat.”

“Him?”

“He’s the caretaker. He sees dozens of patients. Ask.”

The boy was standing beside a door three rooms down. “Good,” George said, “I thought I’d missed you.”

“No, man. There’s this Mercedes SL 100 I watching out for on this side. Joo see it?”

“No.”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe they checked out.”

“He says room service is closed,” he told her.

“It’s just as well,” she said. “Everything is so expensive.” She questioned him closely about their expenses, recalling each traveler’s check she’d given him to cash, and demanding an account of how it had been spent.

“We don’t get a good rate of exchange,” she mourned.

They lived in waves, something peristaltic to their moods, reality pushing them to the wall one moment and surrendering not to joy so much as to a sort of deranged confidence the next. He understood that their burlesque hope had its source in her pain’s by now ludicrous remissions. In an odd way he had become dependent on Mrs. Glazer’s morphine, remotely hooked on the woman’s transitory well-being. He telephoned St. Louis only when she was without pain.

Also, he was still unaccustomed to himself in a foreign country. This was more difficult to figure, but it had to do with his horizon vision, his sense of a life lived within parallel lines. Ciudad Juarez was situated in the open end of a three-sided valley, a trough of drying world set down within the clipped, broken waves of the surrounding hills and mountains. These became landmarks and mileposts. More. They were the spectacle mien and proclamation of his distance, exotic and outrageous as a milliary column in a woods. Snakes oozed in the hills. Queer lizards turned their heads in strobic thrusts. He was where the mountains were who had lived on plains beneath unpunctuated skies. He came from there. He was here. He was here and not there. And lived with a notion of having doubled himself. It was not unlike what he had felt in Cassadaga when he was a boy.

She had started her treatments. After her terrible night there were no more delays. The curious dalliance was over. “It won’t work anyway,” she’d said the next morning. “Let’s get going.”

They wanted to keep her in the clinic annex for two days to administer calcium in an IV solution. The nurse touched Mrs. Glazer’s hair lightly. “It will help keep your hair that pretty yellow color.”