Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

— And what would I say to that?

— Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just remember you were a sweet boy, but just as gloomy as you could be. I said one time I think, I’d never marry Finus Bates, he’s so gloomy.

— You didn’t.

— Well, maybe I did. She laughed. -I don’t remember! My lands, that seems like another lifetime, it was so long ago.

— I guess it was, he said.

— Gloomy, just like that! she said, and laughed again. -Now, look, why don’t you stay and eat dinner? I’m not real hungry, myself, and I know Creasie has plenty to eat.

— Listen, I’m not gloomy, I’m just introspective. How can you say we wouldn’t have been a good couple just because I was a little moody?

— Now don’t get upset, she said.

He heard the slappity sound of another car’s tires out on the highway, passing by.

— Say what you want though, Finus, but you are gloomy.

A mockingbird flew up to the window screen with the sound of ruffled skirts being tossed. It perched on the sill, cocked its eye at him. Startled him. He eyed it back. Thought for a moment he recognized something in its hard beady glare. The bird parted its beak as if to speak.

— Shoo, he said, half rising and making a shooing motion with his hands. The bird flew off. Mike lifted his old hoary head from the floor beside the dressing table.

— What was that? Birdie said. -That crazy mockingbird?

Finus looked at her. He’d forgotten for a second just where he was, forgotten she was even in the room.

— What does it matter now, anyway?

— See what I mean?

He caught sight in the corner of his eye now another face, looking round the doorjamb, a faded blue kerchief knotted above the brow.

— You better rest up, Creasie said to Birdie, unless you want to pass on in front of Mr. Finus.

Birdie flicked at her with a hand.

— Mm hmm, Creasie said, retreating. -Dinner be ready directly.

Meaning lunch, of course, and Finus could smell Creasie’s unmatchable cornbread muffins and pots of greens and peas with okra and it made him suddenly hungry enough to stay if anyone asked.

— Stay and eat dinner, now, Birdie said.

He skitched his cheek at Mike to wake him.

— I’ll run on, he said. -No need for you to get dressed. And he leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, her skin soft and malleable as a plucked dove’s, and squeezed her cold thinning hand, and her eyes had already fallen aside in a half-focused gaze of distraction as he showed himself out.

AT THE BRIGHT blurred window there was a shape, and a sound like pecking on glass. Finus reached to the bedside table for his spectacles, put them on, but the shape was just a flitting shadow, gone, maybe just a figment of his now cluttered and wayward imagination. He cast a cautious, sidelong glance at the stuffed chair in the corner of the room: his dead wife Avis was no longer there. She’d been there the night before as he lay in bed waiting for sleep, just sitting there looking at him with the stony gaze of the indignant dead, saying nothing but refusing his silent demands that she go away.

He hadn’t slept too well. Creasie’s call in the afternoon, day before, had set off all his memories about Birdie, now she was gone. -Miss Birdie’s passed on, was all she’d said.

After a moment, he said, — You okay, then?

— Yes, sir. I’m all right.

— I’ll take care of it then. You wait there with her.

— Yes, sir. I ain’t got nowhere else to go.

He had called Parnell Grimes, let him take care of it. No need to go back out, see her like that. He’d have his last memory of her, alive.

He wondered now if he’d have some sort of Birdie vision, now that she was gone.

He lowered his feet from the bed to the floor beside the sleeping head of ancient Mike, scratched the dog’s head, and shuffled into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet and made water, a pretty good stream, better since he’d been taking the saw palmetto. He looked into the mirror, gave himself a little upper body massage. A spry eighty-nine, he suffered the loose skin of the aged, as if it had been removed from someone larger, stretched and dried, then pulled over his old meat and bones like bad taxidermy. There was nothing to do but accept he was very old. He still walked every day, some days did a few half-push-ups and stomach crunches, and he gave up beer, it gave him such gas. Now he drank only bourbon and gin, and that in moderation. He could only be thankful. He easily passed for seventy-something. Most his age were long gone to the boneyard.

In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffeemaker he’d set to make coffee by itself every morning at four fifty-five. Outside the window over the sink, the courthouse lawn and the tall Confederate monument and the white concrete courthouse itself were just touched with the slanting yellow light cutting over the bluff to the southeast of town. Finus tasted the dark, bitter coffee and touched his fingertips to the window glass, already warm at this hour in late May. He heard clicking old claws and Mike walked stiffly into the kitchen and leaned his head against Finus’s leg, stood there wearily.

— Good old Mike, Finus said. -You still tired? Dreaming them squirrel dreams? Wear you out, old boy.

The dog was fifteen years old, which made him even older than Finus in dog years.

Finus took his coffee to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and let his parts hang over the edge of the mattress. His sac sagged like an old bull’s, and he wore his britches a little low on the hips to make plenty of room for his equipment, whose function now was mostly to get in the way of crossing his legs. Inside his apartment in the Moses Building above the offices of the Comet , he often went naked in the mornings and after evening baths, as clothes were so restrictive and there was too much cinching up of critical parts. He had few visitors, none of them women. The triangular Moses Building wedged itself into the convergence of two streets leading to the civic enclave of the courthouse, its annex containing the sheriff’s department and the food stamps office, an abandoned highrise parking lot that had failed in the seventies, and a row of shops trying in a desperately futile way to help revive downtown in the wake of the mall one mile south. The mall had been failing in its own hapless and inane fashion since its construction, also in the seventies, the decade during which it seemed to Finus that the entire country had seen a failure in terms of morals, economy, politics, and fashion.

At his age he was by some sort of osmosis as venerable in this town as the passing century itself, and was sometimes hailed on the sidewalk: Hey, Mr. Bates! What’s the word, Finus! Slow down, there, Mr. Bates, you’re moving too fast! And such foolishness as that. Finus bathed in it. There was nothing, he had once observed in his obituary for Adolphus William Spinks, a well-loved and longtime mayor, like local fame. It put the national and international variety to shame.

A watering in his saliva glands sent him shuffling to the kitchen for another cup and his daily ration of gin-soaked raisins, an arthritis preventive he thought maybe he’d picked up from Paul Harvey, though he wasn’t sure. For all he knew, they were keeping him alive. He dipped his fingers into the jar and rolled or plucked out exactly nine and dropped them into his mouth, chewing while he rinsed his fingers, and then poured another cup of coffee. If that didn’t keep the arthritis away, he’d help it out with a little Bombay on the rocks later on. Mike lay on the kitchen floor now, and breathed heavily when Finus came in, as if he found all this activity tiresome.