Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

He tried to sit up. “I’m not hungry. Not thirsty. And swallowing hurts.”

“You need food and you need water.” His face looked flushed. There was a dappling of purple spots along his arm. “I think you have a rash.”

“Fine.” His eyes were lazy, starting to loll in their sockets.

“You’re not fine.” The skin around his mouth was cracked.

“Okay,” he said. “Go ahead. Get us some bread. And wine.”

I helped him sit up. “I got groceries.”

“Rip me a piece and bring water. Pour me wine.”

“Not a good idea.”

“You want me to fight when they get here?” He leaned against the side of the tub.

I brought the bread and the pitcher from the kitchen.

“Pour me a glass.” He tried to tear off a piece of the bread. “You do it.”

I poured the wine and tore off a piece of bread. I gave it to him. He took the bread in hand, raised it slightly, and said: “The Body of God.” He tried to take a small bite, pulling at the bread with his jaw. He dipped the bread in water and sucked at it. He raised his glass of wine.

“You really shouldn’t.” I tried to take it from him, and the wine spilled some. I let go of his hand. He straightened with a brief surge of strength, and said: “You will not do that again.”

He looked at the wine, and then he swallowed it all in one gulp. Red streaming from the sides of his mouth, he coughed. His shoulders convulsed and he spat. Then he turned, retching into the tubful of water.

He wiped his mouth, and said, “Your grandfather. We used to stay in hotel rooms. He traveled.”

I tried to give him the water.

He waved it away, and said, “Took us wherever he went. Every room a Bible.” His face was glowing. “Said they came from angels. Angels wore suits, key rings big as hula hoops. A briefcase full of Bibles. Had keys to every room in the city.” His head lolling back and forth. “Where are the wings? Got holes in their jackets?”

“You never talked about him.”

A long pause. “Hotels give me nightmares.”

I took a sip of the wine, and set the bottle on the tub.

“He’s been a constant concern,” he said. “Your grandfather distresses me.”

He was looking at the cloudy bathwater.

“They promised him it was coming.” He coughed. “Light from Heaven, and it’s all over.” He wiped his mouth. “And the faithful will be glorified!” He coughed again. “But then it’s the bread truck. And the birds in the morning, and the milk bottles…”

I put the glass of water to his lips. He sipped from it, and the cot made a snapping-bone noise.

I realized I was crying, and I let it happen.

He was talking now hardly above a whisper. “You’re the last one, a long line of God’s men. American men. You’re the lucky one. Your grandfather, and his father. And his. You should have a boy. He’ll be lucky.”

There are brief glimpses that take you outside, beyond. The last time I smoked marijuana, I was thirty-four and sitting with a good client, poor guy had leukemia. My world opened out like the night-black sky and went on forever, unknowable. There is that long sigh that scoops you out all empty inside from your bowels and all through your soul when you’re standing at the edge of a thing like the Grand Canyon. You wonder at the marvel of a crack, a single crack that opens up turning into something like this, where the world below breaks open and has nothing to do with you, and knows not a thing of what goes on outside its own rocky moon-mountain insides. And your hand is holding someone else’s. Truth comes at you like the floor of an elevator shaft. There are only two good reasons I can think of for God. There is the Good Lord as uncanny family inheritance, a strange great gift from the people who birthed you. Say your prayers before bedtime. Like Dad gave me his God, and his father his, and his father’s father, et cetera. Ad infinitum, for all I know. And of course the Good Lord comes in handy when you first meet the creeping fear of anything unknown, the first time He takes someone away forever.

Dad dropped his legs over the side of the cot and readied his hand at the sink. He took the wine from my hands, and I let him. He drank it all down, in one slow and controlled swallow, and said: “The Blood of God.”

I helped him pull himself up.

He pressed a hand to the tall red wall. His knees were quaking. He whispered, “We’re nothing, you and I, and everyone. Two ways, son, only glory.” He paused. “And frustration.”

He let go of the wall, and he wavered.

“Glory has been patient.” His voice was slurred.

And then he fell.

Everything moved slowly as I reached for him. His arms going around my neck like a lasso, and then it was his weight and my weight together. The pinkish clouds of wine in the water were shifting, and we fell now together, slowly, against the side of the tub. His hand struck the water and our weight knocked hard against the porcelain, and the wine bottle fell in the pool, splashing red water on the walls. A dark blood cloud poured from the bottle, unfurling, rolling, and swirling in the pink dusky storm in the bathwater. The whole sky, all of it, I saw it there like a rippling mirror as we fell back together on the low red floor. I became aware of real time moving around me and beyond me in echoing swirls. I felt we were outside the world somehow, fallen outside and deep inside some borderless moment. It was vast and it was exhilarating. I was aware of my skin, of the very space in my skull, of the infinite space in my skull, of the tidal rush and pull of the so many people we are and can be and ever once were. I was aware of my very own heart, aware in that same way I’d been so many times of my stomach: it was full. My heart was full. I held my father in my arms, and I didn’t want to lose him, and I didn’t want it to be too late, was I too late? I wanted to go back in time, but I couldn’t. And so I became very afraid. Above us, red clouds were poised so still. Then they broke and fell like rain.

Desire can be so exhausting, and has way too long a memory. It was early fall, and the leaves were turning papery and thinning on the trees. The afternoons were suffused with that sad and lovely melon glow, when everybody knows the days are getting shorter and those last hours of work and school take on a fresh purpose, letting out in a day already going dark. Halloween candy was falling off the drugstore shelves. I didn’t want winter to come any sooner than it had to. It had been weeks since I last spoke to Sarah and told her that Dad was being taken to the hospital.

Part of me wanted to tell her about the nurses giving me nasty looks. I mean, What kind of son lets this happen to his father? How they had to feed him through tubes because a body can only take so much before it breaks down, before it starts eating itself. How my father could not, or would not speak. About how Dad and I shared milk shakes from the hospital cafeteria, and the nurses split them into two small cups, and we used thick plastic straws.

I sat there beside him watching the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest, and made plans for the move because I hoped to take him with me back to California.

I needed to clean the house and get it ready for sale, but so much of my time was spent at the hospital that I couldn’t really get much done. I slept in the chair next to his bed and spent my mornings scanning the Times and the Post, and I thought about giving him a haircut because his hair had gotten so long. I read the magazines and movie guides for celebrity worship: what’s she wearing; who is sleeping with who. They were everywhere you looked, on the windowsills, in waiting rooms, by the vending and coffee machines. And I fell in love daily with Latina soap stars on telenovelas. There was a TV affixed in the right upper corner of his room. I realized at some point that I’d not been with a woman for a very long time, and what a pity it was that I hardly ever thought about it anymore, but also that now I was thinking about it a lot, actually. Practically all the time.