Bobby nodded.
Maybe it made no difference, she thought. Maybe now he had gone so far into that land that nothing done or not done to his body made a difference. He was already looking neglected and abandoned, his skin the color of the clay of his yard, his face like a slab of shale. The nails of his hands as discolored and used-up as chicken claws.
He had ripped her like a rag doll and filled her with his evil. And that’s why she had come on that night in her stolen car to his house, where she had found him helpless, for he had gone off with his devil to the night lands. She had put her hands beneath his immobile body and with all her might had lifted him and turned him over, turned his body facedown on the bed to die. And dead was what he was now and she would not grieve.
It would be the old Good Luck Coal company hospital they would send him to. Whatever its name was now. It had been closed for a long time and then become a nursing home nobody ever came out of. When she was a girl, and it was still a hospital but about to be closed by the state, Floyd had pointed it out to her from the truck window and told her Don’t never let them take me there. Don’t let them cut me. And made her promise.
Another nun, young and red-cheeked, came in with stuff to give him a bath. She greeted Bobby with something like joy, as though she’d waited a long time to see her. Bobby watched her fill her basin at the sink, carefully checking the water as though for a baby’s bath.
“So you’re Mr. Shaftoe’s daughter?” she asked. She lowered the rail of Floyd’s bed, the rail designed to keep him in bed if he should ever suddenly awake or come to and decide to roll over, or get up.
“Granddaughter,” Bobby said.
“Oh. I thought.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Bobby said. Too hard, too hard. The young nun began to wash Floyd, talking all the while, to Bobby and also to Floyd. How are we today. Get your bed changed too today. Okay scuse me now. Up we go.
“I can do that,” Bobby said, shamed. “I’ll do it.”
“No trouble,” said the child.
“It’s my job too,” Bobby said. “I’m a nurse’s aide. What I do all day.”
The nun pondered a moment, weighing her duty against Bobby’s claim. Bobby knew there was no nurse in the world wouldn’t turn over some part of the day’s duties to somebody else willing to do them, always too much.
“Well. All right,” she said. “You just give me a call when you want me.” She checked the urine bottle with a practiced motion, and was gone. Bobby momentarily envied her, her life of work and prayer, but then there was hardly anybody Bobby didn’t envy sometimes; it was the way she was, and she knew it.
There was a razor there to shave him with, and a comb for his hair. Bobby picked up the warm sponge and began to work, slipping Floyd’s arm from the johnny and lifting it; it seemed to resist her. She could hear the slight whistle of his breath through his mouth and around the tube in his nose. She wiped his face, pushing aside the lank hair, so thick, she had envied it too.
She lifted the blue johnny from his loins and undid the diaper he wore, folding it over the two small dry turds it contained and pushing it into the waste can. She wet and wrung out the sponge again, and washed the raw and painful-looking skin, wetness and salt urine was what did that. She found cream, the same she used every day on the children, and on his thighs (huge and stringy compared with theirs) and his hollowed butt she spread it well. She could easily turn him now, this way and that, but now it would do no good.
Look what she had done.
Unless it had not been her that had done it.
No one else could say it had been she who’d done it, no doctor, no nurse or nun. So it hadn’t happened. It was his own fault or God’s that he had had a stroke, or his heart had stopped for a while. She could remember right now what she had done in the cabin on Hogback on that night, could remember even the smell of the pines and the clay; she could remember it without believing it, as though the coma he had suffered had caused what she remembered having done and not the other way around.
Ray up North had taken a devil from her that Floyd had put inside her. And thereupon she’d gone and killed somebody; and right after that she’d come and as good as killed Floyd as well. But was that so? If it was so, if they had drawn the Devil out from her, then what was this left inside her? Was there more than one devil inhabiting her? Instead of fleeing from Jesus’ clear light they seemed to be multiplying in it, doubling and tripling, and herself with them; Jesus was like the kindly firm teachers in the schools she had now and then gone to, who had put books and pictures and a globe of the world before her, and a map, and another map, worlds that she was not to choose among—no, they laughed at her when she tried—yet could not reject. She had done it because he had placed the Devil in her. Or he hadn’t placed a devil in her and she hadn’t done it but had dreamed it. Or she had done it but he’d truly never harmed her and look now.
For a moment his gray face seemed suffused with a living light, as though he’d speak, as though he had a thing to say. Then went dark.
She would have to tell them in the group that it could not be made right after all, hard as they had tried. Because it wasn’t sin; it was nature, or it was fate, if that was different. He was a hard bad man but she would no longer believe he had harmed her, he’d been as compelled to keep her as she had been compelled to run away, and not only from him. The thing was, she should have kept running. It was when she let them convince her it could be made right if she turned back that this had happened. She shouldn’t have turned back.
And there was no becoming single again now. She was no longer remembering the past but creating it backwards from every moment, and what was created would now always be there to be remembered. There was nothing she could do for it but to keep going forward into the uncreated time ahead. That’s what forgiveness was, that’s what being reborn was, that’s all it was.
She dressed him in a fresh shirt, and tied its strings in back. He was beginning to draw up into himself, knees to his chest, as a child does going to sleep, as people do who have gone for good; she’d seen it before. She did not raise the barrier of his bed again. Instead she stepped out of her shoes and got up onto the bed; she lay beside him, and curled against him as he was curled.
I won’t go away from you, she said. I have to go back North now, but I’ll come back here. If I can I’ll go there where you’ve gone, and I won’t turn back without you. I’ll follow you until you can be saved too. And if we can’t both be saved, if we can’t return together from that land, I’ll stay there with you, and not return.
14
“Gee,” Rose Ryder said to Pierce, smiling. “You don’t look so hot.”
“I’m fine.”
“Did you come down with something? You said you might.”
He shrugged, trying to look hale. He felt dreadful. Arriving at Conurbana’s bus station was like coming into some desolate port after sailing cruel cold seas for years. He tossed his small bag behind the seat of her car and got in.
“There’s a dinner break now between the parts of this,” she said, moving out into the shiny street and the traffic. “We’ve got a little while. You want to get something?”
“Sure.” The window on his side was open a crack; he tried to close it, as he always did, always forgetting that it was jammed and would go no farther. The little car turned featly left and right. Pierce became disoriented immediately. Soon a complex junction brought them around the periphery of a plaza, wide and bare, on which were grouped a number of new buildings, some low and swooping, some vastly tall, collectively projecting over the stone space they occupied an orgulous hostility.
She told him what it was, the just-completed monument of the founding family of the city, a name he had read of even in grade-school history, grown rich first in furs and lumber, then coal, steel and railroads, finally nuclear power; giving their money away now in further self-aggrandizement. The buildings were a research center, a specialized hospital, an art museum (the
latest avatar of the family was a prominent collector of the severest modernists) and other benefactions, their own offices too, all seeming hewn from adamant, the lights just being lit. A huge sculpture of twisted rusted I-beams in the center of the unpeopled waste, like the family’s Steam Age soul.
“The hospital goes down seven stories underground too,” Rose told him as they went past. “Besides all the way up. Seven stories. They say.”
“Wow. God.” Pierce felt, for no reason he knew, for no one he could imagine, an anguished pity. This was the first of his Conurbana places, first to be placed unremovably in memory, though he would never see it again. They went on, past old town-house tree-lined streets and anonymous rain-slick neighborhoods of cars and bars and Laundromats. Rose pointed down one street, hers she said; they crossed another, called Mechanic; the population turned poorer, the lights fewer, burnt cars along the sidewalks, buildings missing from rows of houses. Rose talked, her cram course, her apartment. She had got a part-time city job, she said, working in a battered-women’s shelter; she laughed a little at this, ashamed or amazed. She. Pierce thought about the flask in his bag. Why are there cities like this, why this replication, streets and cross streets and other streets, persons and other persons, this one only one of thousands, it seemed dreadful to him.
This city was pierced or invaded by stretches of new highway; entrances and off-ramps struck into old neighborhoods, overseen by tall aluminum lamps like marching space-alien troopers, Pierce did not remember New York or at least Manhattan having these incursions; Rose shot up one, shifting gears. Where were they now? They seemed to be leaving the city altogether on a flying skyway, but the lights of its clustered buildings remained around them. At speed the light rain was driving; the windshield wipers clacked then hissed, clacked then hissed, melancholy sound; towering trucks expelled clouds of rain-fog from beneath their tires as they passed hugely by the little car, whose roof was leaking. Rose talked about the session leader, already two hours or more into his performance or job and ready for more.
“He’s so amazing really. He was amazing today. I just hope he can keep his energy up, I want you to see him and know him.”
“Pitt,” said Pierce.
“Pitt Thurston. You know, he sleeps like an hour or two at night. No more. So I’ve heard. Can you imagine me? You’d be amazed though how good I’m getting. Up and attem.” They swooped off the freeway again, having used it for only a couple of miles, but only to take another big road along which cold bright enterprises were lined up, rain-wet cars in their lots like glossy beetles and the icons of chain restaurants. Pierce thought that if he were king he would make it illegal for restaurants to be advertised by euphoric humanoid versions of the animals to be eaten there, it was just too crassly brutal. A chorus line of pigs, there, each grinning, each wearing a chef’s toque and holding a smoking plate of his own cooked parts. That was where she turned in.
“It’s right next door,” she said. “Is it okay? They all sort of go here.”
They had become they again, for now, for him. Next door was a squat motel, absurdly named: Bypass lnn. From out of there came now, in twos and groups, people she pointed out to him: they.
“Just a sec,” he said. He rooted behind his seat, pulled out his bag from the back, and from the bag his flask. He drank, drank again, and capped it as Rose watched with interest. He offered it to her, a joke, and she smiled and shook her head. (One time she did take that very flask from him and drink, at that party on the Blackbury River, the time they first met or maybe it was not the first time, when each thought the other was someone he, she, was not: Pierce remembered.)
“Ready,” he said, and tugged at his overcoat, his breast on fire. “Ready.”
The pig restaurant seemed to know the group, waitresses guiding them to the long tables in the back somewhat apart from the other diners. Rose, holding him tight as though it were she who was the outsider, took him to the center of one table where a dozen were already seated. She introduced or named him to those near them, and they smiled on him with friendly and maybe slightly overeager smiles; vast plastic menus were given them. His fellows seemed to know all about what was on offer here, this place was apparently one of a chain strung all across America, Pierce had never heard of it and would never see another. They talked of the meeting, more about the numbers who were present and the enthusiasm than about what was said. They witnessed—that’s what Rose later called it, telling stories of remarkable and inexplicable blessings, mostly having to do with money: stories no different in form from ordinary stories of coincidence or luck, only always coming out right, the resulting smiles and nods around the table not smug or entranced but only well satisfied, the same smiles in fact they smiled at the plates of food put before them with amazing speed, where had it been kept. Pierce watched one little woman greet a rack of ribs that seemed larger than her own. Others, their mouths open wide, baring their teeth and scrunching their eyes into a semblance of fury, lifted sandwiches as tall as they were broad and dripping with glossy gravy.
“Not hungry?” Rose asked him, mouth full.
“Um no. Not really. I ate late. You know.”
“Okay. Have to keep your strength up.”
What could that mean? What was to be done to him in there that he would need strength to resist? Already he felt like Childe Roland in the wasteland, come to the dark tower; the strength it had taken to get to and pass through this city, Edom, Dis the mighty, all but gone. This was the second of Pierce’s Conurbana places, this table and its twelve flesh-eaters. When they were done it was time to return; they all walked refreshed and eager back across the parking lot and through a line of scragged evergreens to the motel’s parking lot.
There is or was then a certain acrid smell to new motels, arising from the artificial woods and wools they are furnished with maybe, or the harsh cleansers used to scour away the traces of so many humans passing so constantly, or from all that and also another subtler stink of falsity and veneer that the mind’s nose takes; Pierce, nostrils flaring like a wary beast’s, entered the Bypass Inn with Rose and the happy dinner group. Past the pretend Dickensian bar (Sixpenny’s) and down wide stairs to the underground assembly rooms, many others joining them as they went down. Wide is the gate and broad is the way. Pierce furtively assessed them but could make no generalizations, they were not mostly young or mostly old, not very poor, certainly not rich; they were people, his neighbors.
“Look,” Rose said. “Mike.”
In short sleeves and a tie, yes it was him, Pierce’s breast closed like a portcullis; he did not make fists but did feel his ligaments tugged at. He had read, once, that the common physiological “fight-or-flight” response can cause the hair on male arms to rise, to make us look larger and more frightening, like startled cats. Our little vestigial hairs, inside our shirts and suits. His scrotum tightened too.
“Mike,” Rose said. “You know Pierce.”
“Sure. Hi.” Mike put out his hand, a manly possibly aggressive grip; he actually did not know Pierce at all, it was one of Rose’s confusions that he did, for Pierce had told her so, another lie he had been unable to disabuse her of. “Good to see you here. Really good.”
“Well!” said Pierce in response, grinning.
“How are things in the Faraways?”
“Ha ha,” said Pierce. “Are you selling books?”
Mike stood aside from the skirted table where piles of thin hardbacks were stacked. Most were tracts with pugnacious rhetorical questions for titles (Is Jesus God? Why Die Forever?) and the author was Retlaw O. Walter, LL.D.
“That’s him,” Rose said.
“Retlaw O. Walter?” Pierce said. “What’s his middle name? Otto?”
“I don’t think there is one,” Mike said. “Like Truman.”
Pierce was drawn to pick up a book, to see if there was a picture of the symmetric doctor on the back, but he could not bring himself to touch one. Eat nothing given you, refuse all gifts. He knew him anyway, well
enough; the jug-eared head, the potato nose on which his glasses, bound in pink plastic, balanced; the Midwestern caw, the little loud jokes, the brutal certainties.
“We better go sit,” Rose said.
“We’ll talk later,” Mike called after him. “We will.”
She took him inside the Empire Room, as it was called.
“Does his wife know he’s living here now?” Pierce asked. “l mean ex-wife. I would have thought …”
“Her,” said Rose. “Real nice person. You know she was going to call me in her divorce case? Name me as a whatchacallit and put me on the stand.”
“Correspondent. “
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think they did that anymore.”
“Well if you want to get somebody’s kid away from them. That’s how you do it.” She chose seats for them, slung her coat expertly over the chairback. “Mike loves that kid,” she said.
“So does her mother. I’m sure.”
“Well. Not all the power’s on her side. Not any longer.”
Pierce asked nothing more. The walls of the Empire Room were covered with crimson-flocked wallpaper; on them, hung by golden ropes, were large fake oil paintings in ormolu frames, Claude-like landscapes, distant views framed by heavy-headed trees: zigzag of silver river, pale tiny temple, distant hills fading into cloud banks and atmosphere. Pierce gazed into them longingly.
“Ray’s here,” Rose said, but differently than she had said Mike’s here. Pierce looked where she looked, to the dais where a lectern and a few chairs were set; a large man sat at the edge of one, calm, torpid even, holding his elbows in his hands.
“God I know him,” Pierce said.
“Yes?”
“Well. I’ve seen him.” Where? In a white hat and summer suit, outdoors. Boney’s funeral: talking to Mike Mucho, yes, and maybe to Rosie too? The Powerhouse was buying The Woods. Had they got Rosie too, got her or got to her? The man seemed to waken, to open his eyes upon them. The people began to grow quiet. He was heavy, both large and fat; his pants taut around his loins, constricting the large lump of his privates. When the room had been quiet long enough to satisfy him, he stood with effort and came to speak to them.