“Yessir,” I droned. Glad there was no hope. Of Pop ever getting what he swore we all deserved. Meanwhile, behind us, six cars, two of them Packards, pressed closer trying to finally pass. Good taste alone kept them from honking us off the road.
And only now, from this far riverbank, only while recalling Dad’s tour of all he wanted for us, do I see why Riverside summers stayed so cool. It had more than just the shading lid of maples, more than just the mild river itself.
Earlier we’d driven through hot farmland, flat and glaring. We were now headed down, down a slow grade into the only river chasm hereabouts. No wonder wetness kept things here a bright currency-green. This road along a river was incised below sea-level. This wide avenue eased us right down into moisture, a beautiful gash or trench. Fill this with water? you’re done for. All your property’s in the Panama Canal. And the Mabrys’ life wish?
To be allowed to settle exactly here.
They put out the bait. It brought us.
8
SIX MORE DAMAGED “Marions” had been retrieved. One they found washed as far as Greenville, thirty-four miles, carried over all that flooded farmland. It was a mallard, cleaved down the exact center; but still it floated, bobbing weirdly sunny-side up. Its swamp-soaked bill, back-curved, made the bird appear to smile. Had it gone smug (or crazed) with everything it’d seen?
—Myself, I am an optimist, about nothing.
Because Doc engraved his Internet-registered name into his creations’ bottoms, others would get returned that whole next year. (One from South Carolina’s Great Pee Dee River but folks traced its carver here to Falls.)
Marge kept him nested in, secreted away right down our street. Riding past, Jan and I, we’d sometimes catch sight of her cutting his hair on their side patio. Doc’s head bent so far forward he looked about to fall as he sat wrapped in a checked tablecloth. The old man seemed irked at suffering such grooming, her free hand held his noggin still.
Margie’s gaunt now but ever more vigilant and butch. Odd, she looks more bowlegged. Her hair’s chopped short any old way. (Being so on-guard for two, she finds no beauty-parlor time. “A shame,” Jan says. “Time-off would do her a world of good, hearing others’ little troubles.”) Still, Marge’s always been so basically fine-looking, she’s never needed much sissy-tending.
The Ropers’ back-door Hilltop neighbors, the Blanchards, who had lost their cat and almost their granddaughter, swear that Doc often sleeps alone in his old tobacco-colored pup tent pitched far up under their back deck, for further privacy.
SOMETIMES SHE’LL DRIVE him clear out of town where they’re sure to meet no concerned friends. She parks while he basically “looks,” as the Ropers both agree to call it. Marge keeps him in sight but all while simply settled at the wheel, reading that day’s Raleigh paper, flossing, talking to her kids by phone, listening to oldies or Public Radio.
She said that when a couple of his carvings started returning by mail as if via their own will, the sight of ruined ones went harder on Doc. Simpler to believe his waterbirds were somehow “gone.” Migratory, off to seek their fortunes, looking flag-perfect as his decoys did when starting out.
I found it sad but enviable, Marge’s daily carpooling him someplace new. I offered to be her driver stand-in. She thanked me with the saddest smile. “By now, he trusts nobody but me. Not even you, Bill. And we both know, that’s saying a lot.”
“Appreciate that, Marge.” I lowered my eyes, too grateful.
He needed motion, daily hunting. Instead of dawn river-swims, he took to this striding. She’d drive him out still farther and farther. Had he ever told her what he hoped to find? Did his wife dare ask? Theirs proved such a marriage, “in sickness and in health.” A thing now grown unto itself. Beautiful how patient, how simply she lived inside the damage done to him. Now, that’s a love story, I thought, not bothering Janet by my saying it aloud. Somehow that’d sound critical of her. —Roper-marriage comparisons, even now!
If Margie got home ten minutes late from grocery shopping, she confessed to sometimes finding he’d stolen off “to go look.” This proved pretty dangerous. See, Doc’s route stayed fixed along our county’s old waterways. Thanks to city planners and prosperity, many tributaries have been trained through exurban infrastructure, pipes and aqueducts. Lithium, it’s been sent grave-deep, giving us no surface balm. Clear springs where a decoy or some live bird could splash? all imprisoned underground. Streams might bubble up across some unzoned field only to plunge blind, back under the interstate.
But Doc, following the old brook with a dowser’s nose, barely noticed. He mostly stared down. The man seemed unaware of new highways’ barricading wetlands’ way. Being a former Boy Scout (Eagle!) —how literally he mapped a stream! The man and his stick walked right through (then out of) any brook-straddling dress shop at a sudden tony mall, startling security.
THE RISKS ROPER trailed everywhere, he alone never saw. The man never actually looked back: as Doc’s former patients kept pulling their cars over, wanting to help. No time for signaling, folks just veered off-road to offer, what? cash? Starbucks? rides home? He had taught us how to breathe wet kids alive while out for his jog. He had heart-massaged a dead man twenty bonus-minutes extra just in case. His rescuer’s impulse came back and schooled us all. We each longed for the right and privilege of finding him horizontal so we might just once work on him. However badly.
But even if some former patient hollered, sprung out of his car, blocked the old guy’s path, Doc would shake his head no. Cornered, he’d fight you. His wooden staff laid quite a dent into the hood of co-Olympic-gold-medalist Tomothy Bixby’s new red Miata. Finally, the unscarred folks that Doc had left “as good as new” were forced to give up sparing him. Safer for us all, just leaving him endangered. He seemed everywhere, replicas.
Out driving myself, I had the mixed luck of spotting him. Wanting to help I cringed instead. Then risked a few wild U-turns to hurry anyplace else. He had looked . . . feral. What would I even say? I felt a traitor to my early starstruck sense of him. Roper’d promised to keep me alive and, till this sec at least, hadn’t he? But seeing him so publicly addled seemed a gentling hint to let myself go now. Permission. A hall pass.
Part of me longed to join my mentor in his roadside quest. Hike beside him, pointing, “Great to be out looking with you. But, uh-oh, bud, we missed a ditch.” And yet, this short of breath, I couldn’t have kept up with his long blue-heron strides. Even if he’d ever finally invited me.
Janet begged that I stop taking out the car alone. She made me get one of those emergency beepers. You wear it around your neck 24–7. Cowbell. This way I could summon 911 without even needing the digital skill to dial three numbers. “Having fallen, simply press red button,” instructions state. But why?
Jan suddenly claimed she loved riding shotgun with me, even if I was headed off to buy spare lightbulbs. Monitoring, pure and simple. I knew she kept nitroglycerin ampules in her handbag. And the cell phone? given my state, she now carried hers from room to room. Subtle. I just needed one hour alone per day. Too much to ask at my age? I recalled first being stared at by Jan with me sitting unzipped, grade three. And, for better or worse, my unsentimental friend had never stopped, never looked at anyone else.
She feared my next “episode” might crash me into other cars. Every nearby vehicle seemed to contain her ideal young family, ourselves forty years ago. My bad driving and worse heart had become the enemy of precisely us.
“Episodes.” Getting closer together. Contractions, hints. Dilations of egress by centimeters, signs that some canal way out of the world was finally clearing. Last month at a mall shoe store, after buying nice new fleece slippers, I dropped my receipt. As I bent to grab it, their white carpet started looking so good, contrasting with the cold air up at usual six-foot adult male level, I went down to be more toward flooring’s weave.
Perfect bed, placed exactly where Daddy presently needed one. Janet insisted I had fallen. I later vowe
d to her: It had not been an actual fall. More that I simply eased lower, by degree, toward floor covering of increasing interest. Once achieved, the horizontal there felt very valuable indeed.
Young clerks refused to let me enjoy it long. First I heard them above me barking at each other, “You check. Touch his neck or wherever they do, and see. No, you. You’ve got seniority.” I had to laugh at this. Relieved, they jumped, then swore. “Oh . . . ma . . . God. Well, good. The paperwork alone! And already it’s been such a week!”
Despite my explanations of what a great floor surface they had going here, the kids would just not let me keep admiring it up close. The prettiest girl drove me home. She then led me across the deck, into our house. I don’t know why the sight of Janet’s stricken face made me cackle so. Did Jan imagine I was finally bringing home the reason for my live-in absence all these years, my mistress-nurse age 22? That gave me a momentary giggling power surge. Till, weirdly strong, the two of them lifted me right onto the bed.
ON DAYS I feel very clear and able, I still try and sneak her car keys. Sounds like some juvenile delinquent with his greaser’s ducktail. Making the big bank-heist getaway in a two-year-old Volvo wagon! But look, these days I go barely twelve mph. Like Dad as self-appointed docent to Riverside’s top mansions. People honk at me, I go so slow, which is good. Keeps me more alert. Jan’ll be standing at our community mailboxes or talking by phone to Marge (in lowered tones about lessening expectations for their men), and me? I’m just then rolling downhill in neutral. Sly, my Steve McQueen exit strategy! Go un-noisy into that dark night . . . I’ve grown into one cunning pioneering “Red” old man.
I tend to drive along the ragged marsh edges of Mall World. That coincidentally is where Doc mostly hikes now. I tell myself I am somehow using my aloneness to protect him and his. I plan guarding him with whatever’s least likely to bother Doc as he is now.
Marge tried restricting him to the strip mall nearest our development. But even old men are hard to contain. I just want to see him. Whatever he keeps seeking, I sense he’s now pursuing that for me. Or is it me he’s half-forgotten and now absently seeks? Even in ditches, minor sinkhole graves.
It’s counterproductive, living in a town so small. Limits your escaping unobserved. More new charismatic churches, while car dealerships keep closing, and no Harley-Davidson outlet for the Fallen. So small a place when one has hopes so Roper-huge. And, what did I want for him and myself? That . . . that’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s just, to me, the two of us always seemed secretly made of finer stuff. Alike in being different. But what chance did we have, in a zone so rural, strict and married?
It’s hard to spot my dearest wanderer-friend outdoors and in such public need. What’s tougher still? Not seeing him at all!
Anybody hereabouts can tell you—and for years—why I’d have done just anything for Roper.
9
DRIVING CALMS ME. Hands around the wheel, I briefly forget my own factory-second arteries. For miles I ignore even Doc’s splintery mind. I like the Swedish clicking of my turn signal. He’ll sometimes suddenly appear. Along roadside, you’ll see him scare certain schoolkids holding signs for their booster-club car wash.
Last month I spied him way off in the distance. He kept prodding the bank of some irrigation pond. Doc, following his stick, came wading its shoreline silhouetted. He looked like both a ragged crane and some homeless Audubon, hunting all that he’d so slowly painted, then too quickly lost.
A few locals freely talk of getting up a petition. They’ve urged Marge to ship our shaman-friend off somewhere. “For help.” Light-dosage shock-therapy is back in fashion: a flash of lightning might offset his head full of goose down and black water.
They claim Roper is now “sending the wrong signal to Falls’ newcomers.” Among drinkers at Hole Nineteen, I actually heard our Republican mayor, one of Doc’s former patients, explain how the man has become “both a traffic nuisance and eyesore.”
Everybody says that life is short and yet it’s highly possible to overstay.
Take me. Please! Surely our “best if used by” dates, Doc’s and mine, have themselves by now retired to Bermuda! Maybe he and I are twinned, even in this. On principle I favor elective mercy-killing if the patient’s clear and perfectly ready. Surely a human right.
—Still I keep waiting for some sleep-inducing hypo warmed by breath, some pink-slip prescription: “Please excuse Bill permanently from Phys. Ed. and, far as that goes, from Phys. Send him instead to Library Study Hall forever.” Meanwhile, Doc searches.
AFTER YEARS SPENT succeeding far from home, Roper’s children have started coming back. Jan and I, we’ll lately notice the daughter or sometimes the boy out walking their dad.
And I, being around more due to certain congestive setbacks not worth recording here, chanced to stand watching the street from our new sunporch. Magazines now bore me. True, we keep the Raleigh News & Observer going, but we’ve unsubscribed from Time. At our age, everything piles up so.
I called to Janet one room away and quizzed her. If all our neighbors’ kids return for regular visits, why do the Roper kids’ delayed trips stand out? Oldsters on our block speak of Doc’s kids as extra-saintly, flying south so much here lately. We even saw the rangy theologian, up a tall ladder, installing his parents’ storm windows. He kept having to wave at the parade of interested older cars.
Janet, her hands coated in Christmas baking flour, said, “What?” then, chin on my shoulder, leaned half against me. We studied Doc and Marge’s daughter. Arms crossed, this pale young woman simply waited. Eyes half-shut in sunlight, she stood at the curb. I pointed, “What, she’s going more platinum?”
“Get your eyes rechecked. It’s white. She’s nearly fifty, Billy. The children all are. My rule of thumb, add twenty years to everyone, that usually comes out about right.”
“White!” I said.
Doc’s daughter let him explore. Bushes and curbs, at his own pace. She just minded our general practitioner, his sitter today.
“Maybe we notice,” Janet guessed, “because she’s finally coming home to doctor him? Could be that’s why his kids fight to take their turns now. Coast clear. Doc’s forgot to show he’s too independent to need anybody’s help. —His girl looks easy enough doing it, doesn’t she? Like she has all the time in the world. It was the last thing her old man forgot. But he’s finally stopped saying no.”
Listening, nodding, without any reason, I wanted to cry. Had Jan meant to make me? —Cheap emotions seem unlike us. Me.
Looking out, I did manage, “Patient child. —Still quite pretty. She got his eyes.”
10
THIS IS THE end, come all of a sudden at last. You will be almost as glad for it as I. Oh, and thank you for sticking with me through this hell and high water. Between paradise and the tar pit there must be quite a violent border ahead, passport-issues.
During my whole life I’ve never said so much at once as in this thinking-dreaming-recall-chant, last thing. Being one who’s stayed, I’m trying to find the balance needed now for traveling. Like that liquid metal Doc funneled last thing into his carvings’ undersides. To keep birds upright on their shelf or steadied in black water.
Finally what I’ve most wanted and feared finds me like an honor. Why bother trying to prepare for our own good deaths? We’ll each know how. At least, well enough to finally get ’er done. And, if we “choke”? Well, all the better.
—I was driving, see, to buy skim milk, plus cuttlebones for those immortal cockatiels. I’d just invented this chore. Told myself it mattered, might produce a small adventure. Help justify my stealing dear Jan’s car keys one more time.
You know that juncture near the new mall where beggars haunt our medians? They’ll try and clean your car window. Red-haired, smoking cigs, big beer guts, they wear khaki, pretending they’re retired military. CONFUSED BUSH SAND-WAR VET WILL STILL WORK. But they leave smudges so you have to pay to get those cleared. They try to snag folding money fr
om older fellows like me. (Democrat though I am, these guys really burn me up.) I spied one up ahead hiking fast a full yard into my lane. I let myself honk. Felt good to. His overcoat was army surplus, the stride rolled forward, lanky, deliberate. Rearview alone showed his shepherd’s staff.
I pull right over, no time for signaling. Dead ahead of Doc, I angle, waiting. Last-thing I’ll try and trap him. Straight ahead, the sunset’s quite a blaze. Red taillights lead that way and irritate it. Sinking sun shows a sky like golden sand piled with ruby mountains halfway through some mad spin cycle. My windshield’s smeared with undeserved pastels. Janet has been vigilant all day keeping me “grounded.” I thought she’d never nod off, needlepointing her OLD AGE AIN’T FOR SISSIES pillow slip. (Poor ole sissies must age, too.)
He hurtles along this dangerous commercial stretch. He staffs along his wild clear energy. Traffic shoots around him; cars keep honking, going sixty-easy in a zone marked forty-five.
I’ve parked poorly, too near an open ditch. My left arm curves around the steering wheel; I throw the right along seat-back. Where is he? A flashing ambulance veers wide of him. The driver’s screaming, “Fool!”
Feeling breathless, waiting, I’ve buzzed our passenger window down. Ready for the coot, I’m hunched forward to stop my friend. But I keep hearing the car engine or maybe some tire acting up, stray whumping knocks. Only now do I study my chest. The ole ticker’s just a-pounding. My white shirtfront literally shifts forward-back. Not real good of a personal sign, I guess. Seeing a passing stick, I shout, “Doc! Yer ole Bill here. Need a lift?” No answer. I start screaming, “Help me, help me, sir!”