Time Done Been Won't Be No More (2 page)

The hospital itself seemed geared down for the night, humming along on half power. He hated hospitals and went stealthily down the gleaming tilefloored hall. Past doors opened and doors closed. Beyond these doors folks with their various ailments sleeping in their antiseptic cubicles if they could sleep and if not lying in a drug-induced stupor that passed for sleep in the regions. Like the larval stage of something dread waiting to be born and loosed upon an unsuspecting world.

She herself was still wide awake. They'd moved her to the pulmonary intensive care unit and she sat by the window waiting for day to come until she heard the door open then turning her head to see. Ravaged and wildlooking in her hospital gown she fixed him with eyes so fierce he had a thought for what halfcrazy stranger was inhabiting her body. A look of utter viciousness as if she held him and him alone responsible for the predicament in which she found herself. For the wearing out of irreplaceable organs, for the slow inevitable recession of the tide of blood, for life seeping away like night sewage, drop by septic drop.

Then the face changed and he laid an arm about her thin shoulders and she grasped his other arm with a hand more claws than fingers. She hung on fiercely, you'd not expect such a grip from one so frail. Instinctively he tried to pull away, the dying would take you with them if they could, it's dark down there and cold, a little company might lighten the tone of things.

Around midmorning he talked with her doctor. This doctor was young, Wildman considered him no more than a child. Styled blond hair, this wisp of a mustache. A preoccupied air. Wildman wondered was he competent. Perhaps he was a leech, a parasite, there was a pale vampirish look about him, a sucker of old folks' thin unhealthy blood.

She has anxiety attacks, the doctor said. I've tried to explain it to her. The emphysema makes it difficult for her to breathe and it scares her. The fear compounds the breathing problems and her heart trouble. Everything just compounds itself.

Is she going to die?

He shrugged. Well, she thinks she is. In the past weeks she's insisted on being tested for everything terminal. There's no reason she shouldn't live another five or ten years. She seems to be willing herself to die. How close are you to your grandmother?

Wildman shrugged. She raised me from a baby when my parents were killed in an accident. I guess that's pretty close.

Perhaps you could talk to her then. And there's no reason she has to be confined to a hospital. I'm releasing her later today.

I'll talk to her again, Wildman said. He smiled slightly. She taught school for fifty years. She's used to doing all the talking.

We're all going to die, the doctor said, as if this was some hot flash that hadn't caught up with Wildman yet and that he might want to make note of.

I'll tell her, he said politely. Sometimes there were windy gulfs of distance between what he thought and what he said and there was something mildly disturbing about it. He went out into the hall. It smelled of floor wax, antiseptic. He followed it to where he could see morning sunlight through a glass door and he went through the door into it. His senses were immediately assaulted by sensations: warmth, colors, the smell of the hot light falling through the green trees. Everything looked bright and gold and new and dying seemed very far away.

He hired a practical nurse and she stayed two nights which contained no phone calls and no midnight drives toward flashing ambulances then his grandmother fired her.

The nurse came and told him about it. He paid her off and drove out to the farm to see the old woman.

Why did you fire her, he wanted to know. You couldn't fire her anyway. I hired her.

She was a thief, the old woman said. She was stealing from me.

Stealing what?

My things, she said evasively. She waved an arm airily about the room. A motley of photographs, ceramic cats, plaster pickaninnies with fishing poles. I caught her stuffing them into her purse, she said.

Well, he said. He couldn't think of anything else to say.

I can stay by myself. I don't need her. I don't need you.

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. You're three times seven. I guess you can do what you want to do.

I'm many more times seven than that, she said caustically. And I can't do anything I want to do. I can't even breathe God's own air like you and everyone else takes for granted. I'd give all that I own just to take a good deep breath.

She was kneeling astride him, moving above him in the halfdark. Head thrown back, yellow hair all undone. She was deeply tanned but her pale breasts bobbed like flowers. Her breath came ragged, like something feeding. Yet she was somehow unreal, like a fiercely evocative dream of lust.

The telephone rang.

Don't, she whispered urgently.

He reached for the phone and she grasped his arm and he jerked it away and the phone tipped off the nightstand. The ringing stopped and he could hear a tinny mechanical voice shrieking at him from the floor. Beth was laughing and wrestling him away from the phone and when he finally had the receiver against his ear he was still inside her and she began to move again.

Hello?

I've got to have some help over here.

He didn't say anything for a time. He listened to the disembodied wheeze of her breathing, the faint pumping of her ruined lungs.

All right, he said. I'm coming. He laid the phone down.

Beth was laughing helplessly. She collapsed against his chest, he could feel her taut nipples against his skin, they seemed to burn him. Her hair was all in her face, it smelled of flowers. Me too, she said and went into another burst of laughter. She was moving harder against him. He could feel himself inside her rigid and enormous, feel the slap of her flesh against his own. She had stopped laughing. I dare you to just take it out and go, she said. She rose above him light and graceful as smoke and he could feel her knees clamping his ribcage as if she were riding him, some succubus of the night riding him blind and fulltilt into the dark unknown, face in the wind and yellow hair strung out behind her. When she came she fell against him slack and boneless and he could feel her tiny teeth and her hot breath against his throat like a beast's.

The coffin was dark rosewood, an intricate pattern of flowers and vines carved or pressed into it and he couldn't help thinking it was what she would have grudgingly admitted was a fine piece of furniture. The woman within it on the satin pillow looked miraculously younger, no more than middleaged. As if death had peeled away the years like layers of dead skin. Her cares had fled and the skin relaxed and smoothed itself and her face had regained the primness of the longago schoolteacher. Most of all she just looked not there, absolutely gone, profoundly beyond any cruelty he might do her now or any kindness. From the hard oaken mourner's bench he watched this face and there were things he might have said to her had things been different but he willed himself to turn to stone inside.

When the preacher hushed they seemed to be at some pause in the procession of things: he didn't know what was expected of him but everything seemed preordained, dictated by ceremony. An attendant arose and closed the casket with an air of finality. He withdrew from his pocket a tool and began to tighten the screws that secured the lid. Wildman watched. It seemed to be an ordinary allen wrench. So arcane a use for so mundane a tool. Had its inventor had this purpose in mind? The pallbearers had arisen and taken their stations.

Following the casket down the aisle of the church Beth circled his waist with an arm as if she'd steady him in his grief and he was struck with a hot flash of annoyance. Did she think he'd fall prostrate and helpless, did she think he'd fly apart like a twodollar clock into a mass of springs and hands awry and useless unsequenced numbers?

They wound through the gravestones of older residents in this curious neighborhood of the dead toward the summit where raw earth waited. He felt tight and empty inside, his head airy and weightless, he felt as if he might go sailing up into the high thin cirrus. Folding chairs were set about and the green tent awning flapped in a sudden hot gust of summer wind.

He was working that summer with a construction crew laying bricks, work he'd done in his youth. Money seemed always short and the pay was good here and it supplemented his freelance income. He was five scaffolds up helping place walkboards and Rojo was taking a bucket of mortar off the winch. Rojo said, I've got to have some help over here.

This so startled Wildman that he stepped backward reflexively and there was nowhere to step save space. His heel caught a scaffold brace and tripped him and he was going headfirst and backward down the scaffolding. He grabbed at a brace whipping past but all it did was slow him, wrench his shoulder, half turn him in the air. He slammed into a sheet of plywood that capsized in a shower of dust and dried mortar and splintered brick. The plywood rebounded him onto the ground then slammed down onto him.

It had all happened in an instant but already he could hear voices, excited cries, running footsteps. He seemed to be slipping toward unconsciousness, black waters lapped at him. Man overboard, Wildman thought. Throw me one of them life preservers.

He opened his eyes. His vision was blurred. Somewhere some small critical adjustment was made, things came into focus. Colors weren't right though, everything seemed a dark muddy brown. The first thing he saw was a steeltoed workboot, the side serrated by a jagged sawcut.

He wiped blood off his forehead. Knifeblades of pain pierced his chest. There was a cut inside his mouth and he spat blood.

This flying shit is harder than it looks, he said.

Rojo drove him to the apartment building in a company pickup. Head bandaged, ribs tightly bound with some kind of swathing. He was beginning to hurt all over and the pills hadn't taken effect. He got out of the truck with some difficulty. He slammed the door and turned and Beth was standing on the wroughtiron stairway.

Good God, Buddy, she said. What happened to you?

He tried to fly off, Rojo told her. He was long on ambition but short on persistence. Just flopped his arms a time or two and give up and fell like a rock.

Good God, she said again. Her face in the white weight of the sun was flat and unreadable.

I'm all right, I'm all right, Wildman said.

You don't look so all right.

He's just bunged up some, Rojo said. They x-rayed everything he's got and none of it's busted. Ribs stove in a little. He'll be all right in a day or two. Ain't everybody can fall five scaffolds and not break nothing.

Beth had descended the stairway and she was helping Wildman onto the first steps. Hands of gentle solicitude.

You make it all right? Rojo called.

I'm all right, Wildman said. He wished he could think of something else to say. Everything he said sounded dull and halfwitted.

Halfway to the second floor there was a landing.

You want to sit down here and rest? I'll bring you a glass of iced tea.

He didn't want to say how all right he was. I'm just a little dizzy is all, he said.

Rest a minute.

Oh hell. Come on, I'm all right.

He drank the iced tea on the couch. She sat across from him in an armchair waiting as if an explanation or at least an elaboration of what had happened might be forthcoming but none was. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He closed his eyes. The room seemed to be tilting on an axis, everything poised at the point of sliding across the floor and slamming against the walls.

What made you fall?

He opened his eyes. The highvoltage pain pills seemed to be kicking in. She was moving away from him at the speed of light, the chair telescoping backward toward the receding wall. He tried to concentrate.

Gravity, he finally said.

When he awoke it was night. He wasn't on the couch anymore. He was in bed without knowing how he got there and she was reading on a chair by the wall sconce. He watched her. She read on, oblivious to his scrutiny. You won't keep her, a friend named Avery had told him. You can't keep her at home. She's used to being on the wing. One day she'll be a high fly in the tall weeds and that'll be all she wrote. Avery had wanted her himself, however, and this could hardly be considered an objective appraisal of the situation. Wildman had caught her on the rebound so quickly it made him dizzy, she had seemed to come with the thousanddollar story, the contract, the new agent, the dreams about the novel.

She had been with him three years but he had had to work full time at keeping her. He began to think of her as some piece of expensive and highpowered machinery he had bought on time. Some luxurious automobile loaded with options and coated with twenty coats of lacquer but the payments were eating him alive, the payments were enormous with a balloon at the end and he had begun to think he couldn't keep them current. He hadn't been trying as hard lately, he'd been slacking off, and the threat of repossession hung over his head like a guillotine on a frayed rope. Long a student of nuance he had noticed a difference in her body language when other men glanced at her, a speculative look of distance in her eyes when she studied him. He caught her appraising herself critically in a mirror as if she were evaluating herself, looking for microscopic signs of wear and tear.

After a while she seemed to feel the cool weight of his eyes and she looked up. She closed the book and laid it aside.

How do you feel?

Like death warmed over, he said. My ribs hurt. I can't take a deep breath. I can't even breathe God's own air like everybody else.

What?

Nothing.

You're acting awfully strange lately.

Strange in what way?

Strange in a lot of ways. Half the time you act as if you're not even here. You don't talk to me. You talk but it's like little things you say for your own amusement. You're off in a little world of your own. You used to act like this sometimes when you were writing but you're not writing. I don't understand you anymore.