Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

  Mrs. Turpin climbed up beside him and glowered down at the hogs inside. There were seven long-snouted bristly shoats in it—tan with liver-colored spots—and an old sow a few weeks off from farrowing. She was lying on her side grunting. The shoats were running about shaking themselves like idiot children, their little slit pig eyes searching the floor for anything left. She had read that pigs were the most intelligent animal. She doubted it. They were supposed to be smarter than dogs. There had even been a pig astronaut. He had performed his assignment perfectly but died of a heart attack afterwards because they left him in his electric suit, sitting upright throughout his examination when naturally a hog should be on all fours.

  A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin.

  “Gimme that hose,” she said, yanking it away from Claud. “Go on and carry them niggers home and then get off that leg.”

  “You look like you might have swallowed a mad dog,” Claud observed, but he got down and limped off. He paid no attention to her humors.

  Until he was out of earshot, Mrs. Turpin stood on the side of the pen, holding the hose and pointing the stream of water at the hindquarters of any shoat that looked as if it might try to lie down. When he had had time to get over the hill, she turned her head slightly and her wrathful eyes scanned the path. He was nowhere in sight. She turned back again and seemed to gather herself up. Her shoulders rose and she drew in her breath.

  “What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.

  The pig parlor commanded a view of the back pasture where their twenty beef cows were gathered around the hay-bales Claud and the boy had put out. The freshly cut pasture sloped down to the highway. Across it was their cotton field and beyond that a dark green dusty wood which they owned as well. The sun was behind the wood, very red, looking over the paling of trees like a farmer inspecting his own hogs.

  “Why me?” she rumbled. “It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.”

  She appeared to be the right size woman to command the arena before her. “How am I a hog?” she demanded. “Exactly how am I like them?” and she jabbed the stream of water at the shoats. “There was plenty of trash there. It didn’t have to be me.

  “If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty.

  “Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nigger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”

  In the deepening light everything was taking on a mysterious hue. The pasture was growing a peculiar glassy green and the streak of highway had turned lavender. She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”

  A garbled echo returned to her.

  A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

  The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.

  She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.

  A tiny truck, Claud’s, appeared on the highway, heading rapidly out of sight. Its gears scraped thinly. It looked like a child’s toy. At any moment a bigger truck might smash into it and scatter Claud’s and the niggers’ brains all over the road.

  Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.

  Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls was rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

  At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

  In the Cemetery Where

  Al Jolsen Is Buried

  Amy Hempel

  Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

  I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

  The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

  “Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

  I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your Friends”? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does “You’re Having Our Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

  “What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

  Oh, yes.

  For her I would always have something else.

  “Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “A parable.”

  “There’s more about the chimp,” I said. “B
ut it will break your heart.”

  “No, thanks,” she says, and scratches at her mask.

  We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones—a pro by now—she lets hang loose.

  We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It’s the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

  She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.

  “I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada.”

  “That’s how dumb we were,” I say.

  “You could be sisters,” the nurse says.

  So how come, I’ll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?

  They do not ask.

  Two months, and how long is the drive?

  The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death.

  I mean, he died.

  So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through it.

  She shakes out a summer-weight blanket, showing a leg you did not want to see. Except for that, you look at her and understand the law that requires two people to be with the body at all times.

  “I thought of something,” she says. “I thought of it last night. I think there is a real and present need here. You know,” she says, “like for someone to do it for you when you can’t do it yourself. You call them up whenever you want—like when push comes to shove.”

  She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck.

  “Hey,” she says, “the end o’ the line.”

  She keeps on, giddy with something. But I don’t know with what.

  “I can’t remember,” she says. “What does Kübler-Ross say comes after Denial?”

  It seems to me Anger must be next. Then Bargaining, Depression, and so on and so forth. But I keep my guesses to myself.

  “The only thing is,” she says, “is where’s Resurrection? God knows, I want to do it by the book. But she left out Resurrection.”

  She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.

  “Tell me,” she says, “about that chimp with the talking hands. What do they do when the thing ends and the chimp says, ‘I don’t want to go back to the zoo’?”

  When I don’t say anything, she says, “Okay—then tell me another animal story. I like animal stories. But not a sick one—I don’t want to know about all the seeing-eye dogs going blind.”

  No, I would not tell her a sick one.

  “How about the hearing-ear dogs?” I say. “They’re not going deaf, but they are getting very judgmental. For instance, there’s this golden retriever in New Jersey, he wakes up the deaf mother and drags her into the daughter’s room because the kid has got a flashlight and is reading under the covers.”

  “Oh, you’re killing me,” she says. “Yes, you’re definitely killing me.”

  “They say the smart dog obeys, but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.”

  “Yes,” she says, “the smarter anything knows when to disobey. Now, for example.”

  She is flirting with the Good Doctor, who has just appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the IV drip before saying good morning, the Good Doctor says things like “God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake.” The Good Doctor awards himself points for the cripples he could have hit in the parking lot. Because the Good Doctor is a little in love with her, he says maybe a year. He pulls a chair up to her bed and suggests I might like to spend an hour on the beach.

  “Bring me something back,” she says. “Anything from the beach. Or the gift shop. Taste is no object.”

  He draws the curtain around her bed.

  “Wait!” she cries.

  I look in at her.

  “Anything,” she says, “except a magazine subscription.”

  The doctor turns away.

  I watch her mouth laugh.

  What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight—this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.

  “It never happens when you’re thinking about it,” she once observed. “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” she said.

  “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” I said.

  Like the aviaphobe who keeps the plane aloft with prayer, we kept it up until an aftershock cracked the ceiling.

  That was after the big one in seventy-two. We were in college; our dormitory was five miles from the epicenter. When the ride was over and my jabbering pulse began to slow, she served five parts champagne to one part orange juice, and joked about living in Ocean View, Kansas. I offered to drive her to Hawaii on the new world psychics predicted would surface the next time, or the next.

  I could not say that now—next.

  Whose next? she could ask.

  Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean more natural violence.

  I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

  She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.

  I have this dream before a flight where we buckle in and the plane moves down the runway. It takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we’re airborne, skimming the tree tops. Still, we arrive in New York on time.

  It is so pleasant.

  One night I flew to Moscow this way.

  She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats when everybody knows steel sinks.

  I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.

  After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions.

  “Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

  But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.

  A formation of low-riders pulls over to watch with a six-pack. They get vocal when the girls check their tan lines. When the beer is gone, so are they—flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

  Above this aggressive health are the twin wrought-iron terraces, painted flamingo pink, of the Palm Royale. Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, so the re
maining residents line the balconies, rocking and not talking, one-upped.

  The ocean they stare at is dangerous, and not just the undertow. You can almost see the slapping tails of sand sharks keeping cruising bodies alive.

  If she looked, she could see this, some of it, from her window. She would be the first to say how little it takes to make a thing all wrong.

  There was a second bed in the room when I got back to it!

  For two beats I didn’t get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin.

  She wants every minute, I thought. She wants my life.

  “You missed Gussie,” she said.

  Gussie is her parents’ three-hundred-pound narcoleptic maid. Her attacks often come at the ironing board. The pillowcases in that family are all bordered with scorch.

  “It’s a hard trip for her,” I said. “How is she?”

  “Well, she didn’t fall asleep, if that’s what you mean. Gussie’s great—you know what she said? She said, ‘Darlin’, stop this worriation. Just keep prayin’, down on your knees’—me, who can’t even get out of bed.”

  She shrugged. “What am I missing?”

  “It’s earthquake weather,” I told her.

  “The best thing to do about earthquakes,” she said, “is not to live in California.”

  “That’s useful,” I said. “You sound like Reverend Ike—‘The best thing to do for the poor is not to be one of them.’ ”

  We’re crazy about Reverend Ike.

  I noticed her face was bloated.

  “You know,” she said, “I feel like hell. I’m about to stop having fun.”