"You're so mean," she says. She gets out of the car and slams the door. He's parked too close to the concrete cube of a building and she has to sidle until she's past the trunk of the car, and he knows she knows he's looking at her, seeing how she's now so big she has to sidle. He knows she thinks he parked close to the building on purpose, to make her sidle, and maybe he did.
He wants a cigarette.
"Well, Biz, old buddy, it's just you and me."
Biz lies down on the backseat and closes his eyes. He may get up on his back paws and shuffle around for a few seconds when Mary puts on a record and tells him to dance, and if she tells him (in a jolly voice) that he's a bad boy, he may go into the corner and sit facing the wall, but he still shits outside.
The time goes by and she doesn't come out. Ray opens the glove compartment. He paws through the rat's nest of papers, looking for some cigarettes he might have forgotten, but there aren't any. He does find a Hostess Sno Ball still in its wrapper. He pokes it. It's as stiff as a corpse. It's got to be a thousand years old. Maybe older. Maybe it came over on the Ark.
"Everybody has his poison," he says. He unwraps the Sno Ball and tosses it into the backseat. "Want this, Biz? Go ahead, knock yourself out."
Biz snarks the Sno Ball in two bites. Then he sets to work licking up bits of coconut off the seat. Mary would have a shit fit, but Mary's not here.
Ray looks at the gas gauge and sees it's down to half. He could turn off the motor and unroll the windows, but then he'd really bake. Sitting here in the sun, waiting for her to buy a purple plastic kickball for ninety-nine cents when he knows they could get one for seventy-nine cents at Walmart. Only that one might be yellow or red. Not good enough for Tallie. Only purple for the princess.
He sits there and Mary doesn't come back. "Christ on a pony!" he says. Cool air traces over his face. He thinks again about turning off the engine, saving some gas, then thinks fuck it. She won't bring him the smokes, either. Not even the cheap off-brand. This he knows. He had to make that crack about those Little Debbies.
He sees a young woman in the rearview mirror. She's jogging toward the car. She's even heavier than Mary; great big tits shuffle back and forth under her blue smock. Biz sees her coming and starts to bark.
Ray unrolls the window.
"Is your wife a blond-haired woman?" She puffs the words. "A blond-haired woman wearing sneakers?" Her face shines with sweat.
"Yes. She wanted a ball for our niece."
"Well, something's wrong with her. She fell down. She's unconscious. Mr. Ghosh says he thinks she might have had a heart attack. He called nine-one-one. You better come."
Ray locks the car and follows her into the store. It's cold inside after the car. Mary is lying on the floor with her legs spread and her arms at her sides. She's next to a wire cylinder full of kickballs. The sign over the wire cylinder says HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME. Her eyes are closed. She might be sleeping there on the linoleum floor. Three people are standing over her. One is a dark-skinned man in khaki pants and a white shirt. A nametag on the pocket of his shirt says MR. GHOSH MANAGER. The other two are customers. One is a thin old man without much hair. He's in his seventies at least. The other is a fat woman. She's fatter than Mary. Fatter than the girl in the blue smock, too. Ray thinks by rights she's the one who should be lying out on the floor.
"Sir, are you this lady's husband?" Mr. Ghosh asks.
"Yes," Ray says. That doesn't seem to be enough. "I sure am."
"I am sorry to say but I think she might be dead," Mr. Ghosh says. "I gave the artificial respiration and the mouth-to-mouth, but . . ." He shrugs.
Ray thinks of the dark-skinned man putting his mouth on Mary's. Frenching her, sort of. Breathing down her throat right next to the wire cylinder full of plastic kickballs. Then he kneels down.
"Mary," he says. "Mary!" Like trying to wake her up after a hard night.
She doesn't appear to be breathing, but you can't always tell. He puts his ear by her mouth and hears nothing. He feels air moving on his skin, but that's probably just the air-conditioning.
"This gentleman called nine-one-one," the fat woman says. She's holding a bag of Bugles.
"Mary!" Ray says. Louder this time, but he can't quite bring himself to shout, not down on his knees with people standing around, one of them a dark-skinned man. He looks up and says, apologetically, "She never gets sick. She's healthy as a horse."
"You never know," the old man says. He shakes his head.
"She just fell down," says the young woman in the blue smock. "Didn't say a word."
"Did she grab her chest?" asks the fat woman with the Bugles.
"I don't know," the young woman says. "I guess not. Not that I saw. She just fell down."
There's a rack of souvenir tee-shirts near the kickballs. They say things like MY PARENTS WERE TREATED LIKE ROYALTY IN CASTLE ROCK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEE-SHIRT. Mr. Ghosh takes one and says, "Would you like me to cover her face, sir?"
"God, no!" Ray says, startled. "She might only be unconscious. We're not doctors." Past Mr. Ghosh, he sees three kids, teenagers, looking in the window. One of them is taking pictures with his cell phone.
Mr. Ghosh looks where Ray's looking and rushes at the door, flapping his hands. "You kids get out of here! You kids get out!"
Laughing, the teenagers shuffle backwards, then turn and jog past the gas pumps to the sidewalk. Beyond them, the nearly deserted downtown shimmers. A car goes by pulsing rap. To Ray the bass sounds like Mary's stolen heartbeat.
"Where's the ambulance?" the old man says. "How come it's not here yet?"
Ray kneels by his wife while the time goes by. His back hurts and his knees hurt, but if he gets up, he'll look like a spectator.
The ambulance turns out to be a Chevy Suburban painted white with orange stripes. The red jackpot lights are flashing. CASTLE COUNTY RESCUE is printed across the front, only backwards. So you can read it in your rearview mirror. Ray thinks that's pretty clever.
The two men who come in are dressed in white. They look like waiters. One pushes an oxygen tank on a dolly. It's a green tank with an American flag decal on it.
"Sorry," this one says. "Just cleared a car accident over in Oxford."
The other one sees Mary lying on the floor, legs spread, hands to her sides. "Aw, gee," he says. Ray can't believe it.
"Is she still alive?" he asks. "Is she just unconscious? If she is, you better give her oxygen or she'll have brain damage."
Mr. Ghosh shakes his head. The young woman in the blue smock starts to cry. Ray wants to ask her what she's crying about, then knows. She has made up a whole story about him from what he just said. Why, if he came back in a week or so and played his cards right, she might toss him a mercy fuck. Not that he would, but he sees that maybe he could. If he wanted to.
Mary's eyes don't react to a penlight. One EMT listens to her nonexistent heartbeat, and the other takes her nonexistent blood pressure. It goes on like that for awhile. The teenagers come back with some of their friends. Other people too. Ray guesses they're drawn by the flashing red lights on top of the EMT Suburban the way bugs are drawn to a porch light. Mr. Ghosh runs at them again, flapping his arms. They back away again. Then, when Mr. Ghosh returns to the circle around Mary and Ray, they come back and start looking in again.
One of the EMTs says to Ray, "She was your wife?"
"Right."
"Well, sir, I'm sorry to say that she's dead."
"Oh." Ray stands up. His knees crack. "They told me she was, but I wasn't sure."
"Mary Mother of God bless her soul," says the fat lady with the Bugles. She crosses herself.
Mr. Ghosh offers one of the EMTs the souvenir tee-shirt to put over Mary's face, but the EMT shakes his head and goes outside. He tells the little crowd that there's nothing to see, as if anyone's going to believe a dead woman in the Quik-Pik isn't interesting.
The EMT pulls a gurney from the back of the rescue vehicle. He does it with a single quick flip
of the wrist. The legs fold down all by themselves. The old man with the thinning hair holds the door open and the EMT pulls his rolling deathbed inside.
"Whoo, hot," the EMT says, wiping his forehead.
"You may want to turn away for this part, sir," the other one says, but Ray watches as they lift her onto the gurney. A sheet has been neatly folded down at the end of the gurney. They pull it all the way up until it's over her face. Now Mary looks like a corpse in a movie. They roll her out into the heat. This time it's the fat woman with the Bugles who holds the door for them. The crowd has retreated to the sidewalk. There must be three dozen, standing in the unrelieved August sunshine.
When Mary is stored, the EMTs come back. One is holding a clipboard. He asks Ray about twenty-five questions. Ray can answer all but the one about her age. Then he remembers she's three years younger than he is and tells them thirty-four.
"We're going to take her to St. Stevie's," the EMT with the clipboard says. "You can follow us if you don't know where that is."
"I know," Ray says. "What? Do you want to do an autopsy? Cut her up?"
The girl in the blue smock gives a gasp. Mr. Ghosh puts his arm around her, and she puts her face against his white shirt. Ray wonders if Mr. Ghosh is fucking her. He hopes not. Not because of Mr. Ghosh's brown skin, Ray doesn't care about that, but because he's got to be twice her age. An older man can take advantage, especially when he's the boss.
"Well, that's not our decision," the EMT says, "but probably not. She didn't die unattended--"
"I'll say," the woman with the Bugles interjects.
"--and it's pretty clearly a heart attack. You can probably have her released to the mortuary almost immediately."
Mortuary? An hour ago they were in the car, arguing.
"I don't have a mortuary," he says. "Not a mortuary, a burial plot, nothing. Why the hell would I? She's thirty-four."
The two EMTs exchange a look. "Mr. Burkett, there'll be someone to help you with all that at St. Stevie's. Don't worry about it."
"Don't worry? What the hell!"
*
The EMT wagon pulls out with the lights still flashing but the siren off. The crowd on the sidewalk starts to break up. The counter girl, the old man, the fat woman, and Mr. Ghosh look at Ray as though he's someone special. A celebrity.
"She wanted a purple kickball for our niece," he says. "She's having a birthday. She'll be eight. Her name is Tallie. She was named for an actress."
Mr. Ghosh takes a purple kickball from the wire rack and holds it out to Ray in both hands. "On the house," he says.
"Thank you, sir," Ray says.
The woman with the Bugles bursts into tears. "Mary Mother of God," she says.
They stand around for awhile, talking. Mr. Ghosh gets sodas from the cooler. These are also on the house. They drink their sodas and Ray tells them a few things about Mary, steering clear of the arguments. He tells them how she made a quilt that took third prize at the Castle County fair. That was in '02. Or maybe '03.
"That's so sad," the woman with the Bugles says. She has opened them and shared them around. They eat and drink.
"My wife went in her sleep," the old man with the thinning hair says. "She just laid down on the sofa and never woke up. We were married thirty-seven years. I always expected I'd go first, but that's not the way God wanted it. I can still see her laying there on the sofa." He shakes his head. "I couldn't believe it."
Finally Ray runs out of things to tell them, and they run out of things to tell him. Customers are coming in again. Mr. Ghosh waits on some, and the woman in the blue smock waits on others. Then the fat woman says she really has to go. She gives Ray a kiss on the cheek before she does.
"You need to see to your business, Mr. Burkett," she tells him. Her tone is both reprimanding and flirtatious. Ray thinks she might be another mercy-fuck possibility.
He looks at the clock over the counter. It's the kind with a beer advertisement on it. Almost two hours have gone by since Mary went sidling between the car and the cinderblock side of the Quik-Pik. And for the first time he thinks of Biz.
*
When he opens the door, heat rushes out at him, and when he puts his hand on the steering wheel to lean in, he pulls it back with a cry. It's got to be a hundred and thirty in there. Biz is dead on his back. His eyes are milky. His tongue is protruding from the side of his mouth. Ray can see the wink of his teeth. There are little bits of coconut caught in his whiskers. That shouldn't be funny, but it is. Not funny enough to laugh, but funny in a way that's some fancy word he can't quite think of.
"Biz, old buddy," he says. "I'm sorry. I forgot all about you."
Great sadness and amusement sweep over him as he looks at the baked Jack Russell. That anything so sad should still be funny is just a crying shame.
"Well, you're with her now, ain't you?" he says, and this thought is so sad--yet so sweet--that he begins to cry. It's a hard storm. While he's crying it comes to him that now he can smoke all he wants, and anywhere in the house. He can smoke right there at her dining room table.
"You're with her now, Biz, old buddy," he says through his tears. His voice is clogged and thick. It's a relief to sound just right for the situation. "Poor old Mary, poor old Biz. Damn it all!"
Still crying, and with the purple kickball still tucked under his arm, he goes back into the Quik-Pik. He tells Mr. Ghosh he forgot to get cigarettes. He thinks maybe Mr. Ghosh will give him a pack of Premium Harmonys on the house as well, but Mr. Ghosh's generosity doesn't stretch that far. Ray smokes all the way to the hospital with the windows shut and Biz in the backseat and the air-conditioning on high.
Thinking of Raymond Carver
Sometimes a story arrives complete--a done thing. Usually, though, they come to me in two parts: first the cup, then the handle. Because the handle may not show up for weeks, months, or even years, I have a little box in the back of my mind full of unfinished cups, each protected in that unique mental packing we call memory. You can't go looking for a handle, no matter how beautiful the cup may be; you have to wait for it to appear. I realize that metaphor sort of sucks, but when you're talking about the process we call creative writing, most of them do. I have written fiction all my life, and still have very little understanding of how the process works. Of course, I don't understand how my liver works, either, but as long as it keeps doing its job, I'm good with that.
About six years ago, I saw a near-miss accident at a busy intersection in Sarasota. A cowboy driver tried to wedge his bigfoot truck--the kind with the huge tires--into a left-turn lane already occupied by another bigfoot truck. The guy whose space was being encroached upon hit his horn, there was a predictable screech of brakes, and the two gas-guzzling behemoths ended up inches apart. The guy in the turn lane unrolled his window and raised one finger to the blue Florida sky in a salute that is as American as baseball. The fellow who had almost hit him returned the greeting, along with a Tarzan chest-thump that presumably meant Do you want a piece of me? Then the light turned green, other drivers began to honk, and they went on their way with no physical confrontation.
The incident got me thinking about what might have happened if the two drivers had emerged from their vehicles and started duking it out right there on the Tamiami Trail. Not an unreasonable imagining; road rage happens all the time. Unfortunately, "it happens all the time" is not a recipe for a good story. Yet that near-accident stuck with me. It was a cup with no handle.
A year or so later, while eating lunch in an Applebee's with my wife, I saw a man in his fifties cutting up an elderly gent's chopped steak. He did it carefully, while the elderly gent stared vacantly over his head. At one point the old guy seemed to come around a little, and tried to grab the utensils, presumably so he could attend to his own meal. The younger man smiled and shook his head. The elderly gent let go and resumed his staring. I decided they were father and son, and there it was: the handle for my road rage cup.
Batman and Robin Have an Altercation
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Sanderson sees his father twice a week. On Wednesday evenings, after he closes the jewelry store his parents opened long ago, he drives the three miles to Crackerjack Manor and sees Pop there, usually in the common room. In his "suite," if Pop is having a bad day. On most Sundays, Sanderson takes him out to lunch. The facility where Pop is living out his final foggy years is actually called the Harvest Hills Special Care Unit, but to Sanderson, Crackerjack Manor seems more accurate.
Their time together isn't actually so bad, and not just because Sanderson no longer has to change the old man's bed when he pisses in it or get up in the middle of the night when Pop goes wandering around the house, calling for his wife to make him some scrambled eggs or telling Sanderson those damned Fredericks boys are out in the backyard, drinking and hollering at each other (Dory Sanderson has been dead for fifteen years and the three Fredericks boys, no longer boys, moved away long ago). There's an old joke about Alzheimer's: the good news is that you meet new people every day. Sanderson has discovered the real good news is that the script rarely changes. It means you almost never have to improvise.
Applebee's, for instance. Although they have been having Sunday lunch at the same one for over three years now, Pop almost always says the same thing: "This isn't so bad. We ought to come here again." He always has chopped steak, done medium rare, and when the bread pudding comes, he tells Sanderson that his wife's bread pudding is better. Last year, the pudding was off the menu of the Applebee's on Commerce Way, so Pop--after having Sanderson read the dessert choices to him four times and thinking it over for an endless two minutes--ordered the apple cobbler. When it came, Pop said that Dory served hers with heavy cream. Then he simply sat, staring out the window at the highway. The next time he made the same observation, but ate the cobbler right down to the china.
He can usually be counted on to remember Sanderson's name and the relationship, but he sometimes calls Sanderson Reggie, the name of his older brother. Reggie died forty years ago. When Sanderson prepares to leave the "suite" on Wednesdays--or, on Sundays, after he takes his father back to Crackerjack Manor--his father invariably thanks him, and promises that next time he will be feeling better.
In his young years--before meeting Dory Levin, who civilized him--Sanderson's pop-to-be was a roughneck in the Texas oilfields, and sometimes he reverts to that man, who never dreamed he would one day become a successful jewelry merchant in San Antonio. On these occasions he is confined to his "suite." Once he turned his bed over and paid for his efforts with a broken wrist. When the orderly on duty--Jose, Pop's favorite--asked why he did it, Pop said it was because that fucking Gunton wouldn't turn down his radio. There is no Gunton, of course. Not now. Somewhere in the past, maybe. Probably.