He put everything away and closed the lid of the trunk and shoved it back under the pile of empty feed bags and then scattered some of them over it again. He had money stashed in a bunch of places in the barn. Under bales of hay in fruit jars. Inside old feed bags in Calumet baking powder cans with plastic lids. Hidden from his wife. Inside the house, too. He didn’t know how much. Enough.
He got the lantern and shut the door to the harness room and slid the latch closed again. He went out through the hall of the barn, his steps soft in the dry dirt and crushed bits of hay. He slipped out between the two big doors but left the crack open. Wasn’t any need to close it. He’d be back out here tomorrow. He had a cow that needed a shot for her cough and he’d have to find the needle in all the shit he had stashed out here. No telling where it was. Then he’d have to get her in the chute and maybe tie her ass up. Sometimes he wished he had a head gate. It would make it a lot easier to fool with one. Especially for something like that. Maybe he ought to just go ahead and get one. He could stick a thermometer up his bull’s ass if he had a head gate and there wouldn’t be anything the bull could do about it except take it. He had a catalog in the house and he thought he could get a good one for about eight hundred. Then he’d have to get some big posts, dig some post holes, put the posts in the holes, get some concrete, mix it up, pour it in the holes, bolt the head gate to the posts once the concrete set up. It’d be a lot of trouble. Sure would make it a lot easier to give a cow a shot, though. They always liked to try and kick your head off when you did that to them.
The ground was muddy between the house and the barn. Cortez blew the lantern out before he got to the back porch, and he stopped and looked up. The sky was still cloudy and he was hoping the forecast was right. There was some faint rumbling far off in the sky, and he saw blooming yellow light somewhere a long way down the country toward the east. It was very dark. He set the lantern on the back step and went on in.
As soon as he looked at her he knew she was dead. The TV was still playing, and she was still sitting in front of it, but now she was leaned over sideways in the wheelchair, with one of her arms out at an odd angle, and just as still as could be. He leaned over and lowered the volume some.
He walked around in front of her and looked down at her. She was looking at nothing. She wasn’t breathing. He could see her scalp plainly through the thin white hair on top of her head. She was seventy-six years old. She had been twenty-two when Cortez married her. And he was only eighteen then. She must have had another stroke.
There was a daybed in the front room and Cortez sat down on it. He glanced at the TV. That old woman with the sex show was telling somebody who had called in how to lubricate somebody with some jelly and Cortez wondered what flavor they used. He looked at his wife and reached out his hand to touch her on the arm. It was cool. He pulled his hand away. Well. She was gone. After all this time. She couldn’t cuss him any more or call him to the house on her bullhorn. But now he’d have to bury her.
He didn’t know who to call first, Lucinda or the funeral home. Maybe the sheriff’s office? No. He didn’t want them out here. But they might have to come take pictures. Seemed like they had to whenever somebody died at home. They didn’t used to, but he thought now they did.
He wondered how long she’d been dead. He wondered how long he’d stayed out in the barn. Couple of hours. Reading some of those Hustler magazines again before he cleaned his gun. Piddling around looking at that stuff. But when was the last time he actually saw her alive? He tried to think. She was alive this afternoon around four, when he stopped in to get a handkerchief. Wasn’t she? Hell, he didn’t really know. The TV had been going. Which had always meant she was sitting there watching it. But how did he know she wasn’t already dead then? He hadn’t talked to her. She hardly ever turned around when he walked in the room anyway, so it was hard to say. She might have been dead since lunchtime, since he didn’t actually talk to her at lunchtime, figuring she could roll her wheelchair into the kitchen and get something out and microwave it. She kept stuff you could microwave. Macaroni and cheese. Stuffed potato skins.
Why hell. What was the last thing she’d said, and when did she say it? He had to think. He came in here about the middle of the morning and she was alive then, he knew, because he told her he wished to hell it would rain, and she said he’d already said that about a million times and wished he’d shut up about it. And then she’d picked up the remote and flipped the channel over to Bonanza. It was one he’d seen before, the one where Hoss went temporarily blind, so he didn’t watch it. He went on out into the garden and started picking tomato worms off his tomatoes and pulling suckers […].
Hell. No telling when she died. She might have been dead since this morning. It was about eight o’clock now. If that was true, she might have been dead for ten hours. He touched her again to see if she was stiff. Only a little.
Shit. He didn’t know what to do. The sheriff came out when all that happened with Raif. But that was a long time ago. God. Damn near forty years. He didn’t know who to call. He’d have to go find Lucinda’s number if he called her. And she might not be in. He thought she went out sometimes with that retard. She had an answering machine that usually answered if you called. He never had called much after he found out that she was living in Atlanta with a retard. Afraid he might answer.
And where was the damn number at? No telling. He’d have to look. He got up and walked over to the wall and flipped the switch to turn the overhead light on. His dead wife sat there in her chair. The bottoms of her legs were very dark. He looked at that and understood that it was blood that had drained from her upper body down. It was the same thing that happened to a pig when you hoisted him up by his hind feet and cut his throat, only he was upside down and all the blood ran the other way.
There was a table with a bunch of envelopes and junk mail and a small bound book he thought might hold phone numbers for various businesses and people, emergency numbers, that sort of thing. He never had looked through her stuff. A long time ago she used to order flower bulbs and seeds over the phone from some nursery up in Tennessee. He flipped open the book and started looking through it. He didn’t have any idea what Lucinda was going to say. He knew they hadn’t been real close. Not close like a mother and daughter ought to be. Lucinda rarely wrote. Rarely called. Didn’t much want to come home for Christmas. Sometimes didn’t. Just stayed in Atlanta with that retard. Had some excuse or other. And when they were here they made him nervous anyway, because that retard cussed something awful and sometimes he barked like a damn dog and his head jerked and his legs and his feet and he was just a blinking mess. No wonder they didn’t have any grandchildren.
He found the old nursery numbers. Some of them had been scratched through. He found some recipes tucked into the pages, one for cat-head biscuits. He pulled that one out and laid it aside. He knew how to make gravy but he never had been able to make biscuits. She could, when she used to be able to cook and get around in the kitchen. Made good ones, too. For about fifty-four years. His wouldn’t be worth a shit.
He raised his head and looked at her. And the phone rang. Loudly. Right beside him. Without even thinking he almost picked it up. But then he thought, Hell, what if it’s Lucinda? It rang again, and he started to pick it up. It was probably just one of her friends. The other old biddies she talked to and checked on throughout the day. They called each other so much that Cortez had gotten to where he almost never answered the phone in his house. It rang again. He had his hand on it. Whoever was calling was going to hang up if he didn’t answer it in a few more rings. It wouldn’t be Lucinda, surely. Hell, she never called. It rang again and he picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, Daddy,” Lucinda said.
“Oh,” he said. Oh crap. “Uh. Hey.”
“What are you doing?” she said. Sounded pretty happy.
“Not much,” he said. He sat on the day bed. “Setting on the day bed.”
He looked
at the TV.
“Watching TV,” he added.
He could hear some kind of music in there with Lucinda and he could hear what sounded like a bunch of people talking, too. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t know how he could tell her like this, unexpectedly, without being ready, exactly what was going on. He didn’t know how to do that. He wasn’t good on stuff like that. Never had been.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I just called to check on y’all. What’s Mama up to?”
“She’s done conked out on me,” he said. Okay. There it was. She could pick up on it if she wanted to. But she didn’t.
“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Kind of early for her, isn’t it? I thought she always stayed up half the night watching TV.”
“I reckon she was wore out,” he said.
“I got you,” Lucinda said. Somebody laughed really loudly behind her and somebody else yelled something that sounded like Bust it open, baby, just bust it open! Lucinda said, “Well, I hate I missed her. I know I ought to call and check on her more. How’s she been doing on that new medicine the doctor gave her?”
“She never did say.”
“Tell her I called,” Lucinda said.
“Is it hot in Atlanta?” Cortez said.
“Lord yes,” Lucinda said. “It’s been awful. Albert’s gotten a really good tan working in the yard this summer. You and Mama should come visit sometime. You could get somebody to drive you to Memphis and it’s only a one-hour flight. It’s about fifty minutes, actually. I live ten minutes from the airport and I’d be right there to pick you up when you got off the plane. Albert would love to show you his new paintings.”
“I ain’t getting on no airplane,” Cortez said.
“Oh, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “There’s nothing to it. I’ve taken Albert on flights with me before. You know if he can do it, you could, too.”
“I thought he throwed up on one one time.”
“He just had a little bit of an upset tummy that day.”
“Why don’t you come over here?” Cortez said, not knowing what else to say, trying to decide what to do. It was kind of awkward over the phone like this, because you were having to juggle two things at once: keep up your end of the conversation by listening to whatever she was saying while at the same thing trying to figure out what the hell to do while she was talking. And then you had to come back with something, wham, bam! It didn’t leave you enough time to think. He was kind of sorry he’d picked up the phone now. He could have just let it ring.
“I can’t right now. We’re just too busy. We’re having a dinner party tomorrow night and we’re getting ready for that. Albert’s got a pretty bad cold and we’re trying to get him over that. Maybe we can get over at Christmas and see y’all for a few days. Or maybe we could come over sometime around Thanksgiving.”
“Well,” Cortez said. He started to just go on and blurt it out, but he didn’t think he could do that. He wished to hell she hadn’t died right before Lucinda called. Lucinda hadn’t called in about two months that he knew of. She might have called that he didn’t know of. For all he knew his wife might have talked to her every day while he was out of the house because he stayed out of the house all he could. It was tougher in the winter. You could only sit in the barn so much without some kind of heat. It got cold as hell out there in the wintertime. Ice would freeze in a bucket. And in the cows’ watering troughs. You had to take a hammer to it and bust it.
“What you been doing?” Lucinda said.
Cortez was glad for that question because he had a ready answer and had secretly been hoping that she’d ask him what he’d been doing. Besides killing flies on the front porch. And picking worms off his tomatoes. And listening to the damn TV screaming night and day like some unwanted houseguest he wasn’t allowed to kill.
“I been waiting on my pond to fill up.”
“Pond? You mean that old muddy thing down in the pasture the cows wade around in?”
“Naw. This is a new one. I just had it dug this summer. It’s up on the hill.”
“Whereabouts up on the hill?”
“Up there on the ridge by the road. Up there where all them big white oaks was.”
“What did you do with the trees?”
“He bulldozed em down.”
“Who did?”
“Newell Naramore.”
“All those big white oaks?”
“Yep.”
“Oh my God, Daddy. Do you know what that timber was worth?”
“I don’t give a shit what it was worth. I wanted a pond built.”
“Where did you find this Newell Naramore?”
“Schooner Bottom. He used to live over in Muckaloon.”
“Oh. Well, how big is it?”
“It’s pretty big. He took out two hundred and sixty-seven cubic yards of dirt.”
“I don’t know how much that is,” Lucinda said. He could hear her blowing the smoke from her cigarette back out in Atlanta. In a bar. No telling who all was in there with her. No telling what they’d do when the bar closed. He figured it was dangerous over there. He didn’t figure it was safe to walk the streets.
“It’s a shitload,” Cortez said. “I’m gonna put some catfish in it soon as it fills up. I just been waiting for it to fill up. We had a big rain today. Supposed to get some more tomorrow.”
“You just can’t get good catfish in Atlanta,” Lucinda said.
It sounded like a whole bunch more people had just come in because it was getting louder in there with her. It sounded like they turned the music up, too. It was getting harder to hear her. Maybe the battery in his hearing aid was getting low. He’d have to check it. But on the other hand, sometimes he didn’t mind being almost deaf. If you were almost deaf, there was a lot of shit you didn’t have to listen to.
“Maybe you can come fishing later,” Cortez said.
“Maybe we can.”
“Does he know how to fish?”
“His name is Albert, Daddy. And I can show him how.”
“He needs to be careful he don’t get finned,” Cortez said.
“Albert is very smart, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “And I’ve told you over and over that he can’t help what he says sometimes.”
“Yeah, but he sure does cuss a lot,” Cortez said. “I don’t guess you can take him to church much.”
“Daddy. I’ll hang up on you,” she said. Then she muttered, “Goddamnit. Call over there to see how you’re doing and you start that shit up again.”
“Where you at?” he said.
“I’m at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead. In the bar. We come over here for drinks sometimes.”
“You using their phone?” Cortez said.
“Whose phone?” Lucinda said.
“I don’t know. Hotel phone, I guess.”
“I’m on my cell phone, Daddy.”
“Oh,” Cortez said. He’d heard of them. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was like his mind was going totally blank. He kept looking at his dead wife sitting there in her wheelchair. He started to ask Lucinda if she was dating any regular men, but he already knew she didn’t like that question, so he didn’t ask her that. She was strong headed sometimes. Ran away from home once when she was seventeen. Said nobody understood her and nobody could understand what her life was like or how horrible it was. The police picked her up in Memphis and they got her back home. Cortez knew she’d been lucky not to be found naked and raped and stabbed to death in a field out by the airport.
“Okay. I was just calling to check on y’all,” Lucinda said. “I guess I was feeling kind of guilty because I hadn’t called in a while. I just get busy with everything I’m doing. Work. Albert. You know.”
“I don’t know nothing,” Cortez said. “I know I’m gonna walk over in the morning and see how much it rained in the pond.”
“Well. I don’t want to get too close to it. I never did learn how to swim. Wish I had. I’d like to take a cruise, but I’d be scared to get on a ship in case it
sank.”
“They got lifeboats,” Cortez said.
“Did you ever see Titanic?”
“Naw.”
“If you had, you’d know what I’m talking about.”
He could tell that she was getting ready to get off the phone and he still didn’t know what to do. Just to blurt it out seemed wrong. To have to call her back tomorrow and tell her that her mother had died last night seemed wrong, too.
There was silence on the line, and Cortez couldn’t speak. He could hardly hear her with all the shit going on wherever she was.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I better let you go.”
“Well,” Cortez said. “Okay.”
“Y’all think about coming over to Atlanta sometime, now.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He wished she’d shut up about it. He wasn’t getting on an airplane. Not unless they held a gun on him and tied him down in it. And they’d play hell if he knew they were coming for him and he could get to his Thompson. Splinter the whole damn wall of the barn with that son of a bitch. He could see himself shooting it out with these imaginary people, whoever they were. He wondered if anybody else ever thought of the crazy shit he did. Probably not. But then again, if he did, why didn’t other people?
Lucinda spoke to somebody for a moment and he thought how strange it was to be listening to a small part of her life in Atlanta, sitting right here at home with his dead wife. Lucinda was out in a place in Georgia with lights and tables and chairs with some people he didn’t even know, drinking. Whooping it up. Probably laughing and telling jokes. Not caring that she didn’t have a regular man. Content that she had a retard. And slept in the same bed with him. He heard her say something else and then she was speaking to him again.
“I think we’re closing our tab, Daddy, so I guess I’ll let you go. You take care of Mama, okay?”
“I’ll take care of her,” he said.
Then he hung up the phone. Right in her ear. Same way he did everybody. Even Toby Tubby.