She didn’t answer. The shadows thickened round them. The lawn went from gray to black, the color drained out of the treetops and the sky grew bigger by the minute, as if invisible forces were inflating it with the stuff of the universe. He was looking up at the emerging stars — he had no choice, short of closing his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d looked at the stars, indifferent to any space that didn’t have a roof over it, and he was strangely moved to see that they were all still there. Or most of them, anyway, but who was counting? He could hear Eunice sobbing in the dark just to the left of him, and for a long while she didn’t say anything, just sniffed and snuffled, gagging on every third or fourth breath. Finally her voice came at him out of the void: “You always blame me for everything.”
Well, there was truth in that, he supposed, but no sense in getting into it now. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Eunice,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, though his heart was hammering and he foresaw every disaster. “I can’t get up. I can’t even move. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
There was no response. A mosquito lighted on his lower eyelid, soft as a snowflake, and he didn’t have the power to brush it away. “Listen,” he said, speaking to the sky and all the spilled paint of the stars, “how bad are you? Can you — do you think you can crawl?”
“It hurts,” she gasped, “Walt, it hurts,” and then she was sobbing again, a broken dry nagging rasp that cut into him like the teeth of a saw.
He softened his voice. “It’s okay, Eunice. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”
It was then, just as the words passed his lips, that the familiar music of Booters’ jingling tags rang out ecstatically from the far corner of the yard, followed by a joyful woof and the delirious patter of approaching paws. “Booters!” they cried out simultaneously. “Good girl, Booters. Come here, come here, girl!”
Eunice was expecting a miracle, nothing less — she was an optimist, always was, always would be — and the minute she heard the dog she thought of all the times Lassie had come to the rescue, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, Buck, Toto and she didn’t know who else. She was lying face-down on the lawn, and her cheek had begun to itch where it was pressed into the grass and the grass made its snaking intaglio in the flesh, but she didn’t dare move because of the pain in her hip and lower back that made her feel as if she were being torn in two. She was scared, of course she was, for herself and for Walt, but when Booters stood over her and began to lick the side of her face, she felt a surge of hope. “That’s a girl,” she said. “Now speak, Booters, speak!”
Booters didn’t speak. She settled her too-big paws down in the grass beside Eunice’s head and whined in a soft, puppyish way. She wasn’t much more than a puppy, after all, a big lumpish stupid dog of indeterminate breed that couldn’t seem to resist soiling the carpet in the hallway no matter how many times she was punished for it. The last dog they’d had, Booters the First, the original Booters, now that was a dog. She was a border collie, her eyes bright with alertness and suspicion, and so smart you could have taught her the multiplication tables if you had a mind to. It was a sad day when they had to have her put down, fifteen years old and so stiff it was like she was walking on stilts, and Walt felt it as much as she did herself, but all he said was “You measure your life in dogs, and if you’re lucky you’ll get five or six of them,” and then he threw the dirt in the hole.
For the next hour, while the mosquitoes had a field day with her face and the back of her neck and her unprotected legs, Eunice kept trying. “Speak, girl!” she said. “Go get help. Get help! Speak!” At first, Walt did his part too, growling out one command after another, but all Booters did was whine through her slushy jowls and shift position to be near whichever one of them was exhorting her the most passionately. And when the automatic sprinklers came on with a hiss of air and the first sputtering release of subterranean pressure, the dog sprang up and trotted over to the porch, smart enough at least to come in out of the rain.
He was dozing when the sprinklers came on. He’d long since given up on the dog — what did Eunice expect her to do, flag down an ambulance? — and he was dreaming about nothing more complicated than his bed, his bed and a glass of water, half a glass, anything to soothe his throat, when the deluge began. It was a mixed blessing. He’d never been so thirsty in his life, baked and bleached under the sun till he felt mummified, and he opened his mouth reflexively. Unfortunately, none of the sprinklers had been adjusted to pinpoint the gaping maw of a supine old man stretched out in the middle of the lawn, and while the odd drop did manage to strike his lips and even his tongue, it did nothing to relieve his thirst, and he was soon soaked through to the skin and shivering. And yet still the water kept coming like some sort of Oriental water torture until finally the pipes heaved a sigh and the flow cut off as abruptly as it had begun.
He felt bad for Eunice, felt powerless and weak, felt dead, but he fought down the despair and tried to sit up again. Or his brain tried. The rest of him, aside from the sting of his sun-scorched face and the persistent ache of his knees and the shivers that shook him like a rag, seemed to belong to somebody else, some stranger he couldn’t communicate with. After a while, he gave it up and called out softly to his wife. There was no response. Then he was asleep, and the night came down to lie on him with all its crushing weight.
Toward morning he woke and saw that Eunice had managed to crawl a few feet away; if he rolled his eyes all the way to the left, he could just make her out, a huddled lump in the shining grass. He held his breath, fearing the worst, but then he heard her breathing — or snoring, actually — a soft glottal insuck of air followed by an even softer puff of exhalation. The birds started in then, recommencing their daily argument, and he saw that the sky had begun to grow light, a phenomenon he hadn’t witnessed in ages, not since he was in college and stayed up through the night bullshitting about women and metaphysics and gulping beer from the can.
He could shake it off then. Push himself up out of the damp grass, plow through ten flapjacks and half a dozen sausage links, and then go straight to class and after that to the gym to work out. He built himself up then, every day, with every repetition and every set, and there was the proof of it staring back at him in the weight-room mirror. But there was no building now, no collecting jazz albums and European novels, no worrying about brushing between meals or compound interest or life insurance or anything else. Now there was only this, the waiting, and whether you waited out here on the lawn like breakfast for the crows or in there in the recliner, it was all the same. Nothing mattered anymore but this. This was what it all came down to: the grass, the sky, the trumpet vine and the pepper tree, the wife with her bones shot full of air and her hip out of joint, the dog on the porch, the sun, the stars.
Stan Sadowsky had tried to block the door on him the day he came to take Eunice away, but he held his ground because he’d made up his mind and when he made up his mind he was immovable. “She doesn’t want to be with you anymore, Stan,” he said. “She’s not going to be with you.”
“Yeah?” Stan’s neck was corded with rage and his eyes leaped right out of his head. Walt didn’t hate him. He didn’t feel anything for him, one way or the other. But there behind him, in the soft light of the hall, was Eunice, her eyes scared and her jaw set, wearing a print dress that showed off everything she had. “Yeah?” Stan repeated, barking it like a dog. “And what the fuck do you know about it?”