She nods.
“Well, this time we’re doing one. I want to admit him to the hospital tonight and schedule the test for tomorrow, just as soon as we can.”
“Did he have a heart attack?”
“Only a mild one, if that. These mimic his earlier EKG results. But the recurring pains … an angio’s the only way we’ll know what’s going on.”
While Ariyeh phones Reggie to tell him she’ll be staying with her father tonight, I sit by the gurney holding Bitter’s hand. “What happened?” I ask.
“I always told you my grave’s waiting for me, there in a leafy corner of the Magnolia Blossom.”
“What happened, Uncle?”
“Creepy ol’ Crespi grinning in the shadows — ”
“Uncle!”
“Got so bad this time I nearly threw up. Called Ariyeh on your gadget.”
“I’m glad.”
“Don’t let ‘em stick no wires up inside me.”
“Uncle, they need to see what the trouble is.”
“Inside should stay inside. Good Lord packed it that way.”
“And what happens when it gets fouled up? These people can help you.”
“Had a friend once in N’Awlins, he went to a back alley boneshop for his heart pain. Doctor fed him a baked potato with some red sprinkles on it. Turns out, them sprinkles was ground-up juju, and next thing my man knows, scorpions is pinching his guts from the inside, spitting their poison into his veins.”
“Uncle, the state of Texas doesn’t recognize voodoo as standard medical procedure. And you don’t have any enemies, right?”
He closes his eyes. “What I’m really feared of?”
“Yes?”
“I’m feared none of it works, Seam. Not the hoodoo, not the fancy machines.”
I pat his shoulder.
“I tried so hard to kill Grady’s demon. Put fish bile in his whiskey once, shook it all up …”
“You’ve got a good heart, Uncle.” I kiss his cheek. “That’s what’s going to work here.”
“Reggie says hi,” Ariyeh says.
Bitter snorts.
“Looks like you had quite a night.”
“Big city living,” I tell her. “You know.”
She narrows her eyes but doesn’t say any more.
The orderlies move Bitter to a small room on an upper floor. Another patient shares the space, an old white man who has apparently damaged his liver with drink. He’s watching Mussolini give a speech at high volume on the History Channel.
Bitter remains attached to the heart monitor. The nurses want to keep him flat, so it’s hard for him to pee. He has to lie on his side and use a plastic bottle. His roommate rises and pisses every ten minutes or so, only partially shutting the bathroom door. We hear every drop. A horse drilling a grassy field. When he comes back to bed, he turns the fascists up.
Just past dawn, a big orderly who looks like Frederick Douglass wheels Uncle down a chilly hall to the angio room. Bitter’s half-asleep, a blessing. He mutters but doesn’t fight. Buhler, the cardiac specialist, a gruff, no-nonsense German Texan who smells of bagels and coffee, lets Ariyeh and me stay in the room. Swiftly, as casually as you’d scan a morning paper, he runs a tube through an artery in Uncle’s groin, worming it all the way into his chest. On a nearby monitor we see the grid in Bitter’s heart. It’s like a city planner’s map. Arteries branching this way and that. Buhler points to a pinched spot — a feeder road next to the larger byways. “See there? About eighty percent blockage in the left main. There’s some obstruction in a smaller one, too. He’s lucky you brought him in when you did.”
As the orderly sails Bitter back to his room, Buhler stops us in the hallway. “Usually, a case like this, I’ll stick shunts in those arteries, open them up while I’m in there doing the angiogram, but the location was tricky. Normally, a man his age — ” He rubs his neck. “I recommend against surgery and try to treat the problem with medication. I worry about an elderly man’s stamina, fear the possibility of stroke. But his blockage is well-advanced, and he seems fairly sturdy.”
“I don’t want him maintained” Ariyeh says. “I want him fixed. He’s always had a lot of energy. It would pain him to be impaired, and if there’s a chance you could solve the problem outright — ”
Buhler adds, “Sometimes, too, in older patients, we see memory loss after they’ve been on a heart-lung machine. You should be aware of that risk, all right?”
“All right …”
“Inadequate oxygen, fat like little eggshells — ”
“Best-case scenario?” Ariyeh interrupts.
“Best-case, he’s completely back to normal, feeling younger than he has in years.”
“Then that’s the case we’re going to go with.”
She has a good cry after lunch, in the hospital cafeteria. Amid the clatter of plastic trays and Frito bags, she leans her forehead on my shoulder. “What did it get him? What?”
“Tell me, honey.”
“All his politeness. His goddam obeisance. Yessir this, yessir that. Don’t want no trouble. Nosir, not me, sir. Now look. Shit, T, he’s going to die. And what did he ever ask from life?”
“He’s not going to die.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Precisely.”
“He just sat there on that rotting old porch and took it. Day after day.”
I shove aside my cottage cheese. “My mama …” But my throat catches, and I have to swallow to go on. “She didn’t just sit. She went out and tried to snatch whatever she thought she deserved … and I don’t think she died happy, Ariyeh. I really don’t. I don’t think, finally, she felt any more satisfied than Bitter does. Maybe even less so.”
“So none of it matters? Nothing we do?”
“I’m not saying that. I don’t know what I’m saying. Just that maybe — ”
“Don’t. Really. Thanks for trying, but — ”
“I know. I know. I’m just … I’m someone who’s asked a lot of life, right? Scrambled all over, and now, maybe because I’m tired, I feel I’m just me, you know? Just me. Like … what the hell was that all about? But not in a bad way.”
“You’re not making much sense.”
“No. I guess not. I’m sorry. Let’s go see how he’s doing, okay?”
Hitler screams at a crowd. “Jesus,” Ariyeh says. She turns to Bitter’s roommate. “Do you think you could turn that down?”
The old man, toothless, grins. “Feller’s a kick in the pants, ain’t he?” He stabs the remote.
Ariyeh asks, “How are you, Daddy?”
“Scorpions ain’t biting yet.”
“Huh?”
He looks at me. His heart monitor beeps. It’s like a toy truck running in circles. “I mean I’m fine. I want to go home.”
“They’re going to fix you up, Daddy.”
“Know they are. That’s why I want to go.”
His roommate gets up to piss.
“Niagara Falls,” Ariyeh mutters.
“Lord, if my peter shot an arrow like that,” Bitter says, “I’d water the city till all the sewers bloomed.”
Later, Ariyeh naps in a corner chair. Herr Horse-Piddle snores into his pillow. Bitter calls me to his bedside. “Got a hoo-raw for you, Seam. Sit down.”
I help him sip water through a pink plastic straw.
“‘Member I told you your daddy run off ‘bout the time my wife did?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Well. What I didn’t say is, they snuck off together.”
“Uncle!”
“Didn’t know that at first. But a month or so pass, Cass writes me from Oklahoma City asking for money, lets on she’s with Jim. He’s up there trying to scratch out a living loading furniture, roaming the southside clubs at night. Didn’t make no sense to me ‘cause she never could abide him — or so I thought. Said he’s just a bum. Guess there’s more passion in her hatred than she ever felt for me, and maybe it flipped one day into something like love. Hell if I know. Anyways, never saw either of them again. Heard, about five years later, Cass had died in Kilgore — she’d hooked up with some oil man there. Drank herself to death. Jim, I’m not sure. Far’s I know, he vanished up near Tulsa somewheres.”