She thought of his father. “Well, in your case it’s definitely a white man.”
“For most people it is. That’s why we need more songs.”
“Life! It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it.”
“I wouldn’t have voted for it. I wouldn’t give it any stars. It’s like getting a book where the sexy passages are already underlined. Who wants that?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant. But she kissed him on his shoulder anyway. “Wouldn’t it be lovely just to fly out of here and live far away on a cloud together?”
“To be birds and see Gawwd!”
She had given up trying to determine his facetiousness level. She suspected it was all just habit and his true intent was unknown even to himself. “Yes! We could be birds in a little bird-house that had books and we could read them!” she exclaimed.
Dench turned his head quickly on the pillow to stare at her. “Perhaps we have that already,” he said. “But darlin, we ain’t seeing God.”
“Because God is off in some cybercafé, so tired from all those biblical escapades that now he just wants to sit back and Google himself all day.” She pulled her hand away from Dench since he had not reciprocated with his own. “If he’s not completely deaf to our cries, he’s certainly deaf in one ear.”
“For sure. Not just the hardware of the inner ear but the hairs and jelly further in: all shot.”
“You’re a strange boy.”
“You see? We’re getting past the glaze and right down to the factory paint here.”
She let a few days go by and then she resumed her stopping by at Milt’s on her coffee runs. Because summer had set in she was now bringing Dench iced coffee, but invariably the ice cubes would melt and she would just drink the whole thing herself. Milt still heated up his muffins but often needed her to drive him to doctors’ appointments as well as to other places, and so she ran his errands with him and watched him greet all the salespeople, the druggist, the dry-cleaning girl, all of whom he seemed to know. “I’m so glad my wife’s daughters are gone,” he said at one point as they were driving home. “I dread the house with them there. I’d rather just return to the cave of my own aloneness!”
“I know how you feel.”
“You have no idea,” he said and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek before he got out of the car. “They are as cold as they come. I mean, even the ice on Mars melts in springtime!”
Once she took the old man swimming. They went to a beach farther north on the lake, at a state park on a weekday, when there was no one there. “Don’t look!” he squealed as he took off his shirt and limp-jogged into the water, where he was safer than he was on land. He was not in bad shape, merely covered with liver spots, and his stomach was only slightly rounded and his breasts about the size of her own.
“How’s the water?” she called to him. A line of silver at the water’s edge sparkled in the sun. The sky was the deep belligerent blue of a hyacinth.
“Expect the unexpected!” he called back. She could see he’d once been a strong swimmer. His arms moved surely, bold, precise. Of course, when you expected the unexpected, it was no longer unexpected, and so you were not really following instructions. She admired his gameness. As she approached the water she saw that the silver line along the sand was the early die-off of the alewives: washed ashore gasping and still flipping on your foot as you walked. The dead lay in a shiny line upbeach, and if one of the smelt-like fish died closer to the waves it caught the light like the foil of a gum wrapper. Another putrid perplexity of the earth. She dove out anyway — to swim among the dying. She would pretend to be an aquarium act, floating among her trained, finned minions; if she imagined it any other way it was all too disgusting. She bobbed around a bit, letting the olive waves of the lake crest up and wash over her.
They picnicked back on shore. She had brought cheese sandwiches and club soda and difficult peaches: one had to bite sharply into the thick fuzzed skin of them to get to the juice. They sat huddled in their separate towels, on a blanket, everything sprinkled with sand, their feet coated in it like brown sugar.
“Too bad about the dead fish,” Milt said. “They’ll be gone next week but still. So may I!” He grinned.
Should she say “Don’t talk like that”? Should she in her bathing suit with her tattoos all showing feign a bourgeois squeamishness regarding conversations about death? “Please don’t talk like that,” she said, peach juice dripping down her chin.
“OK,” he said obediently. “I’m just saying: even Nature has her wickednesses.” He took out a flask she didn’t know he carried and poured her a little into a paper cup. “Here, have some gin. Goes in clean and straight — like German philosophy!” He smiled and looked out at the lake. “I was once a philosopher — just not a very good one.”
“Really?” The gin stung her lips.
“Terrible world. Great sky. That always seemed the gist.” He paused. “I also like bourbon — the particular parts of your brain it activates. Also good for philosophy.”
She thought about this. “It’s true. Bourbon hits a very different place than, say, wine.”
“Absolutely.”
“And actually, red wine hits a different place from white.” She sipped her gin. “Not that I’ve made an intense study of it.”
“No, of course not.” He smiled and rinsed gin around on his gums.
Back at his house he seemed to have caught a chill and she put a blanket around him and he grabbed her hand. “I have to go,” she said.
A sadness had overtaken him. He looked at KC then looked away. “Shortly before my wife died she sat up in bed and began to shout out the names of all the sick children who had died on her watch. I’d given her a brandy and she just began reciting the names of all the children she had failed to save. ‘Charlie Pepper,’ she cried, ‘and Lauren Cox and Barrett Bannon and Caitlin Page and Raymond Jackson and Tom DeFugio, and little Deanna Lamb.’ This went on for an hour.”
“I have to go — will you be OK?” He had taken his hand away and was just staring into space. “Here is my number,” she said, writing on a small scrap of paper. “Phone me if you need anything.”
When he did not reply she left anyway, ignoring any anguish, locking the door from the inside.
Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready. Life got you sad. And then blood started coming from where it didn’t used to come. People revisited the deaths of others, getting ready to meet them in the beyond. KC herself imagined dying would be full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done. Though all was never said and done. That was the other part about death.
“I had the dog all day,” complained Dench, “which was no picnic. No day at the beach.”
“Well, I had Milt. He’s no kiss for Christmas.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about all the time you spend with him.”
“According to you, you never know what to think.”
“It just seems to me that if things are going to take they shouldn’t take so long. By the way, I’ve found out what that odor is.”
“Really?”
The smell, even with the warm weather ostensibly drying things out, was still in the walls. There was the occasional scurrying of squirrels in the attic. It was surprising Cat didn’t jump up and start barking.
“The rot of a bad conscience.”
“I really doubt that.”
“Well, let me show you.” He opened the hatch to the crawl space that constituted the attic. He pulled down the folding ladder and motioned for her to climb it. “Take this flashlight and move it around and you’ll see.”