Again he went with her to the hospital. She drove this time, in a long old white car he had never laid eyes on before, a Plymouth.
Perry was still alive in his junction of tubing and wires, the monitors, the cannula, the intravenous lines, an undressed mountain. His eyes were turned up. They were cloudy like the eyes of the fish East would see in the Spanish markets just east of The Boxes, eyes that he never let himself look into, for what they had seen he knew he’d see one day. He let Marsha go to Perry’s body; he stood waiting by the door. The nurses eyed him, this mysterious black boy: what did he mean? There were black nurses, young women he noticed in pale, flowery blue; there were black doctors and black men in hairnets pushing mop buckets along the floor. But this black boy with his bare head in this fat old white man’s room, trying quietly to comfort the widow-to-be, what was that? He did not hide from their eyes.
He let Marsha have her time, and when she left his side and went to go sit at the window, where she cried with a little chuffing sound, he approached Perry’s bedside.
“Have they given up on him?”
Marsha took a breath. “There isn’t much to give up, Antoine. All that wiring on him, it’s keeping him alive. When they take it off, then he dies. It’s that simple.”
“When they gonna do it?”
“Now,” Marsha said. “I shouldn’t have. You don’t have to stay.”
East looked down the pupils of Perry’s eyes as if he was looking into a hole in the street, as if there were depths to the man, and in the depths there would be what the fish knew, what the fish saw: the end. The being swept up, the laying down. Sharply, as if she were here right now, he saw the Jackson girl in the street, her eyes: the seeing of the last thing and the fixing on it. He shuddered. Perry was a color part his wind-scorched red and part the opalescent white of paint, the white of the winter sky. East backed away. He stood again by the doorway, and when the two nurses returned, they had to push in past him, so much had he forgotten where he was.
“Mrs. Slaughter?” the younger of the two nurses said. The black one. The older nurse waited quietly, deferentially, much like a nun. “Are you ready?”
Again Marsha took her moment. “Yes,” she said quietly.
“The doctor can be here in a few minutes.”
Marsha stood and came to East in the doorway. Her body, the opposite of Perry’s, female, small, her tiny birdlike bones visible in her wrists, the hands darkened with age. Her brown hair and dark eyes going gray.
“You don’t have to stay, Antoine,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
Words in his throat curled under themselves. He shook his head.
It took less time than East would have guessed. The needles came out of Perry’s body, and the breathing tube with its scarlet cloak of mucus scraped back up out of the mouth with only a little urging. Marsha had reviewed her signatures on the paper without very much looking, and she touched Perry and moved back to the window without very much looking at him either.
“It’s what he wanted,” the older nurse said by way of consolation, and Marsha laughed once, a hollow pop.
Out the window was the highway. Winter cars rushed past in their coats of grime.
“Push this button if you need anyone,” the nurse said.
It was as if Marsha had fallen into a trance, and East, after a minute, moved again toward the bedside. Was this it? Suddenly he was eager to know. He bent over Perry, watched though he had been unable to watch Ty, unable to stay where his brother and the ones before him lay and suffered.
Perry’s breathing was soft and tinkly, glasslike, like a stone rattling in a bottle as it rolled. It tumbled and slowed, tumbled and slowed. It isn’t taking long, East thought. There isn’t much more. Once Perry’s breath nearly ended on the upstroke. Then he let the air out — another roll, another tumble. East put his hand near Perry’s hand, and he leaned and looked again down the barrel of Perry’s eyes. The last thing anyone saw. He supposed he was willing to be it. He put the fingers of his hand atop Perry’s knuckles, and Perry let out a half cough, out of his chest, which was high and white and furred with hairs like bare winter trees on a mountain. The stone in the bottle rolled again. The eyes swam in their clouds, their baths of white. Then the bottle bumped up on something, rolled no farther, and the mountain knew it too, what the fish knew, that last thing of things.
21
Then again it was windy and warm. Like summer warmth after the snow, like California warmth: another wave of southern air, men walking in shirtsleeves, cars with their windows open and music spilling. East kept the range closed. He was alone. No one pulled into the lot, now muddy, the tracks shimmering with melting snow under the blue sky. Melting water sounding everywhere. No one stopped. He supposed it was Marsha the regulars were greeting now, now that Perry was dead. A man’s sickness you discussed with other men. When a man died, you spoke to his wife at last. But no cars at the house either. He did not cross the road. He was not sure how to approach the house or if, now that Perry was gone, she would receive him.
He worked at the building and the yard in the warmth that might not return, he knew. He worked like it was his own. He aired the building, cleaned the storeroom where the many jugs and trays of balls gave out their waxy smell. He put the stepladder up — sixteen feet, it frightened him to climb it — and cleaned the lights, replacing two old tubes that spat and flickered. These were the lights that would kill you — that’s what Fin said once, dull your eyes, take the color out of paint. He dropped the old tubes into the bin and watched them break into curls of glass, puffs of white powder rising from them.
In the afternoon he put on a pair of hip boots Perry had left and wheeled a Dumpster around the range. In shadows lay thick slush like the kids drank with syrup, and it still lay heavy in the lee of the berm with its shading fence. But where the sun hit the ground, he could find the litter in the mud: chips bags, candy wrappers, sandwich papers, sweat towels, plastic flasks, cigarette packs, bloody socks, popper vials, zipper pulls, beer cans, stray gloves. Some of it windblown, most of it dropped. Each time he cleaned the range, he learned things he hadn’t known: what they brought and dropped was what the range didn’t sell. Cherry cigars, green tubs of chew. Wrappers from Chicken Lively — what was that? Glass pipes, someone getting high — he had ideas who. He pinched the pieces with the picker and raised them high for a look. The boots were enormous on his feet, and he tightened the laces until they bit rings around his ankles.
The streak of yellow-orange across the south. A rent in the clouds, or maybe their end.
He filled two bags with trash before dark. The bags weren’t right. Some awkward, shifty plastic, thin and bulgy, not tough like the regular bags. Maybe they were for something else, not trash. But Perry wasn’t here to ask about it. East lugged them out one at a time, opening the gate and scuffling down the shrubby bank to the bigger Dumpster. Then he stood outside eating a bagel dry and looking at the daylight dwindling down the road to his left. A thin, worried-looking dog came padding down the edge of the road from the east as if it were following the fading light. It looked at East and lowered its mutt head. East tossed the rest of the bagel, and it gave it a sniff, then picked it up and took it along. Silent thing, intent.
He left the boots outside the door. Inside, he put the roll of weak black plastic bags away in the storeroom and took his good gloves off.
He vacuumed the sofas and the two raggedy rugs. Swept out the corners.