“I’ll buy the bottles,” Madeleine cried.
“That won’t solve it.”
She said, “I thought I’d seen everything.”
He stepped up onto Dean’s porch and rang the bell, nearly embedded in careless layers of house paint. He had a reassuring hand on Madeleine’s back. There was some sort of somber music coming from within. The door began to open. He wanted to help but knew that Dean liked doing this sort of thing himself. The door opened wide, revealing the interior of what was little more than a cottage, single story by necessity, with the kitchen and living room adjacent to the front door. Then Dean rolled around into view. He had a smile on his big soft face, and the weight of his head seemed to be sinking into the expanding circles of his neck. One hand poised birdlike over the controls of his wheelchair. None of the waywardness was gone from his sky blue eyes. On the television screen, an aircraft carrier was sinking with slow majesty. Homer was relieved to find that the dirge he’d heard at the door was not just something Dean was listening to.
Homer introduced Madeleine and Dean greeted her warmly, and they followed him into the house.
“That’s a new wheelchair,” commented Homer as he made his way past Dean. There was very little furniture but the gas fire log made a twinkling, habitable light, concealing the bareness of the room. “Brand-new,” said Dean. “Haven’t even knocked the paint off it.” There were some trophies on an old library table and milk crates filled with paperbacks, a cheesecake calendar on the far door, which led to the bathroom. The young model, naked on a white fur rug, was holding an automobile muffler.
“Front-wheel drive. Watch this.” Dean pivoted around the back side of the door and, with a graceful thrust of the chair’s motor, swung the door to and latched it. “Onboard battery charger,” he said, leading Homer into the living room. “Actually got to pick the color. That last chair wasn’t nearly enough for quads, more for limited-leg-use folks.”
Madeleine said, “I’ll bet you can go anywhere you want.” She seemed to like Dean. Maybe it was just for leaving Cecile. Homer was glad to see it. He knew Madeleine had had about all she could stand.
“Hell, I’m on the town again.”
He wheeled over in front of the television, on which the funeral of Princess Diana played: it was an anniversary on an odd year. “Madeleine, check this out: here she is again!” Homer didn’t know where this was headed but he was encouraged by the friendliness with which Dean addressed Madeleine.
There were slow panning shots of Diana’s cortege interspersed with scenes from happier times, including those with paramour Dodi Fayed at the beach; then the mayhem with the paparazzi and the fatal limousine chase with the drugged chauffeur ending in underground calamity.
Moving to the side, Homer determined that the shaking he saw in Dean’s body was caused not by grief but by laughter. Madeleine noticed and said sharply, “She died young!”
Dean said, “It’s a start.”
“What?”
Dean turned it off with his channel changer, and as the picture sank to a blue dot he said to Madeleine, “None of that would have happened if she’d been fat.”
Two years earlier, Dean had attended an after-game Cats-Griz party at the Nez Perce Inn, a dependably rowdy annual uproar, and fallen from a second-floor balcony into the parking lot with a freshly opened beer in his hand. He woke up the next morning, hungover and paralyzed. He had been out of work, but now he was running for mayor.
The commemorative bottles were lined up on the floor next to the north wall, receiving the last light of the day. Dean said, “There they are.”
“Let me take them back to Cecile,” Madeleine said reasonably.
“Over my dead body.” His lips were drawn flat across his teeth. He was quite menacing.
“Ohhkay.”
Homer could see that Madeleine was not happy. She would bolt at the first opportunity. All the mean people, all the open space, seemed to be closing in upon him at once.
“I don’t like disappointing you, Madeleine. Or Homer neither. But those bottles are mine.”
“No doubt they are, but I’m the one who let you take them, and now it seems I’m in trouble. You ought not to have done that to a lady. Besides which, you have two beautiful children and you continue to poison your relationship with them over your bottle collection. I’m an out-of-towner and I don’t get it. Cecile has quite a job with those children. She could probably use some help as opposed to battling over a collection of whiskey bottles.” Homer was impressed at the practical way Madeleine swallowed what must have been her distaste for Cecile.
“I’m lucky she isn’t feeding them sardines with the mother-seagull glove to make them think they can fly. Do tears embarrass you, Madeleine?”
“Not at all.”
“Homer’s seen all this before. I blubber, and he just goes with it.” He swept his hand down his face, but it continued to glisten. “The bottles don’t belong to Cecile. I bought those bottles full and I emptied them in my own home. They’re a monument to better days. So, here’s what you tell Cecile: no dice. Also, where’s the phone decanter?”
“Yakima,” Homer said, rather pleased he could supply this fact.
“I emptied that phone last New Year’s Eve. Cecile was upstairs watching the ball come down on Times Square. When she showed up, do you think she wished me happy New Year? No. She said, ‘Shit-faced in a wheelchair is a look whose time will never come.’ ”
Madeleine gazed at Dean for a long moment, with wonder or compassion Homer couldn’t say, though he struggled to understand. He seemed to expect that she would say something wise, should she finally speak, but all she said was, “I give up. Perhaps the bottles are happier with you.”
Madeleine couldn’t make it all the way that night, but Salt Lake City was a hub and gave her several options for the morning, and there were shuttles to the hotels near the airport. She assured Homer that she had loved visiting the West and learning firsthand that it was, as all had promised, breathtaking. And just think: once in Salt Lake, you could go direct or change in Memphis, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati— all those cities! — and still get home. Homer seemed downcast at these prospects, but she assured him it had been a treat catching up.
The Refugee
Errol Healy was going sailing to evade custody in one of the several institutions recommended for his care. He believed the modest voyage from his berth in Cortez across the Gulf of Mexico to Key West was something he could handle. All therapeutic routes in which he was described as having a labile affect and deficient insight had proved ineffective, and friends and professionals alike felt the trip might help him reconstruct events in a way positive to his well-being. In particular, his boss at the orange groves urged him to pull himself together or else, and he realized with a panic that losing his job would, under current circumstances, not be endurable. In contrast to the skepticism he directed at mental health professionals, he ascribed almost supernatural powers of healing to an old woman in Key West, Florence Ewing, whom he’d not seen for so many years that it was questionable whether she still lived in Key West or lived at all. In many of his plans these days, he was reduced to superstition, and the mestizos he managed in the groves, who had won his friendship and peculiar loyalty, were superstitious about all things, hanging their charms everywhere, from their old cars to the branches of orange trees. Errol, quite sensibly, thought it was absurd to describe someone who was drunk all the time as having “a labile affect and deficient insight.” Better to note that a do-or-die crisis seemed at hand and something had to be tried if body and spirit were to be kept together. His body was fine.