It was hard for Horton not to get angry about the matter, though Coots accepted the landscape and l’état gladly as they were away from wearying, impolite and expensive New York. The main point was he was old, damn it, and had been everywhere. He’d never had a thing against roots and a calm place, there was no crime in that. And there would be wide and free places to shoot. He could have a cat or two, his favorite creatures. He was so much like them it was nearly like having children. “The furred serpent,” Egyptians called them.
He did not tell Horton about Latouche.
Lawrence, Kansas, occupied them. Coots breathed in his “square” neighborhood: perfect, superb. The air might give him a few more years, a few more books. The scratchy, potent West. The “Johnsons”—trustworthy, minding their own business, nonjudgmental, quick to ally with a fellow in trouble, salt of the earth, loving of land, their house was yours, etc. — Coots had the forgotten shock of being waved at by citizens who didn’t know him from Adam. Howdy. Partners in the given day. Suitably, it came a “gusher” while they were there. The rain smelled sweet, rich. Thinking of the golden wheat lapping it up, breadbasket of the world, amber fields of, sun-browned boy with a string of bullheads, home-dried cut cane pole with black cotton line, drilled piece of corncob for a bobber, Prince Albert tin with nightcrawlers in wet leaves for bait.
Horton liked seeing the old fellow this happy.
They were out in Latouche-land too. Latouche was originally from Ellsworth.
It was the land of generals — Eisenhower, Bradley. And Frank James rode through Lawrence itself with the guerrilla slaughterers and Quantrill. Then Coots and T. S. Eliot over in St. Louis, not far from Twain. Ah, dreamed Coots on his porch, his thin hair blowing, to have fucked Huck when the country was young, about to strangle itself in the Big One, sun-swollen teenage corpses in the cornfield. Sherman sodomizes the South. John Brown began here first, Kansas, bloody Kansas, my Kansas. What did Latouche think of it? Had Latouche ever thought much at all?
The doctor was at his door and they walked out to see the Hudson purring at the curb. Barnes, in gym suit, was at the wheel saluting him. The Hudson was a gem all right. A space fiction of 1950, drop-shaped, chubby, svelte too. Barnes yelled something about being careful, he’d see Latouche at midnight. Coots noticed his massive legs. That boy could really hurt you if he wanted. Without him, the car gone, Latouche seemed smaller, with snowier hair, cautious and unbalanced. Coots helped him down the stairs to “the bunker,” leaning on the sharp door — like a vault door. Coots gasped, weak himself. Safe inside, Latouche took the sofa and looked about, out of his overcoat. They were alone. Horton was away for the night.
“I’ve brought this mini — tape recorder, if you don’t mind. It’s for Riley’s sake,” said Latouche.
Coots minded. His words were worth a great deal lately. The BBC thing, and NPR. He was to play a junkie priest in a movie soon too. Might as well ham it up toward the end.
Something had clicked one strange tired morning a month ago — he’d been very, very tired, from no direct cause. Coots was going to die soon, the fatigue told him quietly. Some ancient soft voice like that of the unknown man in the pool hall, but this was not an “episode.” This was the dead and dry tone of the inevitable. He didn’t know when he’d die, but something announced the beginning of the last lap. The public flies were on him, even worse.
“I thought you’d bring your forty-four/forty-five,” he said coolly. Coots could wither, with his scratchy voice and small eyes.
“But I did, in the other pocket.” Latouche drew the handsome brute out, size of a good man’s organ, laying it on the coffee table next to the minirecorder, a Toshiba. He punched it on. Coots’s anger left when he spied the weapon. Lovely little highwayman’s surprise, lovely.
“I’ve loaded the thing. Can’t quite figure why,” said Latouche.
“The mean streets. It’s a bad area.”
“No.” Latouche stared at Coots as if lost. He seemed really to have no idea why the thing was loaded. Septagonal barrel?
“Barnes knows you have a loaded gun?”
“No. He’s a deep pacifist, for gun control. New York law, of course.”
“I think he killed an Indian for you.” Coots smiled at the little reels turning inside the machine.
“He told you?”
“I gather things. Pretty nasty, and unethical, medically speaking, you know.”
“Oh, I do. It’s all a bad mysterious thing. And my fault. I found out that Riley has a dangerous loyalty to me. Almost an innocence. If only I could take it back. I’m very shallow with people, I’m afraid.”
“But I suppose you’ve been paid back. The blood of a very wrong Indian. Hmm?”
“Yes. And that wasn’t my first transfusion. I’ve had two others — one for each of my marriages — each done legally. Good Swiss blood, very.”
“What do you mean, for?”
“For Maggie and Verna both. I was slowing down and I did it for us. To keep up, to prance, to dance. They were both a good deal younger and I couldn’t give them an old coot dead on his lounge chair at the end of the day.”
“And they worked?”
“My word, yes! You couldn’t keep me down. It was amazing, scary, truly. I romanced them, read in erotic books” (Latouche blushed), “rowed down the river with them in the bow. I pleased them constantly, not just with flowers and gifts. In fact—”
“Just a second. I’ll have the martinis out. Save this.”
Coots prepared the martinis with more care than usual, dropping in Latouche’s big white onions, specially bought that afternoon. He waited longer, too, to diffuse the agitation the nonagenarian had got himself into. Coots — Saul on the road to Tarsus — suddenly had an overwhelming light on him; nothing like this had happened to him before. He liked Latouche, thoroughly. True friendship was attacking him. He was very afraid the fellow would get too wound up and stumble into the names, the “imagery,” and say cat or dog — wolf? snake? Negro? quail? He was close to saying everything, and in danger. He waited almost impolitely long. When he went out with the tray he stared at the gun. Let’s get that thing away, Coots decided. Which is what he did, turning it in his other hand admiringly, his martini hand freezing.
“Fine heft. A real buried treasure. The recoil must be a consideration. Jim ’Awkins and Long John Silver, eh?”
“What?”
“Treasure Island. Stevenson. What did you do as a boy in Kansas?”
“Oh, sure now. Even I read that one once, I think.”
“I dreamed of almost nothing but pirates, myself.”
“I dreamed of, can you believe it, Kansas itself. Simply re-pictured what was around me. The wheatfields, the blizzards, the combines, the awful summer sun. For dreams in my sleep, I never had any. I never dream.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. A man would die, flat out.”
“But it’s true. Freud would’ve had no use for me.”
“Well, surgery did. But what a fact.”
“The transfusions, though—” began Latouche.
“My friend, this is startling too. Yours worked. Mine didn’t. I tried to kick morphine with one. No go.”
Latouche couldn’t know that he had Coots entirely. Coots had a young healthy crush on him, wanting nothing.
“I’m very sorry.” Latouche drank deep. Coots was saddened by the unusual sloppiness, gin down the doctor’s chin, untended. “But my transfusions, let me tell you, I think, I know — poor Maggie, poor Verna — I was too much. How they loved me! What a heavenly benefit, their love. I could not leave them alone, Coots. Finally, I — now I say, the bed, the bed, the bed, the bed. The dances, the bicycling, the jogging, the too long mountain hikes in rain — they loved it for me. Then always the bed, the couch, the shower, even the garage, every which way, all hours! Then I’d be up with their breakfast, waking them. I’d have written up an oncological technique while they slept! Too much, too much! They died.”