The first thread of steam rose from the coffee. Erin poured two cups and leaned against the counter. She grimaced at the stale, scorched Folgers. Said she needed a favor.
I smirked. “You wanna get remarried? Want me to be Lafayette’s emergency contact?”
Erin fingered some coffee off the edge of her lips and said, “Found Lafayette a donor.”
The night Betty was shot, Lafayette had ambled into their house after work to find a pair of men jacked up on methamphetamine holding her at gunpoint in their living room while robbing the place. Lafayette startled the man training the .357 on Betty into pulling the trigger. The other one, a black guy, managed to make the back door, but the ol’ boy who put a bullet into Betty’s sternum tripped and fell. Lafayette had just enough time to retrieve the revolver and put a round through the back of the man’s skull as he scrambled away. Lafayette chased the other meth head down two backyards over, lodged a bullet in his spine while he climbed over a limestone retaining wall I’d installed for Gray Sherman, the neighborhood queer, the summer before. The man fell unarmed and off Lafayette’s property. Before the trial was over, the black one died in ICU at the hospital, which elevated the case from attempted murder or manslaughter, to committed. Lafayette probably would’ve won against either charge given the circumstantial grounds of his case and his standing in the community. He stunned everyone when he insisted on a plea bargain, took two years for involuntary manslaughter. The best most of us could figure was Lafayette just wanted to move past the ordeal.
Erin and I were already three years into our divorce when Lafayette was admitted to the minimum-security wing at Parchman. A little over six months into his two-year sentence he nearly keeled over during a physical. His blackout led to a biopsy and the diagnosis that sarcoidosis had completely scarred his upper respiratory system. Lafayette’s sentence was commuted to probation by Governor Fordice, courtesy of the urging of Judge Polk, who’d played football with Lafayette at Ole Miss. The convenience mattered little: as a seventy-year-old felon still technically serving out a manslaughter sentence, Lafayette had a lung allocation score — determined by a number of variables set forth by the United Network for Organ Sharing — that was too low for any viable shot of finding a donor in the seven months the doctors gave him to live.
Erin sipped her coffee and explained how she had discovered this loophole called the Good Samaritan clause, which allowed a donor to bypass any UNOS regulations and choose whatever nonfamily recipient he or she wanted at her own discretion. In Lafayette’s case, that donor was a Pentecostal preacher dying of liver disease. The preacher’s church had burned down last year. Erin had set all this up over the phone from Stillwater. Said the man was crazy, obsessed with all the old martyrs or something, had agreed to donate his lung to Lafayette on the grounds he turn over the deed to his house to the First Pentecostal Church of Bodock so that the ministry could continue in his absence.
“Huh.” I nodded at the rest of the house. “So this place is going to be filled with snake-handlers this time next year?”
“They’re not those kind of Pentecostals.”
“So you want Lafayette to trade his house for a lung,” I said, “and you explained all this to Lafayette over the phone yesterday morning, after which he shot himself in the head?”
“It was his ear.” Erin considered the window above the sink, the white oak limb framed there like a pillar of cigar ash. “What am I supposed to do, sit on my fat ass and do nothing? He’s all I’ve got.”
Our marriage had not so much dissolved as imploded after a streak of impulsivity landed me between the thighs of a stripper named Sugartits one night a month shy of our five-year anniversary. We’d married young, while she was still studying elementary education at Ole Miss, a compromise I wasn’t aware of until she enrolled at OSU. I was still building pinewood couch frames then at National Furniture out on Highway 54. We weren’t living hand-to-mouth, but I’d lost out on a supervisor promotion one Friday afternoon to a man I still regard to this day as a fundamental douche bag. Because I was young and dumb-ass enough back then to think Lafayette was the barometer by which Erin measured me, I said hell with it and drove a few counties over to DeWerks La’Rey — spelled backward: Yer Al Skrewed — and spent a good chunk of my paycheck crafting a dollar-bill hula skirt out of Sugartits’s thong. Got drunk and self-deprecated enough for it to seem perfectly justified to hand over what was left of my paycheck if Sugartits would just accompany me to a nearby motel.
Erin explained her favor. There was no guarantee she would be granted enough of a heads-up to fly back in time. I assured her I’d see that Lafayette made it to the transplant center two hours north of here.
Sometime later we ended up on the kitchen floor, our clothes on to protect against the cold brown linoleum. It wasn’t the first time since the divorce: every couple of months or so when she came back home we’d get together to fulfill the more carnal of marital conditions that somehow manage to slip through the cracks of a divorce.
“Have you thought about starting a landscaping business?” she asked. “You’ve done a hell of a job on my father’s yard. Seriously.”
I told her I hadn’t.
Erin stayed at Lafayette’s through the weekend to get everything squared away with the preacher, make sure things with Lafayette were settled down. Monday morning she headed back to Stillwater to teach her evening composition class. The class canceled on account of some arctic front from Canada pairing up with a wet weather system before sweeping through and shutting down the whole state of Oklahoma, delaying all incoming and outgoing flights. The storm then wound its way southeastward, gathering strength the entire time.
The preacher went into a coma Wednesday evening about the time the storm reached Mississippi and dumped six inches of ice and knocked power out across the Mid-South. Hospitals would retain electricity but the Pentecostal preacher had a living will instructing not to put him on life support. The preacher lasted thirty-six hours before he suffocated early Friday morning. The Memphis International Airport was closed when the lung was harvested a little after eight a.m.
When I wheeled into Lafayette’s yard Friday morning his lung was hurling through the air in a helicopter a few thousand feet above us. Lafayette was standing on his roof in a pair of Clorox-stained boxers, a loosely knotted noose around his neck, the end of the rope tied to a branch of the sweet gum stretching its bare, knotty limbs out over the front of the house. His wrists were cuffed behind his back. Gumballs from the tree overcrowded the gutters and piled up the slanted roof, accumulated around his bare feet. The tree had largely survived the storm but the branch he’d tied the rope to had sustained substantial damage. Probably Lafayette would take the branch with him to the ground and fracture a hip instead of stopping midair and snapping his neck in that pivotal moment when the rope and gravity became acquainted. Well goddamn, I thought. Lafayette’s efforts to mount the roof had pulled loose the stitches in his ear; skinny swirls of blood colored the white bandage like a peppermint. I stepped out of the truck and asked him what the shit it was he thought he was doing.
“Had been contemplating killing myself,” he said.
“Yeah, I gathered that much. You forget about us fishing?”
“Nah,” he said. His breath pulsed like a chimney pipe in the chilly morning air. This was the dead of February, when fish hunkered down at lake bottoms, barely moving in their dormancy. But Erin had insisted on the fishing euphemism, something about perceived reality and helping her father to feel as comfortable as possible about not riding with her to his transplant surgery. Last night, I went over to check on Lafayette after the hospital pager Erin had given me alerted us that the next page would mean the lung had been harvested. Instead of sticking around after a supper of hot dogs roasted on clothes hangers over the gas heater in his living room, I headed home to bed. Did not give thought to leaving the old man unsupervised and fending for himself in a powerless house, only the specter of his murdered wife for company.