Jung’s face flashed with alarm, and as Hector walked up the slate path he heard behind him the muted thump of the car’s power locks. At the front door he rang the bell and a uniformed home nurse answered. Hector said his name, adding that he wasn’t expected, and when the nurse appeared again she opened the door and led him upstairs. The house was dim and chilly, the narrow Tudor windows dingy with water stains, the air musty with old carpeting and the lingering gas of reheated food. The bedroom door was wide open and even from the hall Hector could smell the antiseptic sickroom smell, then beneath it the old-flesh smell, the piss-and-half-wiped-shit-and-fungal smell of someone spoiling from within, and he almost turned around then to leave when a raspy, cold-blooded voice weakly called out: “What are you waiting for?”
Hector stepped in the doorway. Old Rudy was sitting up in bed, dressed in a gray hospital gown, a tube for oxygen strapped about his face. Beside the bed stood an air tank in its caddy and a rolling cart topped full of medications. A plastic bag of urine lay on the floor, a line from it snaking up underneath the sheets. His bony shoulders showed through the wide neck of the gown and his once-sturdy flesh had receded, his skin stretched back onto his frame like an artificial hide. He was a menacing physical specimen, this jagged piece of Irish-German rock, and had only been known as Old Rudy because of his prematurely gray hair. But now almost all the hair was gone, leaving just the fins of his temples, the shiny, translucent skin showing through. For a moment Hector wondered what his father, Jackie, would have looked like had he lived to old age. Would his wide, ruddy cheeks have shrunken like this? Would his hand have withered even more? Would he still insist that Hector stay at his side always, to be his best buttress and squire, to sing to in his larking, fanciful tenor?
“I figured you’d come around,” Old Rudy said, having to take a rushed extra half-breath after every fourth or fifth word. “You should make your move, before I croak.”
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Oh yeah? What did you come for, then, to pay your respects? To wish me well?”
Hector showed him the thin brick of bills, saying it was from Jung and that the rest of it was coming but would be a little while. He placed the money on the rolling cart. Old Rudy didn’t look at it, or seem at all to care, breathing out with some effort through his mouth like Hector had already begun pressing a board against his chest. Old Rudy groaned, “You think I’m worried about a few thousand bucks?”
“Seems like two weeks ago you were.”
“Two weeks ago I was feeling like I wasn’t going to die right away. Now even when the piss flows out of me I’m sucking wind.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Everything,” he said, but before he could elaborate he was besieged by a long fit of nasty coughing. When he finally settled down, his eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and he gestured to a large lidded styrofoam cup on the cart. Hector gave it to him and Old Rudy took some sips through the straw, the drink the same color as the liquid in his catheter bag. He said wearily to Hector, “You don’t look much different than you did.”
“You’re not seeing my insides.”
“Fair enough,” he said, handing back the cup to Hector. His voice was hollowed out from the coughing, and his body seemed emptied, too, husklike, its weight hardly pushing back into the pillows. “How long has it been?”
“Maybe fifteen years.”
“You’ve been cleaning buildings since?”
“Other things, too. But pretty much.”
“That’s my doing, I guess.”
“I could have moved on, if I wanted construction work.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” Hector said.
“How come?”
“I guess cleaning suits me, after all.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?” He meant Winnie, of course, and Hector began to realize that the old man had simply wanted to talk about her, and had thus reached out to him in the only way he knew how.
“I do.”
“You’re the last person who spent any real time with her,” Old Rudy said. “She and I just argued constantly. I stopped seeing her like everybody else did. Like you probably did.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“Was she? You’re lucky. The last time I saw her, I had to see her in the morgue. There wasn’t much left of her, above the chest. Really no face at all. You know how I identified her? She wore a ring of her mother’s, a sapphire with diamonds around. When I think of her now I just try to see her hand. It was colorless and pale but it was perfect. Maybe they washed her, but there wasn’t even any blood on it. You think they did that? You think they washed her?”
“I don’t know,” Hector answered, recalling that it was he who most often washed the corpses in the Graves Unit, as it never much bothered him, initially with a hose and then, if necessary, with a bucket and rag. In fact it had heartened him to see them come clean, even as brutally ruined as they were, to leave them again, at least in one small way, pristine. Maybe that was mercy enough.
The home nurse came in to take Old Rudy’s vitals, before giving him a shot. Hector made to leave but Old Rudy waved at him to hold on. The nurse turned him over and swabbed a spot on his sunken rump and stuck him with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She checked his air and refilled his drink cup and changed out his bag and told him it was time to rest.
“Rest for what?” he said.
“For whatever you want, honey,” she answered, and then she left.
Old Rudy was fading fast and turned his head to Hector. “Tell your friend Jung not to bother with the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore. I won’t be around anyway.”
“Okay,” Hector said. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“I want to be left alone,” Hector said, realizing that for the first time in years he was meaning we, as in he and Dora. Which was why he would have never asked before. “That’s all.”
“What, you think that’s up to me?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” Old Rudy said, almost smirking at him now. “Who the hell gets left alone?”
In the car, Jung had been ecstatic with what Old Rudy let pass, but then berated Hector for not trying to claw back the money they’d brought after the dying man fell asleep.
If anyone could glide through the flak, slip past all disturbances, it was the estimable Jung, but Hector had to wonder if he and Dora could ever do the same. Some did get left alone, didn’t they? It seemed he and Dora had just broken into the clear. They were no more or less special than anyone else (well, maybe a little less), and maybe all it would take was for them to stay here inside Hector’s little rooms, one-to-one, hidden from further view.
Dora called out that the steaks would be ready soon and Hector strode to the bedroom holding only a hand towel to cover himself. She wolf-whistled after him. He almost blushed, unaccustomed to being naked before her in the light. In the bedroom, courtesy of Dora, were freshly folded clothes on top of the rickety thrift-store bureau, his usual T-shirts, but he decided to look for something better in the closet, which she’d also organized, hanging up even his dungarees and his several shirts. He would put on a proper one for her, and maybe for himself, too. It wasn’t half bad, to button oneself up in something clean and creased that didn’t smell of the unreachable corners of a bar and his own sloughed skin. Of course he normally laundered his own clothes, but he never paid attention to which mini-box of soap he’d get from the dispenser, and he noticed that Dora slipped a small white sheet into the dryer of their commingled things and now he smelled of lilacs, or what he thought were lilacs, the same waft as from the narrow side yard of his family’s house in Ilion, where his mother tended her flowering vines that exploded each spring in densely petaled ropes of white.