Anyone in my position feels left behind. It’s normal. But you got to keep picking them up and throwing them; you have got to play the combinations or quit. What I’d like is a person, a person I could enjoy until she’s blue in the face. This, I believe. When the time comes, stand back from your television set.
I don’t know why Doc keeps an office in the kind of place he does, which is merely the downstairs of a not-so-good house. I go to him because he is never busy. He claims this saves him the cost of a receptionist.
Doc and I agree on one thing: it’s all in your head. The only exception would be aspirin. Because we believe it’s all in your head, we believe in immortality. Immortality is important to me because, without it, I don’t get to see my wife again. Or, on the lighter side, my dogs and horses. That’s all you need to know about the hereafter. The rest is for the professors, the regular egghead types who don’t have to make the payroll. We agree about my fling with the person. I hope to use Doc’s stethoscope to hear the speeding of the person’s heart. All this has a sporting side, like hunting coyotes. When Doc and I grow old and the end is in sight, we’re going to become addicted to opium. If we get our timing wrong, we’ll cure ourselves with aspirin. We plan to see all the shiny cities, then adios. We speak of cavalry firefights, Indian medicine, baseball, and pussy.
Doc doesn’t come out from behind the desk. He squints, knowing I could lie, then listens.
“My house in town is going to work fine. The attic has a swing-down ladder and you look from a round window up there into the backyards. You can hear the radios and see people. Sometimes couples have little shoving matches over odd things, starting the charcoal or the way the dog’s been acting. I wrote some of them down in a railroad seniority book to tell you. They seem to dry up quick.”
“Still window-shopping?”
“You bet.”
“If you don’t buy something soon, you’re going to have to give that up.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“What have you been doing?”
“Not a whole heck of a lot.”
“See a movie, any movie.”
“I’ll try.”
“Take a trip.”
“I can’t.”
“Then pack for one and don’t go.”
“I can do that.”
“Stay out of the wind. It makes people nervous, and this is a windy town. Do what you have to do. You can always find a phone booth, but get out of that wind when it picks up. And any time you feel like falling silent, do it. Above all, don’t brood about women.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Trust aspirin.”
“I’ve been working on my mingling.”
“Work on it some more.”
“Doc,” I say, “I’ve got a funny feeling about where I’m headed.”
“You know anybody who doesn’t?”
“So what do I do?”
“Look at the sunny side. Anyway, I better let you go. There’s someone in the lobby with Blue Cross.”
So I go.
By hauling an end table out to the porch, despite that the weather is not quite up to it, and putting a chair behind it, I make a fine place for my microwave Alfredo fettucini. I can also watch our world with curiosity and terror. If necessary, I can speak when spoken to, by sipping my icewater to keep the chalk from my mouth.
A car pulls up in front of Patwells’; Mrs. Patwell gets out with a small Samsonite and goes to the house. That saves me from calling a lot of travel agents. The world belongs to me.
I begin to eat the Alfredo fettucini, slow, spacing each mouthful. After eating about four inches of it, I see the lady from across the street, the person, on the irregular sidewalk, gently patting each bursting tree trunk as she comes. Since I am now practically a mute, I watch for visible things I can predict. And all I look for is her quick glance at Deke Patwell’s house and then a turn through her chain-link gate. I love that she is pretty and carries nothing, like the Chinese ladies Doc tells me about who achieve great beauty by teetering around on feet that have been bound. I feel I am listening to the sound of a big cornfield in springtime. My heart is an urgent thud.
To my astonishment, she swings up her walk without a look. Her wantonness overpowers me. Impossible! Does she not know the wife is home from Vegas?
I look up and down the street before lobbing the Alfredo fettucini to a mutt. He eats in jerking movements and stares at me like I’m going to take it back. Which I’m quite capable of doing, but won’t. I have a taste in my mouth like the one you get in those frantic close-ins hunting coyotes. I feel like a happy crook. Sometimes when I told my wife I felt this way, she was touched. She said I had absolutely no secret life. The sad thing is, I probably don’t.
I begin sleeping in the attic. I am alone and not at full strength, so this way I feel safer. I don’t have to answer door or phone. I can see around the neighborhood better, and I have the basic timing of everybody’s day down pat. For example, the lady goes to work on time but comes home at a different hour every day. Does this suggest that she is a carefree person to whom time means nothing or who is, perhaps, opposed to time’s effects and therefore defiant about regularity? I don’t know.
Before I realize it, I am window-shopping again. Each day there is more in the air, more excitement among the shoppers, who seem to spill off the windows into the doors of the stores. The sun is out and I stand before the things my wife would never buy, not risqué things but things that wouldn’t stand up. She seems very far away now. But when people come to my store windows, I sense a warmth that is like friendship. Any time I feel uncomfortable in front of a particular store, I move to sporting goods, where it is clear that I am okay, and besides, Doc is fixing me. My docile staring comes from the last word in tedium: guns and ammo, compound bows, fishing rods.
When I say that I am okay, I mean that I am happy in the company of most people. What is wrong with me comes from my wife having unexpectedly died and from my having read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson when my doctor and I were boning up on immortality. But I am watching the street, and something will turn up. In the concise movements of the person I’m most interested in, and in the irregularity of her returns, which she certainly despises, I sense a glow directed toward me, the kind of light in a desolate place that guides the weary traveler to his rest.
Today, she walks home. She is very nearly on time. She walks so fast her pumps clatter on our broken Deadrock sidewalk. She swings her shoulder bag like a cheerful weapon and arcs into the street automatically to avoid carelessly placed sprinklers. She touches a safety match to a long filter brand, as she surveys her little yard, and goes in. She works, I understand, at the County Assessor’s office, and I certainly imagine she does a fine job for those folks. With her bounce, her cigarettes, and her iffy hours, she makes just the kind of woman my wife had no use for. Hey! It takes all kinds. Human life is thus filled with variety, and if I have a regret in my own so far, it is that I have not been close to that variety: that is, right up against it.
I need a break and go for a daylight drive. I take the river road through the foothills north of Deadrock — a peerless jaunt — to our prison. It is an elegant old dungeon that has housed many famous Western outlaws in its day. The ground it rests on was never farmed, having gone from buffalo pasture to lockup many years ago. Now it has razor wire surrounding it and a real up-to-date tower like out east.