Black Elvis (9 page)

"Cold enough for you?" I said.

"Come on, Lenny," she said. "I don't get paid enough to listen to 'cold enough for you.'"

"You ever know anyone with
AIDS
?"

"Yeah." She lit up a cigarette and offered me one, which I took. She's got pretty hair. Graduated a few years ago with a degree in art, still trying to figure out what to do with it. "Why?"

"I'm taking in a roommate. Friend of my son's."

"I'm so sorry. I heard about him."

"It's
OK
. Life wasn't treating him so good. Now we got this other guy on our hands, see. You think it might be dangerous?"

"Not if you practice safe sex."

"That's not even funny. I mean silverware and stuff. Dishes. Just breathing the same air. Stuff hangs. I saw this program once where they showed what a sneeze does. Droplets in the air. You ever heard of
HAART
?"

"
Heart
like valentines? Like the kind that are always getting broken?"

"It stands for
highly active antiretroviral therapy
."

"I know some of those words."

"Otherwise known as the cocktail approach."

"You mean pills."

I nodded and pointed to my glass, which was empty. I could feel a pretty good glow getting started, too, and I had an idea. The Early Times bottle behind the bar was about half full. I decided I would spend the afternoon killing it off and that would be it—after that I was through with drinking. I'd always known that someday I'd quit, and today seemed as good as any other. "I know a little something about the cocktail approach myself," I said.

Nicole smiled prettily. She had on big hoop earrings and a black turtleneck that showed off those small, high breasts of hers. "What do you know about it?"

"I know that it only works for so long."

I spent the whole afternoon at The Deadwood. Around dinner time, I drunk-drove over to the house, passing by the time-and-temperature sign outside the First National Bank, which announced −15 in numbers lit yellow against the dark sky. As I parked, I was conscious of all the normal lives around me in those 1920s-era houses, and I leaned on my horn just to wake them up a little. Ours was on Bank Street, a nice screened porch out front that I'd done quite a bit of work on over the years—jacked it up where it sagged, painted it, put in new steps. Louise's car was in the drive—we drive the same model, though hers is a few years newer—so I knew she was home. I also knew she wouldn't want to see me like this, but that never stopped me before.

She was in the kitchen, but she came out to the living room when she heard me come in. She'd changed out of her work clothes into jeans and a fleece jacket and she had a knife in her hand. "Was that you honking?" she asked.

"Hell no. Louis Armstrong is out there. He's thinking to himself, 'What a wonderful world.'"

"You are sauced. Go on home. And try not to kill anyone on the way."

"I'm celebrating."

"What?" She gave me a puzzled look. "What are you celebrating? Did the price of whiskey go down?" She moved past me and gave the door a shove, since I hadn't closed it all the way. "I don't even want to think about the next heating bill."

"Where is he?" I said.

"Upstairs, resting."

"I quit drinking this afternoon."

"Go look in the bathroom mirror, then come back and say that again."

I needed to go anyway, so I plowed through the kitchen and into the little powder room we have off it. The temperature in there was a good twenty degrees colder than the rest of the house, but the plumbing wasn't froze up yet, and the toilet flushed just fine. The man in the mirror looked pretty good for his age. Still had all his hair, only some of it gray. Could have used a shave and a haircut. I picked a fleck of something out from between my upper teeth and tried to remember the last thing I'd had to eat. It looked vegetable, but I didn't think I'd had any.

When I came back out, she was chopping mushrooms.

"What's for dinner?"

"You can take home the rest of that ham Maddy brought. It's in the fridge. And the seven-layer salad—there's plenty, and it needs to be eaten soon. Did you do anything at all about what I asked?"

"Asked?"

"Oh, Lenny."

I picked a mushroom off the table and popped it whole into my mouth. "Of course. He'll be out of here tomorrow."

"He will? Where is he going?"

"Never mind about that. We've discussed it. I got him out of your hair. Call me for the tough jobs." The mushroom was dry in my mouth, and I stuck my head under the faucet to get some water to wash it down with.

She put down the knife. I saw that she was crying, just a little. "Thank you," she said, in a tiny voice that just about broke me down, too. "You don't know."

"At least things will be easier for you around here."

"It's like some strange shadow he left behind. With the wasting, they even look the same."

"It's
OK
," I said, "I've got everything under control." I reached out for another mushroom and knocked the entire cutting board to the floor.

I slept until noon the next day. Then I called to see if Clay was ready, and he was, so I drove over to pick him up. He was dressed in jeans he had to keep hitching up, and a dark green University of Iowa sweatshirt. He had two duffel bags full of clothes and an oversized leather briefcase. "Going to the office?" I asked.

"Meds," he said.

I stopped at Hy-Vee first so we could get some food, as I didn't have anything around the house. "What do you like?" I said. "How about we cook up some chili? Put some meat on those bones of yours."

We bought hamburger, chili mix, beans, canned tomatoes, Minute Rice, a twelve-pack of Pepsi, Pop-Tarts, chocolate chip cookies, Steak-umms, some frozen burritos, and a dozen bananas, among other things. When we passed by the beer aisle, I first looked the other way, then picked out a six of O'Doul's. My head felt like donkeys had trampled it during the night, but the feeling wasn't an unfamiliar one, and in a way, I sort of savored it, since I didn't figure to ever feel that way again. As we were headed for the checkout line, it seemed to me Clay was getting antsy.

"They got a bathroom in this place?" he whispered.

"Probably. You gotta go?"

"Uh-huh. Bad."

"Can't it wait?"

"I don't think so."

I flagged down a kid who was on his way to shelve some bread. He pointed back toward frozen foods, and Clay hurried off. I paid for the groceries and stood by the entrance reading the little notices posted there on the bulletin board. Tractor for sale.
AKC
-registered collie pups. A trailer for rent in Tipton. Hockey skates, barely used, $20. I thought about how Junior and I used to skate together sometimes, and then I tried to remember where our skates might be, or if they'd gotten thrown away somewhere along the line. Finally, Clay showed up. His face didn't have much color to begin with, but now, under those store lights, he looked positively bleached.

"You all right?" I asked.

"I don't really want to talk about it."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "All right, let's go."

Clay cleaned himself up and we had dinner, which I thought came out pretty good. We ate the way I always ate, in front of the television. Afterwards, I dug around the basement and found the skates. I brought them up and asked him what size his feet were. He was in the middle of taking two blue pills. That briefcase of his was divided up into sections, color coded. Some of the pills had to be taken before meals, some with them, and some after. Others were for first thing in the morning or last thing before bed.

"Ten," he said.

"Bingo." I held out the box. "Try these on."

Something like a smile flickered over his face and went away. In general, for expressions, he reminded me of those scrambled cable channels I sometimes found myself watching late at night—most of the time there was nothing there, but every now and then, like magic, the picture would come in clear as day. "Junior told me he used to play hockey. I got weak ankles."

"What's the difference?" I said. "I got a bad back. We could still lace 'em up and give it a shot for fifteen minutes or so. That river out there, it's like glass."

"You're nuts," he said. "Look at me."

"Come on. Believe in yourself." I held out the box, and he took it.

Just the effort of lacing them up wore him out—I could see it. He was breathing hard and sweating, and leaning forward he farted, which I made a point of laughing at to make him feel
OK
. I was sorry. Those ankles were like something you see on the History Channel, like something the Nazis did. His feet might have been tens, but they still swam in the skates, and it just made me think of Junior, and how I'd used to take him up to the field house Sundays to play with the rec league, what a solid young man he'd been. I started thinking hard about whether I had anything to drink in the house.

"I'm not much of an athlete," said Clay, attempting to stand. "I play a pretty good game of backgammon, though, if you've got it." He teetered for a moment, then fell back onto the sofa. "We going?"

"It's too cold," I said. "I don't know what I was thinking. But maybe if this breaks over the next day or two, and you're still here, we could."

I set him up in the guest bedroom, and he was asleep by ten. I could hear him snoring back there, surrounded by boxes full of my junk, old magazines and fishing tackle, a
TV
I'd been trying to repair on and off for years, a dusty 1985
IBM
-clone computer (no hard drive) and amber monitor that never did work right in the first place, but that I'd hung onto because I-don't-know-why. I wondered what the hell I'd gotten myself into. I was feeling irritable, so I brushed my teeth, and when I was done I swished Listerine around in my mouth, but instead of spitting, I swallowed. That tasted truly awful, but it also gave me a sudden view of myself as no better than those kids you read about huffing paint, so I made myself a pot of coffee and drank half of it while watching a lunatic Australian on television prance around the desert picking up snakes. And all the while, I could feel the cold outside pushing in at the walls. Nature is hostile, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves the opposite.

The next day I was sick. I hadn't gone twenty-four hours without a drink in years, and my body was in rebellion. Or maybe it was the flu. My stomach was loose, and I was running a low fever. Clay planted himself in my living room and did pretty much what he'd been doing back at the house, which was watch daytime
TV
and smoke, only here he didn't have to go outside. He did a fair amount of coughing, too. For a while, I came out and joined him, and we sat and stared at the shows together—he liked the crime ones, when they were on, but he also didn't mind the talk ones—but then I started to feel shaky again and I went back to bed. About an hour later I woke up and he was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring down at me.

"What's your problem?" I said.

"I was just wondering if there's anything I could do for you."

"Do? I don't know. Can you mix a good martini?"

He laughed. "Probably. It's been a while. Junior used to tell me about a place he went to in San Francisco—The Zam Zam Room. Some strange old codger bartended, and he made the best martinis on the planet, but you had to be really careful. Like, if you looked at him the wrong way, he'd throw you out. So you put your money on the bar and just waited to be spoken to. After he made you your drink, he'd tell you where you were allowed to sit. If you just went to a table and sat without him telling you, that was it—you wouldn't get served."

"You weren't out in San Francisco?" I asked.

"Me? No. I grew up in Moline. I never been west of Sioux City. Been to New York a couple of times. I liked that." I saw that face of his flicker again, this time with memories I was pretty sure I wanted no part of.

"
OK
, listen," I said. "It's nice of you to ask, but don't come in here again without knocking, all right?"

He stood. "That was a joke then, about the martini?"

There were ants crawling around inside my eyeballs; I felt all jittery. "I'm reforming my life," I told him. "This here what I'm going through, it's the necessary pain."

For dinner, we had leftover chili. I washed mine down with two cans of O'Doul's, and Clay had his usual Pepsi. We weren't talking, we were just eating. Then right in the middle of taking a bite, he put his fork back into his bowl and started to cry. I wasn't sure where to look. I had another bite, but what appetite I'd managed to convince myself I had was gone. There were visible cobwebs in a corner of the ceiling, and I reminded myself to remember them next time I vacuumed.

"Sorry," he said, when he'd more or less pulled himself back together.

"Yeah, well. Sometimes it can all get to be a lot."

"I wish I could skate." He was on the verge of losing it again. "I wish a ton of things. I never even got to be in a real love affair. Me and Junior, it was just a couple of young guys in old men's bodies."

"Hey, hey. This is his father you're talking to. I don't need to hear that." He sniffed, blew his nose into one of the paper towels we were using as napkins. "Why don't you live at the house with Louise?"

"She asked me to leave. I wasn't very reliable. Used to disappear sometimes for a couple of days at a time. I might have hit her once or twice. But people can change. You know what you need? A project."

"I know it."

"I'm serious. You can't sit around watching
TV
all the time—you'll turn into a blob. What can you do?"

"Nothing," he said. "Last six months, it was all about Junior. Giving him sponge baths, cleaning up his messes, helping him in and out of bed, just everything."

I'd been in denial about this. When I had stopped over, which wasn't often, they usually had him already out on the sofa, cleaned up and ready to receive visitors. I hadn't wanted to know what went on behind the scenes. "You think that's where you're headed?"