I Live With You (9 page)

“Stay here. Let
everybody
stay here and be as women.”

I can’t answer such a thing. I can’t even think about it.

“But then what else do you know except how to be a colonel?”

She washes me, changes the bed, and throws the bed clothes and my clothes out the door. Then she gets the bullet out. I’m half out of my head from the leaves she had me chew so the pain is dulled. She bandages me, covers me with a clean blanket, puts her lips against my cheek for a moment.

Then stands up, legs apart. She looks like one of our boys getting ready to prove himself. “We’ll not stand for this anymore,” she says. “It has to end and we’ll end it, if not one way, then another.”

“But this is how it’s always been.”

“You could be our spokesman.”

How can she even suggest such a thing. “Pillows,” I say. “Spokesman for the nipples.”

Goodness knows what the mothers are capable of. They never stick to any rules.

“If the answer is no, we’ll not have anymore boy babies. You can come down and copulate all you want but there’ll be no boys. We’ll kill them.”

“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Not you, Una.”

“Have you noticed how there are fewer and fewer boys? Many have already done it.”

But I’m in too much pain and dizzy from the leaves she gave me, to think clearly. She sees that. She sits beside me, takes my hand. “Just rest,” she says. How can I rest with such ideas in my head? “But the rules.”

“Hush. Women don’t care about rules. You know that.”

“Come back with me.” I pull her down against me. This time she lets me. How good it feels to have us chest to chest, my arms around her. “I have a secret place. It’s not a hard climb to get there.”

She pulls back. “Colonel, sir!”

“Please don’t call me that.”

Then I say… what we’re not allowed to say or even think. It’s a mother/child thing, not to be said between a man and a woman. I say, “I love you.”

She leans back and looks at me. Then wipes at my chin. “Try not to bite your lip like that.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does to me.”

“I liked…. I like….” I already used the other word, why not yet again. “I love copulation day only when with you.”

I wonder if she feels the same about me. I wish I dared ask her. I wonder if my son…. Is Hob hers and mine together? I’ve always hoped he was. She’s made no gesture towards him. She hasn’t even looked at him any more than any other boy. This would have been his first copulation day had the women not built their wall.

“Rest,” she says. “We’ll discuss later.”

“Is it just us? Or are you saying the same thing to the enemy? They could win the war like that. It would be your fault.”

“Stop thinking.”

“What if no more boys on either side, ever?”

“What if?”

She gives me more of those leaves to chew. They’re bitter. I was in too much pain to notice that the first time. I feel even sleepier right away.

I dream I’m the last of all the boys. Ever. I have to get somewhere in a hurry, but there’s a wall so high I’ll never get over it. Beside, my legs are not there at all. I’m nothing but a torso. Women watch me. Women, off across the valley floor as far as I can see and none will help. There’s nothing to do but lie there and give the war cry.

I wake shouting and with Una holding me down. Hob is there, helping her. Other boys are in the doorway looking worried.

I’ve thrown the blanket and the pillow to the floor and now I seem to be trying to throw myself out of bed. Una has a long scratch across her cheek. I must have done that.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

I’m still as if in a dream. I pull Una down against me. Hold her hard and then I reach out for Hob, too. My poor ugly boy. I ask the unaskable. “Tell me, is Hob mine and yours together?”

Hob looks shocked that I would ask such a thing, as well he should. Una pulls away and gets up. She answers as if she was one of the boys. “Colonel, sir, how can you, of all people, ask a thing like that.” Then she throws my own words back at me. “This is how it’s always been.”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake stop being so
sorry!”

She shoos the boys from the doorway but she lets Hob stay. Together they rearrange the bed. Together she and Hob make broth for me and food for themselves. Hob seems at home here. It’s true, I’m sure. This is our son.

But I suppose all this yearning, all this wondering, is due to the leaves Una had me chew. It’s not the real me. I’ll not pay any attention to myself.

But there’s something else. I didn’t get a good look at my leg yet, but it feels like a serious wound. If I can’t climb up to our stronghold, I’ll not ever be able to go home. I shouldn’t, even so, and though my career is in a shambles…. I shouldn’t let myself be lured into staying here as a copulator for the rest of my life. I can’t think of anything more dishonorable. I should send Hob back to the citadel to report on what’s happened and to get help. If he was found trying to escape, would Una let the women kill him?

I try to get Hob alone so I can whisper his orders to him. Only when Una goes out to the privy do I get the chance. “Get back to the citadel. Cross the wall tonight. There’s no moon.” I show him my map and where I think there are fewer women. I want to tell him to take care, but we don’t ever say such things.

In the morning I tell Una to tell my leaders to come in to me. I’m in pain, in a sweat, my beard is itchy. I ask Una to clean me up. She treats me as a mother would. Back when my mother did it, I pulled away. I wouldn’t let her get close to me. I especially wouldn’t let her hug or kiss me. I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted nothing to do with mother things.

All the boys are looking scruffy. We take pride in our cleanliness, in shaving everyday, in our brush cuts, and our enemy is as spic and span as we are. I hope they don’t launch an offensive today and see us so untidy.

I’m glad to see Hob isn’t with them.

I find it hard to rouse myself to my usual humor. I say, “Pillows, nipples,” but I’m too uncomfortable to play at being one of the boys.

I’d prefer to recuperate some, but the boys are restless already. I can’t be thinking of myself. We’ll storm the wall. I show them the map. I point out the less guarded spots. I grab Una. Both her wrists. “Men, we’ll need a battering ram.”

Wood isn’t easy to get out here on the valley floor. This is a desert except along the streams, but every village has one tree in the center square that they’ve nurtured along. As here, baby’s graves are always around it. In other villages, most are cottonwood, but this one is oak. It’s so old I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t been here since before the village. I think the village was built up around it later.

“Chop the tree. Ram the wall.” I tell them. “Go back to the citadel. Don’t wait around for me. Tell the generals never to come here again, neither for boys nor for copulation. Tell them I’m of no use to us anymore.”

The women won’t be able to shoot at the boys chopping it down. It’s hidden from all parts of the wall.

When they hear the chopping, the women begin to ululate. Our boys stop chopping, but only for a moment. I hear them begin again with even more vigor.

Here beside me Una ululates, too. She struggles against me but I hang on.

“How could you? That’s the tree of dead boys.”

I let go.

“All the babies buried there are boys. Some are yours.”

I can’t let this new knowledge color my thinking. I have to think of the safety of my boys. “Let us go, then.”

“Tell them to stop.”

“Would you let us go for the sake of a tree?”

“We would.”

I give the order.

The women move away from a whole section of the wall, they even provide their ladders. I tell the boys to go. There’s no way they could carry me back and no way I could ever climb to the citadel again.

No sooner are the boys gone, even to the last tootle of the fifes, the last triumphant drum beat…. (We always march home as though victorious whether victorious or not.) Hearing them go, I can’t help but groan, though not from pain this time. No sooner have the mothers come down from the wall, but that I hear, ululating again. Una stamps in to me.

“What now?”

“It’s Hob. Your enemy….
Your
enemy has dropped him off at the edge of your foothills.”

I can see it on her face.

“He’s dead.”

“Of course he’s dead. You are all as good as dead.”

She blames me for Hob. “I blame myself.”

“I hate you. I hate you all.”

I don’t believe we’ll be seeing many boys anymore. I would warn us if I was able, I would be the spokesman, though I don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance.

“What will the women do with me?”

“You were always kind. I’ll not be any less to you.”

What am I good for? What use am I but to stay here as the father of females? All those small, ugly, black-haired girls…. I suppose all of them biting their lower lips until they bleed.

THE DOCTOR

H
E DATES HIS THIRD WIFE
often but she’ll not come back to live with him. Even before it got this bad she said he’d have to clean out this place first. Have to get new couches not so clawed and peed on. Use a lot of spray for the smell. But there’s no way to clean it up now without burning it down.

She left him five years ago. She had good reasons, lots more than just this mess. One was, he was a partying person and she wasn’t. (Of course if she came back now there couldn’t be any parties anyway, at least not for a long while of cleaning up.) And of course you never can know people’s reasons for leaving—nor for coming back.

The doctor has rugged sexy good looks. He’s still attractive even though in his seventies and even though he broke his back which left him with a crunched-down look. He used to be six feet three but now he’s only six feet. As a young man he had dislocated and broken his fingers so often they look terrible now, crooked and with swollen joints. One wonders how he can be a surgeon, thread his needles, and tie the fancy little knots anymore.

The house is a huge Victorian with a front stairway and a back stairway, five bedrooms not counting the maid’s room, two upstairs bathrooms and one downstairs (only one toilet still works, but the doctor is alone, he doesn’t need more than one). The front parlor is all bay windows and the back parlor is all wood paneling.

There’s empty fields behind the house and little patches of forest on each side. Sometimes deer come in to the doctor’s back yard.

The third wife said if he’d clean the place up even a little bit she’d think about coming back, but he’s like those old men who’ve never thrown away a
Life
magazine or a piece of string. With him it’s mostly medical journals. He’s not thrown one away since he’d been in medical school, nor any books either. Lots of other junk around, too, parts of old motors, rusty tools…. Two dead cars are in the garage. He has to park his diesel sedan in the driveway.

When the doctor and his third wife bought this house, the wife kept things more or less cleaned up. If she was still with him things wouldn’t have gotten quite so out of hand. She never did like having all this stuff, but it was in some control and mostly out of sight. Actually the house was full of junk from the moment they moved in.

The doctor loves a big house like this. When his wife was still with him they could invite guests to stay over. He likes to play the paterfamilias. Of course he can’t do that anymore. Now he does it in a smaller way. Whenever he goes to a party he always brings big chunks of cheeses and special black bread. Sometimes a ham. Sometimes a five pound bag of pistachios. Always more food than anybody can use in a week.

His dog died shortly after his wife left him. He buried it in the back yard. That dog…. Twelve years before he had taken home a sick, mangy puppy, slept with it on his chest and got mange himself. It was a type of mange that human beings are not supposed to get. The puppy grew up to be the dog that died.

But on the other hand, the doctor taught heart surgery by having the students operate on dogs.

The house badly needs painting, but the doctor doesn’t notice. If he did, and though it’s a huge job, he’d probably plan to paint it himself. He’d buy the paint and keep it in the garage or the basement and now and then think about doing it.

The cats started more recently when the doctor discovered a family of feral cats in his garage and began feeding them. One was pregnant. It was getting colder so the doctor made a little cat door into his basement. It gave them the run of the house.

He’s not sure how many cats are in there now. And he thinks he saw a possum.

The cats are mostly tabbies, some gingers, a calico or two…. Only one is white. That’s his favorite. White cats always have a hard time hunting. They’re so easily seen. And she’s smaller. She’s the underdog cat. He has always loved underdogs best. Besides, she’s so luminous. She seems to glow in the dark. He named her Nimbus. He wonders about her fur. He looked at it under the microscope to see if he could see what caused the sheen. Too bad he doesn’t have a normal white cat to compare it with, but wild white cats don’t last long. He wonders how this one survived to grow up.