Timbuktu (8 page)

Midway through Willy’s speculations on canine reading skills, a police car pulled up in front of Poe’s house, and two large men in uniforms climbed out. One was white and the other was black, and they were both sweating in the August heat, a pair of wide-hipped cops out on Sunday patrol, carrying the instruments of the law around their waists: revolvers and handcuffs, billy clubs and holsters, flashlights and bullets. There was no time to make a full inventory, for no sooner did the men get out of the car than one of them started talking to Willy (“Can’t stay there, pal. You going to move on or what?”), and at that moment Willy turned, looked straight into his friend’s eyes, and said, “Beat it, Bonesy. Don’t let them catch you,” and because Mr. Bones knew that this was it, that the dreaded moment was suddenly upon them, he licked Willy’s face, whimpered a brief farewell as his master patted his head for the last time, and then took off, charging down North Amity Street as fast as his legs could take him.

He heard the alarmed voice of one of the cops shouting behind him (“Frank, get the dog! Get the fucking dog, Frank!”), but he didn’t stop until he reached the corner, a good eighty or ninety feet from the house. By then, Frank had already given up the idea of chasing after him. As Mr. Bones turned around to see what was happening to Willy, he saw the white cop waddling back toward the house. A moment later, urged on by the other one, who was kneeling over Willy and gesturing wildly with his hand, he broke into a slow trot and went to join his partner. No one was worried about the dog anymore. There was a dying man to attend to, and as long as Mr. Bones kept himself at a safe distance, nothing was going to happen to him.

So he stood on the corner and watched, panting heavily after his short run, the wind all but knocked out of him. He felt sorely tempted to open his mouth and howl, to let go with one of his dark, bloodcurdling moon wails, but he suppressed the urge, knowing full well that this was no time to vent his sorrows. In the distance, he saw the black cop standing by the car, talking into the two-way radio. A muffled, static-charged response filled the empty street. The cop talked again, and gusts of incomprehensible words followed, another onslaught of noise and gibberish. A door opened across the street, and someone came out to see what was going on. A woman in a yellow house frock and a head full of pink curlers. Two children emerged from another house. A boy of about nine and a girl of about six, both of them wearing shorts and no shoes. Meanwhile, Willy was invisible, still lying where Mr. Bones had left him, blocked off from view by the white cop’s broad, hulking body. A minute or two went by, then another minute or two, and then, faintly in the distance, Mr. Bones heard the sound of an approaching siren. By the time the white ambulance turned down North Amity Street and stopped in front of the house, a crowd of a dozen people had gathered, standing around with their hands in their pockets or their arms folded across their chests. Two paramedics jumped out of the back of the ambulance, wheeled a stretcher toward the house, and returned a moment later with Willy onboard. It was hard to see much of anything, hard to know whether his master was alive or not. Mr. Bones considered rushing back for a last look, but he hesitated to take such a risk, and by the time he’d made up his mind to do it, the paramedics had already slid Willy into the ambulance and were slamming the doors shut.

Until then, the dream had been no different from reality. Word for word, gesture for gesture, every event had been an exact and faithful rendering of events as they happened in the world. Now, as the ambulance drove off and the people slowly returned to their houses, Mr. Bones felt himself divide in two. Half of him remained on the corner, a dog contemplating his bleak and uncertain future, and the other half of him turned into a fly. Given the nature of dreams, perhaps there was nothing unusual about that. We all change into other things while we sleep, and Mr. Bones was no exception. At one time or another, he had entered the skin of a horse, a cow, and a pig, not to speak of several different dogs, but until he had the dream that day, he had never been two things at once.

There was urgent business to attend to, and only the fly part of him could do it. So, while the dog part of him waited on the corner, the fly rose into the air and flew down the block, chasing after the ambulance as swiftly as his wings could carry him. Because it was a dream, and because the fly could fly faster than any flesh-and-blood fly, it didn’t take him long to reach his goal. By the time the ambulance turned the corner onto the next street, he had already attached himself to the back door handle, and it was in this way that he rode with Willy to the hospital, all six of his feet clamped onto the slightly rusty surface of the handle’s leeward side, praying that the wind wouldn’t blow him off. It turned out to be a wild jaunt, what with the pothole bumps and the swerves and the sudden stops and starts and the air streaming in on him from all directions, but he managed to hold on, and when the ambulance pulled up to the hospital emergency entrance eight or nine minutes later, his wits were still intact. He hopped off the handle just as one of the paramedics was about to grab hold of it, and then, as the doors were opened and Willy was wheeled out, he hovered a yard or so above the scene, an unobtrusive speck looking down at his master’s face. At first, he couldn’t tell if Willy was alive or dead, but once the gurney was all the way out and its wheels were on the ground, Mrs. Gurevitch’s son opened his eyes. Not much, perhaps, just a crack to let some light in and see what was happening, but even that squint was enough to make the fly’s heart skip a beat. “Bea Swanson,” Willy mumbled. “Three-sixteen Calvert. Gotta call her. Pronto. Gotta give her the key. Bea’s key. Life and death. A matter of.”

“Don’t worry,” one of the paramedics said. “We’ll take care of it. But don’t talk now. Save your strength, Willy.”

Willy. That meant he’d said enough for them to know his name, and if he’d been talking in the ambulance, maybe that meant he wasn’t as bad off as he seemed, which in turn meant that maybe with the right medicines and the proper care, he’d pull through after all. Or so mused the fly in Mr. Bones’s dream, who was in fact Mr. Bones himself, and because he was a biased witness to the proceedings, we should not begrudge him the consolation of last-minute hopes, even if all traces of hope were gone. But what do flies know? And what do dogs know? And what, for that matter, do men know? It was in God’s hands now, and the truth was that there was no turning back.

Nevertheless, in the seventeen hours that remained, a number of extraordinary things happened. The fly saw each one of them, looking down from the ceiling above Bed 34 in the indigents’ ward of Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, and if he hadn’t been there on that August day in 1993 to see them with his own eyes, he might not have believed that such things were possible. First of all, Mrs. Swanson was found. Within three hours of Willy’s admittance to the hospital, his old teacher came striding down the aisle of the ward, was shown to a chair by Sister Mary Theresa, the staff supervisor of the four-P.M.-to-midnight shift, and from that moment until Willy left this world, she never once strayed from her student’s side. Second of all, after several hours of intravenous feeding and nonstop megadoses of antibiotics and adrenaline, Willy’s head seemed to clear somewhat, and he spent the last morning of his life in a state as lucid and serene as any Mr. Bones could remember. Third of all, he died without pain. No convulsions, no upheavals, no cataclysmic fires in his chest. He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.

The fly never actually saw the key change hands. It might have happened at a moment when his attention was briefly diverted, but then again, Willy might have forgotten to mention it. At the time, it hardly seemed important. Once Bea Swanson entered the room, there were so many other things to think about, so many words to follow and feelings to digest, that he could scarcely remember his own name, let alone Willy’s half-cocked scheme for salvaging his literary archive.

Her hair had turned white, and she had put on thirty pounds, but the moment he saw her the fly knew who it was. Physically speaking, there was nothing to set her apart from a million other women her age. Dressed in blue-and-yellow madras shorts, a billowing white blouse, and a pair of leather sandals, she seemed to have stopped thinking about her appearance a long time ago. The plumpness of her arms and legs had grown even more pronounced over the years, and with the dimples in her pudgy knees and the varicose veins bulging from her calves and the flesh sagging from her upper arms, you could easily have mistaken her for a retirement-community golf lady, someone with nothing better to do than roam the back nine in an electric cart and worry about whether she was going to putt out in time for the early-bird special. But this woman’s skin was white, not tanned, and instead of sunglasses she had on a pair of no-nonsense wire-rimmed specs. Furthermore, once you looked through the lenses of those drugstore glasses, you discovered eyes of the most remarkable shade of blue. Look into those eyes, and you were trapped. They held you with their warmth and vivacity, their intelligence and watchfulness, the depth of their Scandinavian silences. These were the eyes that Willy had fallen in love with as a boy, and now the fly understood what all the fuss had been about. Forget the short-cropped hair and the chubby legs and the humdrum clothes. Mrs. Swanson was no dowager schoolmarm. She was the goddess of wisdom, and once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

Nor was she quite the pushover that Mr. Bones had expected her to be. After listening to Willy go on about Mrs. Swanson’s kindness and generosity all the way down to Baltimore, he had imagined her as a softhearted sentimentalist, one of those flighty women prone to vast and sudden enthusiasms, who broke down and cried at the smallest provocation and bustled about straightening up after people the moment they stood up from their chairs. The real Mrs. Swanson was anything but. That is to say, the Mrs. Swanson in his dream was anything but. When she approached Willy’s bed and looked into the face of her former student for the first time in almost thirty years, the fly was startled by the toughness and clarity of her reaction. “Jesus Christ, William,” she said. “You’ve sure made a mess of things, haven’t you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Willy said. “I’m what you call a world-class fuckup, the king of the know-nothings.”

“At least you knew enough to get in touch with me,” Mrs. Swanson said, sitting down in the chair that Sister Mary Theresa had provided for her and taking hold of Willy’s hand. “The timing might not be so hot, but better late than never, huh?”

Tears started welling up in Willy’s eyes, and for once in his life he was unable to speak.

“It was always touch and go with you, William,” Mrs. Swanson continued, “so I can’t really say I’m surprised. I’m sure you’ve done your best. But we’re talking about highly combustible materials here, aren’t we? You walk around with a load of nitroglycerin in your brain, and sooner or later you’re going to bump into something. When it comes right down to it, it’s a wonder you didn’t blow yourself up a long time ago.”

“I walked all the way from New York,” Willy answered, apropos of nothing. “Too many miles with too little gas in the tank. It just about did me in. But now that I’m here, I’m glad I came.”

“You must be tired.”

“I feel like an old sock. But at least I can die happy now.”

“Don’t talk like that. They’re going to fix you up and make you better. You’ll see, William. In a couple of weeks, you’ll be as good as new.”

“Sure. And next year I’m going to run for president.”

“You can’t do that. You already have a job.”

“Not really. I’m sort of unemployed these days. Unemployable, really.”

“And what about the Santa Claus business?”

“Oh yeah. That.”

“You haven’t quit, have you? When you wrote me that letter, it sounded like a lifelong commitment.”

“I’m still on the payroll. Been on it for more than twenty years now.”

“It must be hard work.”

“Yeah, it is. But I’m not complaining. Nobody forced me to do it. I signed up of my own free will, and I’ve never had any second thoughts. Long hours, though, and not one day off in all that time, but what do you expect? It’s not easy doing good works. There’s no profit in it. And when there’s no money in a thing, people tend to get confused. They think you’re up to something, even when you’re not.”

“Do you still have the tattoo? You mentioned it in a letter, but I’ve never seen it.”

“Sure, it’s still there. Take a look if you want.”

Mrs. Swanson leaned forward in her chair, lifted the right sleeve of Willy’s hospital gown, and there it was. “Very nice,” she said. “That’s what I’d call a proper Santa Claus.”

“Fifty bucks,” Willy said. “And worth every penny.”

That was how the conversation began. It continued for the whole night and into the next morning, interrupted by occasional visits from the nurses, who came by to replenish Willy’s IV, take his temperature, and empty the bedpan. Sometimes, Willy’s strength would flag, and he would suddenly doze off in midsentence, sleeping for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, but he would always come back, rising up from the depths of unconsciousness to join Mrs. Swanson again. If she hadn’t been there, the fly realized, it was doubtful that he would have held on as long as he did, but so great was his pleasure at being with her again that he continued to make the effort—for as long as effort was possible. Still, he did not struggle against what was coming, and even as he went through a list of things he had never done in life—never learned to drive a car, never flown in an airplane, never visited a foreign country, never learned to whistle—things he had never done and therefore would never do—it was not so much with regret as a kind of indifference, an attempt to prove to her that none of it mattered. “Dying’s no big deal,” he said, and by that he meant that he was ready to go, that he was grateful to her for seeing to it that his last hours had not been spent among strangers.