Town Burning (45 page)

“We don’t know Bruce,” John said. “You’re his father and I’m his brother, and we never knew him at all, ever. Why not?”

“It’s too late to find out now, Johnny.”

John had a quick, shaking flap that surged up from his bowels and ran out to the ends of his fingers and toes. “What does he look like? I don’t want to be too surprised.”

“He’s thin, and his hair’s growing back in.”

“Christ.”

“He’s all healed up. Healed up very well.”

“He’s just a man,” John said.

“They feed him through a tube, Johnny. There’s a tube in him all the time. You’ll see that.”

“I don’t want to see them feed him.”

“All right,” his father said.

“What do they feed him, some goddam chemicals?”

“No, it’s stuff like eggs and vegetables and meat—very nourishing stuff—but it’s all like soup. Has to go down the tube.”

“How do they do it?” John asked, and asked himself how to stop asking.

“They put it in a thing like a grease gun and pump it down.”

“Oh, God.”

“Why do you have to know, Johnny?”

“I never had to know anything about Bruce. I never gave a damn about Bruce.”

“Johnny,” his father said, turning his head for one swift, worried look into John’s eyes. “Johnny, I want to tell you something. When Bruce went to the hospital I was glad.” He turned his face again, and John saw upon it anguish, as if it were illumined by a flash of red light.

“I felt nothing,” John said, “except that I didn’t want to come home.”

“I felt glad my own son was sick.”

“Well, Jesus Christ who could blame you? Let’s face it. Bruce was a mean, lousy son of a bitch. Why should that bastard make us guilty? What claim has he got on us?”

“Blood, I guess, Johnny.”

“Is there any of his blood on my hands?”

“I’ve been too busy washing my own, Johnny. I don’t know.”

They passed Northlee Square and the old dormitories, empty and barnlike among the tall elms. At the hospital parking lot William Cotter brought the Buick into a diagonal parking place as gently and carefully as if it were an ocean liner under the care of ministering tugs. He turned the key and everything stopped except the tick of the inset, reminding clock.

Low and squatty, spreading like a crab, the old hospital ejected a little pulse of steam from its laundry vent. “We better keep going,” John said, and they both emerged from the car feeling naked without its comforting shell around them.

They walked side by side, almost touching arms, with the unsteady dignity of fear overcome—or nearly overcome—by resolution. They walked straight through the lobby and entered the long, cream-colored hall with all the doors that opened upon the high white beds of the sick. As they came to the men’s ward they stopped to let a nurse push a cartful of medications through the wide doors.

“Cotter and Son,” a dry voice called. Howard Randolf beckoned them in with a hand as slow and as lacking in inward energy as a weed waving under water. They entered the ward and came, pushed by the nightmare’s end at the end of the hall, pulled by a welcome respite in that journey, to Howard’s bed.
“This
is where you eventually see everyone you know, isn’t it, John?” Howard said. His lined, gullied face looked terribly clean, as if the hospital had washed and sterilized half the life out of it.

“How are you, Howard?” John asked.

“Why, I’m fine and dying, of course, like all the rest.”

“They said you had heat prostration and some broken ribs.”

“Yes, and a slight dying of the heart, they tell me.”

William Cotter seemed not to hear. He cast quick, apprehensive glances at the sick men down the line, and John wondered if he looked for his own face, washed and faded, on one of the hospital pillows.

His father leaned toward him and said in an apologetic voice, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” then turned and walked out, tall and springy, the picture of handsome health. Panic lent him strength this time.

“Well, aren’t you a little frightened too?” Howard asked. “All you healthy bastards feel guilty in here.” He chuckled painfully and tapped his ribs through the faded hospital pajamas. Only the eyes, deep yet unsurrounded, moved as if on stalks and showed fire. “You haven’t been to see Bruce yet, have you?” he said, looking shrewd. “Well, he’s had his visitors all right, and I’ve had the same, grim and vulturine both. Listen, John, don’t write and you won’t get ileitis of the semicolon. Don’t ever make your peace with God, either. Bruce knew better and so don’t I. I’ve had the same buzzards measuring me with their twitchy beaks, and I’d prefer to be Bruce. He can’t hear them! Every time he breathes they know the words that wind would carry if it could!”

“Howard…”

“What?”

“I thought you were a sanguine sort of guy.”

“Man, that
sang
ain’t gwine so good no more, don’t you know? I’ve got a dead spot big as a walnut in my heart. Look at Bruce now. That’s what you’re going to do and you don’t like it, do you? You’ll be looking at an optimist! He always thought that someday he might get away with his own sins. Can you imagine that? He couldn’t keep a sin or a secret or a secret sin from himself, but the poor bastard thought someday he could! If you can’t keep a secret from yourself, who the hell
can
you keep it from?” His eyes twitched on the optic nerves, his chest heaved and hesitated in pain.

“He made no treaties, did he,” John said.

“He was not only brave, Johnny; he was fierce. ‘Why should men love a wolf more than a lamb or dove?’ asked Henry Vaughan, and I might add that women find wolves attractive, too. Oh, well, goodbye, John! Goodbye, goodbye! You want to know something? You may be as fierce as Bruce.” Howard put out a weak hand and shook John’s. “If you weren’t such a shit you’d be a good man.
Goodbye!”

And so, John thought as he entered the hall again, the descent into the nightmare progresses: first one confronts the milder beasts, the mammals, who are not too distant relatives and haven’t the force of terror; then the reptilian bird, the essence of ferocity. That’s at the end of the hall, in the dark, feathery place where the talons wait and you deserve it.

The angles of the hall’s perspective grew acute, and although he walked slowly, the distance to the door grew small at the rate of the dream in which he was pulled. His mouth dried, his hands sweat, the clean clothes he had put on for the hospital seemed insubstantial and full of windy gaps. The door approached; painted steel, it was too small, gummy at the edges and partly open. He passed right on through, eyes shy and staring, to meet the half-man dying on the white bed.

In the cold light the closed face could have been, for purposes of cruel identification, Bruce’s. The forehead was a band of dead white; the shut eyes beneath it were deeply sunken, the dark lids red as fresh bruises. The cheekbones, above the blue swath of shaven beard, were as pearly and ovoid as eggs in waterglass. The expected thin tube entered the left nostril, where it was taped in place, and led the mind down to an inspirated, cruel hook, as would a taut line in the mouth of a fish, no hookeye visible. The wasted face and neck were somehow fungus-like and ripe, as if pale life burgeoned underneath in place of bone, and might split through. The nose was sharp and lean, the untaped nostril black and deep—as deep as the end of the tube’s push into Bruce. His mouth was slightly open, and a noisy suck of air, a windy, whistled parody of surprise, repeated and repeated upon the sleeping lips. Through the bristly new hair, a youthful, unmeant crewcut, John followed on the pale scalp the deep red crosshatchings of the stitched-down flaps. Through there the burr holes had been augered and the saw inserted:
See-saw,
and the bonemeal had come shedding out.

John’s own scalp crawled as if in response to glittering tools, and his hair, in a design identical to the design trenched upon his brother’s head, seemed to stand on end. If he did not love his brother, still the connection had been made in raped bone; in the violation of the most private part of a private man, his brain, brother perceived the shadow of brother’s wounds.

The chair beside the bed was empty, as was the low chair in the corner of the room. Beneath the half-pulled green windowshade the golden light of dusk shone weakly, whitened and sterilized at the sill by the fluorescent bar above the bed. Upon the metal bedtable a glass ash tray, centered upon a doily that was itself perfectly centered, remained and would remain innocent of Bruce’s nervously stubbed long butts and scattered ash. The time for bad habits—the property of anxious brain—had passed. This thing he had become, lax-armed upon a bed, fingers in the slight bend of coma, was the vegetable of whispers, the fascinating horror all men whispered of.

John stood beside the bed, his hand close to Bruce’s white one. Black hairs curled in crisp design upon the backs of the tapering fingers, and the white hand on its narrow wrist emerged as if from a sleeve of soft, woven black. The hand that he had always feared for its unthinking strength in rage, the hand he had found disturbingly weak when he helped Bruce into his last conscious bath, had now in absolute immobility regained its steel. It lay as if waiting for a trump of action—as if, instead of the machine it was, severed forever from its source of power, it saved and bided.

He moved a few inches away, to a point beyond the radius from the elbow to the arc of potent fingers, and only then recognized the distance for what it exactly was. If there had only been a time, if he could only conjure up a time to soften the fear that had grown into reflex! Bruce’s touch was as much to be avoided, had always been, as the kiss of red-hot iron; his flesh leaped back from it as if that separation were ruled by the spinal cord itself.

“I want a memory,” he said out loud, and the wind on Bruce’s lips answered
surprise,
repeated, lost the strength of that suggestion and repeated itself out of meaning into air.

No one could add a thousand little things committed in the course of life, nor, adding just a few, gain the comfort of reason; there
had
to have been a choice, a point where lines diverged like rays from the sunburst of love killed or born, and if he could find that point in time he might at least create a brother in his mind—make Bruce the actor in a play of dignity and worth.

Thunder: above Leah blue-black thunderheads climb in gigantic
billows to the height of the Universe, stretch the sky upward beyond
a ten-year-old boy’s conception of the depth of deep blue. The sound is so loud it is a vacuum in all sound, and shuts the eyes as
well as the ears. CRACK in the electric air, and the houses are
miraculously standing, the misty hills more or less where they were
—
or maybe not. Tame bushes in the yard roll white in maniac gusts;
the arching maples lash thick branches with willowy irresponsibility, as if, in panic, they have lost their comforting strength. On the back porch two boys, one ten and one seventeen, scream back at the storm how brave they are and face the sting of rain that flings itself through the screen. They are alone in the house, and have run upstairs and down closing windows. They have battened the hatches of the ship their home and now face the storm that is a typhoon; that has transformed Leah into a foreign sea. The
lawn and driveway are suddenly water, pebbled by moving sheets of
rain. The air is suddenly cold. Stunning thunder crumps dents in
the blue-black sky, and lightning spits chimes, a jagged crack, then
crackle and BLAM! the hills rock in the violent mist. The boys
scream back, their screams lost and joyful in the higher clamor of
weather. Along the sill below the billowing screen a row of pint cream bottles rock and tinkle. Seeing that they are about to fall
the younger boy runs to save them, slips on the wet porch boards,
skids into bottles, sill and screen and falls among the glass. Then he
sits to watch his right arm gush, watches the rain mix with the red, wash blood and rain together to the boards and out the scuppers of
the porch. The slice in his arm is like a crack in a dam, and he sees
himself pouring out. He is the fluid clear or red that is flowing out
into the storm. Boy overboard! In a terror of dilution he sees him
self for the first time dying, and believes, as he will always believe,
that death is precisely such a random flow. As he begins to faint he hears his voice cry HELP, and sees, as if through a dark lens, the white face of his brother. “All right, I’ve got you,” he hears. Like an iron valve a strong hand closes the hole. He knows then that some of him, at least, is left, and that it is his brother’s hand
saving him, holding his life inside. Thunder would prepare, lightning
split, rain wash him into the swallowing ground
—
but for the one
strong hand that holds him inside of himself.

Bruce’s tapered hand lay slightly curled against the sheet. Blood pulsed, yet the pale hand never moved.
There
was a memory of rain and brotherhood! Alone, brother saved brother’s life. Headline in the Leah
Free Press:
Boy Saves Brother’s Life.

I will give him that memory, John thought, give him the memory and take the scar. And with cold surmise he reached for Bruce’s hand. He gathered the fingers that were as random as tassels into his own live ones, lifted the hand and turned the hairy arm. There ran the white ridge of the scar, from dark border of hair to dark border of hair—livid across the white as white as a toad’s belly.

If Bruce hated the objects of his cruelty, as he had the mangled toads, might he also hate those who helped him? Gratitude was the most unstable of emotions, and there was no plan, no angle of incidence, no physics in that dark mirror. He held the warm hand, and could not let it go. The memory was as inverted as the brain could wishfully make it; the scar could neither be transferred nor erased.

“Bruce,” he called to the body of his brother. In the hand a slight pulse ticked—perhaps it was his own. The wind of breath sucked on; the plasm idled. His hand, in the limp one, seemed to separate from his body altogether, and he stared down upon it and upon the one that was held, or held his. A hawk’s talon cruelly hidden in a mouse’s back: even to witness such a sight meant connection, as if the line of vision itself were palpable as flesh. Held by the long-nailed fingers, their moons covered by untended cuticle, he waited for a sign. “All right,” he said, “I give you my hand in payment. Cut it off.”