Town Burning (7 page)

“Same old Bruce,” John said, trying again to smile. My brother, he thought, my brother.

Bruce seemed perplexed. His mad grin disappeared and he reached for his cigarette with a shaking hand.

“He’s probably afraid the goose won’t lay any more golden eggs, or something….” But the effort was evidently too much. He leaned back, and the cigarette rolled out of his fingers and down the sheet. John stepped forward and picked it up.

“You’ll burn youself up,” he said.

“Who cares?” Bruce said, his eyes cramped shut.

“We do! We all do!” Gladys Cotter cried. “What’s the matter with you?” She began to cry.

“Well, well,” Bruce said, watching her carefully.

“Now don’t be like that, Bruce,” William Cotter said without looking up from his bundle of hat and coat. Bruce ignored him and turned to John.

“I suppose this is your chance to go whoring around in my car.” But he began to look perplexed again, and John saw, amazed, that this time Bruce tried to grin and make a joke out of it. As he spoke he became more and more unsure of himself. “I’d give you a list, but I haven’t had time.” He turned his face away and reached for the ash tray on his bedside table, then turned back. “Well, we’ve decided to drill a hole in my head tomorrow.”

“Bruce!” Gladys Cotter said. She could barely speak, and came toward him, her face in fragments. She made a sound like escaping steam and her teeth clicked together several times.

“For God’s sake, Bruce!” John said. Bruce reached out and grabbed his coat, a quick, vicious jerk that turned him around.

“What do you care?” Bruce said. “It’s not your head they’re going to shave. They save the hair, did you know that? Then the undertaker can stick it back on again, did you know that? What did you do? What did I do to get this? You bastard! You son of a bitch!”

“Bruce, I never hurt you.” He pulled away and went to the window. His eyes began to stream tears. Outside, across the green lawn, a woman walked with a little girl who limped. The sun shone on the little girl’s brown hair as she pointed to a gray squirrel. She and the woman spoke to each other, their faces serious and serene.

The room behind him was silent. An English sparrow landed on the windowsill and flew away. John blinked away the tears, precariously balancing them on the edges of his eyes, hoping none would run down his face. The sparrow darted back, saw him and veered away jerkily on short wings.

Bruce, he knew, could not take it any more than he—take the fact of metal in his head, of cutting tools working at his own dear skin and skull. Bruce, who possibly with good reason never trusted anyone, had now to let himself be drugged and hacked. What would he do in Bruce’s place? Call for help? There was no one to call. He might say to the doctors: “Well, thanks for everything. Thanks for your trouble and all, but I guess I won’t have it just now.” No, he must wait while the minutes go by, smoke another cigarette, think about the sound a saw makes on bone. (And what corruption will they find inside? Something is wrong and working in there.)

His father mumbled in the corner. My father, he thought, our father who sits afraid in the shadow, cuddling his hat and coat, his two passports to the freedom of outside. Our mother, whom for some odd reason we despise and love, who can help us? Love we cannot use at the moment. We’re overstocked on it at the moment.

They were talking in the room behind him, and he knew he must turn around.

“Oh, Johnny will help you,” his mother said. He turned, hoping his tears were dry.

“Sure,” he said.

“He doesn’t like to have the nurse,” Gladys Cotter said.

“I would in other circumstances,” Bruce said.

“Oh,
Bruce!”
she said coyly, happy at once.

Bruce slowly swung his legs over the side of the bed, then pulled his bathrobe around after.

“Here goes,” he said, and stood unsteadily, holding the edge of the table. He arranged his slippers with an uncertain toe, then sighed as he worked his feet into them. He had gained weight, a soft white babyish padding. In spite of the dark blue shadow of his beard and the wiry hair on his chest and shoulders, he seemed too clean to be a man.

“One of my few remaining pleasures is my bath.” He put his arm out and John took it, hardly able to believe this gesture of need. They had never touched each other except, as children, with the cruel hardness of fists, elbows and knees. And now his hand circled Bruce’s arm above the elbow and found weakness in the soft flesh. The idea of touching Bruce had been to poke a snake with a stick to see the fearful, fascinating coil and strike, or even more to see in Bruce’s eyes the same simple hatred he had seen in the eyes of a wounded hawk. But now he held his brother with a hand suddenly superior in all the mechanics and electronics of the body. The frightening machine needed help.

In the hall nurses and attendants passed, unaware of the miracle. Bruce’s slippers shuffled. John took short steps, knowing that if he let Bruce go, Bruce would fall. For a terrible second he contemplated letting go: Bruce would stare up at him, unsurprised, perhaps, the hawk’s eyes hating and understanding all that needed to be understood, and say, “Now you do it. Now in my weakness you do it.”

In the busy heat of the corridor, his hand upon the sick flesh, he began to feel faint. A dented aluminum tray turned from dull silver to orange, and he let his head fall forward to bring back the blood. Bruce pulled weakly on, intent upon his bath. In the bathroom an old-fashioned deep-sided tub pushed its hollow belly above the floor on claw-and-ball feet. The narrow faucets dripped yellow stain on the porcelain. Bruce sat passively on a cane chair and watched John work the drain plug and faucets.

“Not too hot now,” he said, a greedy look on his face. John helped pull his bathrobe off, then had to lift him over the high rim and sit him like a baby in the water. “Ah,” Bruce said, leaning back against the cold porcelain.

“Isn’t the back cold?” John asked.

“Don’t feel it. They got me all doped up. A little hotter—got to feel it. More. There! That’s good.”

The water came around his plump stomach and over his belly-button. With limp white hands he splashed it up over his chest. His skin became pink beneath the black hair. He began to slip down, not noticing it; his stocky legs opened and his knees broke water until he lay completely relaxed and helpless. All tone gone from his muscles, he turned as limp as a dead, boneless water animal—like a squid in a tank of alcohol. After a while John woke him up and lifted him out. He had to do everything for him now; prop him in the chair, dry him, slide his arms through the bathrobe sleeves.

“Thanks,” Bruce said. In the hall he began to walk a little bit, but he could barely support himself.

“You know the old man’s kaput. Business no business with him. You know that, don’t you?”

“We all know you do everything, Bruce.”

Bruce smiled. “You going to give it a try? Or just let it go to hell and take off for Paris?”

“I’ll help the old man until you get back.”

“What? Don’t kid me, sonny. They don’t know how to unscramble brains yet. I’ll be lucky if I know my own name after tomorrow.” Bruce started to sink down, and John had to grab him with both hands. “Sorry,” Bruce said.

“You’ll come out of it. You wait and see. They’ve done a lot of work on stuff like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like what you’ve got—tumors and stuff.”

“Listen. They don’t know asshole, those doctors. They don’t even know what’s wrong with me. When I first came over here they thought my ears needed cleaning. Then they thought I was working too hard—you know—lost my marbles. Now they got to knock a hole in my head and look at the cream-of-wheat.”

In the room Gladys and William Cotter sat as if they hadn’t moved.

“Oh, was it good, Bruce?” Gladys Cotter asked.

“Very good,” Bruce said sharply. When he was settled in bed again he lit a cigarette. “You must be tired of sitting here,” he said in a low voice.

“No! No, Bruce!” his mother said. “No! We want to stay with you!”

Bruce stared at his father, who would not look up, then at John.

“I’ll stay as long as you want me,” John said.

“Sure,” William Cotter mumbled.

Bruce stared them down. “Sure,” he said. “Now go home and get some air. Go home. I want to go to sleep.”

“Oh, Bruce. We don’t want to leave you!”

“Get the hell home,” Bruce said.

“We’ll be back at one,” John said. Gladys Cotter stood against the doorframe, crying. John waited until his father and mother left the room. “Is there anything we can bring you, Bruce?” he asked.

Bruce wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t look at him. John saw the dark profile against the white window, steady and tense again as Bruce brought the cigarette up to his mouth.

Jane waited alone in the Spinellis’ living room beneath the terracotta Virgin and burning candle. Mrs. Spinelli had gone whimpering to bed, and her little husband ran up and down attending to her while they waited for the call from the hospital. The new television set stared blindly across the room. Michael Spinelli, tinted and in black and white, smiled here and there from framed photographs. He looked at her from across the room, his lips too red, his hair too black, his face too white, his Navy uniform too blue. On the sofa, tilted against a white crocheted doily, a rayon pillow in gold, red, white and blue:

M is for the Million things she gave me,

O means only that she’s growing Old,

T is for the Tears she shed to save me,

H is for her Heart of purest gold,

E is for her Eyes with love light shining,

R means Right and right she’ll always be—

Put them all together

They spell MOTHER,

A word that means

The world to me.

S
AMPSON
N
AVAL
T
RAINING
S
TATION

Mike’s favorite pipe, in the shape of a toilet bowl, lay cleaned in a shining ash tray on a bookcase full of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Above the glass-fronted bookcase hung the two discharges, Mike’s from the Second World War and Mr. Spinelli’s from the First. At Chateau-Thierry Mr. Spinelli had won several blue indentations in the flesh of his right arm, a collapsed lung and the Silver Star. He wore the miniature ribbon in the lapel of his good suit when he went to the Legion Hall.

Now he came downstairs and stood in the archway between the hall and the living room, his angular hands hanging slightly forward of his body.

“I got to call the shop and tell why I can’t work,” he said. He picked up the telephone twice before he asked for the paper mill. “I never called up before,” he said, turning and smiling, “I don’t even know the number, twenty-five years.” Then back to the telephone, “Hello. Speak to Mr. Jarvis, please. What? Where? O.K. You tell Mr. Jarvis I can’t work today. My son got in a accident. Hospital. Cesare Spinelli. You tell him. Thank you, thank you.” He came over, stood in front of the Virgin in her corner and stared at the linoleum floor. “You feel O.K., Janie?”

“I guess so,” Jane said.

“I’m sorry you got to worry like this, Janie.” He sat down on the edge of the sofa and picked at a callus on the palm of his hand.

“It’s all right,” she said. She wanted at that moment to put her arms around him, but didn’t know how to do it. She didn’t even have a name for him. She had never called him Dad, or Cesare, or even Mr. Spinelli—had lived in the same house with him for ten years and never called him by name.

“You got a lousy deal, Janie. I know that. Mikey’s a good boy, but he ain’t—I don’t know.” He looked straight at her. “I’m sorry a nice girl like you had to get mixed up with him, that’s all!” He jumped up and walked to the front window, breathing deeply and shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but Mikey never was no good. They kick him out of school.” He raised his hands above his head, palms up; then he went out of the room and Jane heard him climbing the stairs.

Before he reached the second floor the telephone rang three times. Jane heard him stop to listen, then run quickly back down the stairs. In a second he came into the living room.

“Janie? You answer it?”

“Mrs. Spinelli?” The telephone asked.

“Yes. Mrs. Spinelli,” she said, but it didn’t sound right. For a second she felt that she was impersonating Mike’s mother.

“You’d better come to the hospital right away, Mrs. Spinelli. Your husband’s condition is worse, now. This is Dr. Karmis. Are you there?”

“Yes, Doctor, we’ll come now.”

“We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Spinelli.”

She went into the living room and up to Mr. Spinelli, who stood at the window looking out. She put her hands on his small shoulders. “We’ve got to go to the hospital right away,” she said.

“O.K., Janie,” he said, his eyes averted. She followed him into the hall.

Mr. Spinelli called upstairs, “Mama! We’ll be back as soon as we can!” No answer from upstairs, but she had heard.

Mr. Spinelli drove fast, for him, but when they were let into Michael Spinelli’s room they heard the last two or three of long, croupy breaths, and the time between them lengthened and stopped being important. All at once the doctors and nurses straightened up and began to make distinctly different, purposeful movements around the bed. They put away stethoscopes, folded the oxygen tent, gathered long tubes, pulled the sheet up over Michael Spinelli’s head. Jane saw this before Dr. Karmis’ worried face appeared before her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spinelli. We did everything we could.” How could he stand to tell anyone this? She looked at him stupidly. Mr. Spinelli led her out into the hall.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” Mr. Spinelli said, “you done all you could. I’ll take her home. I’ll come right back. Is that O.K., Doctor?”

He took her to the car and helped her in, then drove through Northlee and took the river road to Leah. When they had gone a mile he pulled over to a wide shoulder where, in winter, the snow-plows turned around. He stopped the car and began to get out, but he forgot to turn off the ignition and the car jerked forward and stalled.