Circle View (20 page)

Back at the Robert E. Lee, Eck pulled his ten-speed bike down from its hooks and mounted it in the center of the room, balancing on the thin tires. He bought the bike the same week he quit smoking cold turkey, two days after my mother died. At first he pedaled the bike through the streets of downtown Winston wearing his Sansabelts and tan Hushpuppies, wobbling around corners. By the time my troubles began he had graduated to slick black biking shorts, wraparound sunglasses, and a leather helmet. He was winning his age group in local road races and being written up on the sports page.

Purvis fed strips of beef jerky to Desdemona, after admonishing me to stop clapping my hands to make her faint. I couldn't help myself; it was a neat trick. Purvis scratched her behind the ears.

“Well, Eck,” he said, “you've world enough and time, what do you propose?”

Eck winced as he dismounted the bike. “Bedsores,” he said to me. I learned he had been in the hospital not just a few days, as I imagined, but nearly two weeks. Long enough for his doctors to decide that his cancer was inoperable. When he coughed, the sound was like wringing water from a heavy sponge onto the sidewalk.

“Lily will find us here,” Eck said.

“Let her,” I said. “You have your rights. If you don't want to go back, tell her to go to hell.”

“Well spoken,” Purvis said.

“You don't understand, Robert,” Eck said. He walked across the room to look at the retirement photo of himself standing with Clay Williams, the chairman of Reynolds Tobacco. In 1947 Eck left the police force in Washington and moved south, to be near his sisters. He found a job with Reynolds, where for the next twenty-eight years he operated a Molins cigarette-making machine, days spent packing Camels and Winstons and Salems in the Number 12 plant downtown.

Eck turned and looked at us. “Lily hammered on me, boys,” he said. “I was doped up and sick, and I signed it all away. Wills and testaments, bank accounts, power of attorney, everything.” He hesitated. “She can make me go back.”

I shook my head. “And I'm saying I won't let her do that.”

“Your place is here,” Purvis said, as if that settled the matter. He didn't look up, but sat feeding handfuls of peanuts to Desdemona. “The question stands,” he said, “what do you want to do?”

“Everything,” Eck said. “But first I'd like to rest awhile.” He lay back on the cot and coughed as if his lungs would tear apart.

Purvis petted Desdemona and whispered into her ear: “Easy now, girl. It scares me too.”

Purvis and I watched his black and white TV, following the soap operas (a habit I'd picked up living alone) while Eck slept fitfully. The phone rang. When I answered it, Lily started in on me.

“I'm surprised at you, Robert. No wonder Deborah kicked you out.”

“Don't start that,” I said.

“Is Purvis behind all this? You tell him it's none of his business.” She hesitated, and I didn't say anything. I realized as she said it that Purvis
was
behind all of this, that if it had been left to me, Eck would still be at the hospital.

“You'll kill him doing this,” she said. “He'll run out of his pain medicine. I'm coming down there.”

“Don't do it, Lily. He wanted out. Leave him in that hospital and you'll kill him sure enough.”

“I'll call the police, Robert. I swear to God I will.”

Eck stirred and coughed. “I'm sorry, Lily,” I said, and hung up the phone, my hands shaking.

Twenty minutes later we were heading out of downtown in my Escort wagon, toward the highway. I kept watching in my rearview mirror. Eck said that he wanted to eat some real food for once and drink a beer and a cup of black coffee. He directed us to Harper's Cafe, where we drank bottomless cups and ate something called Pork Midnight, which Purvis called manna from heaven.

Afterwards, Eck decided we should get our beer by way of the free tour at the Schlitz brewery. I felt like we were school kids on some vice-ridden field trip. I parked near the loading dock, where shiny, battered kegs sat stacked on pallets. On the roof of the Schlitz plant was a mechanical billboard, so high up I had to crane my neck to see it. We faced the back of it, the unpainted side, but I knew what was around front. I'd seen it a thousand times, the bright young man, straight out of 1950 with his starched white shirt and crewcut, his arm working up and down, lifting over and over to his smiling red mouth an enormous bottle of Schlitz. When I was a kid and we'd drive past on the highway, Eck would nudge me and point to the sign.

“That fella's always thirsty,” he'd say. “Never gets enough.” That afternoon he'd forgotten to say it. I remembered bringing Debbie out along the highway to show her the billboard. I used Eck's line, to try to pry a laugh out of her. This was nearing the end of our marriage, before the real trouble started, but bad enough that I felt awkward around her half the time, this woman I'd slept with for ten years. She said only that the sign was an eyesore, and they ought to tear it down. I told her she was probably right.

We toured the plant wearing hard hats they gave us, while a heavy-set man in short sleeves and a clip-on tie explained the workings of the stainless vats and the vacuum pumps and the capping machines that whirred and hissed in the huge room below us. Purvis began lecturing the man about the Egyptian origins of the brewer's art. In the pale fluorescent light I noticed that Eck's arms and legs were colored with bruises, the blood spreading under his skin. He stopped and leaned against the rail. All his life he'd had an affection for machinery—guns, motorcycles, power tools, and finally bicycles—but now I knew something was wrong. He drew deep breaths, his eyes closed, his hands gripping the rail. I thought that all of this was too much like the hospital: the tile floors, stainless steel polished to a cold shine, workers in white uniforms. I moved beside him and took his arm, ready to lead him out of there. He held his ground and pressed his hand against the small of my back.

“Smell that, Robert,” he said.

I imitated him, closing my eyes and opening my lungs to whatever he was smelling with his own ragged breaths. I hadn't noticed before—everywhere, pushing at the walls and the high ceilings, was the heavy odor of fermenting yeast. I breathed again, the smell as fertile as a sweaty greenhouse, rank as damp sheets after sex. A seed tossed into that thick air might have taken root.

“That's
what we came here for,” Eck said.

“It's nice,” I agreed.

He was quiet a minute, breathing. “So she's gone for good?” he asked.

I almost laughed. “Yes,” I said. “This one's pretty much over.”

He nodded. “She seemed like a good girl. I'm no expert at marriage.”

“I've always thought you and Purvis have a kind of marriage, a good one.”

His eyebrows drew together.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “You get along. You like each other.”

Eck nodded. “Never thought much about it, to tell you the truth. He's honest, pays his half of the rent.” He seemed embarrassed, and for a moment I was jealous of the ease with which they'd carried out their twenty-year friendship.

“Women are a whole different ball game,” he said.

“Amen to that.”

At the end of the tour they gave us free samples of beer drawn from oak casks. Purvis sipped, swishing the beer in his mouth to taste it. Eck drank in gulps, the beer running out the edges of his mug down the front of his cycling shirt. We were silent awhile, drinking. Purvis read the pamphlets the man had given us, and he and Eck shared inside jokes and old drinking stories, their laughs echoing around us. Finally Eck wiped his mouth and looked at Purvis and me. “Don't let them put me back,” he said.

By late afternoon Purvis was worried about Desdemona and took a taxi back to the hotel to feed her and change her litter box. He promised to play dumb if Lily called, and to meet up with us later. We decided we would be okay for a few hours at my place, the one house on a dead-end street near the bad part of town. The house sat in the shadow cast by the big screen of the X-rated drive-in. It had been leased to me for fifty bucks a month and the promise to bring the roof and foundation and plumbing up to code, which I had never much done. I moved in there the same day Debbie asked me to leave our house. At the time I imagined living in squalor as an act of revenge.

As we walked from the driveway to the house, Eck had to stop every few feet to rest. He would cough and spit blood, and push me away if I tried to help. He still wore his black biking shorts, and had his sunglasses sitting atop his head, in among the wet strands of his hair. I later found out he had refused chemotherapy, not wanting to lose his mustache. It seemed a worthy enough thing to hold onto.

Inside, he first noticed the wall of Bic pens, the separation papers and old letters stuck there, the dusty plaster powdering the floor.

“What the hell is all this, Robert?”

“Steam worked off,” I said.

He nodded. “Better than firing a gun. You going to be all right with this?”

“I am,” I said, though at that point I was still phoning Debbie nearly every night, sometimes just to hear her voice and then hang up while she said,
“Damn
it, Robert, I
know
it's you.”

Eck noticed the column of figures I'd run, the account of all the money I lacked.

“This is no good,” he said.

“I know.”

“I mean if this is how you're going about it, you're lost.”

I nodded, knowing he was right, and knowing at the same time that I would still send to Debbie the sapphire necklace I'd bought for her birthday and that she would send it back unopened.

Eck fell asleep in my bed, and I sat on the porch sipping the good bourbon I'd done without for those months leading up to the divorce. An empty conciliatory gesture on my part, as if I could pour my problems down the drain or stop buying them at the drive-up window. Drink was not what was wrong, but you grab what ballast you can. I watched stray shafts of light spear over the top of the high movie screen. I pulled a Camel filter from the pack in my jeans pocket and lit it, pulling the first drag deep into my lungs. All day I'd been itchy for a cigarette, but had put it off. Behind me, Eck slept uneasily, moaning and grunting, his breath halting. I stubbed out my cigarette against my shoe and then said the word out loud: “Cancer.” I said it to the porch rail, to the moths that circled above me, then threw my whiskey glass out into the dark yard where the light didn't reach.

A nighttime chill settled in, damp and airy. With my eyes closed, I could just make out the soundtrack carrying over from the drive-in, the moans of big-screen sex crackling out through tiny window speakers into the cars of those I imagined as lonely people. I thought of Debbie, incapable of loneliness. It had been two months now since I'd seen her, though as I say I still phoned her nearly every night. She would talk to me as if I'd called to sell her something, which in a way I had. On bad nights, after a few rounds of bourbon, I'd end up telling her I still loved her, and she got to sound superior and pitying, and I'd point that out and she would hang up. I heard from someone that she'd cut her hair.

The sound from the drive-in quit and the light ended, the nine o'clock show over. Darkness fell around me, and I wondered where all this dodging of the sisters was taking us, if finally Eck would have to go back even while hating it, his last wish not to. Lily had mentioned pain medication, and hearing Eck's fitful sleep, I knew she'd been truthful about it, that he needed more than the pills he'd brought. Eck coughed and moaned. Across the way, I heard cars leaving the gravel lot of the drive-in, carrying people home. I went inside and phoned Debbie.

“These calls have to stop eventually,” she said. “You have to let go and embrace other possibilities.” She was seeing a therapist at the university.

“Eck's sick,” I said. “He's dying.”

“What's wrong? Where is he?” It was good to again hear sympathy in place of the usual pity in her voice, to imagine part of it for me.

“He has cancer, and he's here with me.”

“Shouldn't he be in the hospital?”

“He was. I took him out.”

“God, Robert, can you do that?”

“Where would you rather be if you were dying?”

She was silent a moment. “Okay, I understand. But…well, do you need me to do anything?”

This seemed like an opening, a way for me to invent a reason for seeing her, for us to spend time together, drawn into his dying. But no pretext would come to me; there was only Eck in my bed, his fits of painful coughing, and what time he had left.

“Thanks anyway,” I said.

Near midnight a taxi pulled up in front of the house, and Purvis stepped out. He walked into the yellow light of the porch wearing a hat with a tiny red feather stuck in the band. He was out of breath. At the kitchen table he downed half a cup of coffee before he spoke.

“Lily came by the hotel. She's threatening legal intervention again. My guess is she's serious.”

“We didn't break any laws,” I said.

Eck swung his legs out of bed and slowly sat up. “She'll draft her own laws and have them passed by Congress if she has to.”

“Power of attorney,” Purvis said. “She can get a court order tomorrow morning. She can have you committed if she wants to. ‘In the interest of your well-being' was how she phrased it.”

“This is a bunch of damn foolishness,” Eck said, his breath raspy. “Robert, if you take me to one more place then I'll call Lily and we'll work something out.”

“Eck, you don't have to go to the hospital,” I said.

Purvis nodded. “If need be, we'll arm ourselves with an attorney.” He set his hat on the table.

“Damn right,” I said. “If there's one thing I learned—”

“No.” Eck stood. “I have to go back.”