Mr. Was (2 page)

“Your grandfather is dying,” my mother said, her voice going all high and funny on that last, final word. Her hand was still on my forehead, but it was no longer cool and comfortable. It had become hot and moist and she was squeezing. I twisted my head away and sat up. She locked both her hands together, pushed them down into her lap, and looked away. The light reflected off tears on her cheek. I didn't like to see her that way.

“Mom? Are you okay?” I asked.

She nodded. “We have to drive up to Rochester,” she said. “They have him in the hospital there.”

“We? You mean we're all going?”

She shook her head. “Your father's staying here. He's not feeling well.”

“You mean he's drunk.”

She looked away.

“Why do I have to go?” I asked.

“He wants to see you, Jack. He hasn't seen you since you were a little baby.”

“What if I don't want to see him?”

“I need the company, Jack,” she said quietly. “Please don't make a fuss.” Her eyes were filling up with tears again, so I decided not to argue anymore.

My mother drove as if she expected to be hit any second. When a big semi would blow by us she would duck her head and swerve toward the shoulder. My father refused to ride with her. He said she was a public menace. But Mom wasn't the one whose car was in the body shop every few months. Mom wasn't the one who had tried to drive through the back of the garage. She wasn't the one who'd got drunk and run over the mailbox.

I watched her cringing and ducking and swerving her way out of Skokie, the 1 A.M. traffic zooming by, the defroster in the little Honda rattling, straining to clear the frosted windows. I huddled in the passenger seat, hands inside my down parka, my head scrunched down into the collar like a turtle. After a while, the traffic thinned out and the windows cleared and it got warm enough inside the car so I could relax. I had the feeling that Mom didn't want to talk, but it was pretty boring watching the mileposts flash by.

“I thought Grandpa Skoro didn't like kids,” I said.

She flinched, just like she did when Dad yelled at her.

“Now Jack, that's not it at all. It's just. . . he's had a hard time being around people . . . ever since your grandmother . . . left.”

My grandmother had disappeared about two years after I was born. Some people said she left on her own, others believed something terrible had happened to her. It was a long time ago. My dad said she was probably dead. My mother didn't like to talk about it.

“So how come he wants to see me now?”

“He's dying, Jack. Maybe he's sorry he never got to know you.”

“Well, I'm not.”

That hurt her. She drove in silence for a few minutes, then said, “He is a lonely old man.”

“Dad says he likes to be alone.”

She shook her head. “That's because your father never knew him. They're a lot alike, you know. Angry.” She laughed, a high-pitched laugh that I'd never heard from her before.

We didn't talk much after that, and I think I fell asleep.

• • •

My whole life, I've always hated hospitals. When I tell you what happened, and when you get to know more about me, you'll understand. This hospital in Rochester was one of the modern kind where they
have colored stripes on the floors so you don't get lost and they try to make things cheery by putting in lots of fake plants in the halls and cheap prints on the walls and the nurses wear bright colors. But it still smelled like a hospital, full of pain and germs and people hooked up to machines.

Grandpa Skoro was hooked up to at least three of them. He had a tube in his nose, another one in his arm, and this thing attached to his chest that led to a complicated-looking video display like you see in the movies with the jagged green line going across a screen.

I could hear my mother suck her breath in when she saw him. He looked like he was dead, but the line on the screen was showing these little blips. His bald, crinkled head was white and powdery-looking, a forest of stiff white hairs shot out from his brow, and his open mouth was rimmed with dried spit. The only part of him that had any color was a long, pink scar running along the line of his jaw. Mom moved in closer, leaned over him, whispered, “Daddy?”

That seemed weird, my mother calling this half-dead old man
Daddy.

He opened his eyes, pale blue on bloodshot yellow. A grayish tongue crawled across his lips, leaving a glistening layer of spit. He whispered, “Betty.”

She pushed her head in past all those tubes and wires and kissed him on the forehead. I stayed back behind her, wishing I was someplace else. I didn't want to get any closer. I was afraid. Afraid of the old
man and afraid of the nearness of death. I took a step back, thinking that if I could get out into the hall I could lose myself in the corridors and make my excuses later.

But my mother turned around just then and said, “Jack, come say hello to your grandfather Skoro.” She stepped aside so I had a clear view of the old man, and he had a clear view of me.

Grandfather Skoro was smiling, if you could call it that, and reaching out a veiny hand. I started toward him. As I reached his bedside and opened my mouth to say hello, his face changed, as if his flesh were clay in the hands of a mad, invisible sculptor. It began with his mouth falling slack, showing his two remaining peg-like teeth. Then his eyes sort of pushed out of his head and he jerked back away from me like I was a ghost.

“You!” he said, his voice cracking.

I thought, What did I do?

He looked like he was going to die right then and there, but the mad sculptor was not yet done with Skoro. His wide, horrified eyes suddenly went small and glittery. His spiky eyebrows snapped together above his long, twisted nose. His mouth went from round to a bat-shaped snarl, and his pale cheeks bloomed fiery red. I don't remember how he got his hands around my neck, but I remember not being able to breathe, his thumbs sinking deep into my neck, and that face, bright red now from forehead to chin, bearing down on me, my mother screaming, the
old man's horrid breath in my face, his wet lips writhing, saying, “Kill you. Kill you. Kill you again.”

When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back on the hard linoleum floor, a nurse pressing something cool against my forehead, my mother sobbing hysterically, my grandfather hanging half out of his bed, eyes open and vacant, a bubble of spit frozen on his mouth. The monitor displayed a flat green line, howling its mechanical grief.

Y
ou'd think that when somebody dies it would be a simple thing to dig a hole in the ground and stick them in it, but I soon found out that life wasn't simple, and neither was death. It was going to take three days to get everything taken care of, three days in Memory, Minnesota, where Skoro had lived his life and where he wanted to be buried.

We left Rochester in midafternoon, drove northeast to Wabasha at the southern tip of Lake Pepin. Lake Pepin is actually a wide spot in the Mississippi, a lake twenty miles long and three miles wide. We followed the shore north. In that part of southeastern Minnesota the river bluffs rise so high you'd almost think you were in the mountains. The road twisted in and out of the narrow valleys, sometimes climbing to the top of the bluffs, then snaking back down to follow the riverbank. Mom drove with her chin pushed forward over the wheel.

“I hate these roads,” she said.

We pulled into Memory at four that afternoon. A sign at the edge of town read:

W
ELCOME TO
MEMORY
POP
.
40

I said, “I suppose now they'll have to make it thirty-nine.”

“I suppose they will,” she said dully.

After what had happened back in Rochester it had taken awhile for her to calm down, but she seemed to be fine now. In fact, she seemed more relaxed than I'd ever seen her. Now she was calm, but sad. “You know, when your grandfather was a boy, there were almost a thousand people living here.”

“I suppose all the smart ones left,” I said.

Mom smiled. She wasn't going to let me get to her. It was as if when Skoro died a huge weight had come off of her.

She said, “When I was your age, there were still about three hundred. It was a good place to grow up. I had a lot of friends.” She slowed the car. We were driving past a bunch of old buildings. Most of the windows were boarded up, and the signs were faded and unreadable. “I guess they all decided to leave. Some of their parents still live here.”

We came to a traffic light. She brought the car to a stop, even though the light was green.

“They put this stoplight in when I was a little girl. It was supposed to make the tourists slow down so they'd spend their money at the businesses in town. These days there aren't many places left for them to spend it.”

“Is everything here closed?”

“There's Ole's bar,” she pointed at a low building. O
LE'S
Q
UICK
S
TOP
was spelled out across the dingy
yellow wooden sides of the building in script, the green letters faded and peeling. The two small windows glowed with neon beer signs.

“But that's about it, Jack. The Memory Insurance Company moved their offices to Red Wing, and so did the only bank in town. There was a café up until about five years ago. The co-op is gone. So's the gas station. There's still a little post office, and there's the Memory Institute over there.” She pointed at a small, flattopped wooden building next to the railroad tracks.

“That used to be the depot, but the trains don't stop here anymore, they just roar on by. Now it's used as a kind of museum.”

“Where's Grandpa's house?”

“Up on the bluff. But before we drive up there I'd like to drop in on Orville and Vera Sanders,” she said. “I'm sure they'll want to know about your grandfather.”

“Do I have to come?” I had an image of sitting around some hot, cramped living room watching a couple of old people drinking coffee.

“What else would you do?”

“I could just walk around,” I said. It was a nice day for February, sunny and warm enough to start the snowbanks melting. I figured anything was better than sitting around with Orville and Vera Sanders, whoever they were.

She seemed doubtful, but after a moment she said okay. “Just don't wander too far. I want to get up to the house before it gets dark.”

We decided to meet in half an hour in front of the Memory Institute. That's where she dropped me off, telling me that I might want to look at some of the photos. Wouldn't you know, when I tried the door it was locked. A hand-lettered sign on the door said,
BACK IN 2. HRS
. That was fine with me. Why would I want to look at a bunch of pictures of dead people?

The way the town was laid out, all of the businesses had been clustered on River Street. I walked up the street, looking in the windows of the abandoned buildings. They were either empty, or full of broken furniture and shelving and piles of junk. I turned up one of the side streets. The next street up was called Middle Street. Except for a boarded-up brick schoolhouse, there was nothing but houses. Only about half of the houses had their walks shoveled. The rest looked like they hadn't been lived in for years.

It took me about fifteen minutes to see the whole town, which was squeezed in between the railroad tracks and the bluff. I didn't see a single one of the thirty-nine people who supposedly lived there, although in some of the houses the curtains seemed to move as I walked past.

I was getting cold. The sun had dropped closer to the horizon and all but disappeared behind a haze of cloud. I headed for Ole's Quick Stop, which turned out to be a sort of grocery store/video rental/bar/café/bait shop. There were two guys sitting at the bar, a couple of identical-looking old men with the dirtiest mesh baseball caps you ever saw, fingers as
big around as bratwurst, bellies that looked like they'd had a contest to see who could swallow the biggest medicine ball, butts draping over the stools so far it looked like they'd stuck themselves on the posts. They both turned and looked at me with blank expressions. I didn't get what they were looking at, but I figured I was the only thing they'd seen all day that they hadn't seen a thousand times before. You talk about the boonies, this place was so far out they probably hadn't heard which side won the Civil War.

The guy standing behind the bar—I suppose he was Ole—wasn't much better looking than his customers, but he was younger, he'd shaved more recently, and his cap was newer. You could actually read the embroidered front: W
AYNE
F
EEDS
. Who's Wayne? I wondered. I took a look around and saw they had a pinball machine, one of the old-fashioned kind, five balls for a quarter. Half the lights were burned out, but it looked like it would work.

“You got change for a five?” I said to the bartender. He did, and pretty soon I was trying to win games off a machine with a busted flipper and two dead kickers. I had just about got the hang of it when I felt somebody breathing down my neck. I trapped the ball on the flipper and looked back at Ole, if that was really his name, who was standing about two inches behind me, waggling a pair of fuzzy black eyebrows.