The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (53 page)

The moon was due to rise. It appeared as they drove over the ungraded dirt road toward the crossing where Hattie’s turret-shaped car was sitting on the rails. Driving very fast, Darly wheeled the pickup around, spraying dirt on the miner and his girl, who had followed in their car.

“You get behind the wheel and steer,” Darly told Hattie.

She climbed into the seat. Waiting at the wheel, she lifted up her face and said, “Please God, I didn’t bend the axle or crack the oil pan.”

When Darly crawled under the bumper of Hattie’s car the pain in his ribs suddenly cut off his breath, so instead of doubling the tow chain he fastened it at full length. He rose and trotted back to the truck on the tight boots. Motion seemed the only remedy for the pain; not even booze did the trick anymore. He put the pickup into towing gear and began to pull. One side of Hattie’s car dropped into the roadbed with a heave of springs. She sat with a stormy, frightened, conscience-stricken face, racing the motor until she flooded it.

The tungsten miner yelled, “Your chain’s too long.”

Hattie was raised high in the air by the pitch of the wheels. She had to roll down the window to let herself out because the door handle had been jammed from inside for years. Hattie struggled out on the uplifted side crying, “I better call the Swede. I better have him signal. There’s a train due.”

“Go on, then,” said Darly. “You’re no good here.”

“Darly, be careful with my car. Be careful.”

The ancient sea bed at this place was flat and low, and the lights of her car and of the truck and of the tungsten miner’s Chevrolet were bright and big at twenty miles. Hattie was too frightened to think of this. All she could think was that she was a procrastinating old woman; she had lived by delays; she had meant to stop drinking; she had put off the time, and now she had smashed her car—a terrible end, a terrible judgment on her. She got to the ground and, drawing up her skirt, she started to get over the tow chain. To prove that the chain didn’t have to be shortened, and to get the whole thing over with, Darly threw the pickup forward again. The chain jerked up and struck Hattie in the knee and she fell forward and broke her arm.

She cried, “Darly, Darly, I’m hurt. I fell.”

“The old lady tripped on the chain,” said the miner. “Back up here and I’ll double it for you. You’re getting nowheres.”

Drunkenly the miner lay down on his back in the dark, soft red cinders of the roadbed. Darly had backed up to slacken the chain.

Darly hurt the miner, too. He tore some skin from his fingers by racing ahead before the chain was secure. Without complaining, the miner wrapped his hand in his shirttail saying, “She’ll do it now.” The old car came down from the tracks and stood on the shoulder of the road.

“There’s your goddamn car,” said Darly to Hattie.

“Is it all right?” she said. Her left side was covered with dirt, but she managed to pick herself up and stand, round-backed and heavy, on her stiff legs. “I’m hurt, Darly.” She tried to convince him of it.

‘Hell if you are,” he said. He believed she was putting on an act to escape blame. The pain in his ribs made him especially impatient with her. “Christ, if you can’t look after yourself anymore you’ve got no business out here.”

“You’re old yourself,” she said. “Look what you did to me. You can’t hold your liquor.”

This offended him greatly. He said, “I’ll take you to the Rolfes. They let you booze it up in the first place, so let them worry about you. I’m tired of your bunk, Hattie.”

He raced uphill. Chains, spade, and crowbar clashed on the sides of the pickup. She was frightened and held her arm and cried. Rolfe’s dogs jumped at her to lick her when she went through the gate. She shrank from them crying, “Down, down.’

“Darly,” she cried in the darkness, “take care of my car. Don’t leave it standing there on the road. Darly, take care of it, please.”

But Darly in his ten-gallon hat, his chin-bent face wrinkled, small and angry, a furious pain in his ribs, tore away at high speed.

“Oh, God, what will I do,” she said.

The Rolfes were having a last drink before dinner, sitting at their fire of pitchy railroad ties, when Hattie opened the door. Her knee was bleeding, her eyes were tiny with shock, her face gray with dust.

“I’m hurt,” she said desperately. “I had an accident. I sneezed and lost control of the wheel. Jerry, look after the car. It’s on the road.”

They bandaged her knee and took her home and put her to bed. Helen Rolfe wrapped a heating pad around her arm.

“I can’t have the pad,” Hattie complained. “The switch goes on and off, and every time it does it starts my generator and uses up the gas.”

“Ah, now, Hattie,” Rolfe said, “this is not the time to be stingy. We’ll take you to town in the morning and have you looked over. Helen will phone Dr. Stroud.”

Hattie wanted to say, “Stingy! Why you’re the stingy ones. I just haven’t got anything. You and Helen are ready to hit each other over two bits in canasta.” But the Rolfes were good to her; they were her only real friends here. Darly would have let her lie in the yard all night, and Pace would have sold her to the bone man. He’d give her to the knacker for a buck.

So she didn’t talk back to the Rolfes, but as soon as they left the yellow house and walked through the superclear moonlight under the great skirt of box-elder shadows to their new station wagon, Hattie turned off the switch, and the heavy swirling and battering of the generator stopped. Presently she became aware of real pain, deeper pain, in her arm, and she sat rigid, warming the injured place with her hand. It seemed to her that she could feel the bone sticking out. Before leaving, Helen Rolfe had thrown over her a comforter that had belonged to Hattie’s dead friend India, from whom she had inherited the small house and everything in it. Had the comforter lain on India’s bed the night she died? Hattie tried to remember, but her thoughts were mixed up. She was fairly sure the deathbed pillow was in the loft, and she believed she had put the death bedding in a trunk. Then how had this comforter got out? She couldn’t do anything about it now but draw it away from contact with her skin. It kept her legs warm. This she accepted, but she didn’t want it any nearer.

More and more Hattie saw her own life as though, from birth to the present, every moment had been filmed. Her fancy was that when she died she would see the film in the next world. Then she would know how she had appeared from the back, watering the plants, in the bathroom, asleep, playing the organ, embracing—everything, even tonight, in pain, almost the last pain, perhaps, for she couldn’t take much more. How many twists and angles had life to show her yet? There couldn’t be much film left. To lie awake and think such thoughts was the worst thing in the world. Better death than insomnia. Hattie not only loved sleep, she believed in it.

The first attempt to set the bone was not successful. “Look what they’ve done to me,” said Hattie and showed visitors the discolored breast. After the second operation her mind wandered. The sides of her bed had to be raised, for in her delirium she roamed the wards. She cursed at the nurses when they shut her in. “You can’t make people prisoners in a democracy without a trial, you bitches.” She had learned from Wicks how to swear.
“He
_ was profane,” she used to say. “I picked it up unconsciously.”

For several weeks her mind was not clear. Asleep, her face was lifeless; her cheeks were puffed out and her mouth, no longer wide and grinning, was drawn round and small. Helen sighed when she saw her.

“Shall we get in touch with her family?” Helen asked the doctor. His skin was white and thick. He had chestnut hair, abundant but very dry. He sometimes explained to his patients, “I had a tropical disease during the war.”

He asked, “Is there a family?”

“Old brothers. Cousins’ children,” said Helen. She tried to think who would be called to her own bedside (she was old enough for that). Rolfe would see that she was cared for. He would hire private nurses. Hattie could not afford that. She had already gone beyond her means. A trust company in Philadelphia paid her eighty dollars a month. She had a small savings account.

“I suppose it’ll be up to us to get her out of hock,” said Rolfe. “Unless the brother down in Mexico comes across. We may have to phone one of those old guys.”

In the end, no relations had to be called. Hattie began to recover. At last she could recognize visitors, though her mind was still in disorder. Much that had happened she couldn’t recall.

“How many quarts of blood did they have to give me?” she kept asking.

I seem to remember five, six, eight different transfusions. Daylight, electric light…” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t make a pleasant face as yet. “How am I going to pay?” she said. “At twenty-five bucks a quart. My little bit of money is just about wiped out.”

Blood became her constant topic, her preoccupation. She told everyone who came to see her, “—have to replace all that blood. They poured gallons into me. Gallons. I hope it was all good.” And, though very weak, she began to grin and laugh again. There was more hissing in her laughter than formerly; the illness had affected her chest.

“No cigarettes, no booze,” the doctor told Helen. “Doctor,” Helen asked him, “do you expect her to change?”

“All the same, I am obliged to say it.”

“Life sober may not be much of a temptation to her,” said Helen. Her husband laughed. When Rolfe’s laughter was intense it blinded one of his eyes. His short Irish face turned red; on the bridge of his small, sharp nose the skin whitened. “Hattie’s like me,” he said. “She’ll be in business till she’s cleaned out. And if Sego Lake turned to whisky she’d use her last strength to knock her old yellow house down to build a raft of it. She’d float away on whisky. So why talk temperance?”

Hattie recognized the similarity between them. When he came to see her she said, “Jerry, you’re the only one I can really talk to about my troubles. What am I going to do for money? I have Hotchkiss Insurance. I paid eight dollars a month.”

“That won’t do you much good, Hat. No Blue Cross?”

“I let it drop ten years ago. Maybe I could sell some of my valuables.”

“What valuables have you got?” he said. His eye began to droop with laughter. “Why,” she said defiantly, “there’s plenty. First there’s the beautiful, precious Persian rug that India left me.”

“Coals from the fireplace have been burning it for years, Hat!”

“The rug is in
perfect
_ condition,” she said with an angry sway of the shoulders. “A beautiful object like that never loses its value. And the oak table from the Spanish monastery is three hundred years old.”

“With luck you could get twenty bucks for it. It would cost fifty to haul it out of here. It’s the house you ought to sell.”

“The house?” she said. Yes, that had been in her mind. “I’d have to get twenty thousand for it.”

“Eight is a fair price.”

“Fifteen….” She was offended, and her voice recovered its strength. “India put eight into it in two years. And don’t forget that Sego Lake is one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

“But where is it? Five hundred and some miles to San Francisco and two hundred to Salt Lake City. Who wants to live way out here but a few eccentrics like you and India? And me?”

“There are things you can’t put a price tag on. Beautiful things.”

“Oh, bull, Hattie! You don’t know squat about beautiful things. Any more than I do. I live here because it figures for me, and you because India left you the house. And just in the nick of time, too. Without it you wouldn’t have had a pot of your own.”

His words offended Hattie; more than that, they frightened her. She was silent and then grew thoughtful, for she was fond of Jerry Rolfe and he of her. He had good sense and, moreover, he only expressed her own thoughts. He spoke no more than the truth about India’s death and the house. But she told herself, He doesn’t know everything. You’d have to pay a San Francisco architect ten thousand just to
think
_ of such a house. Before he drew a line.

“Jerry,” the old woman said, “what am I going to do about replacing the blood in the blood bank?”

“Do you want a quart from me, Hat?” His eye began to fall shut.

“You won’t do. You had that tumor, two years ago. I think Darly ought to give some.”

“The old man?” Rolfe laughed at her. “You want to kill him?”

“Why!” said Hattie with anger, lifting up her massive face. Fever and perspiration had frayed the fringe of curls; at the back of the head the hair had knotted and matted so that it had to be shaved. “Darly almost killed me. It’s his fault that I’m in this condition. He must have
some
_ blood in him. He runs after all the chicks—all of them—young and old.”

“Come, you were drunk, too,” said Rolfe.

“I’ve driven drunk for forty years. It was the sneeze. Oh, Jerry, I feel wrung out,” said Hattie, haggard, sitting forward in bed. But her face was cleft by her nonsensically happy grin. She was not one to be miserable for long; she had the expression of a perennial survivor.

Every other day she went to the therapist. The young woman worked her arm for her; it was a pleasure and a comfort to Hattie, who would have been glad to leave the whole cure to her. However, she was given other exercises to do, and these were not so easy. They rigged a pulley for her and Hattie had to hold both ends of a rope and saw it back and forth through the scraping little wheel. She bent heavily from the hips and coughed over her cigarette. But the most important exercise of all she shirked. This required her to put the flat of her hand to the wall at the level of her hips and, by working her finger tips slowly, to make the hand ascend to the height of her shoulder. That was painful; she often forgot to do it, although the doctor warned her, “Hattie, you don’t want adhesions, do you?”

A light of despair crossed Hattie’s eyes. Then she said, “Oh, Dr. Stroud, buy my house from me.”

“I’m a bachelor. What would I do with a house?”

“I know just the girl for you—my cousin’s daughter. Perfectly charming and very brainy. Just about got her Ph. D.”

“You must get quite a few proposals yourself,” said the doctor. “From crazy desert rats. They chase me. But,” she said, “after I pay my bills I’ll be in pretty punk shape. If at least I could replace that blood in the blood bank I’d feel easier.”