Page 26 - Vol. V #6

(Delmas continued from preceding page) vent under the window.
another, like a pile-up on a rainy road. Then the truck is gone and everything goes silent again. Except Delmas cannot ever go back to sleep.
“Bop,” Delmas says louder.
The deer straightens up and freezes. Stillness rushes back in to fill the space Delmas has dis- turbed with his voice.
“Give it a chance, dad,” Deborah tells him over the phone. His sons have stopped calling. Deborah says, “Give it six months. I can come out and check on you then.” A few days later, a white noise machine arrives in the mail, with Deborah’s hand- written instructions: “Put this on your bedside table and turn it up loud.”
Delmas stands and waves his arms. He yells and screams and hoots and shouts; he slaps the win- dow with the palms of his hands. The deer drops into a little half-crouch, bounds across the drive- way, and stops in the Harper’s front yard. Delmas yells more, even knocks on the window, but the deer will run no more. Safe in the Harper’s yard, it goes back to grazing.
He lies awake at night now and listens to the white noise, the clicks and pops as they spread out and fill the room, to become a melody inside Delmas’s head. Then one night the rhythm falls apart, the song in Delmas’s head dissipates. He stares into the dark waiting. Waiting for another rhythm to rise from the chaos of clicks, waiting for something to make sense.
~
Six months after Lil’s funeral, Delmas misses a step and falls down the basement stairs after only two beers. Deborah—with her black boyfriend— and Joshua—without his special friend—fly from back east and descend on him. They tell him it’s time to move out of the house. They reason and shame and cajole.
~
“I love you, dad,” Deb says, “and I’d do anything for you.”
Delmas wakes to a doctor leaning over him, look- ing down into his face. The doctor has bushy brown eyebrows; one of the eyebrow hairs twists away from the rest, toward the man’s reced-
“We’d do anything for you,” Josh says.
ing hairline. He explains that Delmas is locked in. “Locked in” the man says repeatedly, you’re locked in. You’ve had a massive stroke. You’re fortunate to be alive.
“But we can’t afford to fly out here every time you fall down.”
He can blink his eyes but cannot turn his head. He is choking on a tube. His daughter is there. He can hear her voice as she reads, the shuffling pages, loose papers. Things she’s printed off the internet because she doesn’t entirely trust the doctors. Deborah says, “Recovery is a long, long process...”
Deborah shames him into letting her have power of attorney. She sells the house, uses his money to buy him a small place—about the size of one of those two-room setups at the Embassy Suites— in a retirement village. He doesn’t mind it, but
He is choking on a tube. He cannot even move his tongue to swallow. There is no saliva, his mouth is sticky and dry—the tube down his throat; he
is choking—he can’t get a single decent swal- low. One good swallow would be as satisfying as anything he’s ever done in his life. Every now and then he gets the panic-stricken certainty that the tube they’ve got down his throat will be the thing that kills him. He panics and tries to thrash, tries
his bedroom window looks out on a tall wooden fence, the only barrier between his narrow patio and a row of dumpsters in back of a strip mall of strange-smelling stores where mostly Mexicans and other non-Americans go. A garbage truck comes at three or four in the morning a couple of times a week and empties the dumpsters, its die- sel engine making a roaring and banging racket like multiple car crashes, one metallic boom after
17