sliding into arizona
by carol dixon [WINNER 2005 SHORT SHORT STORY CONTEST]

He’d been a dickens of a husband most of our 42 years, not to say he hadn’t had some fetching moments. Still and all, I had no reason to expect he’d be anything but his rascally self to the end. It was my philosophy folks died like they lived. Monday morning I was on my hands and knees by Joe’s La-Z-Boy, groping for pills he’d knocked off his breakfast tray. It was an archaeological dig, every mite and crumb evidence of the weeks he’d been living and dying in that chair: bent matches, chewed fingernails, enough crumbs to stuff a Tom turkey, and then the pills. He had this rule: once his chair was lined up with the television, there was no good reason for moving it. None.

“What’s going on, Frances? You’re making me nervous, all your messing around.”

“Getting ready for the new nurse, Joe.”

I folded his clean pajamas on the kitchen table and kept one eye on the lane down to the highway. Then I went out on the porch hoping I could explain about Joe before he told on himself like he would. The porch clutter—a VW engine, old paint cans, a decrepit ladder, paint brushes in gunky Mason jars, the warped Flexible-Flyer sled—was a tell-tale report on our lives.

A dingy sedan stopped in weedy gravel by the porch. The brown woman who wedged herself out could have been from the AME Church in town—no white uniform or polished shoes. What she had was dried baby’s breath flowers tucked in her coarse hair, a tent of a skirt—lilac and marigold—and a bulky violet sweater that must have left a whole flock of sheep naked somewhere. Her suede Birkenstocks slap-shambled up the porch steps, and then she grabbed both my hands like we were old friends. Something about her size or her smile pulled me out of my orbit, and I didn’t want to let go. I’d circled around Joe for so long, now I was spinning off-course.

“Missus Kelley? I’m Gloria Delaney.” Her dimpled cheeks divided the continents of her face into countries.

“I’m Frances. Joe’s inside and...he’s not happy anybody’s coming in here. He thinks we can get along by ourselves.”

“How about you?” she asked, looking at me up close. Me, washed-out, bone-thin, all edges while she looked like a polished rainbow.

“Some days better than others. I pretend he’s getting better, but....but.... He doesn’t know.” I clapped my hands over my mouth.

“Let’s go in and see how things are. I can fix his pain, but the pretending.... We’ll have to work on that together.”

She hefted her black satchel into the living room, an aquarium of space, gray-green light-and-shadow flickering around the walls, oxygen shushing in the corner.
When the storm door banged, Joe slouched down in his ratty brown Naugahyde chair. Sometimes I think that chair kept him going. He always breathed easier there watching television lives as miserable as his own—just different miseries. The chair arms leaked their cottony innards from him picking at the duct tape while he watched his shows. Day by day, the sticky tape curled and collected parts of him: hairs, dander, eyelashes, picked cuticle, other things I didn’t want to think about.

The nurse didn’t seem to notice. She looked at Joe in his faded blue flannel bathrobe and mis-matched tube socks, and I could tell she was smiling inside.
Her barging in on him like that was going to be a challenge for Joe, and he didn’t pass up challenges. He looked her up and down, caressing an unlit Marlboro in his right hand, flipping a matchbook open and closed with his left thumb. The nurse looked right back, grinning, letting him watch her eyes follow his tether to the oxygen tank.

“Hey, missy, we all get a certain number of days and mine aren’t up. Not yet.” He flipped the match pack into his Sliders Tavern ashtray on the coffee table.

“Good enough, Mister Kelly. I’m Gloria Delaney. Doctor Barlow sent me.” Without moving her eyes from his, she kept that big easy grin and sidled over between him and his television screen.

“Guess I don’t have much say then, do I?” He pointed the remote control and the volume went up decibels.

She must have figured he wouldn’t give up easy because she planted herself like a tree. He stretched his neck trying to look around her, but she didn’t budge. He’d want her out before “Maverick”, and I could almost imagine a new strategy percolating in that man’s head right then. Sure enough, he turned the volume down, his smile all show.

“Let’s get started off right. I’m Joe. Mister Kelly was my old man. He died like I’ll die someday, but not soon. You can put your money on that, missy.”

“All right, Joe. Call me Gloria.” She smiled like time and experience were on her side.

“No need. Been thinking about Arizona. A good place for bad lungs is what I heard. Frances’ll get me some hippy-dippy health food, and first thing you know, Arizona here I come.”

“I’ll listen to your lungs and be on my way then.” She hummed “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and excavated in her nursing bag. Joe didn’t know it yet, but I did; he was out of his league.

“Seen many sick people in your line of work? Anybody gone to Arizona?” he asked, trying to make up for his bad start.

“My patients are very sick. I haven’t heard that anybody went to Arizona,” she said.

Joe didn’t ask more questions about her patients and Arizona. I suppose he wasn’t ready for the full discussion.

When “Maverick” came on, Joe pointed the remote control and the volume went back up. The card shark was Joe’s hero; he never lost a game or took a bullet.
Gloria plopped down on the footstool beside Joe’s chair and had her stethoscope on his bony ribs in seconds. I wondered if she’d hear the shushing and wheezing, pounding and sawing I heard when I put my ear on his chest after his coughing spells. She hung the stethoscope around her neck, leaned back against the side of his recliner and winked at me. She sang along with an insurance commercial in a fudgey-rich voice.

“Tolerable pipes,” Joe said. He noticed she hadn’t moved and must have been thinking she’d stay all day if he didn’t out-hustle her.

“What next, missy?”

“How’s your pain, Joe?”

“I’m good as gold. Doc B and Frances keep me going.”

There he was, playing tough with the one person who could help. Sometimes Joe didn’t make sense, even to me.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow, Joe. Anything you need before I go?” Gloria asked.

“Yeah, tuck this in your bee’s bonnet, missy. ‘Cause you’re a nurse, don’t expect me to lay down and play sick. And no yakking about ‘kimmo’ treatments. That stuff’s poison.”

“We agree on that, Joe.” She didn’t smile, and he winced like she’d cut him with something sharp and sterile.

I followed Gloria out to the porch.

“He’s a hard man. That’s just Joe. Don’t take him personally,” I said.

“It’s all right, Frances. How about you? Do you take him personally?”

I caught myself laughing at that. “I gave that up the day we left Saint Rita’s Church. He headed for Sliders Tavern and his pool buddies, and I walked home and waited. Been that way more or less ever since.”

As if there wasn’t another sick person in the world, she stood there breathing so soft, paying full attention to my little life. I couldn’t remember the last time anybody did that.

“We were kids, Joe nineteen, me sixteen. My folks were good religious people. When they found out about me and Joe and my condition, they made me choose. They should’ve known it wasn’t a choice for a sixteen-year-old girl to make.”
All the sudden, I told her what I hadn’t said even to Joe about how much I’d wanted that baby.

“Tobey only lived two months. Been gone most of my life, and I think about him every single day, even with Joe dying by the minute in the living room.” I covered my eyes, shook my head to get things under control and said I was glad she was coming back.

When I stood beside his chair, Joe glared at the television and growled, “You shouldn’t have told her, whatever you said.”

That night the sheets had just warmed to my body when Joe hollered from the living room. He was shivering and feverish.

“Franny, I dreamed about Pop dying, begging for more pills, asking for his gun.” Joe sobbed, maybe for the child, maybe for the man.

I pulled the afghan over his shoulders, and suddenly I saw an old man, cheeks slack and bristly, breath rank with sickness and blood. Where was the rowdy stud who’d taken me to the barn to romp in the hay loft all those years ago?

“Joe, you’ll be all right, you’ll see.“ I put my arm around him and sang the lullaby I’d sung to our baby. When sorrowful words fell apart in my throat, I hummed.
His twitches and breathing evened out, and he didn’t wake when I went down the hall to our old bedroom. A rectangle of brightness from the pole light in the side yard stretched across the foot of our bed. Wedding rings floated up off the quilt like the last night I’d tucked the quilt around Tobey.

Me and Joe had got in on either side of Tobey, feeling his hot, little-baby body. Tobey was dead in our bed next morning. When the country doctor held Tobey and talked about him like he was a thing, I begged to hold my baby one more time. The useless doctor kept up with his useless questions. Maybe we’d rolled on Tobey in our sleep, he said. He took Tobey and said there’d be an inquest. He wanted information; I wanted my baby. I couldn’t give him answers; he wouldn’t give me my baby. And he wouldn’t take back the guilt he left in our house.

I’d rarely thought of Tobey as he might have been if he’d grown up. The small headstone at the cemetery kept him a baby, and Joe wouldn’t indulge me with “what if’s.” Once I imagined out loud who Tobey might have favored.

“Why bring that up now, Frances? No percentage in it!” Joe said.

So I carried double grief, mine and what Joe disowned.

Tuesday I woke to dead silence—no wheezing, shuffling footsteps or water sounds in the bathroom. Joe’s recliner was empty, and the butcher knife was missing from the kitchen rack. In the cellar I heard scuffling and gagging. My legs trembled on the way down until I sat on the bottom step under a naked light bulb, catching my breath, listening.

“Joe?” My feeble voice drifted around boxes, over clothes lines and out through cracks in the foundation. Dark spaces sucked up my words; nothing came back. Then something moved in the coal bin. I stepped into coal-dusty darkness, breathing and tasting the grit. Then I saw the knife stuck in the door frame. Joe was hunched over wheezing in the corner.

“Wanted...to see...what..it’s like...forever...in dark. I couldn’t....”

“Give me your hand, Joe. We got to get upstairs,” I said.

He scuffled forward then collapsed, pinning me against the cold cement wall. When I pushed his face off my pajama shirt, he gasped. Even through the flannel, I could feel his crackling lungs and dimming heat.

Minutes or hours passed, and Joe’s breathing changed: raspy breaths and long periods of emptiness. If I kept exact count of each silence and gasp, I could keep him alive. Then a noise overhead in the kitchen distracted me, and I lost track. I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and finally Gloria stood under the light. Exhausted , I slid to the floor, Joe on top of me. Later I had no idea how we got him up the steps. Too weak to help care for Joe, I stood by the bed watching. He was mottled under black dust and grit.

Finally, Gloria put her arm around my waist and, just like that first day, looked at me up close.

”Frances, Joe’s alright now, but.... It’s a matter of hours, maybe a few days. If you have unfinished business, take care of it. I’m on-call tonight if you need me. Otherwise I’ll be back in the morning,”

Joe mumbled things, and I laid my head on his chest trying to catch words or a meaning. I sat by his bed all day, watching new snow through the side window. He roused once then turned away. After dark, I saw flakes fall through a shaft of pink brightness under the pole light, then everything changed. Light rose up off the patch of snow and re-entered the globe; snowflakes paused in their places.
Suddenly Joe spoke, his lips scarcely moving. “Franny, I’m not getting out of this one, am I?”

I laid my hand over his and knew it was time for truth-telling.

“I don’t think so, Joe.” The satin binding on his blanket was wet when I laid my head on his chest.

“It’d be easier for me if he was here with you, Franny.”

“If who was here, Joe?”

“He would’ve been a good son for us, Franny. I always been sorry, no matter what I said.”

Wednesday morning Gloria huffed up the icy porch steps and crossed the threshold from steely winter light into our over-heated, dull living room. Before the sun was up, Joe had died like every man dies.

Sleet fell over snow, and it was hours before men from the funeral home arrived, gesturing that they couldn’t get up the icy lane to the house. Gloria and I were left to prepare Joe for his last trip past Sliders Tavern and Saint Rita’s Church. We wrapped Joe in the quilt and tied the bundle to the Flexible-Flyer sled with fishing line.

Rusty runners left two orange lines on the living room rug when we dragged the sled to the front door. The Flexible-Flyer teetered on the door sill; for a second Joe was going, then he was staying. I nudged the sled out, across the icy porch to the steps where the runners lost their rusty dullness. The sled picked up speed on the snowy hillside then unexpectedly swerved toward an icy mound, and suddenly Joe lifted off toward heavenly skies while I stood in the snow watching his last stunt. Then, like in a slow-motion movie, the old sled came back to earth and coasted to a stop in a patch of multi-flora brambles.

When I looked up, Gloria was watching me, and I had to ask, “Think Joe’s in Arizona yet?”

Carol E. Dixon, Hot Springs, NC Fifty years ago my dad said, “Be a secretary—no science needed.” Two decades and three babies later, I’d studied science (anatomy to zoology), and become a hospice nurse where I had more more laughs and tears than I’ll ever get on paper. My dad was proud when I was his hospice nurse.
[ carol@pex.net ]