Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 10

He claims he can't get to sleep anymore without music, and Ginger knows just what to do.

After school, she goes right up to Grandpa Ford's room. He's sit ting in an easy chair by the window in his robe and pajamas, one leg c.o.c.ked up over the chair's arm, drinking Scotch out of a teacup.

"Did you bring it?" he asks. She hands over her transistor radio and earphone and he takes this permanent loan in cupped hands as if it were as light as the music that percolated through its circuits.

He was on the radio once, in California, a long time ago. "When I had a life," he lisps. His show was called "Ford Takes Five," and in her mind Ginger smoothes out his voice to what she imagines it must have sounded like then, talking that smooth late-afternoon talk and giving the weather report (sunny, warm) between spins of jazz.

Ginger lives for radio-can't get enough. But the only bands she wants to hear are rock and roll bands, the Beatles and the Stones, and when her parents go out she turns up the volume on the big Motorola and sits in front of the speakers with her eyes shut, imag ining she's in the third row at the Royal Albert Hall, screaming her head off.

She's read about the hysteria and seen it on TV. Not just the screaming and fainting but worse: puddles of urine on the seats in the concert halls. Knickers-that spiky, utterly wrong foreign word-thrown onto stages. Girls going mad.

That night at dinner Ginger negotiates for an overnight with her best friend, Helen. Helen's mom is away, which means Helen's dad will have the girls fix his dinner. Then he'll watch the ball game on television until he falls asleep. "He's always tired," Helen says. "He'll last about an hour."

Then they're going out. But Ginger doesn't mention this to her mother.

Grandpa Ford cuts his meat into slivers and mashes his vegeta-ble and potato into a chunky paste. He looks depressed; but why pretend to enjoy something you can't even taste? Ginger thinks he looks older, more spare than he did this morning, as if small hands had gleaned the bare field of his skin all day. Also, he's a little drunk. The radio she gave him is in his pocket and the acorn-shaped ear-phone is in his ear. Every now and then he drags his voice across a phrase of what he's listening to.

"I don't see why you can't go," her mother says. "Dad?" She means Ginger's father. Her father is in Florida, brown as a football, thriv-ing.

Ginger's dad nods, cutting into his chop, and Ginger holds her breath: it isn't settled until they ask some questions. But just then Grandpa Ford raises his fork as if he's about to make an announce-ment-and begins to sing. It's pretty bad. The mother just looks at her plate and keeps chewing, but the father puts down his knife and fork. "Please," he says. "Dad, give it a rest, huh? Let's have a meal where nothing happens, okay? Can we do that?"

But something does happen, something wicked: Grandpa Ford contracts into himself, drops his fork, and coughs a wad of food about the size of a golf ball toward his water gla.s.s. Some blood splat-ters the tablecloth. Ginger's dad gets to his feet, quick, and takes his father by the shoulders, puts his mouth close to his ear: "Dad. Are you all right? Can you breathe?"

"My G.o.d," Ginger's mother says, and Ginger says, "Mine, too," and looks at her mother in a way that she hopes hurts.

Grandpa Ford sits with his eyes closed. He looks too tired to tremble, but all the pieces of him move as if an outside element were trying to rustle him together or shake him apart. There are fine red veins on his eyelids that are like roads on a map held at arm's length. He slowly moves his hand to cover his son's hand and Gin ger's dad holds Grandpa Ford's head and kisses him. It's still just spring, but the days are already hot. The narcissus have all wilted along the fence out back where the yard ends and the woods begin.

Grandpa Ford's earphone loosens and falls like a petal into his lap: an earful of saxophone squeaks. Then the world's smallest rhythm section begins to play. *

Ginger parks her bike next to Helen's and goes in through the kitch en door.

"Hey."

"Hey also."

Helen's sitting at the table with a textbook in front of her. She smiles, then makes a face that says, "Can you believe this?"

Doing homework on a Friday night is Helen's cross to bear, as she puts it-her parents believe in business before pleasure. Or maybe they just believe in business. The radio on the counter plays Little Eva, and canned spaghetti sauce simmers on the stove. Ginger hears the murmur of a TV announcer's voice leaking in from the living room: And here's the pitch . . .

"I think he's got it again," she says.

Helen puts her finger on her place and looks up. "Who? What?"

she asks.

They've been over all this, but Helen doesn't always listen. If you have cancer, and the drugs don't get it all, it can come spread ing back, unseen: metastasizing, which sounds to Ginger like black feathers fanning out inside you, killing everything they touch, a si lent rushing incoming tide. Ginger imagines Grandpa standing at the railing at the Grand Canyon, his skinny body turning darkly to shreds, the shreds becoming blackbirds and flying off over the abyss, their cries coming back more and more faintly until they disappear.

She'd left the house without any fuss. Her parents had put Grand pa Ford to bed and were in their bedrooom, talking, using the words Ginger'd heard them use before: permanent, hospital, impossible, crazy, dying. She stopped at the door to say goodnight. Her dad was lying back against the pillows, one arm up over his eyes. "Good-night, Ginny, be good now." Her mother didn't say anything, just sat and smoked, her eyes on the window and a better picture than she was seeing here.

Helen goes over to where Ginger is standing. "What are they go-ing to do with him?" she says.

"They're talking about a hospital or a home."

"G.o.d, I'm so sorry," Helen says. But neither of them can imag-ine such places.

The girls set out plates and silver and put the spaghetti into wa-ter. They don't talk about Grandpa anymore-what's to say? Once upon a time, there was an old man who got so G.o.dawful sick he had to be put into a radioactive pressure cooker, kind of a gla.s.s coffin, children, and presto!-when he was done, his teeth floated to the top like kernels of boiled corn.

Ginger sits at the table and picks at the little scabs of fingernail polish that obscure the creamy half-moons rising from the root-end of the nail. She listens as Helen hums to the music on the radio and wishes she could be Helen. Inhabiting Helen's body, she thinks, would free her from the snake of sadness that twists through her like dark, slow water. Helen is safety.

Helen and Ginger kissed one night. They were having an over-night, like tonight, and they were goofing, practice-kissing their pil-lows, when Ginger had the idea that they should kiss for real. They put their lips together and pressed. Ginger had her eyes closed, of course, but then she opened them and saw that Helen's eyes were open, too, and the shock of seeing something so close that sees you, too, broke her up. They fell down on the bed laughing.

Ginger remembers the smell of Helen's soap in her nose, the taste of her mouth-the strange, bright wetness of another per-son's mouth-on her lips. They didn't kiss again, but Ginger never forgot seeing her friend's eye as big as the moon, no longer an organ of sight but a presence of its own, vast and impersonal. She felt now that she had a terrible secret from Helen, and didn't even know what it was; but it was real, as real as Grandpa Ford's face at the dinner table, his eyes screwed down tight, the kiss of death on his lips, and him way down inside, out of sight, where no one could follow. *

Helen's dad, full of spaghetti and meat sauce, lasts through the sev enth inning. Helen covers him and whispers, "Goodnight, Daddy."

No answer-he's outta there. That's it, then: grow up, fall asleep.

Helen's hair hangs straight down when she tucks him in. She's just ironed it, and it shines.

The girls have changed. They're wearing kick-pleat skirts, blous es and sweaters, and black flats. In front of the hall mirror Ginger smoothes Autumn Frost onto her lips and blots it. They look back at themselves from the mirror. It's a nice moment, serious: Two girls whose only wish is to get inside a radio station, be where the music is. What can be so hard? If those girls in New York can get into the Beatles' hotel room, they figure they can get inside their very own WBVA. *

Ginger and Helen crest a hill and lean back to coast down the far side, and there it is: there are two pairs of red lights on it, halfway up and at the top, and these pulse slowly to warn off airplanes. Hel en's ahead, her hair flowing. She has her earphone in and swings her head from side to side, pedals furiously, then coasts, spreading her arms as if she would gather in everything: the night, the invis ible waves rushing through it, and the beacon that draws them si lently toward itself.

This part of town is not too familiar to them. The station, a white, single-story rectangle, sits high above the road. The girls walk their bikes up the long driveway, looking at the now-immense tower and at the houses on either side of the station. In the gloom, Ginger can see the two skinny ladders that run upward from about fifteen feet off the ground, one on either side of the tower, each one ending high up at the level of the lower lights. She stops and leans back to take it all in. She says, "Let's go up to the tower. Let's climb it."

Helen pushes a sheet of hair out of her face. "You want to get electrocuted, right?"

"It's not electric," Ginger says, but she's not positive. Things you can't see can kill you; this she knows. "It works on waves." "You work on waves," Helen replies. They dump their bikes in the long gra.s.s behind the station park- ing lot and walk up the hill to where the tower stands in its fenced field. Hitching up their skirts, they get over then walk around the perimeter, daring each other to test the guy wires for current. Gin-ger does: they're dead and cold. They lie in the gra.s.s and look up at the tower with its red lights that sizzle and dissolve and take turns using Helen's earphone. The DJ's voice, between songs, is so clear it's as if he's standing right beside them-which, in a sense, he is. But they don't recognize the voice.

The only DJ they've ever met is Bob Lewis. He was doing a re-mote broadcast from the shopping center. They had imagined this beautiful guy, slim, with blond hair curling around the headphones. But there he was, sitting at a card table under the awning at the ShopWell, headphones scrunched down over a dirty Orioles cap, that great voice rolling out of this fat body. Bob Lewis comin' atcha. The girls hung around for a while, drank c.o.kes, and accepted free WBVA sun visors from the ShopWell lady, but didn't wear them. After watching the flesh-and-blood Bob Lewis sweat for an hour, they were too embarra.s.sed to endorse the store.

* Ginger's thinking of Grandpa Ford as she starts to climb the tower. In her mind, she is climbing his tower, too, in California, back in the forties, way up on a hard bluff overlooking the ocean. Sailors can see the flicker of the red lights from their ships. She can hear the waves crashing on the rocks and the surge, like deep breathing, as the wave is sucked back into the sea. It's quiet in the studio. The dark, cool rooms are lined with shelves of records heavy as din-ner plates. Grandpa Ford leans forward in his chair; his lips are an inch from the microphone. He's going to a commercial, and he'll be right back. This is rough going. Ginger shinnies up a diagonal beam, gets her feet onto a crossbeam, and looks around. Helen's a shadow a couple of stories away. Ginger looks down on the flat roof of the radio station, its pools of water moving in the breeze like twitch-ing sheets, and at the toy traffic going back and forth on the road down in front.

She holds onto the cold steel and looks up. The lower light's still pretty far above her, seated in its black steel dish. When the light flares up, she sees bits of weeds sticking out from beneath the dish, and in another flash she sees a bird tumble out of the nest and fly off.

It's getting dark fast. Ginger edges over to the ladder and kicks off her shoes, which pitter-patter down through the sh.e.l.l of emp-tiness. Helen yells something she can't make out, but that doesn't matter: what she's really saying is that she's not kidding.

Ginger's halfway up the ladder when she stops to rest, not be-cause she's tired, not exactly; but her legs won't go. So she folds her arms around the ladder and lays her cheek against the cold rung. She imagines Grandpa Ford at the Grand Canyon. She is standing beside him, they grip the railing and grin at each other, and then they look out into magnificence.

Ginger decides to go all the way to the top.

She crawls up the ladder, but as she reaches the top rung, the sig-nal to her legs fails and they sag forward against the ladder rungs. A flutter runs through them, and a faintness flushes upward into the hollow of her belly. She holds tightly to the ladder and closes her eyes. Helen is talking again: she's real excited. "Shut up, just shut up," Ginger says, but her voice is so small she knows Helen can't hear it. Her kneecaps are fusing to the steel and a giddy, sick feel-ing is pa.s.sing in waves through her legs, which seem to float like empty clothes.

Ginger's hands are like clamps on the ladder, but when she looks at them they seem to conceal a malevolent life, and in terror that they will spring open she shuts her eyes again. She sees them crossed over her chest, bleached white, the fingernails framing little dead half-moons. The headline girl falls into thin air, dies floats across her vision. "Stop, now," she says. "Please." But it won't stop.

The room is shadowy and still, candle-flickering, but people are weeping. They come over to look at her and weep, even the men, and she knows she mustn't open her eyes. Helen's dad is there, alert and sorry. Her own parents are there, but unseen. Grandpa Ford comes over. He's wearing his blue blazer with the silver b.u.t.tons. He's alive, he looks healthy, never better. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h," she says. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d." He opens his mouth in a wide smile and Ginger sees that his teeth are black and that's when she screams. She can't tell if she's falling, but the whirling inside her opens out and out and everything inside her rips away and vanishes. Her voice whips out of her and flies away over the canyon. She sees a huge, glittering still thing and focuses on it: it's the eye of a bird, and even though she tries, she can't fall into it. It's beautiful, but it's not hers. She puts her mouth over the rung in front of her face and bites down until the pain-a pain she thought until now was only for him-stops her. *

After a while she hears a voice and feels a vibration in the tower.

Someone's coming up.

"Hold on," a voice says-a man's voice. "Just stay there, hold on,"

he says, and she wants to laugh. It's Bob Lewis's voice. Bob Lewis is comin' at her. *

After Bob talks her down-smooth guy-she stumbles, nearly fall ing, marveling, into Helen's arms. Helen's crying, then Ginger cries.

Two girls having a good cry. Bob is sprawled on the ground. This is not a guy who climbs towers very often. "This is a dangerous thing,"

he says, placing a hand on his belly and breathing hard. "A danger ous thing you're doing."

He says he's late, that they'd better come inside, and they agree- after all, that's what they came for. He takes them down the hill and into the station. In the studio, the other DJ's already putting on his jacket. He hardly looks at the girls. He and Bob talk for a minute while "Green Onions" plays, and after the other guy leaves, Bob cues another record and pours himself a cup of coffee. He motions for them to sit down and puts a finger to his lips: they're in the stu dio and on the air.

Ginger closes her eyes and the music plays. Bob plays all their favorites. Once, when he goes out to check the teletype machine, she goes up to the microphone. She doesn't even know if it's switched on, but she wants to do something. Helen's waving at her to stop, but she can't help it: She leans over and speaks-just a whisper- into the microphone. This isn't his kind of music, so who knows if he's even listening? But if he is, she wants him to know-she wants the anonymous world to know-that she's here. *

Next morning, Ginger wakes up early, gets dressed, leaves Helen sleeping, and lets herself out. The air is cool, and it's quiet; nothing to hear but the sound of her bicycle tires swishing over the pave ment. Everyone's still in bed when she gets home, and she walks quietly through the house and up the stairs. She taps on Grandpa's door with a fingernail and when there's no answer, she pushes the door open. His room's dark. She keeps her eyes open, waiting for whatever light there is to fill them.

Grandpa Ford's under the blankets, curled up like a fiddlehead.

His mouth is open and he's drooled a little. Ginger holds her breath, waiting for a movement or a sound of breathing. She puts her hand over his hand and his fingers tighten around the radio he's holding.

She traces the braided cord to his ear and gently takes out the ear phone. Listen: It's a voice out of the past, unhurried and mellow, saying that there will be a brief announcement, and a pause, and then the news. We'll be right back. Stay right there.

When she pulls the curtains, Grandpa stirs and moans. The sun pours its light into the room. Ginger raises the sash and right on cue some birds begin to call. She leans out the window and spots them: some are in the trees, others are walking over the gra.s.s. She leans out farther to wave, and this breaks up the party. Some of the birds fly off. Others drop down onto the gra.s.s, alert, startled, and c.o.c.k their heads at her in a moment of wonder.

The End Zone.

My folks are dead. They died a year ago this March, when their car went off the bridge between here and the town of Clay, which is where I go to school. The Fairlin River, in whose waters they drowned, is a culvert running down out of the Appalachians, dirty as h.e.l.l from the pollution the Clay mills pour into it, and it boils, swelling up as gray and ugly as any other river in these hills when the snow melts early in the spring. That's when it got them.

They were on their way to see Dad's sister, Ruth, and they broke through just beyond midpoint of the bridge. Dad's Ford plowed through the guard rails, tipped over, back to front, and landed on its top. They found it lying on the bottom like that, snugged up against one of the cement pilings. It was raining; it was night. They hadn't much chance of getting out, and they died. The sheriff said that it was probably a quick death, but how he arrived at this conclusion, I don't know-and don't want to know.

My sister, Ellie, and I went with our dad's brother, Frank-we live with him and his wife, Alice, now-to the scene of the depar- ture the following day. It looked like a tank had gone through there.

Ellie wouldn't get out of the car, but I went and looked over. I had expected this to be horrible, that I would find myself standing face to face with what had killed them, but holding onto the railing and leaning out, all I could see was the river, and since it had cleared of silt overnight, the frame of Dad's car with its m.u.f.fler and tailpipe swaying loosely in the current. *

There was a long time after that, months, that I wouldn't travel in a car: walked everywhere-to school, to track practice, home again.

No one seemed to think this odd. I'd wash and wax Alice's station wagon, but that was just for the fun of it. Or I'd sit on the hood af ter supper and lay back on the windshield and listen to the radio, watching as the windows flashed to yellow one by one and the sky darkened above the house-their house, of course, not Ellie's and mine.

We used to live not more than two miles from here.

One afternoon I walked out of my way to go by there on my way home, and the old house was sitting there just as ordinary as you please. For a weird moment I imagined walking up the sidewalk and going inside-I could see the screen door was still disfigured from where Ellie and I pushed on it in our haste to get out of the house one day a long time ago when Mom was after us, to spank us for something. We were laughing-Ellie was screaming with laughter and crying, too, and I was trying to get the door unfastened. Mom did catch up with us, and she did spank us. It wasn't so bad. By the time Dad got home we were all friends again. I don't think anyone even mentioned it. It was just-a day.

I took a long look at that pushed-out screen door, and then I walked on. I didn't go by there again. *

I sloshed the wet snow off the windshield of Alice's car and watched Uncle Frank pull into the driveway too fast, slewing the van's rear end around. The driveway's on a grade-mostly red mud, this time of year, but studded between the ruts with a backbone of clean rocks. Frank revved the engine as he put the van into second gear and brought it, coughing and trembling, up to the house.

Frank and Alice never had any children and getting us this way didn't exactly make their lives complete. I don't know whether Alice couldn't have children or whether they just didn't want any, but they had little choice, I believe, where Ellie and I were concerned: Aunt Ruth couldn't afford us, even with the money from the estate-a few dollars on the house, some savings-so it was live with Frank and Alice or go to a foster home.

I wanted to go and live with my friend, Bill, but Alice said no, we would stay with the family, both of us: how could I even think of going to live with strangers? I guess it didn't occur to her that, at the time, she seemed like the stranger.

About a week after Ellie and I had been living there, Ellie knocked one of Alice's porcelain figurines onto the floor and broke it. There was so much of the stuff around you could hardly avoid running into it, and Ellie's pretty clumsy, besides. Alice rushed in from the kitch-en, saying, "Oh, oh, oh," and gathered up the pieces. Ellie offered to glue it (I can just picture that) but Alice just ran to her bedroom and shut the door. Frank finally coaxed her out, and by the time we sat down to dinner, she was as self-possessed as ever, which is to say, about as pale and brittle as one of her porcelain people.

And Frank. Frank was nice enough, but he had a habit of slip-ping into your peripheral vision just before disappearing; one min-ute he'd be there, the next, you'd hear him out in his shop, working on some project. Not that he wasn't good-cabinetmaking was his line-but he took on a lot of extra work and was at it nights and weekends after Ellie and I came; and on our account, I guess.

We were all fairly unhappy. We spent a lot of time trying not to break anything.

But Bill was no stranger, not to me. We were best friends, had been since the first grade. Bill was overweight by around fifty pounds but quick, real energetic and outgoing. We were on the track team together, which is what you might do at Clay High if you were a guy and couldn't play a team sport. Bill threw the shot, and I ran, main-ly the 220 dash, sometimes the relays. When we could get dates- which wasn't often-we doubled in Bill's dad's car, a big Chrysler.

Bill loved to drive, eat, and talk about G.o.d. Bill fought what he called "chronic" bad breath by sucking on mints whenever he wasn't actually eating something more substantial. I once suggested to him that too many sugary mints could cause bad breath, but he shook his head-he needed a broader context; his breath, he said, was an affliction.

"It's destroying me socially, man. That's why Ellie won't go out with me."

I could hear the mints clicking against his back teeth.

"She can't get around the old buffalo breath," he said.

But the real reason Ellie wouldn't go out with Bill was that I told her, if she did, I would kill her. Friendship is one thing, but she is my sister. I didn't want Bill snuggling up to Ellie in the back seat of that big car to talk about G.o.d, or any of his afflictions. *

Frank opened the back doors of the van and began to unload some chairs he'd brought home for stripping. He put the chairs in the shop and came over to the car and leaned in at my window, the sharp, woody smells of pine pitch and bourbon drifting in with the snow.

I knew he drank-and drank on the job now and then. There was a pint bottle in the tool box.

"That road's a d.a.m.n mess," he said. "Don't you go and land Al ice's car in a ditch. Where're you heading?"

"Down to Somer's to get some new boots."

I had fifty dollars of trust money in my pocket, the last of my Christmas allowance.

"Are you covered?" Frank's hand strayed to his pants pocket and hovered there, like maybe he was about to pull a fast draw.

But here was something. He was going to pretend to offer me money he didn't really have and I was going to pretend to refuse it, even though I knew it probably didn't exist in the first place.

"I'm covered," I said.

Frank grinned. He put his face up into the light snow and, to my surprise, stuck out his tongue to catch some flakes.

"Well, drive careful. I better get on in the house. I'm beginning to feel like a d.a.m.n popsicle." *

Somer's is a factory store and every shoe in the place is defective- crooked seams and such-and you wait on yourself. It's like you work there.

I found the boots I wanted and tried one of them on. It felt great.

I walked over to the foot mirror to check the before-and-after look, the new standing next to the old, then boxed the boots and laced up my old one. The boots were on sale for $49.95 but when I laid my fifty dollars down the clerk hesitated, then looked at me and smiled: I had forgotten about the tax. But he let me write my name and telephone number on the register slip and told me to bring the money in sometime.