I lay back on the bed, safe knowing that the animals were out there and I was in here, lodged in this peaceful place for about a month, with a beautiful young woman and an admirable old man, whose voices echoed in the bathroom out of which poured the sound of splashing water.
CHAPTER THREE
SOME MEN WEAR THEIR HATS TO BED
The ceiling came to life above me, brick backsplashes groaning until there was a circular portal in the center of the roof, like in an Indian sweat-house. Bright sunshine streamed in through the skylight. I covered my eyes with my hand and stood up, feeling like crap but having no drug or alcohol to blame it on.
“Not bad, hey?”
I looked across the room at Luna in the doorway. She held an oversized remote control in her hand. There was a slight mischievous grin on her face, as if she’d just done a barrel roll with her remote control plane over the family picnic blanket.
“Not bad.”
She flicked a toggle, and the wall started moving back into place. When it was dark in my room again, I removed my hand from my eyes. I sat frozen on the bed, however, as my shirt was off and my morning wood was still at half-mast beneath the blanket.
“I’ll let you get dressed.”
“Thank you.”
She wore a gold velour tracksuit, with vertical white piping up and down the legs and arms. The sweat suit showed her form without hugging it too tight.
“Let me know if you need any help in there.” I tilted my head toward the other bedroom where my uncle slept.
“Thanks, but I’ve got it. Unless you want to help just to do something.”
“Not a problem,” I said. I could always search the scrub and chaparral outside for peyote buttons some other time. Might need gloves too, to avoid scorpion stingers.
She left the room, and I stood, waddled with my blanket around me until I closed the door to my bedroom, at which point I dropped the covers and went over to the black duffel bag.
I could get cleaned up later. For the time being I threw on a fresh green Izod shirt and a pair of pressed Wranglers, padded across the cold sandstone barefooted, out into the hallway.
Luna was visible through the doorway to the bedroom where my uncle slept, standing at the foot of his bed as if keeping vigil. She saw me, held a single shushing finger in front of her full lips, and mouthed something about the guest bathroom being down the hall.
A snore truncated in a grunt, like someone with apnea struggling for breath, and the old man stirred in his bed, fighting to break free of some demons in his sleep. A homburg perched on the crown of his head. The hat was brown, with a black satin band that held a red bird feather.
I kept my voice to a whisper as I came into the room. “He sleeps in his hat?”
“He won’t sleep without it.”
“Must make combing his hair hell.” I stopped a few feet short of her, afraid to get any closer. It was as if there was a force field around the pair, some bond fused by time that I had no right to break.
He sat up as if something had bitten him in bed, which was a distinct possibility out here in the desert. “Nuh!” His eyes widened, full of life but also terror. He swallowed twice, looked first at Luna, which calmed him, and then at me, squinting.
“Marcus?”
I looked over at Luna. “Marcus is his son,” she said.
I didn’t have the heart to confuse him by telling him my real name, or that I was the son of his trophy wife of a niece, but I couldn’t lie and tell him I was his son either, unless Luna told me to do that.
She knew more about this stuff than I did, and so I looked to her for confirmation, for something.
But we suddenly had bigger problems. “Agh…” I knew from the timbre of the moan that this was something in the guts, the bowels or kidneys.
“Uh-oh,” Luna’s voice was free of humor now, professional. “You should turn away.”
“No,” I said. “I can handle it.”
She lost some of her sphinxlike bearing as she acknowledged me, maybe for the first time, as something besides a horny teenager. She recovered quickly and looked back at him. “Okay, you help steer his legs over the side, because this happens quickly.”
I slowly gathered the old man’s legs, which felt weightless, like the leaf-stuffed overalls of a scarecrow. His legs followed my guidance, and I turned away as Luna held something like a bedpan in front of him at the foot of the bed. The homburg fell off the back of his head and he moaned a sigh of relief as piss trickled out, spilling into the container.
It came to me then, that lie that everyone tells themselves, that they’ll kill themselves when they get to be that age, but I knew that as much as I pretended otherwise, death scared me, just like it did almost everyone else. I’d had plenty of chances to check out and plenty of friends who’d already done so, but here I was, helping collect piss in a bucket and not even feeling too bad about it.
“Thank you” she said.
I couldn’t say, “You’re welcome,” because I needed to help him as much as he may have needed the help. I’d been useless until this moment and now I felt more like a human. I wondered if this had been Debbie’s plan from the jump. It was a character-building exercise, but not like the bullshit ones we did on retreat.
“I’ll dispose of this.” Luna stood from the old man’s bedside, nodded her head toward the bathroom. “Why don’t you wash up in his bathroom after I finish up in there, and then he’ll do his breakfast and his morning writing exercise?”
“Sounds good.” I didn’t think he was in any condition to pen his memoirs, but I went along with it.
My uncle continued his business as if I wasn’t there, sliding his feet into a pair of terrycloth slippers that had been hiding under the fringed edge of his bed’s slipcover. He pulled on a pair of tube socks and adjusted the elastic waistband of his pants.