FALLING by Bonnie Jo Campbell
On his first day out of the hospital, that no-good son-of‑a-bitch Jonas comes walking up the driveway beside the garden. He’s got a lot of nerve coming here. Considering he’s been on dialysis for a month, he looks okay, though older than his forty-one years. Maybe his neck is a little more bent, his coarse hair maybe has a few more gray strands. Not sure why, but my eyes water at the sight of him. I take the bandana off my hair and wipe my eyes before he reaches me in the bush beans. He drank a cup of antifreeze, the girl told me at the grocery, mixed it with orange juice so he could get it down.
“So you got yourself locked up in the psych ward,” I say. Some women in the neighborhood are scared of Jonas because he’s big and because they see him walking all the time. Some people assume he’s mental, but he’s not.
He nods. “Everybody up there on One North is all cut‑up wrists and shit.” He’s got a bottle in a bag under his arm. He’s always been a slow talker, but maybe he’s even a little slower now.
Myself, I never could fathom the wrist cutting, so much room for error and for changing your mind, and so much blood. Jonas is sweating as bad as I am, though I’ve been out in the garden for an hour, trying to save the last beans from the woodchucks, and he’s just walked up from the bus stop. I wipe my face and neck with the bandana, and tie it back over my hair. I consider slapping Jonas right across his face, but then I might just keep on slapping and hitting him, and he might be weak enough that I’d kill him. Or if he takes a mind to hit me back, he could probably knock me across this garden.
“You make any friends up there?” I’m wondering if he’ll have anywhere new to go so he won’t be coming up here all the time, trying to borrow money or trying to climb into my bed in the camper. I’m twenty years older than him and getting fat; I’ve never been anything to look at, but he’s been lonely, and there was a time, not long ago, when I wasn’t turning him away.
“There was this one big black guy who kept bumming cigarettes from me,” Jonas said. “He tried to o.d. on sleeping pills and some other drugs, but they found him.”
Drugs. I have no use for them, not the illegal stuff Jonas and the kids used to cook up in my house, not even the drugs doctors might prescribe a woman like me, if I was fool enough to present my deteriorating form to one of them.
“You tell that guy where I live?” I ask. I bend down to pick another handful of green beans. My daughter who lives two thousand miles away yells at me for bending at the waist; I’m too old to learn a new way to bend, I tell her. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, the way the hospital tosses all the suicides together in a ward, so they can concur about putting an end to this travail. The beans are freckled with rust spots. I drop them into the paper bag near my feet and wipe my hands on my jeans. Some women throw away beans freckled like these, but they taste fine to me. Last year I processed four dozen pints in my pressure cooker, back when I had my old kitchen. I say to Jonas, “I don’t need anybody doing drugs out here. Not you or some guy trying to o.d. I got enough to worry about with Robert.”
“I didn’t tell the guy nothing.” Jonas says this tiredly, as though his not making friends in the psych ward is some new kind of failure piled on top of failing to kill himself and failing to want to live.
When we hear the garage utility door open, we both look over and watch Robert. He hobbles out a few steps and then rests with both hands on the cane. He won’t use the walker. He pulls shallow breaths through pursed lips. Robert’s been living in the garage since April. He’s got emphysema and he’s been crippled since the heart surgery and is just coming off a long treatment for a mersa staph infection. Last week Robert was standing the way he is now with his cane, and then he crumpled in the driveway, almost hit his head on the concrete pad. Luckily I was right there and got him back inside and into his chair, and he was okay. Robert will be happy to see Jonas; Jonas might be the closest thing Robert’s ever had to a son, though he’d never say such a thing out loud. It’s been two years since Robert applied for Social Security disability, and probably the government assumes he’s already dead.
He’ll pay me some rent, he keeps saying, as soon as he gets that settlement, but I’m not holding my breath. Robert used to have a cowboy mustache, and he moved so gracefully that when he walked into my kitchen, my own legs went weak, but now he’s just a broken up man I’m stuck with. I don’t know what he will do in the winter. I don’t need anyone with me in my tiny camping trailer, and I really don’t need anybody freezing to death on the driveway ice because he slips when he goes out to piss. Robert had a room in my farm house until this spring when Jonas and a few of the local kids burned it down cooking their drugs. I was letting a neighbor girl stay upstairs because her dad kept beating the hell out of her, and so kids were in and out. I told the police I didn’t know what happened or who those kids were, but the girl ran off to Florida, took Jonas with her. When he came back a month ago, he was skinny and strung out, his eyes all crazy, and I told him he wasn’t welcome on my property. The old farm house, the house I grew up in, the house we all lived in, was not insured.
“What’s that you’re drinking? Soda pop?” I ask when he unwraps his bottle. Used to be that Jonas showed up with a forty-ouncer and he poured me a cup off the top, and to be honest I could use a cup of beer right now. He holds out the bottle of pop unsteadily, and I shake my head no.
“Social worker says I shouldn’t drink alcohol.” He unscrews the cap with some difficulty, and takes a sip of grape pop and swallows (also with difficulty), and nods. That bend in his neck is probably from nodding agreeably, because he’s had to be agreeable to all those doctors and social workers. He nodded at me that way when I told him, before the fire, no more cooking drugs in my house, so I’m not sure it means very much.
“Why’d you want to do it with antifreeze?” I say. “Couldn’t you get a gun?”
“I thought a gun would hurt too much.”
“Wouldn’t’ve hurt as much as what you did, wouldn’t’ve cost folks so much money taking care of you.”
He nodded.
For myself, I already have a plan. A .22 bullet penetrates the skull but can’t get out, so it spins around inside your head and scrambles your brains like eggs. Maybe Jonas doesn’t know about the brain, how all the pain in the whole world gets sent there, but the brain itself doesn’t feel anything – hell, doctors do brain surgery while you’re awake, squeeze the brain in their hands, cut parts of it away. Maybe there’d be pain when the bullet hit the skin, but after that it would just be lights flicking out, one after another, making one sad fact after the next disappear forever.
“What was it like?” I ask him, in a whisper. “I mean, before they took you to the hospital.”
“I won’t do that again,” he says. “That stuff was nasty. Sweet and nasty. Every time I think about it, it makes me sick.”
“But how did it feel when you were sure you were going to die?” This is something nobody else can tell me.
“It just hurt. I was throwing up and then trying to throw up. My dad said I should call him if I ever think about doing something like that again,” Jonas says, backing away from me, into my tomato patch.
He steps on a perfectly formed (but still green) Brandywine tomato, and the anger swells up in me again, until I realize I’ve actually scared him. I’ve been absentmindedly poking my finger into the place between my temple and the top of my ear, the place where I’ve rested the tip of my own pistol hundreds of times, pretty much every night these last few months, sitting at my little fold-down Formica table, before putting the gun away and laying out another hand of solitaire, deciding to wait a little longer, just to see what else might happen. My farmhouse kitchen had pine cupboards all around it, full of stewed tomatoes and beans and sweet bread pickles. I used to sit with my feet up on the end of my big kitchen table and read Mother Earth News and murder mysteries and drink pots of tea with the sun coming through the window over the sink.
Robert has made his way out to the driveway, about twenty feet and now he’s under the apple tree with his eyes closed. Be careful, I wish across the distance. I study him for swaying or other signs of impending collapse. The doctors seem amazed he’s still alive. When Robert was a boy in the army, he accidentally killed a fellow soldier, a kid from Texas, and spent a few years in jail on a manslaughter charge. He told me the story years ago at my kitchen table where I’d been feeding him glass after glass of elderberry wine; the sad grace of his confession, with his cheek pressed against my hand, loosened some screw in me that I still haven’t gotten tightened back up. Some mornings I think there’s no reason to get out of bed, but then I see Robert’s light come on in the garage.
“You call your dad,” I tell Jonas. Robert takes another step toward the driveway. When I realize I’m holding my breath, I let it out and say, “That’s a good idea, Jonas.”
Truth is, though, his dad is a useless piece of shit, and a mean drunk besides. I know and Jonas knows. To avoid watching Robert’s every agonizing step, I turn to the raspberry bushes, ever-bearing, pick a few red fruits. Automatically, forgetting how mad I am, I hold them out to Jonas. He takes two, with trembling fingers, and leaves me two. Only one berry makes it to Jonas’s mouth. We both study the raspberry that falls like a big drop of blood and lies in the dirt.
“The social worker got me a room downtown. Two guys already come to my door trying to sell me meth.” He talks toward my feet. “I told ’em I didn’t do that shit anymore. I’m finished with all that.”
“For Chrissakes, Jonas,” I say. “You told me you were finished with drugs before you burned down my house.”
“I’m so sorry about your house, man,” Jonas says, and he looks me in the eye for the first time since getting here. “If you ever want to build another house,” he says, slowly, “remember I worked for that construction guy. I know how to do framing, and how to put on a shingle roof. I was good at doing roofs.”
Whenever I’ve seen guys putting shingles on a roof, I’ve thought of laying down cards on a table, felt something soothing in the way they place one shingle after another in a row then move to the next row, all in straight lines. But the slow way Jonas talks makes me think any house of ours would take an eternity to erect.
“Do you ever think about killing yourself?” Jonas says this so quietly I hardly hear him. “I mean, not with antifreeze.”
“Sometimes,” I say, after a pause. No reason to lie. But all these nights sitting at my fold-down table, maybe I’ve just needed to finger the bullets, slide them into the chambers, measure the weight of the loaded pistol in my hand; maybe I’ve just needed to feel the cool barrel against my head. Maybe that’s all.
Jonas nods. He’s slept beside me. There’s no telling how much he knows.
This was not my plan, but I can’t see any way around it. I sigh. “You can stay here if you want, for a while, anyway. Help me take care of Robert. We’ll pitch you a tent here somewhere.”
Robert catches sight of us in the garden, against the backdrop of raspberry spears as tall as our bodies and some lush pokeweed I’ve neglected to yank. Robert stands a little straighter when he sees Jonas, maybe he smiles. He lifts a hand off his cane and gestures to us with two bent fingers, but I wish he hadn’t. His hips waver, his thin legs seem unable to support him, his cane slips a little in the dirt. Jonas is watching too, his trembling jaw setting up, his big body clenched beside mine, until Robert regains his balance. We wave back at Robert, as though waving to any old friend, and when Jonas lets his hand fall, I catch it and hold it steady in both of mine.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road (2002) and the short story collection Women & Other Animals (1998). Her second story collection will be published by Wayne State University Press in spring 2009. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.