Valentine(11)
What in the hell are you talking about? Corrine knocked her fist on the table, and coffee sloshed out of their mugs. Get up and fight! like you always said to Alice, and me too, on occasion.
Well, it didn’t do me no good, telling y’all that. Speaking low and fast, Potter leaned toward his wife. Alice still ran off to Alaska with that boy. You still walked away from teaching, the minute things got hard. All that work, Corrine—when we met, you were the only person I had ever known who went to college—and you gave it up to stay home and read your poetry books.
Her face was crimson with fear and rage. I think I told you a dozen times that I was sick to death of it all.
Baby, I don’t think you understand how serious this is. He reached across the table, but Corrine snatched her hand back and folded her arms across her breasts. Don’t you dare call me baby, Potter Shepard, or I will kill you myself.
I’m already dying, honey.
Screw you, Potter. You are not. Never let me hear you say that again. And they sat in stupefied silence while the coffee went bone-cold and the ice cream turned soupy.
When they pulled into the garage the next morning, they were greeted by the same musty smell of cardboard boxes and Potter’s old army tent, the same click and whir when the motor on the deep freeze switched on, the same old tools gathering dust on Potter’s tool bench. Nothing was different in any way, except they hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and Corrine looked like she had aged ten years, and Potter was dying.
While she made a skillet of corn bread and warmed up some pinto beans, he set a jar of chow-chow and a plate of sliced tomatoes on the kitchen table. He pointed at the heat shimmers on the other side of the sliding-glass door. The heat in August, she said, it’s a special kind of hell. It’s a wonder any of us survive it. He laughed gently, and the two of them fell silent.
After breakfast, they set the dishes in the sink and went into the bedroom, where he turned the swamp cooler on high and she pulled the draperies closed. They crawled into bed, Corrine on her side, Potter on his, and in that strange midday dusk they lay next to each other, fingers twined and minds numb with terror. They waited for whatever was coming next.
*
Thinking it might help with her hangover, she tries to make herself a fried egg sandwich, but she sees the yolk wobbling in her cast iron skillet, a watery yellow eyeball, and her stomach roils. Instead, she holds her hair back, lights her cigarette on the stove burner, and leans against the icebox while she waits for the nicotine to help bring the previous night into focus.
It had been a slow night at the Country Club and by midnight, everyone had gone home except Corrine and the bartender, Karla, along with a few diehards, men with nowhere to be and no one waiting for them once they got there. She’d be damned if she was going to make small talk with any of these fools, so she watched Karla polish glassware while the men talked football and oil prices—1976 looked like it was going to be a damned good year for both—and discussed Carter and Ford—hated them both, one was a dipshit and the other was a pussy. Nixon had been their man, and now, with Watergate in the rearview mirror, the men were beginning to understand that they’d not only lost their leader, they’d lost their war against chaos and degeneracy. Black Panthers and Mexicans, Communists and cult leaders, people who fucked right in the middle of a street in downtown Los Angeles, for chrissakes.
Talking shit, Corrine mused, same as any other group of men anywhere else on the planet. She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker. After a few minutes, it was all just low, male murmuring.
Karla! Corrine thinks now as she stubs her cigarette out in the kitchen sink. It was Karla who called earlier, or maybe Ginny’s kid, who calls almost every morning to see what Corrine is doing, and whether she might not like some company.
*
On the last day of 1975, they stood on the back patio after supper and watched the stray carry a white-throated sparrow across the backyard. It was a female, rarely seen this far south, and they had been listening to its sweet, singular song—Old Sam Peabody, Peabody—since early November, just a few days after they brought Potter home from the hospital. For the last time, he said when they were still sitting in the hospital parking lot. Corrine hadn’t even got her key in the ignition when he leaned over and tried to pat her knee. I gave it a shot, for you, he said, but this is the last time. No more treatments, no more doctors.
He didn’t feel up to driving to church for the New Year’s party, and she had never wanted to go in the first place, and by four o’clock, they’d eaten supper and put on their sweatpants. While Corrine enjoyed her cigarette, Potter leaned heavily on his new cane. The cat sat atop their cinder-block fence like he owned the place, his fur turning gold in the last bit of daylight. Potter said that he couldn’t help admiring him. Most strays didn’t last a week before they were run over on Eighth Street, or some little boy shot them with his .22. The black stripes across the cat’s face made him look a bit like an ocelot, he observed. He’d probably be good company, Potter said, if you got him fixed.
We ought to poison the little bastard before he kills every living creature on the block, Corrine said. She handed her cigarette to Potter, who held it stiffly between his thumb and index finger. He had quit twenty years earlier, and they’d been fighting about her habit since. But all his griping hadn’t mattered a bit, she thought sadly as she walked over to sweep up the bird carcass. She was going to outlive him after all.