Surviving Immortality Page 2

  “Grou—hee—cho.”

  Jessup’s eyes registered nothing. He sat up, took Matt Reece’s arm, and drew him onto the couch. He tugged Matt Reece’s Stetson off his head and dropped it on the easy chair, then wrapped his arms around Matt Reece and held him. “Okay, son. It’s just another anxiety attack. Close your eyes, and breathe with me. Deep as you can. We’ll work through this. You and me.”

  This close, Matt Reece smelled the sour whiskey tainting Jessup’s breath. That didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and felt Jessup’s empathy flowing into him. He knew Jessup’s strength could protect him from everything except loneliness. He let that body heat and sour breath carry him to a gentler place. His lungs slowly unclenched. Jessup could do this, only him, because of the trust they shared.

  They stayed nailed together with Matt Reece gazing out the front window at the unpeopled vastness of the Promesa Rota, until Kenji ambled across the work yard carrying a pail of milk.

  “I know what Groucho means to you, son,” Jessup said, his voice low and soothing, “but we have to face it; everything that lives will eventually die—you and me and Kenji and Patrick and Grandpa, everyone. It’s how nature works. We can’t change that.”

  “He’s all I’ve got, sir.”

  “You have me and Kenji and Comet, and for a short time we have Grandpa. Old Groucho had about the best damn life a dog could want. Maybe it’s time we gave another dog an opportunity. There’s bound to be a litter of pups somewhere in the county.”

  He looked down, not wanting to think about a replacement. There was, however, no denying the mention of a puppy lit a spark of yearning in his heart. He could even name it Harpo, as a way to honor the memory of his greatest friend.

  “Tell you what, sport,” Jessup said. “You put the coffee on while I clean up. After breakfast I’ll dig a grave, we’ll say goodbye to him, and I’ll make a few phone calls to see what’s available.” He loosened his arms, and Matt Reece stood. Jessup pushed himself off the couch and had trouble balancing. Matt Reece held his arm to keep him from falling backward.

  “I’m okay,” Jessup said, but his face winced. Jessup shared those same features that Patrick had—high cheekbones and thin lips, black hair, and sapphire-blue eyes—only nineteen years older. Before Blake got sick, Jessup had a youthful appearance and strong physique. But over these last months, Jessup’s face lost its vitality. The effects of drink and depression spread over his features, making fine lines appear around the mouth. His cheeks grew flush and more pronounced, the eyelids sagged, and deep lines etched across his forehead. At forty-three, he had a sixty-year-old face, and the slight drooping across his features gave the impression of profound grief.

  Looking into those bloodshot eyes, Matt Reece figured this was how he would end up, not a scientist or even veterinarian, but rather, he would stay on the ranch living a small, dull life, and when everyone abandoned him, he would let whiskey beat him down to nothing.

  AS MATT Reece grabbed the coffeepot, a noise came from the mudroom. He crossed the kitchen to the doorway and saw Kenji leaning over Groucho, using a stethoscope to listen to the dog’s chest. His vet-medical bag was open and within easy reach. There was an assortment of futuristic-looking devices in it, the kind of equipment one would expect to find only in scientific laboratories.

  “Don’t let him die, sir,” Matt Reece said with a low voice so Jessup couldn’t hear.

  Kenji looked up. “Must be hard never leaving the ranch. A boy needs friends.”

  For the last two years, Matt Reece had been homeschooled to protect him from bullies at school. Jessup and Kenji assumed he was picked on because they were a gay couple, but Matt Reece knew better. The other boys had rightly guessed he was also gay. This was a tough country, and the boys were coarse. When Patrick was no longer there to protect him, they picked fights with him. Once they realized he couldn’t fight back because of his phobia with violence, the persecution intensified. After months of black eyes and broken teeth, Jessup put his foot down. Matt Reece hadn’t left the ranch since.

  Kenji seemed to turn inward, as if analyzing himself, rather than Groucho’s condition. After a moment, he nodded. “Maybe there’s something I can try.”

  Jessup passed behind Matt Reece and eased himself into the mudroom. Kenji stood, and they embraced and kissed as Matt Reece looked on. Their intimacy was a reminder that they had each other while he had only Groucho. He felt his heart free-falling.

  There was nothing to do but start on breakfast. He grabbed the bucket of eggs and the pail of milk Kenji had carried in. He set them on the counter next to the stove, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and washed his hands in the sink. Jessup walked to the bathroom, but Kenji stayed in the mudroom, which seemed somewhat suspicious. Matt Reece tiptoed back to the doorway and leaned his head inside. Kenji was again stooped over Groucho, but this time he held a gadget in his hand. It looked surprisingly similar to a Star Trek medical tricorder that Dr. McCoy used to diagnose patients. It didn’t make a sound, but it did emit an aura of purplish light that engulfed both dog and man.

  Matt Reece eased back into the kitchen, his hopes raising the width of an eyelash. He knew the Star Trek tricorder was used to gather and interpret data, but he couldn’t remember if it actually cured anything. But of course, that was a TV show, purely fiction. No telling what Kenji was doing, if anything.

  Matt Reece poured coffee beans into a hand grinder and pulverized them. As Jessup hauled himself to the dining table, Matt Reece measured out water and coffee into the percolator, set it on the stove, lit the burner with a match, and turned up an inch of flame.

  “Fried or scrambled?” Matt Reece asked.

  “Over easy will do.”

  Kenji joined Jessup at the table.

  Jessup said, “After breakfast, I’ll dig a grave.”

  Kenji shot Matt Reece a glance and told Jessup there was still hope. Before Jessup could argue, Matt Reece turned on them. “After we bury Groucho, I want to go live with Patrick and enroll in college. I love you both, but I’m done here.”

  He wanted to tell them it was time for them to man up and take care of Grandpa Blake themselves, but that sounded too confrontational. Why state the obvious? And he was hoping they wouldn’t ask what he wanted to study in college, because he wasn’t sure yet. He just wanted a different life than this, something like being a marine biologist. His favorite TV shows were the Jacques Cousteau documentaries. He often pictured himself living on the Calypso as part of Cousteau’s red-capped crew, studying climate change and making a positive difference in the world. His favorite one was about sharks, and he longed to swim alongside a hammerhead or mako. They claimed that sharks have to keep moving in order to breathe—constant forward motion to force water through their gills. That’s what he felt like, that the ranch was stagnation, and he needed forward motion to someplace else so he could finally breathe.

  Jessup shook his head. “Son, I know the ranch is lonely and the work is hard, but it’s also safe. You know how you respond to violence. Patrick lives in Berkeley, which borders Oakland, one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. I’m talkin’ gang wars, innocent people shot down in the streets, and thugs willing to kill you for the change in your pocket.”

  “I need to be more than a cowboy.”

  “Son, we’re all sad about Groucho. Kenji and I will help you through this. On the ranch we stick together and live the way nature intended, no matter what. Here we’re safe, and we live a fine life.”

  “Fine for you, sir. You have your writing and a husband. I’ve got nothing.”

  “You have us. Funny thing about people, they’re like coins. Holding four quarters is far better than lugging around a hundred pennies.”

  “Give it a rest,” Kenji said. “Groucho ain’t dead, so let’s wait to see what happens.”

  “All’s I’m saying is: it’s foolish to rush headlong toward danger,” Jessup said. “When it comes to courage, better than passing the test is not being put to the tes
t.”

  Matt Reece turned his back on them and clamped his jaw so tight it could crack his teeth. His mind was set. His ass was Berkeley-bound an hour after they lay Groucho to rest. He would ride his thumb, and if nobody stopped to lend a ride, he would walk there. He imagined himself hoofing it along the highway, head held toward a new future, as dignified and lonely as an asteroid hurtling through space.

  Chapter Two

  MATT REECE prided himself on his ability to make a first-rate cup of coffee—he only used Arabica beans from Columbia and knew the exact measurements and brewing time—but today he was not himself. After setting a frying pan on a burner, putting a pot of pinto beans on to heat, mixing up ground masa and hand patting a tortilla, he dropped it on the hot frying pan. But by that time, he forgot about brewing coffee. It boiled over. When he heard the sizzle, he panicked and grabbed the pot, burning his hand. Coffee spilled. Jessup leaped up and snatched a dish towel to wipe up the stove. “You sit, and I’ll clean this up.”

  “No, sir, I’m fine.” Matt Reece seized the dishrag. But of course, he was light-years from fine. His hand stung, and his palm would no doubt blister, but he wasn’t about to let Jessup baby him. “I can do this.” It was only then he smelled smoke. He caught the tortilla just in time to keep it from catching fire. He slid it from pan to counter. It was charred on one side.

  “Don’t let it upset you,” Jessup said. “This’ll be a shit day for all of us.”

  Matt Reece wrapped the dishrag around the coffeepot handle, poured two mugs, and carried them to the table. The room smelled of burned corn. He withdrew into a vacuum of silent churlishness. He busied himself with frying eggs and potatoes shiny with grease. He transferred them to china plates and added pinto beans and tortillas slathered in butter. He poured milk into odd-sized mason jars and served the men at the table. Rather than eat with them—he knew eating would make him sick—he prepared a breakfast tray and carried it down the hall to Grandpa Blake’s room.

  Blake didn’t respond to his knock. He knocked again, harder, and opened the door. A sickroom smell greeted him, something akin to a short-circuited electrical device.

  The curtains were drawn with the windows wide open. Although the room was filled with nothing more than the ordinary light of a country morning, it seemed luminous. An empty bed was revealed in that luster, and Matt Reece glanced around, searching for Blake. Before coming to the ranch, Blake was a country music musician, playing guitar in honky-tonks and barrooms from Nashville to Lodi. He lived out of suitcases, always poised to go someplace else. But once installed in this room, for the first time in his life, he built a nest and feathered it with a La-Z-Boy recliner, shelves of hardbound books, Navajo rugs, Indian pottery, and paintings involving cowboys on horses.

  “Grandpa?” Matt Reece called.

  “Help me up.”

  Matt Reece focused on a naked figure sprawled on the floor beside the bed. He set his tray on the dresser and knelt beside Blake.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” he asked, but it was obvious from the pool of piss around Blake that he had fallen while trying to get himself to the bathroom.

  “Been up all night, staring at the moon, trying to figure out how my life slipped by in the time it took to wink. The cold floorboards help me think.”

  “Sure, and I’ll bet the smell of piss helps stimulate your brain cells.”

  Blake’s face showed a venerable yet childlike wonder. A sparse pelt of gray hairs covered the meager mass of muscles stubbornly clinging to his skeleton. His blue-white skin shimmered in the light.

  A coughing fit racked Blake’s body.

  Matt Reece pulled the shirt off his back and wiped off the piss still clinging to Blake. He flung his shirt onto the puddle to soak up the remaining urine and muscled Blake onto the bed. He would wait until after breakfast to give Blake a sponge bath.

  With nothing covering his torso, he felt a chill. He closed the windows and was about to give the old man a lecture on the dangers of catching pneumonia, but Blake said, “It’s terrifying to think that a person is just a collection of cells that you drop into a hole in the ground and there’s nothing left. But it’s so comforting to know that the agony will soon end.”

  Blake raised his legs and swung them onto the mattress. His scrawny back pressed into the pillow that Matt Reece propped against the headboard. Matt Reece held the coffee mug to Blake’s lips. The old man sipped while scratching his gray wedge of pubic hair.

  “Comforting for you, maybe.”

  Blake’s face scrunched up in thought, as if Matt Reece proposed a difficult algebraic question, finding the hidden value of x and y. He drew an audible breath, and another. It seemed as if the dazzling light penetrated his skull. His eyes pooled with water, and he mumbled a barely audible, “Yes, son. I’m sorry to bring this on you.”

  A series of watery coughs shook Blake’s body and left his eyes streaming.

  Blake snatched the bottle of painkillers at his bedside and popped three Vicodin. Matt Reece held the mug to his lips again so he could wash them down. He sat the mug on the nightstand beside an aromatic candle, which had burned down to a half inch from extinction.

  “The pain bad?”

  “Like a nagging wife; it never leaves me in peace. The pills only turn down the volume.” His voice was a wheeze.

  Matt Reece thought about taking one of those pills to ease the pain in his blistered hand. The sting had grown sharper.

  “Hungry?”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Eat,” Matt Reece said, using his most authoritative tone. He pulled the sheet over Blake’s legs and carried the tray over and sat it on the bed. “I’ll clean up this mess while you eat and then give you a bath. Can you handle the fork, or should I feed you?”

  “Up yours, you cocky little bastard!” Blake lifted the coffee mug and sipped.

  “That Vicodin must be some kickass stuff.”

  “Take this away. I’m done eating, done prolonging this shitty existence. I’m sorry you’ll be hurt by it, but there’s no point in dragging it out.” He leaned over the nightstand and lifted his silver pocket watch on a chain. It was something Blake cherished. He held it out to Matt Reece.

  “You’re the timekeeper now. Don’t let me down.”

  Matt Reece was startled. Blake watched him with the strained grim look that had become habitual to him, the look of someone with an utterly regrettable past and no future.

  On the ranch, the men told the passage of time by the position of the sun and moon and the movement of shadows across the walls. There were two clocks on the ranch: Blake’s pocket watch and an antique, nickel-plated alarm clock that always ran a bit erratic. Both clocks were the property of Grandpa Blake, and he considered himself the custodian of time on the ranch. It was his only responsibility since becoming bedridden, and being the authority on time grew into his passion. Whenever asked the time, he would answer down to the second, as if lives depended on him being exact. Everyone except Blake knew that Kenji’s iPhone gave the time, but nobody had the heart to tell Blake. They let him believe he contributed something useful.

  Earlier in the month, while Blake napped, Matt Reece noticed the watch’s black hands stuck on quarter after one. Blake forgot to wind it, and it ran down. He couldn’t let Blake see it; it would have robbed him of the one purpose his life still held. Matt Reece snatched up the watch and raced to the living room to get the correct time from the iPhone. He reset the timepiece and slipped it back on the nightstand before Blake woke. After that, he reminded Blake twice a day to wind the watch, at which point Blake always snarled at him to mind his own damned business.

  Matt Reece took the watch, which had a winged boy engraved on it and had originally come from Switzerland, carried by Blake’s grandfather. It was heavy, solid, and slightly tarnished. He flipped it open and checked it was set to the proper time, the second hand moving with a delicate jerking motion.

  “You’re quitting?”

  Blake closed and
reopened his eyelids. His face had a peculiar tightness about it. “You say that like I have some chance of improvement. If being fed like an infant is all I have left, then I want no part of it. You have another bottle of this?” He pointed at the Vicodin. “A full bottle? Bring it here. And take this food away. The smell is making me nauseous.”

  “What do I tell Jessup?”

  Blake was breathing hard and with effort. “Tell him to pack a suitcase and drag your skinny ass off this ranch. Tell him to let you see some of this old world while you’re still young. You deserve that. Now leave me be, and fetch me those pills.” He closed his eyes, gasping for air, until he no longer struggled, lying there peacefully.

  Matt Reece slipped the watch into his pocket. Feeding, bathing, and administering medications to Blake fell solely on him. He did it willingly and had done everything short of reaching inside Blake’s flesh and scraping out the cancer with his fingernails. But all his effort had been futile. He felt that he only accomplished two things in his short life: one was becoming a superb horseman, and the other was to love this cantankerous old man. Caring for Blake taught him to love unconditionally, to give all and expect nothing back. And Blake’s gift for that life lesson was infinitely more valuable than a silver pocket watch.

  Now he had no reason to stay on. He could finally and thankfully leave without guilt.

  Still, it felt like another betrayal.

  He dropped his urine-soaked shirt on the breakfast tray and carried it to the kitchen. He saw Jessup through the front window, hauling a pick and shovel up the road toward the family burial plot. Kenji paced back and forth in the living room, talking on his iPhone. His voice grew harsh. His anger permeated the house. He was scolding someone that the timing was too early, that there were more experiments to analyze before the announcement could be issued.

  Matt Reece paid him no mind. He didn’t need any more drama heaped on his shoulders. He thought about Blake, all those bouts of black diarrhea and vomiting and scrubbing the sheets and washing the body, and now the upcoming burial. He felt profound sadness, but mostly he admired the man’s courage. Blake was giving him one more gift before checking out.