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It was a Thursday--Thursdays can be so routine--yet so awful. He was in a hurry to get to his VA Hospital appointment at eight o’clock that slightly rainy morning. It was the damn annual eye exam, when you had to be there at eight and wait your turn and if you missed it or were too late they wouldn’t "see" you again for a year--they’d also chew you out, and Wilfrid hated that even worse. He’d need to hustle. During the whole five years he’d lived at that apartment building he’d fretted about someone being so stupid as to be behind his car when he backed out. And this was the day. It had to be a child. He’d worried for years he might hit one of the other old, doddering and thoughtless men or women who came and went there, sometimes thoughtlessly--age does crappy things to the senses--to awareness--to caring about awareness. And now age came upon Wilfrid in a split second. After the accident he aged a decade. It was a two-year-old. Great-granddaughter of some woman there in the building whom he didn’t even know--fifty or so old people had apartments there--Wilfrid was a nodding acquaintance with about five. The child’s grandmother stepped back into the building to get a casserole dish she forgot. Annalise Potter was her name, and she’d called on her mother, Evelyn O’Brian, who lived on the street floor directly under Wilfrid by one unit off-kilter, and Wilfrid may have seen Evelyn O’Brian a time or two but didn’t know her, couldn’t really pass a test on "knowing" her. Annalise Potter that morning had rushed in on her way to work to deliver a gift to her mother, and then when she got out to the parking-lot with Sami, being taken to the day-care center by her grandmother, she remembered she hadn’t brought the casserole dish. Annalise had taken her mother a cheese-and-escalloped-potatoes casserole the week before. It was a big dish and she wanted to take it back--use it again--so she said "Wait here" to Sami and hustled back in. Her mother’s door was only three away from the entry--on the ground floor--very simple. Wilfrid had fretted for years about backing out. At the same time he felt rather secure, comfortable. In that time he saw that no old person, a tenant, had been stupid enough to be in the way of his dark-green Mitsubishi Mighty Max (though they could be pretty stupid, he knew), so he felt okay, turned the ignition, glanced at the seat to his right to make sure he had the papers for the appointment--yes, he did--and would have to get moving if he wasn’t to be late. Wilfrid didn’t get to the VA appointment at all, of course, and Annalise Potter was fit to be tied, and it goes without saying that Evelyn O’Brian was near death, and the hour of the whirl and nightmare of the building manager and the police and the ambulance following--it was a worst nightmare--but real. Real. How it sickened Wilfrid that it was real. Sickened, literally. Wilfrid sat in the police car, parked akimbo in the lot, blocking it, giving information as a bland officer, a man, and another less bland one, a young but very officious and accusative woman, scribbled notes on legal pads, whipped out nasty officious forms for filling in. Then he was told to park his truck and go in and get whatever he’d need, the male cop went up with him, he’d be going with them for the day, downtown to headquarters. And it was a dark day. The rain had stopped, but the day stayed dark and cold. When the ambulance workers carried Sami over to their truck on the litter he told himself, Don’t look. Don’t look at that child’s face--and then he did. He couldn’t help himself. He had to look. And he got a good look, too. It sickened him. He also would never forget the looks on the faces of the two women, grandmother and great-grandmother. Even more haunting. The building manager was something of a bitch, to make matters worse--Cherry Jacklin--and he thought of how difficult--impossible?--it was now going to be to face her, and she’d thrown him a filthy look, to be sure. He didn’t sleep when he got back in bed that night. They allowed him after quite a few hours downtown to go back home--they drove him home--and "go about your normal life as usual"--those were the chief’s words--and await trial. Arraignment would be in six days, Wednesday, and the trial later in the month. For a week Wilfrid’s existence was not "normal." He went through a strange series of emotional and physical stages he’d never known--that first day, that gray Thursday, just sitting in a chair and staring, staring at the walls, staring a bit out the window at the catalpa that hugged the building there, for which he was grateful, but now its beauty meant nothing. Tea meant nothing. He tried to fix a cup of hot green tea, but didn’t even want that, and he didn’t eat. Wilfrid didn’t eat for two or three days. He didn’t turn on television. He didn’t turn on his computer. He didn’t give a damn about the Inbox or the Outbox or anything about the computer. He took a few hot soaky baths and stayed in much longer than usual, but couldn’t read in the tub. He tried reading and it failed. He had no concentration powers whatever. He’d had plenty all his life, but now it was gone. Gone. His life was gone, seemingly, along with Sami Potter’s. He rolled into a ball in bed all day, in the fetal position under covers, but didn’t sleep. He didn’t sleep at night. Saturday night he tried to go walking--oh, about nine--his first time out--and he’d get back in time for "Saturday Night Live," but he didn’t get a block away. The walk was meaningless, sickening, so sickening that he thought of stepping quickly out in front of traffic--pick a big truck, he told himself, and hope it’s breaking the speed limit. Go down to Seventh East--that’s the ticket--pop out quick in front of a big fast one. He went back up into his apartment--he no longer had the actual pit in his stomach, but he wasn’t well, not at all--and turned on "Saturday Night Live" and couldn’t stand the laughter. Simply couldn’t stand it, turned off television and tried to take a hot soaky bath--and that didn’t work. He was constipated. He didn’t sleep. At four Sunday morning he got up and fixed coffee and sat in the usual chair, staring at the computer screen. He hadn’t had it on since the accident. While the coffee cooled he thought he’d turn it on now, see if he could stir up some interest in some of the things he used to do with it, even though he was still prepossessed. The coffee didn’t sit well. It made him sick. He almost barfed on it. So he put some cheese on crackers and tried more coffee, hoping he might get back to some semblance of a "your normal life as usual." All of the putrid phrases he heard Thursday were spinning in his head, the cops’, the chief’s, the lawyers’, that goddamned Cherry Jacklin’s. About halfway through that second cup, and after he nibbled a cheese-cracker unenthusiastically and sat staring, just staring at the screensaver pattern--gorgeous views in national parks--something happened. Something very startling. He spilled the coffee. His spine chilled. Quite badly. It wasn’t any longer the Great Falls of the Yellowstone. Why? What? What was it? Wilfrid spilled the coffee again, the cup fell right to the floor. Now there was a mess to clean up. He almost had a spasm . . . It was Sami Potter. Her face. Sami’s face was now where he’d been looking at the Great Falls of the Yellowstone. He didn’t want to look. For a moment, he didn’t. He tried to look away. He tried to look at the catalpa’s dark leaves against the dark window, but they weren’t distinct. He was impelled back to the screen, and now it displayed the Great Falls again, so he sipped a new cup of coffee and thought he’d get up and go over soon and maybe send an e-mail--or see if one had come in.
What Wilfrid really didn’t like was that when he then went to the bedroom for a sweater--the apartment was getting cold--Sami’s eyes followed him worse--or more so--or whatever--at that point it didn’t matter what language was used--and what he didn’t like even more than the eyes was that the dam in all other respects was the same, the same as all the periphery of the Great Falls of the Yellowstone had been the same, except Sami Potter’s face now dominated every natural sight that came on the screensaver. In an hour, Sami’s face was Wizard Island. On the screen there wasn’t a thing wrong, otherwise, with Crater Lake and the whole periphery, but the island was Sami Potter. That wouldn’t do. He got up to throw up and buckled over, fell on the bedroom floor before he got to the bathroom. He worked his way back up and tried to vomit but nothing would come. His insides were in knots and he thought he’d die. He wished he would. He’d try to sleep now--he’d lost so much sleep maybe he might--that was his hope--but first he’d go back and turn off the computer. That was the thing to do now. And when he stumbled and dragged himself back to it the screen was showing Sami again--the focal point of a well known scene in another park. Her eyes were big--and riveting, following--but no smile yet. A smile meant the dead person was now happy in heaven--he’d been taught that--but with Sami it wasn’t happening. He didn’t sleep. Monday came and he tried to look at the computer again, but Sami was there, again. Sami’s face wouldn’t leave those scenes. She wouldn’t smile. She wouldn’t stop staring at him. He didn’t sleep that night, either, and now it was Tuesday, and the next day, Wednesday, he knew only too well, was the arraignment. He tried to vomit again. Nothing would come. He wasn’t eating--that was probably the problem. So he ate a TV dinner and that made him so sick he crawled into bed in knots and sweated and squirmed and tossed, didn’t sleep, and didn’t vomit. He wished he were dead. Wilfrid fixated on the looks of Annalise Potter, and of her old mother Evelyn O’Brian, his downstairs "neighbor"--didn’t that seem preposterous now--and he thought of that bitch who ran the place, that damn Cherry Jacklin. If that Jacklin bitch hadn’t been enough trouble she was sure to be now. How could he go on living there? He sweated and squirmed in bed thinking of how he’d see them, deal with them, get talked-back-to by them, at the arraignment. Get told he was a murderer. A thoughtless stupid rotten vile killer. Ashamed. They’d use the word "ashamed" one hell of a lot--on him. He knew where Bert Krindler kept his guns. Yeah, now as he lay there writhing he thought of how glad he was he’d kept Bert and Carolyn Krindler such close friends all these many years since college. They may have had their differences, may have had their hiatuses and fracases in the friendship (politics was always a bone of contention), but it had never completely deteriorated, as most such friendships do. How good it was that Bert Krindler was such an outdoorsman. That meant he had guns--and ammo--and Wilfrid had puttered so many times with Bert in his garage that he knew the place as well as if he lived there himself. He knew Bert didn’t lock the garage at night. When Wilfrid didn’t appear for the arraignment the police, of course, went to see Cherry Jacklin. There were two of them again, but this time it was the man who was officious and accusative and the woman cop bland, almost an onlooker--maybe a trainee. Cherry Jacklin in one of her smart pantsuits, that deep-goldenrod number, turned the key. They went in. Wilfrid lay in a pool of blood, his hunter-green sheets a mess of discoloration and the pillow in its hunter-green case askew on the floor. Keith Moore is the youngest of seven in a devout Mormon family, grew up a few blocks from the University of Utah, where he went to school, earning a degree in music, which he later taught, along with English, on the college level. He has spent his 78 years teaching piano, but mostly writing and trying to break into print on the major level. Keith can be reached at topazhouse@redrock.net. |
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As he was slicing another piece of cheese in the kitchenette and glancing
under the little inlet over the sink at the screensaver he saw another
gorgeous view, this time Hoover Dam. He took the chair again and settled,
didn’t look at the screen, got busy with the coffee and crackers,
looked out the window--but couldn’t concentrate. Looked unwittingly
back at the screen and Sami’s face had replaced the big concrete
face of the dam. This time, her eyes followed him. She wasn’t
smiling. Otherwise, she looked all right, just the same as he’d
remembered her going into the ambulance on the litter. He didn’t
like it that she wasn’t smiling.