Even under normal circumstances, the idea of someone seeing him on a toilet, having a regular bowel movement, made Marty dizzy with terror. Even in his own home he locked the door whenever he used the bathroom-he couldn’t face the possibility of Beth walking in on him.
Marty had already decided, moments after his decision to walk home from downtown, that he wouldn’t take a dump for the next few days. He was determined to be constipated for the duration of the crisis or until he could find a porto-potty with a strong interior latch.
So much for his resolve.
Like every other promise Marty had made himself that day, this one would be broken, and within the next few seconds. His body was rebelling, his intestines twisting into braids. He had to do something.
Marty couldn’t ask somebody if he could use their toilet because even if they said it was okay, he couldn’t risk going into a house that might collapse on him. What he really needed was a hiding place.
He had ten seconds to find one.
Why hide? Drop your pants and get it over with, right here in the street, or on that lawn over there. Who’s going to care? The city is in ruins. There are people bleeding and vomiting and dying all over the place; do you think anyone is going to give a damn about some guy taking a shit?
Marty couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. There had to be someplace to hide.
Then he saw the court-yard apartment building on the corner, and the big, ragged hedge that ran alongside one wall. There was no one near it.
Clutching himself, Marty hobbled quickly to the hedge and dived into it, scratching his face and tearing his clothes on the thorns. But he didn’t care, he wanted to be enveloped by the shrubs, totally hidden from view.
Marty unbuckled his pants, slid them down to his ankles, and squatted in the sharp branches, a mere instant before his sphincters blew. Grimacing, he closed his eyes tight and cowered in the bush, tortured by the cramps, the sounds, the smells, and the overpowering humiliation of his nakedness and vulnerability.
Intellectually, Marty knew there was nothing shameful about this. He was a human being. He was ill. He had no choice. But there was nothing he could say to himself to ease his embarrassment, which was even greater than his considerable physical discomfort. Marty pulled the dust mask over his nose, kept his eyes closed, and prayed that no one would walk by as his body convulsed, cramped, and purged.
A wave of heat washed over him, and he was floating, in a fishing boat on Deer Lake, his grandfather holding the rumbling outboard motor with one hand, his eyes on the trolling pole, waiting for a bite.
It was a hot day made even hotter by the reflection of the sun off the aluminum boat. They were a frying pan drifting back-and-forth across the stagnant water. Nobody built homes on Deer Lake. They parked them and put a picnic table in front of the door and called them fishing cabins.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Marty whined for the sixth or seventh time, rocking on his bench, sunburned and uncomfortable, his arms wrapped around his stomach.
His Grandfather, Poppa Earl, held out a rusted MJB coffee can to him. It was full of cigar stubs and ashes, fish guts and peanut shells. “Piss in this. The fish are biting.”
“I can’t,” Marty smelled like a coconut, sweating off the gobs of Coppertone his Mother made him put on every time he went on the lake. “It’s number two.”
“Then you can hold it a while longer,” Poppa Earl decided, absently picking dried fish scales off his pants, while keeping his eyes on the line. “We’re on top of a school of silvers. They’ll be hopping in the boat soon.”
They’d have to. The last fish they caught was three hours ago, and it was a thin, sickly one that probably swallowed the hook on purpose to end his miserable life. They hadn’t had a bite since.
“We can go in for a minute and come right back out,” Marty argued. “The fish will still be here.”
Poppa Earl shot him a furious glance. “You can’t catch fish with your line in the boat.”
That was Poppa Earl’s all-purpose observation on everything in life, from his brother’s impotence to the invasion of Grenada, a line of inarguable wisdom that took on even greater, almost religious significance when, in fact, he was actually fishing. When Poppa Earl made that statement, ten-year-old Marty knew no amount of whining, begging, or cajoling would change his mind. So Marty just sat there, staring at the dead fish in the Styrofoam cooler, floating in the bloody ice water.
When Marty couldn’t hold it any longer, when he was sobbing with shame as his bowels emptied into his bathing trunks, Poppa Earl was too busy to notice. He’d gotten a bite. Poppa Earl was standing up in the boat, reeling in the leaded line, giving his standard play-by-play the whole time.
“It’s bending the pole in half, look at that! It’s a monster! It’s got to be the killer mack, biggest fish in the lake. They’re hungry bastards. I once caught a thirty pound mackinaw on ten-pound test line. Did I ever tell you that? Nearly pulled me out of the boat. But I got him. Oh yes, that fish met his match in me. I’m the nightmare of the dark waters, you know that? For sixty years, I’ve been coming and killing. They fear me. It’s instinct in them now, part of their fish DNA. Whoa, this one is fighting! Don’t he know who he’s up against?”
And on and on it went, Poppa Earl oblivious to Marty’s plight until the six-inch silver, every bit as thin and sickly as the one they caught hours ago, was in the boat and Poppa Earl was back on his bench, yanking the hook out of the fish along with most of his internal organs.
“Lookee there,” Poppa Earl held up the fish’s stomach between two fingers. “He’s been eating somebody’s white corn. Who the hell uses white corn for bait?”
Poppa Earl tossed the fish into the cooler and the guts overboard, and was washing his hands in the lake when he sniffed something foul. “What the hell is that smell?”
Marty couldn’t look at him. He just hugged himself, trying to become as small as he could, sobbing quietly.
“Did you just shit yourself?” Poppa Earl yelled, rising to his feet. “God-damn it, the fish are biting!”
Poppa Earl picked up Marty under the armpits and threw him into the lake. His grandfather sat back down in front of the outboard, wiped his hands on his pants, and steered the boat back the direction they came.
“You can’t catch fish with your line in the boat,” his grandfather said, shaking his head disgustedly as the boat chortled off.
The water was cold and light as mist. It smelled of pine and hospitals and clean counter-tops. He was swimming in a lake of Lysol.
Marty opened his eyes and was blasted in the face again with disinfectant. Someone was holding a can of Lysol out of the window above the hedge, dousing the bush with spray. Before he could say anything-not that he could in his present disoriented, poisoned, and disinfected state-the spraying stopped and an old lady stuck her head out, her smile revealing a row of blazingly white false teeth. Around her withered neck, she wore fake pearls the size of jawbreakers and as white as her teeth. It was all hurting his eyes.
“I hope you’re feeling better.” Her voice was filtered through a mile of gravel road. “I’ve got a nice glass of ginger ale and some saltines for you in the courtyard. The gate is open, be sure to close it behind you when you come in.”
She dropped a roll of toilet paper into the bush and disappeared. Marty was mortified, but not so much so that he didn’t quickly clean himself off, hitch up his pants, and escape from the bush, carrying the rest of the toilet paper roll with him.
He tumbled out of the junipers and tried to regain his balance, feeling as if he just got off a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Everything was spinning, but at least the cramps were gone. He wandered around the corner to the front of the 1940s-era, white-stucco apartment building.