“Go, go, go,” she said.
After a few laps, Otto sat on the porch and held the light for us. We made a few more runs in front of the house. I wondered if Father was watching as we passed. I wondered if someday I wouldn’t be doing this with him too.
When I feared the cold would take her, I took her in. As I undressed her, His Helene started to panic. She could feel the gravity shifting. The water in her feet had begun its migration.
Otto went for her box of shots in the freezer. Some high-altitude sedative. That kind of devil had to be kept fresh. Once the needle was under the skin, His Helene looked peaceful. We laid her out on the pullout in the front room. She slept on the ground floor of the house. Otto feared she’d fall down the stairs. The other night, he’d said, she had managed to push herself out of bed and had taken a few steps before crashing into the bookcase. He’d found her on the floor struggling to lift her face out of the carpet. She’d fought him off kicking and wailing.
“You’ll suffocate yourself,” he’d said.
“Who says I’ll let you kill me like this,” she’d replied.
Otto wouldn’t get a night nurse. He said people wait for everyone to leave a room before they die. “Sometimes,” he said, “I pace the house just to give her room to slip away.”
Once His Helene was quiet we went out onto the front porch to get some air. Outside there was a weightiness between us. I stood next to Otto on the mat that lined the door looking out at the road.
“What do you do,” he said, “when there’s almost no one left?”
The way he took me in his arms, pulling the small of my waist into his belt, I felt the sudden surging up of all the ways I’d wanted to be needed. I saw Mother in Father’s arms that morning as they’d danced next to the drain board in the kitchen. I saw Callie push Father into her bed. And too, I saw everything of His Helene. I tilted my head back. He was careful with my lips.
Afterward, Otto took my face in his hands and turned it sideways examining my profile under the gloomy spin of the porch light. There was a softness to my chin which the dentist had once suggested doing away with. “A little insert,” he’d said, turning my face in his hand just as Otto did now, showing Father my weakness in the mirror of the examination room. “Best to correct for any overbite before she grinds her teeth and lockjaw sets in.”
“You have a long nose,” Otto said.
“It belongs to my mother,” I said.
“It’s good to know what belongs where,” he said.
It was late. Or it was getting late. But there was something in the way Otto looked at me, that pride brimming up in his eyes, I was afraid to leave it alone. “Come inside,” he said. “I’ll put us on a pot of coffee and some cards.”
“I suppose I could deal just one hand,” I said.
The table in the kitchen was littered with piles of hospital bills, dirty coffee cups, and mountains of discarded creamers. We sat across from each other. The table was small. Our knees touched from time to time.
“He doesn’t mean any harm,” Otto said nodding toward the RV where Wilson had retired as he poured a glass of Whiskey. “He’s just looking for someone his own age. There isn’t anyone left.”
“Who’s left for you?” I said.
“Well,” he said. “Callie keeps me busy from time to time.”
“How long have you known her?” I said.
“Long enough,” he said. “To hate her a little. I’ve raised her like one of my own.”
“I’ve seen her on your lawn,” I said.
“Always up and out the door before the next day breaks over top of her,” he said. “Never could shake the life out.”
He reached out across the table and handed me the cards. The box was soft and worn at the edges.
“Deal me a good hand, Jeanie,” he said, taking my hands in his as I reached for the deck. A wind came in through the slat where the window next to the table was open. The old hobbyhorse clanged against the side of the house in the breeze. I could make out the outline of its hooves where they hung in the dim light of the porch, the thin strips of gun-metal silver. I wondered how old Callie had been when she’d spray-painted her name on its rump and where she’d ridden it on his lawn.
“I’ll deal,” I said. “You cut the deck.”
There’s something about hands that cuts to the quick of a man. Otto’s were lithe and narrow, with large boxish fingernails which he kept clipped close to the flesh. Watching them move over the pile of cards reminded me of the way Grandfather had once sharpened knives in a steady arc against the carving stone in his kitchen. “A fast even clip,” Grandfather had said. “That’s where you find your edge.” Otto’s hands flipped and spit with the same confidence. Here was a man without patience for clumsiness or idle. He’d had so much backward speed fall into his life, it was all he could do to get himself and his son washed each morning. Every now and again he groomed his own mustache or changed the straight pin on his lapel. Occasionally, when he needed to get away from the world, he cracked his whip at the air for a while.
Otto flipped his last card. I still had two on deck.
“I win,” Otto said.
“You always win,” I said.
The speed fell out of us. At some hour Otto’s Scotch turned into Whiskey. My cup he filled with sweet cognac, which he cut with a teaspoon of sugar. The edges of the cards adopted a haze. Each time Otto shuffled they fluttered momentarily.
His knees gripped mine.
I got up to go the bathroom. How long I sat on that yellow toilet seat counting the cracks in the rim, I couldn’t say. When I came out, the room was spinning and my body had taken on a leftward lilt. I stood for a moment in the hallway and steadied myself against the expanse of wall. Otto was in the living room with his tumbler of Scotch regarding the pale screen of the television, its lead-bellied glow illuminating the thick grain of the carpet, which he hadn’t bothered to vacuum since His Helene had stopped entertaining and now lent considerable dirt to the bottom of the foot. Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” played on the hi-fi. Otto wore his field boots inside the house as of late. He said he feared gnats. He feared lice. He feared paper fleas on account of the newspapers he kept stored in the wood crate next to the fireplace. Some nights, he said, he awoke to the feeling that a strange mold was growing up his throat on account of the floorboards. The earth around the foundation had crumbled in recent years. In the winter when the snow came in under the house, the floors were damp for weeks. He’d taken to packing old trash bags with dried leaves to try and patch up the gullys under the house where he could. The bags provided little protection. When the wind got to raging he swore he could hear it cursing the floor beneath him.
Other nights, he’d told me, he woke to the feeling that the house had been raised off the earth. I imagined him in his robe throwing himself toward the window in order to look out and regain some sense of his habitation. There was the earth. There was the barn. He searched for the line of trees in the distance to convince himself the house itself hadn’t been swept from the earth like some dwelling in the Malaysian peninsula which stood suspended next to the shore on thin legs of reed in case the river swelled after the storm. A kelong they called it. He’d seen the word in a recurring dream.
The dream, as he’d told it, began with a knock at the door. His first thought was of his wife. He was living in a motel next to the sea in the old fishing town in Galicia where he’d gone to dry out his head after the war. His Helene had caught him at the door with a towel around his waist, some dark-eyed woman who he’d met behind the glass at the currency exchange laying in the blue glare of the rented bed.