inside hospitals are too much alike. Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. She kept changing, little by little, going further away from me. They did a tracheotomy, and from then on a machine was doing her breathing for her, pumping her chest up and down. When I bent close to her to touch my lips to her dank forehead, I could detect the faint sour smell of mortal illness. At one point, early in the vigil, I went out to the car and made the mistake of trying to eat one of the clammy hamburgers and was siclc on the asphalt.
Meyer came out, bringing a change of clothes and my toilet kit. A nurse found me a towel and took me to a place where I could shower and scrape the pale stubble off my tired brown jaws.
Somebody forgot to stop me and tell me. I went in a little after eleven on Monday night, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The equipment had been moved away.
'Where is she?' I roared, and they came running toward me, hushing me, ushering me toward the door.
A big black nurse, big as a tight end, had been answering questions for me during other visits during that shift. She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a shake. 'Easy now! Easy now!' she said in a husky whisper. 'It's better we lost her.'
'Better than what?'
'Hush now. You hush down. A temperature like that, for so long, it cooked her brain. She would have been a vegetable. Ternble thing, a strong young woman like that.' She had led me out into the corridor. 'Who you got to come get you?'
'I'll manage.' I tried to smile. The tears were mnumg down my face. No sobs. No shudders. Just eyes naming. 'Where is she now?'
'They're doing an autopsy.'
'Who said they could!'
'It's a law, Mr. McGee. When the cause of death is unknown, they have to. There's no way anybody can stop them, and that's a good law. Whatever is killing people, we have to find it out.'
'What finally happened? There was that machine...'
She shrugged. 'Total kidney failure, and then the heart gave out right about the same time.' She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. 'I don't know. We get so many old ones here.
The Green Ripper
Not young strong women like her. Whatever it was, it came and wore her right down to nothing. It took the life right out of her. It ate her up, like it was some hungry thing.' She caught herself. 'sorry. talk too much. Listen, if you're the only one she had, what you've got to do now, you've got to make the arrangements. She's got to have a burial'
I wallced on out of their hospital, snuffling from time to time, marveling that I could walk with so little thought and effort. Long strides, heels thudding against the tile door, hand lifting without conscious command to flatten against the push plate on the big glass door, push and let me out into the chill night, spangled with stars that were faint above the security lights of the parking area. I walked to the tall dark shape of Miss Agnes, my ancient Rolls, and leaned against one of her high front fenders, my arms folded, ankles crossed, eyes running again.
Cessation.. Ending. A stopping of her. I heard the night sounds of country and city. Yawk of a night bird nearby. Faraway eerie pulsing of siren. Whim poring drone of light traffic on University Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling its way on through its allotted four billion more years of ffme, carrying its four ~billicn souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some in blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity the obscenity of the fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them, just as dead as the teenagers who impacted a tree at a hundred and ten miles an hour near Tulsa, the llying dentist who didn't see the power lines, the Muslim children dead by fire in Bangladesh, the three hundred elderly in Florida who would not make it through the night in their nursing-home beds.
I could not fit my mind around the realization of finality. There seemed to be more that would happen for the two of us, more of life to be consumed and completed. My body knew with a dreadful precision all the contours of her, the shapes and fittings, the sighs and turnings, gasps and pressures.
I sought refuge in a child's dreaming. They had spirited her away, mended her, and would soon spring the great surprise upon me. She would come running, laughing, half crying, saying, 'Darling, we were just fooling you a little. That's an. Mid we scare you too much? I'm sorry, Tray, dear. So sorry. Take me home.'
And on the way home she would explain to me how she had outwitted the green ripper. I had read once about a little kid who had overheard some adult conversation and afterward, in the night, had terrible nightmares. He kept telling his people he dreamed about the green ripper coming to get him. They finally figured out that he had heard talk
The Green Ripper about the grim reaper. I had told Grets about it, and it had found its way into our personal lan- guage. It was not possible that the green ripper had gotten her.
Not possible.
43
3
Meyer took care of practically everything. I couldn't have managed. I was too listless and too depressed. We both remembered that after her brother's death at Timber Bay, Gretel said she preferred cremation, just as he had. Cremation and maybe a small nondenominational memorial service for close friends. Not many people had attended John Tuckerman's memorial service in Timber Bay. He had been too closely associated with Hum bard Lawless, the man who had taken all the money and tried to run.
I did not think there would be many people who would want to come to Gretel's memorial service. Meyer arranged it at a small chapel up beyond
44
Lee Green Ripper
South Beach Park, at eleven in the morning on Saturday, ten days before Christmas.
Ten or so people came in from Bonnie Brae. And a lot of people from the Bahia Mar area. Meyer calls it a subculture, the permanents. The great waves of tourists and boat people flood the area and recede, leaving the same old faces, most of them, year after year. I did not see all of them come in. When it was over and we walked out into December sunshine, they were there, moving toward me to touch, to shake hands, to kiss, to say some fumbly words: We're sorry. That's what it was about. Together we form a village. And share the trouble as much as we can. Take as much of it upon ourselves as is possible, and we knifer it is not very much. Okay?
There was Skeeter, and there were Gabe and Doris Marchman Gabe's metal crutches glinting in the sun. From charter-boat row there were Billy Maxwell, Lew and Sandy, Barney and Babs, Roxy and his nephews. There was the Alabama Tiger, and Junebug was with him, looking strangely sub- dued. Raul and Nita Tenero were there, up from Miami, with Merrimay Lane. There were Irv Deibert and Johnny Dow, and Choolcie and Arthur Wilkinson, back together again. And there were others, from the hotel and the shops, the boatyards and the tethered fleet.
My village and my people. They seemed to know what I needed most, a sense of place, the feeling of belonging to some kind of resilient society. A man can play the game of being the loner, moving unscathed through an indifferent world, toughened by the diminished expectations of his place and time. I spoke to them, thanked them, managing to keep myself together. As I did so, I thought of the ones who weren't there any more. Lois, of course. Puss Killian. Mike Gibson, of the world before I came to the marina. Nora Gardino. Barni Baker, who went down with her 727 into the swamp short of the airfield. Too damn many of them. I could just barely stand losing them, but I couldn't handle having Gretel gone too. She was destined to be a part of the life that would come after the marina. But she was gone and I was fixed there, embedded in time, embedded in a life I had in some curious way outgrown. I was an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale- eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lampshade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon. They don't make grails the way they used to. She had deserted me here, left me in this now unbreakable mold, this half-farcical image, trapped me in my solitary, fussy, bachelor hang-ups from now until they turned me off too. I shook hands, I hugged and was hugged, and I tried to smile into reddened eyes, and they left, slowly, car doors chunking, driving away from the sunlit ceremony of farewell to my girl.
The Green Ripper
I had parked Miss Agnes two blocks away. An electric-blue Rolls hand-hewn into a pickup truck seemed too conspicuous and frivolous for a memorial service for my dead.
After we got in and I waited for the chance to move out from the curb, Meyer said, '~id it go all right? Did he pick the right things to read?'
'It was fine.'
'I tried to ask you ahead of time, but I couldn't seem to get through.'
'It was fine.'
I thought of the fine running we had done, Gretel and I, on the beach near the shack where her brother was living. I thought of making love with her on the sun deck at dusk, in a hard warm summer rain. I had never really told her how much it all meant. There was going to be plenty of time for that. All the rest of her life. I could make a list of the things we were going to talk about someday. When we had the time.
'Good turnout,' Meyer said.
'For God's sake!'
