waste pile of deadfall and autumn leaves, and the faint odor of the spiced smoke had pleased him as well.
Danny had come out of the office, shrugging on his jacket, headed home. They stood talking for a moment— or, to be more accurate, Danny stood jawing at him while Jude watched the dogs and tried to tune him out. You could always count on Danny Wooten to spoil a perfectly good silence.
Silence. The office behind Danny had been silent. Jude could remember the crows going
Jude started forward once more, but he was ill at ease again. It wasn’t any one thing. It was all of it. It was the dimness of the office and the glaring red eye staring out from the face of the receiver. It was the idea that the radio hadn’t been on an hour ago, when Danny had stood in the open office door zipping his jacket. It was the thought that someone had recently passed through the office and might still be close by, maybe watching from the darkness of the bathroom, where the door was open a crack—a paranoid thing to think and unlike him, but in his head all the same. He reached for the power button on the stereo, not really listening anymore, his gaze on that door. He wondered what he would do if it started to open.
The weatherman said, “…cold and dry as the front pushes the warm air south. The dead pull the living down. Down into the cold. Down into the hole. You will di—”
Jude’s thumb hit the power button, switching off the stereo, just as he registered what was being said. He twitched, startled, and stabbed the power button again, to get the voice back, figure out what the hell the weatherman had just been going on about.
Except the weatherman was done talking, and it was the DJ instead: “…going to freeze our asses off, but Kurt Cobain is warm in hell. Dig it.”
A guitar whined, a shrill, wavering sound that went on and on without any discernible melody or purpose except perhaps to drive the listener to madness. The opening of Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” Was that what the weatherman had been talking about? He’d said something about dying. Jude clicked the power button once more, returning the room to stillness.
It didn’t last. The phone went off, right behind him, a startling burst of sound that gave Jude’s pulse another unhappy jump. He shot a look at Danny’s desk, wondering who would be calling on the office line at this hour. He shifted around behind the desk for a glance at caller ID. It was a 985 number, which he identified immediately as a prefix for eastern Louisiana. The name that came up was COWZYNSKI, M.
Only Jude knew, even without picking up the phone, that it wasn’t really Cowzynski, M., on the other end. Not unless a medical miracle had transpired. He almost didn’t pick up at all, but then the thought came that maybe Arlene Wade was calling to tell him Martin was dead, in which case he would have to talk to her sooner or later, whether he wanted to or not.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Justin,” said Arlene. She was an aunt by marriage, his mother’s sister-in-law, and a licensed physician’s assistant, although for the last thirteen months her only patient had been Jude’s father. She was sixty- nine, and her voice was all twang and warble. To her he would always be Justin Cowzynski.
“How are you, Arlene?”
“I’m the same as ever. You know. Me and the dog are gettin’ along. Although he can’t get up so much now because he’s so fat and his knees pain him. But I’m not callin’ to tell you about myself or the dog. I’m callin’ about your father.”
As if there could be anything else she might call about. The line hissed with white noise. Jude had been interviewed over the phone by a radio personality in Beijing and taken calls from Brian Johnson in Australia, and the connections had been as crisp and clear as if they were phoning him from down the street. But for some reason calls from Moore’s Corner, Louisiana, came in scratchy and faint, like an AM radio station that’s just a little too far away to be received perfectly. Voices from other phone calls would bleed in and out, faintly audible for a few moments and then gone. They might have high-speed Internet connections in Baton Rouge, but in the little towns in the swamps north of Lake Pontchartrain, if you wanted a high-speed connection with the rest of the world, you souped up a car and got the fuck out.
“Last few months I been spoonin’ him food. Soft stuff he don’t have to chew. He was likin’ them little stars. Pastina. And vanilla custard. I never met a dyin’ person yet didn’t want some custard on their way out the door.”
“I’m surprised. He never used to have a sweet tooth. Are you sure?”
“Who’s takin’ care of him?”
“You are.”
“Well, I guess I’m sure, then.”
“All right.”
“This is the reason I’m callin’. He won’t eat custard or little stars or anything else. He just chokes on whatever I put in his mouth. He can’t swallow. Dr. Newland was in to see him yesterday. He thinks your dad had another infarction.”
“A stroke.” It was not quite a question.
“Not a fall-down-and-kill-you kind of stroke. If he had another one of those, there wouldn’t be any question of it. He’d be dead. This was one of the little blow-outs. You don’t always know when he’s had one of the little ones. Especially when he gets like he is now, just starin’ at things. He hasn’t said a word to anyone in two months. He isn’t ever going to say a word to anyone again.”
“Is he at the hospital?”
“No. We can care for him just as well or better here. Me livin’ with him and Dr. Newland in every day. But we can send him to the hospital. It would be cheaper there, if that matters to you.”
“It doesn’t. Let ’em save the beds at the hospital for people who might actually get better in them.”
“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”
“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”
This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.
“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”
Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.
When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”
But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”
He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”
“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”
No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.
But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”
