Keeping the Doctor Away
Billy Ramone
The odor rattled like an old bead curtain in the doorway, tingling through my nose, and I flashed momentarily to a cold winter morning long past and my boyish boots clumping snow-smeared over this same jamb, and so together we--that boy and I--sailed the rest of the way in with it, riding that spiced, homey tingle like a wave. Thus joined, I wondered whether he’d glimpsed me then as I did him now, paused and meditated my amassed forty and three with the same awe I experienced in contemplating his nine or ten, but I sensed deep down that the communion was all on my side.
And, yes, I bridled a bit at that. The mighty trouble with youth is it’s wasted on the young, for the young are unable utterly to imagine anything but youth itself. Thus I was granted the chilling warmth of a visit from my ghostly self while not receiving the satisfaction, even, of imagining the dreadful snot-nosed brat was shocked into a bit of decent humility by the haunt of the horrid thing he was to become in thirty-odd years. Oblivious little twit missed the entire show.
Ah, but the scent . . . there I couldn’t fault him, for there at least we shared a sensate, tongue-and-gut identity which no number of years could sever, a delighted affinity born of an odor sticky and sweet and redolent of redbrown dustings, oh-so-sweet yet merely hinting at its lurking innermost sweetness--a scent laden with sly invitations. In plain, it was the aroma of that Holy Grail of American cuisine, mom’s apple pie.
I coasted through the swinging door into the kitchen to find that while she wasn’t there it certainly was, and stemming hotly, too, though already missing a rough-edged wedge, gouged too early from its still-molten mass, a chunk of glucose-engorged brimstone off to torment some poor sinner’s blood sugar level. Angry yellow rivulets crazed the extraction site, severed nerves pulsing phantom pains to the golden motherlode remaining while I, resisting the temptation to swab a piping syrupy glob with a fingertip and paint my madly slobbering tongue, went out slowly and, calling, went bumbling into the den, where I found her on the area rug, recently but all too plainly expired.
I and the room danced a lazy spiral, then I lit in the crackled nogahide embrace of the old lazyboy, my weight inspiring an easy ebb-and-flow in the aged rocker’s joints, movement that stilled me while inside began a furious scramble . . . dead, damn, no, gone, how, no, god, god, god . . . One arm extended across the floor, old cardigan sleeve bunched about a gaunt elbow, the impossibly still, pale hand rooted into the carpet by splayed fingers impossibly still and thin . . . head lolligagging lazily to one side and eyes glassing widely at one innocuous corner of the ceiling as if mad Lucifer and all the demons of hell hovered there in the soft drift of afternoon light.
My gaze was so entirely absorbed by the form before me, so entirely engaged by its painful, pregnant stillness, that for some while I did not see him there. Or perhaps it is that he simply was not there in the beginning. He was not there later either, of course, but even non-being is subject to degrees of relativity. In any case, whether due to the distraction of my own senses or to some more fantastical cause, I did not notice him for some moments. Eventually I became aware of a wavery, glistening motion opposite me, and my eyes rose to meet it. He was standing there, looking much the same as he had in the doorway although sans the boots, looking, indeed, much as he must have any one of a hundred, a thousand, days of my boyhood. He wobbled in the middle of the wood floor, one stockinged foot scraping the top of the other, itching mindlessly while his pale green eyes found a point somewhere above the hem of the dead old woman’s skirt and stayed there, stayed there in a way that made we want to punch the dirty little bastard’s lights out.
I wonder now if I could have smelled the cinnamon on his breath if I’d gotten close enough, but I didn’t try. Instead I glared, studying how he chewed and swallowed until he faded silently back into whatever . . . disruption . . . he had emerged from. He never looked at me but he was there, and that was enough--that and the cold hand clutching my nape. Back in the kitchen I phoned for a squad and, still shivering, devoured the rest of the pie before the medics arrived.
And, yes, I bridled a bit at that. The mighty trouble with youth is it’s wasted on the young, for the young are unable utterly to imagine anything but youth itself. Thus I was granted the chilling warmth of a visit from my ghostly self while not receiving the satisfaction, even, of imagining the dreadful snot-nosed brat was shocked into a bit of decent humility by the haunt of the horrid thing he was to become in thirty-odd years. Oblivious little twit missed the entire show.
Ah, but the scent . . . there I couldn’t fault him, for there at least we shared a sensate, tongue-and-gut identity which no number of years could sever, a delighted affinity born of an odor sticky and sweet and redolent of redbrown dustings, oh-so-sweet yet merely hinting at its lurking innermost sweetness--a scent laden with sly invitations. In plain, it was the aroma of that Holy Grail of American cuisine, mom’s apple pie.
I coasted through the swinging door into the kitchen to find that while she wasn’t there it certainly was, and stemming hotly, too, though already missing a rough-edged wedge, gouged too early from its still-molten mass, a chunk of glucose-engorged brimstone off to torment some poor sinner’s blood sugar level. Angry yellow rivulets crazed the extraction site, severed nerves pulsing phantom pains to the golden motherlode remaining while I, resisting the temptation to swab a piping syrupy glob with a fingertip and paint my madly slobbering tongue, went out slowly and, calling, went bumbling into the den, where I found her on the area rug, recently but all too plainly expired.
I and the room danced a lazy spiral, then I lit in the crackled nogahide embrace of the old lazyboy, my weight inspiring an easy ebb-and-flow in the aged rocker’s joints, movement that stilled me while inside began a furious scramble . . . dead, damn, no, gone, how, no, god, god, god . . . One arm extended across the floor, old cardigan sleeve bunched about a gaunt elbow, the impossibly still, pale hand rooted into the carpet by splayed fingers impossibly still and thin . . . head lolligagging lazily to one side and eyes glassing widely at one innocuous corner of the ceiling as if mad Lucifer and all the demons of hell hovered there in the soft drift of afternoon light.
My gaze was so entirely absorbed by the form before me, so entirely engaged by its painful, pregnant stillness, that for some while I did not see him there. Or perhaps it is that he simply was not there in the beginning. He was not there later either, of course, but even non-being is subject to degrees of relativity. In any case, whether due to the distraction of my own senses or to some more fantastical cause, I did not notice him for some moments. Eventually I became aware of a wavery, glistening motion opposite me, and my eyes rose to meet it. He was standing there, looking much the same as he had in the doorway although sans the boots, looking, indeed, much as he must have any one of a hundred, a thousand, days of my boyhood. He wobbled in the middle of the wood floor, one stockinged foot scraping the top of the other, itching mindlessly while his pale green eyes found a point somewhere above the hem of the dead old woman’s skirt and stayed there, stayed there in a way that made we want to punch the dirty little bastard’s lights out.
I wonder now if I could have smelled the cinnamon on his breath if I’d gotten close enough, but I didn’t try. Instead I glared, studying how he chewed and swallowed until he faded silently back into whatever . . . disruption . . . he had emerged from. He never looked at me but he was there, and that was enough--that and the cold hand clutching my nape. Back in the kitchen I phoned for a squad and, still shivering, devoured the rest of the pie before the medics arrived.