__________
T h e
G o o d
T h a t
M e n
D o
__________Brown
The first baby, Rose, had come right. William fed and bathed and
sang to her in the kitchen every evening, neglecting the mother, Marisa.
He stayed home from work to play with her whenever he could think of an
excuse to beg a day off. Only Marisa got in his way, hovering over the
child when he wanted to be dressing and undressing her by himself.
To distract his young wife, he impregnated her again as soon as he could. He instructed her to pamper her body with herbs and sent her into the desert on buses to consult fortune-tellers. He brought home bundles of bright yarn so that she could keep busy knitting clothes for the next daughter she would be giving him.
Unsuspecting Marisa padded around the barrio, boasting to the other women about her husband's coddling. But when the second child was born and William eagerly pulled down the sheet to inspect it, he saw the miniscule spout of a penis. He was incredulous, then enraged. With a shout he fell on the bed where Marisa lay and pounded with his fists until the midwife came running in.
"Devil! You'll kill your son!" she cried and pushed him against the wall. Marisa's face turned blue and swollen. The battered infant was carried to an aunt's house for fear of William's surprising temper.
When Marisa was strong enough, she brought the boy, Luis, to a room by her bedroom. As she nursed him there she listened, mystified, to the songs and whispers coming from the kitchen, where her husband went on powdering and dressing and undressing his precious Rose for hours.
William didn't sleep with Marisa again for months, but spent his nights tossing on the sofa. He understood now that he couldn't will a child to be female; the odds went either way. Yet he feared he would kill them all if Marisa gave little Luis a brother. Then one evening when he was stroking Rose's fat belly at the table, his pleasure grew so acute that he couldn't resist the hope of another baby girl any longer. He ran to Marisa's room whispering a savage prayer. To his relief, the next child his wife bore him was a daughter. They named her Viola. A year later came another miracle, Desiderata. In renewed delight he brought his girls trinkets from town and played his dressing games with them at the kitchen table.
Between his rages William forgot the beatings, though little Luis screamed so piercingly that neighbors would knock and ask if someone was passing a kidney stone. Then Marisa would take courage and pull the boy out of her husband's reach. Afterward she salved her son's wounds with lard and kept him home from school until the skin cleared.
Otherwise she scarcely noticed Luis growing up, any more than William did. She still registered her husband's tantrums, but since she couldn't explain them, she didn't know how to complain to the priest. "All men have tempers," her mother assured her. "If he hates the boy, be glad. It means he's jealous of the girls, and later he'll protect them."
Marisa took no comfort from this advice. She was distracted by a nameless, welling anger toward her daughters. She thought demons must inhabit their bodies; their shouts at play drove her wild. Over a few years she changed from a carefree young bride with a moony brown face into a vindictive shrew with straggling hair and unwashed dresses that hung over her body like sacks. Without a word from William to encourage her, she stopped caring about the flies that swarmed through the back door or the red dust that billowed in on the wind. Mornings, she wandered the sun-blinded barrio muttering curses against the girls. They had to endure her frowns and smacks when she came home, just as Luis was always in danger of a thrashing if he stepped into the kitchen when his father was there.
The sisters, so spoiled by William, couldn't remember for long what was ghastly about him. Minutes after he drove Luis away with a roar or a slap, they were chanting rhymes again and tugging at their father's arms for a dance. In a few years they shot up taller than their mother; after that, her fists seldom bruised their flesh. "Filthy sluts!" Marisa screamed, but they forgot about her the instant William's truck pulled into the yard.
Only Luis held all the evil in his mind. Whenever he snatched Rose, Viola or Desiderata away from his mother's upraised hand, he registered the shock on his own skin incredulously. Each time he saw his father's mouth twist above him with loathing he winced, then sobbed for hours, baffled by the pain. After the family broke in two when he was thirteen, he couldn't let go of the ugly memories. He phoned his sisters or talked through the night with them, if they rode up on the bus from Albuquerque to spend a week with him and William in Reno. He couldn't relax until he'd persuaded the girls to remember certain scenes.
"I guess Daddy did whack you with a hairbrush till it broke," Rose admitted.
"I can see him holding you out the window above the back porch," Viola agreed, "and he would've dropped you if Mama hadn't yelled that she'd call the police."
"There was a knife on his dresser with 'Luis' carved in the handle," said Desiderata, her eyes glittering. "We found it while we were playing and passed it around, really scared of touching it. We knew he kept it there in case he decided to kill you some night, and he wanted a way of doing it close at hand before he changed his mind."
Luis didn't care that his sisters still adored their father, or that they bore no grudge against Marisa and became her kind keepers after he and William moved away. They were charming creatures he'd saved a hundred times from their mother's fury; keeping them half-ignorant of her jealousy had provided his only satisfaction so far. Now the memories he extracted from them flattered his hope that his father's blows had been a crime too and must be recompensed.
He enrolled at the state university in Reno, got a stipend for graduate study in Indiana, enjoyed his work there well enough that he published his first findings in learned journals. But while he was mastering the distant universe of linguistic theory, at another level he went on nursing his private wound. He kept coming back to it in hints sprinkled through his conversations. Would-be friends, possible lovers who'd been attracted by his smile or his slender hips were put off when they noticed his obsessive phrases: "it hit me like a slap" or "your own father won't know you." He lived alone and spent his vacations in the library. All that he did while he was away in Bloomington--studying, fucking, bicycling around the campus--was mere circling until someone released him.
"This one's hilarious! When I was in high school my wicked stepmother sent me to Colombia as an exchange student in hopes I'd never come back! Of course I didn't know she was planning any tricks when I left. My teachers told me how lucky I was to get the scholarship; then came the long plane flight. Once I landed in Bogota, this grandee with a fabulous white beard and blood-red skin welcomed me to his mansion. It seemed like a huge adventure was unfolding.
"Every day the grandee's limo took me to a private school packed with rich kids--the country's creme de la creme. At night I ate with him and his housekeeper in a high-ceilinged old room. He told me stories about the wicked parties he used to throw there when he was young that made the housekeeper blush. She was a middle-aged virgin who never looked up from her plate--perfect manners, but incredibly shy.
"Here, take a drag of this, it's good shit.
"The trouble started when I realized there was no way to meet anybody else. The rich kids vanished from school in their own limos every day at four, and all the grandee's party guests must've died, because nobody ever visited him. I asked the housekeeper how I could make some friends, but she said, 'You've already met our most distinguished elder statesman'--that was the grandee!--'and also'--she blushed--'you've met me.' So think of me, who'd grown up with my sisters in a noisy barrio, suddenly a million miles away from home and with no connections in Bogota except that quaint pair! After a month I was so lonely, I would've gone on dates with girls!
"On weekends I wandered around the mansion or tried to make friends with the animals in the grandee's park. That was a wild dark place where you'd expect fairy tales to happen--frog-princes winking from under rocks, genies popping out of tree stumps. I kept hoping to meet a gardener or a kitchen boy there who'd lead me to a cave and teach me the secrets of Andean love; but the servants knew their places too well for that to happen.
"So I began looking forward to going back to the States, bad as my life had been there. After all, with Daddy's new wife in Reno I still had some hope that things were turning around. However, here's the joke: my plane ticket didn't arrive when I expected it. I wrote to my stepmother Janette about it, but her reply made no sense. She said the money was safe and she'd send me a ticket as soon as Daddy agreed. All I could do was write again, begging her to hurry. It was hard to compose the second letter, since I couldn't imagine what her problem was with Daddy. He hadn't objected when I moved into her house with him--in fact I don't think he'd noticed me. I wasn't the little boy he used to beat up any longer--I was nothing to him at all. So why would he care if I came back?
"I only figured out why Janette fucked with me about the ticket later, after I got back to Reno. While I was away, Daddy would vanish from her house for days. She guessed he went downtown on gambling binges, but her cousins who worked in the casinos never spotted him. Her worst fear was that he might hightail it home to New Mexico sometime. She hadn't been married before, and she didn't trust her luck in keeping a husband. She complained constantly about her looks: once I heard her compare her body to a white bowling ball.
"No one had explained to her yet that Daddy would never leave her--that she was the best he could hope for. He'd been squeezed out of our old house for good, you see, damned in Mama's eyes and ignored by my sisters once they grew up enough to notice the cute high school boys. He'd started drinking alone at night; then out of the blue he left for a vacation in Nevada. When he bumped into Janette in a bingo parlor, she whisked him home and sobered him up, all the time telling him how distinguished he looked! But she didn't take him for granted, even after she'd guided him through the divorce and a quickie wedding. When I arrived on Daddy's heels she was terrified, because she suspected Mama'd sent me to bring him back.
"Even after I moved into the loft over her garage and started high school, she worried that I reminded Daddy of the family he'd left behind. All this time I was trying to make her into a second mother in my mind, but she must've had no feeling for me. When she advised me to apply for the scholarship to Colombia, I figured that if I won it, she'd be proud of me and let me go on living with her forever. At the time I didn't see the inconsistency of that! But I could tell that she was ecstatic when she put me on the plane. She must've figured she was well rid of me.
"Here, rub my back, will you? You have terrific hands.
"Finally she sent me a ticket--this was three months after the semester in Bogota ended; guilt had gotten the better of her at last--but it was for a flight to Dallas, with no connection to Reno! I didn't know what to do. I'd be stranded in Dallas if I flew there. Mama's house was six hundred miles beyond, and besides, even if I could pay for the bus as far as Albuquerque, I'd have to plead with Mama to let me in--or my sisters might've sneaked me inside after she went to bed.
"Remember, I'd left New Mexico not because I missed Daddy, but because I had to get away from Mama to save my skin. By that time she hated every man or boy she saw, and she'd gotten it into her head that I was storing rat poison in order to knock her off! After Daddy left, she threatened me with a pair of scissors to make me go too.
"I wasn't sure why Daddy's new wife was trying to keep me away from Reno, but I figured like this: I was still a kid, and somebody owed me a home in my own country! I was going to insist on that. To do it, though, I had to see Janette again and maybe tell her things about Mama's place that Daddy and I'd been ashamed to mention before.
"After the ticket to Dallas arrived, I found the grandee's housekeeper reading in one of the parlors. She always dressed in light silks, and she looked so lovely and calm that day that I thought, Why weren't you my mother? Then I could go on living here and not feel too lonely, and I wouldn't have to think about those rotten people up north. Of course she was probably no better than average, but she was a big improvement over any grownup I'd dealt with before. She took one look at my face and said, 'Let me help you, Luis,' before I could ask for anything.
"I was so moved by her that I forgot the speech I'd been rehearsing. I blurted out, 'Will you lend me the price of a plane ticket from Dallas to Reno?' She asked, 'How far is that? I know Dallas, but not the other one.' When I told her, she whispered, 'We won't ask the grandee for money; he's a little old-fashioned. I'll give it to you out of my kitchen allowance.' I hugged her, and she laughed and called the airline, and here, as they say, I am."
"So the moral is, like you told me before, if my parents don't love me after they find out I'm gay, I've got to go on in spite of them and, um, insist on being happy anyway. Is that it?"
He carries his body in the elegant way I remember--the brown eyes curious, the black hair swept back from his face by restless hands. Still witty, a raconteur, though shy with strangers unless he feels predatory; defensive, a rationalizer with a hundred pretenses; ironical, yet dreamy about politics. In high school he used to fascinate me: the barking laugh, the small manipulations, the play of nerves across his face.
Since he's moved back to the loft above Janette's garage, his official line is that the academic job market dried up on him. After he finished his degree in Indiana, he didn't bother applying for work anywhere; he took the bus straight to Reno at the end of May.
"Linguistics is so remote!" he urges. "Now that I'm out of it, I wouldn't go back." Yet in letters he wrote me from Bloomington, he described the pleasure he found in solving problems using the arcane symbols of his science. He said that the order of our minds is revealed by our grammar--as if such abstractions were real to him. It's hard to understand how he can dismiss a career that once looked so hopeful. I wonder what he expects to do here that he'll consider less remote? I doubt--I scarcely think--that his coming has anything to do with me.
This afternoon he appeared on my porch holding the leash of a stocky gray Norwegian elkhound. "His name's Eddy--isn't he beautiful?" he began in a rush. "Janette and William say I can't keep him at their house because he makes their dogs fight all the time. Besides, Janette's annoyed because Hugh and Mark never bothered to housebreak him. They just locked him in the bathroom when they went out and cleaned up the pee later. I found him when I went home with Hugh on Saturday night. They were fed up with him too--he was headed for the pound in a couple of weeks."
When he released the dog, it bounded into my living room and lifted its leg against a bookcase. I shouted, "Luis!"
We got it into the backyard, and Luis tugged me out to watch it mark the fence. "He's sweet tempered if you don't cross him. Also he's a purebred; you can make a fortune hiring him out for stud." I felt my body tighten, but Luis went on talking as if I'd already agreed to keep the dog. He was describing his history as a savior of animals. When he was a child, he set free a litter of kittens that William had told him to drown. In Indiana his landlady's parrot had escaped from its cage, and he'd spotted it up a tree.
"I give hope wherever I go, like Mother Theresa." He clapped me on the back unpleasantly; but as he went on exclaiming, I noticed that his fingers remained encouragingly between my shoulder blades. Anyhow, I'd begun to admire the way the elkhound's fur went silver in the sunlight. It might be a sign of something, I thought, that Luis brought the dog to me.
Luis keeps congratulating himself on saving Eddy from that heartless pair, Hugh and Mark, after I've gotten used to owning a dog and no longer care where it came from. In his retellings, the story is taking on a surprising edge. "I was so furious at Hugh for forgetting he'd locked a pet in the bathroom that I fucked the bejesus out of him that night. He was screaming when I finished. 'Take the goddamn dog if you want it and get out!' he said, so that's what I did."
His forehead knots, and his hands tug at his shirt. Possibly my face betrays an accusation, because his eyes bore in at me. He must think I disapprove of his anger at Hugh, since I haven't told him that I'm half-jealous whenever he picks up someone in a bar.
"Well?" he challenges when I turn away.
Another day he chuckles as he watches Eddy sniffing flower pots on my patio. "Binky was going to kill himself, you know. I actually saved a human life in Bloomington, Indiana."
Binky was a freshman who panicked when he realized he was gay, Luis says. He didn't know what else to do--he'd never heard of crisis lines, was terrified of queer groups--so he decided to throw himself off a bridge into a limestone creekbed near the university. Luis was walking back to his room across the same bridge after working late at the library. He saw a clean-cut kid up ahead under a streetlamp and heard a half-suppressed sob. As a dare that seemed justified by the vibrations the kid was throwing off, he murmured, "Your hair's beautiful in this light."
In a flash the kid was all over him, crying on his neck and at the same time running a hand down his chest. Stunned, Luis listened as the kid brought out some choked words about jumping.
"But you might've been killed!" Luis cried.
He folded the kid into a hug and led him back to his room. I believe they scarcely separated from that embrace for the rest of the year.
"Every night Binky'd knock his code on my door. He was a willing virgin with golden skin who truly owed me every breath he took. He kept wanting to give me orgasms like you'd pay homage to a god."
After sex, Luis told stories he thought Binky would find encouraging. The kid listened quietly, but before he left he always asked, "So I'll see you tomorrow?" as if he still needed that reassurance. At the beginning of spring finals week, Luis changed his answer. "I've been invited to a farewell dinner with the linguistics group. Why don't we take a breather for once?"
Binky's eyes widened, but he nodded. He took pride in carrying out Luis's orders, and he wasn't going to violate his training now. But the night after the next one when he knocked again, Luis said through his door, "I'm not feeling so hot. I don't want to give you a germ."
The night after that, Binky stood on the sidewalk looking up at Luis's lighted window. From a dark window in the hall Luis looked down at Binky. After half an hour Binky turned and headed back toward his dorm. The path he took led over the bridge where Luis had found him the previous September, but Luis wasn't worried now that Binky would be tempted by it.
For a man as needful as Luis, the decision to give up an eager lover is puzzling. His impulse to rescue Binky must've been so selfless that it could only complete itself by letting go. Yet Luis insists on the story for a couple of weeks until I think that he's regretting his loss. Then with a chill I wonder if he's seen through my mask and means to warn me: if he couldn't love Binky, he'll never fall for anyone else.
Janette and William's house sits on a windy crest overlooking our valley of highrise casinos. Nearby are a few other cabins and a sweep of sagebrush across the flank of Mount Peavine. The paved road ends fifty yards from their door. Luis passes his days up there writing in his journal or doing small jobs for Janette, until it's time to wander down the hill and share a six-pack with me on his way to the cruise bars. All he wants to talk about while we drink, besides his menagerie of creatures snatched from death, is the old man.
William has no passion left, Luis says. He sits alone in his bedroom after Janette leaves for work, mending garden tools or tinkering on inventions made of sticks and rubber bands. Eventually he'll appear in the kitchen to cut a slice of melon for lunch or shuffle out to the garage and come back trailing tacks and wood shavings. Whenever he emerges like this, Luis will look up from the book he's been reading.
"Hey, Daddy, whatcha got there?" Then he waits to see if William will notice him and reply.
So far no connection's been established between them. "Daddy doesn't recognize me from the last time I was in town!" he laughs exasperatedly. His picture of William's absent-mindedness is apparently not exaggerated. The first time I phoned to invite Luis for dinner, William answered in his faint wheeze. "I don't believe Luis lives here any more, does he? Isn't he back in Illinois, or one of those places?"
When I assured him that his son was staying in Janette's house with him, he paused. "I believe you're right, I saw him an hour ago. Shall I go look--"
At that moment Luis came out of hiding in the next room. I heard him say shyly, "Here I am, Daddy--is that call for me?"
In high school Luis used to describe his stepmother as a comic-book figure of jealousy, rolling her globular eyes if he so much as walked between her and William. But when she met him at the bus station in May, Janette planted a kiss on his chin and drove him back to a house filled with high school friends she thought he'd remember. She plied us with sweet wine and embraced us when we left. These days she's buying Luis gifts on her lunch hour--shirts in loud patterns, a coffee mug with his name in pink. When I raise an eyebrow at the mug, he grins: "She's apologizing without saying so." He models the crazy shirts for me and winks, as if something he'd been expecting is finally coming true.
After supper most nights Janette plops her round, doughy body beside him on the sofa, happy to discuss William's faults with him. They laugh at the cigarette burns William has left in her furniture, the tools he's forgotten on the piano bench. "Janette takes comfort from the clutter," Luis tells me. However, she has no fear of losing William now, so she doesn't mind sharing him with his son.
Luis keeps asking her for any scraps of William's conversation she remembers from the years when he was away in Indiana. Does she guess what he's aiming at with his father, any better than I do? At least she must suspect that he has some business to transact with the old man, since she's trying to draw William out for him. She prompts her husband to hand Luis plates at dinner and help him with the grocery shopping. After two months she's persuaded William to go along when Luis takes the family's dogs onto the mountain for their runs.
Luis doesn't mind that on the way to the store, he and William only discuss which vegetables to buy. He says he's struck by his father's voice pronouncing complete sentences for a change, after weeks of broken mutterings. William's mind hasn't declined as much as Luis thought at first, but he sounds gentler than in past years. "Maybe it's from living with Janette," Luis shrugs. In the Hispanic accent he sometimes puts on for fun he adds, "Nobody can explain a holy miracle--but maybe we can help it along anyhow!"
The first time Luis proposed a few questions about New Mexico, William's face betrayed no shock. What year did they whitewash the house? Which of their former neighbors is still alive? Luis slipped these temptations in between casual remarks about Reno's late-summer heat and Janette's cooking. Suddenly it felt as if he and his father were in a conspiracy together--like they were gathering courage from each other in preparation for some huge joint labor they're about to perform. Every day Luis offers William more hints about the work that lies ahead. "Daddy, look at that woman picking out oranges! Isn't that the way Rose used to wear her hair? Here, smell this fish! Remember the stink of canned sardines that filled the barrio on Friday nights, and how terrible they tasted?"
Luis says William's features are sharpening at the challenge. Through the grammar of his father's creaky gestures, shufflings, grunts, he detects an order of possibility. Today as they rode in the car together, William interrupted a story Luis was telling. "No, that's wrong. You never saw me undress Viola at the kitchen table. Bathing the girls was your mama's job."
Astonished, Luis left his anecdote unfinished. William's assertion was a mistake, he says. But he reasons that the rusty wheels of memory are only beginning to turn inside the old man's head. Not to worry, Luis tells me: together they'll sort it all out in time.
Luis vows to press ahead, though in the last week William has crankily refused to remember most of the details his son's been forcing on him.
"No, I didn't keep a bone-handled knife on top of my dresser. And I never beat your skull so hard that a hairbrush broke in my hand. No, no, nobody held you out an upstairs window and threatened to drop you. Do you think I'd try to kill my son?"
Luis's hopeful look is fading as he circles back every day to hurl more questions. William will only agree that there were a few slaps, minor nosebleeds--but in his defense he claims, "Boys always need more discipline than girls, the way they charge around."
For several days I've understood exactly what Luis must've been hoping for when he came back here. As I suspected from the start, his goal had nothing to do with me. But maybe this is for the best--maybe falling in love with Luis would have been too frightening, not what I need at all. The worry I feel for him seems more like a brother's than a lover's anyhow. What I care about most right now is that, even though he's shown plenty of courage in confronting William, his plan may still fail; and if it does, has he left himself room to walk away?
Luis and his father followed the dogs up a steep trail behind the house this afternoon, arguing at every step. At last in his distraction Luis found himself stumbling forward to grab at the old man and block his way. As he shouted out a final accusation, William fell back, brittle legs thrust apart, face tilted at the sky. Seeing what he'd done, Luis suddenly felt ashamed. He helped his father up and searched his arms penitently for bruises.
They began walking uphill again, sharing the rocky trail. The accident had collapsed the distance between them, and a small hope warmed Luis's chest as he waited to see what would happen next. "I loved my daughters too much," the old man panted. "I probably didn't give you attention like I ought." (Yes, Daddy, say it all now! Luis thought, breathless too.) "But you must see that a father and a son will be competing for the females in any house," William went on, "and then bad words may fly."
"He meant that I can't be gay like I claim, since I'm jealous of his success with my sisters!" Luis shouts when he tells me this part. So William was merely getting his revenge for being knocked off his feet. When Luis turned on him angrily, the old man conceded at once that he believes in his son's gayness after all. But he implied that Luis must've been driven to it from humiliation, because he couldn't measure up to his father's virility.
"The girls remember how you wanted to kill me," Luis screamed as the old man turned and whistled for the dogs to follow him down the mountain. "Even Mama remembers how you beat her the first time you saw me."
"Marisa always did make stuff up," William threw over his shoulder. "I was away on business when you were born. I drove home from Waco like hell on wheels because I knew the child was due. When I saw you the first time, you were a few days old; Marisa was up walking around--there wouldn't have been any midwife in the house by then."
Nervously I reach out to hug Luis till he quietens. We haven't touched like this since high school, yet his bones are so sharp with grief that after the first instant I feel no thrill, and soon his sadness invades me.
Since his quarrel with William's blazed up, Luis argues his case to anyone who'll listen--not just Janette and me, but strangers downtown who buy him drinks. I hear the story on all sides when I go out to the bars, in scrambled versions. He's acting pretty loco, somebody says--his eyes wide, his voice jangling as if he was high on pills. People wonder--I do too--what kind of help he expects from his friends. One evening I hear a banging on my front door and hide in the kitchen while I gather strength to endure another of his shouting spells. When the noise stops, relief rushes over me.
Janette says he's imposing on her hospitality too. When I run into her at a shopping mall and mention his obsession, she wrinkles her pale round face and snaps, "He's throwing fits at dinner till we can't eat. Forgive and forget, I tell him. Where's his sense of humor now?"
Is it progress when William finally says something aimed at shutting Luis up? "If I did you any physical damage, which I'm sure I never intended, then I'm sorry." Luis repeats this apology to me with a withering smile. He interprets it as pure equivocation. But after pondering it overnight, he runs downhill at breakfast-time to tell me that he's changed his mind. For William, saying even this much must be counted as a defeat. It means Luis is the stronger one now, and William will have to give him formulas until he declares he's satisfied. Of course it's not the civilized outcome he was hoping for at first. He's seen fear in his father's eyes, as if William thinks his son wants to persecute him to death with memories.
Tonight Luis stays late at my place, emptying my refrigerator of beer. Should I offer him my spare room for a few weeks, in case he wants to forget about the old man? On the other hand he might refuse me, if he suspected I was trying to trap him in a pointless romance. Besides, if he moved here, I'd hear his wrongs repeated at every meal.
He cuts through my fumblings by announcing that he's moving to San Francisco as soon as he can pack. "I've gotten all I can get in Reno. At least the bastard's had to face what he did before he dies."
"What'll you do in the City now that you're free?" I ask, still uneasy about failing to help.
"Do?" He bubbles his lips. "Why, what does it matter after this?"
In winter William is found on the mountainside guarded by his dogs. Janette phones me from the hospital. "Call your pal Luis and tell him he got his wish. The doctor thinks my husband isn't going to wake up."
"People recover from strokes all the time," Luis, in San Francisco, pleads into the receiver. "He can't die yet, he's still got work to do. But I'm glad he's sick--this could change how he looks at things." We say goodbye, but as I'm hanging up he shouts, "If he asks for me, call again."
A tide of blood sweeps William away that night without another word. The next morning I encounter Janette bent double in a hospital chair, holding her belly with both arms. "I should've chased the stinker off when I saw what he was up to," she mutters. "He could've pestered his sisters, if he had to pester anybody. The old must be left alone."
After the funeral I meet the three daughters--easy, pleasant women who serve us sandwiches and wine at Janette's place. Two have brought their husbands along from New Mexico, though the third is still single and cares for their mother in the old house. "Daddy and Luis were both so good to us--we never understood why they couldn't get along," Desiderata confides to everyone. She's apologizing for the spectacle Luis created at the cemetery before he ran back to the bus station on his own. Nobody wants to hear too much truth at a time like this, so I don't tell her what I know. In fact with Luis gone we can all relax, and before the party breaks up I make a date for next weekend with a man I haven't seen around town in a while.
As I pull into the garage after this wearing day, a faint yapping comes from the back yard. My dog Eddy's been alone for hours and wants to romp before his dinner. He's never learned to fetch a ball--elkhounds aren't retrievers--so even though I'm tipsy, I pull off my coat and run back and forth across the icy ground, shouting and waving my arms the way he likes. He makes extravagant dashes, then prances while he waits for me to catch up at the fence. His prison in Hugh and Mark's apartment must be long forgotten. Once when I pause for breath, he shakes himself and yelps to encourage me. Hurry up, come on--the cold, the dark are nothing to us! Here beneath the stars, you and I are free! If only you'll stay out, great heart, we'll go on playing straight till dawn!
Richard E. Brown has written a novel, Chester's Last Stand (University of Nevada Press, 1988), and a collection of stories, Fishing for Ghosts (University of Nevada Press, 1994). "The Good That Men Do" comes from a series of stories in progress; another called "Luis My Stepson Sheds a Few Tears" appeared in the non-electronic Red Cedar Review (1995).
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