“Now,” Marsha said. “I shouldn’t have. You don’t have to stay.”
East looked down the pupils of Perry’s eyes as if he was looking into a hole in the street, as if there were depths to the man, and in the depths there would be what the fish knew, what the fish saw: the end. The being swept up, the laying down. Sharply, as if she were here right now, he saw the Jackson girl in the street, her eyes: the seeing of the last thing and the fixing on it. He shuddered. Perry was a color part his wind-scorched red and part the opalescent white of paint, the white of the winter sky. East backed away. He stood again by the doorway, and when the two nurses returned, they had to push in past him, so much had he forgotten where he was.
“Mrs. Slaughter?” the younger of the two nurses said. The black one. The older nurse waited quietly, deferentially, much like a nun. “Are you ready?”
Again Marsha took her moment. “Yes,” she said quietly.
“The doctor can be here in a few minutes.”
Marsha stood and came to East in the doorway. Her body, the opposite of Perry’s, female, small, her tiny birdlike bones visible in her wrists, the hands darkened with age. Her brown hair and dark eyes going gray.
“You don’t have to stay, Antoine,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
Words in his throat curled under themselves. He shook his head.
It took less time than East would have guessed. The needles came out of Perry’s body, and the breathing tube with its scarlet cloak of mucus scraped back up out of the mouth with only a little urging. Marsha had reviewed her signatures on the paper without very much looking, and she touched Perry and moved back to the window without very much looking at him either.
“It’s what he wanted,” the older nurse said by way of consolation, and Marsha laughed once, a hollow pop.
Out the window was the highway. Winter cars rushed past in their coats of grime.
“Push this button if you need anyone,” the nurse said.
It was as if Marsha had fallen into a trance, and East, after a minute, moved again toward the bedside. Was this it? Suddenly he was eager to know. He bent over Perry, watched though he had been unable to watch Ty, unable to stay where his brother and the ones before him lay and suffered.
Perry’s breathing was soft and tinkly, glasslike, like a stone rattling in a bottle as it rolled. It tumbled and slowed, tumbled and slowed. It isn’t taking long, East thought. There isn’t much more. Once Perry’s breath nearly ended on the upstroke. Then he let the air out—another roll, another tumble. East put his hand near Perry’s hand, and he leaned and looked again down the barrel of Perry’s eyes. The last thing anyone saw. He supposed he was willing to be it. He put the fingers of his hand atop Perry’s knuckles, and Perry let out a half cough, out of his chest, which was high and white and furred with hairs like bare winter trees on a mountain. The stone in the bottle rolled again. The eyes swam in their clouds, their baths of white. Then the bottle bumped up on something, rolled no farther, and the mountain knew it too, what the fish knew, that last thing of things.
21.
Then again it was windy and warm. Like summer warmth after the snow, like California warmth: another wave of southern air, men walking in shirtsleeves, cars with their windows open and music spilling. East kept the range closed. He was alone. No one pulled into the lot, now muddy, the tracks shimmering with melting snow under the blue sky. Melting water sounding everywhere. No one stopped. He supposed it was Marsha the regulars were greeting now, now that Perry was dead. A man’s sickness you discussed with other men. When a man died, you spoke to his wife at last. But no cars at the house either. He did not cross the road. He was not sure how to approach the house or if, now that Perry was gone, she would receive him.