Wyoming

Stanley Szarka’s prostate, removed five days ago, had swelled to 7.275 inches across and now swims, a diseased and eyeless fish, in the glass jar of his mind. Stanley measured it himself (nightshift dares, nitrous oxide) with the help of a giggling student nurse.

Stanley can measure the length and breadth of anything by applying to it the paddle of his left thumb (1.5 inches across the nail; 3.25 inches from the raised scar at its base to the tip) and marching his digit along. Behind his eyelids, the closed doors of his pupils, dimensions multiply themselves, piles of precise and tidy lumber. His sight was the only bodily task to fail him, taken by a childhood fever, until now.

Stanley slides his thumb beneath the sheet and parses the length of the incision through which his insides were amended. 10.75 of an inch, beginning just below his navel where the sutures prickle upward like thorns, then cresting the mound of gas that is his gut, and ending at place dark and private. If only people came with zippers. He thinks of his Emma, cut open on the horizontal, 6.5 inches, when she gave birth to their son. Nolan is fifty-four now, on his third wife (Ilene? Irene?), and when they last shook hands, Stanley felt the fingers of a man who has never owned tools. Nolan buys day-old grocery store banana bread and sells it roadside near Chugwater to the tourists and the wayward, each loaf saran-wrapped with a bible verse taped on top. To reach people, Nolan says. He lives in a yacht. No, that isn’t it. A yurt.

Then: a clipboard, snap-jawed and mean, a soapy breeze, the jawing of polyester slacks. It must be ten-thirty or so. Doctor’s rounds. An introductory clearing of a throat, and the disrobing of a minty lozenge. The oncologist puts a hand on the stone of Stan’s knee, and summarizes certain doom.

At eighty-six years of age, you see, a man must look back and be proud. And make your preparations, Mr. Szarka, make preparations.

What would those be? Isn’t he ready?

Then the doctor releases a blast from his sinuses that smells of cabbage and damp fireplace ash. He removes his hand and Stanley hears the zwit and zwat of the hospital curtain upon its metal rod. Preparation is another word for practice. Stanley closes his eyes to practice being dead. To practice finding Emma.

Emma. His darling old girl. She would take his mind elsewhere if she was here, tell stories about how Nolan caught those trout in the gulley at the edge of town, near the train tracks where he was not supposed to go—he was only eight—then fried them up with beet greens as a birthday surprise for his dad, how Stan could smell that trout from four houses down where he was working on a set of new kitchen cabinets for Olga Velhagen, each with a spray of wheat hand-carved in the lower corners, and how Stan pretended to be surprised, even feigning a nap on the sofa so that Nolan could wake him with the steaming plate held under his nose. He’d modeled those wheat grains after Emma’s tiny fingernails, honing them by touch. He’d pronounced the fish the best (still the best, actually) he’d ever eaten. And he’d sat at the table with his little family, felt pride beneath his breastbone, a thousand saplings of it, pushing upward.

If only she could, his Emma would lie alongside him and make him laugh until his stitches pulled tight, recalling Olga surveying her new cabinets and thundering, Vat? Veet? Veet on da vood? Vat is dat? When Emma reminded her that the grains symbolized prosperity and good health in Germany, in her motherland, and Stanley was blessing her household for the future, Olga nodded. Veet is goot, she declared.

Now you rest, Stanley, she’d tell him afterward, smoothing his hair (what remains of it). If she was here.

When Emma got the cancer (a lady sickness), no one even suggested operating. All Stanley could do for her was keep a filled syringe of morphine ready on the bedside table, slipping it by touch beneath the paper of her thigh. Then he’d hold her hand while she soared, and dove, and spun in the skies over Yoder, the only bit of help he could give taking her farther away from the pain, and farther away from him.

After she’d gone he stayed up all night, and into a new day, and past the decline of another, building her casket in his workshop. He fit the lid so it clicked shut the way her tiny gold locket did. He carved its top with her initials, ES, and surrounded them with a carved spray of lilacs, her favorite. Every small splinter he found with his fingers and banished with finest garnet sandpaper and pearls of his own spit. Finally, he lined the interior with the quilt she’d made for Nolan when he was small, the tufts of yarn gesturing at intervals, the fabric thin as breath.

Beneath the place her head would rest, hidden under the quilt, he tucked away the silk nightgown—he never knew its color, never got to watch it slip from her shoulders to the bedroom floor—that she wore as his bride. I’m naked as a plucked duck, she had teased. Reach for me. Flesh and wood; he can still recall every inch.

A machine near his bed startles, MOK-MOK-MOK, and Stanley flings his right arm into the water pitcher and a dish of lukewarm pudding, the left into the pole where a bag of something soupy dangles, sustaining him, and a herd of nurses, feet cawing against the sticky tile, arrive with their pities. One presses the cold coin of a stethoscope to his chest, another raises the thumping of his wrist into the air and counts one, two, three, four. Yet another digs a thermometer beneath his tongue.

Mr. Szarka, see what you’ve done?

Stanley’s fretting hands have worked the IV tubes into a pinch, setting off this storm of kingdom come. His penalty: the throb of his last good vein when a nurse relocates the long, mean needle, the probing, rubbing, swabbing, rolling, wiping, rolling again, wetness, heat, and the ministrations of too many brisk palms and fingers, the puffs of breath and clicking tongues and a pen, scraping, starving for ink, recording the facts of his reduced existence. Voices (only one is soft and comforting, like the fuzz of a dog’s ear), each connected to a duty and a body and a pair of sturdy shoes, but not one of them is Emma, not one, and no one can reassure him that he will leave this earth having been loved.

No one asks him where it hurts.

Stanley bellows a smog of regret and strife toward the ceiling, scattering the nurses (even the sweet one), and he is sorry (such shrieking from them all), but cannot bear this one more minute, not one more. After awhile, the sweet one returns with a cup of warm apple juice. When she leaves, he reaches beneath the mattress and selects an assortment of tiny confections—like helping himself from the Brach’s pick-a-mix at the market—tiny pain tablets, enormous blood pressure capsules, the fat, dry, grainy sleeping pills that turn mule deer into monsters, trout into whales. He has saved them like penny nails, fourteen—no, fifteen of them, until seven escape his hand. Eight, then. Eight should do it.

It is time for him to go.

Stanley P. Szarka must go.

* * *

Incident Report

Laramie Community Hospital

Date: June 26, 1985

Staff Member: Jeannie W. Pond, RN

Patient: S. Szarka, Male, Age 86

Room: 132

Incident: Stanley Szarka is a handful to heck and back, and by the way the orderlies are still smoking in the elevators. When one of them could be bothered to answer a page, Diggy, or that’s what his nametag said anyways, found Mr. Szarka dragging his urine bag behind him like a dead dog. He asked Diggy to take his ‘dog’ to the cafeteria for a ham and cheese sandwich, so that’s what Diggy did, leaving Mr. Szarka to hassle the nurse at the maternity ward station, and most of them are out sick with potluck food poisoning, the potato salad from Keck’s grocery, it’s the mayonnaise, they don’t keep the refrigerators cold enough and I should know as my nephew Rolly works there and says it smells ‘off’ and not to eat it. Mr. Szarka also demanded that somebody bring him his newborn son, and the man is just about older than fossils, and then he lifted up his hospital gown to show off his stitches as proof of the Caesarian section, and that’s not all he showed off. After that he crawled into bed with Mrs. Linda Dee Sauer, the fire chief’s wife, and said some very rude things about her bosoms. She had just birthed twins, and was fuzzed-out enough from her pain killers not to care too much until Mr. Szarka proposed marriage and she said yes, but he kept calling her Emma and she got upset and hit him with her dinner tray. She smacked him a good one, because he had a bloody nose and fainted. I sent someone to the cafeteria to fetch Diggy and we got Mr. Szarka back to oncology and in his bed, but I don’t know what they are doing with the medications around there because he was just right out of his mind and someone might want to pay attention to that.

* * *

Stanley is going home. Things happened last night that he doesn’t remember and certainly would not have done. He obviously never gave birth. The mysteries below his navel were meant for Emma, only Emma. Never would he speak rudely to a woman. He did once have a dog.

Stan had expected a different outcome to all of this. Eight pills. He should be grey by now, grimaced. Gone.

Someone would have tracked down Nolan to stand over a divot in the earth and recite churchy things about eternity and salvation and family connection when none of those things applies to this life. Emma was not forever. Stanley has not been saved. And Nolan has no phone.

Now here he is, in a car with a man named Diggy, a bag full of bandages and ointments in his lap, and what Diggy tells him is a bruise the color of blackberry jelly over his nose and left eye. Diggy has been fired from the hospital, something to do with cigarettes and ham sandwiches. Stanley has been banished for having ‘needs greater than the staff can answer.’ The nurses took up a collection to fill Diggy’s gas tank and cover his time driving Stanley home to Yoder. One of them, the sweet one, gave them enough money for two value meals at the Taste-E-Freeze, including curly fries and milkshake upgrade. The milkshake, vanilla with traces of Pine-Sol, seeps its chill onto the skin over his heart. When he lifts it away, the westerly sun takes its place, leaning in like an old, worshipful hound.

There will be a nurse waiting at home, sent by the county, with a mechanical bed, and tubes, rubbing alcohol and syringes full of sleep. She will wipe his drool, and mop his armpits.

He will be there by dark.

Diggy grunts down another fry. Stanley hears the rasp of greasy fingers on the upholstery, the shuck of a sleeve over wet lips. A paper bag is beaten into a wad; a window lowered, the wad discarded. When the window closes, Stan’s inner ears make a kissing sound.

Hey, you finish your burger? Diggy messes with the radio. Static. Then a polka. Then a horserace.

Here, says Stan. I don’t want it.

So, Diggy says. Buried or burned?

Stanley doesn’t follow.

When you die, I mean. You’re going to die, ain’t you? I’ve gotta be cremated, Diggy tells him. Got the whatsacallit, the claustrophobia. Can’t be crammed in some shoebox like that.

Buried, Stanley says. Next to my wife.

To each his own, Diggy answers.

Stan’s casket waits, in his workshop, under an old sheet. He built it when the economy took a steep and terrible dive, the railroads laying off men, the women laying off their dreams of bright new cabinets. May as well save Nolan that expense, was his thinking. From the scrap pile: crosscut oak, slightly warped cherry, groove-fit pine. Stanley thinks of it as the boat he will sail to find Emma.

But it isn’t finished yet, Stanley.

It isn’t finished.

The remembrance of this is a fever, a flushing of his blood through a shameful furnace. No carvings, no lining. Unvarnished. Undignified. His Emma deserves better, so she can see how hard he tried, how he tried to be on this earth without her but just could not.

Why, Stanley, why? Doldrums, for starters. And television game shows, their manufactured cheer. His old fingers, fat as gherkins. And the way a Thursday becomes March becomes 1983 when there is nothing better on offer. He’d always planned to get to it. He must get to it. Today. Make preparations, the doctor said. Good thing he’d dropped seven poisons from his palm. Good thing he is going home. Otherwise, he’d be rolling around like somebody’s pet hamster in a careless, un-proud box. He would take the humiliation of last night’s rampage over that.

Diggy’s car hits a pothole, a small animal, something, and the urine bag tumbles from its perch upon the glove compartment’s open door, letting go its contents upon Stanley’s legs, soaking his overalls and the carpet.

Crap! Shit! Oh, man, not in my car! Geez, that’s gonna stink!

The car whines left, jags right, shuddering. Stanley smells rubber and grease, mustard and pee. Diggy’s right hand claps Stanley’s chest, pinning him back against the seat. Gravel chatters. They stop. A thin sauce of milkshake and codeine exits Stanley’s stomach.

Diggy gets out and opens the passenger door. He pulls Stanley up and out by the shoulder straps of his overalls and leans him up against the car. Then he opens the trunk.

A tire iron jangling on pavement, the jingle of empty beer cans. The tiny yawn of a lawn chair opening, the suction of an umbrella. A chop of wind as a semi moans past.

Stanley is set into the chair. Diggy crams the bag of bandages into one hand, puts the umbrella handle in his other.

Here, Diggy says. Hold this, keep the sun off. Tire iron’s under your chair if someone hassles you. Diggy slams the trunk, then opens it again.

Here’s two beers. They’re warm. I’m sorry, Mr. Szarka. I hope you get home.

And then Diggy is gone.

* * *

A car sings past, its wake slapping at the overalls around Stan’s legs. They are striped, he knows this, Emma always did the shopping and he’s had them for decades. He likes imagining the faint, true lines where dark meets light, traveling from his ankles up and over his troubles and back down the other side. He’s only taken them off twice since Emma’s funeral (nights included): once for the urologist, and again for his surgery.

He remembers his mother making their pillows and mattresses from the same kind of material, strong, plain, infinite, pushing back the furniture to spread it out, and cut, and sew, and stuff. He still sleeps on one of her pillows. He should line his casket with it, this striped cotton. What’s it called—ticking? Denim? If his entire life could be represented by a substance, this would be it. And he should be buried wearing his overalls. Emma would like that. The dough of these ideas swells up, and he is satisfied.

But he is alone. He cannot do this alone. He needs a ride to a store where fabric is sold. Is there such a thing? There must be.

He opens one beer for fortitude. Half of it geysers onto his lap, but the rest is sour and good. Knowing where beer goes next, Stanley feels around for his urine bag. Maybe he can hook the confound thing up again, could it be very difficult? It’s nowhere, not within his reach, and already an urgent bit of business tickles at his plumbing. He can’t wet himself, not again, nobody with a half-pound of mind would pick him up—he is already, in Emma’s terms, a walking pig yard.

The bag, the plastic bag full of bandages—that will work. Stanley empties the contents, all but one gauze roll, into the upturned umbrella. He thumbs at the remaining two buttons of his fly to make an opening, and tears off 10.5 inches of bandage with his teeth. Pinching the bag tightly about his delicates, Stanley wraps the gauze six, seven, eight times around. He lets the wind test his handiwork, and tucks most of the bag inside, against his gut.

Now, he must attract some attention. Stanley nudges around under the chair until one arm of the tire iron can be reached, losing his hospital slipper in the process. It takes time, and his incision squalls, but he inches the metal X into his lap and decorates it with gauze streamers. He holds it erect atop his knees, a snarled, gyrating beacon, see me, help me, but doing so means losing control of the umbrella, which spins on a gale up and away, nicking his scalp with its spines. He touches the skin under his hair. His fingers come away wet.

Never mind, he must focus. He puts a pleasant look upon his face, the kind of smile Emma liked in photos. He settles for leaning the tire iron against his shins, a sort of make-do dream catcher. He’ll waggle the other beer when he hears a car. Bait. Incentive.

For several minutes, nothing. Then a motorcycle, then two, then what sounds like a hundred steaming metal mosquitoes. No one stops. The silence when they’ve gone is as loud as their thunder. One of the gauze strands is looped around his leg. He tries, one-handed, to free himself, then gives up.

Then a chattering vehicle with a skipping transmission and muffler problem approaches, and slows. Stanley adjusts his face: see, I’m just a regular old man here, and waves the can, which slips from his hand and rolls. He settles for twiddling his fingers in a cheerful way, and tries to call out, hello there, hello, but the words are sawdust and he belches around them.

The sigh of a car door, five footfalls.

See me, help me.

Stanley waves faster, smiles wider, hoping to utopia and back that he does not smell.

Ha! Look, it’s a beer! He threw us a beer!

The voice of a man, laughing, thinking Stanley can’t hear him.

Take it, says a woman. Get that tire iron, too. We might need it.

Stanley cannot find his voice or his grip. He cannot find his own legs.

Old drunk, laughs the man.

Faulty clutch, Stanley wants to say. Then they are gone.

Everything but the lawn chair is gone.

The sun behind him strokes his neck, and he slips into sleep.

* * *

A small hand on his arm, the bleat of a kind voice. His shoulders, shifting, dancing. These things he dreams, until the small hand pats his cheek, and a voice asks if he’s dead.

Mister. Hey. Mister.

Stanley breathes in, and then he knows. He is not dead.

It’s a teenager, a girl. Just got her driver’s license last week and a car for her birthday, one of those old wood-paneled station wagons, dirt brown, she says, a gift from her grandfather who teases that it’ll hold a lot of booze and boys if she’s so inclined but she isn’t. She just wants to drive around by herself and take pictures of clouds, at the storms building in the west, because each cloud belongs to a soul, she has always though so, ever since she was a kid. And that is how she found him.

The girl, Melody, gives him water from her thermos. She dabs a bit of gauze in what’s left and cleans the cut on his scalp. He tells her what he needs, that he has to find a fabric store, today, so he can finish his casket, that he knows how much to buy, 3.5 square yards, because he remembers the exact measurements of every board, and could she help? It is an emergency, it really is.

Cheyenne, she tells him. There’s a store like that in Cheyenne.

Melody asks him to wait just a second, she’s going to make space in the back of the wagon so he can stretch out flat and rest. She has a bag of laundry back there. She’ll put it under his head. And an old bedspread, for her dog, Skunk, who is riding along. She is going to wrap it around Stanley, who seems to be shivering. So many mercies in a matter of minutes, more than can fit in the pockets of his heart, shaking him loose from the inside.

Now don’t worry, she says, I’m just going to pull the car up closer so it’s just a few steps. I won’t run you over or anything.

The kindnesses are spilling over. He feels the heat of them down to his ankles, in the cave of his throat. He will finish what he started. He will have made his preparations.

Now, mister, put your arm around me. It isn’t far.

He is going home to Emma.

One, two, she counts.

Her shoulders are paper airplanes.

Three.

Emma.

He is borne aloft.

LAURA FARNSWORTH is a Denver-area natural sciences artist and writer. She is currently at work on a collection of stories about the aging process, all of them based, with great affection, on bits of family lore.