“Once you know how.”
“So they change the lock every time you come, I guess? That’s why you don’t bother to just memorize it?”
“You,” my grandfather said, “are a sharp cookie.” He swung open the gate. “After you.”
He led her onto the grounds. They walked up the road toward the old clubhouse drowning in kudzu, then bore to the left. The road stayed more or less clear until you reached what had been the clubhouse parking lot. They sat down in the folding chairs and spread napkins on their laps. He laid the salami and the cheeses on his lap and took out his pocketknife. He sliced off half a dozen roundels of French bread and passed them to her. She cupped them in her hands. He peeled the papery skin from the salami. She fed him a stuffed pepper while he worked, and then an olive.
My grandfather had finally gone to see the specialist his doctor had referred him to, and the news was not good. He knew he would have to tell Sally about it, but he was afraid that when he did, she would decide—and he would not blame her—that she was just not up to crawling down that road again.
“I’m going to make you a perfect bite,” my grandfather said. “That’s what my daughter used to call it.”
“What’s that?”
“A little bit of everything all together.”
“That’s exactly what I want. Make me a perfect bite.”
He sliced a thin wedge of the semi-soft cheese and laid it on a slice of bread. The salami went on that, and the whole thing was topped with an artichoke heart and a sliver of hot pepper. He passed it to her.
“Perfect,” she said.
He made one for himself. There was a strong breeze moving across the grass and through the leaves of the Australian pine and melaleuca trees. An airplane passed overhead, trailing a banner that reminded the public to go wild by consuming some product. It was seventy-two degrees.
“You see?” she told him. “This is the way to do it.” She leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek, and he took advantage of the opportunity to kiss her back, on the mouth. She slid her chair nearer to his to make it easier on her arthritic shoulder. He took hold of her by the waist and lifted her out of her chair and onto his lap. He heard a creak in his own shoulder, and the canvas seat of the beach chair groaned under their combined weight.
“Who was president the last time you just sat around necking with somebody?” Sally asked him.
“Gerald Ford.”
“Richard Nixon.”
Out on the road beyond the trees and the gates a car tore past, scattering Cuban trumpet by the fluttering handful. He kissed her at the salt cellar of her throat. The open collar of her shirt released a cloud of Opium perfume that literally dizzied him. He laid a cheek against the scrollwork of her clavicles and tried to collect his thoughts. He remembered having read that the temple of Delphi, home of the ancient oracle, was built over a geologic fault that released vapor from a seam of hydrocarbons far below the surface, that the sibyl’s trances and prophecies were effects of ethylene intoxication. He hoped that he was not about to start talking some kindred type of nonsense. He closed his eyes and helplessly imbibed.
“I love you,” he said.
He felt her tense and, when he lifted his face, found that she was looking at him with a puzzled, even doubtful expression, as if his words had been particularly oracular. It was the truth, though, so what could he do about it but surrender.
There was a rustle in the scrub about twenty feet from the clearing where they had lunched. A snap of branches. My grandfather got to his feet. He watched the brush where he thought the sound had come from. His nostrils flared, and he caught a whiff of rotten egg, or maybe it was more like the smell of flowers left to rot in a vase of water. He could feel each hair on the back of his neck standing erect. Something light-colored passed among the spaces in the tangle of brown branches and dark green leaves. He reached for the snake hammer.
“No,” Sally said. “Let it go.”
He gripped the handle and flexed his fingers restlessly along its lacquered surface. He had been thinking for a long time about how it would feel to bring the hunk of lead down onto that skull with all its needle teeth. Looking back from the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room before he died, my grandfather conceded that he was probably looking forward to smashing the snake’s skull. He had been repressing his anger from the day he entered the Wallkill prison, and there was no doubt that since then, right up to last week’s diagnosis, life had afforded his anger ample fuel. But the truth was that anger required no trigger or pretext. It was sourceless, a part of him, like yearning, curiosity, or sadness. Anger was his birthright. It was hard for him to surrender that longed-for crunch of bone.
“It’s very charming how you have sworn revenge on behalf of my late husband’s cat and taken on this noble quest and so forth. But to be totally honest, it’s sort of irritating, too. I don’t need you to be my paladin. I don’t need to be rescued. And I promise you, kiddo, I’m never going to love you back until I am absolutely persuaded that you are not the kind of person who would beat a snake to death with a sledgehammer.”
“I see,” my grandfather said. He put down the hammer. He went back to the chair and stood behind Sally with his hand on her shoulder.
The rustle and snap got very loud and resolved themselves into a padding kind of rhythm, paws moving in sequence, and then an animal broke into the clearing. At first my grandfather was uncertain in his identification. It came stepping out of the brush, gray fur streaked with brown and black. At first he thought that it might be a very large and well-fed raccoon, but it didn’t have that flat-footed gait.
“Oh, good Lord,” Sally said. The animal stood still. It made a sound like a bullfrog. “Ramon.”
The cat’s forehead and neck were caked with blackened blood. His socks were dyed pinkish brown. He appeared to have lost an ear, and his tail had a buttonhook kink. His belly hung nearly to the blacktop.
“You got fat, Ramon,” Sally said.
The cat replied with another irascible croak. Sally got up and started toward him before my grandfather could prevent her. The cat bared his teeth and growled, warning her off. My grandfather wondered if the cat might be rabid, if he would have to use the hammer after all, and if, should he sky or brain Ramon, Sally would never be able to love him.
“You smell just awful,” Sally told Ramon. “You’re fat and you stink.”
The cat paced a lopsided figure eight of indecision. There seemed to be something wrong with one of his legs. He moved stiffly and his leg turned out.
“He has holes in his face.”
“Tooth marks.”
“Oh my God. He got into a fight with the python.”
“There hasn’t been a missing pet in a month,” my grandfather said. “I think Ramon might have won the fight.”
“Ramon!” Sally said admiringly. “Oy, his poor ear,” she called over her shoulder. “And his tail, do you see? He’s a mess. You really think he killed it?”
“I think so.”
“So much for that big shtekn you’ve been dragging around the swamps for weeks.” She took another step toward Ramon, and the cat abruptly seemed to lose interest. He turned and hobbled back into the leafy darkness among the trees.
“Oops. That’s it? He’s gone.”
“That is a tough fucking cat,” my grandfather said.
Sally called after the cat once, then again in the loud South Philly holler she had used on the night they met. “I guess he’s happy.”
“I can’t believe he beat me to it.”
“Are you jealous?”
“I’m annoyed.”
Sally came over and put her arms around my grandfather. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You want to maybe kill Ramon instead?”
“Not today,” my grandfather said.
Sally leaned his head on her shoulder. She didn’t say that she loved him back, and he never told her about the shadow in his gut, then or on any of the few, happy days they subsequently spent together.
35