Vapors

Doc Aberdeen looks more like a bricklayer than a doctor. In the front hall he hangs his hat on a spoke. His hair is center-parted so exactly that his white scalp shows through. I try not to look. Instead I fix my eyes on his leather kit of torture instruments, the black-brown handle worn pale from his grip. Once when he was in the john I opened it and saw its innards: hooks, scrapers, syringes, gauze. I guess I like him okay.

He hangs his jacket over his hat. There're big half-moons of sweat under his arms. I can see his pink skin clear through the fabric. My eyes are on his monstrous shoes; two of mine could fit inside one of his, easy. He dries his face with a handkerchief (baby blue) and takes his time folding it and slipping it into his back pocket.

He turns to me with that unsmiling smile of his. "How about this heat, then, Staying cool?"

"No," I say.

He laughs through his nose, and what a nose it is. Nostrils the size of half-dollars.

"You know it's a hundred percent humidity today? At least that's what the radio said on the way over. I've lived in St. Louis my whole life and I've never understood that. They say the Mississippi's got a hundred percent humidity, so how could the air have a hundred percent humidity, too? Answer me that."

It's just adults asking you questions. They don't want an answer.

I've got my thumbnail between my teeth and I'm looking at the rug like it's got lips. I should offer him a glass of lemonade. Before he got sick, Houghton loved a glass of lemonade on a hot day. He'd pulp twenty lemons himself and drink it in a swallow. Things are different now.

I ask Doc Aberdeen if he wants to see him.

"I'd like a glass of water first, if you don't mind. I'm parched."

In the kitchen he sets the leather kit by the sink. I lean against the door frame. He fills the glass, drinks, and fills it again. The glass is tiny in his big hand.

"How was Grandpa this morning?" he asks.

He's always called him my grandpa; I've never said he wasn't. I shrug.

"The same? Worse?"

"Same."

My eyes drift around the room trying to catch on something. Finally they land on the alley between our fence boards and the neighbors'. This is where the neighbor girl Ruthie meets me after supper, where we kiss until our lips go numb. Last night her mouth tasted like grape soda.

I'm asleep in my head, then I wake up. It's one o'clock, but the light looks like 5 p.m.—you know, that sad, burnt yellow. Doc Aberdeen is watching me like he knows I was someplace else.

________

Early this morning Houghton woke me coughing. When I went in with a glass of water he was turned to the wall. The room was dark but I could see his stringy white hair spread out over the pillow.

"Have some water," I said.

He hadn't talked in days. I stood there with a jagged chunk of stone in my chest. The room looked like a tornado'd blown through it: clothes everywhere, towels, blankets. A tang of mold and urine. By my foot was a plate with a blond crust of something like apricot jam. He doesn't like when I pick up after him.

He'd kicked the sheets away so I could see his whole shrunk-down body, his curtain-rod thighbones and his shoulder blades like some kind of bird's wings. The way his ribs stood out made me think of an elder Christ, a Christ who'd lived.

I came around the bed and put my hand on his forehead. He stiffened but didn't say a word. He was burning up and his...