Couldn't Hurt

    There is a very subtle, yet palpable innocence that hangs over the dying of a day. John Henry Lewis looked out over the horizon at the pink, orange, yellow and red pastel sky as the sun slowly disappeared beneath the dark outline of his neighbor Francisco's house. John Henry loved the dying of the light and the natural, living art it created for his approval on a nightly basis. He picked up a half empty can of Pabst sitting on the white plastic table next to his heavily padded lawn chair and swallowed it down with one gulp. He then crushed the can in the middle, folded it in half, and tossed it into a tattered cardboard box sitting next to the table. He made note to himself that the box was almost full and would soon need emptying into the large, green plastic trash can he kept in the back. The lawn chair, one of those old aluminum ones from the sixties wasn't very comfortable, but John Henry had attached an old, memory-foam pillow to the backrest and placed a thick, brown cushion on the seat.

     He sat out on his small porch damned near every night until the sun went down, and usually, as soon as the last golden shimmer turned to silver, he'd fold up shop, swallow the last of his beer, toss the last empty can into the box, pick up whatever was left of his pack of Pall Malls and go back inside the house. This night the pack was empty, so he crumpled it up and placed it into the pocket of his robe. Lastly, he'd pick up his treasured ash tray, one of them old small, bean bag looking things with a red plaid fabric and rounded red metal dish to hold the ashes. He worried about his things, about losing them to someone who would steal such a thing of the hell of it. He had won the ashtray on his first date with Jenny, a trip to the county fair in Fresno over fifty years before.

  "Gonna quit these fuckers one of these days, " he mumbled to himself, smiling as he pulled the screen door open because he knew that there was half a carton of unopened packs laughing at his lie.

    The television was already on. He slumped down into his well-worn easy chair and picked up the remote to turn up the sound. Every night he watched the end of the nightly news before turning in. He hated the news, all of it. He hated the anchor-men and women most of all. He often complained to Jenny that he couldn't stand people who would repeat anything they were told for a paycheck. She would  roll her eyes and tell him, "If you hate it so much, Johnny, then why the hell do you watch it every night and then complain?"

    It didn't matter how many times she asked the question, her comment would always sting, and he would hesitate and think before answering, try to mumble something out a few times, before finally replying in one broken sentence, "Why Jen......we wouldn't....have nothing......to talk.......about." She'd just smile a catty little grin and go back to doing whatever she was doing. The fact that she'd ask the question always made him feel a bit like crying, and he never  understood why.

          He knew that Jenny never really understood him either, right up till the night she died. She just made do and pretended and went along for the ride most of the time. He did the same for the sake of their relationship. Theirs wasn't a great marriage by any means, But compared to the perpetual silence he endured now, it was Bogey and Bacall.

       Her last days were spent in a coma, lying silent in their bedroom under Hospice care. The brain cancer that she'd battled against so long and hard finally ran her to ground. She was blind in her right eye and paralyzed on her left side. Jenny would have been mortified, had she known, that her husband of over fifty years was changing her diapers and giving her sponge baths. Their relationship, although not the great passion seen in the movies, had reached a state best described as being comfortable, all the hard edges worn away by the wind, the rain, and time. Out on the porch sometimes, he would remember with some guilt, the many times when their marriage was brand new, and she would talk about how much she hated their parent's boring life style. More than once, she reminded him that she had almost rejected his proposal because of the way his parents interacted in their old age.

    The final night, he had left her bedside while she slept and gone outside for smoke. He heard someone whistle in the darkness, looked across the street toward Pancho's and saw the tiny dot of fire on the tip of the joint his friend was smoking. He stepped off the porch and tottered down the side walk to his front fence. Ponch saw him coming and got up from where he was sitting and ambled across the street.

              "Big Bad John, what's up, man? How's Jenny doing?"

             "She's dying, Ponch," he tried to say it all matter-of-factly but his resolve gave out before the end, so the name of his friend was barely audible. After a slight hesitation he gathered the wind to say,  "She ain't got much longer. The nurse said she probably won't last out the week." There was a moment of complete silence before he broke into sobs, his shoulders shaking. You couldn't see it in the darkness, but his legs almost gave out. Only the desire not to just completely collapse in front of his old friend, the desire to be an old-school man like his dad, kept him from giving the whole thing up and lying on the sidewalk and letting it all go. Ponch reached across the fence and steadied his shoulders; taking a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket, he handed it to John Henry who used it to dry his eyes and wipe his nose..

            "I'm so sorry to hear that, Johnny. She's fought so long and hard. Helen been praying for her....we were hoping.....well, you know." Then Ponch reached a complete lack of words. He wanted so badly to say something that would comfort his friend, but there were no words to be found. He thought for a second that in the billions of times throughout human history, human speech had never evolved words that measured up to the gravity of the situation. The sight of his friend crying shook him to his core, made him understand that someday, probably not far off, he or his beloved wife would be in John's shoes. He gripped his friend's hand firmly and shook it. After a minute, he finally got some words out. "Helen told me to make sure you know that if you need us, we're here. She made you some stew and some rolls, I'll bring it over tomorrow. She's real worried about you, man."

             "Tell Helen thanks, and thank you too, Frank. Jenny loved you guys. You guys have been the greatest help. Give me hit off that joint, Ponch. I need something to help me sleep."

            "Hell, you quit smoking this shit forty years ago. I remember the day; Jenny was going to leave you." He suddenly caught the irony of his statement right before John Henry held his hands apart and shrugged. Ponch handed the joint over.

           John Henry took a deep drag and held the smoke in for  a  while then handed it back to Ponch. After a bit, he exhaled slowly. "You're right. We made a deal, I quit partying altogether, and she stayed. She's leaving me now though. I can't sleep at night, Ponch. I'll have to rethink things, I guess."

           They stood there at the fence talking when Helen, Ponch's wife, came outside in her bath robe and slippers and walked across the dark street and gave John Henry a big hug. When they went back home, John Henry didn't go in right away instead he stood outside by the fence alone  looking up at a big yellow moon.

       When he finally reentered the house, he noticed right away that it was oddly quiet and that he couldn't hear Jenny's raspy breathing coming from the monitor on the coffee table. He hurried into the bedroom and there, by the dim light coming from the hallway, saw her body frozen with her right hand raised above her head as if to ward off a blow, eyes wide open, with spittle leaking from the bottom corner of her mouth.

             "Oh. Jenny," he slowly exhaled, the words coming out as gentle as a spring breeze.  He took the blue wash cloth from the nightstand and washed off the spittle from her mouth, gently closed her eyes, folded her arms across her chest, kissed her on the forehead, and sat down in the chair by the bed and softly cried.

           After  several minutes, he composed himself enough to call his girls and his boy Junior.  They were all expecting the news and took it fairly well considering their beloved mother was no longer alive. Cyndi, the youngest, was the only one who seemed more concerned about his well-being than the loss of her mother. She felt that she had lost her mother years before when she had informed Jenny that she was gay. John Henry had taken that news well enough, preferring to lose a religious absolute than his own daughter, but Jenny had never accepted it. Despite John Henry's formidable efforts, her relation with Cyndi had only existed on the pretext that she refused to acknowledge that her baby was married to another woman. He called the number on the Hospice letter and the people on the other end they said they would be there within thirty minutes time. He went back into the living room and sat back down in his easy chair. There was a story on CNN about some terrorist attack in Europe. They could wiped Paris, France off the face of the earth at that moment, and he wouldn't have cared.

          The undertaker and his crew couldn't get their gurney up the front steps because it had something wrong like a broken wheel. They ended up carrying Jenny out of the house wrapped in a bed sheet. His last view of his wife of fifty years was of her bare feet sticking out of a gray bedsheet as they loaded her into the back of a large black van. Going back into his house, he left the front door open because he couldn't bear the thought of being inside the house alone. He remembered that he had went and got down a half empty bottle of Scotch from the liquor cabinet over the kitchen sink and an ice tray from the fridge and poured himself a stiff drink. He sat down in his chair, closed his eyes and breathed in and out several times while trying to relax his shoulders and calm his racing mind.

       He had fallen asleep in his easy chair before a commercial for light beer woke him up and he decided to sleep in the chair and had not gone back into the room.  He had slept in the chair for a week before he finally bought a new bed and gave the one that Jenny had died in to a local thrift shop. He had tried his very best to keep things as normal as possible and succeeded to a large degree, in the daylight hours that was, but as soon as the night returned though, all the dark things would come out of storage to haunt him in his loneliness. It was the reason why he started his little ritual of sitting out and watching the sun until went disappeared.

          On this night of remembering, he was also thinking about the night long ago when Jenny and him had stayed up and watched The Wizard of OZ on TV. It was Jennie's favorite movie, and it was one of his favorite memories of their life together. She was lying on the sofa with her feet across his lap. When the characters in the movie sang the Yellow Brick Road song, she had moved her legs to the music and giggled at the absurdity, and when Dorothy clicked her ruby slippers together, Jenny clicked her heels together three times too. That was too much, so he asked her with a sheepish grin, "You really think that's gonna work?"

          She just laughed and said, "You don't know, Johnny. It might just work, couldn't hurt."

          "What did you wish for then?"

         "That you would love me forever and ever."

        He remembered that it wasn't his favorite memory though; it was close, but his favorite was of one  night when they'd driven home from the casino on the little side road about a mile long that led from the casino out to Kansas Avenue, Jenny unbuckled her seat belt and slide over to sit next him. It  made him feel so happy and he reached over and put his hand on her knee. Now, he teared up every time he left the casino at night, remembering how simple and fleeting true happiness could be.           

        After the movie had ended that night so long ago, he told his wife about a theory of history that L. Frank Baum had written the stories that the Wizard of Oz movie was based on as an allegory for the social-economic events occurring in America when they were written. It made Jenny angry for some reason.

        "Johnnie, why can't you ever just watch a movie without the history lecture? I loved the fantasy of it.  Why do you always got to spoil the mystery by analyzing things to pieces?"

             "I don't know, Jenn. I just like knowing the truth behind things, and not just accepting this crazy world on its face value." He wanted to say so much more, to explain to her the hunger for knowing things that burned inside him like a flame. He wanted to impress her with his knowledge of things because he felt that he had gotten way pass being able to impress her any other way. By the time he sorted it all out in his head, he looked over at his wife, and she was already fast asleep. So, he closed his eyes and silently explained what he meant and pretended she was still listening.

            Since she had died, he often held such silent conversations with Jennie and sometimes even with the picture of Jesus that Jenny had gotten from her great-grandmother's house a long time ago. He couldn't convince himself to take it down even though it always made him feel sinful. Sometimes he even converse with the poster of Bob Dylan that he had hung up on the wall after she'd died, and he didn't have to worry about her getting mad. He would explain his feelings to them, and they both would listen attentively without complaint.

       He sat in the darkness about thirty more minutes, saddened and worn out by all the remembering and thinking that went with it, thoughts about Jenny and that night they'd watched the movie, and about how they'd sang the songs together and told jokes at the Wicked Witch's expense. He finally got up enough energy to rise up and go to his bedroom. He turned the light off, slid beneath the comforter and then clicked his heels together three times.

          He smiled at the thought. "Couldn't hurt," he mumbled and winked at Jesus in the dark.