Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,46
as he’d ever made to anyone, and never-intended lies rotted together with never-realized truths of his best intentions.
Marsden found a moment’s solitude in the slow-moving elevator as it slid upward to the fourth floor. He cracked a zippered gash into his bulky canvas flight bag, large enough to reach the pint bottle of vodka on top. He gulped down a mouthful, replaced the stopper and then replaced the flask, tugged down the zipper—all in the space of four floors. Speed was only a matter of practice. He exhaled a breath of vodka as the elevator door opened.
Perhaps the middle-aged couple who waited there noticed his breath as he shouldered past them with his bag, but Marsden doubted it. The air of Brookcrest Health Care Center was already choked with the stench of bath salts and old lady’s perfume, with antiseptics and detergents and bouquets of dying flowers, and underlying it all was the veiled sweetness of urine, feces and vomit, physically retained in bedpans and diapers.
Marsden belched. A nurse in the fourth floor lounge scowled at him, but a blue-haired lady in a jerrycart smiled and waved and called after him, “Billy Boy! Billy Billy Boy!” Michael Marsden shut his eyes and turned into the hallway that led to his parents’ rooms. Somewhere along the hall a woman’s voice begged in feeble monotone, “Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me.” Marsden walked on down the hall.
He was a middle-aged man with a heavy-set frame that carried well a spreading beer-gut. He had mild brown eyes, a lined and long-jawed face, and there were streaks of grey in his short beard and in his limp brown hair where it straggled from beneath the Giants baseball cap. His denim jacket and jeans were about as worn as his scuffed cowboy boots.
“You’d look a lot nicer if you’d shave that beard and get a haircut,” Momma liked to nag him. “And you ought to dress more neatly You’re a good-looking boy, Michael.”
She still kept the photo of him in his uniform, smiling bravely fresh out of bootcamp, on her shelf at the nursing home. Marsden guessed that that was the way Momma preferred to hold him in memory—such of her memory as Alzheimer’s Disease had left her.
Not that there was much worth remembering him for since then. Certainly the rest of his family wouldn’t quarrel with that judgment.
“You should have gone back to grad school once you got back,” his sister in Columbus had advised him with twenty-twenty and twenty-year hindsight. “What have you done with your life instead? When was the last time you held on to a job for more than a year?” At least she hadn’t added, “Or held on to a wife?” Marsden had sipped his Coke and vodka and meekly accepted the scolding. They were seated in the kitchen of their parents’ too-big house in Cincinnati, trying not to disturb Papa as he dozed in his wheelchair in the family room.
“It’s bad enough that Brett and I keep having to drive down here every weekend to try to straighten things out here,” Nancy had reminded him. “And then Jack’s had to come down from Detroit several times since Momma went to Brookcrest, and Jonathan flew here from Los Angeles and stayed two whole weeks after Papa’s first stroke. And all of us have jobs and families to keep up with. Where were you during all this time?”
“Trying to hold a job in Jersey,” Marsden explained, thinking of the last Christmas he’d come home for. He’d been nursing a six-pack and the late-night movie when Momma drifted into the family room and angrily ordered him to get back to mowing the lawn. It was the first time he’d seen Momma naked in his life, and the image of that shrunken, sagging body would not leave him.
“I’m just saying that you should be doing more, Michael,” Nancy continued.
“I was here when you needed me,” Marsden protested. “I was here to take Momma to the nursing home.”
“Yes, but that was after the rest of us did all the work—finding a good home, signing all the papers, convincing Papa that this was the best thing to do, making all the other arrangements.”
“Still, I was here at the end. I did what I had to do,” Marsden said, thinking that this had been the story of his life ever since the draft notice had come. Never a choice.
They hadn’t wanted to upset Momma, so no one had told