Oxygen
This nursing home oxygen isn’t as pure as what I get at the hospital. I know my son, living down there in Florida, is paying plenty to have me here, so I’m getting to the point where this cheap ass-smelling oxygen won’t cut it anymore.
I pull the facemask off and get up from the recliner they park me in most of the day. One of the orderlies comes over and slides my walker in front of me. He’s a big kid, black, could have been a lineman, but now he’s just an orderly. I tell him about the oxygen, about the smell of it, but he looks at me like I’m crazy and walks off.
I remember how it felt to hit a guy in full pads when I played for State. Now, it’s Saturday, and there’s a sign saying we’re going to bar-b-que outside. It’s only ever vegetables, but I still like the smell of charcoal burning. There was a time I had a steak every night. Rare. Had to keep my iron up.
I go outside to the parking lot, pushing the little metal walker in front of me. My knees don’t bend right anymore, so I’ve got to shuffle a little. When I get out there, more orderlies, and those other guys—not janitors really, but not orderlies either—are unloading watermelons from the bed of a pickup, and I can see myself, sixty years ago, doing the same thing.
I move over beside the truck and let loose the walker. When I reach into the pile of melons, I can remember the pain of a day’s work on my uncle’s farm down in Lustor. I’d pick melons from his patch, haul them out to the side of the highway three or four at a time, try to sell them, haul back whatever was left by dark. My hands move over a big one, and I give it a thump, hear the dull, watery echo. It’s a ripe one, and I think I’ll just pick it on out, haul it back to my room and cut into the thing. Have a few pieces before I lay down for a while.
It takes me a minute to get a grip, but when I do, I lift the melon right out. They think I don’t have muscles anymore, because of the walker and the oxygen and such, but the truth is, I could kick these boys’ asses if my knees and lungs were right. I tuck the melon up against my chest and start to shuffle-walk back towards the door. It’s ten yards there and another twenty or thirty to my room once I get inside, but I think I can do it without my walker.
One of the not-a-janitor guys puts his hand on my arm and says, “Where you going with that?”
I shrug him off and keep moving.
They’re all paying attention to me, but none of these is my regular orderly, so they don’t know me well enough to do anything.
For a minute, as I’m hauling this melon, it’s like I’m out on the field again, tucking the football and dodging tacklers. I smile a little, and I’m just about to the door, just about back into the cool air-conditioning when my foot comes out the cheap backless slippers my son bought me. I feel myself sort of tilting over, the melon toppling my weight back, and I can’t do anything to stop it. I go down hard on my ass. There’s shooting pain, and I think maybe I’ve gone and done it this time, maybe my hips are gone. With those out and my knees, too, I’ll just be another cripple in a wheelchair.
I ignore the pain and look up a little, enough to see that the melon’s still against my stomach, whole, unbroken. I’m gripping it like a damn football, like one of the melons on Uncle Goot’s farm, one of them melons I’d pay for if I broke it or ate out on the highway when I got hot. I can taste this melon now, and I think maybe falling is worth it if they’ll let me have some before they get to working on me.
They’re swarming over me now, trying hard to get the melon out of my hands, but I won’t let go, even though my breathing’s coming up short. I think about my son – too tan from all that Florida sun. And my granddaughter, who still lives here in Wyeth, who brings me meals and tries to take care of me best she can.
I’m wheezing and they’re prying my fingers off the melon one by one. Somebody says, “Bastard’s strong.” And I grin, and nod, and try to say, “Damn right,” but nothing comes out ‘cause I’m not getting enough air into my lungs.
I start coughing, and that’s the end of it. They take my melon, and I hear the clank of a tank beside me as they place the mask over my face and start pumping foul-smelling oxygen into my lungs.
I remember sitting on the big rock there beside Highway 17, a melon open in front of me, my hand wrist-deep in it, taking out great chunks of watery meat, the juice so cold it made my fingers go numb. I close my eyes and try to remember anything ever tasting so pure and clean and fresh, as fresh as the oxygen they’re too cheap to buy.
– Christopher Lowe's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction Weekly, Superstition Review, New Plains Review, and Third Coast. His work has been anthologized in Sundress Publications' Best of the Net 2008. A graduate of the McNeese State University MFA program, he lives with his wife in Lake Charles, LA, where they are anxiously awaiting their forthcoming daughter.
