The Hotel Eden(61)

I didn’t want to go into the house. This was the oddest call of my first day driving oxygen. There had been something regular about the rest of it, even the sanitized houses in Sun City, the upscale apartments in Scottsdale so new the paint hadn’t dried, and the other houses I’d been to, magazines on a coffee table, a wife paying bills in the kitchen.

I pulled my dolly into the house, dark inside against the crushing daylight, and was hit by the roiling smell of dog hair and urine. I didn’t kneel to wipe the wheels. “Right in here,” the old man said, leading me back into the house toward a yellow light in the small kitchen, where I could hear a radio chattering. He had his oxygen set up in the corner of the kitchen; it looked like he lived in the one room. There was a fur of fine red dust on everything, the range, the sink, except half the kitchen table where he had his things arranged, some brown vials of prescription medicine, two decks of cards, a pencil or two on a small pad, a warped issue of Field & Stream, a little red Bible, and a box of cough drops. In the middle of the table was a fancy painted plate, maybe a seascape, with a line of Oreos on it. I got busy changing out the tanks. You take the cardboard sleeve off, unhook the regulator, open the valve on the new tank for one second, blasting dust from the mouth, screw the regulator on it, open the pressure so it reads the same as you came, sleeve the old tank, load it up, and go. The new tank was always hot, too hot to touch from being in the sun, and it seemed wrong to leave such a hot thing in someone’s bedroom. Nadine handled all the paperwork.

The cookies had scared me and I was trying to get out. Meanwhile the old man sat down at the kitchen table and started talking. “I’m Gil Benson,” his speech began, “and I’m glad to see you, David. My lungs got burned in France in 1919 and it took them all these years to buckle.” He spoke like so many of my customers in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve lived all over the world, including the three A’s: Africa, Cairo, Australia, Burberry, and Alaska, Point Barrow. My favorite place was Montreal, Canada, because I was in love there and married the woman, had children. She’s dead. My least favorite place is right here because of this. One of my closest friends was young Jack Kramer, the tennis player. That was many years ago. I’ve flown almost every plane made between the years 1938 and 1958. I don’t fly anymore with all this.” He indicated the oxygen equipment. “Sit down. Have a cookie.”

I had my dolly ready. “I shouldn’t, sir,” I said. “I’ve got a schedule and better keep it.”

“Grab that pitcher out of the fridge before you sit down. I made us some Kool-Aid. It’s good.”

I opened his refrigerator. Except for the Tupperware pitcher, it was empty. Nothing. I put the pitcher on the table. “I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll be late.

Gil lifted the container of Kool-Aid and raised it into a jittery hover above the two plastic glasses. There was going to be an accident. His hands were covered with purple scabs. I took the pitcher from him and filled the glasses.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, young fella.” When I didn’t move he said, “Really. Nadine said you were a good-looking kid.” He smiled, and leaning on both hands, he sat hard into the kitchen chair. “This is your last stop today. Have a snack.”

So began my visits with old Gil Benson. He was my last delivery every fourth day that summer, and as far as could tell, I was the only one to visit his wretched house. On one occasion I placed one of the Oreos he gave me on the corner of my chair as I left and it was right there next time when I returned. Our visits became little three-part dramas: my arrival and the bustle of intrusion; the snack and his monologue; his hysteria and weeping.

The first time he reached for my wrist across the table as I was standing to get up, it scared me. Things had been going fine. He’d told me stories in an urgent voice, one story spilling into the other without a seam, because he didn’t want me to interrupt. I had I’ve got to go all over my face, but he wouldn’t read it. He spoke as if placing each word in the record, as if I were going to write it all down when I got home. It always started with a story of long ago, an airplane, a homemade repair, an emergency landing, a special cargo, an odd coincidence, each part told with pride, but his voice would gradually change, slide into a kind of whine as he began an escalating series of complaints about his doctors, the insurance, his children—naming each of the four and relating their indifference, petty greed, or cruelty. I nodded through all of this: I’ve got to go. He leaned forward and picked at the back of his hands. When he tired after forty minutes, I’d slide my chair back and he’d grab my wrist. By then I could understand his children pushing him away and moving out of state. I wanted out. But I’d stand—while he still held me—and say, “That’s interesting. Save some of these cookies for next time.” And then I’d move to the door, hurrying the dolly, but never fast enough to escape. Crying softly and carrying his little walker bottle of oxygen, he’d see me to the door and then out into the numbing heat to the big white pickup. He’d continue his monologue while I chained the old tank in the back and while I climbed in the cab and started the engine and then while I’d start to pull away. I cannot describe how despicable I felt doing that, gradually moving away from old Gil on that dirt lane, and when I hit the corner and turned west for the shop, I tromped it: forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, raising a thick red dust train along what would someday be Chandler Boulevard.