With a Bark and a Roar.

“I think I'll find another way
There's so much more to know
I guess I'll die another day
It's not my time to go.”Madonna: “Die Another Day.”


Andy Baldwin was fourteen years old and he was dying of pancreatic cancer. It was local and resectable, but even after surgery he was given only a handful of months. Postoperative chemotherapy made him extremely ill. Andy was sitting in his bed today watching MTV while trying to eat some bland hospital pudding. His mother was down the hall in the bathrooms and his father was at work. The nurses were tending to a girl in the next stall. She was about sixteen; she was recovering from appendix surgery and suffering from infection. They were trying to get her fever down.

Andy listened to the girl struggle, watched her parents come and go; sometimes standing in the hall with doctors…he could often hear the mother crying. Andy would look out the window by his bed then, and hoped the life going on outside the cold glass would distract him.

Autumn was a gentle herald for winter. The trees in Mayberry Park turned fiery, the leather leaves drifting down to the brown grass like a test run for winter’s snowfall. Mayberry Park was created by the city of Dowd in 1958 to honor Lieutenant William Mayberry, a home town boy killed in “Operation Shingle” in World War II. This was an allied attack by water in the area of Anzio.

Lieutenant Mayberry lead a team of men were sent to help draw the Germans from the hills between Rome and the coast. They met with members of the British Eighth Army to prepare for the advance into the Alban hills to cut German communications there. He and his men were trapped by Germans in a gully guarded by remnants of the German XIV Corps. Mayberry held the Germans off under withering crossfire long enough for Major General Lucas to land the US VI Corps. The son of one of Dowd’s most prominent bankers Lieutenant Mayberry’s name was destined for the new city park across from Dowd Memorial Hospital.

On the west end of the park was the Grand Hill cemetery. No one every said the city planners had much ability in the planning department. Grand Hill was started in 1848 by William Henry Dowd, one of the founders of the city families steeped in the “old oil money” of Southern Texas. The north end of Dowd Memorial happened to look out over Mayberry Park and the little cemetery. Andy could see the large crypts there dotting the brown lawn, and the assortment of grave stones placed over the years by the rich families of Dowd.

“Could you change the channel for a while?” a voice said from behind antiseptic curtains.

“Sure,” Andy said. “What’s your preference?”

“Something that will help me sleep, maybe a Soap.”

Andy flipped around until he could see people arguing intensely for no good purpose and left the TV on that channel.

“How’s this?” he said.

“Fine,” she said.

There was a long moment of silence when all you could hear in the room was Bob arguing with Emily about her treatment of Darren. There was some movement from behind the curtain, some shuffling of sheets, and then nothing.

Andy was watching the park across the street. A Mexican family was sitting on benches having lunch. The children played vigorously on metal Jungle Gyms. Every so often the little one would return and hang on the father who was trying to eat. He tolerated her very well. He was a good father.

Now Darren was at the beach with his new friend Elise. They were talking about Emily. Elise didn’t like the way she treated Darren. Her hand absently rested on his tanned arm. The girl behind the curtain coughed. Andy heard her move her water and drink. Then there was only the TV again and a commercial for Dodge SUV’s.

Andy found himself absorbed in the Mexican family. They seemed very tight knit. They integrated with the children well. Andy envied their closeness. He yearned for that kind of familial contact. Since getting his “death sentence” his family has distanced themselves form him, probably in an effort to diminish the pain when the inevitable came. He wished they hadn’t. He needed their closeness now more than ever.

The little Mexican girl was chasing around some trees, her brother trying to hit her with an orange balloon.

“How long do you have kid?” the voice said behind the curtain.

Just then his medication nurse came in and he was distracted. The second chemo drip was started. He felt the pain where the needle was inserted again. He was being poisoned for no good reason he thought. The nurse collected her things, checked the drip for the last time and patted his cheek.

“When are you going to die?” the voice said again.

“March of next year they say.” He was waffling between amusement and annoyance at her question.

“That’s pretty screwed,” she said from behind the curtain.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Do you get any last requests?”

“What?”

“You know, like that ‘Make a Wish’ thing.”

“Nothing that I was told about,” he said. Now he wished she would just shut up. Outside the empty park benches were being dusted with a new flurry of wrinkled leaves. They flitted over the bronze marker next to the water fountains, the plaque saying “In Honor of Lieutenant William Mayberry.” Off in the distance, by the wrought-iron gate leading into the Grand Hill Cemetery, a boy and a girl stood motionless in the fiery rush of autumn leaves.

In that brief moment Andy saw them kiss.

“That’s the shits,” the voice from behind the curtain said.

Andy thought, “Why don’t you shut up,” but said nothing. The couple in the park moved across the grass littered with the fiery bodies of dead leaves. The nurse came in and removed the drip. The sky over the park was changing. It was darkening. The sun cast long shadows through the trees. Gradually the park emptied of people. The stars flickered through the dark blue atmosphere above, the pearl colored street lights flicked on. Now and then an ambulance passed by to the hospital emergency room.

His mother came after dinner time. She sat and read to him for an hour, showed him pictures of his sister in the back yard. There was another of his father waving off the camera as he worked at his oak desk. He was scowling as he usually did. His mother read to him some more and then refreshed his water, and left.

From the far corner of his window a rescue helicopter wafted in, its rotors whuffing along as it descended to the helio-pad.

“Andy?” the voice from behind the curtain said. “Do you have a girl friend?”

“No,” Andy said, shifting uncomfortably in his bed.

Outside another ambulance wailed by, red lights whirling around in the whiteness of the hospital room ceiling.

“Ever had a girlfriend?”

“No,” he said, annoyed.

Hours passed and three more ambulances arrived and departed. He wondered about the people the ambulances were taking from their injury or illness, their “emergency.” He thought about the night he stopped breathing on the kitchen floor. He felt his father’s large hands trying to squeeze a rhythm out of his faltering heart, the stubble around his father’s mouth prickly as it pressed to his, trying to force air into him.

In the distance, from another room…his mother wept.

There were hands, hands on his chest, hands around his face, hands on his legs and arms. They were fluttering around him like dry birds. The hands flew around him like doves on a sidewalk. Then he was lifted into a flat surface, buckled in and whisked away into unconsciousness.

“Andy,” the voice behind the curtains said, only this time it was next to his face, the words breathing warm puffs of air on his dry skin. He shaped his mouth to reply and that’s when the lips pressed to his and silenced him. They were warm, with a kind of bottomless quality to them; their touch reached down past his lips, teeth, tongue and throat and blew around inside him like wind.

Hands drifted up and settled on his face. The lips gently probed his own. Then a tongue insinuated itself into his mouth and gently drifted over his. He breathed with it, his body blending and melting into the sensations that had all gathered now at a single place, a focus that felt like his whole essence was about to tumble into it and be lost there forever.

“I want to be your girl friend Andy,” the voice whispered across his eyes in warm puffs of air. Every fiber in him rushed to say “yes,” while other parts of him were having problems trying to decide what to do next. The fingers nestled in his hair, the nightgown fabric rustled briskly over small breasts that pressed and brushed against him. Kisses peppered his skin dancing with waves of warm silkiness all up and down his nervous system.

Hands lifted his pajama top and kissed his chest and stomach. He felt the world rushing now to the bowl of his pelvis, the blood gorging the veins there. He became stiff in the persistent touch of those hands, stiff, strong and healthy and whole.  And then that mouth descended on the center of his awareness, wet, warm, manipulative there in the intense darkness. He was panting. Something rose in him and sat there humming in his blood. It focused on one place, a single spot in the world where it seemed everything had suddenly flooded to.

Then it stopped.

There was shuffling, tiny grunts, and then weight on the bed. Legs settled over the tops of his thighs and a hand guided him inside moistened darkness. He responded to it with an inbred movement that wanted to spear the room in a mechanical way, over and over until some unseen result was gained. His belly pressed another belly slick with a fine dew of sweat, small breasts daubing at his chest, panting breath bursting across his face and neck, hair trailing and tickling his forehead and cheeks. And all the while some powerful, unformed something reached towards some unfathomable goal that he could only ride out the purpose of.

And then it happened.

He exploded from between his legs and lower pelvis and suddenly it was like his soul followed that rush into some unknown place in the center of the world.  

In the morning the nurses announced that the girl in the next bed had broken her fever. Her mother wept in the hall. The next day she was readied to go home. Andy watched as they stood her up. He saw the shadow of them supporting her by the arms as they dressed her. For a moment she stood in front of the bed in Jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was long, brown and curly. He father helped her into a wheelchair and in a few moments she was gone.  Two days later Andy went home too.

Three months later Andy passed in the middle of the night.

At the funeral snow was tumbling down from the bare branches darkened with winter ice. The group by the grave side was small. Andy’s sister put a yellow flower on the frosted coffin lid. Someone spoke, people wept. The cemetery began to fill up with snow and sorrow. After the graveside speeches the family drifted away into the coming winter storm. As they left, a noisy “chopper” arrived, a shiny Harley Davidson motorcycle. A nineteen year old man in a leather jacket cut the motor and sat staring into the winter fall.

A young girl on the back removed her helmet and long, curly brown hair tumbled out. She took a white rose from her jacket and walked carefully across the snow around the various tomb stones to the place where the shiny casket was being lowered into the ground.  The men doing the task paused for a moment, and she placed the rose on the wet, slick surface. It rested there as the casket was lowered, all the way down. Her lips moved but the snow muffled the words.

She whirled around, and marched back to the young man on the motor cycle. Together, they left the grave site with a bark and a roar.