30 July 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 2

What Heaven Might Be Like

by LARRY T. MENLOVE

I started worrying about my ride home right after Dr. Thursgard told me I could put my bra and shirt back on. I didn't know it would happen so fast. Deke had driven me to the office and made sure I was signed in and sat with me in the waiting room for twenty minutes, but then he left to go get his wooling shears sharpened.

"Have you got a ride home, Mrs. Smith?" asked the pretty little nurse as she helped me on with my blouse. Bless her heart. She didn't know I was an old spinster.

I told her I thought so, and then I got dressed and went out into the waiting room, and there was Deke, sitting in a chair reading Time magazine with his long legs crossed in his overalls and lace-up work boots. He smiled at me when he looked up.

"How'd it go?" Deke asked as he stood and placed the magazine down on the coffee table, careful to align it with the others displayed there.

"Good, I guess. Did you get your shears done?"

Outside the air was warming up and I could smell the blooming lilacs lined up along the clinic fence. The lilac's perfume scent cheered me considerably and helped take my mind off of the new little hole in my back beneath the antibacterial gauze and surgical tape.

—

I opened the door and helped Ruellen up into the cab of my old truck. She kind of brushed off my arm and gave me one of her looks that let me know she could see right straight through my uncommon generosity and that my opening the door and offering my arm didn't exactly make her feel any better about what it was she was doing here at the clinic.

"Smell the lilacs?" she said after we had settled in the cab and I was turning out onto the highway.

"Uh-hum. Sweet," I said.

We sat there in the truck and I drove along. After a while I thought I should say something.

"You feel like getting a burger or something to eat?" I asked her.

"No, thank you, Deke."

She sat there and I drove. I turned onto Canyon Road and headed towards her house. Right as we crossed over the Peteetneet Creek Bridge, Ruellen asked me if I had ever put any thought into what Heaven might be like.

"Huh? Heaven?"

"Yes, Deke, Heaven. The great beyond. Past the pearly gates. Up there."

"No, I guess I haven't," I said.

My truck was in need of a new head gasket and the burnt oil coming off the engine was starting to work its way into the cab of the truck. I said, "Sorry about that smell."

"I imagine green grass and cool streams."

Our relationship kind of goes like this: Ruellen asks questions and I sometimes answer when I can, but most often I sit back and let her talk her way through the questions. Rhetorical examination I take most of them to be. But after I thought about a feasible Heaven for a minute, I did say, "I hope there's a tree or two. Damn better be a whole forest there. Shade sure would be nice."

She chuckled like she does and then said, "I hope there are seasons."

I put some thought into that and said, "Yut, I do like to see the leaves turn and fall." And then I said, "It sure would make things seem more like home, I suppose."

—

Deke drove us up the canyon to my house and pulled in behind my truck in the driveway. We sat there in his cab and looked out at nothing. I do have the darndest time trying to get him to talk sometimes let alone anything else.

After a while, Deke cleared his throat and said, "That truck's been doing you OK?"

See? Like that. Deke didn't give a tinker's dam about my truck. I turned and looked at him and said, "Come on Deke. I've got some beer in the fridge."

Walking through the carport to the backdoor, Deke said, "I sure hope there's cold beer in Heaven, too."

"Oh, I'm sure there is," I said.

—

I followed her in through the little breezeway to her back porch. I held back a little so I could relieve the silent fart gas that had built up in the truck on the way up canyon. I hoped the breeze was in my favor. If it weren't, Ru wouldn't mind. She knows my shortcomings.

Ruellen's got a nice view of the mountainside from her back porch. I do like to sit there in her little log swing she's got back there. I can see clear up the hillside and right then, while I was sitting in the swing waiting for Ru to bring me a beer, there were the wild turkey foraging about in the sage and gambel oaks. The Forest Service or wildlife management folks planted these turkeys a few years back and they've taken to the canyon and multiplied. Can't say I blame them. I myself couldn't imagine anywhere else I'd rather spend my time foraging.

I live up the road a spell, well off the canyon road. My father's old homesteader house. Me and Ruellen's the closest neighbors either of us has got. Well, that was until they put in that development on Walkers Flat. Them folks aren't exactly what I'd call neighborly, though. Well, the most of 'em anyway. I sometimes can hear them down off the hill raising their human ruckus, bringing it up here in the canyon. It's a shame. Your odd kegger and marijuana party in the bushes was all that used to remind me of them folks down out of the canyon.

"It sure is nice out today." Ru handed me a can of beer and sat down in the swing beside me. She kicked her toe at the cement and got the swing to rockin' a bit.

I decided to just go right ahead and ask her.

"Is it cancer?"

Ru let the swing rock to and fro before she said anything.

"They don't know yet. They have to have it biopsied."

"What's that?" I said.

"Tests they do to see if it's benign or malignant."

I just let those words sit. I figured one is apt to be good news and the other bad, though neither one sounded all that encouraging. I sipped at the beer. Ru sipped at hers. The stream down beyond her little lawn was gurgling loud with late runoff pushing over the rocks.

"How do you reckon you could a caught that?" I asked her and sipped a little more beer from out of the cold can that was sweating with condensation.

—

We were sitting out on the log swing and Deke asked me how I might have contracted the melanoma. I had asked Dr. Thursgard the same question when I was lying on the examining table with my bare back showing. The doctor was numbing my mole, sticking a long needle in there around it. He said it could have happened years and years ago. Most likely from a severe sunburn.

"From the sun," I said to Deke now. "What else?"

I hadn't had a sunburn since before I was twenty when Clark Stillson and I would go fishing. He was my boyfriend, my fiancé, to be quite honest. There was that last time right before Clark was called up to boot camp when we took the blanket out in the willows. I stripped to the waist for him and lay on top of his bare chest while the sun shined down on my bare back waiting for my courage to rise. On the examining table this morning I relived a little more of what we did, me and Clar