The View from Castle Rock

a tray across the front of his chair, like the tray on a child’s high chair. He has been given a washcloth to play with. He rolls up the washcloth and pounds it three times with his fist. Then he unrolls it and rolls it up again, carefully, and pounds it again. He always pounds it three times, once at each end and once in the middle. The procedure continues and the timing does not vary.
    “Dave Ellers,” my father says in a low voice.
    “You know him?”
    “Oh sure. Old railroad man.”
    The old railroad man gives us a quick look, without breaking his routine. “Ha,” he says, warningly.
    My father says, apparently without irony, “He’s gone away downhill.”
    “Well you are the best-looking man in the room,” I say. “Also the best dressed.”
    He does smile then, weakly and dutifully. They have let him wear the maroon and gray striped pyjamas that Irlma took out of their package for him. A Christmas present.
    “Does it feel to you like I’ve got a bit of a fever?”
    I touch his forehead, which is burning.
    “Maybe a bit. They’ll give you something.” I lean close to whisper. “I think you’ve got a head start in the intellectual stakes, too.”
    “What?” he says. “Oh.” He looks around. “I may not keep it.” Even as he says this he gives me the wild helpless look I have learned today to interpret and I snatch the basin from the bedside stand and hold it for him.
    As my father retches, the man who has had nine operations turns up the volume on his radio.

    Sitting on the ceiling
    Looking upside down
    Watching all the people
    Goin’ roun’ and roun’

    I go home and eat supper with Irlma. I will go back to the hospital after supper. Irlma will go tomorrow. My father has said it would be better if she didn’t come tonight.
    “Wait till they get me under control,” he said. “I don’t want her upset.”
    “Buster’s out somewhere,” Irlma says. “I can’t call him back. And if he won’t come to me he won’t come to nobody.”
    Buster is really Irlma’s dog. He is the dog she brought with her when she married my father. Part German shepherd, part collie, he is very old, smelly, and generally dispirited. Irlma is right-he doesn’t trust anybody but her. At intervals during our meal she gets up and calls from the kitchen door.
    “Here Buster. Buster, Buster. Come on home.”
    “Do you want me to go out and call him?”
    “Wouldn’t work. He’d just not pay no attention.”
    It seems to me her voice is weaker and more discouraged when she calls Buster than she allows it to be when she speaks to anybody else. She whistles for him, as strongly as she can, but her whistle, too, lacks vigor.
    “I bet you I know where he’s gone,” she says. “Down to the river.”
    I am thinking that, whatever she says, I will have to put on my father’s rubber boots and go looking for him. Then, at no noise that I can hear, she lifts her head and hurries to the door and calls, “Here Buster old boy. There he is. There he is. Come on in now. Come on Buster. There’s the old boy.
    “Where you been?” she says, bending and hugging him. “Where you been, you old bugger? I know. I know. You gone and wet yourself in the river.”

    Buster smells of rot and river weeds. He stretches himself out on the mat between the couch and the television set.
    “He’s got his bowel trouble again, that’s it. That’s why he went in the water. It burns him and burns so he goes in the water to relieve it. But he won’t get no real relief till he passes it. No he won’t,” she says, cuddling him in the towel she uses to wipe him. “Poor old fellow.”
    She explains to me as she has done before that Buster’s bowel trouble comes from going poking around the turkey barn and eating whatever he finds there.
    “Old dead turkey stuff. With quills in it. He gets them into his system and he can’t pass them through the way a younger dog would. He can’t manage them. They get all bunched up in his bowels and they block all up in there and he can’t pass it out and he’s in agony. Just listen to him.”
    Sure enough Buster is grunting, groaning. He pushes himself to his feet.
Hunh. Hunh.
    “He’ll be all night like that, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe never get it out at all. That’s what I can’t help but be scared of. Take him to the vet’s I know they won’t help him. They’ll just tell me he’s too old, and they’ll want to put him down.”
    Hunh. Hunh.

    “Nobody even goen to come to