The Murmur of Everything Moving

Abstract

The Murmur of Everything Moving Maureen Stanton (bio) On a quiet Saturday afternoon in May, while Steve napped on the couch and I sat in the La-Z-Boy watching television, I heard a tinny knock on our screen door. Joey, Steve's childhood friend, stood on our veranda. "Hey, Joe," I said, and welcomed him in. I'd met Joey two years earlier, after a Sunday dinner at Steve's parents' house in his hometown of Jackson, Michigan. Joey had noticed Steve's truck in the driveway and stopped by to say hello. As Joey and Steve shot pool in the basement, I studied Joey—the dirty jeans, the beat-up leather jacket on his slight frame. He was bald on top with a ring of brown hair brushing his shoulders. He reminded me of the townies I'd known growing up in Walpole, Massachusetts—former high-school athletes still hanging around the center square, looking for parties. Or small-time drug dealers who'd never left, only the high-school girls they enticed into their cars changing year after year. Joey worried me; perhaps I didn't really know Steve if he had friends like Joey. We'd met in New York, both of us working [End Page 253] temporary jobs. I fell in love with him quickly, and after two months, I moved with him to Michigan. That afternoon in Jackson, we perused their high-school yearbook, Joey and I flanking Steve on the couch as we scanned the rows of black-and-white portraits. They'd graduated in 1974, and so everyone's hair was mashed down. In spite of his mutton-chop sideburns and rippled bangs plastered across his forehead, Steve looked handsome, with his blond curls and sleepy blue eyes, his creamy complexion. Back then, Joey had a full head of hair; the monochrome photography smoothed his acne-pitted skin. They looked so hopeful, all these teenagers, the way the photographer positioned them looking up to the camera, guileless and naive, their dreams and aspirations recorded in the yearbook. Steve touched the headshots of his classmates, pronouncing life sentences. "Divorced … divorced … in jail … dead." Ten years had passed since they graduated and people's fortunes could be told. ________ Steve sat up to greet Joey, which took some effort as he was still sick and weak from the most recent round of chemotherapy. We were excited about a visitor, someone to take our attention away from each other—a live person, not like the television shows or movies we watched for hours each day, an escape from Steve's dreary circumstances. "I saw your mother at Motor Vehicles," Joey said. He looked scruffy in his leather jacket and shaggy hair. "She told me about the cancer. Man, I couldn't believe it." Joey sat in the recliner, leaning forward toward Steve. "How you feeling, buddy?" "Pretty good," Steve said. "I was supposed to be dead by now." [End Page 254] Steve's bluntness seemed to me a brave front for his friend. He recounted his history, the back pain which had begun six months earlier, the chiropractic care that hadn't helped, his diagnosis by an oncologist at St. Joseph's hospital in Ypsilanti, a gleaming, six-story facility, where the doctors had given him two weeks to live (two months at the outside). He described the alternative hospital we'd found, a six-hour drive away, in Zion, Illinois, the experimental therapy that Steve would have there, whole-body hyperthermia, at four thousand dollars per treatment, which his insurance refused to cover. Joey was quiet. I'd never heard him speak much anyway. I'd only seen him a few times in the couple of years since I had first met him, though often enough to have my impression of him alter from wariness to the kind of affection one has for the runt of the litter. Joey didn't seem to have much going for him. He worked at Hoyt's junkyard in the industrial zone of his and Steve's hometown, where flat-roofed, corrugated-tin warehouses stretched for blocks. A few months before Steve fell ill, he and I had...