You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Page B

day. You know that,” Leonard said. Every day since the discovery, in mid-visit to the Iowa farm where his old mother and brother lived, of cancer, and the necessity of going to Sioux City for radiation treatments, six minutes each day beneath the Cobalt-60 machine. He borrowed his brother’s car each day for the thirty-four-mile trip, an hour and a half gone and back.
    “You going this morning or this afternoon?” Melvin asked. Leonard looked to his wife. She lifted eggs and bacon from the skillet, tested cornbread in the oven, put that out too. No sign from her for a preference.
    “This afternoon,” Leonard said.
    Melvin nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Gavin wanted me to come into town this morning. To help out.”
    Leonard nodded, understanding him.
    “You’ll be around here all morning?” Melvin asked.
    “Yes,” Leonard said, knowing his brother was aware of the danger, wanting to protect the farm and the mother from being alone.
    All that morning Leonard and his wife and his mother worked in the garden, not with the old mean labor that he had given when he was a boy, twenty years ago, but rather with an easy pleasantness that came from doing work that one didn’t feel compelled to do; they set out tomato plants and weeded the strawberries. There were already many strawberry blossoms, fragile and white.
    At noon sharp, Melvin was back.
    “Well, did you and Gavin nab the killer?” Leonard asked. Melvin shook his head, grinned. “Nope. There’s a story they got somebody up at Spencer. But nobody’s sure yet, and Gavin doesn’t believe it.”
    At one o’clock they went to Sioux City. No, the mother did not want to go along. “Ooph, I’m not feeling so good today,” she said, Leonard thinking she was only begging off to have her afternoonnap. They drove the new highway, thirty-four miles in thirty minutes, went in to see the sleepy radiologist who muttered of palliation. “Are you feeling all right now?”
    “Yes,” Leonard said.
    “No back pain anymore?”
    “No.”
    “He gets tired very easily,” the wife said.
    “Yes. That’s bound to happen,” the radiologist said, and gave a stricken yawn, trapped it partially between throat and chin. “That’s caused by the radiation. But your back pain has gone away?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Good.”
    They, the sleepy doctor and the robust nurse, took him through the heavy lead door and lay him on the cot, rolled him beneath a streamlined bullet-shaped machine that said “Eldorado” on it.
    “Only two more treatments on your side and then we radiate your neck,” the doctor said. “That will suppress the growth, and give palliation for a good long time.”
    The thought of time, any time, gave him a chill, how the bored doctor could talk easily of a “good long time” when he knew it could not be more than three years at the most for him, this doctor who could easily yawn away three years of his own life without even thinking about it.
    Leonard did not say anything. He lay still, as he should, looked up at the perforated squares on the ceiling, lay silent in the air-conditioned comfort of the lead-in room. The red light came on after the radiologist and nurse exited to the safety of their control booth, the machine above him thukked and a little complacent hum of the machine began, as of a digestive process deep within it. He contemplated lying there, and of the discovery three weeks before of the malignant cancer in him, not localized, spread already with unseemly haste, and where the doctors had at firsttalked confidently of energetic treatment and suppression, now their lips could manage murmurs of only “palliation,” an unforgivable word to him, absolutely a devilish word to him at thirty-three. Palliation and defeat, and nothing to be done, oh the best doctors agreed, there was nothing else to be done, for “it” had already spread beyond localized bounds, and what was there now to do but palliate and wait?
    He waited the six minutes,