Free Rides a Stranger by David Bell

M y father died slowly.
    In his early sixties, after a lifetime of vigorous health and strength, he contracted a rare neurological disorder that killed him inch by inch. First, he couldn’t walk. Soon after that, he couldn’t dress himself or feed himself. Eventually he was confined to bed, wearing adult diapers. A nurse came and changed him several times a day, rolling him from one side to the other with the detached and practiced care of the medical professional.
    My dad’s eyes remained sharp and intelligent. He was in there. We all knew that. But his body deserted him, like an electrical device with a failing battery. He slowly wound down, losing motion and control. A slow unraveling.
    The last thing to go was his ability to speak.
    For several months, his voice became a raspy whisper. Every word cost him effort. To say something as simple as “yes” could take five minutes and reserves of precious energy he just didn’t have.
    I didn’t visit as much as I should have. I lived four hours away in a small college town where I taught American Literature to the indifferent and unwashed masses of middle-class kids at a public university deep in the heart of Kentucky. It was a good job and mostly fulfilling, and I told myself it left little time for regular trips to my hometown to see my father wasting away in a hospital bed. The truth is—I didn’t know what I could do for him. Even when my father was at his healthiest and in full voice, we didn’t have much to say to each other. We didn’t see eye-to-eye politically. His facts came from Fox News, mine from MSNBC. He spent his life working in business, selling auto parts to distributors around the Rust Belt. I spent my life in the ivory tower.
    We couldn’t even agree when it came to books. I wrote my dissertation on Fitzgerald, specifically The Great Gatsby . Dad’s reading habits remained more pedestrian. He read anything that landed on the bestseller list. When I was a child, he read Alistair Maclean and Jack Higgins. Later he switched to Tom Clancy and James Patterson. Big dick books, my ex-wife—also an English professor—used to call them. Big dick books.
    And Dad’s favorite big dick genre of them all—the western. Oaters. Horse operas. Shoot ‘em ups. He read them all. Max Brand. Will Henry. Luke Short. And his favorite of them all—Louis L’Amour. Dad read every Louis L’Amour book ever written. He read and re-read them. He bought multiple copies of them. He’d wear one out from re-reading, and then he’d go out and buy the same book and wear that one out as well. It seemed like strange behavior for a man who grew up in Vermont, lived most of his life in Ohio, and never once ventured west of the Mississippi River.
    So, we didn’t talk about books either.
    But I did hear the last words he ever spoke.
    This happened about three weeks before his death. I made one of my infrequent visits. The university I teach at had a fall break, and my mother had been calling me, obliquely warning me that the old man didn’t have much time left. She’d say things like, “Well, your father isn’t as strong as he used to be.” Or she’d say, “Well, we all just have to do what we have to do.” I understood. Mom was telling me to come and say good-bye.
    So I made the trip. I went into their bedroom, the bedroom in which I was conceived, and which was now filled by a large hospital bed. My dad looked small beneath the tucked in sheets, almost like a sick child. He had lost close to sixty pounds, and when I saw him that day, he looked like a sketch or an outline of himself, something without substance or heft.
    I took the seat next to the bed and held his hand. I didn’t like holding his hand. My dad had acquired the habit of reaching down beneath the bedclothes, trying to fiddle with or even remove the diapers he wore. I never knew if this was out of discomfort or because he rebelled against the idea of wearing a diaper at all. But his hands were often busy