My Good Man, page 37
“Anybody else been by?’ I asked, trying to distract him. I remembered what a pain that was, as if every hair on my body were being yanked off, one by one.
“Just you, Christine. This young lady here,” he said, and Lottie smiled. “She says a guy comes with Christine sometimes but stays in the lounge. Probably know who that is.” He locked eyes with me, telling me I shouldn’t speak my guess aloud. I was surprised he’d learned the Eee-ogg rule of not speaking names. “Oh and the EMT that knows you. The one that brang me in. Been by a couple times. Semper Fi and all that.” Leonard. Surprising. Strangely, Lottie blushed.
Rusty lines of blood traced the wounds around an orderly row of surgical staples. They looked like motorcycle jacket zippers, installed across his skin. My zipper of surgical staples had looked nearly identical, though I’d only had the one. When you looked at them, metal against bruised flesh, an orderly row of dull silvery teeth with a few stray bars around your navel, you didn’t believe your body would ever close enough to remove them.
Tim’s biggest strip followed the same pattern mine had, sternum to pubic hair—that would be the splenectomy. There was no way to wear undershorts while the staples were in. Even the lowest Low Rise waistband still rubbed the bottom few staples. You were stuck with your butt hanging out the gap in the back if you got out of bed. When they changed the dressing, your only covering was the top sheet you’d been sleeping under, and you tried to keep it from slipping too far down. Every day, the nurses assured you they’d seen it all before, but it didn’t change the sharp knife of your vulnerability, your inability to ensure your own privacy.
Tim’s second staple strip was a large diagonal across the left side of his chest, from low sternum up to his shoulder muscle, looking like a zipper slash pocket for his heart. I assumed that just sealed an especially large gash.
“How many?” The incision length seemed almost double mine, just by the sheer gap between my height and his. At twenty-six, I was definitely done growing. Though I couldn’t tell with him lying in bed, my full height was probably still no further up than his Adam’s Apple.
“Doc said over two guns, so something like eighty? Right nursey?”
“I’m not technically an OR nurse, Mr. Sampson, and definitely not an OR nursey, but that sounds about right, not counting whatever’s inside, and up here,” Lottie said, gently touching his jaw. “Those look pretty good. They might not leave much of a scar. They usually try to be pretty careful with the face. You had one of the best, Mr. Sampson.”
“Don’t they all think they’re one of the best?” he asked.
“It would be unprofessional of me to say. These look good, not much drainage. You’re closing up, sir. We could probably put these pads back on but I’ll get fresh, ’cause you’re nice.”
“Nah, these are fine,” he said, looking at the blood-tracked cotton squares.
“Get new ones,” I chided, and she smiled, a whole different person these days.
“My insurance company thanks you,” he said, and turned to Lottie. “Go with the boss’s orders.” She left and I suspected I only had a few minutes before her return.
“Do you want me to bring you home? I mean, to my place? No bullshit here, I know it’s been a long time, but—”
“I’ll be fine. Christine’ll pick me up, but if not, I might need a ride home.” I reached into my wallet to give him a business card, but he reached a hand up to stop me. “I know how to get ahold of you, if I need to.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure if I felt better or worse. “Well, I better head out, before they do the official Go On Home announcement. Margaret hasn’t been by to see you, probably.”
“Hah! Too busy with BINGO. But you know, she’d have no cause, really.”
“You’re her uncle. The only link left to the dad she so fiercely guards.”
“Don’t get your shorts in a bunch, now,” he said, somehow half goofing and half serious. “You know she’s got her own heartache to tend to. I was teasing about BINGO.” He shrugged.
“Like what? What could be so important?” He looked me straight in the eye, frowning, and then flicked his eyes in a variety of directions, something dawning on him.
“I heard you wrote the obits. Isn’t it, though?” I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about, but was beginning to feel that heaviness, the way my scar throbbed when I unconsciously clenched my torso muscles, bracing for a blow.
“We share. I do a couple days a week, and … people die every day. What did I miss?” That list held very few possible names. My mom tended to keep track of who was dying and who had new babies, but some slipped through the cracks.
“Her man, what was it they called him? Bull Hoof Stew? Something weird like that.”
“Moose,” I said, my belly seizing tighter. “Moose-Knuckle Stew? No. Can’t be …”
“Six months, maybe? Heard he was taking inventory upstairs in that garage you worked at sometimes. They didn’t know how long before anyone noticed him missing. Word is it was one of those widow-makers. If you don’t get it that second, show’s closed. But you can’t know how true something is when you get your news through people talking.”
He leaned back and reclined the bed a bit; I approached his head and adjusted his pillows. “Thanks,” he said. “Tough to reach up and do that.”
“I remember,” I said, working until he touched my arm to indicate it was good enough. “Was really tough to adjust them, and do a bunch of other things I took for granted. Being alone really made me understand how my life had changed there.”
“Apartment, you mean? I imagine it was. Funny how quiet can seem like an obnoxious noise when it tells you how alone you are. Anyway, I guess that explains why you weren’t at the wake or the funeral. I stayed the whole time. Went to the graveyard. They let him be buried out on Skid Row.” The Rez graveyard was loosely organized around clans. If a couple wanted to be buried next to each other, they had to go where the wife’s clan was, like it was a different period in history, the man moving in with the woman’s people. If you were one of the miscellaneous outliers, but had been a meaningful community member, you went to the strip of graves everyone jokingly called Skid Row.
“Stew’s dead? Really dead dead?” Even as I said it, I wanted to pull the statement back. Until a few seconds ago, he was still alive in my head. It was like he’d just now died, and for everyone else we knew, his grave was probably already covered in grass.
“There another kind of dead I don’t know about?” Tim said. One word he’d said lingered: widow-maker. It was a word he knew. Widower-maker also existed. “Anyway, people’s lives are just plain messy. They do what they can, you understand?” I didn’t. People remained an ongoing mystery to me, but I nodded. “See you tomorrow?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Come here.” He reached his right hand up to mine, and I closed mine around his. Once again, it wasn’t a handshake. That same something else. That same something more. “Thank you. Thank you for coming. All this time, I wasn’t sure you were really here, at first.”
“Well, you never delivered on your promise of going to Lakeside Park,” I said, fighting to blink back tears, myself, something that never happened to me.
“Promise,” he said. “We’ll go. You know, over the years, I’ve come to like that song. I bought a copy of the album even.”
“You lie!” I hissed, a bit of Rez slang.
“I swear,” he said, laughing a little, then proceeded to name every song on Caress of Steel, in order. If it was a lie, he’d rehearsed. “Anyway, that stuff they give you to dull this,” he added, gesturing to his torso. “It fogs you up some. Last night, I swore the middle of the night nurse was crying and carrying on and some other fellow comes in and she yells at him, but—”
“That wasn’t no hallucination,” Alvin yelled over, “unless we’re sharing one.”
Tim laughed dutifully, then lowered his voice. “When I knew for sure it was you visiting, and that you were really here, I didn’t want to say anything that would scare you off.” He made sure we locked eyes. “So I would see you come in and listen to you being here, glad to know it.”
“Didn’t you think I’d come?”
“Hard to tell. Christine’s pretty much all I got in the world, I mean, Hayley, too, but she lives so far away. For day-to-day life, I’m gonna be a Special Occasions Dad for her probably forever.” He almost always noted that Hayley wasn’t around because she’d moved away. Since almost no one left the Rez quite that permanently, the families of those few who did made sure everyone knew why they were absent. “That’s it for visitors. So when you came, I don’t know, it was like a safety net or something. More than …”
“If I’m such a safety net, how come you don’t tell me what really happened?” I asked, and we both noticed Alvin’s TV volume inching down, and I nodded. Eee-ogg lived everywhere, I guess.
“You come see me, when I get home. We’ll have a talk. May not be the one you want, but we’ll have one, just the same. We got catching up to do, if nothing else.” Tim let go of my hand and rested it on his chest, exhausted, as Lottie came back in and finished up. I asked her if she had another minute, when she was done. She nodded and I leaned in and patted Tim’s shoulders. It wasn’t exactly an embrace, but it was the kind of exchange between two people needing to acknowledge the massive, jagged gap they were working against, a fear of falling back into it, if they weren’t careful. Given how wiped out he still was, I was sure he’d be sleeping deeply by the time I hit the parking lot.
“So what’s changed?” I asked Lottie, waiting for me in the visitor’s lounge.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Don’t lie. You’re no good at it,” I said. “You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been meaner than a roo(t)-squuht-naeh for years, and all of a sudden, you’re Little Jeet-neh.” I wondered if Dusty had finally told her we were related. Not that being related prevented meanness; Rolanda had no issues expressing her own venom all these years.
“When you first got here, I thought you were doing your Eee-ogg job,” she said. “And I know how that turns out for people.” Dusty apparently never did explain the relationship between my article, Dusty’s prices, and Lottie’s savings account. Probably she could have figured it out, but a lot of people learn not to ask questions if they fear the answer. “When you came back, and then again, I knew it was different. Why do you come for him? He’s nothing to you but someone’s dad. It’s not like you’re even related or anything.”
“Well, that’s not your business, and it’s not true,” I said. “I know a lot of people at home only hang out with family. That all their friends are family and the only time someone new comes into the picture is when there’s some jigging going on somewhere.” She laughed and turned red again, surprising me. When I was younger, Dusty and Lena were the most scandalous girls I knew. “But who I’m close with is my business. And Tim is one of those people.”
“But no one I know ever sees you and him together. Anywhere!” she stressed. “I’ve asked around.”
“And you say I’m chasing Eee-ogg? Okay Kettle. What we have is our business.” I was not giving her the satisfaction of confirming even one detail. She could use some mystery.
“Okay,” she said. “Sorry. But after you’ve been here? He’s a different person. Better, more awake. And I’ll tell you,” she added, dropping her voice. “He ain’t like that after Christine leaves. I mean, he’s not agitated or anything. Just … not the same as after your visits.”
“Nyah-wheh,” I said. “I appreciate that. I know you didn’t have to say.” I left and did a few Rez Laps, thinking about what she’d said, and what he’d said. I knew what Tim and I were likely to talk about, when we met up at his house.
I wondered where Christine and Randy were spending their days and nights now. We’d each moved on. All the aspects of my old life had fallen off when I’d gotten involved in my new life: Technically, the Rez was ten minutes from my apartment, but by the time I’d finished Cascade duties, I was wiped, most days. Sometimes, all I had the energy for was to drift through a few videos on MTV before crashing. One nice thing about Rez life was that almost every month, there was some community function going on, and you could drop in and visit with any number of people from your life with the time you could manage. No one expected you to go to everything, but you were guaranteed to find a few people to visit with at any gathering. Trying to maintain an apartment and a job, and staying balanced between the Two Canoes, was getting so tough I didn’t know how I’d keep it up.
So tough, I’d literally missed the funeral of someone I’d once had a very complicated friendship with. And I didn’t even know what to say, or how to approach the love he’d left behind. I didn’t think Margaret would ever stop blaming my mom for stealing Gihh-rhaggs away from her family, like he hadn’t had a mind and heart of his own. Or blaming me for not busting Stew in his long-term affair with her half sister. I couldn’t blame Margaret in either case.
I hoped they’d come to some peace before Stew stepped out, but I also couldn’t file the idea that he might have had company taking inventory, when he departed from our world. Did people change their ways? Randy Night hanging in the hospital lounge left an unsettling vibe.
The sky was still light when I left and I headed to the graveyard. Stew was deep in Skid Row, the start of a new row where the woods dropped off across the rocky escarpment. His headstone proclaimed the lie of his life here: Stewart Broad Moose. His real last name, Napier, was nowhere on the stone. What would happen if his relatives from wherever he’d come from showed up, being told he was buried here? Could they find him, or would they wander our graveyard, see the stones with the names disappearing from one hundred and fifty years ago, and wonder why no Napiers appeared anywhere in this long meandering gathering place for the dead?
At home, for the first time, I heard the sound of being alone that Tim had described. I ate in silence, looked at future columns in progress, and went to bed. In the morning, I checked work messages. Some part of me hoped Randy would turn himself in, but it was only a small part. I recognized the number on the last message, and it stopped me dead. DogLips Night cleared his throat before he spoke, a terrible, snappy sound, like a fish makes when you pull it from the river and it lands on the concrete, gasping in its new, terminal, environment.
“Hey!” he yelled, “get your old man outa my summer cottage. I called you a week ago, but you don’t call me back. It’s eviction day.” DogLips knew better than to think of calling my ma—she might just show up at his house with a baseball bat for implying she had responsibility for My Old Man. “Do it right, I might get Tiffany to let you buy her steak dinner.” He laughed, still busting my nuts about my high school crush on his daughter, years-old jokes being a Rez Specialty. But this joke abruptly dissolved into hacks.
Normally, I wouldn’t have considered this my problem, but Hillman’s words, and in truth, Christine’s observations from years ago about My Old Man, lingered in my head. I had to change my ways before I could expect anyone else to. As soon as I finished Obits and Blotter the next day, I headed home, to the reservation. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go, so I passed Tim’s place, the Summer Cottage, Hillman’s, and landed at my ma’s first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ape Zero
I pulled into my ma’s long driveway, crushed stone sunk back into mud. When the world felt too strange, or foreign or irritating, I went home. Tonight, she occupied the corner chair.
“So Tim Sampson’s out of the ICU,” I said, walking in. She held up the recent Cascade with my “Assault Victim Improves” story. The first story had been on the front page—blood and violence—but this was buried on Page Six. She thought journalism was my latest stupid decision. After I’d explained my initial internship, she said those were for kids who didn’t need to worry about bills. Even after I became a full-time reporter, she’d encouraged me to get a job pumping at one of the Rez gas stations, because I could just write in between customers. She said she saw my name so infrequently, she assumed it couldn’t be too demanding.
“I’m working at the Cascade full time, these days,” I’d said. “Just because my name isn’t always on there, doesn’t mean I’m not working.” What I did was ethereal to her, even if I offered proof of success, like making home repairs on her place. She’d subvert them. When I replaced crumbling dining room drywall with tongue and groove, she scotch-taped newspaper articles to the paneling. None I’d written, just Bigfoot sightings, a cat with two faces, stuff like that. If I gave her framed pictures, she’d stack them face down on the TV like books.
Whenever I mentioned these changes, she’d say I should have spent the money getting a trailer for our property, or improving my old room and moving back home. More and more, this house was changing from the home I’d known. My apartment wasn’t quite home, but neither was this place any longer, and I suddenly had a sliver of understanding about My Old Man’s life. When he used to loiter at our house, and I’d try to send him back to the Summer Cottage with other drifters, using every Rush album I had if the Bowie didn’t work. I wondered if that hardwood floor and his group of fellow anchorless drifters offered him familiarity, as our house grew into something else.
“I’m doing what Hillman believes I should,” I said, words like lazy flies. “For Tim.”
“Glutton for punishment. I was teasing when I suggested it,” she backtracked, now that I’d started. “What makes you think it’ll work any better this time?” she added, trailing her smoky laugh.
