My Good Man, page 39
“Anyway, I’m sorry. Thought about leaving a message at the paper, but … I was afraid I might catch you in. If you’d picked up, I wouldn’t know what to say. I tried, I really did. Even bought you a card. I didn’t have your address, and I didn’t want to send it to your mom’s place. It’s in my top dresser drawer if you don’t believe me. Keep it with that letter you wrote me.”
“You still have that letter? Why?”
“Why not? It’s mine. What do you care?”
“It’s not that I mind. You know, you read letters and most, you toss out,” I said, excusing myself and heading down the hall to the john. Secretly, I felt a kind of joy that he still had the old letter, but I didn’t want him to see the ridiculous prideful smile I felt welling up inside me.
“Not me,” he said, loud enough to still hear. I glanced at the magazines on the little stand. The library, people joked. When I opened the door, he spoke again. “Go down to my room. Top dresser drawer. Far corner, under the socks. Your card, might as well open it. But the letter’s mine.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that letter again.
“Maybe later,” I said, coming back into the living room, holding a magazine.
“Kept it, figuring you might come someday.”
“Well, you know, we have different lives now …” I said, and even as I did, I heard the lameness and guilt. “True Confessions? Not what I would have pegged for your reading taste.”
“Vestal’s. Look at the cover dates and the labels. Never had the heart to throw them out.”
“I haven’t come, because …” I started, “I didn’t think you wanted me to. When you didn’t come to the hospital, I figured I’d done something to you that I didn’t know. I was …” I paused, trying to find the right word. Being a writer didn’t mean you had access to all the words you wanted at all times. It meant taking the time to find them and recognizing them when you did. “I was respecting your absence.”
The Rez only had five entry roads, and nowadays I almost always chose the one past his place. In the evenings, he usually had the TV on, and its blue shadows caressed the closed curtains like anemones on ocean TV shows.
“Why the hell did you think that?” he asked, vaguely irritated. “Suppose we do have different lives. So what! Lots different these days, but that don’t mean you gotta disappear,” he softened, a thread of pleading in his voice that seemed so much like that New Year’s Eve a million years before. And then, even softer: “So what is it you’re doing here, anyway? No bullshit. I’m super happy to see you, even happier that you came to see me in there. One of those shirts you brang me.” He tugged on his baggy T-shirt, confirming I’d been wrong with the size. “I read your stories faithfully. Even shit I got no interest in, if your name’s on it, I’m in. And yes, I’ve read what’s been hidden in them just for me. I’ve saved all those ones. I wanted to respond, but I’m scared, I guess. It’s tough allowing someone to see your most vulnerable side. Even someone you’ve shown it to before.” He looked down at his lap, as if there were a cheat sheet hiding there, and after a pause, continued.
“But I hope you’re not looking for a story now. There’s none here. Told the cops, I don’t remember anything. And since they say the reservation ain’t technically in their jurisdiction, chances are good they won’t be back. Maybe if I asked them, but that’s it.” He looked at me when he spoke, but at the end, he closed his eyes and leaned back on the pillow.
“And you just happened to be on Moon Road in the middle of the night. Some police investigator might buy that, particularly one that doesn’t want Rez red tape, but I don’t guess that’s true, either.” He shrugged, not giving me much. “They have enough active cases they aren’t gonna waste time on someone who refuses to identify his attacker.” At that, he looked down, studying the coffee table. “Just don’t go thinking that your story was convincing or anything. Anyone from the Rez paying any attention to you would know that’s a lie.”
“That’s why my story’s good enough. No one here pays me any mind. Just you.”
“But that’s not why I’m here,” I said, again. “I mean it.” I had to stop myself from getting sidetracked, and from inventing sidetracks. “You want to put those events away in a box? Fine, it’s away as far as the news or my job goes. I want to help you, but you gotta be honest for me to do that.”
“Help me what?” he jumped in. “Solve the mystery? I think you know enough what I’m saying to know there’s none to be solved.”
“I understand that, Tim. I got it. And I promise. What I’m about to ask you about, will stay only between you and me. Totally private. You understand?”
“No, son, I don’t,” he said immediately. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t even know what you’re saying here. You’re rambling like the old days. You seem to be hinting at something you’re offering me, but I guess I’m dense. Like I said before, I was coming home from the Spithouse, knocking back a couple with buddies, and decided to take a ride around the reservation before turning in, like we used to.” He reached over and took a long drink of water, then slowly set the cup back down. “Some nights are lonelier than others. That’s the last thing, before waking up.” I could hear the studied phrases. He’d rehearsed them to himself, the way I did when I knew every word I said was going to be scrutinized. But I knew he was lying. If I could have kept him talking for a while longer, he might’ve given in, but it was time I was direct, and explained why I needed to know the truth.
“Listen, even though you’re white, you’ve figured out a way to live among us. And people have grown so used to you, folks even talk about things they wouldn’t around other white folks.” I could hear my own evasiveness, the ways I wasn’t saying what I wanted to say.
“You mean like the Skidaddles?”
“Please tell me you don’t really call them that.” He’d been around enough that people discussed our unseen world in his presence, even the death singers. Did he know about Tallman, the Little People, shape changers? Did he believe what everyone else did about Hillman’s work with me? Only one other white man I’d known had that invisibility. Tim’s brother, of course.
“Just yanking your chain, son, keeping you on your toes. Ow. You gotta quit making me laugh.” He reached up and touched his face.
“Here, let me see that.”
“Eh! It’s fine. You gotta be in good light to see it and it’s hard for me to move around.” He frowned when I stood, I guess thinking I would have respected his dismissal. He eventually shifted and made room on the couch, near the end table lamp. I tilted his head and he grimaced. The sutures were tight and small, and a tiny row of surgical butterfly bandages lined up across the wound. That scar would be visible, even after they pulled the thread.
“Have you been skipping shaving?”
“Not skipping. Doctor’s orders. Leave it alone, let it heal. Gotta keep looking at it. If a hair starts growing into the scar, I’m supposed to see if I can yank it, or call them to take care of it. Otherwise, get snipped in another week? They said the thread might bust on its own.”
“Did a plastic surgeon do this?”
“Hell, got me. Don’t think those are on standby at that rinky-dink hospital. They said it shouldn’t be too bad. They tried to be neat. Besides, who’s looking at my sorry ass, these days?”
“Can I see the others?”
“I guess. Gotta shower anyway. Christine’s been helping, but I give her a break. I can do the shower alone. She bought me one of those stools. Only tough part is getting a shirt off. Wanna give me a hand?” He lifted his right arm and sniffed. “Maybe you wanna wait until after I shower before you look.” He struggled to sit up and raised his arms into the air, waiting for me to lift the shirt like a little kid would. I grabbed it from the bottom hem and carefully pulled it up away from his belly, stretching the neck hole to slide around his face.
The same butterfly bandages ran right up his midline, from below the sweatpants waistband to the bump of his sternum, and then again, diagonally across his left chest, replacing the surgical steel staples that had been there last week. Beneath them, the scar, thick and purple, became nearly black down at the bottom. He’d been shaved in surgery and his belly and chest were covered in a uniform layer of stubble as his body tried to put itself back together.
“They said these things’ll wash off on their own, but that I shouldn’t rush them.” He looked at the line of butterflies. “Longer I kept them on, the better chances that the scar would be less, what? Less obvious? Probably a load of shit they tell you to buy time while you get used to the idea of your new body. Hurts like I got a belly and chest full of rotten teeth.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. No story in the paper. None of that. I promise. This is between you and me and no one else, ever. I hope whatever connection we had … and lost. Man! I hate to say that! But it’s true. I’m here to try and rebuild my end. You understand?”
Neither of us was good at this kind of conversation and I’d gotten worse. I was rarely in situations where I needed to dull my anxieties about saying wrong things and I didn’t really drink much anymore, so I had no effective strategies to loosen my tongue.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard about what happened when I left the hospital,” I said.
“All that voodoo with Hillman?” he said, eyebrows raised. “That he fixed you up good as new with his secret tricks? Sure, who hasn’t heard that around here?” He still absently rubbed the edges of the line dividing him into halves, a new Prime Meridian of his body I already knew.
“Yeah, all that.” Like most stories around here, that one was fueled by a little bit of truth and a lot of speculation. “You didn’t hear about that whole Tin Man scare back in the seventies, did you? Too new here for people to talk about it in front of you?”
“Son, as God-fearing a Christian woman as Vestal was, she woulda been terrified of that Tin Man!” he said, laughing and then sighing. “That Tallman story was bad enough. That’s why we don’t have a second floor here you, know.” Funny, most older Rez houses had an upstairs, but almost any built from the midfifties on had a basement and a main floor alone. I suddenly wondered if the fear of Tallman had changed the whole Rez architecture demands. You never knew where and when stories would take hold.
“She didn’t want giants peeking in at night. No matter how ridiculous I said it was, that no man two stories tall could hide in these woods, she just shut her ears. She wasn’t stubborn about a lot, but that? Insisted it had to be true. Made me swear never to spend any time at night alone in the woods, and to never build an addition up. She was gone by that Tin Man year, but I heard about it the whole year, mostly from Christine and Hayley. One day, people just quit talking about it, like it never happened. I don’t think Christine ever watched that Wizard of Oz again though. Always wondered what it was in the grove really causing all the fuss.”
“Couldn’t say. But anyway. The thing I want to talk to you about? It’s kind of like that. If you told someone in the city that you’d seen a Tin Man, they’d laugh in your face. But you know we live in a different place. I want to try to give you something, something from here that would also get you laughed at out there. And there aren’t any guarantees.”
“There usually ain’t, but what are we talking about here? What Hillman did for you?”
“You see, what everyone believes and the truth? Often two different things. You already know that,” I said. I could still say something irrelevant and get my ass out of here.
“Sure, seen it happen often enough,” he said, scratching gingerly around the bandages on his belly. I remembered the constant cross between pain and itch as your body did its job. “My brother’s name bumped up in status after he crashed his car, like he’d been something special alive. People claiming he did all kinds of good things. Even folks who wouldn’t give him a ride if he had his thumb out on Dog Street. Truth? They didn’t give him a ride for a reason. He was a shiftless shit who drank too much and gambled his money away and couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants unless someone threatened to shoot it off. Worst? He left two daughters to their lonely mothers when he got bored.” He puffed out his lip a little, grimacing, but determined.
“You and your mom … your brother and sister, you’d have probably been left the next time some barfly rubbed up against him at the right crossroads of drunk and horny, hoping he had more than that surplus of charm and a skilled hand. You caught him at the end of the line. I loved him, he was my brother, but he wasn’t the miracle man your mom remembers.” I had to wonder what their relationship had been like for such an unflinching assessment of Gihh-rhaggs.
“We knew his faults,” I defended. “We just accepted them. Which is one of the things I’ve learned. Hillman trained me, and he’s willing to do more, but as my ma is so fond of pointing out, I still have this.” I lifted my shirt, revealing my own thick line of purple welts, and then dropped it quickly. Almost no one saw me this way. When I inadvertently caught glimpses in the mirror, I felt like Dr. West had delivered a curse onto me. I had become a mutant.
Even now, years later, I still felt most like Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four. The other three members could walk around, looking totally normal, pass for regular average people. But for all the strength Grimm had been given, he could never escape the fundamental way he’d been changed, and anyone who encountered him knew it too. The superhero duds Reed designed for him were a joke, confirming his outsider status. The whole outfit was just a pair of blue satin briefs that more or less said “why bother?” Ben was The Thing, twenty-four hours a day. It felt melodramatic to still have such ruminations years after the fact, but there was no denying what faced me in the mirror every day. I remembered that I used to think of Tim as a living Ben Grimm, because he was so massively bulky compared to anyone else I knew. Now here I was.
“Hah! We match,” he said, wincing again in his smile.
“Well, not quite. I don’t have that one across my chest like you and the Tin Man.”
“Oil Can!” he said, squeaky, laughing through a grimace, and then coughed, quickly pressing a throw pillow against the sutures. A key hospital discharge instruction, if you must cough. “No offense, son, but it doesn’t look like Hillman did too good a job, if that’s what you’re offering.”
“Hillman told me I had to be totally honest with him in whatever he asked. If I couldn’t, then what he did wouldn’t stick. Or it wouldn’t happen at all. Or only a little.”
“Been my experience that full-bore honesty’s hard to come by,” he said, trying to whistle. “Bet it’s worse if people think you might be sniffing around for something to go in the paper.”
“I don’t get told a lot of direct lies,” I agreed. “Mostly silence or, you know, Rez answers.”
“Nah. Folks don’t want you thinking they’re wasting a good lie on you,” he said, growing distant. “They look at you and say nothing. Like you did, that first night we went for a ride.” He’d assumed I was doing a Rez Stonewall that New Year’s Eve. I guess if you were around us long enough, you got to identify the strategy. If someone asked you a nosey question, you just acted like no one had said anything, as if their voice stopped projecting. But that night, I’d been afraid I might say something to set him off, stuck in a minefield with no map whatsoever.
“Well, anyway,” I said, Rez Stonewalling exactly as he’d claimed. “Hillman asked me if I’d accepted that the surgeon screwed up and that humans do. It’s like beadwork. You know, faithful beadworkers put one wrong bead in their work because only the Creator can make things perfect.” A couple beadwork picture frames hung on the wall, his wedding picture in one, and the other shared by Hayley and Christine’s pictures. I couldn’t see if they had intentional errors. Some beadworkers ditched that belief, saying tourists treated flawed pieces as “factory seconds.”
“I said I accepted, but I didn’t, really. Maybe if that surgeon admitted his screwup, instead of filing a State Health Department Report that I spontaneously started bleeding like a mutant, I’d consider that. But people don’t spontaneously start bleeding by themselves, particularly when they have a scalpel inside their body.”
“Seems to me you still haven’t accepted it,” Tim said, lifting his eyebrows. His expression, his expectation, must have been met a thousand times with Rez Stonewalling before he finally got it. “You know? Another way to see it? You’re here. He messed up, but he had enough going on to put you back together. Now, I’m not saying what he did was right, being too greedy with his nest egg to admit he fucked you up.” He shrugged, acknowledging where his sympathies lay. “But you wouldn’t be talking to me if he hadn’t gotten his shit together quick.”
“Yeah, Hillman’s medicine decided the same thing. That I hadn’t accepted it. So, it took most of the pain, and left the scar the same way it looked when I was discharged. Worse, actually. It separated and grew bigger that first month. But …” I said. This would be where he’d listen and we’d move forward, or he’d raise those bushy eyebrows, defining his usual doubts.
“Hillman showed me how to make the medicine that takes away the scars, and the kind that’ll take away the pain if it doesn’t leave on its own. He said your body remembers when someone else’s hands have been inside. The medicine allows your body to understand that those hands saved your ass, but you have to allow the medicine to come to those terms.” Tim stared at me, eyebrows in place, his own version of the Rez Stonewall. But doubt still flashed in his eyes.
I’d doubt this story too—still could, really. If I were honest with myself, I’d admit that I hadn’t fully committed to everything Hillman offered. It was nearly impossible to reconcile evidence-based journalism with Hillman’s world. But my offer to Tim was one part of the last two stages to complete my education. I didn’t want to be in the position of an incomplete education by my own shortsightedness. And I could help someone I loved. Even though I hadn’t done a single thing with the medicines in the years since my surgery, people had come forward from time to time obliquely asking for help, asking me to finish what I’d started with Hillman.
