Near Flesh, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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Pieces
I
JOHN GREW UP AS A MECHANIC on his father’s fishing trawler out of Puget Sound. On the day the accident happened he was a lean twenty-three with thick hair and an electric grin. The trawler was tied up at the cannery dock. John got bored and set to tinkering with the engine. It was a stupid thing, a dropped wrench. He reached for it wrong and the flywheel caught his left hand and tore his middle finger off. He took the finger with him to the emergency room and waited his turn on a crowded wooden bench with his hand and finger wrapped in separate greasy rags. That was before they got so good at sewing things back up.
John’s family believed you couldn’t get to heaven packing less than you were born with. No circumcision in that clan. And any subtractions, accidental or incidental, had to be buried with you.
John kept the severed finger in formaldehyde. It turned brownish in the liquid and then stopped changing. At Fourth of July picnics he’d entertain the nieces and nephews by bringing out the jar so they could peer in. The liquid was smoky and the limp finger was bloated and ragged at one end. Only the faint shape of a grimy fingernail at the rounder tip proved that it was, truly, a finger. He kept the jar packed in a small wooden box cushioned by crumpled paper. For thirty-five years, whenever John moved or shipped out, the box went with him.
Then he was a granddad, thick and bald, the captain of a sea tug towing log rafts to the Philippines. Just back from three months at sea, John was driving home from the dock when his car was crushed by a stampeding garbage truck. The jar and its box were smashed in his seabag in the trunk. The reek of formaldehyde made the emergency crew wary of toxic chemicals. They scuttled into safety gear while John quietly stopped bleeding.
The funeral director put the finger, in its new jar, into the coffin before he closed it. John changes, but not that finger.
II
The mortuary has a big walk-in freezer. Its wire shelves hold detached human parts whose former owners still live. These are the bits amputated or extracted in surgery from all over the state.
Each piece is wrapped in white paper, labeled with a discreetly typed bag. One bulky package contains the mangled legs of the boy whose bicycle slid beneath the train. The narrow slab is the wrist and hand of the sawmill worker who slipped and fell against the machinery. The skier’s frostbitten toes are in the small parcel beside the toes of the diabetic. Various bundles hold a pancreas, several appendixes, a malignant stretch of colon. There are the boxed breasts of the senator who didn’t stop wearing wigs even though all her hair grew back after the chemo.
The boy, brilliant in his speeding wheelchair, is a bitter debater in his college classes. The ex–mill worker has a hook and two sons to help on his Christmas tree farm. The skier limps slightly and vacations in the tropics.
According to the faith of these survivors, each abandoned part must be given Christian burial. For those who can afford the nominal storage fee, the pieces will wait for two or ten or fifty years. The senator and her breasts will sink together in the hillside plot she’s already chosen and paid for.
Other pieces sit frozen for months or years until enough of them have collected on the cold shelves. Then they are stacked together in a cardboard box and carried out to a ready hole. A hired priest reads over them and blesses them before they are lowered and covered. Then the thawing begins.
III
It was a numb, starless night in the jungle. They were dug in when the attack came, but Davey’s partner in the foxhole was killed by the first rattle of fire. When the small man in the black pajamas slipped into the hole, Davey knifed him and kicked him and then stood on the corpse, listening, waiting for more. At the first seep of dawn Davey sliced off the enemy’s right ear and buttoned it into his breast pocket. Then he dragged his buddy’s body back to the unit. Davey was eighteen at the time.
Later, back home, Davey’s mother found the ear wrapped in tinfoil in his drawer. She threw it out and screamed at him. He was drinking a lot and getting into fights, so it wasn’t just the ear that set her off.
After a while his war dreams sifted away and left only the one dream of the ear. The earless one wanted something from him. This was the message. Davey read about Eastern religions until he understood that the earless one couldn’t go to his heaven with a piece missing. He would wander the dreamscape forever.
Davey felt bad about it but other things were happening—heroin and politics and motorcycles and women. There were sojourns in the Veterans Hospital to sober up and read. There was some college time, several jobs. Sometimes he wouldn’t dream at all. Other times the earless one was with him every night for weeks. During one of those sieges he went to a refugee temple and asked the priest how to make amends. The priest said Davey would have to figure that out for himself.
He was thirty-three then. He worked clearing trails in the steep, wooded parks. The crew chief was a pacifist who’d spent the war in jail. The two became friends. Davey usually worked hard but mornings after a bender he’d flop in a grassy clearing and sleep. The chief understood and didn’t bother him.
One morning Davey took his sharpest ax and drifted away from the rest of the crew. He spread his left hand out on a tree stump. Breathing carefully he lifted the ax and cut off the smallest finger.
Lifting it, he offered it to the earless one. “Fair trade, man,” he said. “Peace, man.” He tossed the finger into the brush.
At the hospital he tried to explain why he was so happy. But the crew chief told the admitting nurse it was an accident on the job, that the wounded man was in shock, delirious. He whispered harshly into Davey’s ear, “Shut the fuck up. Workers’ comp won’t pay for spiritual atonement.” Davey shut up, but he couldn’t stop grinning.
IV
The big freezer at the county morgue is a wall of burnished steel file drawers. The Number 2 parts drawer is in the lower left corner and, like the others, pulls out to the length of a bed. Number 1 is fairly full, but, for the moment, two smallish plastic bags are the only things in the Number 2 drawer.
In the first bag is a greenish-gray bone shard. If you press the clear plastic flat, a single black tooth is visible, rooted in the bone. The jawbone’s bag has its own typed tag with the date and location of its finding, and a number code. If you type that code into the computer down the hall you learn the name of the fisherman who was digging for bait grubs last fall when he found the piece out near the river slough. The experts say it’s not old enough to be a Native burial.
The finger has its own bag, tag, and code. It was discovered by a woman who massaged her moods with walks on the wooded park trail. Her dachshunds, a mother-daughter pair, were fighting over it in the brush. There wasn’t much flesh left, a few tatters at the joints, but it was fresh enough that she recognized it with that chilling of the chest that we all know. The cops spent a full day up there, sifting the leaf mold, quartering through the undergrowth, without finding anything more.
The morgue has a procedure for parts drawer cases. Photographs from different angles, samples taken, slides made, some basic lab analysis. Reports are filed and checked. It may be months or more, sometimes a few years, before the decision is made. It has to do with odds and intuition and how big a chunk is left to work with, and how crowded the parts drawers are. If no more is found, no connective element is recognized. If no clue surfaces, the part is sent to whichever crematorium is next in the county indigent rotation. The attendants wait until several parts can be sent at the same time. Until then the pieces wait, their movement stopped by the cold.
I Had the Baby on My Left Hip
I HAD THE BABY ON MY LEFT HIP. We’d had a great day, gone to the Green to feed the ducks, spent a few hours in the library. I walked down to the corner to catch the bus home to Howth. I was two blocks away, strolling along, talking to the baby, when the boom came—
The vibration hit me solidly in the gut and stayed, rippling out to my shoulders and hip sockets, rattling steadily so that my arms and legs felt hardly attached. I walked very quickly toward the bus stop, came around the corner, the gray stone wall on my right, the big McGurk Drayage sign above me—I didn’t know what I was looking at. I was some space traveler caught in the wash of a time slip. I jerked once and blinked to see the vortex of my world gone cartoon blotto in an instant.
The bench at the bus stop was heaped with torn clothes. Beyond that, nothing on the street was familiar at all—or right. I could not tell where I was.
A small shoe was on the pavement in front of me, pumping red, quietly, gently, the sock concealing what was still inside it. I picked the shoe up in my right hand and walked up the block, looking for the place where the shoe belonged. I couldn’t find it. My eyes skated everywhere, searching. Holding the baby against my side, I bent and stooped, but kept moving straight ahead. At the end of the block I turned around and headed back, thinking I’d surely missed it.
The shoe was completely soaked now with what had been pumping out of it. I stopped to wipe the thick stuff off the toe of the shoe. It was a white patent leather shoe, about five inches long. It had a single layer of leather for a heel and a thin strap. The sock had sagged down over what was inside but I could see the little crocheted edge on the cuff. It had been a white sock, and I was sure the edge was pink or pale blue before the whole thing went red.
Fanno Creek
I DISCOVERED THE FANNO CREEK EFFECT by accident, as others must have before and since. Yet a search of the literature indicates that the phenomenon remains undiscussed and unstudied. I fear the recent decades of easily available recreational and pharmaceutical alternatives may permanently deter rigorous analysis.
My own experiments back in the early 1960s were spurred by the fact that my peers considered coffee and cigarettes to be drab, sour entertainment suitable only for the ancients, and I didn’t like beer. The brew reek nauseated me, and at the time, beer was the only mind-altering substance in reach for most teens in my small western town.
If more specific blame must be attached even at this late date, I willingly finger Henry David Thoreau and the reckless high school teacher who assigned Walden to students trapped in the hormonal lunacy of adolescence. Too self-absorbed to notice what havoc the book might be wreaking on my classmates, I wolfed it down as fuel for my already dour “Only Man Is Vile” phase. The increasingly tattered paperback was my treasure through the ensuing summer.
Improvising Thoreau’s plan I hid out in the hilly pastures around town and found thousands of microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. I spied for hours on the languid, reciprocal bubbling of big slugs mating.
In a ditch at the foot of the hill there were tadpoles and the infant nurseries of bug legions. The ditch led around muddy curves to a deeper, wider ditch, almost a gully, which oozed into an actual flowing stream. Following the stream’s clay banks for a ways I was at first disappointed to find that this was mere prosey old Fanno Creek, which snuck through town beneath roadbeds and stumpy bridges and which I had commonly seen only from the back seat of my mother’s car. It had never occurred to me that Fanno Creek had a life before and after the town. It kicked up a little in the heavy rains of winter and early spring, but most of the year it was slow, tepid, and shallow. It was also known to be polluted by toxins of unspecified lineage. None of us were ever allowed to play in it.
That was all right, of course. I was far too old to be playing in the stream, was in fact conducting research. The blighted and despised Fanno was the perfect subject for my adoring scholarship. At one secluded spot a mile or so from town, the Fanno wandered through a copse of smallish trees that provided enough shade for horsetails and skunk cabbage and multifarious mosses along the shore. This became my secret laboratory. And in the process of collecting specimens (dragonflies, crawdads, and five-legged frogs) on many a blistering July or August afternoon, the most serious of naturalist philosophers might slip, quite unintentionally, and fall on her butt in ten inches of oily rainbowed water. And once the damage was done, jeans and sneakers and T-shirt soaked, totally by accident, only a priss or a grown-up would refuse to enjoy it. Henry, I know, would have stayed there, splashing and examining the texture of the muddy bottom, the seep of ooze into his shoes. His mother did his laundry, after all, just as mine did.
If the philosopher’s throat was just a tad sore the next morning, she thought her scabby little brother was right, that it was the result of practicing Tarzan yells on the garage roof. It was only later, on a still October night, that the truth of the Fanno effect came to me. Steeped in school gloom and romantic agonies more akin to Poe than Thoreau, I snuck out my bedroom window after everyone had gone to sleep and crept down to the creek.
What had been pleasurable in August was deliberate masochism in October. I waded out to the deepest point, where the water reached almost to my knees. The swift ache of the cold was an exquisite expression of my internal agony. Penitent and stricken, I reached for deeper flagellation. I sat down. Ice almost to the armpits. The pain was almost sharp enough. No one knew how I suffered, no one recognized the depths of my rage and sorrow. I could die there of exposure, or drown by an act of sheer will.
I eased down onto my back. The water was so cold I barely felt the rocks biting into my spine. They would find my corpse in the first light of dawn with a water veil sliding over me. The beauty of the image was so touching that I began to sob harshly. Locating a convenient rock near my left ear, I wiggled until I could rest my head on it. This had the marvelous effect of keeping my whole head and face submerged in the rushing stream, with only my nose sticking out.
Thinking to improve the aesthetic impact on those who would discover my tragic corpse, I stretched my arms out to symbolize how I had been crucified by the unjust pressures of society. This had the unfortunate effect of leaving my left hand out of the water, flopped on the clay bank. No matter how I rearranged myself the stream was not wide enough at that point to do the job. Redesigning the image, I tried clasping my hands on my chest as if in prayer. They stuck up and formed an oddly phosphorescent V in the water. I was just wondering whether this was a desirable effect when I was interrupted. What felt like a crawdad had climbed into the gaping cuff of my blue jeans and scrabbled up my bony shin.
I yelped and leaped up and out, stamping and dancing wildly to shed the invisible interloper on the creek bank. The wind touched me and I set off trotting, squelching and squishing, dripping, chattering, and shivering ecstatically all the way home. I snuck back in through the window of my bedroom, shed my sodden clothes, jumped into a hot shower, and then put on flannel pajamas. I slept immediately.
In the morning I woke with a raw throat and a gravelly voice, pitched a full octave lower than normal. My eyes were sunken and burning with dark intensity. My mind raced with furious precision. I twitched with excess energy. I avoided speaking within range of my mother’s hearing to prevent being trapped at home. I popped a decongestant to keep my nose from dripping constantly, boarded the school bus, and immediately started ranting at the Jehovah’s Witness in the window seat. She had often helped me with French verb declensions and, unlike certain creationists in my biology class, she never pushed her religion on anybody. Still, the molten Truth erupted from me. “Only the weak and gutless need a cotton candy religion to disguise the volcanic wonder of the universe!” I roared.
My voice was spectacular, as if a monster was trapped in my chest and roaring nastily. The raspy power of it was so enchanting that I kept talking just to hear it, to play with it. The Jehovah’s Witness stared at me suspiciously but refused to argue. I was usually sullen and quiet.
In English class I was belligerently witty, spouting crassly erudite commentaries on Mr. J.’s lecture, spontaneously crafting adaptations of jokes instantly recalled from years of close reading of Reader’s Digest. The entire room wobbled with laughter until Mr. J. sent me to the principal’s office. The principal’s secretary took one look at me and sent me to the nurse, who determined I had a temperature of 102 degrees. Even as my mother picked me up, took me home, and tucked me into bed, I knew that Fanno Creek had unleashed me from the gray realm of normalcy. I had tapped the furnace of my own power.
When talking about the Fanno experience in these decades since, I’ve been guilty of saying, “When I had to give a speech or an oral presentation in school I used to lie full length and fully clothed in a polluted stream named Fanno Creek until I couldn’t stand the cold any longer and then I’d jump up and run home wet. And in the morning I’d have the kind of sore throat that lowered the pitch of my voice by an octave, and a degree or two of fever—just enough to give me some flash, a competitive edge.”
