Seeing Things, page 15
I lowered the bed to stare at the ceiling, now covered with a constellation of purple flowers. “Go away,” I said. But if anything, more flowers bloomed.
No wonder I’d botched everything. I was nuts. Crazy nuts. Mixed nuts. Spiced nuts. I promised myself to talk to a psychiatrist when I got back to Ouray. Surely they had a pill for people who grew flowers on the ceilings, fell down imaginary mountainsides, and carried on conversations with literary characters.
The bigger the pill, the better.
HUCK SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON the floor by the bed, his shoulders rounded, his head bent low. He traced the shape of an oak leaf in the rug. “I sure miss that hound of yourn’s.”
“The lady of this house isn’t crazy about dogs,” I said. “Bee made her nervous. And to be fair, Bee did rip the skirt off her sofa. A very expensive sofa.”
He met my gaze. “I heard your humbug talky-talk with her, all polite as pie. All I can say is ladies is ladies, and you got to make allowances, but yourn dog was a sockdolager.”
“A sockdolager? Is that a good thing?”
“If I’d a-wanted a dog, there warn’t one better.” He drew deep furrows in the rug. “That is, if I’d a-wanted one, which I don’t.”
“There’s no better companion than a dog if it’s approval you’re looking for. Of course, they can be a lot of trouble too. Bee nearly eats me out of house and home.”
“That ain’t no matter, not if a hound will eat catfish.”
I watched Huck rub away the furrows like swiping writing in clear sand. “I couldn’t help noticing that you touched Bee and she responded.”
“Geewhillikins, I ’bout swallowed my tongue when she showed her belly. I warn’t sure at all if I should touch her. But then I put a hard think on it. I can touch this here rug, and I can feel the coolness of the grass through my pants at the park. But I ain’t never touched nothing breathing—at least not that I can tell.”
“Huck, is this your first time out of the story? Do you mean to tell me you’ve never visited anyone before me?”
“No ma’am, I ain’t never been out of the story a-fore, although I’d like to light out for the territory. There’s injuns out there, and space for a body to do as he pleases. But I always end up where I started, back with the Widow Douglas, trying my best to be respectable.”
“Let me get this straight. As far as you know, you’re always living the story. You run away to Jackson Island, find Jim, float down the river, come across con men and pirates, but you have never ever stepped out of the story to explore the real world? If I was pulled out of my world to visit another, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be as calm as you.”
“Afeard of you? You’re a gentle lady, ‘wellborn’ as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a woman as it is in a horse. Besides, I could shinny through the dark and you’d never find me nohow.”
“That’s all well and good, but how did you get here, Huck? Did you walk into a wardrobe? Drink a mysterious brew? Eat a poisoned apple?”
“I reckoned it was you who called me out with the magic of a hair-ball oracle or some such thing. Tom would know. He reads books about magical and romantical things all the time.”
“If I called you, I don’t know what I did, but I’m awfully glad you came. At the very least, you’ve made a difficult time quite interesting. Beyond that, you’ve filled an old woman’s life with wonderment and a breathless expectation that anything’s possible.” I swung my feet over the bed. “Huck, you must tell me if I’m asking too much, but I would very much like to touch your shirt. That may seem like an odd request, but I haven’t seen a homespun shirt since I was a young girl in Tennessee.”
Huck drew his hands into his lap. “After I touched the hound, I had a long think about this. Do you suppose there’s rules about what a body should do in t’nother world? It pulls on me pretty tight that I could end up in an awful peck of trouble.”
“I would never hurt you. You believe that, don’t you?”
He stood and paced the length of the bed. “I touched a rattlesnake skin once and that fetched me some powerful bad luck.”
“Look at me, Huck. I’m not a rattlesnake; I’m a grandmother. And I wouldn’t be touching your skin. Quite frankly I’m not sure I should do that either, but I would very much like to touch your shirt. My pa wore a homespun shirt when we read in front of the fire. I spent many nights sitting on his lap, leaning into his chest, feeling the pebbliness of his shirt against my cheek. He read us Bible stories that puzzled me something awful back then. Of course, Evelyn felt all superior whenever I asked a question, but Pa didn’t mind.
“He read about a talking donkey, a woman turned into a pillar of salt, and a Levite who chopped his concubine into twelve pieces. Pa would never let me read a story like that from the library, but there it was, right in the Bible. He said some stories are meant to teach us what not to do.”
Huck yawned and stretched. “Aunt Peggy only told me about loaves and fishes, and I knowed plenty about fish already.”
I swallowed hard. “What do you think, Huck? Should we chance it?”
He raised his arm to me, cocked at the elbow. I reached out like he was a snake until my finger lit on his cuff. His eyes opened wide.
“Do you feel that?” I asked.
“Yup. Do you?”
I traced small circles on the fabric. Saddle leather. Wet wool. Tobacco. Pa. “Oh my.”
Huck withdrew his arm like he’d touched a hot iron.
I reached for him. “No, don’t.”
“Your eyes went somewheres else. I seen mesmerizers and phrenologists do that. Gave me the willies, it did.”
“I can’t hypnotize you, Huck. But when I touched your sleeve, I smelled my pa.” I reached out my hand. “Please, may I touch your shirt again?”
“This ain’t no deviltry, is it?”
Was it? Surely not! “I’m a good Christian woman. I don’t give the devil any credit for all that God the Father delivers through his beloved Son.”
He lifted his arm again. I rubbed the fabric between my fingers. And then Huck did the most surprising thing of all. He rested his fingers, as light as a sparrow, on my hand. I felt the calloused tips of his fingers and the pulse of blood under his skin. He pulled away and jumped up.
Huck clutched his shirt over his heart and scooted away. “My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I reckon we tested prefore-ordestination as best as we ought.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I ain’t afeard, not worth bothring about. But I’d druther not be a tangle-headed fool. I reckon it’s best I skedaddle.” And he rose and walked to the patio door. With his hand on the knob, his shoulders drooped. “I’m all tuckered out.”
“You can sleep in the chair like you did before.”
“I won’t a-turn in. Me and Jim a-going to boom along down the river tonight. I’ll see the moon go off watch. That’s the splendist sight, unless a storm’s a-brewing.”
He opened the door.
“Huck! Thanks for . . . well, thanks for sharing your time with me.”
“Talking donkeys? I’m gonna have to get me one of them Bibles you have a fondness for.”
Chapter 24
“Okay, Bats, the timer’s set,” announced Ruth. “Who’s first?”
“Praise the Lord, all’s stable for me,” Ruby said.
“Me, too,” added Ruth. “Just counting down the days until the great-grandkids come. Betty?”
She sniffed loudly. She did everything loudly. “I suppose you want to hear about my latest hallucination?”
I set my coffee cup down and held my trembling hands in my lap. “Hallucinations?”
“Did Cary Grant show up at the foot of your bed again?” Ruby asked, breathy and eager.
“That’s a little pedestrian, Ruby. I’m on to smaller things.”
“Don’t toy with us, Betty,” Margie said.
“If you insist.” She wagged her fork at Margie. “You know I listen to Fox News every morning. Yesterday, during my second cup of coffee, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, and clowns certainly never came to mind—but there they were. Very strange.”
“Clowns? You had clowns in your kitchen? How many?”
“I never thought to count them, but at least half a dozen of them, right on my table. They stood no more than five or six inches tall, moved just like people . . . or clowns. Some sat at a picnic table, eating a dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Teeny-tiny cobs of corn, stripped down to the husks. One clown sat in front of a mirror—the kind movie stars use, you know, with all the lights—touching up his makeup. Another scratched his head under a purple wig. A clown wearing oversized shoes smoked a cigarette, which didn’t seem very funny to me at all.”
I thought of Huck’s pipe. “Could you smell the cigarette?”
“Oh no, I didn’t smell a thing. But my schnozz doesn’t work too well anyway, not since I had chemotherapy a few years back.”
Margie said, “This is your craziest hallucination yet. Had you been thinking about clowns?”
“I said I hadn’t. Don’t you listen? I’ve never even been to a circus my whole life, and if I had, I would have gone for popcorn when the clowns showed up. Back when the kids were small, I saw clowns on The Ed Sullivan Show. All that falling and hitting didn’t sit well with me.”
Ruby pounded the table. “Your doctor said every memory is stored away just waiting for a chance to pop out. I’ll wager cold, hard cash that your parents took you to a circus when you were too young to remember.”
Ruth laid her hand over mine. “Birdie, you look white as a ghost. You don’t have to worry. Betty isn’t crazy. She’s experiencing Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Some folks who’ve lost their sight have vivid hallucinations. Betty’s the lucky one of us. She’s had Cary Grant come to call.”
“Stepped straight out of To Catch a Thief. I must have watched that movie a hundred times after he showed up, but he never came back. Now I’m seeing miniature clowns on my breakfast table. What kind of trade-off is that?”
My heart raced so that I had to gulp air to talk. “And this is perfectly normal?”
Betty leaned closer. I eased away as much as I dared. “The doctor,” she said, “when I finally got the nerve to ask him, told me the brain gets tired of blank spots, or so they think.” Her voice got low as to add to the mystery. “The brain pulls pictures out of the deep coves of the mind. But honestly, nobody’s sure how the mind really works.”
Ding!
“Ignore the timer,” Ruth said. “This is fascinating. Betty, tell Birdie about the stone wall.”
I laid my fork down.
“Most of the things I see are quite pleasant. Flowers where no flowers have business growing. Children playing in the yard. And Cary Grant. For obvious reasons, Cary’s my favorite. But every once in a while, a stone wall appears. The stones fit so closely together, there’s no need for mortar. A real craftsman built the wall, that’s for sure. Moss covers the rocks, so if I’ve ever seen a wall like that, it wasn’t in Colorado.”
“Betty, tell her about the time you went to the zoo,” prompted Ruby.
“The wall never fails to show up at the most inappropriate times. The first time it happened, I was visiting the zoo with my son’s family. We were on the way to the elephants, munching on cotton candy as we walked. All of a sudden, the stone wall appeared.”
Ruby said, “Tell her how tall it was.”
“Do you want to tell this story?”
“You leave out the interesting details.”
“Fine. The wall was about chest high, so I stopped cold. My family kept walking. All of a sudden I was on one side of the wall and they were on the other. I looked up and down the wall. No gate anywhere. I knew the wall wasn’t real, even though the stones looked as solid as any I’d ever seen. My son returned to find me gaping at nothing. I struggled over what to tell him. I didn’t know a thing about Charles Bonnet Syndrome. I thought the only reasonable thing a woman in my situation could think: I was losing my mind. And I certainly wasn’t going to announce that I’d lost my marbles at the zoo, of all places. Next thing I knew, I’d be living with the penguins.”
“It was wide too, wasn’t it?”
“That wall reached the full width of the walkway. Everything in me said to climb over it to rejoin my family. Wouldn’t that have been a pretty picture? Somehow, I knew better. I looked in my son’s eyes and walked toward him. I fully expected to crash into the stones, but I didn’t. When the wall appears now, I can’t help but take a moment to admire its workmanship, enjoy the flecks of color in the stones, admire the cushiony softness of the moss. I welcome its arrival. It’s the clearest thing I see, except for the flowers and the clowns.”
“And Cary Grant.”
“His eyes were the color of caramels, not the kind you buy in the bag, the kind you get at the candy store—rich and buttery.”
“Cary brings out the poet in you, Betty.”
Charles Bonnet Syndrome? My hallucinations had a name, a French name. I wished I’d taken French in high school like Evelyn. I took German, but still my heart said, Frohe Weihnachter—the only celebratory phrase I remembered. Knowing my brain caused the visions made the moment as happy as any Christmas I’d remembered.
“Did Cary speak to you?” I asked.
“Oh no, the doctor spoke quite adamantly about that. The hallucinations do not talk, and I was to report to him if they ever did. That’s an entirely different part of the brain. And if you don’t think I longed to hear something out of Cary’s mouth, especially with Harry snoring like a chain saw right next to me, you girls are older than I thought. As a matter of fact, Cary looked completely self-absorbed, as if thinking about a pleasant memory, maybe something about Audrey Hepburn. They were gorgeous together in Charade. I love that movie.”
Ruby said, “If he was thinking about anyone, it was Deborah Kerr from An Affair to Remember. Now they had an explosive chemistry. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.”
“I Was a Male War Bride was on TCM the other night,” Ruth added. “Maybe Cary was thinking about how to get out of his garter belt.”
The ladies around the table laughed. My stomach soured, and I pushed Margie’s lemon pudding away. If Josie or Emory had seen me refuse a dessert, one of them surely would have called 9-1-1. The Bats jabbered on about Cary Grant movies. I squirmed, my thoughts a jumble.
One speculation after another bounced around my cranium. Maybe Huck’s appearances weren’t Charles Bonnet Syndrome after all. Maybe another syndrome, something equally benign, allowed me to talk to and touch Huck. Besides, I’d known more than one doctor who talked out of the top of his head. Think of all the recent medical discoveries, especially involving the brain. Perhaps Betty’s doctor was behind in his reading. Better still, maybe I’d dreamed Huck’s visits. I’d heard that anesthesia remained in a body long after surgery. Surely something as sedative as anesthesia would affect dreams.
Who was I kidding?
Huck and I shared a conversation—many conversations—and he touched the back of my hand with his fingertips. Life doesn’t get stranger than that.
Just for clarification, I asked Betty, “Are you absolutely, positively sure you didn’t hear one word from those clowns? Or a honking horn? A whoopee cushion? Laughing? Anything?”
“If I had, mum’s the word. I’m not looking for a short trip to the funny farm.”
THAT NIGHT I BEGGED off listening to the end of Huck Finn with Fletcher. He asked if I was feeling okay, and he seemed genuinely concerned, but my thoughts were too tangled to follow a story. He left me a plate of shu mai that I dumped in the trash. I heated a can of tofu soup that tasted like soggy cardboard, then I sat in the dark, hoping Huck would be too caught up in his adventures with Tom to bother with the likes of me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him. Far from it. He provided color where grayness reigned. I just didn’t want to explain him, especially not to myself, and that was getting tougher by the day.
Chapter 25
This grandmother’s heart swelled when Fletcher swung behind the truck’s steering wheel and brought the engine to life without gulping for air. He even waved off Lupe from directing him out of the garage. At the corner where we usually went straight to go to the Snappy Dragon, Fletcher flipped his turn signal on. “Might I suggest a diner in the Fremont District?” he offered. “They have the best hamburgers in Denver.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice.”
The spring afternoons had settled into a congenial pattern of sunshine and a playful breeze, so we chose to sit under a broad umbrella. I sat with my back to the sun. The breeze fluttered the hem of the umbrella. I closed my eyes and I was overlooking Ouray. The town looked toyish from the top of Box Canyon falls. And then a car drove by with the resonance of a drum.
The waitress brought hamburgers she assured us were organic and antibiotic-free. One less thing to worry about.
Beef as pure as the driven snow didn’t improve Fletcher’s table manners. He talked around a hunk of beef and whole wheat bun. “So, Grandma, what’s Huck been up to lately?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. I guess.”
I swirled a French fry in catsup. “Okay. I talked to him for an hour the other day.” I told Fletcher that Huck had never left his story before to meet with people in the real world. “I’m honored, but I don’t know why he chose me, although he says he didn’t. It all gets rather complicated.”
Fletcher waited for a motorcycle to pass. “He hasn’t tried to hurt you, has he?”
“Absolutely not. Far from it. He allowed me to touch his shirt the other night. It brought back such wonderful memories of my father.”
Fletcher lowered his hamburger to his plate and wiped his hands clean with three napkins. “Let me get this straight. You touched Huckleberry Finn.”
“Just his shirt,” I said with a flip of a hand, but my heart was beating wildly. “And I only touched him once.” I pushed my plate away. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”
