Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  I’ve always heard said that a person is never in doubt if they’ve suffered a bone fracture. I am in doubt, so I reason that my leg can’t be broken. Most probably I’ve twisted something. I even manage to take the lift up and ski back down again before the pain puts a stop to any more exertions for the rest of the day.

  I leave my boyfriend and take a bus back to the hotel, trudging up the last bit of icy road with my rented skis in afternoon sunshine. Lying in bed at the hotel, I google around to find out what to do about my knee. If it swells like a balloon, it says somewhere, seek immediate medical care. I look at my knee. Sure, it’s swollen, but like a balloon? A balloon is big, and my knee is not that big.

  By evening I’m unable to walk. I use a chair for support to get to the bathroom. The next morning, we take a taxi to the local urgent care center, though the place is only a quarter of a mile from the hotel. It feels like stepping into a scene from a Broadway musical, a small clinic manned by four or five doctors in pale green medical suits. They put me in a wheelchair and roll me around the shiny linoleum floor of the pristine white room. X-rays are taken, it’s like a dance, I’m lifted and placed on a gurney, three doctors stand and study the screen, two doctors bend over me and say: Something in your knee is broken. They point at the X-rays. Here. Your leg needs to be in a full cast. A full cast? But I’m going to Texas, I tell them. You’re not going to Texas, they tell me. We’re putting you in a cast. From the groin down. With the edge of his hand, the doctor indicates exactly where the cast will start. There’s no getting around the fact that I need an operation, they say, but the operation will be done in my homeland. For the time being, they’re going to give me what they call an open cast. Your knee is like a balloon, they say, and drain a quart of blood off it.

  The scene continues, they roll the gurney into another room where the cast man is already waiting with long strips of plaster gauze draped over his wrist, all very elegant, alluring almost. He swivels around, the strips trail momentarily in the air like the ribbons of girl gymnasts at the Olympic Games, and a young doctor says: Lift your backside. He puts a pair of white elastic pants on me.

  Stylish, I say. Prada, he says with a wink. He hands me a pair of grass-green crutches with the clinic’s logo on them. They look sporty. They look like ski poles.

  •

  I’m transported home on a medical flight and admitted to the Rigshospitalet. My room is on the sixteenth floor. I lie there and watch a seagull as it sits on the railing outside the window looking in at me. The city is dressed in snow. I lie and wait for my operation. After three days, a doctor comes in, a surgeon, and says he would advise against surgery, but that’s up to me. If it was my knee I wouldn’t, he says. I decide against it and am put back in a cast, this time a closed one, from the groin down.

  The house we live in is a tall, narrow townhouse with one room on each floor. Before they let me go home, they send me up and down the hospital stairs on crutches to practice. People hurry past me. I clutch the banister with one hand, crutch in the other, and heave myself upwards. Not bad, says the physio. A nurse hands me my belongings in a carrier bag, they need my bed and have already made it ready for someone new. I take the elevator down.

  For six weeks, I lie in my room on the third floor of the house. Six weeks that vanish into oblivion. My memory is a black hole. If I can’t move, I can’t think. All sense of time dissolves, the days are the same. Up and down, up and down to the bathroom. Making tea on the floor below and carrying the cup back upstairs with me takes an hour. By the time I get there, the tea is tepid. I drink it anyway. And then I need the bathroom. Such are my days.

  I lie and think about Texas. I think about my dad’s window. They said that when the cast comes off my leg will be thin. You need to be prepared, it’ll be like learning to walk again, they told me. The surgeon said it could take two years before I no longer have to think about it. Two years. It seems so very abstract. I try to feel my leg inside the cast. I try to flex the muscles. Is it thin? I don’t think so. I imagine biking home from the hospital when the cast comes off.

  •

  We’re in mid-March when the cast is finally removed. The cast man splits it open like a hot-dog bun with a tiny circular saw. My leg is unrecognizable, thin and white as a piece of chalk, and oddly hirsute. Is it really mine? It embarrasses me. It looks like a dream Kafka might have had, I feel an immediate urge to cover it up, and lift it carefully off the gurney to put my pants on, but the leg is as stiff as it was when the cast was still on. It’s impossible to bend. Impossible in every respect. It feels like someone else’s. When eventually I manage to wriggle into my pants, the cast man hands me my green crutches and says: You know how to use them.

  I’m put through a regimen reminiscent of what you see in movies when the hero is told he or she will never walk again. Three mornings a week, before the birds are up, I’m collected by a transportation service along with others in the same predicament whose casts have been removed from broken legs or feet in the city of Copenhagen. We’re driven to a place of exercise bikes and apparatuses to help us walk again. Squares of carpet, for instance. Seated on chairs to form a circle, we “polish the floor for the ambassador,” pretending that the mottled standard-issue linoleum floor is herringbone parquet we polish for some ambassador by drawing our squares of carpet back and forth with the feet of our damaged limbs.

  My schedule says three months of rehab, but my dad’s window is only a month away. After two weeks of floor polishing and other exercises I’ve managed to dispense with one crutch. Cautiously I ask the physio about interrupting my program so I can travel to Texas. I don’t want to inflict permanent damage on my leg. But my dad’s window is now. It’s hard to explain, I tell the physio. It has to do with his wife and his work. It’s those days, those exact days—or else maybe I’ll never see him again.

  Let’s see how you get on, she says.

  The week after, I dispense with the other crutch and have become a highly proficient polisher of the ambassador’s floor. I ask again if, with her approval, I might go ahead and book a flight.

  She thinks about it. As long as you don’t do anything crazy, she says after a moment.

  I tell her I’ll be visiting cemeteries with my old dad. He’s seventy-nine, I tell her.

  It sounds restful enough, she says. But only if you buy one of those folding walking sticks and promise to have it with you in your bag at all times. You can give it to your dad when you go home again.

  the distances. i always forget that America is no place for pedestrians. Most of it was built long after people stopped using their legs to get from A to B.

  Because of the uncertainty regarding my injury, I bought my ticket rather late. The price of a more direct connection turned out to be prohibitive, and I had to make do with a time-consuming route that went through LA. I allowed myself the luxury of booking a night at an airport hotel, so-called for a reason, or so I thought. Looking at it from home on Google Maps, it looked like the hotel was within walking distance of one of the arrivals hall’s two arms, which opened Christlike toward the city, but the arm I’ve chosen turns out to end abruptly at an unrelenting freeway. As the sky colors lilac and then red, I drag my wheelie suitcase behind me along the roadside as if walking a stubborn, box-shaped dog, until eventually the sun sinks away and everything is plunged into darkness.

  It’s ten o’clock by the time I reach the motel, only to discover that I’ve got my dates mixed up. The motel man looks up from his computer and tells me my room will be ready in the morning, but that he can offer me a double now, the only one left. A double room at triple the price.

  It has a view of the pool, he says through the opening in the glass, as if to entice me.

  I manage to get three hours of sleep, in a huge bed with the luxurious view of a swimming pool full of dead leaves, before a shuttle service picks me up and drives me back to the airport.

  •

  My thin leg is already exhausted by the time the plane
touches down, a Wednesday morning in April, at the airport outside Austin. The man behind the counter of the car rental firm wants to give me a different car from the one I’ve ordered. You need a bigger car, he says, and looks at me through drop-shaped glasses.

  Why?

  To be safe out there. On the highways.

  You mean I’m not safe in the one I’ve ordered?

  Everybody here has big cars, he says. It just makes them feel safer that way.

  I think I’ll stay with the compact model, I tell him. I’m from Europe.

  Oh, he says, disappointed, before handing me the keys to a four-door Hyundai with automatic transmission.

  i have never owned a car. In fact, it’s been eight years since I even drove one, but somehow among the tangle of roads and off-ramps I succeed in finding Route 183, which takes me south to Lockhart.

  The highway into my father’s hometown is identical to the highways leading into all other American towns. A billboard forest emblazoned with primary-color ads for gas stations, repair shops, fast-food chains, money lenders. I have the feeling of driving into a plastic toy town made by some restless giant. It looks like everything could be pulled down at a moment’s notice and assembled again somewhere else. Exxon, Expert Tire. Cash America Pawn. Everything is generic.

  What on the internet looked like a cozy inn a short stroll from the town square, reveals itself to be a shabby motel farther along the highway. A brown brick building blackened by soot, it comes into view immediately after an orange sign that says Whataburger. The guy who looks like he’s the owner, an Indian graying at the temples, comes out of his little booth through a glass door to receive me with an unassuming dignity that would suggest that this miserable peat-colored hovel could be the Taj Mahal. The filthy motel sign, the noise from Route 183, it’s all an illusion. I’ve booked you the best room, he says, and shows me to one where only the windows stand between me and the traffic.

  I ask if he might have a room at the back instead.

  This one has a king-size bed, he says. His voice is mild and patient, he has nothing but time. Endless days and nights in this sad outpost must have made him immune; he sees only the size of the bed and its practical proximity to US 183. You won’t like it as much as this one, he says of the other room he can offer.

  Nevertheless, he takes me around to the other side of the building to look. He shows me a room at the end of the walkway, looking out on some scorched grass and a low, gray building that looks like a prefab. Saplings poke up from the grass. Some pick-up trucks are parked on the gravel, and there’s a sign: Chisholm Trail bbq. It’s perfect, I tell him.

  on my way from the airport I stopped by a shopping mall and bought a pay-as-you-go sim for my phone. Now I’m wandering around the dusty road behind the motel with my phone held aloft as if I were trying to invoke the ancient gods. I might as well be. Back in my room I use the motel’s landline to call the phone companies my grandmother once bought shares in. An hour or two goes by while I consult various operators. Eventually I get hold of someone who can tell me why the sim I just purchased at no small expense doesn’t work. He asks me where I am. I tell him I’m in Lockhart. How do you spell that, he wants to know. I spell it for him. Where is that? Thirty miles south of Austin, on the way to San Antonio.

  A silence ensues. I assume him to be searching his system for Lockhart. There are rustling sounds at the other end. He tells me Lockhart doesn’t exist. What do you mean, doesn’t exist? I look out of the window. It seems real enough. Google tells me its population is 13,232. Well, ma’am, the place you are at is not recognized as a place by our system, he says. The network will work in other places, but not in “Lockhart.” He handles the name like it was a boiling hot egg. Sorry for your inconvenience.

  A low rumble, as if I lay in the belly of a whale. But apart from the traffic on the other side, the place is almost quiet. The door out onto the walkway is ajar, and the sound of crickets and birds fills the room, a chirping carpet of sound. I flop back onto the bed, feeling a strange sense of relief at being in a place that does not exist. I watch the sky turn red through the crack of the door. All my ideas slip into background, until only my senses remain. I allow my thoughts to wander. Here I will do nothing but see, hear, and feel. Note down my impressions before they vanish into the ether.

  Questions follow me into sleep, brought with me from home. Will the soil take me as its own, will the wild sky take me as its child? Somewhere beyond sleep, I faintly register the slamming of car doors, someone moving about in the next room. By the time I wake up they are gone again. I sleep best in strange beds.

  with trepidation i get in behind the wheel of the white Hyundai and drive into town along the quiet back road. An ordinary road with knotted evergreen oaks and flat lawns in front of wooden houses painted pale yellow, bright green, milk white, rust red. Each house has a covered porch where those who lived there would once have sat in rocking chairs, sipped iced tea, and perhaps passed time the Grandma Clark way, sewing a quilt, but which now, with the advent of air-conditioning, have become a place for cardboard boxes and withered leaves. The spindly frame of a children’s swing, like a rusty insect on a lawn. A rowboat under a blue tarp. Sleepy front lawns. Beware of the dog.

  A cluster of towers comes into view behind the trees. The square in Lockhart has always looked like something out of a Western, not an open place like any town square back home, but a quadrangle edged by storefronts with generous overhangs and in the middle, like some fairy-tale castle, the county courthouse. When I was little, I imagined such a square to contain all that a heart could desire. A person could go to church on its north side, get drunk on its south side, and when they had run out of money on the east side, they could rob my grandfather’s bank on the west.

  I park under a tree and an oddly flattened figure follows me out into the sun. Is that really me? I stand for some time and study the short-legged human shape with its mop of hair. My shadow seems sharper here on this foreign sidewalk.

  The day is already hot. Not a leaf moves, not a living soul. Apart from me and my shadow there’s nobody around. I feel like the guy in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo who travels to his ancestral town in search of his father and finds it to be populated by ghosts …

  The sun follows my orbit around the courthouse, the light so bright I must narrow my eyes to see: a closed barbershop, a pastel-colored drugstore that besides medicine also sells handbags and shawls, three rusting horses galloping across a turquoise storefront beneath a sign saying Ranch Style.

  But there must be something living here, inside the stores if nowhere else. The store from which my grandfather sold his saddles and gunpowder and fishing rods has been taken over by an insurance broker. I shield my eyes from the glare. Through the window, I see not the modern office with its thick carpeting and wilting potted plants, but a high-ceilinged room with pillars of dark wood and sawdust strewn over the floor. Behind the counter stands a man wearing a leather apron. I grasp the door handle, at long last to greet Poppa, hoping that he will show me the white saddle he once made for Buffalo Bill, but the door is locked.

  In the store next door, his son, my dad’s Uncle Gene, had a barbershop. I peer in, but find no one peering back. Besides their hair, women didn’t interest him.

  And there, on the west side of the square, exactly opposite the courthouse entrance, is my grandfather’s bank, First Lockhart National Bank, familiar to me from my dad’s pale blue checks, it too closed. The original building was pulled down in the 1960s and replaced by a more modern structure in brown marble with white columns. I put my ear to the smooth, thick wall, but it’s too smooth, too thick, and my grandfather was so quiet …

  In one of the streets behind the square, two armchairs backed up against a wall stare out at the road. On one corner is a closed repair shop, on the other a faded mural advertising Vogel’s Frigidaire. Rust and wind. Behind a dusty window a white Hammond organ has been put on display, a sign: Available for event leasing. Behind the orga
n, row after row of empty chairs.

  A sign tells me that the library, a churchlike building in red brick with a dome in the middle next to Poppa’s store, is the oldest operating library in the state of Texas. Its founder, a community physician who donated the building to the town, shares his name with my brother, Eugene Clark. I seek company among the books. The reading room is cool and dim, the sun falling inside in sections of color through a mosaic in the domed roof, shafts of dreamy light. In one corner, a spiral staircase leads up onto a balcony. Dust descends almost immeasurably slowly through the air. A sickly sweet smell of old books. I gather an armful on local Texas history and sit down at a long mahogany table. Across from me, a girl of about fourteen years old with a headful of braided hair and a pair of purple headphones on sits ensconced behind a laptop, the only person here besides me and the librarian.

  I skim through a book claiming that there are fossilized dinosaur tracks out by the Paluxy River, a claim supported by a photograph of a farmer selling dino footprints held together with barrel hoops.

  In the next book, a picture of a boy in a soapbox cart pulled by two turkeys.

  The girl at the laptop, apparently chatting with someone, seems to have a cold. Every time she sniffs, the vaulted room amplifies the sound into tremendous, echoing music. A Gregorian sniff, a sniff concerto. With her headphones on, she herself gets no joy from this performance, but notices me smiling and smiles back. I gesture to her. Allergies? She pulls the phones away from her ears and nods. I whisper and say that if I had some tissues she could have one. No need, she says. A waste of time, it comes right back. She puts the phones back on and sniffs again.