Stranger Son

by Jim Nelson

  "He is," Ruby reported. They were speaking of Kyle in the third-person as he lay watching. "He took his meds at noon, right before I went out. No pain meds, though."

  "They're there if you need them," Alice said to Kyle off-handedly. "How's the leg doing today?"

  "Pain up and down," he said. "My foot feels on fire."

  "That's the nerves repairing themselves," she said. To him, she asked, "And your new friend?"

  "Alive and kicking." He patted the bag under the blankets. "Henry, go on upstairs."

  Henry, who had been lying across the floor watching television, rose and switched off the set.

  "Don't come down until I say you can," he called to Henry as he climbed the steps.

  Once they heard Henry's bedroom door close, Alice pulled back the blankets and raised Kyle's gown. Ruby stood behind Alice watching over her shoulder.

  The middle of Kyle's body was a web-work of stitches and scars covered haphazardly with blood-soiled bandages. His bag held feces and was ballooned with gas. As with that morning, Alice emptied the bag into a pan. The familiar odor filled the room. Ruby took the full pan from Alice and emptied it in the bathroom. When she returned, Alice had finished clipping the end of the bag closed.

  "Tomorrow, you'll do it," Alice told her.

  Alice turned to changing Kyle's bandages. Using a pair of surgical scissors on the table, she cut eight clean stubs of tape from a roll. She stuck the tape to the bed railing, one after the other, so they were ready to use when she needed them.

  Kyle knew what was next. He lay back gritting his teeth, each hand braced on the bed railings. Alice peeled off the taped-up bandages to reveal the extent of the damage to Kyle's leg and abdomen. Kyle's body shivered and shook as she worked. Gashes like volcanic fissures revealed bloody meat beneath the surface of his skin. Surgical scars bound with hairy stitches ran like train tracks. It looked a sloppy job to Ruby's untrained eye, but she guessed the surgeons were doing the best they could, considering the damage to Kyle's body.

  "Gauze here," she heard Alice say to her. "Tape and press down—he's going to feel that," she heard Alice say, again, with Kyle in the third-person. "This is why I prep the tape first. Get the gauze into the wound—you have to press it down into the wound. It's no good if it's only lying on the surface—get it in there—" She heard Kyle groan. She saw the bed rails rattle as his oversized hands spasmed. "And close it down with the tape."

  Ruby, woozy and breathing lightly, nodded with each instruction from Alice.

  From a package Ruby mistook as a bulk bag of tampons, Alice removed cottony pads individually sealed in plastic. She laid the large rectangular pads over the tape and gauze she'd just applied to the bullet wounds. The pads created another layer over the thinner bandages taped in place.

  "Got that?" Ruby heard Alice say when she finalized with the pads.

  "Yes," Ruby murmured. She stepped back and discovered she was not breathing well. "That wasn't so bad."

  "We're not done," Alice said. "Part two awaits."

  With Alice supporting him as best she could manage, Kyle rolled on his left side with great groans and a sailor's dictionary of swearing. Ruby stood helpless, watching. His lungs made his back expand and deflate. His cheeks billowed and his mustache fanned out, each breath an indicator of a new excruciation he was experiencing.

  His backside was now exposed. Ruby realized with horror another set of wounds populated the rear of his right leg and his buttocks.

  Aghast, Ruby said, "Just how many times were you shot?"

  "Once," Alice said calmly.

  As Alice removed the padding, Ruby said, "These look worse."

  "They are worse," Alice said matter-of-factly. "The bullet fragments were spiraling when they exited his rear. Each took a big bite of muscle with them." She added, "Some of those wounds in the front were enlarged by the surgeons to remove the bullet fragments that didn't exit. Some embedded in his intestine, which is why he's wearing the bag." She pointed down his backside. "These wounds, though, these are exactly how the gunshot ripped him up. That's why Kyle doesn't like the movies. Isn't that right?"

  He grunted, hands quivering on the far bed rail.

  "One bullet did all this," Alice said.

  With the pads and gauze removed from his buttocks, Ruby's eyes engorged. The wounds here were much deeper than those on the front. The faint-headedness returned as Alice pulled bloody lumps of cotton out from cavities within his cheeks oozing ichor. With each one came a fresh odor she'd not noted before in the room, the stench of raw meat.

  Alice removed the largest bandage last. Ruby could see bone deep in the rear of the leg wound. She realized she could put two of her fingers all the way in, all the way to the hilt. Chunks of Kyle's body had been ripped loose by the fragment.

  Ruby tottered backwards, one step, then another. She reached out wildly for the wall. Alice said something about gauze and then called out something about watching yourself. The darkness emerged from within. It grew without bounds.

  Thirty-nine

  Ruby came to with a pungent aroma filling her head. She snapped her head back and shook her face as though surfacing from a deep, terrible dream.

  "Can you hear me?" Alice said into her face.

  Ruby pushed away the smelling salts. "Yes." The flush of embarrassment arrived.

  Alice helped Ruby to her feet. "I need to finish with Kyle now," she snapped, as though Ruby's fainting spell was an inconvenience. "Go lie down in the other room."

  Ruby slunk off feeling the burn of failure. Who was she kidding? When she told Dr. Benford of her plan to be his nurse, she'd taken the role lightly, a job for pretty young things who handed important-looking doctors patient files and medical charts. She only wanted to be with Henry—to make sure he was cared for—and nothing more. She came to Angels Camp for Henry. In the blink of an eye, it became something more.

  She sat at the kitchen table with her face in her hands. She felt clammy all over. Her pulse was weak, although she could feel the blood thumping in the side of her neck. She pressed her hands against her nape. Her body felt cold in some spots, as though there was no circulation to those regions. In other spots, she felt feverish.

  She'd failed when it came to caring for Kyle. What made her think she could care for Henry? She'd minimized nursing, was she also minimizing raising a teenager?

  Wait—had she suffered another pons mal? She ran a finger along her gums. Usually when she passed out from pons mal, she coughed up a little blood. Usually she came to shaking with mild tremors, like an epileptic. None of that was present this time. No, she'd failed for real. The first sight of blood had sent her into a Scarlet O'Hara fainting spell.

  Get your head in the game, Cynthia would have said. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. God, you always are feeling sorry for yourself. Cynthia bore a child and died. She could have taken the easy way out. Instead, she muscled through her truncated life to the very end. Ruby had cheated. That quack doctor in Calistoga had frozen the gemmelius within her, collected the money, and left without even a farewell or Good luck.

  Quit feeling sorry for yourself.

  Alice pushed through the swinging door separating the den from the kitchen. She strode across the linoleum removing her translucent medical gloves one finger at a time. Ruby waited for smugness. She waited for Alice to taunt her from on high.

  "He's all patched up." Ruby could feel the accusations in every syllable Alice said. "He asked me to apologize to you."

  "To me? For what?"

  "He feels he should have warned you," Alice said. "I told him you're a nurse. You're supposed to be ready for it."

  "I'm sorry what happened in there."

  Alice dropped down into the chair across the table. "My number one concern is Kyle's health and well-being. I have to know when I leave here that you are capable of taking care of him. Are you?"

  Get your head in the game. "Yes," she said, hoping it sounded as strong as Cynthia would have said it.

&nbs
p; "When we do this tomorrow, will you give me a repeat performance?"

  "No," Ruby said.

  Alice studied Ruby for a long moment. Her jowls shifted slightly as various thoughts crossed her mind.

  "When's the last time you ate?"

  "Oh, I'm not hungry," Ruby said, then realized her mistake. Alice didn't take to being blown off. She's more like Cynthia than I am. "I don't remember."

  "All right," Alice said with an exaggerated sigh. "Let's get some food into you."

  Ruby told her about the spaghetti. Alice brought the container from the refrigerator and a fork. Ruby ate it cold. She had forgotten to feed it to Henry as a snack.

  "You cannot do this to yourself again." Alice stood over her as though witnessing the meal for later testimony. "You could spend every waking moment taking care of him. There's always more to do. You cannot forget about yourself."

  "I don't see how you do it," she said to Alice. "I got some cleaning done today while he was sleeping, but you're right. I could spend all day emptying his bottles and checking his pills and helping him with the bed—"

  "You don't have to tend to his every need," Alice said. "He's a grown man. He can handle himself. He'll call you if he needs help."

  "He's not the kind of man to call for help," Ruby said. "He'll hold it in as long as possible."

  "Kyle is exactly that kind of man," Alice said. "And he needs to learn to ask for help. You fussing over him constantly gives him an excuse not to ask for it."

  Her fork was embedded in a knot of cold noodles and red sauce. Alice was giving her a crash course in nursing. She thought nursing was about medicines and bandages and changing bedpans. Apparently, nursing was also about taking care of one's self.

  "And another thing," Alice said. "I've seen you fuss over the boy. Don't coddle him. You won't win him over that way."

  Ruby said softly, "Something's wrong with him."

  "I know," Alice said, softening. "We all know it."

  "I just want to help him."

  "You can't," Alice said. "He needs his mother. You're not her."

  Forty

  She understood why Kyle referred to it as a coffin freezer the moment she found it behind the house. The all-steel appliance was long and low, like a surgery table, with its white enamel surface scratched and banged-up from years of wear and weather. Kyle had built a small roof over it to protect its top from the elements. She unlocked it with the key he'd given her. The top surface of the freezer swung up, like popping the hood of a car. Cold smoke billowed out into the hot day. As promised, ochre rocks of organ meat were stacked without organization across the freezer compartment. It wasn't so much a coffin as a frost-coated sarcophagus.

  She wondered if the lock was to prevent theft or to keep raccoons out. The latter seemed likely, as she had seen quite a few of the clever ring-tailed bandits around the property during the evenings. The contents of the freezer were unappetizing, but she had to accept that Kyle's occupation had saved them hundreds of dollars in grocery bills. If Kyle and Henry could eat liver and kidney, so could she.

  The key—she held it in her palm before her. It wasn't to prevent theft from human or varmint. It was to keep children from hiding inside the freezer. She would return the key to Kyle and make sure he kept it on his ring, along with the key to the rifles stored beneath the bad she slept in.

  Across the way from the freezer stood the GMC Jimmy. Ruby did not notice the bullet hole the first time she'd driven the truck. Now she could not help but see it. It was in the center of the driver's side door, the diameter of a number two pencil. The ring of metal around the hole was bursting outwards. It was sharp around the edges, like the sharp edge of an opened can of beans, sharp enough to puncture her finger when she scraped it across the hole. She found no matching hole in the passenger's side seat or the windows. It appeared the gun had gone off from inside the truck.

  Army-green blankets covered the enclosed bed of the truck. She'd set the groceries on the blankets when she made her run to the supermarket. She'd assumed the blankets were protective covering. When she folded the blankets back, she discovered the tan factory-installed carpet was jet black and crusty. Kyle's blood was now a part of this truck.

  Forty-one

  Ruby was disenchanted to learn how quickly the three of them went through the groceries. The grocery cart of food she'd purchased on the first trip was depleted within four days, save for a smattering of canned and frozen goods she failed to incorporate with her meals. Her meals were too large. They were eating too much. She would have to reduce their portion sizes. She hated the idea of Henry going to bed hungry. She would reduce her portions so he could eat well.

  The next grocery bill was ninety dollars, which caused her to scold herself all the way home. The next was over a hundred. Prices in Angels Camp seemed a bit higher than she remembered in Southern California. She wondered if it was due to shipping costs, or some problem crossing a state line where no state line existed two years earlier. Every time she stood at the checkout counter, she braced herself for the credit card transaction being denied. The last working card continued to come through, and she made it home with fresh supplies each time.

  The kitchen lacked basic necessities. She had to buy flour and bulk sugar and all the little ingredients recipes called for, like baking soda and baking powder. She wanted to try her hand at making bread. Once she restocked the pantry, she told herself, and once she got the hang of cooking the organ meat, the grocery bills should come back down to earth.

  "What if we kept Alice on for one more month?" Kyle asked her one morning. It was Alice's last few days of work. She would be arriving within the hour.

  "We can't afford her," Ruby said. "I'd like to, but I don't think we can." She asked, "Why do you say that?" Did he want to get rid of her?

  He said, "You're babying me."

  "Don't you want me to baby you?" she teased.

  He grimaced. "When Alice changes me, she gets right in there. She digs in the way you're supposed to."

  "When she does it, it looks like it hurts."

  "It does hurt!" he said. "But that's doctor's orders. You've got to get in there like Alice does. Healing is how I get out of this damned bed," he said, almost scolding her. "I'm not going to be an invalid the rest of my life. I want to walk again. I've got to heal up."

  The next afternoon, an envelope with peppermint-green stripes around its edges arrived. It was large enough to hold a family portrait. Inside was a copy of Dr. Benford's report, two double-spaced letterhead pages describing his findings attached to six printouts of lab reports and blood test results. Ruby was disappointed with him. She understood little of the report's medical jargon, but it was so dry and terse, she felt Benford had robotically dammed off a source of funds right when Kyle needed them flowing in.

  "Look at this." Kyle waved a plain white envelope from the hospital bed. It had come in the mail as well. "You should read it."

  The envelope was the size of a postcard. Inside was a twice-folded sheet of paper:

  Mr. Weymouth, was scrawled in blue wild handwriting. You were gracious, considering circumstances of my visit. Enclosed check is not charity—I couldn't bank Abney payment to me for services rendered. My conscience and so forth. Hope you can find good use for it. Yours— "Mark Benford" was scribbled out in such a mad whirlwind of circles and lines, Ruby could almost not make out the name.

  Folded in half within the small envelope was a cashier’s check to Kyle Weymouth in the amount of one thousand five hundred dollars and no cents.

  Grinning, Ruby waved the check like a flag. "We most certainly will find good use for this." She strolled to the kitchen with a perk in her step. "Pizza tonight!" she called back. She'd thawed three livers for dinner. They could wait for the next day.

  Two days later, an envelope appeared in the post with no identifying marks save for a Los Angeles post office box as a return address and a Santa Barbara postmark. Henry brought in the mail to Ruby, as she'd begun sorting th
e bills as they arrived. Sensing the news, she carried the unmarked envelope to Kyle. One look and he told Henry to go upstairs.

  "Abneys," he growled after the bedroom door closed. He ripped open the envelope and read the letter. "There it is," he said. "Didn't take them no time at all."

  Inside the envelope was a business check, a check physically larger than the personal checks Ruby had seen before. The Abney Family Trust paid Kyle Weymouth three thousand dollars from a bank Ruby had never heard of before. The letter-sized sheet of paper folded around the check declared the Abneys had fulfilled their fiduciary responsibilities for Henry Earl Weymouth nee Barry Oliver Driscoll and no further funds would be forthcoming. It was signed by Emeril Abney, Esq., who had a rather robust artistic signature compared to the dry three-sentence paragraph printed across the middle of the sheet.

  "That's it," Kyle said. He spoke down to the letter. "That's the last of it."

  His hand found Ruby's, who was leaning on the railing to read the letter from one side.

  "I could have stalled them," he said to her. "I could have squeezed from them another year of support. Did I make a mistake?"

  She stared down at him with doleful eyes. She attempted a smile. She shook his hand in reassurance.

  "Not at all," she said. "Good riddance to the Abneys."

  Forty-two

  Ruby eased the Jimmy into the student pick-up lane that ran along the front of Henry's high school. The rack and pinion steering required both arms to turn. Everything about the truck when she drove it made her feel she was at the gym. Even the brawny masculine odor in the truck smelled like the Long Beach gym locker rooms she used to clean at midnight.

  Henry was waiting in a line of students at the school bus stop. He stood alone, Ruby couldn't help but note, looking off toward the east mountains as though he was not of this place and time. In profile, his youthful face and round cheeks and sharp nose reminded her even more of Cynthia. It's the nature of how we image ourselves that Ruby did not realize how much Henry looked like her. Ruby was Cynthia's twin, after all, and Henry was their genetic similar. The DNA differences between herself and Henry was a rounding error, a testament to the fidelity of human reproduction.