“It doesn’t take luck.”
“Yeah, I guess not, I guess that’s kind of a lousy excuse, but what does it take? Because it seems to me every other person I know… And they weren’t even volunteers. I was a volunteer, but nothing matters, nothing helps. I vacuumed basements, heavy industrial machines, a hundred basements. They owe me, you know?”
“It takes being confident, but also realistic. You must claim to be someone who is dependable and responsible, and then be that dependable and responsible person, not slide back into I was a volunteer. Do you take offense at correction? That might be a problem.”
He was about to say, look, I don’t need your therapy. But the Pontiac was flying them towards Rochester, smoothly, quietly, and he felt proud of his dad for keeping such an impossible, outdated machine alive so he said instead, “How do you know these things?”
She laughed. “I watch and listen. It’s a difficult task. You might think it sounds easy, but I can tell you it is very, very hard. You must empty yourself of all…what do I want to say? Opinion? No, not just that, all preconception, all expectation. My project is based on listening and looking and being kind. I don’t put my photos on Facebook or Instagram. I’m saving them for a formal art show and then a book, American pictures in one half, French pictures in the other. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay. I am changing the world slowly, modestly, one person at a time, through believing, giving, making things possible. Opening doors, not closing them. I am an ambassador of kindness.”
He smelled a scam. “Why?”
“Why?” she repeated, her tone incredulous. She turned towards him, facing him square-on, eyes wide open. “It is this!”
It was so fucking intimidating he could hardly drive.
“This! Do you feel it?”
Clearly, she was into the hard sell, an idea, a membership, he wasn’t sure. But there was nothing in her hands. And that bag of hers, it was stuffed with possessions. She was a vagrant. Or an FBI undercover guy.
“Surely you can feel it? The line of sympathy between us? We are connected as human beings.”
“Connected?” he asked, stalling for time. And as he might have predicted, there was the full-on gaze. “You must take me for an idiot.” That line, too, was borrowed. From where, he couldn’t remember.
“Ah, non, vraiment! I trust you.”
“Listen, I don’t speak French.”
The familiar landscape flew past. It was the same fields and farms and outlying buildings he remembered from all the times he’d driven up to Rochester for movies and concerts with friends, the same steely grey sky as every other winter. They passed the sign for Geneseo. Good old Geneseo, home of the state college, location of the means and methods of one hundred ways of getting wasted. Colby knew all the bars, all the contacts. He’d had an inside man, a Manhattan connection, in one of the dorms.
They passed Avon, Rush. A fog of white lay over the fields. It was a huge, sucking, whirling space, home of deer and turkey, the snow printed with their steady traffic. A hawk, sitting on a wire, scanned for rodents, and the subdued light, its endless horizon, endless sameness, endless soul-sucking opacity glared down from the sky as it had always done. As it had done for his mother and sister, two people who had been desperate for excitement. If you thought about it, and he had, it wasn’t a coincidence that their deaths had happened in March when it was still winter, still sleeting and snowing, when the accumulated cloud cover from all of the lakes in their area, Finger Lakes to the east, Lake Erie to the west, Lake Ontario to the north, hung over the weary, ice scarred land. Colby had enlisted in March; that wasn’t a coincidence either. It was the kind of unchanging light, day after day, that hammered you down, a light that had no surprises. Sliding along the highway beneath it, he realized this was why he stayed in the city even though the rents were so punishing. There was sun down there. There were whole days, and not just a single day here and there, but a whole stretch of them, one after another, with winter sun. And even when it was cloudy the sun broke through for a little while.
The rusted bridges and concrete pillars on the southern edge of Rochester seemed unequal to the task of holding up the road, but they did, the interchanges appeared, and as they entered the city, their highway merged with others. He chose the ramp he thought was correct.
“Right, 390 north.”
“You know everything don’t you?”
“Well, I’m getting to know you and I’m getting to know Rochester. That’s not everything.”
“But how do you know me?” She didn’t, she couldn’t, and though he might be hidden, he wasn’t anybody’s supplier.
“You could know me if you tried. You don’t try, that’s all. You’re all taken up with you. But you could observe some things about me if you gave yourself the opportunity. Not when you’re driving though. Later. When we’re in the hospital.”
“I thought I was taking you to Goodman Street.”
“I’d like to come with you to the hospital.”
He didn’t respond. The thing he’d learned, when his mother had died, then his sister, when Colby came back without his feet, is that what you thought about something didn’t matter. The beast of nightmares had an endlessly rich imagination. Including, right there next to him, the ambassador from France.
They waited outside of surgery. A man came through the doors in the booted, hatted, baby-blue uniform of the operating room and asked for Family of Field, and Dan stood up. “That’s me.”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “but there are complications. You folks might as well stretch your legs because it’s going to be awhile longer.”
There was a splatter of blood on the doctor’s blue top and Dan knew it was his father’s. He imagined the surgery, the steel tables, the gutters draining fluids, the thick grey coil of intestines pulsing under the lights. There was a flash of silver, latex covered fingers peeling back skin.
“Are you hungry?” the girl asked. He followed her to the cafeteria, squeezing into the elevator with hospital employees, saying to the beast, Please, I will be good. Just bring him back. Was it a prayer?
He bought a roll and a pat of cold butter. It cost two dollars plus change, leaving him with enough for a Red Bull, but he decided to start being good right then and not give in to his craving. So he drew a glass of water. Then he sat down across from her, accepting her presence, maybe even glad of it, and proud of the fact that he had paid for his food. Prayer was new for him. Hope was too. He’d never held hope for very long, and though he wasn’t hungry, he made himself eat. He made himself drink the entire glass of water, just like a mother. Sometimes he had to do that, become the mother he never had, someone to make sure he wore clean clothes and ate breakfast. Sometimes he didn’t bother.
“I think we should talk,” she said. “But not now, over food. Let’s go back up, see if he’s in recovery, and then we can find the chapel. That’s the secret, you know. Hospitals have chapels and bathrooms and cafeterias. You can live in them easy and nobody pays attention.”
He did not trust her. And he saw no reason to talk. All he had to do was get through these next few days and then he could get back to the sun, back to civilization. Even if he had to take his father with him. (But where would they live? How could they afford anything down there? You couldn’t surf couches with a depressed old man. Weren’t there places for poor people? The farthest reaches of Queens? Some little basement apartment beyond the subway, reached only by bus?)
The chapel at Rochester General was larger. It looked less like a church because there wasn’t any schmaltzy stained glass or pews, just a row of chairs in the front and a sofa with a reading light along the back wall. They sat there.
She began: “In America, everything stops you. What is the word? Thwart. Everything thwarts you. You need a lot of money just to go to the doctor, just to go to college. Huge amounts of money. The food is terrible, but that’s beside the point. People everywhere are beaten-down, unhappy. Or else they’re drunk a
nd high. Everyone’s expectation is that the answer will be no, that the desire to do something, to go somewhere, to accomplish something will be thwarted. So I say yes. That’s my guiding principle. I have no plan, no purpose, but that. I say yes in every encounter. Though not every. I’m careful. I don’t say yes to things that would be harmful to me or to someone else, but I do take risks. I take risks by trusting people, choosing to believe what I am told.”
“You get paid? Someone gives you a credit card and like, no restrictions?”
“It is me. I fund it. But don’t let that distract you. I’m here with you. And right now I want to tell you what I see.” She paused. He felt the turkey rustle its wings.
“Nobody ever comes clean. It’s too risky. But I have nothing to lose because I don’t care if you like me or not. Also, I will never see you again. So it doesn’t matter. You will never find a person as honest as me, or who knows as much about you. I mean, not everything, only certain knowledge, only what I see on your face. I don’t know anything about your life experience except for what I see on your face.”
She had an encouraging, eager expression, entirely cleansed of judgment; he felt as though he needed to protect his eyes, as though her face was a wattage he couldn’t bear.
“May I take your photo now?”
Again, he hesitated.
“You are very beautiful, but in a rough, unpretty way, very boy. Very boy,” she repeated, the wattage softening. “No one has ever loved you enough. And I think you have never loved back. Without regrets, without hesitation. You have, I think, many…” she paused. “Not regrets, that’s not the right word. No, I think many insecurities. Maybe, what is it, guilt? But you are not guilty. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You hold your family close to you, Dan, I can see that, your father especially. What I think, and of course I don’t know, but what I think is that when you choose to love someone you will become a strong person. That eighty dollars is for you. It is from me in gratitude for letting me take your photo.”
“But I didn’t say that you could.” And then he got angry. “Hey, I said I was going to pay it back.”
“It is a gift.” Her eyes were shiny, like she was about to cry. Some kind of a spirit, that’s what she was. “Listen, I have given you a gift. Accept it.” She took the camera out of her bag. “May I?” He nodded a yes. But she said, “Please, for me, express it like you mean it.”
“What?”
“Like you really want me to take your picture. Like you want to be generous.”
“Okay.” He got down on his knees as though he were a penitent. “Will you please take my picture?”
Clicking, dancing about him, she talked: “Dan Field, a man of, well I don’t know how old you are, let’s say twenty five years, that I met in Dansville, New York who took me to Rochester, New York. That will be the caption. Nothing more. I will not reveal anything but that. It’s all simple. Very, very simple. Dan Field received a gift from Brigitte Robeau.” She squatted down, then she stood on a chair, then she lay on the floor and looked up at him. He could tell she was experienced, but still, there was a dark, dusty corner of suspicion in his mind: “Listen, if this is about Colby Danvers I want you to know that ever since he came back, I’ve only seen him a couple of times. I’m not his man in the city. Search me, there’s nothing on me. And I really don’t think he’s dealing anymore. Leave the poor son of a bitch alone why doncha.”
“Colby Danvers? Do you suggest I go see him?”
“He’s in Bath. At the VA.”
“Which is what?”
The question was so open, so guileless he said, “Never mind.”
That night he stayed at a house in Rochester where everyone spoke French. They fed him and gave him a couch to sleep on. In the morning, he left his phone number and email with Brigitte in case the book were ever published. He signed a form that gave her permission to use his image and then he drove back to the hospital on surface streets, the rumble announcing every touch on the throttle.
On the sixth floor the hallway was so polished it gleamed and the doors at the end shimmered with light. His father looked just as pale and exhausted, but now he was hooked up to more machines than before. Dan tried to give him a solid hug, but it was difficult with all of the wires.
The old man’s lips parted to say something. “Thirsty,” he whispered, lifting a bruised hand to point to the bed-table.
Dan saw a Styrofoam cup filled with ice water and held it under his father’s mouth. He put the straw to his mouth but nothing happened. Then he moved to the bed and squeezed in behind his father’s shoulders, supporting his back against his chest so his head was raised enough to sip. The skull was heavy and surprisingly warm and it bent forward, the lips sucking the water in a needy, desperate way. Dan gave him another cupful, and when he was done with the second cup, Dan settled his father’s head back into the pillows.
“That was good,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
Mischief
I.
The call came in February. Chipper Hanson had found a lost goat and tied it to his porch, where it was kicking and butting and destroying things. He called the hardware, and the hardware called me, because if nobody got it off his porch soon, his wife was going to get the gun and take care of the problem herself, and whether that would involve just the goat or the goat and the husband, no one could say.
Right away, I offered to take him.
There was a foot of old snow, hard-crusted. The pickup was drifted in. I dug out the wheels and started scraping ice off the windshield, the hills echoing the noise. The thermometer registered seven degrees, the cold a razor against my cheeks. The sun had vanished, and the sky was hard, metallic. When I saw glass, I started the engine, ran the defrost to melt the rest, and went into the house for my purse. Ramona to the rescue!
Andover is three miles down the road, and all the way there it never occurred to me to wonder why, in a place where a lot of people had barns and animals, I was the one they called. All I knew about were chickens. But Jim at the hardware must have remembered that Shep and me were planning to get a couple of does in the spring.
The hardware was where we bought the fencing supplies. It was where we asked our questions. Of course, that was one of the strikes against us. We were city folk, ignorant about things the others grew up knowing, too willing to suppose they had the time to talk us through the way to do one thing or another, repair the hydrant, set a corner in fence line so it will hold.
So I was pleased when I picked up the phone that winter morning and a deep voice that I knew right away, belonging to the big-bellied man who’ d sold us thirty rolls of woven wire last summer and recommended where we could buy locust posts, called me by my first name. He was a man whose family had starved and shivered for generations in a rundown old farmhouse at the top of one of the hills until, finally, the third son got out of dairying and opened the hardware that now employed his brothers too. This was the person who said, “Mona, there’s a lost goat down here, and it’s wrecking Chipper Hanson’s porch at Twenty-Two Greenwood, where he got it tied, and we wondered if you and the boss could take it off of Chipper’s hands—he don’t got no barn—even if it’s just for a little while.”
Ah, but don’t be fooled. It’s not that I’m the world’s most spontaneous person, not by a long shot! And I knew it would take time to dig out the truck. No, I agreed to it because Jim had called me “Mona”. After the thousands of dollars we had spent at his store, after the advice he’d given and the questions we’ d asked, I was still “Mrs. Brightner.” Shep and me both, we were “The Boss” and “Mrs. Brightner.” I’d given up ever becoming “Ramona” in this town.
We were different. The Boss had been to college, and they suspected (rightly) that I’d been, too—that is, real college, not a state techie. But the biggest problem? As superintendent of the school, Shep’s salary was public information, and though it was modest compared to other places, it was, in Andover, quite a bit larger than most, and
when all of those savers and scrimpers and government haters got their school tax bill every September, they resented us. “Mona” and “Shep” would never happen. I was resigned to it. But on that morning, “Mona” and “The Boss” was what Jim said, and it was as musical as the first robins in March. And on a bitter day in February, when the temperature hadn’t climbed over ten degrees in a week and the sky’s dark light was as even as a sheet of stainless steel, “Mona,” better even than “Ramona,” coming from Jim’s mouth made me happy.
It was a small goat with a long, shaggy brown coat and long floppy ears. The floppy ears meant its mother or daddy was a Nubian, and the furred coat meant it had been living in the open for a while. The curious thing about it was the collar. It wore a necklace of green felt with tassels and triangles of red felt sewn onto it like a jester’s costume. It was a homemade affair, some kind of Christmas getup. Had the goat escaped from a manger scene at a local church? Not in Andover, because Jim would have known about it. But maybe in Independence or Canisteo; no one would have thought a goat on the run could make it all the way here.
Chipper Hanson put his arms around the goat’s legs and lifted it into the space behind my seat. He tied a rope from the necklace to the door handle, giving the animal just enough room to lift its head. “Gotta keep it tight, Mona. This one’s got a taste of the wild. Been runnin’ with the deer and thinks it’s just one a them. Hope you got good fencing.”
After he knotted the rope so it would stay, he stood at the open door, talking. His hair smelled like cigarettes, and his voice had a smoker’s rich, syrupy tone. “See, I throwed ’em cracked corn. Out there.” He nodded to the field behind his house. “First seed him, oh, maybe a week ago. And this morning, wouldn’t you know it, just happened to look out, and the little bustard trottin’ down the sidewalk just like he one a them kids going to school.”
The Exit Coach Page 6