The Removed

by Brandon Hobson

  Wyatt came around the corner of the house, looking flushed and breathing heavy. “She found you,” he said. “Wow, you look like a new man.”

  “I FEEL BETTER THAN EVER,” Ernest said a little later, back inside the house. “And look at this boy who’s blessed us with his presence.”

  Wyatt came into the dining room, dressed in a collared shirt and khaki pants, his hair combed and wet from a shower. “I always feel better after a good day of work and a shower,” he said. “Smooth water, the smell of shampoo.”

  I started sweeping the back deck while Ernest raked the leaves outside in preparation for the bonfire in two days. I decided to postpone dinner so I could enjoy the beautiful evening outside with him. I couldn’t believe his energy. He bagged what he raked, tied the trash bag, and carried it to the trash can by the side of the house. When he came back to the deck, we talked about our kids. We talked about Ray-Ray, too, Ernest laughing as he told the story about the time Ray-Ray dressed up as a ghost for Halloween when he was little. “Remember we just threw an old white bedsheet over him and cut two holes for eyes?”

  I laughed hard at that memory. We were both laughing. Then Ernest wanted to go out for ice cream and celebrate how well he was feeling.

  “I feel drunk,” he told me. “It’s like I’ve been drinking all day. I want dinner and ice cream. I want a good glass of wine.”

  “You haven’t touched a drink in months and months,” I said.

  “Not since April of last year,” he said. “It was the day I met Wes Studi downtown. He was in town for a funeral, I remember. He liked my hat.”

  “Yes, I remember,” I said.

  He was already putting on his shoes to go. So I quickly changed clothes and drove the three of us to a nice restaurant downtown for dinner. Ernest ordered a glass of rosé, which made me uneasy, but he held a finger up and said he didn’t want to hear it.

  “Let me enjoy this while it lasts,” he said. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time. My energy is up. My back doesn’t hurt. I didn’t get winded walking from the car to the restaurant.”

  “You’re healed,” Wyatt said.

  “Your back is feeling better, too?” I asked.

  He stood up then, with people around us, stretched his arms forward and did a knee bend. He jogged in placed. I was getting embarrassed and told him to sit down.

  “Maybe our prayers are finally answered,” he said, settling back into his seat and taking a drink from his glass.

  We enjoyed a long, unhurried dinner, then went for a walk downtown. We stopped in Morgan’s Bakery to buy Wyatt a cream puff, which made him happy. I was elated.

  “If only Edgar was here,” Ernest said on the walk back to the car.

  I immediately called Edgar and left a message. “Honey, please call us. We want you to come home for Ray-Ray’s bonfire, sweetheart. I’m not mad and Papa isn’t mad. We want you here. Please call me back.”

  * * *

  “Fear the beard,” Ernest said, back at the house. “Remember when the Thunder lost James Harden?”

  “I’d like to grow a beard someday,” Wyatt said.

  “You’re fifteen, so you can start trying.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says my smart wife.” Ernest winked at me. “She knows the good bearded ones in sports: Johnny Damon, James Harden. Right? You think I’m kidding, son, just ask her.”

  “Ernest used to watch sports all the time,” I told Wyatt. “For years it’s all he watched, and I just started watching, too.”

  “Kareem had a beard,” Ernest said.

  I tried to remember the last time Ernest had even remembered an athlete’s name. It was as if the boy had showered him with some strange invisible angelic dust that reset his memory, if only temporarily. Ernest talked about a baseball game in Arlington, Texas, when the Rangers beat the Red Sox after clobbering Wakefield’s knuckleball. “Wakefield,” he kept saying. “That knuckleball either hissed or missed. Go watch the big league sometime. Of course in terms of Oklahoma sports, Jim Thorpe was the best athlete we’ve ever seen, just ask anyone.”

  Wyatt wanted to hear more. Ernest was invigorating to listen to, and it occurred to me that Wyatt brought out an energy in Ernest that had been stagnant for months, even years. Listening to him talk now was like the Ernest thirty years earlier, before all his ailments, all his arthritis pain and high blood pressure, pre-Alzheimer’s, when he was more social. To be young again, to share stories, to laugh—how wonderful. To sit in lawn chairs in the backyard and look up at the fireworks in the sky. To drink lemonade on a humid summer evening. It would all be possible again, I realized.

  “Maria,” he said, unable to conceal his excitement, “remember that old Chevy I had back in the seventies? The one with the bucket seats?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You’d love them,” he told Wyatt. “I remember recovering them, removing the seat-back rubber bumpers and hog rings to get to the burlap. I stripped the backrest, popped off the headrest. Remember, Maria? My pal Otto helped me. We used a special set of wires to hog-ring the upholstery to the foam.”

  “What kind of Chevy?” Wyatt asked.

  “Nova.”

  Wyatt nodded approvingly. “A good solid car.”

  “I had sideburns back then,” Ernest said. “Otto worked at the body shop downtown. We would listen to rockabilly on the radio. Elvis and Eddie Cochran. Oklahoma’s own Wanda Jackson. Otto worked with a guy named Phil who picked a guitar as fast as Chet Atkins or Jerry Reed. You heard of them guys, son?”

  “True pickers.”

  “Goddamn legends. I got records in the basement.”

  “Trippy.” Wyatt nodded.

  They headed downstairs, Ernest leading the way. He was energetic. His posture and overall body structure even looked different. How had his posture improved so quickly? While they were downstairs I called Irene, and told her what was happening to Ernest.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “He’s cured? Is that even possible?”

  “It sounds crazy, but it’s true. He’s cured.”

  “I wonder if his medication is finally working?”

  “He’s happier. He feels alive. He’s standing up straight.”

  “Strange his memory improved so suddenly.”

  “His memory is sharp,” I said. “Earlier he even told me about the upholstery in our Oldsmobile forty years ago. Forty years ago. I can barely remember what color that car was, much less remember the upholstery.”

  “Maybe you should call and talk to his doctor? If he can suddenly recall specific details from so long ago, that seems so odd to me. But how wonderful he’s talking like his old self again.”

  “It really is wonderful,” I said, a little uncertainly, looking out the window at the dim shapes of trees and their complicated, twisting branches.

  Sonja

  SEPTEMBER 4

  I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT from a horrible dream. I was in Quah, being chased down the street where Ray-Ray had died. Vin and Calvin Hoff were running after me, gaining on me, until Calvin was close enough to grab me and press his hands against my throat. I looked into his face and saw his sagging jowls, his furious eyes. He tried to choke me. Suffocate me. He pressed his body against mine, but all I could feel was his hands on my throat. Vin yelled at me to keep my mouth shut, not to move. I struggled, unable to break away, and when I woke I felt a heaviness in my chest like never before.

  I didn’t sleep well after that, only a few hours. Finally I got out of bed and sat in the kitchen with my morning coffee. I left Edgar a voice message for what felt like the hundredth time, then went outside to work in the flower bed. The sun was out, and it was warm and humid. Bugs and mosquitoes were swarming, so I didn’t work too long. Inside, I took a long shower and got dressed. When I checked my phone, I noticed that Vin had left a message.

  “Come over tonight,” he said. “I want you. I wanted you last night, babe. Call me when you get a minute.”

  I did
n’t call him back. Whatever desire I had felt for him, I’d lost, but I still held my anger toward him. Since last night at the casino and that awkward goodbye, my feelings for him had fluctuated between anger and apathy. It saddened me a little, because I’d developed such a connection to Luka, sweet Luka, who reminded me so much of Ray-Ray. But I knew that I had let things go too far with Vin. I wondered if he would say something to his father about me. Every time I thought of that dream I’d had, I felt weirded out. Was the dream a warning to stay away from the Hoff family? Were the spirits telling me I was wrong?

  In the kitchen I rifled through the cabinets for a Valium, but I couldn’t find one. It took me a while to let my frustration settle. I thought my parents might have a Xanax or something to calm my nerves, so I walked down the road to their house. “Hi, Mom,” I called out as I opened their front door. “I’m here to meet the foster kid.” I felt a little bad for lying.

  “Wyatt’s at school,” my mom said from the living room. I told her I needed to use the bathroom and rummaged through the medicine cabinet, but I couldn’t find anything. My mom asked me to take a walk with Papa, which I thought might take my mind off Vin, so we walked down the road to a spot in the trees where Papa used to like to paint, a place we had both come to often throughout the years when we wanted solitude and quiet. Papa talked about wanting to paint an orchard full of apple, pear, and plum trees. He liked to paint in concentrated colors, yellows and reds and greens. I remember watching him, as a girl. I would study his hands, his grief-stricken eyes, noticing how he worked with such precision and heightened sensitivity. I saw artful shadows and reflections in his work, beauty in an unstable world. I recalled the sheer brightness of a lazy afternoon when I played in the area so long ago, the tall grass and thickets of maple and oak around me.

  “I loved to paint when I was a kid,” he said. “We lived out near Briggs in a small house, all eleven of us. Did I ever tell you about the creaking floorboards in that house? My sisters and I used to step on them over and over just to annoy my mother.”

  “I love hearing about your childhood,” I told him. I kept it to myself, but I was absolutely amazed by his memory.

  “I feel better than I have in a long time.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “This boy Wyatt, he reminds me of Ray-Ray,” he said, looking away from me, as if he was thinking aloud. “Maybe our prayers are being answered.”

  “Our ancestors watch over us,” I said.

  “Yes, they do,” he said. “I’ve been telling Wyatt some of the old stories about our family.”

  “I remember some of those.”

  “You and Edgar used to love for me to tell the story of Tsala when you were young. About how soldiers shot him dead because he refused to leave the land. It’s an important one.” For a moment he looked down at his hands and said nothing. “I haven’t seen Edgar since the intervention.”

  “I think he’ll come home,” I told him. “I think he’ll look for work here. Last time I talked to him, Desiree had broken up with him and he didn’t have any sort of plan. I kept bugging him about it, but he didn’t tell me anything about what he wanted to do. He didn’t know. He should just come home and let us help him.”

  “He knows we want him to come home.”

  “I’ve told him that over and over.”

  He looked at me with uncertainty. “Desiree was good for him. She called a few days ago, worried about him.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She wouldn’t say anything except they split up and she wanted to let us know. I told your mother maybe we should drive out to Albuquerque again.”

  I looked at him and saw that he was serious. “For another intervention?”

  “Whatever we need to do,” he said. “Bring him back to live with us so he can save money. Anything to help get him out of this situation.”

  When we returned to the house, we sat on our back deck for a while. I was feeling overwhelmed to see Papa this way again—so supportive and protective of his kids during a crisis, exactly as he’d been after Ray-Ray died. Soon my mother came outside and suggested we all go down to the lake.

  “You’ll have to meet Wyatt when he gets home,” she told me. “He is so charming and smart. I have to tell you, he reminds us of Ray-Ray.”

  “That’s what Papa said. The guy I went out with the other day has a son named Luka who resembles Ray-Ray in a way. The way he looks, his facial expressions. It’s so strange.”

  “Wyatt’s more than just a resemblance,” Papa said, and I saw my mom tap Papa on the arm for some reason. They were holding back something from me. Sometimes they acted secretive like this, and I decided not to press it. Honestly, I didn’t care much about the foster kid—I was more concerned with my own problems, with Vin and with Edgar not contacting us.

  We saw a hawk swoop down at the edge of the road, ahead. Papa pointed. It perched and turned to us before flying into the woods. “I see that hawk from time to time,” Papa said. “I’ve always wondered if it’s Ray-Ray watching us. Or maybe an ancestor.”

  “I like that it could be Ray-Ray’s spirit,” I told him. “He would play tricks on us, for sure. Right? I can totally see that.”

  As we walked, we heard a girl’s voice from down the road, and a moment later she came into view. She was running toward us, calling out, “Wolfie! Wolfie!” When she reached us a minute later, she was out of breath. “Have you seen my dog?” she asked, breathing hard. “His name is Wolfie.”

  “What kind of dog is he?” I asked.

  “He’s a shepherd mix,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. I guessed she was eight or nine years old. “He ran away. He has light-brown fur and a collar with his name on it.”

  My mom took her by the hand and promised we would help her search. We all hurried down the path toward the water, calling Wolfie’s name and whistling. “Where is he?” the girl kept asking us.

  After a few minutes, my mom knelt down to the girl. “What’s your name? Is your mom or dad around? We should find them, too.”

  “My name is Sarah,” the girl said. “I live with my daddy in that house over there.” She pointed to a gray house across the lake. “He’s looking for Wolfie, too.”

  My mother asked, “Why are you by yourself? What happened?”

  “I ran off to try to find Wolfie,” she said. “My daddy’s looking on the other side.”

  Papa and I knelt down to her, too. “But he’s probably looking for you,” I told her. “We should go find him.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Papa told her. “Everything will be fine.”

  The girl was near hysterics by now, and my mom held her for a minute. Papa put two pinkies in his mouth and tried to whistle. “I used to whistle this way,” he said, disappointed, then looked down to see Sarah’s face wet with tears. I could see his compassion for the girl. He understood that she was so afraid of her dog never returning she could barely breathe. It was a feeling we all understood. In such a moment, there is never enough comfort to soothe that fear.

  My mother announced that she would take Sarah to find her dad, and we promised to keep looking for Wolfie. Papa and I walked back toward the house, calling Wolfie’s name. The woods could be thick in parts, and also dark. When we were almost to the house, my phone rang. I saw that it was Vin, but I didn’t answer it.

  In the kitchen I made Papa a glass of water with ice and took it to him in the living room. The window overlooked the yard, where we could see some birds pecking around. They flew away, scattering. When I was young, Edgar and Ray-Ray spent Saturday mornings in this room, watching old black-and-white movies with Papa: Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Mickey Rooney—but I didn’t like slapstick, couldn’t understand the juvenile humor.

  In the kitchen I made myself a salad. I found some blueberries and apple slices in the fridge, along with salad dressing. There was a half-full bottle of white wine, so I poured myself a glass and sat at the kitchen table. While
I ate, I played the balloon game on my phone a while. Afterward I stepped outside on the back porch and smoked a cigarette. A little ways down the trail I saw my mother talking to the little girl and a man I assumed was her dad. He was dark-haired and rugged-looking, wearing a vest and boots. It was difficult to see exactly what he looked like from where I was standing, but he reminded me of someone I had seen in a movie somewhere, or on TV, maybe his overall posture and what he was wearing. I could make out his face a little, but not entirely. From afar he looked to be built, in good shape. He leaned down in a fatherly way to comfort Sarah as she embraced him, all the while talking to my mother. And then she turned and headed back, and I watched the guy walk the other way with Sarah.

  “Well?” I said when she reached the porch.

  “That was Sarah’s dad, but we couldn’t find the dog,” she said. “Poor thing, she was so upset. Her dad’s name is Eric.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “Is he married?”

  “Married? He didn’t say.”

  “Did he say how long he’s lived over there? I haven’t seen him before.”

  “He didn’t say,” she said. “Hey, Wyatt should be home from school soon. Do you want to meet him?”

  “I should go back home. There’s a phone call I need to make.”

  “Call Edgar, maybe he’ll talk to you.”

  “I’ve called him so many times, I’d be surprised if he talked to me,” I said. “But who knows? He’s so unpredictable.”

  I WALKED BACK HOME. My quiet house breathed sadness. Every room I entered held a dim silence, and I started listening to the rooms breathe their presence into me. I could hear their whispers, or maybe they were the whispers of ancestors’ spirits. I thought about what Papa was saying about our ancestor Tsala walking the land around us. I knew I should listen for him, for courage. I imagined Papa speaking to the wind and sky as our ancestors watched us. Listening to the quiet house, I was again plunged into fear. I worried too much, the sort of unsettled, troubling concern one feels before a line of tornadic storms approaching. I knew my anxiety was stirring again, and I felt tense at the thought of Vin coming over.