Ragged Company

by Richard Wagamese

  I never heard Rock until he slid into the pew beside me.

  “That holy water looks a little brown there, Digger,” he goes.

  “Yeah,” I go. “Diff ’rent kinda religion.”

  “I suppose,” he goes. “Got a little?”

  “Yeah.” I hand him the bottle. He takes a little sip and hands it back.

  “He okay?” I go.

  “He’s stable.”

  I nod. “Nothing new, then?”

  “No.”

  “I gotta smoke.”

  “Okay. I’ll go with you.”

  We go downstairs and find a small patio with benches. It’s mid-afternoon by then and people are moving around all over. I fire up a tailor-made with my new lighter and stand there looking at it. Rock eyeballs me all the while.

  “I feel fucking bad,” I go. “Real bad.”

  “Like it’s your fault?” he goes. “Like you did this to him?”

  “Yeah,” I go, glad for the understanding.

  “Good,” he goes.

  “Good? Fuck me, Rock. If this is some kind of a pep talk, you’re really fucking it up, man.”

  “It’s not a pep talk,” he goes. “You need to hear the truth.”

  “Jesus,” I go. “I don’t need this.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “I do? Why?”

  “Because you’re fucking everything up. Or, at least, you will.”

  “I will? How?”

  “You don’t realize what you have here.”

  “I fucking know what I have.”

  “Yeah? What do you have?”

  “I got four and a half friggin’ million dollars. That what’s I got.”

  “No. That’s not what you have. That’s only part of it.”

  “Part of it? That’s fucking all of it, Rock.”

  He moves right in front of me and looks me in the eye. We stand there for a moment gunning each other off and I’m thinking that this Square John’s gotta lotta friggin’ balls. I like that about him. So I listen.

  “You have what millions of other people don’t have, Digger. You have what every one of us carries around inside ourselves all our lives but hardly any of us ever get to see. You have the power to change your life. You can become anything you want to become now. Anything. You can choose.

  “But if you keep on doing what you’re doing, if you keep on partying and throwing money on the ground for all the stooges, loogans, boobs, losers, and stumblebums to pick up just because you can, you’ll throw all of it away. You’ll piss it all away, and when you do there won’t be anyone in this world that will feel sorry for you, because you squandered the chance that everyone wants. To just be.

  “Dick’s lying up there because of choice. You chose to party. He chose to join you. He chose to drink like he used to drink. You didn’t cause that. You might feel like you did, but you didn’t do this to him. You’re not that friggin’ big and powerful, Digger. Dick chose. He made a choice. You’re guilty only of setting a bad example, of making your own choice—and I have to say it was a pretty piss-poor one. But you can end all that right here. You can choose to make that money work for you and go out there and be. Be whomever you want.

  “And the others will follow you. They’ll follow you because you’re their protector. They’ll follow you because you’re the rounder’s rounder. So this money gives you two big friggin’ gifts, Digger. It gives you the power to choose to be whomever the fuck you want to be, and it gives you the power to help the others become whomever they want to be. But if you keep on going the way you’re going, you’re only going to be one thing in the end.”

  “What’s that?” I go.

  He looked at me as hard as I let anyone look at me for as long as I can remember. “You’ll be a loser—a boob, a stooge, a loogan, a stumblebum. And if you take the others with you, you won’t even be a rounder anymore because rounders don’t do that to each other. Rounders watch each other’s back, and it’s time, Digger. It’s time for you to watch their backs like they’ve been watching yours all this time. Especially Double Dick Dumont.”

  “Why him especially?” I go.

  “On accounta he doesn’t have a filter,” he goes. “Not like you and me. You do things out of anger—rage, really. Rage that your body failed you, rage that time went by too fast, and rage that there’s no place left for the best friggin’ wheelman in the world. You filter the world and your choices through that rage, that anger.”

  “And you?” I go.

  “I filter it through anger too,” he goes, and we look at each other for a moment or two. “But Dick doesn’t filter it through anything. He just respects you. He just believes in you. He just follows you—and he just watches your back in his own small way. He’s pure that way, Double Dick is. He’s innocent.”

  I nod. “Lot to think about.”

  “I hope so,” Rock goes.

  I reach out and shake his hand. Just as we’re doing that I catch a glimpse of the old lady hotfooting it across the patio. Something in my heart pauses.

  “He’s awake,” she goes. “And he’s asking for Digger.”

  One For The Dead

  THEY PUT THEIR HEADS TOGETHER like little boys trading secrets. I don’t know what they said to each other, but as we stood at the far end of the room and watched Digger and Dick talk, I looked at the rest of us and saw how tied together we had become. There couldn’t be anything wrong with that. No matter how scary this had been, no matter how close we might have come to losing Dick to drink, it brought us even closer—all of us, not just us rounders, but the whole lot of us. I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. You been around death as long as me, you get to know its feel, its weight, even before it gets here, and I knew it wasn’t time for Dick. There wasn’t anything I could say, though. There’s times when you have to keep a deep knowing to yourself so others around you can find the teachings in a thing. Those of us who can see know that, but the hard part is letting others go through it. While it hurts to watch them deal with hurt, you know that you still have to let them, that it’s a gift, that it’s a teaching way. So I bided my time until Dick came out of the deep darkness that the booze had put him in and tried to offer the comfort that I could. I was glad to see that Granite and Digger had talked. I wouldn’t have changed that for anything.

  Dick waved his hand to invite us to his bedside.

  “Me ’n Digger got a plan,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said. “What’s your plan?”

  “Well, first we’re gonna get me the frig out of here, then we’re gonna go see Field of Dreams like we meant to all along, then we’re buyin’ everybody dinner.”

  “Sounds like a really good plan to me,” Margo said. “I’d like to go to the movies with you, Dick.”

  “Yeah, an’ you could sit with Granite on accounta I think he kinda likes you, Miss Margo,” Dick said with a grin.

  “Well, that sounds like a nice plan too,” she said.

  “The doctor says you need to rest another couple of days, Dick. To get the alcohol out of your system,” James said. “But we can get you a TV in your room and a VCR hooked up to it so you can watch movies.”

  “Yeah?” Dick asked. “They let you?”

  “They let you, all right. Especially a wealthy man like you. I’ll get them to move you to a private room as soon as the doctor thinks you’re ready.”

  “Okay. Digger?”

  “Yeah, pal?” Digger asked.

  “You wanna watch movies with me in my room?”

  “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  “Okay. You choose then. You go get us some from a movie store an’ we’ll watch until they let me out of here.”

  We spent an hour or so talking around that bed. It felt good. Granite, James, and Margo joined right in, and as I stood there and watched these friends standing knee deep in relief together I felt mighty grateful. There was no way in the world that seven people like us could have ever found each other. There was no way that the lives we l
ived before could have ever brought us together across so much time and distance, sorrow and longing, living and dying. Well, there was a way, in fact. It was a magic way. A mystery way. A great mystery way like Grandma One Sky had talked about a long time ago. The hand of Creation moving in mystery, bringing teachings to us in the smallest things. I looked around me. In that hospital where so many lives had turned, where so many sorrows were born and losses taken, there were no shadowed ones around us. I expected them. But in that room right then the light of friendship, alive and powerful, burned away all shadow and there was no room for them to stand. I smiled at that.

  The nurses came and told us that Dick needed to rest. They were giving him medicine to help him with the hangover. He’d had so much that they were afraid he might have a seizure, so keeping him calm was important.

  “Amelia? Can I talk to you in private?” Dick asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The others said their goodbyes and left the room. I took Dick’s hand in mine.

  “What is it, Dick?”

  “You know how I don’t like dreamin’? How it scares me?”

  “Yes.”

  “An’ you know how I drink so I don’t have ’em an’ how that always helps me get through the night most times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I didn’t have no dreams. I was asleep a long time there an’ I didn’t have no dreams.”

  “That’s good. You needed to rest.”

  “Do you think the money made ’em go away? Could it do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. What do you think?”

  He turned his head and looked out the window, lay there quietly for a minute or so. “It was quiet where I was. I don’t know where that was but I know it was real quiet on accounta nothing woke me up. I just kinda opened my eyes when I was ready. So I think maybe I wanna buy some quiet with my money. Maybe if I buy enough quiet then the dreams’ll go away. Can you do that? Can you have enough money to buy quiet?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think you can do that. It sounds like what I’d want to spend my money on too, Dick. Quiet. It’s nice to think about.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I need to sit with Digger now. I don’t want him to feel bad no more about what happened.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re a good man, Dick.”

  He grinned at me and I walked into the hall to join the others.

  Digger

  I SAT WITH HIM for five days while he got better. They got him a good room that next morning and we had us a TV and a movie player right off the bat. The others came and stood around for a while but I kinda figured they figured that me ’n Dick was having some time together and left us alone to do that. We musta watched a hundred movies in that room. Me ’n Dick were friggin’ amazed at how many you could get to watch on your television set. It was kinda like heaven. We never said word one about the party or about him slipping away like he did. Instead, we just watched movies and we laughed. Fuck. I didn’t even hardly drink. When I did I’d slip into Dick’s bathroom and have a little swallow but not enough to bug him by getting tight or nothing. After five days he was ready to leave and we made it back to the hotel finally. I was actually glad to be there, and that friggin’ amazed me. I never stopped to think that for five nights me ’n Dick was inside. Inside. In between walls. Off the street. It just kinda happened and when I finally realized it, I was in my room, towelling off after a good hot shower, trying to find a movie to watch on the television. There I was in between walls. I walked over to the big windows in my room and hauled open the thick heavy drapes. There it was. The city. The streets. It all kinda lay below me like something you forgot you had. Seeing it again surprises the shit out of you and you want to pick it up again and feel it, remember, recollect, remind yourself of somewhere you mighta travelled once or somewhere you mighta been. Then you just put it back on the shelf or in the corner where it sat and keep on moving wherever you happen to be moving at the time. That’s what I did. I kept right on moving.

  We made it to Field of Dreams the night Dick came out of the hospital. All of us. All seven of us. And when we walked into that movie house there wasn’t any fuss at all about us being there. We were dressed good. We were clean. We were seven regular movie-loving people out to catch another flick and the forgotten thing—the street—was just something we were walking on to get there.

  The movie was about baseball. Or at least it started out that way. It was about a guy having to make a baseball field out of his farmland so some dead ballplayer could get to play again. Not really my kind of thing. Not enough action and lights for me. But it got to me. Everyone had a reason for being where they were in that movie. Everyone had something important to do so the story could move where it was supposed to move, and as I looked along that row of people I was a part of that night, I wondered what I was supposed to do. I wondered why I was there.

  Rock said that the others would follow me. Follow me where, I wondered. They followed me to a drinking party and it almost cost us big time. Then near the end of that movie the big black guy gets invited to go where the dead players go every night. He gets invited into the mystery and he says something like “if I have the courage to do this, what a story it’ll make.” What a story it’ll make. That’s what I heard. I figured if I had the courage to go where this money could take me, into this mystery place, maybe it’d make a pretty good story too. I didn’t know what was out there. I didn’t know what would happen when we got there. I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. But I knew that I had to go there. For them. For my friends.

  If you build it, they will come. That was the other thing I heard. I remembered me ’n Dutch standing at the back of the big semi looking at the wheel all piled on the flatbed, all pulled apart and empty laying there. When I put my hands on those pieces of steel there wasn’t nothing in them. No energy. No motion. But as we raised the wheel to the sky it got to be something. Bolt by bolt we put something magic together, and when we were done it wasn’t empty no more and neither was I. I’d stand in the crossbrace and look across the midway, across this field that held the dreams of all those people that would come because they saw the lights of the wheel spinning around and around against the sky, and I’d hold my hands a little tighter on the cables and struts of that wheel and feel it thrumming and pulsing and I felt like a magician. I felt alive. Alive as the wheel.

  There were four and a half million pieces to put together here. And later, as I stood at the window in that hotel room far above the city watching them lights twinkle and dance and shine like tiny eyes looking up at me, I felt like I stood in the crossbraces of another great wheel in the sky. A wheelman. Someone who could build it from the ground up. It didn’t scare me like it shoulda then. It didn’t make me wanna bolt and run back to what I knew. It didn’t even make me wanna drink it all away. No. Instead, it made me wanna finally get over that far horizon, my horizon, our horizon, and see the life I could live on the other side.

  Were you ever on a Ferris wheel?

  Only once, when I was small.

  Did you like it?

  It scared me at first but after a few trips around it got to be exciting.

  What was the most exciting part for you?

  I suppose that moment when the wheel’s turning and you’re sitting in your seat looking across it, seeing the backs of the other seats, the spokes, off into the fairgrounds to all the lights and then you get raised to the sky. You come over the top and there’s nothing but sky and you feel like you’re being

  lifted up into the stars. That was the most exciting part.

  Why?

  Hmm. Because you can feel the world disappear.

  You like that?

  I did then. Actually, there were a lot of times I wished for that particular magic.

  Never happens, though, does it?

  No. You always come down the other side, back into it.

  Except when they stop you right at the top. Then you can see the whole world. Or at
least, it feels like it.

  Yes. I liked that feeling too. Seeing the whole world.

  Ferris wheels are like life then, aren’t they?

  Yes. I suppose they are.

  What a ride.

  What a ride, indeed.

  BOOK THREE dreams

  Timber

  I WALKED. I still walked. Every morning I’d get up before sunrise and wander the streets. The others would all be asleep, even Digger, and I’d move through the house we bought on Indian Road and get ready for the street. Digger had discovered coffee makers that turned on automatically like alarm clocks and he set it for me so there’d be a hot cup when I woke. He’d discovered a lot of gadgets in those months since we won the lottery. There were gizmos that turned the outside lights on and off at a certain time each night and morning, gadgets that let you tape a TV show or movie while you watched another one, and even one that turned our bedside lamps on when we clapped our hands. It never failed to surprise me when Digger came home trundling another box of something. The world was filled with thingamajigs, doohickeys, and doodads, and Digger seemed to be able to find all of them. I liked it. It made the house a curious place. It made it irregular, and irregular suited me fine in a neighbourhood of sameness and predictability.

  We bought a big three-storey house with an attic. We decided that if money meant we had to live inside, we might as well live inside together. So James Merton, Granite, and Margo had found a real estate guy and we’d toodled around the city looking for some digs that would be big enough for us to have our private spaces. We found this place after about a month. Indian Road was close to one of the biggest parks in the city and known as a quiet, stable area filled with hard-working people with families who’d been in the same house for years and years. I actually liked it. It took a few weeks to get used to it, and I didn’t sleep much, but just knowing that there was someone down the hall to talk to if I woke up feeling heebie-jeebied made it easier. My room was in the attic. We fixed it up and made it into a living area with skylights and big triangle windows at each end so I could look out across the skyline at night. It was like street digs almost, all tucked away and quiet.