“You see any phone lines out here, slick?”
“All right,” Ryan said. “Christ.” He was getting thirsty, although he tried telling himself he wasn’t. Warm Coke was starting to sound pretty good.
“Come on out back, you can see for about a hundred miles.”
It wasn’t a hundred miles but it was a good long ways into empty air. Chip led him past the straggling edge of the homestead and its discarded piles of possibly useful junk, and up an incline. Even this mild climb coated Ryan’s neck with new sweat. He should have thought to bring some kind of hat. They stood on the loose and pebbled dirt, which was in the process of turning itself into sand, in the next geological era, and looked out at a line of distant, pale green that marked a draw or some temporary watercourse, not yet gone dry for summer. In the farthest distance, very small, another mountain range, like something made of toy blocks.
“You know what you’re looking at?” Chip asked, and when Ryan shook his head, he said, “My home planet.”
“How do you figure?”
“It just feels right. I dunno. Clears my head, being out here.”
Even with sunglasses, Ryan felt the glare bearing down on him. “Kind of a lonesome place.”
“Yeah, well, I never had much luck with people anyway.”
Ryan kept quiet. There wasn’t any point in contradicting Chip just so he could hear himself say something nice. Chip poked at the dirt with his sandal, sending a few small stones skidding down the hill. “It’s no-bullshit real out here, man. Live or die. Eat or be eaten. The basics. What more does anybody need?”
“How about, Chicago-style pizza and cold beer.”
“Always with the funnies. I’m making a serious point here. Modern life, it’s turned us soft. We lose . . .” Chip stopped, searched the empty air with his free hand for the rest of his thought.
“Connection?” Ryan suggested.
“Yeah, something like that. All the survival skills get beat out of us. How do you think Indian tribes lived out here? You think we could hunt, or build shelters, or make our own clothes? We wouldn’t last two weeks.”
“We don’t have to do any of that,” Ryan said. “I survive just fine, I went out and got a job so I could take care of myself. You might give it a shot.”
Chip went on as if Ryan hadn’t spoken. “We’ve lost touch with, ah, actual, physical stuff. What’s more real, a computer, or a rock that’s been in the ground for five hundred thousand years?”
“Now you’re confusing real with natural.”
Chip waved this away. “See, that’s what happens when I try to explain. It always turns into an argument.”
“I’m not arguing with you, Ray.” It was a lost cause.
“Human beings,” Chip said, “have evolved too far from their animal origins. I get so tired of trying to figure out words. Maybe I’ll just quit on them. Make animal noises. Bird noises.”
“I’d miss talking to you.” Which was true, in some perverse way.
Chip squinted at him, as if trying to tell if Ryan was making fun of him. “You’re OK, you know? You’re a pretty righteous dude.”
“Thanks.” They were back to dude again.
“I mean, you could have turned out to be a real dick. Because you always had the smarts and the good looks and the women chasing after you—”
“Oh yeah, sure,” Ryan muttered, embarrassed at being the object of Chip’s envy. You wanted to be envied, of course, but by somebody cool.
“—but you never acted like that put you in some special category, you know, better than anybody else. You didn’t have to look me up out here. I appreciate that.”
“You’re family, Ray.” True enough, although it sounded weak or insulting to fall back on that as a reason: Even though you’re a freakish loser, we feel some obligation toward you. Which was pretty much the case. “I need to be heading back to the hotel pretty soon here.”
“Right. No problem.”
“You said something about Cokes?”
Chip turned and skidded down the hillside, his sandals wobbling in the dirt. “Couple a Cokes, coming up.”
Ryan walked back to the car and opened the doors to let some of the heat out. He was trying to think what report he could send back home to Chip’s anxious parents. He really loves the weather out there. And officially, he’s only twenty percent disabled.
Chip came around the side of the building, holding four Coke bottles by their necks. “Here, I got us a couple each since they’re kind of small.”
Ryan took them. They were somewhere between warm and tepid. He opened one and drank down half of it. “The pause that refreshes. Thanks.”
“One sec, I gotta . . .” Chip headed back inside the stucco building. Ryan wasn’t looking forward to the inside of the Dodge. The steering wheel and the vinyl seats looked hot enough to melt skin. Behind him on the road, the sound of a car engine, still some distance away. He stood and watched it until it became visible. A baby blue pickup truck with a tarp stretched over the bed. It slowed and heaved itself into the dirt lane, pulling up behind him.
It did not occur to him to feel apprehensive.
Two things happened, one right after the other: A man swung out of the pickup truck and crossed the distance between them at a shambling run. Then Chip emerged from the rock shop with a green army knapsack, cradling it in his arms.
“All right, asshole,” the man said, pointing first at Ryan, then at Chip, or not pointing, really, since there was a gun in his hand and that was what he was using for emphasis. Ryan looked at it without real comprehension. He was still trying to figure out why someone he’d never met was calling him an asshole.
“Hey there, Otto,” Chip greeted him. He’d stopped short, not moving from his place near the door.
Otto?
“Put that down. Now, dirtbag.” Otto waved the gun around. He had a big black beard and wore a straw cowboy hat. His face was red and sweating and twitchy.
“Jeez, chill,” Chip said. He bent down, placed the knapsack on the porch, opened it, and held up a mud-colored rock. “It’s just my opals, man. I told you I’d be back for them.”
“Soon as you pay me the four hundred you owe me.”
“You mean two-fifty.”
“Nice try.” Otto turned to regard Ryan. “Who’s this joker?”
Ryan kept quiet as Otto looked him over. Ryan guessed he was afraid, but it didn’t feel like fear. He was just very, very interested in what was happening. Otto kept moving the gun from Ryan to Chip and back again, eenie meenie miney moe.
“Hey,” Chip said. “Leave him alone. He’s my cousin, he’s from Chicago.”
“Cousin,” Otto repeated. He had small, squinting black eyes and a heavy gut hanging over the waistband of his jeans. “What, a whole family of dirtbags?”
Ryan said, “I think we should just leave now.”
No one seemed to hear him. Otto looked him up and down. “The two of you don’t favor.”
Chip said, “You have to imagine me all cleaned up and with a real classy wardrobe.”
The gun had a small black mouth. Otto brought it up to Ryan’s nose. “It would be a privilege to shoot any family member of yours.”
Ryan said, “Don’t.” He couldn’t come up with any better argument or reason not to get shot. It was going to end up the last dumb thought he ever squeezed out of his brain. Don’t.
Chip said, “You’re overreacting, Otto. You’re a classic overreactor.” Chip sounded aggrieved, as if having a gun pointed at him was just one more of life’s unfairnesses.
“Shut up or I’ll shoot you first.”
“You don’t want to start shooting people, Otto. Bad things can happen.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Tesman. Every time you open your mouth, this whole parade of bullshit comes out.”
“I guess we’ve reached a real crossroads in our friendship.”
“Just shut up.”
“Say the word, we’re gone. Like you never knew me. Like I’m a—what?
Figment. Figment of your imagination.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” The sound of Chip’s voice seemed to infuriate Otto. Chip shrugged and leaned against the screen door, as if to say he’d given it his best effort. Otto hadn’t moved the gun from Ryan’s face. “Turn around.”
Ryan felt the Coke he’d swallowed rising in his throat. He turned so that he faced the car, leaning against it, his legs no longer doing the job of keeping him upright, the sun balanced on the top of his skull like another bullet about to drop, the heat of the car’s roof against his bare arms, the gun speaking, CRACK.
Somebody screaming but it wasn’t him. “GODDAMNIT FUCKING ASSHOLE SHIT SHIT SHIT.”
Ryan turned around. Otto rolled on the ground, clutching at his shoulder, his T-shirt filling up with blood. Chip stood over him and kicked the gun away. He held his own gun, smaller, silver-plated, palm-size. Chip said, “Oh, come on, Otto. You’ve hurt yourself worse having a good time. These tough guys,” Chip said to Ryan. “I get so tired of their big bad act.”
“FUCKER YOU FUCKIN SHOT ME.”
“Well sure I shot you, what do you expect? Was I supposed to think you were just playing some dumb game?” Chip stepped over Otto so that he had one foot on either side of him. “You want a towel, maybe? Ry, look around and see if there’s anything like a towel around here.”
Ryan went to Otto’s truck and looked into the front seat. There was a pile of clothing on the floor; he found a gray sweatshirt and brought it back to Chip. He’d propped Otto up against the wheel of the Dodge.
“CHUNK OF SHIT FUCKHOLE.”
“Otto, seriously, you should save your breath. Here, put some pressure on that hole.”
Otto groaned. Ryan tried to say something but thought had gone clean out of his head, like the empty balloons over a comic character’s head, like the comics Chip used to collect back in Iowa a hundred years ago. Chip said, “You want a ride someplace, Otto? We can give you a ride if you’ll agree this was all a big accident. We were messing around target shooting and my shot went wide.”
“We need to get him to a doctor,” Ryan said, recovering the power of speech.
“Maybe. But first Otto has to get with the plan.”
“SCREW YOU DICKFACE.”
“Just as well. You don’t want him making some big stupid bloody mess in your car. They’d probably charge you extra, you know, for cleanup.”
“Say, Chip?”
“Ray.”
“Ray. I think Otto is actually very sorry that things got out of control. I bet he’s actually trying to apologize, but it’s just not coming out right.”
Otto groaned again and showed his teeth. Blood was beginning to seep through the wadded gray sweatshirt he was holding to his shoulder.
They started back, Ryan driving, going as fast as he could without hitting any bumps, because the bumps made Otto scream. Chip sat in the front seat, turned around, the silver gun in one hand, cigarette flipping up and down in his mouth. The knapsack with the opals on the floor at his feet. He seemed to be in a good mood.
He said, “Tell me this isn’t more exciting than some old convention.”
“This is more exciting than a convention.”
“You can go back and tell everybody that you had a chance to see the real West.”
“If that’s what you say it is, Ray.”
“Sure it is.” Chip took the cigarette out long enough to exhale and reposition it. “Just like in the movies, except Otto wound up all shot.”
Ryan drove through the landscape of the real West. Although it didn’t look any different from the way it did a couple of hours before, he didn’t trust his eyes.
Chip was still pleased with himself, still tickled by his own wit. “I guess old Otto thought he was Charles Bronson or somebody. What do you say, Otto, would you like to be in the movies? You could be a cattle rustler, or a saloonkeeper. You could be the guy who gets hit and falls down and doesn’t get up. That have any appeal for you, huh?”
“COCKSUCKER RATFUCKER.”
Iowa
JUNE 1989
She had six grandchildren now. Six! It was bewildering to think how everything changed, fast and slow all at once. She couldn’t get her mind around it. If only you could grab hold of time like the end of a string, follow it along, roll it up into a ball until you got where you needed to be. Baby pictures of each grandchild hung in circular frames over the fireplace in the family room. Anita’s two and Blake’s three and the newest, Ryan’s little girl. She stared at them and they stared back. Six wrinkled baby faces looking out at the world in perfect incomprehension. Of course most of them weren’t babies now. Matthew was twelve, and Marcie and Kyle were nine, and so on down the line. Or maybe Marcie was ten. She hadn’t thought about it in a while and it was possible that some birthday had slipped past her. Who would imagine you could forget a thing like that, your own granddaughter’s birthday?
But she did forget. She didn’t always pay attention to everything that people assumed you paid attention to. Sometimes she just got tired. So many things piled up in a life, after a while you felt them as a weight. So many babies, hers and everybody else’s! They took too much out of you. All the excitement and worry of their arrival and the suddenness of their needs. She must have felt all the right things at the time, happy and fond and anxious. But looking back, she couldn’t remember feeling them. Some part of remembering, or feeling, had been blotted out in her.
People said, I don’t know how you manage it, and you told them that you just did the best you could, day by day, which was what they wanted you to say. They didn’t want you to say that sometimes you locked the door to your room and stayed in bed all day and it didn’t matter if there was screaming on the other side of the door, screaming and kicking and swearing, you did not get up. Fuck fuck shit, shittin cunt whore. Where had her daughter learned such language, and why was it one of the things she remembered?
Some days were sad days and they cried together, as if all the salt tears in the world could change a thing.
Some days were good days when Torrie sat quietly, looking at magazines. She liked National Geographics best because of all the pictures. Jungles with tiny, vivid, poisonous frogs perched on leaves. Bedouin on camels, frozen waterfalls, beaches with frills of turquoise water, with sea turtles and sharks and puffins. At such times Audrey watched her and wondered if her daughter was still in there somewhere, in a far country. Or was she lost inside the pictures?
How is she doing, is she doing any better now? And Audrey always said Yes, thank you, she’s a little better, and people were So glad to hear it, because then it meant they didn’t have to do anything else.
Better because the emergency surgeries were long past, better because there would be fewer and fewer reconstructive surgeries. Better because the swelling of her face and head had gone down, better because her hair had grown back. Better because Audrey no longer had to change the catheters and urine bags. Better because her shattered pelvis had healed. Better because she was able to use a wheelchair, and after the hip and knee surgeries, a walker, and later, a cane. When she walked now there was a good leg and a bad leg. The good leg went first and the bad leg followed.
The doctors were always encouraged, encouraging. There had been so much progress already, there would continue to be progress. Not as much, or as quickly, as you might want, and not 100 percent, certainly not back to the way she’d been before the accident. That was a doctor for you. They lifted you up with one hand and shoved you down with the other. She hated doctors now.
In the first terrible hours and days and weeks, they had been told not to get their hopes up, no one was sure if Torrie would even live. They kept waiting for someone to give them a real answer, remove the dread. But with doctors, Audrey understood now, there was no such thing as being entirely out of danger. There was only one more day when the patient had not died.
People sent cards and brought casseroles to the house. The church bulletin requested prayers on
their behalf. But now it had been almost ten years. There was no longer any crisis, only life and time, which made everything unremarkable.
So that her beautiful, willful daughter had been stolen away and replaced by this changeling creature, a furious and oversize baby who had to be taught all over again how to eat with a knife and fork, toilet herself, tie her shoelaces. Once a week she had physical therapy and speech therapy at the clinic in Des Moines. The therapists were encouraging, like the doctors. They measured out hope on graphs and charts, inches and syllables. Thatagirl, Torrie! One more time! Great effort! It was in their self-interest to say that people got better, because otherwise there would be no need for them. So Torrie lifted weights, stacked blocks, blew into tubes, said A EE I O YOU, said see bee tree and everyone agreed she was making slow but steady progress.
Audrey didn’t tell them about the days when Torrie refused to put on clothes, or lit all the stove burners when Audrey was in the bathroom, or cursed at the television so that they hardly ever watched anymore. Commercials in particular seemed to set her off, those inconsequential dramas of people choosing Coke over Pepsi, Ford over Chevy. “What is it, Torrie, what’s the matter?” And Torrie made a motion with her hands that looked as if she were trying to wash them and said, in a tone of accusation, “Everybody too happy!”
That was what the commercials wanted you to believe. Buying things made you happy, and buying the superior brand made you happy. All of it was exaggerated to the point of stupidity and everybody understood that. Maybe Torrie didn’t anymore. Maybe she couldn’t tell when the world didn’t mean what it said, what was real and what were brightly colored lies.
The brain, Audrey had been told, was complex, subtle, fragile. If it was bruised, insulted, torn, it still kept trying to do its job, its neurons firing and looking for connections, short-circuiting and sparking. The brain was the boss of everything. There were the autonomic functions, breathing, the beating heart. Gross and fine motor control. Whatever could be sensed, touched, seen, smelled. Language and speech. Logic, memory, behavior, judgment. It had been explained to her many times that there were some things Torrie could practice so that simple repetition convinced her brain to follow a certain pathway. Other functions might be like a highway that no longer led anywhere.
The Year We Left Home Page 19