Madagascar
Page 12
JEWS SELL YELLOW SNOW
Silly puffs of air came out of Peter’s mouth when he tried to speak. His throat constricted from the astringent taste of his own foolishness and rage, and he struggled for breath. Finally his voice came in an abrupt fury: “YOU! You wrote all this! You those swastikas! You those sick comments! You your own father’s car! You,” and he stumbled toward the boy, grabbing him by the collar and twisting it down to the breastbone. “You little monster—you stirred up all this hatred, didn’t you?”
Stuart tried to escape the choking grip; his sweatshirt was a large knot and he was hanging from it. “Nobody cared! Nobody was doing anything!” he pleaded in his defense. And when Peter rose up on his legs, the boy fell to his knees, cringing from a hand that struck his face hard, making his head ring against the fence post and blood spurt instantly from his mouth.
Peter stepped back, horrified. The boy, dazed and whimpering, lay inert against the fence, one shoulder cocked as if he were talking on the telephone. Peter looked closer and saw that he had not so much split the boy’s lip as seemed to have unzipped it neatly along a wide line. Then Stuart parted his mouth and a bubble of blood popped, revealing inside the broken fitting of his braces.
‘‘I’m going for help,” Peter said, but only took a few steps backward, staring into the boy’s mouth, transfixed and frightened by the deep welling of blood.
He found a patch of ice that he slammed with a rock, chopping frantically, shoveling the pieces into his scarf and then returning to Stuart. But the boy, seeing the bundle coming straight for his mouth, screamed, “Don’t hit me again!”
“Don’t say that. I’m not going to hit you. It was an accident…” but Stuart raised his hands protectively and squeezed back against the fence.
Peter knelt down and studied the wound. He was in awe of its will to bleed. He kept fighting a strong urge to let himself be drawn deeper, much closer; he forced himself to turn away. After he did, he could still feel the pulling, the suction of a cooling glass on his skin. He had, for a moment, utterly lost himself in the boy’s flowing blood.
“My mouth really hurts,” Stuart said. There was a scared look on his face. “When’s it going to stop?” He meant the blood, and Peter—gently this time—pressed the scarf to the boy’s mouth, showing him how much pressure to use.
“You won’t tell, will you?” Stuart asked.
“Shush now. Hold that on tight.”
“I won’t tell on you. I swear I won’t.”
Peter strapped the boy’s legs around his waist, heaved the body onto his back, and then stood up and started running. He ran into a cornfield, crushing the brown, frosted stalks under the weight of the both of them. He forgot which way he was supposed to go, and Stuart kept turning him in the right direction, riding close like a jockey to his neck. His kidneys began to hurt from the strain and the bouncing, and he thought about how in two days he would be thirty-six. For five years, he’d been lucky and careful enough not to even have a cavity. If he slipped on a patch of ice now, he’d break both their necks.
“Hurry!” Stuart breathed in his ear.
Peter wrenched his head forward and kicked out his legs. He’d given over the rest of his body to the boy; only his chin bobbed freely. His shoulders ached enough to tear off in the next strong wind. He had fifteen minutes, a mile and a half to go. He had 370 million more breaths if he lived until eighty. He’d figured it out on his calculator last week. He could use most of them now. He could use most of his share and still hope for a decent life with whatever was going to be left.
The Horse Burier
The sisters wanted to bury Lulu on their farm, so they called Henry’s son, Landon, to do the job. Landon owned and operated a front-end loader with a backhoe. He mostly worked construction but took side jobs too, including horse burial. He worked nights and weekends to support his ex-wife and two kids. Several years ago he’d gotten into trouble gambling beyond his means—way beyond them—and Henry hoped that after a divorce, bankruptcy, and visits from mirthless men with snake-eyed determination, his son’s problems were now behind him.
Still, it was clear his son had never disliked him more, and when he called Henry early in the morning, Landon’s voice was low and begrudging.
“What do you need me for?” Henry asked him.
“Pipes,” Landon said.
It was seven a.m. Henry had finished his first of two cups of coffee before he’d take his morning walk and then afternoon nap. His right hip had been replaced six months before, and though that side of him was good now, his left hip had started acting up. He couldn’t sit for long without it stiffening and favored it on his walks. Before retiring a year ago from Western Waterworks, he’d crawled around in ditches checking water lines for the county, and if he knew anything, it was where all the water pipes ran across easements on private property.
“I can’t locate anything without seeing where the grave is going to be. I’ll have to go with you.”
“I suppose so,” said Landon.
“You don’t want the same trouble again,” Henry said.
“I don’t need you reminding me of that.”
Once, when digging a grave for a horse and working at night to beat a deadline, Landon had struck a water main. The damage interrupted service for two hundred homes, necessitated twenty man-hours of repairs, and cost four thousand dollars. Landon’s insurance company had upped his rates so prohibitively that Henry was afraid to ask if his son was still paying the premium. Surely, he wouldn’t be that stupid to go without. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time Landon had taken chances. He’d once jumped from the roof of a friend’s house when he wasn’t even drunk. He had landed on the target trampoline but had bounced into a shed, breaking it and his collarbone. On a Boy Scout camping trip, he’d decided he could wander off solo one morning and find a shortcut across a raging river, only to wind up clinging to a tree midstream for three hours until he was rescued.
He had not entirely outgrown such adolescent shenanigans at thirty-five years old, his latest being the ill-conceived construction of a zip line for his two sons across his junked-up backyard. The zip line had snapped and whipped back into the face of Jeremiah, his thirteen year old, resulting in eighteen stitches and unending teasing from the boy’s classmates who nicknamed him Zipper Face. As with much of his life, Landon’s actions had been well intentioned but poorly executed. Or maybe, as in the case of gambling, just poorly intentioned too.
Chad, Jeremiah’s younger brother, had asked Henry recently what their father was a like as a boy. Henry froze up, completely unable to answer, fearful his own biases would come through and confuse or sadden the child. Every word he said to Landon now was so measured. “Your father was a funny little rascal,” Henry finally offered, ruffling his grandson’s hair. “Just like you.” Chad waited for more. Nothing came and finally his grandson, puzzled at the brevity of his usually forthcoming grandfather, went off to play one of the two video games Henry kept at his house.
With the dregs of his coffee, Henry took a painkiller for his left hip, the pain having flared up while he sat and stared out the window at two hummingbirds fighting over the feeder. He had read that their hearts could beat 1,200 times a minute. Could his own heart even muster a couple beats per hour with all its despairing sludge? But that was the self-pity talking again. Meg had been gone for two years now. It was time to move on, as everyone advised him.
Until Landon called, the phone had not rung in three days. Even the telemarketers seemed to have forgotten him. Landon contacted him only when he needed a favor. Meanwhile, Jenny, Henry’s daughter, the child he had always thought would dote on him, lived two thousand miles away in Rhode Island with her sculptor boyfriend; they barely scraped by on a rocky farm they’d gone into hock over. No, there was nothing to do but bury a dead horse. A dead horse who had loved and been loved by two old ladies who probably never felt sorry for themselves a day in their lives.
He knew these two old ladies.
He’d been up to their farm a few times over his forty years living in Meldrum, a once sleepy rural Colorado town that was presently exploding as a bedroom community for Denver sixty miles south. While all around them other ranchers and farmers sold off their property to developers, the sisters held out. Now they were ringed by subdivisions, their land worth far more than they could pull out of the ground growing sweet corn and winter wheat. And by the looks of the fallow fields, he wasn’t sure how much they were doing of that anymore.
He’d met them through his wife, Meg. Esther and Gladys were their names, and one winter they both came down with the flu. Though near death, they’d been unwilling to leave the farm. Meg, a nurse for county health services, had gone to check on their welfare after a neighbor worrying over them had made a call to the Senior Health Outreach. Fretting about her going alone on a February day forecast to have a blizzard, Henry had driven her up to the sisters’ farm and waited in the car with the heater running while Meg went inside and checked their vitals. She couldn’t persuade them to go to a hospital. They were proud to say they’d never been in such a place, not even when they were born.
She was able to give Esther, who was the sicker of the two and severely dehydrated, an IV, getting her fever down from 105 degrees with the help of a cool bath and aspirin. She also insisted on staying overnight to watch over them, telling Henry, who’d been reluctant to leave, to come back in two days. The snow had started falling so fast and heavy it was if a plush blindfold had been slapped across the windshield. When he did come back, he found both women on the upswing. Henry was quite sure Meg had saved their lives, or at least Esther’s. The sisters, though embarrassed to be at the mercy of anyone’s help, showed their appreciation with a month of homemade pies, dropped off at Henry and Meg’s door. Henry would see Gladys run up, ring the bell just like his daughter had done playing ding-dong-ditch as a mischievous ten-year-old, and then jump back in their pickup before anyone could say a word to them. Over the years, he’d also seen one or the other riding their beloved mare, Lulu, along the dirt road in front of their farm, on the way to the little country store that had closed a year ago and been replaced by a 7-Eleven.
When she was dying, Meg came out of a stupor one morning to plead, “Promise me, Henry, promise me!” She spoke desperately. “I promise,” he said. “Promise me!” she screamed, squeezing his hand with astonishing strength. Her eyes were wild and her forehead soaked with sweat. The nurse came rushing in. He’d never heard her speak with such fright about anything.
And what did she want him to promise anyway? He would never find out. She was dead two days later. That he would try to be happy? That he would marry again or never marry? That he would not show his disappointment in Landon any more than had been obvious over the years? If he could have figured this out, if he could have believed she was in the least bit lucid and wanted him to achieve some goal, some meritorious purpose, he might not be the miserable, aimless bastard he felt himself to be now.
“Thank you for coming,” Esther said. The two sisters stood with him and Landon in the open meadow where they wanted Lulu buried. They’d camped here last night with a shotgun to keep the vultures and coyotes from scavenging the horse. The mare had been part of their lives for twenty-eight years, and well, goodness, Gladys said, she was going to have a proper burial and not be carted off to some rendering plant!
Henry nodded. Landon pulled his backhoe around to a slight rise in the meadow where the sisters wanted Lulu’s grave. The sisters’ farmhouse was a mile away, as required for the burial, and as far as Henry could tell there wasn’t any water source close enough to be a problem. In the distance rose the Rockies, still snowcapped at the end of May. To the east, a new development of three-story homes with decks as big as his house’s main floor marched toward the sisters’ open land like a military campaign. He could imagine catapults firing burning bales of hay at the sisters in an effort to uproot them. Or maybe they were just savvy businesswomen, holding out until the money became so good they couldn’t resist. Seeing them kneel beside the dead mare, its bulging, translucent eyes sightless in rigid death, stroking the blaze marking the horse’s face and whispering last words into the still pitched ears, he couldn’t help thinking they were also saying goodbye to the farm and perhaps all else. Near ninety, how much longer could they operate independently out here, no matter how fierce their determination?
Tears, involuntary, surprising, unwelcome, ran down his cheeks. The last afternoon of Meg’s life the cancer had rendered her unable to speak at all. She’d been moved to hospice a month before. Landon had driven over every day after work, and Jenny had come from back East as often as she could, calling twice a day if she couldn’t. They’d been devastated by her early death, he knew, just short of her sixty-fifth birthday. But she had not been their whole lives as she had been Henry’s, and he hardly could think what to do with himself some days other than walk around the house talking to her, the loneliness so acute he clapped his hands over his ears and screamed shut up shut up shut up! at himself. He didn’t hear her voice, just his, and he wished he would be crazy enough to hear her talk back to him. But it was just silence upon silence like a hollowed-out wind or a starless night seen through a porthole.
“Any problem?” Landon asked him.
“I’ll be okay,” Henry said.
“What?”
He realized his son was talking about something else entirely and hadn’t noticed his tears. Henry turned away, wiped his face. The sisters, however, were watching him intently. “What problem?”
“The pipes. Am I going to hit any when I dig?”
“You’re fine.” The pipes ran through the neighbor’s property to the eastern quadrant of the sisters’ land. Where they wanted the grave wouldn’t be a problem. He knew because he’d been up here a number of visits when retrenching had taken place. At one time, the water for the farmlands around here was pumped from a water tower. But that wasn’t enough to handle the development, and now other aquifers had been tapped. Pipes crisscrossed the area delivering the water to a new treatment plant six miles south. “You’re safe to dig.”
Landon lowered the backhoe’s boom and struck the ground with the bucket, scraping off the topsoil in deft strokes. Before he became known for his expertise burying horses, he’d once dug a hole too shallow and narrow. When he’d put in the horse—more like slotted it—the hooves had stuck straight up above the ground like tiki torches. These days he dug more generous holes, allowing the thousand-pound creatures to be laid to rest on their sides, if they fell in right. “Ten feet going to be okay?” he asked the sisters.
“That will be just fine,” the sisters said in unison. They had told Landon they didn’t want quicklime put on top of Lulu, just her buried deep enough to be safe from coyotes or dogs digging her up. They would plant grass on top and mark the grave when the time came. Lulu alone, Henry thought, would keep them from selling the place. How they loved that animal.
He had to admit that when his son was focused, no one could do a better job. You wouldn’t think he’d be irresponsible enough to gamble away his mortgage payments and his wife’s savings too as he did five years ago, and then a year later wonder why she was leaving him and petitioning for full custody of the kids. He had no idea about his son’s present love life, if he’d even dated anyone since the divorce. Landon worked twelve hours a day to make good on his obligations. Henry couldn’t fault his son for a thing now. He’d said as much to Landon, but Landon had just grunted in return.
“He’s a good man, your son,” Gladys said, as if reading Henry’s thoughts. “He called us back right away when we came to him with our problem. Not everyone is so willing to bury a horse. We would have been out of luck if he hadn’t come. You all…” Gladys turned away, looked blankly at her sister. Esther put her hand on her sister’s thin shoulder. She finished her sister’s thought, knowing it as well as her own. “You all have always been there for us when we needed you,” she told Henry who nodded, thoug
h he shouldn’t have taken credit for what was all Meg’s doing. He swallowed hard remembering her up here with these two ladies in the snowstorm when they were sick. He couldn’t get her to leave them for anything. He wanted her to come back with him and have her call an ambulance and make the sisters go to the hospital. “There’s no forcing them,” Meg had said.
“Then they’re just being reckless,” Henry had fired back, sitting in the car with Meg, the car’s heater running at full blast.
“Maybe,” Meg said, “but they have their principles and you got to respect that.”
Principles, yes, that was the issue, wasn’t it? He had a lot of time now to think about principles and whether his own had or had not done the job they were supposed to in his life. When Meg got out of the car that snowy afternoon, he wondered if he’d ever see her again—the radio was calling the storm the blizzard of the century. He did, of course, see her again, and her bond with these ladies and her respect for their implacable will, well, that will was the same in her. She was always prepared to make a sacrifice, even for two old obstinate ladies who wouldn’t budge on selling their land any more than going to a hospital. Maybe that’s what Meg had wanted him to promise. He’d show some spunk in the right direction when the time came.
Landon sat up in the cab, wearing coveralls and wraparound sunglasses, getting bumped around even with the stabilizers by the clawing backhoe lashing the ground with angry blows now that he’d hit the heavier clay soil. Such work was nasty on the back and kidneys, and Henry wondered how long Landon could do this without incurring some kind of disability.