by Gregory Hill
Here’s a small sampling of the thoughts that enter my mind as I take the eight strides necessary for me to reach the storage room:
This is just like the time I ran twenty-four miles to try to save Vero from a bullet.
This is not just like the time I ran twenty-four miles to try to save Vero; in this case, it wasn’t me who pulled the trigger. And cats aren’t girlfriends.
Can a bullet from a handgun pass thru a wall?
I skid into the stockroom door, turn the knob, and open. To answer my question, yes, a bullet from a handgun can travel thru a wall. An armada of pulverized dust and gypsum chunks is billowing out of the sheetrock. The armada is already halfway across the shallow room, only a few more feet before it reaches the kitten. And a couple of feet ahead of that armada, leading the charge, is a misshapen bullet, still traveling forward, spinning head over heels, refusing, in spite of all common sense, to abandon its deadly purpose.
Meanwhile, the kitten is curled up in her basket, unaware that Death is churning the air just a few inches away.
Suck it, Death.
I dive forward and, you know how everything slows down when you’re in a car accident? That’s what happens. As I travel across the room stretched out like a temporary Superman, I wing my arm so as to knock the cat basket off the shelf. My hand makes contact; the basket and cat are airborne and out of harm’s way. I, who remain airborne and practically horizontal, then shift my attention to the wayward bullet, with which my face is about to collide. I go cross-eyed as my momentum carries me directly toward the lump of lead. At the last moment, I squeeze my eyes, tilt my head to one side, and brace for impact.
I dream I am a good person.
70
I awake face down on the floor of the Keaton Grocery’s stockroom. I’m covered with a powder of dust from the punctured wall. I touch my temple and there’s a crust of dried blood from where I collided with the bullet. My fingers follow the crust to the wound itself. I can’t tell without seeing it, but it feels like more of a scrape than a split. I’m fairly certain I will survive striking a bullet without any lingering aftereffects. There is a throb in my head, moderate disorientation. A variety of my ribs and knees are in various stages of discomfort.
My headlamp has fallen off in the collision with the bullet and it’s now on the floor on other side of the room. I crawl upon my discomfited knees to the lamp and stretch its elastic band over my forehead and point it toward where I last saw the cat basket hovering. The basket has descended halfway to the floor. The cat is still asleep, still in bed. I wipe chunks of dust off the shelf and put the basket back in place, making sure the kitten is curled up comfortably. Cute kitty. I saved your life and you don’t even know it. I reconsider and put the basket in the crook of my arm. I’m not leaving that kitten in this mess.
What has become of that accursed bullet? I can’t rest until I know it’s no longer trying to kill and maim. I scan with the headlamp until I find a pinkie-sized hole in a cardboard hat atop the head of a cardboard Twinkie the Kid store display whose sedimentary layers of dust suggest that it hasn’t been out of this stockroom in several decades. The bullet itself is lodged into the cinderblock wall behind Twinkie’s hat.
I feel my temple again, where I collided with the bullet. A nasty bump, some blood in my hair, no worries. I brush the dust off the front of my shirt and exit the stockroom and walk down the frozen food aisle and out of the Keaton Grocery.
My work is completed. Dom DeLuise: safe. Charlene: safe. Kitty cat: safe. Twinkie the Kid: mortally wounded. Guns: on their way to the roof of the bank. Narwhal Slotterfield: mildly concussed.
The people of Keaton can sort it out for themselves what happened. Charlene won’t have to sort out anything. I brought her and the kitten back to her house and wrote a letter in which I explained the situation as well as I could. Then I placed the three-dollar gold coin atop the wooden box under her bed and then I went out to gather Vero from where I’d perched her next to the bank.
I said to her, “Yes, my dear. This time, we’re really, really leaving,” and we headed north to good old Route 36, California-bound.
71
I’ve learned my lesson about moving fast in a slow world. Thick air offers resistance, and resistance leads to overly-stressed connective tissue, which hurts. So we’re walking, not jogging, to California. I wouldn’t want to jog anyway; it’s too dark out here; I could collide with a low-flying bird and break my nose.
Lifting my legs like a careful old man, and with my last three Vicodin dissolving in my belly, I push Vero along the highway, drawn perpetually onward by the next set of taillights of the next car up the road. The stars have grown brighter, the horizon is dotted with yard lamps from the various homesteads. The cars all have their headlights on and I can see grasshoppers being flayed in radiator grills. Some of the drivers have pulled over and are wondering what happened to their cell phones.
We’ve made camp at the House of Pronghorn, under the hellfire storm, south of the tornado. The Mister still hasn’t come home for dinner. The Missus looks concerned. Perhaps the Mister is a truck driver with a watermelon fetish.
My first order of business was to visit the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. The closest thing I could find to a painkiller was a bottle of Acetaminophen, With Codeine. Prescribed by Dr. Elijah Shepard for shoulder pain for Mr. Austin Tucker. Hey-o, my hosts have a name. The House of Pronghorn is now the Tuckers’ House of Pronghorn.
The back of the bottle warned me that Codeine is habit forming and potentially abusable. That’s promising.
I swallowed two pills and put the bottle with its remaining ten pills into my backpack. I wasn’t hungry, so I left the last of Mrs. Tucker’s pot roast roasting in the pot and I went to bed in the guest room with Vero floating by my side. Even with the Codeine, I slept poorly, expecting any moment for one of the bullets from Mr. Tucker’s twenty-one-gun salute that I’d way-back-when fired into the sky to fall thru the ceiling and crack my skull.
After several endless, unchanging hours, I gave up on sleep, got dressed, and ate two more Codeine pills. I tell you what, Codeine is not in the same drug-league as Vicodin. I honestly can’t tell if it’s doing anything. But it must be doing something; I haven’t yet detected any withdrawal symptoms from coming off the Vicodin.
The lights are on in this house; it’s nice here, if not entirely to my style. I find the Tuckers’ aesthetic, with the guns and dead animal heads and dark paneling, to be more ominous than it is appealing. Still, thanks for the food and all.
Alas, I shall now remove myself from this place, just as I’ve done with Cookie’s Palace Diner and the town of Keaton. I give Mrs. Tucker a kiss on the cheek and I place Vero in plank position and push her out the front door. We retreat from the glow of the Tuckers’ House of Pronghorn yard light and we venture north into the hellfire storm, which has lately begun flashing lightning every few hours.
You didn’t think I’d go to California without a detour to the Riles Place, followed by a quick visit to the tornado, did you? There’s still a part of me that wants to find my birth parents, and another part of me that wants to throw sticks into that tornado one last time. I will satisfy both of those parts.
I opted not to explain the side-trip to Vero in one of my notes, as the reading and answering process would take too fucking long. She probably won’t notice the detour anyway. It’ll last, like, one second.
I walk the gravel road. No sound, no cars to guide me, the stars hidden behind the hellfire storm clouds, my headlamp casting a private, finite, subtractive dream which I inhabit like a bathyscaphe creeping about the ocean floor.
My light reveals a road, some fence posts, my feet, my fiancée floating before me. If I look straight up, my headlamp bounces light off the grey-white churling cloudbottoms.
I sit in the road cross-legged with my sketchbook on my knees. I draw the shadows and the curves of the clouds. I can’t make them properly loom, so I point my headlamp at a fencepos
t and attempt to capture my sense of confinement, but I only manage a sense of smallness. How about I darken the entire page except for a tiny thumbprint of light in the bottom right corner? Show the smallness of my world. No luck. I tear the page out of my sketchbook and rip it into pieces and leave them floating.
I walk until my headlamp is reflected back to me by the broken windows of the Riles house. The house, the whole homestead, has grown more ominous with the onset of night. The ghostly, sagging buildings of pale wood, the lingering doom of the dead brothers, it tugs downward like angry gravity.
A red light glows from beyond the swaybacked barn, smoke hovering above, the air fragrant with combustion.
Tugging Vero by the ankles, I peer around the corner of the barn. Remember the two kids fighting over the bag of coins? They appear to have ended hostilities. They’re seated at a campfire made from chunks of wood torn from the rotting barn. The girl is staring into the flames. The boy is using a broken shingle to scrape pudding out of a large can whose label reads “Tapioca Pudding.” The shadows of the firelight are doing a fantastic job of emphasizing the kids’ hungry, hollowed flesh. I cannot imagine what led them to this ghostly place. They’re just two more clumps of dust in my journey beneath the living room couch in the townhouse of lost souls. I leave the kids a handful of granola bars, courtesy of the Keaton Cooperative Grocery, and then I move along.
Creeping past the barn, away from the kids, I stumble over the half-buried Riles family basketball hoop, its orange paint eaten by rust. I squat next to it and try to pull it out of the ground. It won’t budge. I scrape dirt away with my fingers and wiggle the hoop. I lean back and pull and pull and it comes away with clumps of dirt and yucca needles attached to it.
I float the hoop as high up in the air as I can, which is pretty high since I’m six-eight, and then I step away and find a clod of dirt. I run and jump and dunk the dirt thru the hoop. I land hard and I lay on the ground on my back, hugging my legs. My headlamp shows the hoop and the dirt clod hovering together nine feet above the ground.
Goodbye, Riles Place.
*
As we cross the north grassland, my knees and back and shoulders and everything else settle into a state of all-encompassing achiness. I eat two more Codeines, but they don’t touch the pain, so I eat two more. And then two more. Hell, I only have two left. Might as well get it over with. I finish them off and wait a few minutes. Trick done. I embrace the numb and push Vero ahead thru the night, stumbling on small mounds of dirt. Sometimes, for the variety, I walk around front and tug her along by her feet, but that tends not to work because I can’t walk backward without veering to my left.
Deeper into the storm, we cross into the curtain of rain and then into the hail. We follow the contours of the land. Vero’s feet become wet from bouncing into raindrops.
How does one locate a tornado in this silent darkness?
I should have followed my old footprints from the last time I came up here. But I didn’t and so now I’m walking without crumbs. Too much rain, too little light. I’m not gonna find the tornado unless I walk directly into the fucking thing. This is dumb.
In our short relationship, Veronica and I had quickly established a set of rhythms, traditions, rituals. One of those was “Tuesday Night at the Old-fashioned VCR”. It was our way of looking at the past thru the eyes of the past. The basis for VCR night was Veronica’s extensive Collection of Last Episodes, as recorded live off network TV in the 80s and 90s. Her family had been taping them for years. M*A*S*H, Newhart, Friends, Cheers, Island of Hair, The Witch and the Whistler, etc. Tuesday evenings, Vero would fill a bowl with licorice and beef jerky and we’d wrap ourselves in a quilt and watch from 10 to 11 PM, without fast-forwarding thru the commercials.
These final episodes—also known as series finales—were a parade of high drama and fond farewells, especially when a lead character would get burned to a crisp while saving his family from a ball of fire, as happened to Kelvin Blatmore in Island of Hair’s thrilling conclusion. Even the comedies got heavy-handed in their death rattle, which is why Party Line’s Romeo and Juliet-themed ending, with its lessons in interfamily kindness and tragic nipple piercing, resonates to this day.
Some of those final episodes were for programs that were canceled abruptly, without offering the writers a chance to wrap things up. The final Star Trek was, for instance, just another, slightly below-average episode. But even in cases like Star Trek, when the final episode isn’t a celebratory event, when it isn’t even acknowledged, the viewers, especially the two viewers at Tuesday Night at the Old-fashioned VCR, know this is the last episode. In those cases, it’s like watching someone enjoy a big-chip day in Vegas while we snicker into our elbows knowing that thon is going to die in thon’s sleep that night. It’s also like how, as you approach the end of a book, you simultaneously read faster and impart every word with more import than it probably deserves. Which is to say, anything can seem deep, secret, heavy if you’re willing to invest the emotional time into it. At least that’s what Vero said when I complained that I didn’t like watching TV on Tuesdays.
72
With my light pointed upward thru the glittering raindrops, my eye espies a shape to the clouds, a large spiral, like a hurricane. I orient myself to the spiral and begin guiding Vero toward this center of depravity.
There, a glint. A scintillating glint. And another and another in a line that leads in an upward hyperbola to the center of the spiral. I follow the scintillations thru the rain curtain, pushing gently on Vero’s shoulders.
Although I can’t very well make out the details, these glints reflecting the light of my headlamp are, without a doubt, silver, as in, silver coins, as in, the same coins I’d poured into the tornado all those inches of hair ago. Hot damn, Gretel, we’ve got our crumbs back.
I continue forward, following the arc of coins. Step, step, step, and—
The ground disappears, my hands slip off Vero’s shoulders, and down I fall.
73
I’ve landed hip-deep in a hole of the approximate diameter of an NFL offensive lineman. It’s a coyote hole or a sinkhole or something. Although I’ve suffered no major injuries, both ankles, both knees, both hips, and every single one of my vertebrae are, more than ever, in need of a serious session of rolfing. I have no more Codeine, no more opioids. I’ll deal with the consequences when they come.
I point the headlamp at the back of my fiancée’s head. In falling, my flailing my arms had knocked her slightly askew. Still, other than looking like she’s in the midst of an Olympic dive, she seems hale and hearty and deeply asleep.
I gaze upward at the cyclonic swirls in the clouds above. Illuminated in the lollipop blue of my lamp, the line of coins leads up and up and directly to a black wisp that’s all that remains of my tornado.
I say to Vero, “A few weeks ago, that wisp of a cloud was a bona fide twister. I fed those coins into it and they led us here. Alas, the tornado is not the marvel of nature it once was. Nevertheless, by finding its mirthly remains and gazing upon them, I have satisfied any lingering desire to revisit this general area where Charlene Morning discovered an infant boy. I once thought I was that boy. But we all know I am not that boy, for that would be overly coincidental and utterly preposterous. And so, with no further delay, let us now proceed apace to California.”
I place my palms on the upper rim of the hole. I brace myself to hop out onto the ground and remove myself and Vero from this poorly-thought-out tornado chase, whenupon I see a movement.
74
It was a bright glow, maybe thirty yards down the hill. Initially, I supposed it was one of the tornado coins, somehow flitting about at a speed enormous enough that I could register it in my personal time warp. But, hey. Coins don’t glow, they reflect. When I held my hand over my headlamp, the not-coin continued to shine.
It hovered several feet above the ground and wobbled back and forth like a hypnotic fob watch. But not like a fob watch. It glowed. It was Tinker Be
ll, an orb, dazzling and soft, and it behaved as if it were watching me.
It had been ever so long since I’d seen anything move—really move, I’m not talking about my own limbs or airplanes that crept or tornados that stirred, or even bullets that bulleted—that my brain quickly ran out of processing power and went directly into standby mode. Overwhelmed and growing gradually under-medicated, I became so dizzy that I had to squat back down into the hole in order to avoid falling over. Vero remained above, vulnerable, oblivious.
After some deep breaths, I regained a sense of equilibrium and chanced my head over the lip of the hole.
The orb had either grown larger or it had grown closer, I couldn’t tell. Either scenario was worrisome. It’s common knowledge that not all sprites are friendly. I watched it for another moment and then it disappeared. Then it reappeared, unmistakably larger and closer.
I once again squatted in the hole. I pushed my headlamp’s off-switch, which I knew wouldn’t work, and it didn’t. So I removed the headlamp and stuffed it deep into my backpack. I was in absolute darkness now, which was terrifying. But I was also no longer broadcasting my presence to the orb, which was comforting. And Vero was still up there, still askew, still vulnerable, and I didn’t see how I could possibly fit her in the hole with me, which was disconcerting.
Keeping an eye on the orbic faerie, I climbed myself up and out of the hole and stood on the grassy earth. I reached forth, searching the dark for Vero. My hand squished into her beehive haircut and I reached until I could grasp her by the shoulders.
I would walk backwards with her in the dark until I was sure we were safe. Then I’d pull my light out of my backpack and, opioid withdrawal or not, I’d run like the dickens over the Rockies and thru whatever states lay between Colorado and Yosemite National Park. And then we’d spend a month in a cave under a waterfall, dining on salmon and bears before we moved on to Hollywood.