Tom wasn’t swinging a deal with Karen for himself. Hell, he didn’t know what he was even considering. He might be calling the police right now... but if he did help her, it wouldn’t be in exchange for his life back. It would be for Zeke’s. Zeke did this. Tom knew it.
“It wasn’t me,” Tom said. “It wasn’t. You have to know this.”
“Oh, not this again,” she said, snorting up some snot to regain her composure. “The retard did it, right, I get it.”
“Well, he must have,” Tom said, pleading in his voice. “Smitty can’t. Guys with Down’s almost never can. And Dar, well, I don’t need to spell that out. And, honestly. Honestly. I couldn’t have.”
“And why not?” Karen said with incredulity.
“Because,” he said as Zeke approached. “I might be... gay.”
27
Nurse Karen looked from Zeke to Tom and back to Zeke.
“Where ya bin, hotshot?” she asked Zeke, as if he was her ten year old nephew back from bible camp. She threw him a devious grin. And she completely ignored Tom’s confession.
“Hi Missus—I mean, Nurse Karen,” Zeke said. He hung his head, wary of making eye contact. They both seemed weird to Zeke. Like they’d been talking about poop or sex or some other subject that smart people stopped discussing when a dummy like Zeke entered a room.
Nurse Karen traipsed off. She didn’t look back. “The lawn needs cut, Tom. Try and see to that other thing we talked about, too. I’ll give you until tomorrow noon. If you can’t handle it by then, the deal’s off. Remember what we talked about.”
She headed for the house. Shaken, Tom stood and rubbed his quivering hands together. He wasn’t sure if he really was gay, or as his dad said of a co-worker he suspected was gay, off the women. That was a term he liked to use. When the news cameras showed pride parades in California that was what he said: those men are all ‘off the women’.”
Tom wasn’t in denial. He just didn’t know for sure. What he did know is that a gorgeous girl was teasing him and flirting with him and spending a lot of energy on him. He didn’t know her whole name (that was part of her game and he was astute enough to know that), but he just didn’t care about her one way or another. And what else he knew is that a muscular, James Dean-wannabe by the name of Mikey who couldn’t care one way or another what the world at large thought of him, made Tom tongue-tied and nervous. Up until Mikey had shoved him and kicked him, Tom had wanted to hang out with the guy as much as he could. And he didn’t know exactly why.
But now he wanted to spit on Mikey Dean. And if he saw him again, he might just do that.
With only a handful of days left on his contract for Karen, he wasn’t certain if he would see Mike. Or Farrah With No Last Name, for that matter. He wanted to see her, if only to explain the food poisoning, to explain that he was... confused. Yeah, that was it. Confused. About as good a word as any for it.
And with that handful of days, Tom was sure of one thing. Nothing that happened here was going to wreck his future. Karen had this idea that she had him brainwashed. That he was young and stupid and she was seasoned and wise—and that if she told him she could wreck his life, that must be true.
Tom had decided when Zeke joined them. It was like Zeke brought a strange breath of fresh air. And now Tom knew for sure. Offing her husband, even with a handful of submarine pills, wasn’t going to happen. At least, if it did, Tom wasn’t going to be the man mushing them into apple sauce. No way, no sir, no how.
“You made it back in one piece, I see,” Tom said to Zeke, finally breaking the silence as they stood together.
“What?” Zeke said.
“I mean, you’re okay. It’s good to see. I have scant memories, Zed. Hardly any since the night you and me went up north to that house of hers.” When he said “hers” he was reasonably sure Zeke knew he meant Karen.
“Yeah,” Zeke said. “I have yer camera.”
Tom’s eyebrows went up at that. “How come, buddy?”
“Nurse Karen,” Zeke said. “When you were sick, she went on a... what Daddy used to call a warpath. She was mad. Mary says that she got real mad. Mad at you, Tommy. She went down to the furnace room while you was sleeping. She took some of your stuff and made a real mess. I kept your camera in my truck.”
Tom was impressed. Pissed at Karen—that woman was getting worse every moment and he couldn’t wait to get out from under her thumb—but impressed by Zeke.
“That’s some good work there, champ,” he said and again, he silently scolded himself for calling the older man ‘champ’. It just didn’t sound right anymore. Zeke was no one’s kid brother.
“It’s a good thing you did that. Karen is mad. At me and you.”
Zeke made a gesture that said, Really? Me?
“Yeah, big guy, hard to believe. But you have my camera. That’s great news.”
“How come?” Zeke asked.
“Cuz I have some things to tell you and we have more pictures to take.” He started off in the direction of Zeke’s truck. “Come on,” he said. And Zeke followed, not looking as bewildered as he ought to.
28
As they drove off, Tom reached out through the unrolled window and tilted the side view mirror. He had bags under his bloodshot eyes. His five o’clock shadow was more like a two-day beard and his hair—which he’d refused to get cut for the month of August—was disheveled and greasy. He knew he probably stank of sweat and b.o. He hadn’t brushed his teeth in how long?
His stomach grumbled and he wished he’d gotten something to eat.
In his lap, he had the open camera case. He was fiddling with his new camera. Its metal housing was burning hot. He had four cans of film left. They were hot to the touch too.
The municipal truck hit a pothole. Something banged against his leg. He was still wearing shorts and the shock of cold water ran down his leg. Startled, he pulled his leg back and looked down at it. In the foot well, beside his sandal, was the head of an axe, quite possibly the same axe that Zeke had brought down to the furnace room when he’d confronted Tom about Karen’s use of the Benzodiazepine ‘vitamins’.
The rusted blade was dripping wet and pooled beneath the sharp silver and mottled red of its head. The wood handle with worn paint was dark with wetness too, as though the whole axe had been submerged in water. That was the part that had bumped him: the long wet handle.
Tom looked over at Zeke. They were driving fast and hitting the bumps in the road with more abandon than usual. Zeke wasn’t paying close attention. He was using a match to light a pipe. Tom had never seen Zeke smoke. And he’d certainly never seen him with a pipe.
That’s when Tom noticed how damp the man was. He looked freshly shaved and showered. His thin hair clung together in wet groupings and was pulled back neatly to the place where his skull met his neck.
Tom remembered what Zeke had told him when they were out at the hot spring. Doan like the tub, Mr. Tom, he had said. Like showers. Me and my Daddy, we’s always like showerin way better den tubbin.
Zeke got the pipe going with a puff of white and blew some out his open window. He spat a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue too, then seemed to regain some level of attention on the road. They turned west off Main Street and headed up an avenue.
Tom pushed the handle of the axe away from him and it leaned harmlessly on the axle ridge between the driver’s half of the bench seat and Tom’s passenger side.
“Taken up the pipe, Zed?” he said, half eyeing the axe, half looking at this man who seemed somehow... different.
Zeke puffed on his pipe and steered with one hand. He looked more relaxed than ever before at the wheel of his truck. He glanced sideways at Tom. Then he spoke.
“My daddy smoked a pipe all ‘is ever-lovin life. Prolly chewed up by that c-word, from the inside out. Prolly his insides look like Mr. Banatyne’s outsides.”
“C-word?” Tom said. “Cancer?”
“Yeah, that one,” Zeke said and took another puff.
&nbs
p; “Y’know, Zed, buddy, I gotta tell you something and I don’t want you to get upset, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Mary. You know Mary?”
“Yeah. Mary-Mary-quite-contrary.”
“Uh-huh. Well, Mary’s going to have a-a baby.”
Silence from Zeke. The pace of the truck remained steady. They jittered on gravel as they left Dovetail Cove proper. The shoulder’s bush and scrub translated into tall thickets that pressed in on the road around them.
“Do you know what that means, Zed?”
“Yeah.”
“And... are you okay with that? I mean, do you know why that happens?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“No.” Zeke followed the bend of the road with one hand and took his pipe out from between his lips to examine it. He looked like he was half-listening. Or maybe listening even less than that. “But I knew that already,” he said.
“You did?”
“Yuh. Mary, she tole me. When you were sleeping.”
“She did, huh? Found out from that old doctor, did she?”
“Yeah, they took her blood with a big needo. Mary, she was scared. I made her feel better.”
“Good work. Nice to look after people you care about.”
“Uh-huh.”
They drove in silence for a while. It was at least a few more minutes to the bridge. Zeke spoke again. “I know how it happened. And I know Nurse Karen thinks you did it.”
Swallowing hard on the shock of that, Tom said. “You know what, Zed, buddy? How Mary got a baby in her tummy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you tell me about that?”
“Sure can, Tom,” Zeke said as they started across the bridge. The uneven juncture between the road and the lip of the bridge made the truck bounce and shift to the passenger side and it sent the wet axe handle banging into Tom’s leg again. “Sure can,” Zeke repeated. And he began.
29
You already know I wasn’t born a dummy. I’m not like Smitty. He has a... a syndrome. Something that makes him and a buncha people like that. They all have the same thing. And they’s born with it.
And I’m not like Mary or Ingy or Dar. Dar, his mummy used some drugs or some such, when he was in her tummy. She felt sick alla time and the drugs, they helped, but they made Dar come out all mixed up.
But me? I was hauling water pails for my daddy out on his acre. Many, many years ago this was. Back when his acre was fifty or seventy-five. He just has the one now. But he used to have a lot. He was a pretty rich man out this way. At least rich in land.
You remember when I was telling you about them deep, dark steps at Mr. Chris’s and Nurse Karen’s big old house on the avenue? You remember when I said I got stung by that yellow-jacket dragonfly? I did, I swear I did. And I tole you that, since then and the hot water in the hot pool, that I can put things out of order in my head and still come back to them.
Well, I can. I remember zactly what I was gonna say to you then but I didn’t because I had to tell you about taking Mr. Chris in the rolled up blankie out to this other house here.
But now I need to tell you bout this. And I need to tell you bout the axe.
I already tole you about that quarter horse up and kick me and knock four year old Zeke clean into next week. That’s what Daddy said to his friends when they sittin around the table with beers and vodka. He said, that old horse, he up and kicked my boy clear to next Tuesday. They’s laugh when he says it, but I seen the look on Daddy’s face. He didn’t like what that dumb horse did to me. That dumb horse, he kicked my thinker-bottle into a million pieces and it never come back together. Not till that yellow-jacket dragonfly sting me in the neck and I went down in the hot water.
Funny, huh?
That one animal, he take my thinker-bottle and he smash it. He take it away.
Then that other animal, he help bring my thinker-bottle back to one piece. He polish it up and make it new out of the box. He bring it back.
Funny.
I think my daddy loved me. Whatever that kind of thing is, I think he had some of that for me. Lots maybe even.
But about twelve years later, here’s his big galoot of a son. The doctors tell him a faulty thinker like that ain’t never gonna get itself fixed up right and so that daddy o mine, he just keep trying to teach me things. And he gets... what’s the word... frustrated. He gets so tired all the time. He yells and he yells. I can’t haul the wood right. I don’t fix the shoe right, I don’t milk ar cow right.
So yeah, twelve years or some such, after that quarter horse gives me a kick to next Tuesday, I’m with this girl. She’s purty and she’s nice. I just love the sound of her laughing. I can still member it like it was yesterday. Even though it might be fifty-five years gone by since I’d heard it.
Don’t get me the wrong way, Tom. I didn’t hurt her. Not like that. Not like you think when you look at me and I tell it like it was. And not like they all thought neither.
But I was bigger than she was. Margie, she was. That was her name. Only I called her Princess Margrett. The most prittiest princess ever.
And we was out in her daddy’s barn, way up top where the hands never come and only the cats and the odd crow come in there. And she asked me, she said, “You ever seen a girl’s how-do-you-do?” And I say, “Naw, I ain’t never. I ain’t never knew it was differnt than a boy’s,” and she says, “Let’s start with a girl’s taw-taws. You ever have a girl show you her special private taw-taws?” and I say, “No, Princess Margrett, I ain’t never been shown no purty girl’s special private taw-taws.”
So, just like that, the Princess, she takes off her top and she shows me her special ones. She’s only fifteen. Or maybe fourteen. No horse kicked her. She’s smart enough to know what all that stuff was for. And she’s strong and healthy. She look like a mama with those big round taw-taws. They looked awful interesting to me. Seventeen year old boy, I was. And so Princess Margrett, she says, “Let’s see what your how-do-you-do is up to, now that my special private taw-taws are getting an airing out like this.”
And just like that. She’s pulling on my coveralls. And out comes my prick. “I ain’t never heard it called a how-do-you-do before,” I say. And she laughs. I see all them purty teeth in her purty mouth and I smile because there ain’t nothing better than the sound of purty girls laffing.
And my prick, it’s not like usual. No sir. It’s big and long. It’s hard and it wants more of them taw-taws. It wants more. Even my broken thinker knows it.
So then, Princess Margrett, she says, “Now, let’s see what my how-do-you-do is up to. I’ll bet it wants a peek at yours.”
And so there’s Margrett. She’s got all her lady parts out in the hot sun streaming through the roof boards of her daddy’s old barn. And mine, mine want hers so bad. So she’s laughing and giggling like girls do, even though her parts, they don’t look like a girl’s, they only look like a mama’s. And so we start to giving those parts to each other’s.
And I will not lie. I will not backtalk and I will not break promises. But most of all, I will not lie. I liked it, Tom. It felt so good, listening to my princess laugh like that, and feeling her taw-taws and her how-do-you-do.
She showed me some things to do and, I got down to what she said. We did all the stuff that mamas and daddys do with each other, that’s what she tole me.
And no lies. I was happy. I lay back in the straw just as happy as I ever was in my whole life.
But that Princess Margrett, she started to show. Her purty belly, it swole up that summer. And when her daddy asked her why, I guess she tole him. She come to me in the night with a black face that was filled with hard round eggs inside her cheeks and under her eyes. I asked her what bird laid them eggs under her purty-princess face but she just looked sour and said I had to run. Had to run and not look back.
But Tom, you know this is an island. Even the fastest runner can’t outrun anything on an island. I ain’t
never been a sailor and I tried to get m’self on a boat for one of them fisheries. But they took one look at the retard I was, and they turned me away.
I can only thank some kind of God—if there even is one—that it was my own daddy who found me first. I was sleeping in a wood shed up in the northlands, I was.
And he come in and he start hollerin at me.
What did you do and why would you do that? Who were you thinking about when you wrecked your life so completely? Those were the words he used, Tom. Wrecked your life.
I member that. I do.
So he hauled me back to town. I remember the low end of Main Street where we met up with the men from town. They all been looking for me for days and nights. And I seen Margrett and her daddy and mama. I seen everyone I knew. And Daddy, he did a lot of talking. He shouted. I think so everyone could hear him where they were gathering in a big pile of people at the low end of the street that always floods when the rains come.
And he tole them stuff that I don’t really remember understanding. But I do know that Daddy and me, we were let to leave. They said we could go. “I’ll show you when it’s done,” is what I remember Daddy saying, course only after my stint at the hot pool and my treatment which got my thinker polished and new again. “I’ll show you when it’s done.” That’s just what he said.
And the crowd of mean men and mamas, they bled into nothing. They went back into shops and houses and down to the water. They went back to doing whatever it is people do. And those words—when it’s done—seemed to satisfy them.
Daddy—my daddy—was gonna take care of everything.
30
I didn’t remember for years and years. I still don’t have all the pieces but I don’t think they all exist to be found.
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