by Chuck Logan
. . .
Sometimes there was more than nothing.
Glimpses.
Damaged snapshots from a burned family album. All alone in
the dark theater of his head, he became a child again, waiting for the show to start.
I remember . . .
And suddenly he was there with his first memory . . .
Mom.
She was strongly made, a dark-haired farm girl with large hands, on a rubber pad on red linoleum, scrubbing, down on her knees with a can of Babbo and a pail at her side. She'd put out the front page of the Detroit News to keep Hank off the wet floor, and the grainy picture on the newsprint was gritty black and white and showed soldiers raising a flag above a scrub of brush.
She was first-generation American, with cousins fighting for Hitler and a husband in the Pacific killing Japs. He remembered the cool, sticky scent of lipstick, powdery cosmetics on soft leather, and the smell of Chesterfields in her purse. The war was everywhere. Like fat, black victory germs, the endless factory smoke sprinkled down on the snowbanks.
At play in the summer backyard, among tomato plants that grew up in humid green waves down in the hot tickling dirt, under the leaves, in the emerald-filtered light, he dug holes for his toy soldiers. Tiny khaki vinyl men. Dappled shadows.
Like the island jungles on the other side of the world where his dad . . .
First song. An old scratchy 78.
"Feudin', Fussin', and a Fighting" by Dorothy Shay.
The song played on the night his dad came home from the Pacific. Dad was hugs and tumbling on the floor, a smell of tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. Whiskers.
Two years later they were both gone, instantly, in a head-on crash. Mom's sister raised him after that. Holy Roller Church four times a week to keep him out of trouble.
Sister Wolf at the young people's meeting on Friday night would work her pimply congregation with guilt and shame, and then close the sale with cold-war terror. The bombers, she would say, have left Russia and are coming to drop their atom bombs. You better give your soul to Jesus tonight. And during the altar call he learned to go forward in the second wave, so the preachers were busy laying hands on the first rush and he'd slink on his knees right through the
thrashing of the Holy Ghost and creep out the back door of the basement auditorium and sneak a cigarette in the alley.
First bike. Schwinn. Red. With fat, treaded tires pebbles got stuck in and clicked on the sidewalk.
First woman. Halloween night, 1960, his freshman year at Wayne State in Detroit. She was older, a high-breasted Canadian graduate student down from Toronto for a party, impressed enough with his persistence to take on his sexual education. Set the bar real high for all the slow American girls to follow.
. . .
The first man he killed . . .
. . .
But then he heard the words . . .
"So here's the thing," Jolene thought out loud as she ran the suction wand over Hank's gums and around his tongue. "Whatever I did before, I haven't done any of it since I've been sober.
"Remember what you said about drunks being lucky because they can reinvent themselves? How they can lump all the bad stuff they did together and flush it down the past. What I'm shooting for here is to see you through this thing to make my amends. The problem is goddamn Earl doesn't seem to get it."
She fluffed the pillows behind his neck. "Earl doesn't think people can change. For sure not me. He's sort of the original antipersonal growth hormone in that regard." She fingered his chin and touched his cheek. "And you. I think you're due for a shave."
She left and returned with a plastic razor, shaving cream, a bowl of hot water, and a towel. As her hand glided the razor over the familiar contours of Hank's face, her eyes wandered the room, remembering how they'd worked together, Sheetrocking and taping the walls, building the bookcases, both of them in T-shirts and jeans spotted with paint, eating ham and cheese on rye, drinking Cokes.
They both tried to quit smoking the first time in this room, after they'd fooled around on the floor amid piles of books.
All those books. Had he really read them?
Could she someday? Before she met Hank the most she'd read at one sitting was People magazine.
"We had a pretty good time for a while," she said, carefully wiping the lather from his face and neck. She clicked her teeth and hunched her shoulders. The house surrounded her like an expensive train wreck.
Her train wreck, goddammit.
She patted Hank on the cheek and walked over to the books Earl had tipped to the floor. She stooped, collected them, and methodically put them back on the shelves. That was Earl for you. He threw tantrums. He could be a violent child.
Then, after the temper subsided, he would be sweet. But he never apologized for the tantrums. The good and the bad alternated. There was no—Hank's word—synthesis. No learning from experience.
Like she was trying to do.
Jolene felt the amputated craving for a cigarette. She shoved her hands in her pockets.
She and Earl had been born on the same day, the same hour, in the same hospital in Minneapolis. They had the same astrological pedigree. Mars conjunct Pluto. Biker stars, Earl called it. Deep, powerful urges for both good and evil. They were biker's stars because Earl said the Hell's Angel's credo meant you had to know the difference between good and evil.
And choose the evil.
She knew all this because they'd had their charts done by Lana Pieri who lived down the block when they were high school sophomores in Robbinsdale. "This is some heavy shit," Lana said. "You guys could go either way."
"Or both ways at once," Earl said, grinning.
There was this part of AA where you admit to God and one other person the exact nature of your wrongs, and she had told Hank how she'd had a part in killing a man once during her wild phase.
She knew about the jokes that Allen and Milt told about her and Earl being Bonnie and Clyde. Well, Allen and Milt were pretty perceptive guys. Because that freezing night outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, at that isolated convenience store with the one sorry gas pump out in front, that's exactly who they were. Driving straight through from Minneapolis on no sleep and no food, a
nickel bag of grass, two six-packs of Blatz, Earl's guitar, an amp, and one suitcase.
They were hungry and broke, working mean drunk-dares back and forth inside a stolen '89 Camaro. And it was so cold it made you crazy. Colder than Minnesota, if that was possible.
This time she was going in with the gun because she just wanted to get warm. So Earl handed her the gun he'd stolen from his uncle, a Colt .45 automatic, a big military keepsake that weighed as much as her mom's klunky old handheld electric mixer.
So she went in and the guy behind the counter licked his lips and hitched his cowboy belt buckle up under his round cowboy beer belly and grinned at her like she was Sheena of the Prairie or something, for sure the best thing he ever saw come swinging into his graveyard shift. And she didn't really enjoy the frog-eyed, dryswallow gulp of sheer animal fear the big pistol produced on his startled face. And she understood exactly the problem with guns when instead of handing over the money from the till he reached right through his first fear and under the counter for a gun of his own.
The thing about guns was, if you took one of them out and pointed it at a person you better be ready to use it.
Which—bang—she did before he did, point-blank. Knocked him over into the racks of Skoal and Red Man chewing tobacco and beef jerky. Jolene didn't see any blood but she remembered distinctly the gritty scuffed silver soles and the metal taps on the heels of his cowboy boots as the big slug knocked him for a flip.
"I killed him," she explained to Earl who came running in as she was cleaning out the cash register.
"No, you didn't, he's still moving," said Earl who took the pistol and sent her out to the car. And she could still remember how big and cold that night was, with the gas station lit up like a big candy m
achine under all those stars and how lonely those two last shots sounded, muffled behind the glass. She vowed she'd never go back to North Dakota, ever.
"I didn't kill him," she said.
"You didn't kill him," Earl said.
Jolene had hugged herself and shivered. "God, it's cold."
"Absolute zero," Earl said. "At least it is for that guy back there." Jolene had stared at him. And Earl had grinned. "The tem
perature at which everything stops—minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade. I got straight A's in physics, remember."
And they talked about it as they turned off the Interstate and drove a jigsaw down back roads north of Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt State Park where they ate bologna sandwiches on the shore of Lake Sakakawea and counted out $135.74, which was what that clerk's number amounted to when it came up.
They'd talked about God and if he were there and always watching, and would he hold it against them, and about karma coming around on them, which was different than God, but still definitely payback.
They'd finished their sandwiches and both agreed. They'd take their chances with God and karma over witnesses any day.
Chapter Nineteen
Allen, almost jaunty, swung a black satchel bag in his left hand. It was an old-fashioned doctor's bag, and he was on the kind of professional errand that surgeons never perform. Certainly not these days. He was making a house call. The bunched clouds threatened rain and the air was the color of damp cardboard. But the day was easy on his eyes. Every needle in every soggy spruce tree punched up bright as miniature green neon.
Allen crossed the Timberry Trails Hospital staff parking lot and walked toward his car, thumbed his remote, and heard the door open with a snug chirp. It was a light-paperwork morning and he had offered to sit with Hank Sommer while Jolene went into St. Paul for her first office meeting with Milton Dane so they could restart their bumpy relationship and get Hank into a full-care nursing home.
Seat belt. Ignition. He tapped the CD console as he steered his three-year-old Saab out of the lot into the tangle of midmorning traffic. He hummed and moved his shoulders experimentally along with the earthy cross-rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.
He could learn to loosen up.
Yes, he could.
Toward the end of his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic, Allen had a recurrent fantasy that he would go into the hospital one day, walk across the red line, and never return. The red line was a
literal line painted across the corridor that marked the boundary between the germ-infested world of the patients and the blue, sterile, controlled world of surgery.
In this fantasy his life would be one long procedure, and when it was over he would have operated on everyone who'd ever lived.
Allen saves the world. The End.
Now he was amending his fantasy.
Allen saves Allen.
He identified his problem and appreciated the irony. In surgery he space-walked on a tether of pure clinical knowledge. He manipulated precision instruments to fix the broken parts of the people who lay motionless under his hands. But when he took off the blue clothing and stepped back across the red line he returned to earth and was warped by G's. By the time he reached the sidewalk he was a fallen medical astronaut. He and the patients had traded places. On the street, he was the one anesthetized. Numb to the world.
Since Hank's accident he was obsessed with learning how to leave his work brain in the OR and just go out and live. And he was on his way to take his daily dose of the risky treatment he had prescribed for himself.
In a few minutes he'd cleared the traffic lights and was streaking down a secondary road between fields of standing corn. Beyond the corn, the tree lines hovered in a damp Impressionist mist. The chlorophyl dipstick was way down, the carotene was up, and the leaf change was in full glory.
Then he rounded a turn and his pastoral vision disappeared as the Timberry development blob munched its way through the woods, vomiting out rib cages of blond timber and farting out concrete cul-de-sacs.
He had joined the Timberry Medical Group to escape this very congestion. He only had to park his car once a day. He could walk from the clinic to the hospital, and to the health club. Some docs he knew had to commute all over the whole Minneapolis/St. Paul metro to three of four different hospitals a day.
Allen veered and accelerated past a queue of cars lined up for a left turn. Too many people were moving in. On his right, bulldozers scuttled like maggots on the remains of the forest and the fields. Lowball Mexican carpenter crews banged away, roughing in more new homes.
He disdained traffic. They should have a two-tiered road system, he mused—one for busy professionals and another for the patients to play bumper cars.
Hank Sommer's house sat back from the road on a bluff over the St. Croix River behind a screen of two-hundred-year-old white pines. From the road it looked like a small lake cabin, but as Allen wound down the serpentine driveway between the thick tree trunks the house revealed itself stage by stage in levels that cascaded down the bluff.
Hidden, subtle; quirks that Hank appreciated and Allen did not.
The weather-streaked cedar-plank walls and the rough shake roof were silver-dark, as were the thickets of frost-tortured ferns and hosta that clogged the walks of liver-colored cobbles. Canadian hemlock and Japanese yew grew in the shade like prickly green shadows. That was Hank for you, drawn to shadow as the better part of light.
Allen would cut it all down. Let in some light. Put in a tennis court.
Earl Garf's boxy green Chevy van sat like a guard dog in the turnaround in front of the garage. Allen parked behind the van, got out, and noted a bubbling of rust along the driver's side of the van's rocker panels. He was expected, so Earl would stay in the basement, out of sight until summoned to drive Jolene into town. But he'd make enough noise to intrude, to let Allen know he wasn't far away. That had been the daily drill every time he'd checked in on Hank since they'd foolishly brought him home.
Allen mounted the simple brick porch and pressed the bell.
Jolene opened the door and Allen sniffed. The secondhand smoke of Hank's Camel straights still lingered inside the house.
Seeing her, he wanted to take her all at once, like medicine. Like tonic. But he controlled himself and disguised his disappointment at the way she had renounced makeup and shorn her long hair. He was used to the suffering look that bleached the faces of families of terminal patients. But he didn't like seeing it on her.
This morning, fresh from the shower, she wore gray sweatpants and a blue, armless T-shirt. It was very warm in the house so she was barefooted.
"Hello, Allen," she said, very friendly.
"How're you doing, Jo." His eyes flew to the firm white magnets of her bare upper arms. Veered away.
She merely nodded, letting the weary smile play across her lips as she took his coat. He kicked off his shoes as she hung his coat in the hall closet, and as she turned back to him he was minutely aware of the entire volume of her body, the air it displaced and the smooth way it moved. She was all surface, image.
It occurred to him that he could only visualize the interior of anesthetized draped bodies on an operating table. He could not see past the surface of moving bodies. This insight bothered him slightly.
"I really appreciate this," she said.
"No trouble at all," Allen said.
As usual there was no mention of Earl down in the basement.
She led him through the living room. He approved of the way the house was a little cleaner every time he visited. More of Hank's clutter had been pruned and removed to the basement and the garage.
Seeing the light filter into the house through the slats of heavy wooden Venetian blinds, and the black Bakelite plastic rotary phone on the living room desk, Allen understood that Sommer had been born twenty years too late. On more than one occasion, he had heard Hank quip that he would have liked to jump into Normandy with the Airborne and kill Germans, but he was only two year
s old at the time. Spiritually, Hank belonged in the tar pits with the generation of blue-collar smokers who'd fought in World War II.
They went through the kitchen and down the circular stairway. "The canoe guide called," Jolene said. "He's bringing down Hank's truck this afternoon."
"Broker," Allen nodded. "He's a good guy. Doesn't say much."
"I'd completely forgotten about leaving it up there."
"It's all right."
"No, it's not, it's a detail. Details are important."
"Yes, they are. For want of a nail," Allen recited.
She stopped and cocked her head. Allen explained, loving the bare slate of her face, "It's an old saying, from a poem. 'For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.' "