The man with the clipboard tried his best to reassure in his genteel, southern accent. Who knows what horrors of Mother Nature’s disaster path he’d seen in his line of work.
“We’re doing everything we can to locate those caught up in the waters, ma’am,” he explained. “Ya’ll in the best place now for us to keep you sheltered and informed.”
An equally sympathetic young woman wearing a “trained volunteer” vest with a heavily made-up face, set us up with cots, pillows, sheets, extra blankets and towels.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her eyelash extensions and the thick line of turquoise, sparkly eyeshadow that emphasized a pair of otherwise well-intentioned pale blue eyes as she handed each of us a zippered plastic bag containing socks, a toothbrush and travelsize paste, a washcloth, bar of soap, stick of deodorant and a sleep mask.
“No way in hell I’m sleepin’ tonight,” Bridget declared. “For God sake, Bobby’s out there, he’s all alone. Do not let me close my eyes, Maggie.” She clung to me, her fingers gripping my forearms in the same tender spot that she’d held onto earlier.
I ran through an abridged version of our story three or four times to various people with clipboards and walkie-talkies over the next hour or so. Some kind soul brought us trays of food that we never even touched.
Marcus took off, mumbling something about needing a basin. He wandered back with a metal crutch under one arm and the handle of a plastic bucket of water balanced over the other.
“There’s a large pack of highly agitated dogs and cats in wire pens out in the parking lot,” he said. “Poor creatures are all riled up, terrified.”
I watched as he lost his cool openly, abruptly turning away a medic who was handing out sleeping pills like candy. “No drugs,” Marcus snapped. It might have been easier to tell the medic he was in recovery. We’d talked about it only briefly the previous night. “What I really fucking need is a clean elastic bandage,” he barked.
Seating himself on the edge of his cot, Marcus asked me if I would hold up a blanket for privacy. “Brace yourself, Maggie,” he said, locking eyes. “If you’ve never seen a prosthetic removed, I’m telling you, it’s not all that pretty, especially the first time.”
I listened as he explained how if he were to leave the artificial leg and liner on too long without a cleaning, it would lead to blisters and sores.
My first test, I figured, as I readied myself for the intimacy of Marcus’ most private world. I was learning fast.
I maintained a steady eye contact as he demonstrated graphically the mechanical extension of his body connecting to a socket that fits over his residual limb.
He was searching for any sign of reaction, I sensed. There was no point in any polite bullshit between us given the brutal pace and fast-forwarding of our getting to know one another. Marcus explained how each morning he fits a liner over his limb in order to make for comfort and cushioning and to provide a barrier between skin and socket. The design of his artificial leg is coated with a cosmetic cover to make it look more realistic, though I’d recognized it as a prosthetic from the start.
“It’s to please myself,” he said. “I’ve never felt the need to make any one else feel more comfortable.”
He told me how after the accident, he had ranked high on the scale the military used in deciding the level of prosthetic mechanics he would best respond to.
“Seeing as I was a soldier, relatively young and an athlete,” he explained, “I was considered way more likely to be successful with a high caliber artificial limb.”
I watched intently, expressionless, as he methodically removed the fake leg and socket, carefully laying them down beside him on the cot.
“I was reliant on a wheelchair at first,” he continued. “The crutches came into play as I waited for the surgery to heal and the swelling to go down. First year was a nightmare, worse than the blast itself. It took time to recondition my muscles, to relearn balance, to walk on different surfaces, climb stairs, drive.”
Bridget looked on with a glazed expression as Marcus peeled the liner off his stump and dropped it into the bucket of water. Afterwards, he took a washcloth and soap from one of the plastic bags we’d been given and soaked it in the warm bubbles. Soaping and squeezing, he gently cleansed the reddened scar tissue at the amputation site. Only then did I let him see me look away.
“Don’t be embarrassed on my account,” he said. “It is what it is. Took me enough time to get over my own anger and disgust. It’s alright, though you know. I’m one of the lucky ones.”
He spoke of Bobby and how they’d depended on each other after the rehab.
“Will power is never enough,” Marcus said. “It was a holy hell of a day-by-day deal for the both of us, Bobby and me. Addicts are never fully cured. You are aware of that, right? Any slight setback makes me yearn for it, even if only for a brief second, the relief I’d sought from the drugs,” he said.
Marcus looked down at the ground. He choked back tears. “Son of a bitch, Bobby kept me going,” he said. “Man.”
I watched as he ran his fingers over his scar tissue, feeling for signs of swelling from the day’s exertions. I resisted the urge to sit beside him, to hold him.
He dried his skin meticulously with a second, clean cloth before positioning the elastic bandage he’d requested over the top of his stump. “This should prevent any swelling overnight,” he said.
Next he washed the socket with the same careful process, setting it out to dry alongside the liner and the prosthetic on a towel that he’d carefully unfolded and laid out beneath his cot.
I listened, as he opened up on the subject of his friendship. “Bobby helped me figure out it was grow up or give up,” he said. “He had his shit together, more than most in recovery. I never once considered I would lose him first.”
We looked back over at Bridget. She was in a trance-like state, lying on her side on the cot, facing away from the two of us by then. I crouched down to touch her cheek softly with the back of my hand, checking to see if she had fallen asleep despite her protest. She turned at my touch, awake, wide-eyed, staring, blindly, into the room.
“Rest, Bridget,” I whispered in her ear. “Don’t sleep, but it’s OK if you close your eyes and doze a little.”
Marcus was up from his cot and back on his crutch. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder as he left, I assumed, for any update he could get out of the folk with the radios.
I felt an unfamiliar pang — his strong presence was much needed, it was comforting to the Bridget and me. As soon as he was out of my line of vision, I felt his absence, acutely. I wanted him back beside me. And, having shared with me so much of his emotional weakness, I figured he needed me as much as I needed him at that moment.
I moved my cot closer to my sister’s, reaching out to be of some small comfort to her. “Remember when we shared a room when we were kids, sis?” I asked. “The stories you told me to help me sleep, Bridget. Remember the imaginary magic rabbit hole at the bottom of the bed? Down we’d go into fairyland, night after night. Everything was so happy-go-lucky and vibrant in our land of make-believe, wasn’t it?”
Bridget turned to me amidst the sound of muted texts, a thousand pairs of feet shuffling around in the dark. “I remember,” she said. “Those silly, childish stories were my way to escape it all. The sum total of my adventures, Maggie, while I still had some shred of an imagination.” Tears. A sudden intake of breath and Bridget launched into a rocking motion, sobbing with a level of intensity unlike any I’d experienced in the lowest points of my life, not even when our parents died. I was powerless, sick to my stomach at the lack of privacy afforded us in this most primal of moments.
I felt a familiar flickering sensation rising in my chest, a tightening of the lungs, my heart pounded in a throat-closing readiness for another one of my ill-timed fucking panic attacks.
This was not the time for working on my self-regulating routine, that whole bloody business of breathing in, breathing o
ut. Instead I tried to picture something pure and good and beautiful. I dug down deep inside my head and conjured an old image of Mia that I’d posted on my refrigerator. It was one of her first school photos and I’d taken it with me on every move. Bridget had sent it to me after she’d paid for one of those overpriced packets filled with an excessive number of prints. “Who else is going to want a picture of my kid?” she’d written on a sticky note on the back. My one and only niece, cute as a button, her long brown hair tied into two neat braids, thick blue ribbons the same color as her sweatshirt with its white pony motif on the front.
I concentrated on the mental image of young Mia in tandem with my breathing in and out, tuning in to the sound of a coffee machine in the main auditorium, drip drop, the mutterings of the half asleep, the thrum of the ventilation system.
Bridget rocked from side to side in the narrow confines of her cot, loosening and releasing her hand from my tight, clammy grip. We were not alone in our heightened state of anxiety. I managed to maintain a sufficient mode of defense so as not to come completely undone for my sister’s sake and I somehow slept though fitfully and only after Bridget had cried herself to sleep from the sheer exhaustion of it all. I awoke to the sound of Marcus’ return sometime during the night, opening my eyes and propping myself up on one elbow as he balanced a plate of foil-wrapped food in one hand, while navigating his way around his cot on his crutch.
We sat, side by side, the pair of us, at once made suddenly ravenous by the savory, spicy aroma of a small pile of steamed tamales. I peeled off layers of cornhusk and devoured the spicy red chili and pork filling that was wrapped in a soft and especially comforting masa dough, the same sweet, pungent scent and texture of the street food I had purchased from the baskets of Mexican grandmothers in San Francisco’s Mission District on my way home from work in a different life.
“Can you believe they turned these delicious morsels away?” Marcus asked. The humble tamale maker who had walked to the shelter to share her homemade comfort food was deemed, along with so many other benevolent givers, as unauthorized in the supply of perishables. “It’s crazy out there,” he said. “Crowds of folk showing up with all kinds of stuff.”
“What else is going on out there, Marcus?” I asked. “How did you manage to get a hold of these if they were rejected?”
“You need details? Why? Are you keeping tabs on me now?” he shot back, clearly on the defensive all of a sudden.
“No. Just wondering.”
Marcus put his hands to his face and covered his eyes.
“If I tell you, do you promise not to judge?”
Test number two as Marcus described to me how he’d approached the night shift volunteers for any news on Bobby, while I was comforting my sister.
“There was a rush of activity around midnight,” he said. “One of the EMT guys had gone outside to handle an emergency situation with an elderly man.”
Marcus had found himself alone in a room with an open drawer and a ready supply of painkillers in plain sight.
“I had a bottle in my hand, Maggie. Fuck. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. I slipped the pills into my pocket and took off outside. I stayed there, on a bench, in the shadows of the outer parking lot, holding on to it, shaking the bottle, rolling it around in the palm of my hand.”
It would have been that easy. Only, something stopped him.
“It was Bobby, I felt like he was there looking over me,” Marcus said. “It was then that I walked outside and into the path of the woman who’d been sent away with her basket of tamales. She was more than happy to hand them over to me.”
I moved closer, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, brushing the skin above his beard line with my lips. “I’m here for you, Marcus,” I said. “You can trust me.”
~ I stirred after an hour or two more of fitful sleep as Marcus caressed my cheek with the back of his hand. I opened my eyes directly into his, noticing for the first time the tiny speckles of brown that floated in a deep-sea of blue.
“The search, Maggie, it’s resumed,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s daybreak, though you’d never know it in here.”
According to Marcus, both Bridget and me had slept way more than we’d thought we had. He’d stayed awake the whole night through.
“What did you do with the bottle of pills?” I had to ask.
“Slipped them back into the drawer where I’d found them,” he said. “My single most disciplined move, Maggie, through this whole damned ordeal.”
Bridget stirred and rolled to the side of her cot. She opened her eyes, swung her legs into a seated position and let out a deep, instantaneous moan. Her scarf had slipped from her head, exposing spiky tufts of short, white, newly sprouting hair. The sight of this took me aback and I gasped, promptly clapping a hand over my mouth.
My sister was both vulnerable and alert, all eyes and ears, like a fawn searching for its family. She reached for the bucket of water beneath Marcus’ cot, retching whatever little contents remained in her near empty stomach.
I gagged, in sympathy. My instincts told me it was time to bolt, to get us out of there, find someplace else, anyplace in order to wait it out. I feared the onset of another panic attack as florescent lights flickered strobe-like and incessantly over a sea of huddled heads.
Marcus was back on two feet. He took Bridget’s arm and led us through to the main room where the aroma of fried sausages, eggs, bacon and maple syrup failed to mask the sweet and cloying smell of fear and the unmistakable odor of so many unwashed bodies.
What we needed was fresh air. We made our way over to the main door, heading into a flurry of activity and buzzing walkie-talkies.
Two men interacted with one another over the radio chatter. We heard them talking about a body that had washed up on the roadside near Jenner that morning. “We’ll get to you shortly,” we were told.
I bustled us outside and found a space on a bench for Bridget and me to sit. Marcus took off and returned a couple minutes later with disposable cups of hot, sweet tea before he set to walking the perimeter of the building as we awaited news from the sheriff’s department.
Around 8 a.m., the three of us were taken into a small windowless room at the front of the building and informed, in shockingly plain speak that the recovered body fit our description of Bobby.
We desperately wanted to believe it wasn’t he who had washed up on a bank of weeds and rock where the river met the ocean. “Please, God, let it not be him,” I begged. Whosever’s body it was would need to be formally identified as all clothing had been ripped off by the strength of the current.
Bridget dropped her head between her knees and wailed like a wolf. I crouched down beside her and holding her tight, I placed my hand at the back of her head to steady her in her continual flailing. The sheriff’s deputy asked Marcus if he was able and willing to identify Bobby’s body. Marcus nodded, turned to Bridget and me and said: “You two best wait for me here.”
“I should have stopped him,” Bridget moaned, tearing at her clothing. She was inconsolable. Someone sent a counselor in. She was quite a bit younger than Bridget and me and despite her sympathetic manner and evident training, really, what could the poor woman possibly have done to make this any more bearable?
My mind raced. I couldn’t comprehend the injustice of it. What kind of world is it when a good guy like Bobby gets dealt the death card? It’s bad of me to admit it, I know, but my first thought was why the hell was Andres spared some similarly horrid end? He’s still free to go on playing around for the rest of his miserable life, thinking only of himself, treating women as disposable commodities. Bobby, on the other hand, what had he ever done to deserve such a cruel and sudden fate? I pictured him lying there in the morgue, ice-cold and bloated from the bacterial activity in his corpse.
How my sister and I found the strength to sit there and wait on Marcus coming back, I’ll never know. The pain of the high probability of a conformation of Bobby’s violent death pinned us to o
ur seats. Awful visions floated into mind. Hours of binge watching CSI have taught me that when a person drowns, their body floats due to the gases that build up inside. I remembered how I’d once watched a grim show about the dozens of people who drown in lake Tahoe each year. It’s a weird thing to retain, but it’s a known fact that of all those who drown, 90 percent of people do so in fresh water as opposed to salt. Lakes and rivers are evidently way more dangerous than bodies of salt water. It’s something to do with the chemical constitution of fresh water being a lot more similar to blood than its salty counterpart.
When Bobby took his last breath, he inhaled a flood of murky river water into his already compromised lungs. “The flood water passed through into his bloodstream, bursting his blood cells,” Marcus explained in overly technical detail during his shellshocked delivery of the news we’d so desperately hoped not to hear.
It was fast. At least there was that. I still can’t get it all out of my head. The coroner told Marcus that in Bobby’s case, his organs would have failed in two to three minutes at most given that his lungs were already shot from the hand rolled smokes, those lethal “casket nails” as he’d jokingly called them.
Was it any consolation to learn that Bobby went without a fight? Hell no and I’d never say any of this to my sister, but if he’d been doubly unlucky and he’d drowned in salt water, it would have taken more like eight to ten minutes of his desperate thrashing about. So that’s something, I guess, that he never made it out into the ocean. We found out from the pathologist who conducted his autopsy that they’d discovered bits of plant life, rocks and stones in his lungs.
Bobby’s physical wounds, his cuts and bruises were caused by debris in the current, his body washed up on the rocky bank. Thank God he wasn’t swept away at sea, along with the Airstream trailer that floated by, the cans of paint and television sets that rushed through and rolled out into the open waves. If that had been the case, there was every chance his body would have drifted miles through the open salt water before resurfacing on some far off beach to the north or south. Even in death, Bobby had chosen to stay in the familiar territory of his beloved home county.
Big Green Country Page 21