by Ron Rash
Bill hesitated, then soaked the gauze and gingerly coated my tender mid-foot, pausing each time I winced. Shirley handed Grandfather the needle and syringe as Bill dropped the gauze in the wastebasket and set the Betadine on the counter.
“You’re not finished,” Grandfather said, and placed the syringe in Bill’s right hand.
“I’ve never given a shot,” Bill stammered.
“Good,” Grandfather said. “You’ll learn several lessons today.”
“No, sir, I can’t,” Bill said. “I don’t know how to.”
“You’ve seen it done,” Grandfather scoffed.
“I know you need to deaden all around it,” Bill said, “but I don’t know how deep to go, or how much in each place.”
“If you don’t go deep enough, son,” Grandfather said coldly, “I’ll tell you and you can do it again. If it’s not enough, you will know that pretty quick.”
Bill turned to Shirley, hoping she’d offer to do it, though he knew as well as I that she’d no more defy Grandfather than Nebo would.
“The foot has to be lanced to get that splinter out, and you can lance it with or without lidocaine,” Grandfather said, turning to me. “Do you want your brother to do it with or without numbing it?”
I said I wanted my mother, and between wiping tears off my face pleaded that the splinter didn’t hurt anymore and I wanted it left in. Grandfather lifted the steel lance from the tray, nodded at the syringe in Bill’s hand.
“Your choice, boys?” Grandfather said.
Shirley took a needle and syringe from a cabinet.
“Like this, Bill,” she said, and angled the needle into her upper arm. “See, just under the skin.” Shirley slowly withdrew the needle. She angled it again, an inch higher on her arm, and repierced the skin. “Do that twice on each side, a quarter of a centimeter of the lidocaine in each place.”
Bill nodded, but uncertainty clouded his face as he came over to me. “Close your eyes and keep your foot as still as you can, Eugene. Pinch your arm the way I showed you at the dentist,” he added. “That way you’ll hardly feel it.”
I did what he said. The needle still hurt though, and I tried to jerk my leg back. Bill clamped his hands on my ankle. For a sickening moment, I felt the needle dangle from my foot, free of Bill’s grasp. Then he secured it and injected the lidocaine around the skin.
“Quit being such a sissy,” Grandfather barked. “You hear me, boy?”
I opened my eyes, thinking he scolded me but Grandfather’s glare was aimed at Bill, whose eyes, for the only time I ever saw in our childhood or adolescence, had filled with tears. But unlike my own, Bill quickly stanched his with a wrist rubbed over his eyes. He set the needle and syringe in the metal tray, and when Grandfather held out the scalpel, Bill took it. I looked away, only to see the disembodied hand raised above us as if to bless the proceedings.
“Quit crying, Eugene, and close your eyes,” my brother said quietly. “It won’t hurt, I promise.”
I closed my eyes but I couldn’t keep my body from shaking.
“You’ve got to be still, Eugene,” Bill said, settling his free hand on my ankle. “Feel that?”
“Feel what?” I answered.
“It’s out,” Bill said moments later and I opened my eyes.
He held up a bloody inch-long wood shard.
“Are you certain you got it all?” Grandfather asked.
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied.
I watched him wipe off the scalpel with gauze and set it back in the tray. Grandfather came over and inspected the cut.
“Well done,” he told my brother. “The patient should survive.”
DESPITE BILL TELLING me not to call his office, I do anyway.
“Dr. Matney cannot come to the phone,” the receptionist says.
“Where is he?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“I’m his fucking brother, in case you haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m following orders,” the receptionist answers, “his orders.”
“I need to know where he is and I need to know now, damn it.”
“Mr. Matney, I’m going to have to hang up.”
“Listen,” I say, trying not to shout. “You tell him to call me right now, that I will see him, even if I have to come into his operating room. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she hisses, and then all I hear is a dial tone. Though I place the phone back in the cradle, my hand remains on it. I think of Sarah’s photograph and how her coat befitted a northern city. But which one . . . Boston, New York, Hartford?
There is a moment in Nabokov’s novel Lolita when the title character explains her mother’s demise with two words: “Picnic/Lightning,” thus hurdling a scene that Nabokov’s character and the writer himself, no doubt, found too tedious to explain further. At the final AA meetings I went to, “Family/Alcohol” would have sufficed. But I told my story, explaining what had been lost: the academic, perhaps even literary, career; a teaching job; the marriage. I never spoke about Sarah though. To do so seemed a surrender of hope. But there was another reason. Nietzsche once said “that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” I didn’t believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate—and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was a Friday in mid-July when Leslie drove the six hours from Virginia to Sylva. The photograph I’d seen had not done her justice, especially her eyes, their ripe blueberry color but also their almond shape. Taller than I’d thought as well, five ten or so. She was shy and tended to hunch slightly when nervous, perhaps because, like most tall girls in adolescence, she’d towered over both genders, so wished to appear smaller. Knowing she’d once doubted her own attractiveness made me like her even more. My mother warmed to her immediately. Leslie was given my bedroom and I slept on the couch. On Saturday she and Bill spent the day on the Blue Ridge Parkway, taking with them a picnic lunch our mother made. So I polished the office floors without Bill, but I didn’t work by myself. Nebo, seeing I was alone, grunted and took the buffer from my hands.
I sat in the waiting room while Nebo finished, his huge hands guiding the metal disk across the floor, working without pause until the last room was done. When he was through, he put the machine back in the closet and sat down in a chair across from me. He wiped a phlegm-stained handkerchief across his brow and then over a skull made red from the exertion. I’d never been alone with Nebo before and it was unsettling. I had the key so I flipped through a magazine, waiting for him to leave. When I set the magazine back down ten minutes later, he hadn’t moved.
“I guess I’d better lock up,” I told him, but Nebo didn’t acknowledge my words. He continued to sit with his legs apart, forearms resting on his knees. I could see the outlines of the razor and whetstone in his front-right pocket and recalled a particularly frightening childhood dream of that razor. “I had better lock up,” I said louder, and when he still didn’t move added, “Grandfather doesn’t like me to be here if I’m not working.” He stood and went outside. When I heard the whir of the push mower, I went to the closet and, since the decreasing Valium samples might soon be noticed, pocketed two Quaalude packets.
Despite Leslie’s long drive back to Virginia, Grandfather insisted she stay for Sunday lunch. We all went to church together but it was only when we arrived at Grandfather’s house that the interrogation began. He asked Leslie about her family and her plans after college. Her answers, father a Methodist minister, mother a housewife, like her plans to be a lab technician, elicited a tight-lipped nod, as if, as my brother seethed later that day, Leslie were a hunting dog whose lineage was being appraised.
Maybe if it had ended there, nothing more would have happened, because though Leslie’s hunched posture implied tension, she answered courteously. Grandfather then held forth on how medical students shouldn’t marry until at least their residency, and how he was sure Bill had explained this to her
. My mother tried to change the subject, but Grandfather stopped her with a glare. Bill had stared silently at his plate through most of it, though he took Leslie’s hand once the questioning began. It was when Grandfather spoke of children being unwise for sleep-deprived residents that Bill set his hands against the table as if ready to upturn it onto Grandfather. His arms shook and his face filled with the same fury as when he’d been cleated.
“What Leslie and I decide about our future is none of your business, Grandfather,” Bill said.
For only the second time I know of, our grandfather appeared astonished.
“Well, Bill,” he sputtered, “I don’t mean to . . .”
Then Grandfather’s face and body pulled taut. It was like watching a startled copperhead coil to strike.
“It is indeed my business, boy, if I’m paying for your education,” he said, “and you had better never, ever, forget that.”
Bill pushed back his chair and stood.
“Leslie needs to go,” he said, taking Leslie’s arm to urge her up too. After a few strained good-byes we left. Back at our house, my brother carried Leslie’s suitcase to her car, where they lingered despite the midday heat. I watched from my bedroom window as they talked. It was a serious conversation, followed by a fervent kiss. Bill still wore his suit, and as Leslie drove away, my brother wiped the back of his wrist across his brow, or perhaps across his eyes.
“Can you believe he did that?” Bill fumed an hour later as we drove toward Panther Creek.
Of course I could, and said so.
“I should go over there right now and call him an asshole to his face,” Bill said. “That old man shouldn’t be allowed to live his whole life without someone doing it at least once.”
I’d have enjoyed watching Bill do that, but Ligeia was waiting for us. I turned the radio on. A James Taylor song played and I kept it there, hoping it might mellow Bill out. At the convenience store he got the beer and the Strawberry Hill, but he told me if I wanted a condom to buy it myself. I went to the restroom and got one from the machine clamped to the wall.
When we got to Panther Creek, Ligeia was sitting by the big pool. Bill didn’t bother with the rods and reels. He tore a beer from the plastic and walked upstream. I got a beer for myself and opened the wine and filled a cup.
“What’s bumming your brother out?” Ligeia asked as she took the wine.
“He’s pissed at our grandfather.”
I pulled the beer tab, a sound I looked forward to more and more. It was like an exhaled breath I’d been holding since the last Sunday. I set the rest in the creek and took a long swallow.
“He’s far enough away not to see the candy you brought your sweetheart,” Ligeia said.
I dug the Quaalude samples out of my pocket and handed them to her.
“The Valium was getting low.”
“These are even better,” Ligeia said, opening one packet and washing the white tablets down with the wine. “Plenty of these, though, right?”
“Some.”
“Thanks for getting me some extra again,” she said, gesturing at the second packet. “Getting stoned is the only way I make it through Wednesday-night prayer service. Too bad I don’t have three packets. If I did, your mermaid could float through Sunday school and preaching too.”
Ligeia paused and looked upstream. Bill was out of sight now.
“I need to ask you something,” Ligeia said. “My sis is coming up here Saturday and she’s bringing weed with her, a lot of it. There are kids around here who smoke pot, right?”
“Yes, some,” I said.
“Good, I need money for Miami, not just to get there but for an apartment down payment, that kind of thing. If I do end up here until October, maybe I could clear a thousand. That’s enough until I get my first paycheck. Jimmy, the guy my sis is getting the pot from, he can get me as much as I can sell. You know, Eugene,” Ligeia said more softly, “I could deal more than pot. I bet there’s all sorts of goodies in that cabinet. Dexedrine, Obetrol, Desoxyn. We could split the profit, if you’re okay with it.”
“I’d get caught for sure if I did that.”
“Just a thought,” Ligeia said. “Jimmy can get me some. He can get anything. Last summer he could score downers as easy as at the commune. We had a blast until we got busted.”
“You and Jimmy, are you good friends?”
A trout rose in the pool’s center, sipped an insect off the surface. Ligeia moved closer, placed a finger in a jeans loop and gave a tug.
“Why don’t you get the quilt,” she said, lifting the wine bottle off the bank. “I’ll meet you downstream. I’m going to do something new to you, and I think you’ll really dig it.”
I took the quilt from the truck bed. The rods would stay there, unless Bill wanted to try and make peace with Grandfather. I took two beers from the creek and joined her.
Ligeia still wore her bathing suit. I lay down beside her and was taking the condom from my pocket when she pressed her hand to mine.
“You won’t need that,” she said. “Just lie back, Eugene. I’ll do the rest.”
AFTERWARD, WE LAY beside each other awhile, then she raised herself onto her elbows. I did the same, drinking my third beer while she sipped wine. When my can was empty, she passed me the half-filled bottle.
“I don’t want anymore, so you drink the rest.”
“Sure,” I said, and raised the bottle to my mouth.
I didn’t like the sweet taste but took another long swallow.
“You don’t like it, do you?”
“Not really, but like you say, it gets the job done.”
“We need the hard stuff,” Ligeia said. “I bet your grandfather drinks some high-dollar whiskey. You ought to cop us a bottle.”
“He doesn’t drink.”
“You’re bullshitting me?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“What a waste,” Ligeia said. “To have money and not use it to feel good. And talk about feeding your head, he can get pills that will take him up, down, or sideways, gets them free, and he doesn’t touch them?”
“No,” I answered. “He’d never do that.”
“I bet he’s got a fancy house, though, right?”
“It’s nice.”
“I’d never want that,” she said, sounding wistful, “but a cozy little beach house right on the ocean, that would be out of sight.”
“Maybe you will have one,” I said, but Ligeia didn’t seem to hear me. She stared out at the woods.
The wine had taken my buzz up another notch. I took another swallow. Cough syrup, the red kind, I thought.
“Why don’t you go get Bill,” Ligeia said. “Tell him I’ll help him get over his pouting.”
“It’s probably better if I don’t,” I said. “When he gets in a bad mood like this, he stays in it.”
“Go ask him anyway.”
I got up slowly, feeling the full effect of the beer and wine for a few dizzying moments, then made my way upstream. Bill was at the pool, a beer can settled on a kneecap as he sat and stared at the water.
“Ligeia wanted to know if you were over your pouting yet.”
“I’m not pouting,” Bill answered, “and I’m not going over to where she is either.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I’m just not.”
“What do you want me to tell her?”
“You don’t have to tell her anything except that I’m not doing what we’ve been doing ever again.”
“Okay,” I said, and nodded at the single beer left in the creek. “You going to drink it?”
“No,” Bill answered, “but you shouldn’t either. It’s clear you’ve had more than enough already.”
I took the beer from the stream and walked into the woods.
“Just because he’s pissed at your grandfather?” Ligeia asked when I told her.
“I think it’s more because his girlfriend at college came to see him this weekend.”
“So she wore him out?
”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re pretty serious. I mean, he said he wasn’t going to . . . you know, with you anymore.”
“Well, that is William’s hang-up,” she said, “not ours, right?”
“Right,” I answered. “He acts like he’s forty years old. If I crank up the radio, he complains more than our mom.”
Ligeia lay back and closed her eyes. I closed mine too.
“I like this,” I said, “it being just me and you.”
“You and me is groovy,” Ligeia said. “Bill’s got some good things going for him, but he can get boring. He talks about medicine and science, even baseball, for God’s sake. The books you tell me about are cool, even if I haven’t read them, and talking music with you is a blast, unlike with your brother. Can you believe the music he’s into? Simon and Garfunkel? That’s like listening to Lawrence Welk.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s lame.”
“Anyway,” Ligeia said. “He’d better not try to hang some guilt trip on me.”
“Damn right,” I agreed, loud enough that Bill might hear, “the hell with William the Third.”
I emptied the wine bottle with a long last swallow, held it by the neck, and threw it in a looping arc toward the creek. It hit a rock and shattered.
“Why the hell did you do that?” Ligeia bristled. “I could get a goddamn gash in my foot from that.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, grinning. “William’s going to be a world-renowned surgeon. He can sew you up with fishing line.”
Even through the alcohol haze I knew it was a stupid thing to say, as the look on Ligeia’s face made clear.
“I need to split,” she said, and got up.
“Hey,” I said, feeling the world waver as I also stood. “I’m sorry. I very am.”
“I very am?”
“I really am,” I answered. “I’m real sorry. It was stupid.”
“Okay,” Ligeia said after a few seconds.
“You’ll come back next week, won’t you?”
She looked at me and her eyes faded back into their druggy dreaminess.
“Sure,” she said. “But you’ll still bring your mermaid her feel-good pills, right, maybe a couple of extra if you can?”