I knew I was fine but that the puppy should get to the vet, if only because the prints were pure blood now, thick blood, like her foot was a brush sopped with red paint. I stood, sat again, stood, then sat, then stood and skated over to the edge of the pond, where I’d left my hiking boots. It took me some time to unlace the skates as my fingers were thick with cold and the laces were hard, but finally I gathered the pup in my arms and I carried her to my truck. I was dizzy, I wanted to collapse into the snow, but I told myself, as I do at such times, oh, Lillie, shut up and wait it out, because the pain would pass and I believed then that such fleeting moments shouldn’t get much attention, though now I understand that they are in fact what make up my life.
There was an old towel under the pickup’s seat. The last time I’d used it was to rub a newborn calf into life. He’d been plopped down, wet and slick, into the snow on a day that was ten below and his mama was doing a half-assed job of licking him warm. But the calf lived, and that’s what I was thinking as I started the truck, the memory of me wrapping the calf in blue and the warmth of life underneath, just like when I put one hand on the pup’s side to hold her down into the seat and apologized for the ways life can surprise you with pain.
That was several years ago. That was the last moment I remember of my old self, my self that had not yet met Ruben. The next moment I was in a train wreck, which is to say, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong state of mind. I could not have avoided it, even if I’d tried, which I did not.
Ruben is not the vet. Ruben is the vet’s technician, and judging from his looks you’d guess he’s about thirty. A child. In comparison. To me. So perhaps I am crazy or worse. But Ruben looked at me as I told my story, looked at me for longer than one would expect. Ruben glanced at the puppy, and then looked back into my eyes, and again he held the gaze for some time. His eyes are very dark, liquid dark. The puppy was on the examining table and Ruben held the paw, and after I quit talking, Ruben started to sing a song under his breath, a country song I recognized but didn’t know all the words to, and neither did Ruben, because he patched it together with somethin somethin somethin. Then Ruben said, “Name?” and tilted his head at the dog.
“Well. I don’t know, I just got her. I call her Puppy.”
Ruben’s eyes moved from the pup’s foot to my head. “Your forehead. You could use a stitch or two.” But he said it without conviction, because we both knew I wouldn’t be driving twenty more miles off the mountain into the sprawl of town for two stitches.
“I hit the Far Side. That’s the name of my boat. Which is what I hit,” I said. “Do you have any of that glue that sticks your skin together? It didn’t hurt. Yes, actually, it did. But a passing sort of pain! Not the kind that sticks with you! You know that glue I’m talking about?”
In that moment, in Ruben’s eyes was this thought: We will be good friends. That is a surprising thing for him to be thinking so soon, but nonetheless, that is what his eyes told me.
It might be too much to believe that’s all it took. Although maybe not; maybe you can move from disinterest to interest to crush to heat to calm respect in a few moments. Perhaps it’s uncommon to run into a new person on the mountain, one who has interests that closely align with yours—animals, outdoors, fragments of country music, tenderness in a world that is without—and then to have your breath taken away for no other reason than his searching eyes and some sort of quiet sadness buzzing about him. Perhaps, on top of this, you know you are a bit off-kilter, and that the outside world has a tendency to scowl at you since you cannot quite maneuver through life as they do, and perhaps you know that there are only a handful of people who are going to think that’s fine and maybe even preferable. Perhaps all this can happen, and it is not love, at that particular instant, but it is the beginning of it, or at least contains the potential.
Ruben said, “Yes, glue, in a minute,” like that was the conclusion he’d already come to. “Your pup has a deep laceration, but the tendon isn’t severed. It’s a full-skin thickness cut, though, so Sy will use skin staples, wrap it, antibiotic. Clean cut, though. Nice cut for a cut.” He shrugged. “You’re Lillie, right? The woman who helps out at the Vreeland Ranch? You’re their ranch hand, right?”
“Yes.”
“You have a lot of animals.” This he said with a certain amount of admiration.
“Yes, lots of animals.”
“Sy is fond of you,” he said, referring to the vet. “It’s odd I haven’t met you before, considering.”
“Well, I mostly stay at home. The Vreelands usually bring in their animals, and my animals, well, Sy usually stops by my home.”
“You have bees, you sell honey.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “People think I’m crazy. I know that. My neighbor, Wendell, calls my place a Damn Petting Zoo. I told him he had so much junk on his property that I could get tetanus just by looking.”
Ruben chuckled, and of course there’s nothing better than hearing someone laugh, especially when you cause that laugh. Then Ruben said, “The truth is, Sy is at home. Archangels are visiting him today.” He looked at me to see if I understood, which I did. We all knew that Sy was schizophrenic or something, and on most days functional, but some days not. At this point in time, the community had voiced its complaints and compassion over Sy already, and I knew I had the option of driving all the way off the mountain for a real vet, or letting Ruben take over, this vet tech, this person whom I’d heard about but never actually met.
“Well,” I ventured, “can you do it? Because town is pretty big and I get turned around. Usually I go only when my neighbor, Wendell, is with me because, well, Wendell and I are just friends, actually we don’t like each other at all, so we’re not even friends, but we do come in handy for each other, you know what I mean! Helping to fix a thing or going to town together because neither of us like crowds much. Neither do you, I bet.”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Yes, true. I knew as much about you, although I don’t know why I would. But then again, we can be aware of all sorts of things about people in our periphery. If you can fix my puppy, please just do it.”
I pinched my lips together with my fingers, hard. That is a funny thing about me; I spend most of my time alone and the silence of my body is more or less in equilibrium with the silence of the world, and it’s only when I get with other people that I become this way, out of loneliness or nervousness or what I don’t know—it’s a little hard to clarify some things about yourself to yourself, even when you have long conversations with yourself about yourself in the silence.
“I can fix her paw. But I’m not a vet.”
I kept my fingers over my lips and nodded. Our eyes met briefly and his eyes had something in them, not amusement or irritation, as you might think, but a wish for me to be comfortable around him, not so nervous, but perhaps that is something I imagined, because, of course, that is the sort of thing I would want to imagine. Here’s something I’ve noticed, one of the greatest discoveries of my life: If you look carefully at people’s eyes the first instant they look at you, the first instant in any glance, what they’re really feeling will shine through before it flickers away, and what I saw was this compassionate wish. Then his eyes went hard because he was one person, and I was another, and our eyes must therefore mark that distance.
My own eyes went from his to a window, to the blue sky outside, where they stayed for some time, as if they were embarrassed for me. Ruben helped my puppy. I held the dog on the table and purred into her ear and scratched her neck and did not say, but certainly felt, how sorry I was, for already she occupied a large and intense place in my heart. I decided I should name her Ruby for that reason. I stayed quiet because I could tell Ruben needed me to; he was concentrating. He said only one thing: “A bee makes ten million trips to get enough nectar to make one pound of honey, I just read that.” To which I said, “Yes,” and I wanted to say, They’d break my heart with their
work, except the gold sheen of pouring honey is so beautiful.
But I didn’t say that, or anything at all, because at the same time I was observing Ruben’s hands with their thick fingers, and his palms seemed very soft although there were old scars and new cuts, dirt in the cuticles, blood blisters under two nails, and these were hands that knew something, and my heart was straining under it all. This sounds ridiculous, for I am not a teenager, not even close, and I’m supposed to be a steady elder, but I’m simply saying that from this point on, everything I felt had the embarrassing burning brightness and recklessness of a long-ago time. Perhaps I should not admit to such a thing, although I don’t have much to lose since very few people care for me anyway. Although, as an aside, I believe that other people’s opinions of us do in fact matter a great deal, because each other is all we have. Anyway, I wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but I did not. Because I did not, tears came to my eyes. Then I had to bite my lip very hard to keep from crying. This caused the inside of my lip to bleed, tangy salt. All this, and still my eyes stayed on his hands. Our hands in fact did touch one time, while he was fixing my dog’s paw, and for some reason I said, “Oh, sorry about that,” though I was not.
When Ruben was done, and the pup was standing on the floor, wagging her tail, holding her bandaged paw up, Ruben washed his hands and came to stand in front of me. He squinted at my forehead. Cleaned the wound with a cotton ball dipped in something. Dabbed on a bit of glue from his finger to my forehead. I tried (successfully I might add!) to breathe quietly and not let the tears slip, for suddenly my forehead hurt a lot, and I was feeling very alone, that kind of feeling that generally comes at night, that buzzing terror of a space when you recognize that you are alone, you are going to die, and you are going to die alone, and this was bad timing for such a moment to descend, but I managed under the weight of it all.
Ruben said, “You cut your lip.” For a moment I thought that perhaps we both wanted him to kiss it. But such a thing is not allowed by the invisible forces that operate this world. These invisible forces have too much power. If only the world could be less influenced by them, then their potency would naturally decrease.
Ruben put on a Band-Aid. It seemed that his fingers stayed an extra moment on my head as he gently moved his hand over the plastic to push it down. He said, “It’s nice to meet you, Lillie.”
This is the moment that becomes slowed down in my mind. Because he said my name, because I am not a person who is ever touched. Then he directed me, with a wave of his arm, to the front of the clinic, where I paid my bill. Then I left.
That is the bulk of my story. By the time I got to my truck, with the pup in my arms, I was wondering what the best course of action is when one is in a train wreck. Run away from the wreckage? Or stay in the danger and heat?
Please do not think I dreamed of us kissing, or our bodies coming together in rising desire, which is of course to say that I did indeed envision such things. But what I really wanted was to be in his presence. And that is what I yearned for during these past few years, which is how long I have fiercely loved him.
I’ve come to understand that I can be happy with very little, because I knew from the very beginning (though all my daydreams contradicted this, of course!) that it would be an unrequited love. I can be happy with very little, because I’d long ago ceased to believe that anyone could love me, and I do not say this to be coy or self-effacing, I say it because thus far it has proved to be the case, and because, to be frank, I have suffered from a touch or two of the bad forces of this world, and they have hurt me, and my recovery has sapped from me a certain energy that some humans have and project and which makes them noticeable, a little more human, and a little more alive.
Yes. I fell in love with Ruben. Maybe after all it wasn’t love immediately, because at first it was probably gratitude, and then it was more about me than him, which is standard fare, I believe, but I believed it to be love when, at sudden times, it was more about him than me.
Several weeks later, my pup’s foot had healed up, I went back. When I walked in the vet clinic, the puppy in my arms, a couple walked in right behind me, the man dressed in a denim jacket with white wooly stuff underneath, the woman in a slim-fitting jean jacket that was nowhere near enough to keep her warm, and we all shuffled up to the counter. As Ruben turned the corner, responding to the ding of the door, his eyes went from me to the couple, and I felt a tension rise and saw his face harden. He said to me, rather gently, “Can I help you?” but I did not want to be hurried, of course, I had many questions formed in my mind to keep him near me, and so I said, “Help them, first,” and the man stepped in front of me and said, “Uh-huh, all we need is some tincture of iodine,” and this seemed like a simple-enough request, so I was confused when Ruben hesitated, his eyes going back to me.
“A gallon,” the man said during this pause. “For my horse’s foot.”
Ruben cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with your horse’s foot?”
“Thrush.”
“We’ve got better products for that.”
“I just need the iodine.”
“I’m not sure we have any.”
“I bet you do.”
“I’m not sure.”
By this time, I realized something was going on. My eyes were drifting back and forth and I could see both men knew something I did not. The girl was aware of it too, but she looked too exhausted to care, and, in fact, her tiredness looked as if it had nearly emptied her out. I also noticed that one of the lower buttons on this man’s jacket was unbuttoned, and through this space, his right hand was placed, as if, for example, he was holding his stomach or something to his stomach, like a gun, and I noticed that because Ruben had noticed it too and then pretended he hadn’t.
Ruben said, “I’ll check in back.” Then he said, “Lillie, why don’t you come with me, I’ll put you and the pup in the examining room.”
“Okeydokey.” I said it as if I were oblivious, and I followed Ruben back, but when he left me at the door of the room, I stepped just inside, right near the entrance, so I could still hear.
After some time, Ruben said to the man, “We’ve got a pint.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“How about you order some more?”
“Do you want to leave your name and address?”
There was a pause. “Here’s a phone number. Call when it comes in.”
And then the ding of the door.
When Ruben came in the examining room, I caught his brown eyes and raised my eyebrows so that he knew I wanted to know. He hesitated. I raised my eyebrows higher. He smiled at me as he gave in. “Meth lab,” he said. “A gallon of iodine lasts this clinic a long time. And you wouldn’t use it for a horse’s hooves, anyway. They’ll boil the alcohol off and have the crystals.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
He told me about the vet in Wyoming who got held up last month, and about the traveling vet in Montana who had his truck hijacked. “I just applied for my concealed weapons permit,” he said. “They’re granting them to vets left and right. It’s an odd thing, feeling vulnerable like that.” He looked at me, and I knew what he was thinking, which most everyone around here thinks from time to time, which is whether or not a woman living alone in a trailer in the mountains ever feels that way, my answer to which is no, not really, or rather that I used to until I realized that you rarely notice an item, a tree for instance, that’s been there a long time, and that the same was true for me, and there is a certain safety in being mostly invisible. For this reason it is mainly a comfort that I am minimally existent, because it means that I am safe and can watch the world unawares.
“That guy had a gun,” I said, but I asked it as a question.
“I thought so.”
“I’ve got one, a .38 ACP.” Now why I said this I don’t know, because I knew that any such conversation could never pre
sent the truer version of myself that I wanted to show, and I was desperate to reveal something real, simply because I’ve spent my life constructing such conversations in my head, and I wanted to have one actually occur out loud. It is a fact that love turns you into a weird kind of salesperson about yourself, and this was not the best approach.
“Mine’s a Colt. I don’t like to shoot,” he said.
“Me either, not really, too loud. If guns were quieter, maybe I’d like them more. Once every five years I take mine out and shoot, just to make sure that I can still hit the pop-can on the fence post.”
“Exactly.” Our eyes met, complicit in our understanding that this was not any sort of conversation that pierced anything but that perhaps it would have to do. But Ruben did an interesting thing then. It was a common thing; people do it all the time for one another. And it could be called a kind thing, although it did not feel like that at the time. He said, “I have a girlfriend.”
I know this much about being blue, that if you give into it, it only gets worse, and that the same is true for love. But the fact is, it takes a lot of strength not to give in. So when someone clarifies for you that he is in no position to love you, or you to love him, and even when this is something you already know, because you have, for example, seen him and his girlfriend walking together, the best thing to do is not give in to the pain that suddenly shoots through your chest.
The Blue Hour Page 4