“Howdy,” a man’s voice booms behind us. “Just where Doc said you’d be. I like that. Arkansas reliability.” The plaid of his jacket and the wide-brimmed cowboy hat make him seem twice as wide.
In his shadow is the thinnest girl I’ve ever seen. She’s the same height as Mom, but her shoulders curve forward and her sweatshirt sleeves hang below her wrists. Her fingers—what I can see of them—are bony enough to be sparrow’s claws. My first thought is she’s sicker than I am. And I’m relieved, which makes me feel terrible.
“Spike McIntyre, missy, pleased to meet you.” The newcomer finds Mom’s hand and pumps it several times, then drops it to put his beefy hand on my head. No time to duck, I didn’t see it coming. “This your ailing cub?” he bellows.
Mom nods, the silent laugh in her eyes aimed at me.
“Daniel. Daniel Landon,” I say, but I’m looking at what must be his daughter, whose eyes are shuttered and whose shoulders are quivering. Mr. McIntyre ignores her and moves on to the man with the sign. The voices mute around me as I try to decide what to do. I know that pain. She’s going to faint any minute. She needs a chair. I hug her. It’s all I can think of. When she goes limp, I swing her featherweight around to my suitcase, her slippered feet skimming the floor. With a slow bend of my knees, I fold her onto the suitcase, her spine against the pull-out handle, her head on my shoulder.
“You’re okay,” I whisper. “Want to put your head down?” I speak over her father’s complaints about the turbulence in the air, the limited drink menu, the cramped legroom. He doesn’t turn around.
When the man with the sign coughs and dips his head, Mr. McIntyre finally turns and moves into high gear.
“Dahling.” More surprise than concern. “Dahling child, there you go again, Southern charm just making those boys fall all over you.” He clamps one hand on my shoulder and twists me away. “I’ll take it from here, son.” And those two tree trunk arms scoop her off the suitcase as if she were a chick just fallen from the nest. “What the hell we waiting for?” he announces to the whole airport.
Mom and I are speechless. But the man with the sign steps forward and shoulders all four bags. Apparently he’s done this before.
“Welcome to Mehico. You bring the good weather, no?” Without waiting for an answer, he heads for the blinding sunshine beyond the automatic glass doors.
Behind him the sign floats to the floor like a failed kite. We have no choice but to follow. Mom’s smile is fixed to her face, her hand on my arm to keep me close. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
The Dodger fan fellow, our greeter, drives the old black Mercedes up and down the Mexican hills, all shale and sand. There are pockets of pale green undergrowth in the gulleys, but mostly open space. The sky is cobalt. No lie: deep blue, almost purple. I swear it would be blue forever if you cut it open like a melon. I wish I’d thought to bring my camera. Meredith would love the colors. Mr. McIntyre has his arm across his daughter’s back, her head on his knees. Sputtering coughs punctuate her light snores. Mom pats a tissue at the corner of her eyes. Grit, I think, but know better than to ask.
The clinic is three whitewashed buildings in the middle of a desert. A dorm marked MEN on one side, another marked OMEN.
Mack would love the Stepford-Hanes irony of it. Two dirt paths lead to a long low L-shaped building. I’m guessing offices and treatment rooms and maybe some kind of cafeteria, although I’m not sure acceptable standards of hygiene allow the mingling of sick and well. On either side of the dust bowl of an entry road there are only cacti and weeds in the sand. No roads out.
To tell you the truth, despite the odd piles of junk and seediness, I like it. It’s blunt, honest, no frills, no decorator lounges or travel magazines. This is serious business. And it can’t have cost that much if it looks this worn. Hard to tell what Mom thinks, she’s so quiet. I do wonder if she imagined something softer, gentler.
“I’m starving,” Mr. McIntyre says to our driver. “You got any nachos or”—he bumps me with his elbow—“what’s those other things Mexicanos make?”
“Quesadillas?” I’m short on Spanish vocab.
“Yeah. Kay-so-dee-dahs.”
But I don’t correct him. The driver ignores the backseat and speaks to Mom who’s sitting up front. “Dinner, four. After you meet Doctor Henkins. Wash now. Meet at one and thirty in white building.” He points. When Mom tries to open the trunk to take our luggage, the driver waves us away. “I take to rooms. Too hot. You go in.”
Ten minutes later we’ve peed and are sitting on plastic folding chairs that are arranged in a circle, staring at each other. Seven adults and four kids. It’s not hard to pick out the adults who are sick from the ones who aren’t. Mr. McIntyre and his daughter are not there. Right on the dot, the doctor and his staff, five of them, march into the welcome session as if it were a military drill. The first badge reads DIR. PABLO JENKINS with the IR in such little letters I wonder if it’s supposed to look like Doctor from a distance.
None of the staff are introduced as doctors, only by first names, which should add extra credibility in Mom’s eyes. One nurse in white whose tag says MARTINA tries to show a video but the tape sticks in the machine. The director is not at all flustered. He repeats several things and smiles widely, showing off his perfect line of bright white teeth, while Martina fiddles with the equipment and finally gets it running.
Afterward the other families crowd in on each other at the reception. The staff in assorted white shirts and pants circulates with forms on clipboards for the parents to fill out. The adults are eager to compare information, to reassure each other they’re not crazy to have come out to this wilderness. The kids are silent. I try not to stare at a boy who’s younger than Nick and already bald, the stump of one knee resting on an empty chair while his father corners the director and fires questions in a pig Latin kind of Spanish.
“I thought they were very straightforward, didn’t you?” Mom asks as we head back to our assigned rooms once we’ve completed registration and the director has circulated and has shaken hands with everyone.
“It sounds pretty simple,” I say. “Did you know it was all natural, no chemicals at all?”
“Sweetie, I gave you the printout from the Internet.”
“I was studying.”
“Studying Meredith maybe.”
I laugh with her, I can afford to. This is the paradise that will make me whole again and it’s Mom’s perseverance that got us here.
“When we get home, it’ll probably still be sitting on the table right where you left it,” she says.
Seven days in a row the airport driver comes for me in my room in the men’s dorm. We wear paper bathing suits that the staff throws away after each session as if we are contagious. First they feed us green stringy mush with the odor of salt water. Literally they feed us like babies with Teflon-coated spoons, maybe to keep track of how much we actually ingest. I’m guessing it’s seaweed. It tastes like asparagus with too much salt and no butter. As part of the meditation frame of mind, the loud speakers fill with Andean flute music like the traveling carnival musicians at the Essex County Fair. We wash down the mush with something that smells like gasoline. It makes me light-headed and sleepy, but we’re not allowed to sleep during the treatments. If you start to nod off, they jiggle you to keep you awake.
When I try to describe it to Mom at the communal dinner—the bathtub jets and the massages and the three bowls of mush—she pats my hand and smiles. “Thousands of people have been cured here,” she says. Her tan deepens every day and the circles under her eyes have disappeared. She tells me about the card games she plays with Mr. McIntyre. And how sometimes she walks out into the sand hills with the older mother of a young woman who has liver cancer and goes everywhere with her oxygen tank.
Although the treatment room has five cots and five bathtubs, the only patients in it are me and a very old man, Gerald Hovenfelt, whose belly is like a basketball. When the attendants leave, we talk a little. Mr. Hoven
felt has a tumor in his stomach, and over the ten days it shrinks so that he can’t stop grinning. He asks me every day if I’m feeling better. I’m so tired I can’t tell, but I say yes because I know it’s what he wants to hear.
Mom doesn’t ask me any questions. She does say that she talked to Dad on the phone in Director Jenkins’s office and that Nick and Joe are fine. They are all going to meet us at the airport. I want to ask for Meredith to come, but am afraid the police may be part of our homecoming.
“We leave on Friday, right?” I ask her the second week.
“Whenever Director Jenkins says.”
“How will he know? He never comes in to examine us.”
“The nurses must have to file reports.”
“Mom, are you sure these people are trained? The two guys in with me have a gazillion tattoos and they talk about our esteemed Director Henkins like he’s a joke. They mimic his voice and make faces at each other when they’re feeding us, when they think we’re not looking.”
She thinks about what I said. “If you’d read what I gave you at home, you’d have seen the testimonials from people who’ve been here. Their tumors are gone. They’re living regular lives. Playing golf, dancing, going to work.”
“Yeah, well they wouldn’t print what the dead ones said.”
“Daniel.”
After dinner we’re allowed to stay in the main building for movies or games. Mr. McIntyre and Bethany, his daughter, who’s still a stick, usually leave right away. But on the fourth night, when they announce they’re going to show Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she begs her dad to let her stay.
“I can walk her back to the dorm, Spike,” Mom volunteers.
“Please, Daddy.” Her voice barely stirs the air.
He nods without speaking and I can tell it’s hard for him to refuse her, which makes me wonder how many other treatments they’ve tried.
Mom lets Bethany and I sit together and she takes a chair in the back row. Most of the kids have stayed, and a few adults, but still the rows are mostly empty. Perhaps Director Jenkins’s treatment center has seen better days. While they’re fiddling with the film and clearing the buffet table, I ask Bethany about her hometown.
“My friends are scared of me, boys especially. They don’t understand cancer. They think it’s like the flu and they can catch it.”
“People are so ignorant. Did you have chemo?”
“That’s how I got so thin. You won’t believe it, but I used to be fat. I mean really fat, like a plus size. Pizza and french fries and double chocolate fudge cake. Since my mom left, Daddy lets me eat anything I want. I think he feels guilty.”
“About your getting sick?”
“No, about running my mother off with his gambling buddies and his NASCAR trips. They argued all the time. And she drank a lot of wine.”
“My Dad’s in AA.”
“Oh, my mother’s not an alcoholic. Once she didn’t have Dad embarrassing her anymore, she stopped drinking cold turkey. That shows she never really loved him.”
“I like your father. He’s a little loud, but he really cares about you.”
“I know. Mom only married him because he was rich. It wasn’t good for either of them.”
“How old are you?”
“Almost nineteen.”
“I would have said fourteen.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No offense. I guess it’s ’cause you’re so thin.”
“I can thank the cancer for that.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I did. He broke it off as soon as I lost my hair.”
“Wigs are so not cool.”
She looks at me funny, her eyes all squinty, and I realize she’s trying to figure whether I might be wearing a wig.
“Oh, no.” I laugh. “Chemo is poison according to my parents.”
She doesn’t laugh. The lights go off and the movie starts, grainy images on the white wall from a squeaky VCR tape. She could be offended if she thinks I was making fun of chemo. Struggling for a way to change the subject, I reject six or seven ideas until the figures on the wall start talking.
I whisper, “Why do you want to see this movie so much?”
“I don’t. But the room they have me in is a double. I’m sharing it with the woman who has the oxygen tank.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-seven. She hates her mother and that’s all she talks about. I try to change the subject or just not comment, but she rants and rants.”
“I’m lucky. I’m all alone. I could even alternate cots if I wanted to.”
“Maybe I’ll come over and hijack one of yours.”
“Fine with me, but the building says ‘Men.’ How you going to pull that off?”
She shrugs and turns her face up to the screen as if it were sunlight.
Monday night after dinner I’m so bored I sign out the Scrabble game from the dining room collection. Nick would go ape if he knew. Bethany goes out with her dad after dinner. I can see their cut-out silhouettes against the sunset as he walks her to the dorm. Little dust billows collect at their feet as she shuffles along the sand. Alone in my room after saying good night to Mom, I spread out the letter tiles and the board and play two hands against myself. At eight thirty I can barely keep my eyes open. Stripped to my boxers, I lie on the cot on top of the sheets and take out Catcher. They wash the sheets every day and put on clean ones that are practically crunchy from being dried on the line in the hot sun. A blue bedpan sits at the ready by the foot of the bed. We’ve been warned not to use the public men’s room in the night because of scorpions.
Holden’s drunk when he calls Sally back to apologize. Maybe he meant it to be funny, but it was kind of sad the way she humored him. He still hurt her feelings and ruined everything. It’s almost like he intended to do it, to prove to himself he wasn’t a good guy and not worth her attention. I’ve been drunk twice and it does make you think crooked.
Both times I was in ninth grade. Mack and I stole some of Joe’s beer and drank it in Mack’s canoe the first time. We rowed back to the public landing and walked to my house to crash. We were asleep by the time my parents came home. We lost one paddle getting out, and Mack couldn’t use the canoe for a month until he had saved enough to buy a used paddle from the attic at A to Z Antiques. The second time the Petrianos had taken Roger and his dweeb friends bowling in Richmond for his birthday. We invited Yowell because he promised to bring three girls from St. Margaret’s. Only two showed. When the girls came to the front door, we invited them in just like a legitimate party. But Mack was worried about spilling something on his parents’ furniture so we went to his room. Their basement wasn’t done back then. Yowell didn’t want beer. He made drinks for all of us in the bathroom from rum he’d taken from his dad’s liquor cabinet. He explained the way he added water with a funnel after he took the liquor so no one would notice any was missing. I never would’ve thought of that, but Yowell’s smart that way.
I don’t remember too much because the rum went straight to my brain. But Yowell wasn’t nice to the girls. He made their drinks stronger and tried to get them to dance on the bed in their underwear. Mack passed out and I ended up being the one to walk them back to the dorm. They had a friend inside who let them in the side door that opens out to the river. A little dicey because you can’t be but so quiet when you’ve been drinking rum and Cokes for two hours. Brewer must have been napping that night.
Here’s the thing about Holden and the bars he hangs out in. When Holden finally hangs up on Sally, he knows he’s been a jerk. Which makes him feel even lousier than when he started. Not a good feeling, but it’s how I learned I didn’t really like to drink. I don’t think I’ll tell my dad. No point in spoiling what’s left of my crazy life or making him think he failed as a father because I drank when he’d worked so hard to convince us not to.
The whole point of this story, though, is Bethany coming to my room. I’m not sure who lets her in, unless it’s Mr. Ho
venfelt who’s been teasing me all week about how cute she is. Yeah, cute like a lapdog. He’s a man who likes happy endings, definitely an optimist.
Anyway she knocks and whispers, “It’s Bethany McIntyre.” Like there were so many Bethanys in the Mexican desert.
“What’s up?” I open the door and she slinks in.
“I wanted to talk.”
“About?”
“Just talk. You know, with someone my own age. Kids’ stuff, music, school, not business or my mother.”
“Yeah, okay, have a seat.” I pull out the desk chair. But she ignores me and flops herself down on the second cot, the one that isn’t all messed up from my lying on it. She’s in her bathrobe. Pj’s underneath, I hope. My stupid body is going crazy and I’m mad at myself for being so disloyal to Meredith over just the closeness of a girl in pajamas.
For a couple of minutes we lie there on the cots, on either side of this crumby little bathmat they put in there for a rug. It’s bright yellow, but all mashed down like people have been walking on it for years and it’s never been washed. I try not to think about those other people.
“My mom doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks Dad took me for a vacation to the islands.”
Apart from “the islands” being an insider’s code for a social group I’ll never be part of, I feel like we’re soul mates in this whole experimental thing. There’s a reason we’re here at the same time.
“Are you a virgin, Daniel?”
If I’d been drinking, I would have sprayed soda all over the room. I hardly know this girl. The whole thing is too weird, sharing this kind of out-of-body experience in a foreign country where no one outside the clinic knows your whole name and you’re hiding from the authorities. I’m still stuttering when she goes on without my answer.
“I am. And it’s a drag. No one will go to bed with me now that I’m sick, and if I die, I’ll never know what it’s like.”
The echoes in my head are pounding through my skull. This girl who just met me knows my innermost thoughts. And if she knows this, maybe Meredith knows too and was just being nice to me.
Catcher, Caught Page 20