Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “I know. She’s freaking unbelievable. Probably the smartest, most beautiful human being to ever live—and that’s not my opinion. That’s science.”

  He turned his water glass in slow spirals, dug into himself in order to ask the next part. “My mom told me you’d gotten married. Then she told me you had a daughter. I never got the story, though—I mean, with Whitey.”

  He didn’t know why he used the nickname. He didn’t mean it to be cruel, it just sort of slipped out. She rolled her eyes, annoyed but not offended. “Jesus, what is it with that? You know even his friends still call him that? Because he didn’t listen to DMX in high school?”

  “Is that how it started?”

  “Who knows. But Jonah or Kruger or someone starts calling him ‘Whitey,’ and now it’s a dozen years later, and even the other teachers call him that? I’ll see you in hell, all of you.” She hesitated, picked up the pepper and held it in her hand like a lucky talisman. “It’s not like anyone would ever accuse New Canaan of being this liberal, happy-go-lucky oasis, but I can feel people looking at us and Emma sometimes. And then my mom and dad . . .”

  “I can’t imagine they’d have a problem? That doesn’t sound like them.”

  “No it’s not—and they don’t. It’s just when we first started seeing each other, they sort of went out of their way to treat him well. Like they bent over backward to make it clear that they don’t care that he’s black, but sometimes they can be so, so awkward. Like they buy magazines if Michelle Obama is on the cover and leave them on the coffee table.”

  Dan snickered at this.

  “Anyway . . . I don’t know. Eric and I were just friendly. I never thought of him that way. But I was back in town working, and he was back subbing at the high school, and we started seeing each other, and I got pregnant. It wasn’t till then that I, you know, sort of figured out I wanted to have a family with him.” She swallowed. “And I was in love with him.”

  “How’d it start?” he asked immediately. So they could blow by what she’d just said. She looked at him, probably wondering if he really wanted to hear this.

  “When Rick Brinklan died, they had a parade for him.” Dan stared at the condensation on his water glass. “Everyone was back for it. Our families ended up by each other when the coffin came through. Dad’s friends with Marty Brinklan, and I hadn’t seen him that upset since Mom’s cancer. Afterward, Eric and I went for a drink and had a good talk—Eric’s just a really . . .” She hesitated. He could feel her gaze the way you feel a fire if you put your face too close. “Decent guy. It’s funny, in high school I thought his eyes were too close together, but it’s the stuff like that you end up falling in love with.”

  “That’s good,” Dan said. “You sound happy.”

  Maybe her smile was rueful. “I am.”

  The conversation stuttered. He’d feared it since he first saw her. That his jaw would clamp, and the heft of whatever he felt for her would hold it closed like a counterweight. One of Hailey’s skills was changing the subject, though.

  “You know what I can’t wait for? When Emma gets old enough that I can start getting her into Calvin and Hobbes. Hence the tiger outfit. I’ll tell her she went as Hobbes.”

  “You ever read them still?”

  “Are you kidding? I have all the books on a shelf by my toilet.”

  He barked a laugh.

  “Only— Okay, here’s the thing.” She leaned in to reveal the embarrassing. “Calvin and Hobbes changes when you get older, especially after you have your own kid. I think because it’s this really . . .” She paused, searching for the right words. “This specific, acute rendering of childhood and everything that childhood’s about. Just all the hope and friendship and wonder of being a kid, but also some of the sadness and the loneliness. You know?”

  Of course he did.

  “So sometimes I’ll read it, and I’ll just . . .” She laughed brightly. “I’ll start crying. It’s silly as hell, but I’ll get to the strip where Calvin’s railing against the condominiums being built in the woods where he plays or the one where he’s putting himself in the transmogrifier, and it doesn’t really matter the subject, I’ll just be moved by it. You know? And then I’m sitting on the toilet, holding Calvin and Hobbes, getting all teary . . .”

  They were both laughing, and then her hand shot out and grabbed Dan’s.

  “No! No! And I can’t let anyone ever know that! Promise to take it to the grave.”

  “What about the raccoon story line?”

  She pulled at her cheeks until the pinks of her eye sockets shone wetly. “Oh God the raccoon! When Calvin’s talking about death and he tells Hobbes, ‘But don’t you go anywhere.’ That’s like rip-my-heart-out, leave-me-sobbing-in-the-corner Calvin and Hobbes.”

  It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It’s why he dreaded the moment when they’d have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.

  * * *

  Their waitress had what looked like blood spots on her apron and an uneasy-making bruise on her arm that he saw when she set down their plates. Hailey voiced her displeasure at splurging on a burger while he forked at a salad. Vicky’s menu didn’t offer many options for vegetarians. She cut her burger in half, and asked him what his days were like. “Tell me about your life while you eat your dainty little salad.”

  He told her of Chesapeake Energy; visiting the rigs; the difference between horizontal and non-horizontal wells; his boss, a jocular, high-spirited former Pitt baseball star turned engineer, who called him “D.E.”; his apartment, a one-bedroom in a two-story unit on the west side of Titusville, overlooking Oil Creek (and the less scenic Morrison Builders Supply).

  “Maybe I’ll come visit sometime.”

  “Not a lot to do in Titusville. Nearest movie theater’s about a half-hour drive.”

  She gave that twitch of a smile, hard to read now, and bit off a gnarly chunk of beef.

  “Seeing anyone?” she asked, mouth full.

  “Not right now, no.”

  “Seen anyone lately?”

  He felt the old frustration, born when Lisa told him about Curtis Moretti, now curdling in the light of her husband, her child, her new life.

  And like that, he let it go. Like he’d always done.

  “I don’t have a lot of time for dating. I’m always helping out with Rudy.”

  “Your mom told me, yeah.” She poked at her fries. Her face gleamed with grease and compassion. “How do you help out?”

  He didn’t give her the whole story. Just the aftermath and Rudy’s injuries. His mother, Yunely, worked at the Titusville Quality Inn as a housekeeper. She didn’t speak much English and needed a lot of help dealing with Rudy’s injuries, talking to doctors, and navigating the VA. When Dan arrived back stateside, he visited Rudy at the polytrauma unit in Richmond, Virginia. The doctors told Yunely no way, no how would he make it. He had severe burns and had been shot in the head, just above the right ear. The bullet had torn across his frontal lobe and exited the other side. That the medics had kept him alive at all was something of a miracle. But Yunely refused to take him off life support. Dan had enough high school Spanish that he didn’t need the hospital translator to understand Dios encontrará la manera. God will find a way.

  Burns had seared away most of the flesh on his chest and left arm. To prevent life-threatening infection, the medics had needed to close those wounds right away, washing away charred flesh with light streams of warm water and then beginning grafts immediately. The burns on the right side of his face required a much more difficult procedure. The doctors cut a strip of skin from his shoulder, peeled it back, and let it grow onto the ruined part of his face. This odd pink bridge looked like a giant tongue lapping at his cheek. It would be fourteen more surgeries until the skin took. The grafts contracted into thick scars and pulled at the tissue around his nostrils and right eye. Like pinched plastic.


  Yet the burns were not why the doctors didn’t hold out much hope. The bullet had done severe trauma to his brain. They gave the technical explanation, but this meant as little to Dan as it did to Yunely. Parenchymal hemorrhage and edema. The only thing he really understood was that they’d removed a large piece of his skull to allow his brain to swell. All Rudy had was skin between mind and world.

  He thought Yunely was just being a mother. Dan knew his own mom would have to be dragged away by about fifty cops before she let the doctors take him off life support. Yunely and Rudy’s father had come from Nicaragua to join family in Pittsburgh and to escape the rampaging of the Contras. She had an immigrant’s tirelessness, the quiet ability to accept and assimilate whatever new obstacle descended. He thought it would be his job to convince her to let Rudy go—at least that’s why he told himself he was in Richmond. Then he finally saw Rudy. His good eye, the one that had escaped the burn and wasn’t buried in a stretched plastiscape of skin grafts, landed on Dan and widened. Rudy couldn’t move, but he made a sound deep in his throat, a grunt of recognition, Dan was sure. He took Rudy’s limp palm and held it. Beneath the carnage of his face he could see what Yunely saw, that Rudy was very much alive inside.

  After the cranioplasty, when the doctors fixed a prosthetic piece to his skull, Yunely persuaded them to release Rudy to a rehab center in Pittsburgh. Dan followed, living out of a dumpy motel on the south side, all thoughts of returning to school abandoned. The rehab center had little success. The bullet had destroyed whatever part of the brain sends signals to the rest of the body. He couldn’t move a finger. Noises would bubble up from his throat, but it was hard to tell what these articulated, if anything. Since he couldn’t keep his trunk erect, he had to be strapped into his wheelchair, head held in place with the same type of setup as quadriplegics. After three months, though, the therapists did make one advance they considered significant. When Rudy arrived he still couldn’t swallow. The therapists used electric nodes to zap his throat. To trigger muscle memory, they explained. After months of patient work, they taught him how to use his cheeks and tongue to drink through a straw and swallow. Dan picked up Yunely in Titusville every Thursday on her day off. This was the arrangement they’d worked out so she could keep her job and spend her spare time at Rudy’s side. That Thursday afternoon, when the therapists held up the flex-straw of his plastic mug and Rudy took it with his lips, his cheeks going concave as he drew the water, Yunely shrieked. Like Rudy had thrown a touchdown at the Super Bowl instead of sipping liquid. Her voice flowed in a dense, indomitable waterfall as she gripped her son and kissed his ruined face. Then she went around the room hugging the therapists, weeping onto their sleeves, and the women looked so unembarrassed for her, so genuinely happy to have been the cause of this display. Finally, Yunely held Dan, her head barely reaching his chest. Dios enviaron a su amigo. Su hermano. God sent you to be his friend. His brother.

  Rudy went home, and Dan found a job in Titusville. The gas boom had begun. Companies were cracking into the Marcellus and Utica Shales like an enforcer bringing a baseball bat across a car’s windshield, spiderwebbing the rock to release the prize. He moved into an apartment down the road from Yunely and Rudy, and they worked out a schedule. Rudy still needed twenty-four-hour care, and the endless list of tasks included dressing him, changing his diaper, managing the feeding tube, and checking and treating problem sores. Dan would arrive after he got off work and stay until Yunely came home at midnight. During the day, the VA paid for a nurse. Carly, sullen and quietly truculent was first, but then came Annette, a vivacious old Jamaican, who called both Rudy and Dan “Boy-man.” Between Dan, Yunely, and Annette, they managed. There were still moments of real fear. When Yunely worked a late shift, he usually spent the night at the house and would hear Rudy making these desperate, keening moans in his sleep. They had the power to put a dream in Dan’s head the moment before they woke him. He asked Yunely how often Rudy had nightmares. He thought she said once or twice a week, but she may have meant those were the rare nights he didn’t dream.

  Rudy had come a long way from when the doctors considered him a corpse in suspended animation, but it was relative. He could move his head, lift a hand every now and then, look at Dan’s one eye with his one eye, but that was his range. His progress seemed to promise so much more, and yet after those first months of rehabilitation he’d hit a wall. Yunely still thought he would be the same again, someday, but it was hard to see how.

  Meanwhile, Dan learned how to have a conversation with a friend who had no voice. They watched a lot of movies—he never expressed interest in picking them so it was a lot of Dan’s Netflix queue, a lot of historical documentaries with a Hot Tub Time Machine thrown in now and then. They watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War all the way through twice. He bought graphic novels, held them before Rudy, and read to him.

  A few weeks ago, Dan had been reading to him from the Frank Miller classic The Dark Knight Returns. He came to a panel where Harvey Dent was flashing back to his eponymous facial injuries. He felt Rudy stir, and Dan looked up. With great effort, Rudy lifted his arm—the one where the burns had just missed the knight and Sí Se Puede—and his hand hovered over the illustration, index finger attempting a gnarled effort to point. His eye met Dan’s. The left corner of his lip, which managed all of his ability to express, curled up. A movement Dan knew to be his grin.

  “Uhn,” he said.

  Dan burst out laughing, and Rudy stayed like that, smiling, for the rest of The Dark Knight Returns.

  * * *

  “Do you ever see Kaylyn?” he asked.

  They waited on the check, and Dan picked at the cold chits of fries from Hailey’s plate.

  She wiped her fingers on a crumpled napkin. “Not really.”

  “She’s around, though.”

  “Sure. She never went anywhere. We don’t see each other that much. She was still a barfly up until she got pregnant.” A grim smile.

  “Pregnant?”

  “Yeah. So there’s that.” She closed her mouth, looking oddly troubled.

  “Bill told me something tonight.” Maybe it was in poor taste to gossip, but bringing this up didn’t seem any worse than watching Hailey’s face go limp as he related the story of Rudy. He told her what Bill had said about him and Kay. Hailey barely looked surprised.

  “You knew?”

  She flicked at the napkin and watched it spin and tumble on the plate. “Yeah, I knew.” She closed her mouth. Her teeth clicked together. “Kaylyn called him her ‘pity fuck.’ Bill had been after her for so long that she thought . . . Well, I don’t know why she ever did anything she did, but I’ve got theories.”

  “Such as?”

  “It was all like a game to her. It was her way of being able to get to Lisa if she ever needed to.”

  This sat poorly in his stomach. His most persistent memory of Kaylyn was when she’d lost her inhaler in the eighth grade (Dan in seventh), and he’d seen her in the hallway heaving breaths during an asthma attack, a teacher rubbing her back and telling her to breathe while Kaylyn’s face brimmed with panic. “That’s twisted.”

  She chuffed a humorless laugh. “Hardly the most twisted thing Kay has ever done. She hangs around real fucked-up people now. She hasn’t had a job since she quit waitressing, so she makes money any way she can . . .” She trailed off.

  “How ’bout Lisa?”

  She gave another humorless laugh. “No.”

  “She’s gotta come back someday.” He felt a surge of longing for his long-gone friend and fellow bookworm. He missed her dearly wherever she was.

  “Maybe,” said Hailey. He could feel the night going blank. Hailey preparing to return to her other life. The waitress brought the check. He took it before she could offer to pay. They sat there for a while waiting on the change, looking like a still life painting to anyone passing by the window.

  * * *

  He could never explain it to Hailey or Mom or Heather or Betty. Not even Dad. Why he wanted to
go back. Why even after he was healed and discharged, he couldn’t leave Rudy.

  It was tour #2 in Iraq, September 22, 2007, thirty-five days before they would go home. They were doing a dismounted patrol just south of a mosque where they usually took small arms fire. When muzzle flashes and tracer fire erupted, they were ready (“Got some MacDougals on the rooftop and in the alley,” Coyle had warned). Cleary laid down fire with the .50 from the gunner’s hole, Della Terza with the SAW, and it didn’t really feel like much. They’d encountered way worse. And then Dan saw a boxy white car coming their way, the kind you saw all over the roads of Baghdad. All he remembered was the driver’s beard peeled back in the smarmy grin of the about-to-be-martyred. Della Terza went cyclic and the VBIED detonated well before it reached the convoy. But they were building those things with a lot of frag: ball bearings, nails, feces, ceramic shards. The post-blast buzz filled his ears until the world he knew returned: the smell of hot, ripe shit, and the rubble plinking and thunking off his helmet. When he saw someone down, he didn’t think it could be Coyle. He thought Coyle had been standing to his right, on the other side of the blast, but for some reason he must have gone to the lead Humvee. Dan could see the explosion had blown both front tires, shattered the windshield. He ran, splashing through engine oil.

  He got to Coyle first, before their medic, Sasha Laymon. Laymon was one of the best sixty-eight whiskeys Dan ever worked with. He had lightning hands and an intuition for unseen wounds, but when he got to Greg Coyle, he knew Laymon’s gifts wouldn’t matter.

  His friend had been torn in half, Coyle’s left leg completely gone and a wound going up his midsection so deep he could see hot blood boiling up from primal, interred pockets, spilling into light it was never supposed to see. His left arm was pulp. Part of his face and scalp were burned. You wouldn’t even know where to start with the Kerlix.

  Yet he was conscious, shivering all over when Dan got to him, kneepads skidding across asphalt. Coyle was trying to look down at himself to assess the damage. Dan pushed him down. Cleary slid into the dirt beside him, ripping his headset off.