by Bill Ransom
He opened the door again and wiggled her foot.
“Is your neck stiff, honey?”
She shook her head. She had her eyes closed because the light made her headache worse.
“Just the headache?”
“Yes.”
He closed the car door and sent streaks of red shooting through her head.
“She has no fever, although she’s clearly been sweating,” he told her mother. “My greatest concern would be for meningitis, but this doesn’t look like that.”
“What could it be, then?” Again, her mother’s worried voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I want to see her tomorrow in the office. Call me tonight if she changes in any way for the worse, but bring her in tomorrow even if she’s all better.”
Maryellen slept most of the day away while relatives came to welcome her father home. The men laughed over their beers and her father brought them into the kitchen one by one to show them the nicks in the linoleum and to tell the story of the rat. Each time, he pushed the curtain aside and looked in to see how she was doing.
All of the coats were piled on her parents’ bed, and Maryellen’s mom kissed her forehead each time somebody came or left. When everybody was gone and her parents sat in the kitchen alone, swirling the ice in their glasses, Maryellen felt a sudden, intense hunger. She padded out to the kitchen and wolfed down a huge plate of spaghetti while her parents joked with each other and ruffled her hair.
“Better, huh?” her dad said.
“Yes.”
“Probably just some kid thing,” he said. “She got over it pretty fast.”
“We can borrow my parents’ car again tomorrow to take her in.”
“She’s better,” her dad said, “she said so herself. We can’t afford to pay him to tell us what we already know. Kids get these things, they get over them. . . .” He waved his hand to dismiss the whole thing.
“But, he said. . . .”
“Right. He said to bring her in. He didn’t say it would be free. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to get out of this dump, and the sooner the better. If she gets sick again tonight, we’ll take her. How’s that?”
Her father’s voice snapped the words out and his tone bordered on a growl.
Her mother rubbed her eyes the way she did when she was tired or when she just wanted everything to go away.
“All right,” she said. “I’m tired and don’t want to think about it right now. She’s been like this off and on since the earthquake, maybe it’s just . . . nerves or something.”
“Yeah,” her dad said. “Nerves. So we’ll see how she is in the morning. You ate a good dinner and got plenty of sleep, Muffin. That’s all you needed, right?”
“I guess so,” she said.
She felt like she was taking a side against her mother, and she didn’t like that feeling.
The dream-work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any
way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.
—Sigmund Freud
Dr. Mark White approached the last summer of his two-year psychiatric residency on The Hill with relief. Most of his colleagues from medical school had chosen private hospitals for their residencies, grooming themselves into a lucrative network of suburban practice. Mark’s appearance did not lend itself to suburban practice—executives and their wives did not want to trust their psyches to someone who looked like an Eagle Scout too young to shave. His bright blue eyes and unmanageable brown hair furthered the naive adolescent image. During his ER rotation he’d been mistaken for a high school volunteer and for the lab tech’s (high school) son.
Mark decided to continue with public medicine in the fall, but he kept that decision to himself. He was going to treat himself to some fishing first. This morning he bought his first fishing license in six years as a commitment to relaxation.
He had offers, all places like The Hill, but he had no plans beyond his residency. These not very attractive offers all came from overworked, understaffed state agencies. He had ignored his advisor’s warnings about a residency at the state institution, and now he reaped the consequences.
“Rich people get as crazy as the poor,” Dr. Bidet had advised him. “Psychiatric care takes time, it’s not like a gallbladder that’s wrapped up in a couple of hours.” He tapped his desktop timer that ticked away Mark’s allotment of six hundred seconds. “Time costs money—if it’s your time, then it’s either your money or somebody else’s.” He rubbed his fat neck and sighed just as the timer dinged. “I think you’re an excellent physician, Mark. I’ll recommend you wherever you choose to go.”
Mark had never admired his advisor, a corpulent teaching psychiatrist with a very limited, very lucrative private practice. In therapy Mark had faced his distaste for the rich and fat, a “reverse snobbery,” as Mindy once put it.
The new Dr. Mark White had chose The Hill for unprofessional reasons. The hospital grounds, parklike and peaceful, perched a wooded ridgetop overlooking the valley. On a clear evening, standing on the helipad atop the fifth-floor roof, he watched sunset trickling down the Olympic Mountains as it pinked up the watery spaces between the San Juan Islands. Even the rain was a pleasure up there. Rather than washing the landscape gray is it did in the city, rain simply brightened the evergreen vista and freshened the air. If The Hill was not therapeutic for others, its location was pure therapy for Mark White.
His name tag read: “Dr. Mark,” and he seldom wore white. He worked in one of three corduroy sports coats: brown, gray or beige. By the time he started his tenure at The Hill he had already made his only tie, a black clip-on, last four and a half years. The tie was a going-away present from his younger brother, who inherited Mark’s room over the garage.
His tie was the last straw with Mindy, who made the issue of a state institution an ultimatum.
“I can’t stand the thought of you working in an asylum,” she said. Her nose wrinkled up in that way he’d thought cute, but now he thought officious. After all, he was the only one in the room with her at the time—not his patients, not the asylum. She was not wrinkling her nose at them but at him and at his pitiful prospects, a pungent substitute for what his medical degree had implied.
Mark White had a firm confidence in the skills of his head and his hands. The year of psychotherapy required for his matriculation in psychiatry had not gone wasted. He looked forward to The Hill, not down on it, and every time he saw Mindy picking imaginary lint off the arm of her chair he felt the gulf between them widen. She was digging a hole between them by the bucketful. He knew that nothing short of continental drift could save them.
Mindy had been his only intimate relationship, and he regretted his inexperience, particularly his inexperience in ending it. Even the best therapy only reached so far.
In the end, he didn’t have to worry. She took charge of the ending as she had taken charge of their meals or their selection of movies that she preferred to call “films.”
“I respect your social conscience,” she told him. “But I believe that money saves more people than good intentions. You should be an example for them to aspire to, not grubbing around among them.”
He had simply smiled and taken her hand.
“You’re being understanding,” she said. Again, that wrinkle of the well-tanned nose. “Being understanding is not the same as understanding. You’ll see what I mean. Someday, you’ll need something or someone and nothing will quite bring it off like money. That’s why I’m going to Houston.”
She flew to Houston as the first vice-president of the BankWest International Investments division and married her Chief Executive Officer a year later. Mark circled the date on his calendar after he received the invitation, but by the time the wedding rolled around he had already met Eddie Reyes.
In dreams begin responsibilities.
—W. B. Yeats
The boy Rafferty dragged stones to the uncle’s grave to prop up the lid of an old toolbox that he’d
inscribed with “Uncle Hungry” in neat black letters. Above and below the name, and to either side of it, four clusters of translucent wings caught the rising March sun and licked the bleached backdrop of wood like cold flame. Rafferty dropped the young sack of his body down on the gravetop and watched a finger of sun pry apart the iron lips of the sky.
Wind whipped around the corner of the barn, last of the night wind running for cover. Rafferty was tired, sweaty from the night’s digging. The wind that had teeth in it last night passed him this morning without a snap. Along this side of the barn, the morning-sun side, a scatter of crocuses nodded their lavender heads. The uncle saved those bulbs an extra year before planting, just to be safe.
“Quiet as a grave,” the older man might have said. Rafferty said it for him and added the quick snort that his uncle used for a laugh. Wind-sighs, the raspy rattle of loose dust off the stone-tops, his crow on the barn roof stretching his right wing out—everything was waiting for Uncle to show up so they could get on with things.
Right after the hatch, inside the still, things were much quieter than this. Those quiet days dragged into months, a year, two years thick with fear, with knives in the night and the heavy stink of rotting flesh from the barn and from the spring. Visits from the Roam had been their only relief.
Rafferty fingered one of the bronze flutterings tacked to the box lid—a clump of brittle, translucent wings. Inside the barn, bushels of these wings filled bins along one wall. His uncle, or the man he called uncle, saved them from those first terrifying months of the hatch.
Nothing like it since, the boy thought.
The voice in his head was older than he remembered. Those bright buzzing things crawled out of the ground that day and they took wing after a spring shower. He remembered the sun during that shower, and a rainbow. He remembered that glimpse of the boy, Eddie, whose blue eyes stared back at Rafferty from the crack in the world.
Later, the blue-eyed man unrolled him from the blanket and laid him on the slope outside the car. One of the hands had that same design of the “8” on its side that Rafferty saw on Mrs. Gratzer.
Until uncle got him out of that car, Rafferty had had no idea how bad he smelled. The hillside around him was not the seething mass of bugs that he had heard a few days before, but plenty still crawled around.
The air outside the car made him feel dirty at first, then clean again. The places that stopped hurting in the car throbbed now that he was free. Even though the breeze had a chill to it, he lay still and bathed in the luxury of clean air. He sucked at the water-bottle that the stranger offered him, and lay still.
Verna’s brother felt Rafferty’s head, his back, his arms and legs. The boy moved his fingers and toes when asked and noticed, behind the thin man who prodded and pulled at him, that nowhere did he see any grass, any of the new spring leaves. Around them, as far as he could see from the hillside, the leafless and barkless trees shone pale in the afternoon’s glare.
Rafferty woke up in bed, between smooth clean sheets, to cramps in his stomach and visions of those bright bronze bugs just out of reach. He smelled coffee and fried bacon. Bandages itched at his chest, back and shoulder. He had three bandaids on his right shoulder. The bandage between his shoulder blades itched the most.
“Stop scratching.”
The uncle’s voice came from a doorway beside the foot of the bed.
“Come and eat.”
The boy found clothes stacked on a chair and put them on. Everything was blue and a little too big. Rafferty didn’t think he had anything at home that was blue except socks. These blue socks and sweater were especially bulky, but warm. He hadn’t had warm feet since the hatch. Now, sitting the cold grave five years later, Rafferty remembered that as the last time he had had milk from a refrigerator.
“This is the last of the bacon,” Uncle had told him. “Those other pigs won’t be ready to put down yet for another couple months.”
Uncle had been right about the bacon. But this year. . . .
“Bacon this year, buddy,” Uncle said just yesterday, but Rafferty didn’t know how to get the bacon out of the pigs. In the years since that morning at his uncle’s table, he’d learned to eat that meal over and over in his mind. Then he’d learned not to.
Verna’s brother sat across the table from Rafferty and sipped his coffee. He was balding, and when he sipped coffee the furrows in his brow opened and closed above the steadiness of those blue eyes. The design on the back of his hand was a scar, and he wondered how it got there.
Uncle was always grinning. Rafferty knew that pretty soon he was going to have to talk. His plate was almost empty.
“What’s your name?” Uncle asked.
“Rafferty.”
He tried to get his throat to swallow a mouthful of dry fried potatoes. “What’s yours?”
The uncle frowned. “I thought you knew,” he said. “You said, ‘Henry,’ when I found the car. Call me Uncle Henry.”
Rafferty felt himself blush. “I didn’t say ‘Henry,’“ he said. “I said ‘Hungry.’”
Henry laughed and said, “Well, then call me ‘Uncle Hungry.’ There’s going to be a lot of it going around.”
A week later the first raiders came through. Uncle Hungry woke him up with a hand over his mouth, grabbed up some clothes and blankets and led Rafferty into the dirt basement. He slid something aside that looked like a piece of the furnace and he put Rafferty inside a tunnel.
“Crawl ahead,” he whispered. “Stop when you get to an open space.”
From upstairs came the splintering of cupboards and shelves, the heavy thump of bootheels, curses. Rafferty heard Uncle Hungry close the tunnel behind them, heard him stop several times. The boy picked his way through roots and fallen-in chunks of sharp rock. Suddenly the tunnel opened up on both sides. When the uncle caught up with him he switched on a red flashlight. Rafferty stared at a grotesque mechanical creature that squatted in the middle of the room.
Uncle nudged him out of the way and stepped over a case of bottles on the floor. He set the blankets and clothes on top of a stack of bottles, then he wedged the flashlight into some wing-colored coils rising out of the machine’s head. Uncle jammed a big roll of pink fluff into the opening they’d just crawled through. He slumped into one of two overstuffed chairs and waved Rafferty into the other.
They sat inside a huge underground room full of sacks, bottles, crates and their two chairs.
“It’s a big cooking-pot,” Uncle explained, his voice low. “Called a ‘still.’ It cooks cereal, from those bags.”
He pointed to some sacks stacked on a board beside him. Rafferty tried to imagine how many bowls of cereal you could cook in that still, and where you might find that many people at breakfast.
“Nobody can find us here,” Uncle told him. “We’ll hide out here until they’re gone.”
The room with the still was the quietest place that Rafferty had ever known. He heard all of his own breaths, and all of Uncle Hungry’s. Uncle’s stomach gurgled every few minutes and sounded like a conversation in another room.
“We have plenty of batteries,” Uncle said. “We have a water faucet. Lots of cereal and sugar but no way to cook it without getting caught.”
We, Rafferty thought. He said that we have plenty of batteries.
He didn’t know how long he slept that first night in the still, but he remembered being so hungry when he woke up that his stomach cramped when he took a drink of cold water. They couldn’t leave yet; the raiders were camped in the house.
“We can get out if we have to,” Uncle said. “This other tunnel comes up between the manure pile and the barn. But then we’d just have to hide, so we might as well hide here.” He stirred a couple of spoonfuls of sugar into the water.
“Here,” Uncle said. “Drink it now. It’ll stop the cramps.”
Uncle Hungry figured later that they hid in the still for fifty-one days, living on that sugar and water and grain. Another party of raiders killed the first bunch
, stripped them, carried off all of the rest of the food topside. They came out of the ground to summer, and Rafferty couldn’t tell where the sky and the earth left off because of the dust.
In fifty-one days in the still Uncle Hungry taught Rafferty letters and spelling, reading, numbers and counting money. And he taught him something of the Roam, the nomadic people who had been his teachers. Rafferty taught him the rope-skipping song, the song about stars and a trick for getting gum out of his hair. Uncle showed him the scar on the back of his hand.
“You see, I wear the brand of the Jaguar. That’s because someone else has been dreaming in my head. The Roam can tell you all about it. We always let them stay here; they bring their caravan through twice a year. They put up in that flat spot down by the creek. That’s how come I got this. The Jaguar’s priests found me when I was asleep. I don’t know how they did it. I had a dream where a bunch of fellas held me down and this fat, dark guy branded me. Verna had the same dream. Sure enough. . . .” He held up the hand again, for emphasis.
“Why did they do that?”
“To keep track of me. They say I’ll go crazy, or burn up from a flash of light in my skull. But I think that’s just talk.”
“Who is the Jaguar?”
“Nobody really knows. Lots of old stories, of course, but that Jaguar was a god, and a good one. This one causes trouble, no doubt of that. But these plagues, earthquakes, floods—it’s just handy to blame everything on him. He has it in for the people of the Roam, for some reason. With the brands and whatnot, he’s turned whole cities against them—against us—but nobody knows why. It’s against the accords, and we’ve lived by the accords for a lot of generations. Townspeople, where you lived, just want it to go away. They figure if they drive the Roam out, then the trouble will stop.”