"You gonna bail me out?" I ask, and Glenda grins as I step into my pants. She stands, letting the quilt fall away from her. "I believe I will," she says, and I nod and smile and buckle my belt, and her skin is shining so bright and warm it's a wonder I don't melt.
What You're Walking Around Without
—FOR MELANIE RAE
IF IN THE last ten years you've lived within a hundred miles of Houston along the southwest corridor of Highway 59, and in that time you've had a breast removed, or both, or you've had a hysterectomy or a lumpectomy or a swollen purple mole dug from your skin, then this is true: Whatever your surgeon cut out of you spent some time with Dean Covin in his car.
They put the breasts in quart-sized plastic containers with snap-on lids, the kind of cheap Tupperware Dean hopes they don't reuse. A uterus warrants a half-gallon bucket. Ovaries and tumors bob and float in pint-sized containers filled with gray liquid preservative. On a busy day—say, a Friday, like today—between his two insulated totes, Dean will have bits and pieces of forty people sloshing around on the back seat by the time he makes it from Victoria to Deer Park, where he rolls slow into the neighborhood, pulling into the driveway of the house his injuries have purchased for him.
Once parked, he cracks the window so he'll be able to hear the dispatcher, Luanne, bantering with the other drivers on the radio. He leaves the engine running, the totes on the seat, the a/c blasting to keep the car cool while he grabs a can of beans from the pantry and sits spooning them into his mouth on the front porch. Today, as always in August, the sun is blazing, and Dean's ears are humming with the overhead heat. He sweats and blinks and thinks back to the day he slipped on a ladder and tumbled fifteen feet to the floor of a Gulf Coast drilling rig's void tanks, to the moment he awoke in the spotlight of sun that came with God through the portal above, to the hum in his ears and the twitching in his extremities. Now he watches these loud and lanky neighborhood kids, children enjoying their summer break from school, jumping bicycles over a makeshift ramp in the street, sliding on plastic garbage bags over sprinkler-slicked lawns of St. Augustine.
If you live on this street, if your husband is working the day shift at the Exxon or Phillips plant across the highway, if you keep the television volume muted so you can hear if the evacuation sirens start screaming, then you've told your kids to steer clear of Dean Covin. There's something not right about him. Wears that brace on his wrist to squeeze off the shakes. When he's mowing his lawn, that eye, the one that rolls untethered in its socket, seems always to follow you from carport to porch when you carry your groceries inside. And his face, it jolts sometimes with a tic, like he's got electricity pulsing through him for no reason at all. Leave him be, you've said. Ain't a reason on earth for you to pester a man like that.
For the most part the children listen, but there's always one.
Dean Covin stands, drops the plastic spoon into the empty can, drops the can into the garbage by the garage, and gets back in his car, a two-year-old Chrysler with six-digit mileage from his daily route, a blue car with enough clear-coat shine to trigger suspecting looks in this pickup-truck neighborhood. But what's it matter? Dean thinks. The car's got enough room up front so he can hit the cruise control and stretch his bad leg on the longer straightaways of 59. That alone's worth a crossways look or two. He checks in on the radio, lets Luanne know he's back on the road. "Ninety-six," he says.
"Ninety-six, go ahead."
"I'm ten-seven from the house, Luanne. Should make the lab in half an hour."
"Ten-four, Ninety-six. Try not to get lost."
That Luanne, Dean thinks. Now there's a woman. Black hot-dipped jeans and a red-lipped smile. Sense of humor, too. Oh, what he wouldn't give. He turns the radio down and checks the rearview. Behind him, a kid he knows gets up to speed on his bike, aims it at the ramp in the street, then bails off at the last minute, rolling on the concrete and hopping to his feet as the bike launches itself aloft unmanned before it crashes and slides, spitting sparks, on its side. The other kids stand silently street-side, as if Jesus himself has descended to perform a BMX miracle. A tiny, scraped-kneed girl with red pigtails makes a break for her porch across the street and disappears inside.
This boy, John Dalton, pumps his fist in the air. "Shit, yeah!" he screams. "Nice." Then he spits in the street, leaves his bike in a heap, and struts up the drive toward Dean Covin's car, working a plug of bubblegum around in his mouth the way a big league pitcher might. This kid walks bowlegged, wears an old orange Astros cap backward on his burr-cut head. He spits a good deal, Dean's noticed, like at eleven years old he's already tasted something he can't quite wash clean from his mouth. Yes, he's a sour little guy, sneering and squinting all the time. Still, he's the only one on the block who will return so much as a look from Dean, and as the boy sidles up to the car Dean rolls his window down and the hum in his ears begins to recede, pulling itself back into him until it's barely distinguishable from the idling engine.
"What you got in the coolers today?" John Dalton says, leaning into the car. "Anything nasty?"
Two weeks before, Dean Covin had peeled one of the plastic container lids back and let the boy poke a floating breast with the eraser end of his pencil. "Bet you haven't seen the likes of this," he'd said.
The boy had smiled with only the chapped corners of his lips, pushing the tissue down into the liquid, widening his eyes a bit when it came bobbing, buoyant, back to the surface. "Have too," John Dalton said. "All the time."
Now, every day, the boy wants more. Dean prays about it, frets about it in bed, but the boy is only curious, a kind of curious Dean understands, and though he steels himself against it the same way he promises himself he'll quit smoking—tomorrow, so help me God—he can't tell this boy no.
Dean turns up the country and western station on the radio. Loud, but not so loud that he can't hear Luanne on the two-way. He pushes in the lighter and reaches into the back seat, fishing around in one of the totes. "What do you want?" he asks.
John Dalton sucks snot back into his throat and spits on the driveway. "An eyeball," he says. "A big slimy one."
Dean laughs, lights his cigarette, pulls a container from the tote and tries to steady it with his good hand so it doesn't slosh around. "We don't do eyes," he says. "They keep them alive. Give them to people who need them. Blind people, so they can see."
"Yeah, right," the boy says. "Whatever. Another boob then, I guess."
Dean pops the lid, says, "I thought so," and hands John Dalton the pencil.
After his specimen drop at the lab, after Dean Covin calls Luanne to let her know he's ten-eight and available for local STAT runs, while he waits, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and listening to the two-way for his next job, he slides the pencil from behind his ear, double-checks his specimen log for the day. He pulls his spiral notebook from beneath the seat and transcribes the list of names. Most are women, most are always women, as if their bodies more often betray them, or are, as Dean sometimes thinks, more generous, more giving of themselves, as if these women look up from their gurneys, the anesthesia sliding cold through the IV line, and what they find bubbling up from the glazed-water surfaces of their minds is something that makes them wet their lips and, out of selflessness or some unnamable desire, whisper to the surgeon, Please, just take what you need. Dean runs the fingers of his good hand over the new list of names. It has been twelve years since he touched a woman—a real woman, a whole woman—with his hands, his mouth.
When he gets home tonight, he'll memorize these names, dream their bodies into being, veins flushed with blood, breath-stretched lungs. He'll kneel with his rosary, his elbows propped on the cushions of his couch, imagining himself at the bottom of that void tank offshore, the sun screaming through the hole in the deck above, and instead of men in paint-splattered coveralls, instead of men with tool belts and filthy mouths and callused hands, he'll see these women descending to him, each of them walking down the ladder without turning her back, without t
he use of her hands on the rungs, as if this were no less sure-footed an endeavor than swishing down a wide, carpeted staircase in a knee-length dress to meet a boy with satin lapels and sweating palms and the intention to press himself, before the night gives itself over to morning, against her.
These women, in his vision, will come to him, come into the light that shone, Dean knows, more brightly at the bottom of that void tank than it ever did above on deck. They will come and kneel themselves down with him in the metal tank meant to do nothing but hold air, to keep the drilling rig afloat on the ocean while a tugboat tows it from one latitude to the next. And here they will be, kneeling amidst the hot chemical swirl of new paint and urethane sealant he'd been hired, all those years back, to spray, to keep the rust in check, the salt water out. Here, on the hardwoods of his living room floor and in the beaming light that narrows its way into the dark metallic holds of the rig, he will say their names—Leslie June DeMarco, Jennifer Blue Johnston, Camilla Rosemarie Stump, Bethany Evelyn Green— and on, and on, until the names become prayers for themselves, until the rosary beads slip through his fingers, one bead at a time—one name, one bread, one body—until their limbs twitch and seize, their musculature turned against them, their eyes rolled backward, looking in. Until at last there comes an immediate release, and sweat drips from them as they blink their vision back into focus and they notice they're kneeling in slicks of paint and pools of light. Until their muscles give them what's left of their bodies back, and they relax, eased at last of the need for what they've surrendered.
In the car, Dean puts his notebook back under the seat, cranks up the a/c against the south Texas heat, rolls his pencil between his thumb and fingers. On the radio, Luanne is paging a new driver, Eighty-two, a heavyset woman with a tiny nose and enormous green eyes. Dean has seen her at the dispatch office only once, when he stopped in one Friday to pick up his paycheck, but drivers come to know each other by voice alone, by the way they joke and complain on the radio. Eighty-two, she's forever running late, calling in for directions, and still Dean finds himself clinging to her voice, wishing he'd never seen her, wanting her body made only of sound. Now she calls in on the radio, her voice an injured trill, so slight that what she says seems spoken only for her own benefit.
"Eighty-two," she says.
"Eighty-two," says Luanne, "I don't know about this, but I've got a run I need STAT, a dedicated roundtrip out to Memorial Hospital in Liberty. You game?"
"Ten-four," the woman says. "Send it across the pager."
Dean shakes his head and does the math. A bankroll run. Three hours, dedicated. A hospital job. Good money. He could drive five hours' worth of local blood and urine samples and still he wouldn't make out as well. He pulls the Velcro straps from his wrist brace and takes the thing off to let his skin breathe. His hand, it's not too bad today. Only the slightest tremor.
Luanne exhales into the handset, her breath crackling over the airwaves. "Eighty-two?" she says.
"Eighty-two, Luanne. Go ahead."
"This job," Luanne says. "This is a fetal demise job. Hospital to downtown pathology. You copy?"
Dean Covin puts his brace back on, pulls the Velcro so tight it pinches his skin, and if you could be here with him in the car, the air conditioning swirling in your hair while a dead baby's cartage is arranged over the radio, maybe you wouldn't notice that Dean is fiddling with the pencil in his good hand, rolling the thing between his thumb and fingers. Maybe, even if you did, you wouldn't recognize it as the kind of nervous habit that so often begets another. But maybe you would. Maybe you'd touch his shoulder, point to the pencil, remind him about John Dalton, about the eraser swirling in all that gray liquid. Maybe you'd take both of Dean's hands in yours and keep them steady while driver Eighty-two lets the idea of being alone in her car with a cold little body for an hour and a half sink in. Maybe, if you could be here, you'd take that pencil away before Dean Covin lifts it and rests the eraser, out of habit, on his tongue.
But you can't.
The night before his accident, Dean Covin, nineteen years old and stockpiling his offshore cash for a diamond ring, breathed a woman into his lungs. Randi Stimmons, her skin so pale he could see, on nights like this one, when there was moonlight enough, the sweet blue traces of veins in her breasts. Half naked, the both of them, and an hourlong stretch of Highway 288 between this beach and the Houston house where her parents sat in front of the television trying not to watch the clock or listen for the sound of a car finding its late way into the drive, Dean and Randi lay on their backs in the sand, looking up at the racing clouds while the surf slid up to them, slid back, pulling sand from beneath their feet.
And it was agony.
Two years now they'd been grinding against each other. In the sand. On Randi's couch. In Dean's car. Some nights she begged him—Jesus, baby, just do it—and the slippery sound of God's name in her throat made it all the worse, made him feel, despite this Texas heat, as if he were frozen under his skin, the ice expanding as his body temperature dropped, cracking him open from the inside out. And still he couldn't bring himself to do it. He would hold her head to his chest and feel himself hardening against her, and her breath would steam through his shirt, through his skin, and yes, sometimes she'd beg, and still he would save himself, but he didn't see it that way. What he imagined was that he was saving her. Keeping her whole, and by doing so, keeping her wholly his. Once, in the car, he'd almost given in, had slipped a finger into her, up to his first knuckle, had felt the tight band of intact tissue squeezing around him. He couldn't help it—it reminded him of a day so many years back, in a restaurant after Mass, when as a child he'd twisted and turned and yanked at his mother's wedding band, trying to pry it from her finger. It's not supposed to let go, she'd said. Not ever.
But he couldn't tell Randi this. He could barely even admit it to himself. What kind of man—God, what kind?—thinks of his mother while his finger is knuckle-deep in another woman? No, instead he'd tell Randi, this night on the beach like so many other nights, that the day would come. That they'd be married and then she'd never keep him off her. That he knew all their other friends were screwing, knew they had been since even freshman year, some of them, but that he didn't want it to be like that, didn't want her to regret it when it happened.
"Fine," she said, sitting up, crossing her arms over her breasts. "But make it soon."
She lit a clove cigarette, blew smoke from her nose, wouldn't look at him.
The truth, he knew even then, was that she terrified him. All that white, moonlit skin. The way he could see through her to the winding of her veins, her body its own blueprint. The way fistfuls of muscles clenched in his back when she put her lips down low near the waistband of his shorts and blew smoke onto his skin. The way he imagined entering her, little by little, in his dreams, until he was burrowed completely into her, living in her body. The way, even just thinking about it, he wondered if he'd lost something of himself that he'd never be able to get back.
And then she did something she'd never done. Taking a drag off her cigarette, she leaned down over him, a hand on his crotch, and kissed him, dipping into him with her tongue, and when he began to inhale, to breathe her in, she blew hard into his mouth and the sweet sting of clove smoke rolled its way down into him.
He sat upright and he held her, her smoke, inside him, until with his eyes wide he saw only the color of blood, a thick and viscous red. When he came to, she was frantic, a constricted face and a moving, voiceless mouth. She leaned over him and a bead of sweat rolled from her armpit down the slope of her side, landed on his stomach. He touched it with his thumb, rubbed it into his skin. He felt her breath, the sharp fire of it, still alive inside him, smoldering, kindling its way aflame.
"Do it again," he said.
They slept on the beach until an hour before sunrise, until the alarm on his watch started beeping. Dean changed into his coveralls and they drove to the Freeport docks so he could catch the crewboat out to the rig. Even
with the car windows down, with the sea salt heavy in the air, Dean could smell only Randi. His nose, his sinuses, his throat—they all burned with her, stinging and sweet with cloves. He told her about it, how it felt, like she'd given him a part of herself he could keep inside him, said he hoped it would last the whole two weeks of his hitch. She smiled, shook her head, said, "Not the part I wanted, Dean," and, "You scared the shit out of me."
On the docks, between the overhead barking of gulls and the clomp of his boots on the waterlogged planks, Dean kissed her, said, "Fourteen days," and she stood there while he lugged his duffel to the boat and met up with the rest of the crew at the stern. His boss, Tully, the rig's chief painter, lit a cigarette, put his arm around Dean's shoulders, and waved at Randi as the boat slipped away from the docks. "Boy," he said, "I'm thinking I'd pay upwards of ten dollars just to smell your fingers this morning. I was you I wouldn't make the mistake of washing your hands."
Dean ducked Tully's arm, grabbed his duffel off the deck, said, "What I've got, it doesn't wash off," and stepped down the stairs into the hold to sleep away the hourlong ride to the rig.
Now Eighty-two starts balking. Dean sits in the lab parking lot, lights a cigarette and turns up the two-way, lets her go on awhile about how she doesn't know Liberty all that well, wouldn't want to run late on a job like this, about how she's got only a quarter tank and would have to stop for fuel. He can hear, in the rise of her voice, in the short spurts of static that hiss through his receiver when she squeezes and releases her handset button between sentences, all her real reservations: What do you do, after all, to keep your eyes on the road, to keep your mind on the driving instead of on the cold blue body of your cargo?
Men in the Making Page 13