Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  He took the book from her fumbling hands. “It’s okie. It’s just a book,” he said. “You can ask me whatever you like. I have all the answers here.” He tapped his head. It was the simplest gesture, but she relaxed into girlish laughter that smoothed the lines in her face. He saw himself in her eyes—tall, dark, and elegant in his suits, with his crisp, cultivated English, a mystery. “For example,” he said gently, “I am Igbo.”

  “You read my notes.” The flush returned to her face. “I just wanted to know some things.”

  “I come from a great family. My father is a chief,” he said with pride. “He sent me to America to become a doctor.”

  “A chief,” Cheryl echoed. “A chief, that’s like the president or a king?”

  After a moment of consideration, Job agreed.

  “It’s funny,” she said softly. “My daddy always said I’d marry a doctor. Well, here it is. I married a doctor.” She grinned at Job.

  “And I married my nurse,” he said of Cheryl’s current occupation, which as a veterinarian’s assistant was roughly equivalent.

  He assumed she’d ask about lions and tigers and jungles. Surprisingly, she didn’t. “Been in Nebraska my whole life,” she said solemnly. “What’s your favorite memory of home?”

  Could it be so difficult to answer her question? What was so special about the place he now considered home more than ever? “My family, my friends . . .” he started. But that wasn’t it, not completely. An image began to form in his mind, of him and Samuel, Samuel with his arms extended before him, gripping Job around his waist, hoisting him high enough to peek over the concrete wall surrounding their estate. Glass and shoots of wire, meant to keep out intruders, jutted from the top of the wall. From above, Job saw the world, or what he imagined of the world at age five. Cars whizzed up and down the busy street. Hawkers weaved in and out of traffic with baskets of corn and fresh fish. Guards, dark and shiny from the sun, with semiautomatic rifles at their hips, lazily gazed out over the distance. One of them glanced up, catching Job’s eyes. Surprised, the guard let out a sharp exhale as he clapped and thudded on his partner’s side. Job angled his hips and waved his arms, pretending to be the evil spirit the man believed him to be. Job saw himself the way he imagined the guard saw him, a small boy suddenly a giant. This she cannot understand, he thought, so he said simply, “My brother, Samuel. Before the war.”

  He continued thumbing through the pages, not quite paying attention to the words on them. The pool of dark coffee quickly dried. As he handed the book to her, Cheryl’s hands stretched to meet his, palms up.

  It was then, as he was placing the book in her hands, that their fingers touched. Her hands were wet. By the time the coffee had splashed her skin, it had cooled to lukewarm. Just the same, he couldn’t help himself. “Be careful,” he said. He ripped a page out of the ruined book. Cheryl jerked at the sound of the page tearing, but she didn’t try to stop him. Where Job dabbed her wrist with the torn paper, Cheryl’s skin was a warm, pinkish hue. She allowed him to sop up the moist beads of coffee from her arm. She pretended, just as he had, that the coffee was too hot.

  “I think it’s okay,” she finally said.

  “Run it under cool water,” Job instructed her. “That will soothe the burn. Apply hydrocortisone treatment to it. This will prevent infection from developing.”

  Her eyes widened into full moons. “Really?”

  “Like this,” he added, making circular motions on her skin with his thumb and forefinger.

  She nodded, hanging on his every word. Still, she didn’t stand up. Instead, her freckled hands grasped at the scar on his hand, trembling. In silence, their eyes met more than once. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that she was not such a terrible-looking woman. Frankly, she didn’t look older than him, though she was two years his senior. Had they grown up in Nigeria, they would have been agemates. Red hair, at the right angle, glowed. Freckles and small teeth on the right face evoked character and youthfulness.

  Bristling under his gaze, she asked, “Job, what do you do for fun?”

  “Fun?” Job furrowed his brow.

  “Yeah, I mean, like when you don’t work, where do you go? What do you do?”

  “I go home,” he said.

  “But come on, what do you do?” When he didn’t answer, she pressed on. “I make things. Scarves, sweaters, stuff like that. I have an elliptical machine in the basement that I run on sometimes. When he’s not shitting on the world, my asshole brother tinkers with computers.” She gestured broadly at the remains of scattered computer parts. “And I read,” she said, indicating the magazines cluttered on the table.

  “Ah, yes,” Job agreed. “I read too.”

  “Really? Job, I thought I had no life,” she said sadly. “You have no life.”

  “You say, ‘Have no life.’ What does this mean?”

  “Nothing. Just, I’m running out of things to say, but I don’t want you to go yet.” Her hair was red like a fresh wound, and she picked her fingers through it. “I don’t know. I’m alone here. I’m scared. But I want to do what’s right. Job, I can’t lose this place. It’s all I have. You know, Job,” she said softly, “it’s strange, but you’ve come to save the day again. You’re like Superman.”

  “I won’t let anything happen,” he said.

  As midday approached, they remained sitting together in silence, Cheryl’s dry wrist still upturned in Job’s palm. By her side, he forgot completely about the horrors of that morning—Gladys’s derision, Ifi’s looks of disappointment, Aunty’s complaints, more of which surely awaited him.

  On the way home, the darkened sky divided into a V formation. From his windshield, Job was astonished to see a flock of ascending sandhill cranes alight the sky, a roiling, honking gray mist. What was left of the morning sun staggered through its gaps. In awe, Job’s eyes left the yellow lines splitting the highway ahead of him and took in the moving sky. Just then, a splatter of bird excrement painted his windshield. For the rest of the way home, his vision of the sandhill cranes’ grand flight was obscured by four white streaks of shit.

  CHAPTER 14

  THEY WENT TO THE BUSH, IN BELATED HONOR OF THE BOY’S BIRTH, TO butcher a goat. It had mostly been arranged by phone. There was a farm on the edge of the county in a town called Hickman. An aged man and his wife ran it. Their ad boasted of the biggest, meatiest Boers in the entire state. They would even prepare the goat the Nigerian way—roasted, skin on—free of charge. To Job, this was the biggest relief of all. After hosting Aunty for nearly four months—enduring the cold, sexless nights on the scratchy living room couch, enduring Aunty’s optimistic complaints—Job fervently hoped that everything would go well.

  Still new enough to America, Ifi believed that because the farmers were American, and because English was their native tongue, they must be educated, as the upper classes were in Nigeria. And because they were educated and lived princely lives, they must not tell lies; it was surely beneath them. In his own way, Job believed this as well, presenting the ad to Ifi only after all the arrangements had been made. He was, after all, head of the family.

  The original plan was for Aunty and Ifi to stay behind with the boy, to wait for Job to return with the goat. Then the women would stand over the sink cleaning, cutting, and curing the meat for pepper soup, jollof rice, garri, and egusi. However, Aunty insisted on coming along—to see America. She had only a short week left before her return to Nigeria, and for the four months she had spent with them, she had seen, at most, the local theater, grocery store, and a couple of restaurants. Her memory of the sandhill cranes was still clouded by her vision of a ruined commode. Because she was determined to spend as much of her remaining time as possible with her “son,” she refused to attend without the boy. As a result, Aunty rode in front alongside Job, holding the boy to her chest throughout the ride—despite Ifi’s attempts to convince her that in America it was illegal for a child not to be buckled into a car seat. Ifi, who sprouted budding tufts of thread-tie
d hair underneath her wig, sat in the backseat.

  On the ride out to Hickman, Aunty saw nothing of the skyscrapers from the tabloid magazines she purchased during their weekly outings to the grocery. Unlike Ifi, who bit back her disappointment in silence when she first arrived, Aunty did her best to encourage the young couple, remarking, as they passed the lone steer dotted along the Nebraska skyline, “Don’t count your chickens; they might hatch,” a phrase she had picked up from television during her short time in America.

  The first sign that something was wrong happened when they arrived at the old man’s farm. They saw the mailbox, the wire fences, and drove up the dirt road until they found the faded two-story house sitting on a slight rise. At first no one answered the door. Job knocked again and again. He rang the doorbell. A very old woman wrapped in a shawl and smelling of urine finally answered. She was wrinkled but ruddy faced. Her hands were strong. Her forearms were tight and corded with veins. She had the sturdy look of a farm wife.

  “He’s ill. Didn’t you get the message?” she asked.

  “There is no message,” Job said. But he recalled the phone ringing on his way out the door. He remembered Aunty wondering aloud if it was Uncle. And he remembered, that for exactly that reason, he had rushed them out the door in the interest of putting the money toward the goat instead of another international call.

  “You’ll have to come another day,” the farm wife said.

  Job could see Ifi’s face in the car window, strained with annoyance. He was responsible for making the arrangements, yet she must always look as if she was begging him to fail. The last few months, he had seen that face again and again: each time he groped Ifi from behind while Aunty washed in the bathroom, each time he attempted to handle the boy, and each morning on his return from work. For this reason, he had chosen not to share the news of their new home with Ifi until Aunty returned to Nigeria. “Please, Aunty,” he said to the old lady in such desperation that he forgot: this is America.

  Her face softened. “I’ll ask my son if he can help.” She hesitated for a moment, but went inside, made the call, and returned. “He’ll be along in fifteen minutes or so. He’s up the road.” She beckoned to Ifi and Aunty until they met the two on the porch steps.

  Inside, they sipped iced tea that was thick with sugar and lemon seeds, and the old lady asked them question after question about Africa: “How long you been here?” she asked. “Do you live in houses in Africa?” And, “What’s the goat for?”

  From a distance, the farmer’s son appeared as a teenage boy, shrunken, with blue overalls free on one shoulder and a T-shirt a little too big for him. He wore a backwards baseball cap. Job wondered if a boy should be left in charge of such a task, butchering a goat, but he reminded himself that the celebration must take place the next day. His own father had butchered a goat in honor of his birth forty years earlier. And his father before him. Reluctantly, Job had even gone to the trouble of inviting Emeka and Gladys to the festivities.

  When the farmer’s son was closer, his stained, leathery face revealed his age. The two men shook hands, exchanged money, and headed out the back door, leaving the women in the parlor. They tramped across flat, damp earth, and he led Job out past the goats that were scattered behind a wire fence with sturdy wooden posts. He retrieved a .22 from the shed while Job waited outside, heating the insides of his hands with his breath. It was late March. Winter was just beginning to thaw. The sun was without warmth.

  He told Job to pick the one he wanted, and Job puffed out his shoulders and marched toward the goats as if he had done this before. To be honest, they all appeared the same to him: skinny and meatless with long, flattened ears, nothing like what the ad had described. Evidently, the man had been ill longer than his wife had implied. Job thumbed one. But he made the wrong choice.

  “Are you sure?” the farmer’s son asked.

  But Job would not look like a fool and refused to relent, even after the man explained to him that wethers were best. Instead, Job replied, “Remember, it must have skin.”

  The farmer’s son wrangled the goat and hauled it to a slaughtering pen near the shed. The goat bleated and whipped its tongue in protest. The slaughter was supposed to be included in the price, but only after Job paid an additional fifty dollars did the son proceed. The farmer’s son slapped the goat on the rear, and it trotted around the pen. He spread some feed on the ground, stepped away, and watched the goat circle and bend to taste. Before Job could turn, the .22 cracked off; the goat dropped. Job was so near the goat he could feel its warmth. A flock of birds perched along the roof of the shed scattered.

  Inside, Ifi, Aunty, and the old lady paused when they heard the sound. The boy began to cry. But then they heard it again. Another crack.

  And then another crack before the old lady came charging out the back door. Job was turned over, gasping into the dirt. For a second, it looked as if he was the one who was wounded, and Ifi’s throat closed up. But the old lady put a finger in her son’s face. The goat was limp and bleeding from three places. Vomit ran down the sides of Job’s mouth.

  The farmer’s son refused to meet his mother’s eyes.

  “One shot, Scotty!” she said.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said. “It misfired.”

  Job could smell it now, the alcohol on the man’s breath.

  Ifi and Aunty were still on the back porch, peering out at the commotion. When the farmer’s son wrung the goat’s neck until it cracked, Aunty turned away. The boy, held over her shoulders, inadvertently had a direct view. His tongue out, he watched as the farmer’s son slit the goat’s throat and tied off the gullet. The farmer’s son nicked the goat at each Achilles tendon and hoisted it onto a hand-cranked pulley. Blood ran down its sides. Automatically, he began to fist off the hide, but halted and torched the bleeding goat instead. He rinsed off the ash with a hose. He emptied its insides. Then he hacked the limbs off in pieces with a saw, muttering to himself each time metal collided with bone. Panting, he mopped his damp forehead with the crook of an elbow, spreading small streaks of burnt blood across his face.

  Instead of envisioning himself in place of this small man dressed like an American teenager, Job imagined his father sturdily holding the goat’s kicking legs together, tying it upside down, slitting its throat, and watching the life tremble out before setting it ablaze. Job stepped outside of himself, but all he could see was the back of his body as his hands worked vigorously on the line in the meatpacking plant. He hated what he saw.

  The farmer’s son bagged the broken goat so that it could be packed on ice, so that the “cleanup” money could be exchanged, and so he could go back to his whiskey. On their way back to the farmhouse, without noticing, they passed the goat that had been meant to be slaughtered, left hungry overnight by the old farmer, collapsed on the floor of an isolated pen in exhaustion.

  On the way home, Job pulled over twice before the contents of his stomach were finally emptied. Each time the car stopped, Ifi’s eyes remained fixed out the window, staring at the grainy landscape. She ruminated again and again on the feeling in her throat when she thought, for just a second, that Job had taken a bullet. Aunty said little and pushed the baby more firmly into her breast, willing, with all her might, her body to protect the small boy, but knowing that soon she would be gone. The heat of the boy’s flesh and the warmth of his breath dampened her neck. She was reminded of a saying she had heard nearly her entire life. In a whisper, she said, “A goat that dies scared will taste of fear.”

  When they returned home, they pushed the goat meat into the freezer. It was so large they were forced to move everything else into the refrigerator. They would be eating the goat’s remains for many months.

  That night, Job lay flat on his back, staring at the streamers and balloons hanging from each corner of the living room ceiling. His belly ached with failure. He wished he could do it all over again. But he could not. He wished he could go somewhere, get away from his life, just for a little while.
Where is Cheryl right now? he wondered. Walking dogs, sipping a milkshake, reading one of her magazines? Already, he knew the answer. Sitting at her dining room table, her neck craned, her eyes pinched by the dull blue glow from a nearby room, she flicked through a book with pages well worn by her fingertips, a book about Nigeria, about him, about the exotic life she imagined he lived. The corners of Job’s mouth drew into a smile.

  Soon he would tell Ifi about their new home. Everything had been finalized. The whole time he had stood before the bank teller withdrawing the money, executing the close of the account, it felt right.

  Tomorrow, they would cook the goat, drink Sapporo and Heineken, chat about politics, tease the boy with the taste of food from his native land, and pray for his future. In the safety of the time-honored preparations, preparations that had been made before him and would continue to be made after him, Job found sleep despite the boy’s wails.

  The boy cried as the pitch-black darkness escalated into a purple, then a steel gray. In the bedroom, Aunty and Ifi were spread out on the bed. Whispering, Aunty explained that the boy was crying because he could sense that she was going away soon. Although it was clear that he had a fever, Ifi couldn’t help but feel that in part, Aunty was right. Rather reluctantly, she had grown so used to Aunty’s place in her home that she couldn’t imagine herself returning to the kitchen to cook a meal alone or sleep with her husband so close. Throughout the night, Aunty bathed the boy’s face with a damp cloth and shined his chest with a mentholated rub. Each time she spread the salve across his body, she leaned in, eyes closed, and puffed her breath on his skin so that the heat could warm him on the inside. Of course, Ifi was not allowed to touch him.

  When morning arrived, the boy had cried so long and with such gusto that his throat was strained, and he fell into an exhausted, fitful sleep at Aunty’s breast. Each time the boy tossed in his sleep, she scraped her lacquered fingernails across the back of his head. As Ifi watched her, she imagined the tenderness that her mother must have had for her as a baby girl. Not like her aunty’s forceful ways. She wondered if girls raised by surrogate mothers could ever replicate such a feeling with no memory of their birth mothers.