Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  He waited. Doc smiled at the twenty, twenty two kids. Oh Christ, right! They were waiting for a story.

  What the heck could he have been? Been thinking? He had no stories. No story was there. He looked at the floor between his legs, at the good oriental carpet. He hoped he looked like he was stirrin’ up a good one, settin' up a real yarn! Figuring just the way to put it. He raised his eyes.

  “There was a guy,” came out of his mouth, “just an ordinary guy. Had a good profession.” What?, Doc wondered, what’d this guy do? Why mention his job? Christ! “Cut meat for a living.” There it was! Where’d that come from? Where? “The meat-cutter trade got you work anywhere you went!”

  What was this, Doc wondered? What the hell?! This story was coming but from where? Don't look too close, he told himself, it's coming from somewhere.

  “One day the meat cutter man married the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful, and ohhhh, she liked him. He liked her. He liked her kids – oh, I didn’t tell you? She had a passel of 'em! Kids of all kinds. She had one like you,” he pointed, blindly, at a spot where he knew a kid was sitting. “Like you,” he pointed to another, farther back, “and you, and you, and you...n'you, n'you, n'you, n'you...” Doc pointed to maybe a dozen places around the room. “And YOU!” he leaned down and pointed into the little Native American face he remembered.

  Ah, laughter. Kid’s laughter. Giggles and squeaks, the Magic Moment. His heart shook like a leaf fibrillating, but outside he was doin' fine, just fine, collywobbles was all! A doctor's hands shake with nerves? Nosir. Here comes a story and he was telling it. Coming from where? No idea, but don't be countin' them teeth a gift horse's got.

  “Now funny thing was, lovely as she was, cute as those kids a hers were, seemed nobody liked his wife and her kids very much. That’s hard to believe, now, isn’t it?” He paused, just a hair.

  “Yeeess…” came whispering from the dark, along with a few uncertain, “Noooos”

  Ah. That little pause! Timing was everything!

  “So there it was: a mystery to him. She kept telling him: ‘Nobody likes me. Your brother doesn't. Your friends don't care for me. Folks you work with? They just hate me!’

  “'No,' he said, and 'nah,' and 'can't be so...'

  'You'll see,' his wife said.

  “Pretty soon he saw. Pretty soon, he began looking at all those folk: His brother. His friends. The people he worked with. And, you know? She was right! People didn't like her. They didn't like her kids. Now, guess what? They didn't even like him. Can you imagine that?”

  Doc Mouth almost stepped on it, but another sing-song “NooOOoo,” came out of the dark.

  “NoOoo.” He shook his head and agreed with them.

  “So he moved. Up, packed and moved like that! Wasn't near as nice where they went. The work was harder, smellier. The meat was tough and half-rotted and stringy and the people were crabby and walked around all the time like...” He made a crabby face and the kids giggled. “Like that! The house they moved to was falling down and smelled of bad things. Roof leaked, paper peeled, windows cracked and there was no heat.

  “But!” he held up his finger and made a wide smiling face, “It didn't matter. He had his work, he had his beautiful wife and their wonderful kids and that was his life. He was happy!” He waited a beat. “Kind of.”

  “oooOoo,” came back from the dark.

  “One day his wife told him, 'I don't think we're liked here,' she said. And she told him why...”

  The story rolled from him, took him over, filled the seat he sat in, it was lungs and voice, the tale was him, this story he’d never heard before.

  Doc was happy.

  “'These people,' his beautiful wife said, 'they hate me and my kids. They hate you too. They do. They hate us all because we're not from here. You cut the meat different from the way they're used to havin' it. They hate me because my hair is different, because I talk like our people talk back home and because I wear these pretty clothes they think crappy! Oh, love,' she said to her husband, 'oh, please, my dear, let's go back to where we come from.'

  “And doggone. What do you think? What do you think they did?”

  A scattering of voices. “They went.” “They go'ed.” “They should stay and make new friends 'cause...”

  He let the kids express what the story was leading them to in their minds, their innocent hearts.

  “Well... what they did was...” he held it for a second, “They packed up and went on back! Just like the wife said!”

  He was in the zone. The story was being written on their souls, these kids. They were with him, he knew it, he knew it because... “Yeaaaa!” they said. To a one. “Yeaaaaaa!”

  “The man was back home where the meat was good and folks dressed like they did and talked like they did. He was back where they liked the way he cut meat. He got a job…Like THAT!” Doc snapped his finger. It cracked. From the darkness he heard tiny fingers trying to snap like he'd done. They couldn’t. He was proud.

  “He didn't make quite as much money, but he made enough. His beautiful wife, her terrific kids and he were living the life they’d been put on earth to live!

  “Then, one day, he came home from work, really tired from a hard, hard day. His wife sidled up to him. She gave him his slippers, give him his pipe and his dinner. She sat him down after his meal of good meat that had been cut just right. And she said, 'I am so, so tired,' she said, 'so tired of your daddy looking at me like I killed his only son. 'I am so tired of your kin all treatin' me like I was something they wanna scrape from their shoes before comin' in the house. I can't stand it no more. Can't we move? Go to a better place this time? A place that likes me and my kids?'“

  The black space was pin-silent.

  The tale went on. He told the tale. The man, his beautiful wife, their terrific children wandered. To each they went and from each they came, there and back. With each move their lives grew bleaker. Here they were broke, there they were homeless, she was sick in one place, he was in jail in another, their kids had troubles, bad troubles. He told it well. It was all so surprising and so real! He was giving, giving the best he could, the most he knew how.

  “One day, on the road between one place and another, the aching man, his sickly wife and their terrible, terrible children got caught in the rain. For miles and miles they walked through cold and wet. Finally, in the dark, they came to an inn. 'Maybe,' the man said – and the chilly rain dripped off his nose – ‘maybe the innkeeper'll let us sleep in his barn. I have no money for a room, not a penny for a meal, but our plight and the goodness of his heart will move him.'

  “The wife glared at the warm light streaming from the windows of the inn. She shook her head. 'You are such a fool,’ she said. ‘You think they'll let us stay?’ She laughed a terrible laugh. “They do not like me here! Can't you see?! They do not like me there. Not me, not my children. They hate us because we’re poor and wet and are on this road with you, a jobless butcher who cannot cut the meat the way they want it cut!”

  An ice water tingle smacked Doc in a sudden rush. THIS story! God, he remembered. Oh, God, he did and oh dear God he could not stop!

  “‘Yes,’ the man agreed, ‘yes, wife, yes, yes, yes,’ he said. With the yeses, his hand reached for his tools, he wasn’t thinking, he just touched the knives, the cleavers and bone shears he'd carried across the world searching. Touching them, they spoke. He drew forth his longest, sharpest knife. He didn’t think about it but in a single skilled stroke he flensed the face from her head. Like that,” he said to the little Indian-like face below him. “Like that.”

  That was it.

  The dark wall of parents in the back of the room creaked and rumbled! He heard their voices. Some didn’t bother to whisper. Feet were moving, he heard it even on the soft, soft carpet.

  He finished the story, though. He finished as the kids were lifted, dragged, one at a time or shoveled off in groups. The Story Room poured them out the sliding door. By the time the tale ended, wi
fe, children, man, gone, all gone, slain bloody and in parts, the man’s carotid artery laid open, the long way, neatly pumping the blood that had been meant for the brain into the mud of the highway, the room was empty and the darkness real.

  Doc had attended that story in the city: a husband, wife, kids, all dead in one night of terrible weakness. The guy? A laborer, a war vet. An expert at knife work. Doc had done the post mortems, foregone conclusions: multiple knife wounds, a variety of traumas. If he closed his eyes, he saw the chest spreaders, saw his measure of the snicks and nicks on the aorta, the bisected liver and detached kidney of the wife, the bone chips and shavings. The special thing was that face. The woman’s face, removed, peeled neatly like a mask for saving. Probably the man’s second to last cut. The last cut, his own, of course. But that face lying separate and apart, hidden in the bed clothes, that was the thing that blocked his memory of the night. In the end, of course, a simple Triple homicide with a suicide chaser. The cause? A 3:00 a.m. thing, a thing people took into the great silence on the edge of the knife, at the end of the pipe.

  Later, Doc Mouth walked into town, to the Wagon Wheel. The fat priest was not there, nor the young Jew. People were not as friendly, did not want to shoot darts, did not want to drink with him.

  He stood and drank alone until Bunch showed up. Bunch either hadn’t heard or didn’t care. “Good to see you, Doc,” Bunch said and nudged his about-empty Pilsner an inch closer.

  “Bunch...” Doc started, and that was it because Doc had noticed the guy sitting at the end of the bar, two stools down from Bunch. God. The hematoma on the back of the stranger's hand, the marks growing up his arm. Oh, God. God, the guy's dead. Dead in a week. He doesn't know it. Here he is walking and drinking, getting thinner all the while, gut distending. Dead in a fortnight at best...and he doesn't know why or what for...

  “What you been up to, Doc?” Bunch leaned between Doc and the dead man at the far end of the bar.

  “I've been up to scaring people, I guess. Telling tales to terrify children and make their parents mad. You know?”

  “Nope,” Bunch said. He still wagged the empty glass.

  “I tried to tell a story. A little something. It turned into my old life, my doctor life back in the city. I began a fairy tale, I don't know, a moral fable. Something for the light and it ended a Grand Guignol blood feast. Something from 3 in the morning.”

  “Grand what?” Bunch said.

  “Never mind. My stories. Everything inside me is what's inside dead people, Bunch. Can't help it. All those years a doctor of the dead and all I know is sick.”

  “You the doc. Doc Mouth!” Bunch said and raised his empty glass to toast the famous medical man.

  “I'm an internist, Bunch. I see insides. I look and there they are. The sickness, the things' gonna kill them and is going to make them take other people into death with 'em.”

  “Huh,” Bunch said.

  “I can't stop looking, Bunch.” He leaned over and whispered a whisky little secret. “It's getting worse. See over by the popcorn machine?”

  Bunch turned. “Yeah. Adolph Lednicer. He always comes and bops to the music.”

  “That man. . .”

  “Adolph.”

  “Adolph's got real problems. I'd tell you what, but...” He looked at Bunch sadly, “but you wouldn't know what I was talking about, anyway.”

  Doc squinted at Bunch. Looked deep in his eyes, cocked his head. For the first time, Doc took the measure of Bunch from a different angle.

  Bunch let him take it.

  Doc was peering up Bunch's nose holes when something came to him. Hit him! Doc rammed his eyes back at Bunch's whole face. The doctor's mouth hung open.

  “You,” was all he said.

  “Yep. Me.” Bunch said. He nudged the empty Pilsner.

  Doc was gasping like he'd caught an eight-point buck at the round end of his rifle, first day of the season.

  “Ho. Ho. Holy.” is all he could say, trying to say, “Holy Christ.” He got up, laid a five on the bar. He started to leave, came back and added a ten, then left.

  Bunch covered the ten and waved his hand for a drink.

  Doc locked up the house. He lives in it, down deep inside it. He almost never goes out when people are in the streets or at work or at the restaurant or meeting other people at banks and all the places where people walk in the light. Doc never goes to stores and has everything delivered.

  Doc goes out. He goes out at night. Sundown in Bluffton comes quick and early. People go to bed early, too. TV's lousy in the Driftless.

  It's then Doc takes the air. Summers, winters, he's out after dark and doesn't say much to anyone. He smooths along in shadows and hides his eyes when people come near. Sometimes though. . . Sometimes Doc slips up to the windows of warm-looking houses late at night. He peeks in at people who sit, eat, watch snowy TV, read, talk with each other, talk to no one, cry, laugh to the night, alone.

  Doc peeks and draws it all in. He sometimes thinks it would be good to be invited into the warmth and light, it would be good to be face to face with this or that person, tell him what was wrong, how he could fix it, how she might heal, how to deal, how to watch for that 3 in the morning urge. He thinks sometimes he knows more and more every day. Every night, that is. More and more, he sucks in the town, makes it part of him, his walks, his nights. By 3 a.m. the town’s dead, asleep. Mostly. His best time, 3 a.m. All the stories are closed and Doc’s safe as a bug. He sometimes wanders, 3 a.m., to the stock yards up by where County H dips into town. There, death is simple. It waits in the mud and shit. The cattle snort and fart. They don’t know. Doc does and he snuggles into it and enjoys their company. Later, when the sun peeks over the bluffs and he starts smelling pie from the American House – Eats (he remembers to tack “Eats” to the name), then he goes home.

  He puts it all down. But he hardly ever says a word. Who’s he going to tell it to? Bunch?

  Nah.

  Chapter 11

  THE NINTH GODDAMNED KID

  The end of the world started on Friday morning after darts finals at the Wagon Wheel. Maybe it began earlier, but the sky started falling, 3:46 that morning.

  Vinnie had locked up the Sons of Norway and by two a.m., 23 of the old farts were sleeping it off at Township Hall. Egil Dorbler, off his game since the kid, didn't think loosing to the Graingers was worth a sleep-over in the can and Friday morning breakfast at the American House—Eats with his buddies, so he wasn't among them.

  Vinnie settled the Sons and headed out County H. By three a.m., he was parked and dark waiting for Karl Dorbler to make one of his Goddamned deer runs. The prowler's nose barely poked from the trees at the bend of the road by the Closed-for-the-Season drive-in. A mile over the limit, that's all Vinnie needed, one mile and he'd have the S.O.B.'s license yanked like that!

  By 3:30 Vinnie was nodding. At 3:46 he was dead to the world and that's when the sky started falling. Stars slashed across the night so quiet they could have been in another room. The light woke him like that! He was out of the vehicle in a shot. A bright rain of shooting stars streamed from bluff to bluff. A couple big ones stripped the night vision out of Vinnie's eyes and for a half-second, half-blind, he felt he ought to what’d they call it? Duck and cover.

  “Huh,” he said aloud. “Meteors,” he said too loud. “Something. Ain't it? Ain't it just, huh?” Felt good to talk.

  Up the Bluffs, deep in the old woods past Karl's (Bad) Kabins, Gram Kingsolver stood on a faint perch high in the trees. She rose and fell as the slender branches breathed with the night air. She held the Good Old Book in both hands and looked at the still night.

  Gram was a tall woman who cared for her family: the smelly little man, his mouse-boned woman, the kids she'd chosen along the years of traveling. They were all the Father's hope for the race of Man. They slept below.

  Why them?

  The question was always there but she never put it out. Oh she asked herself, yes, but never Him. Of all the folks across
this New Saved World, those eleven, below, were her charge; caring for them, was her fact of life. And she loved them; loved them before she knew them. The way all mothers must.

  She clutched the Book to her chest and about wept with love as she talked to the Lord Who lived everywhere. “Criminy's sake, it sure is a good night, ain't?” Gram swayed softly among the branches that bore her in the sky. “Not yet too cold and not a bit too hot, anymore neither, thank You very much!”

  She thought deeply for a moment. When she spoke again, her words were the same as always, every night.

  “This is a pretty good old place You made for us here. This world? A lot bettern' the old one the folks below never seen, praise Your mighty ways! This old home You provided in this place ain't too bad, either, you betcha it ain’t. Now, Father all You got to do is give word what we ought to be doing with this new chance You've given us here.”

  Same words as always, but Gram never took words with the Father as an always thing. She gave Him a moment—in case He might want to say something. She always did.

  He never had.

  She didn't feel she ought remind the Old Man that His creatures, the little man, the mouse-boned woman, herself, even the youngest, below, wouldn't last forever. She took another tack: “Been a while, you know that for sure. I know what's long to us ain't but a tick of Your Mighty Heart, Lord.” She listened for a moment, then added, “...so when it's Your good time, You let me know and I'll speak Your will to the others, and we'll get on with Your work. Okay, then?”

  It was 3:46 and stars slid from the sky.

  Gram ducked. She hadn't meant to. A willful child would flinch; but Father would not smite her like some wrathful daddy might. She knew that. Yet there she was, dodging His Word. She still was a bad one!

  The night came alive as she raised her head. The Lord breathed a sweep of bright rock. The faint sound of His mighty breath! Must have been like the fall of waters pharaoh's army heard as the sea zipped them up in its bosom.