“It’ll hurt like a bitch for a while but it could have been a lot worse,” Amani said. “You’re lucky. Went clean through and only nicked a few things.”
Amani looked at everyone present in a moment of assessment and then snapped her fingers at Ramos and gestured toward the door. The two of them left.
After she was gone, Dawn said, “She literally used to babysit Ramos, how funny is that? Now she’s like, a freelancer. I had her number in my phone.”
Oscar tried to smile and then grimaced.
“How does it feel?” Dawn said.
“Like there’s a pissed-off beehive under my lungs.”
“I mean—to have been shot?”
Oscar was silent for a moment. “Was I that close to death?”
“Less from where it hit you than from where it could have hit you.”
“It does give a certain funny feeling.”
“It was extremely scary. I think I’ve retired from this.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“You have someone else’s blood pumping in you now. Three bags.”
* * *
They spent the day on Amani’s property, which was a secluded, charmingly scrubby patch of land on a small pond up in a green protrusion of hills. Amani and Ramos washed and worked on the car, which had taken some damage to the front bumper and radiator when Oscar blacked out and ran it into a tree, although most of the impact had been taken by the expensive deer guard, which was now removed and cast aside. Amani was confident she could fix it well enough with a few parts she had lying around in the Quonset-style garage structure behind the trailer, the same structure in which she had worked on an anesthetized Oscar on the operating table she kept under a blue tarp.
Dawn made them all egg and cheese sandwiches. (Oscar was concerned about eating, but Amani assured him that the bullet hadn’t nicked his alimentary canal and that it would be good for this strength.) After a few hours of moaning on the couch, Oscar grew determined to stand up, and Dawn helped him to his feet. A leaden center of pain swung down through his middle and repositioned itself, but he found that it didn’t get much worse as he stood, and he allowed Dawn to lead him by the elbow and shoulder as he haltingly stepped across the floor and out through the screen door.
The sun felt good on his face. They spoke of nothing important while they strolled the grounds, no other houses or structures in sight on the unfarmable land. She intermittently asked him how he was feeling. At one point Ramos joined them briefly to explain his actions, having the night before already thrown himself on the ground at Dawn’s feet to beg for forgiveness.
He told Oscar about how Matadamas’s men had pulled him off the street with a gun in his face and pulled a few of his toenails off, but it wasn’t until they showed him cell phone pictures of his daughter’s mother dropping her off at daycare that he had begged. Oscar thought he would feel more aggrieved by the betrayal but found that he couldn’t blame him. What was he to this man, anyway, compared to his own daughter?
Oscar asked him if he had contacted the child’s mother to tell her to get out of town with the child until things could be figured out and he said that he had. Ramos offered him his hand, not extended for a shake so much but just to make contact, and Oscar took it, absolving him. Why not? He would never have dealings with this man again.
Oscar asked Ramos what his real name was and he told him that it was Erwin.
* * *
Every half hour or so, one of them would check the news to see if there was any kind of report about what had happened yesterday. There was none.
* * *
Amani changed his bandages. While the old wrapping was removed, Oscar looked up at the ceiling—he would not look at the hole in himself.
“I know this sucks, honey,” she said, “but we’re gonna have to keep taking looks at this or it still could go south.”
* * *
From a charger near the sink in the little kitchen, Oscar retrieved his cell phone, from which Dawn had done her best to wipe the blood, and limped slowly up the gravel road to the top of the hill where he could find some reception and call his father. He stood there in the sun and pleasant breeze with the phone to his ear. There was no answer.
While he stood there, three texts came in simultaneously from Sundeep. He registered only the words worried and missing class before he stopped reading.
Walking back down to the trailer, he stopped and lay down in a patch of grass and felt the waves of pain wash over him and tried to think of some evidence, and there was at least some, that the essence of existence was not suffering.
* * *
Some hours later, Oscar and Dawn sat in two Adirondack chairs that were positioned by the water. It appeared that some sort of pump fed the pond from the middle—there was a low bubble and gurgle. A few tiny orange fish darted in the murk.
“I don’t suppose it would be possible to never leave this place,” Oscar said.
“We can stay one night,” Dawn said.
* * *
Dawn bathed herself in the outdoor shower. Oscar joined her at the edge of the spray of water, nude except for the bandages, and she scrubbed the exposed parts of him. Rivulets of dirt and dried blood ran down his legs. He bent over at the waist and she washed his hair.
* * *
That night Amani cooked burgers on a charcoal grill and the four of them sat around a small fire that Ramos made within a circle of stones, of which he was very proud. A bottle of whiskey was passed around. Oscar was allowed only one swig, so as not to thin his blood. Amani, with little prompting, told them her war stories with a surprising lack of reticence—mostly tales of grievous injury that seemed intended to highlight the extent to which the human body could be disassembled before it finally shut off for good.
The sun set fully. They brushed their teeth with their fingers.
* * *
Amani told them that the couch was a pullout but there was also a tent, and it would be a nice night for sleeping outside. Oscar and Dawn helped set up the tent in the yard. Amani gave them sleeping bags, said good-night, and went inside. After sniffing the couch and deciding that it needed some airing out after Oscar’s night, Ramos lowered the back seats of the Range Rover and lay down across the trunk, windows open.
* * *
Oscar was still in tremendous pain. He and Dawn sat next to each other on the cinderblocks that served as the steps to the door of the trailer. The night was moonless. Above the trailer’s roof, there was a line of hugely canopied trees, rustling in the rising wind, and then above that began the stars. Oscar imagined himself briefly in an ancient place, some type of fortified encampment, danger held just barely at bay, until the morning.
“I am oh so very tired,” Oscar said.
Dawn took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulders. He sucked air over his teeth in pain. They listened to the grasshoppers.
“Is this over yet?” Oscar said.
“I’m not sure,” Dawn said. “Does it feel over? Do you think those guys will still come back for you? Or us.”
Oscar thought for a moment. “For some reason, it feels different than before. I think he might be done with me. I can’t explain it. Also, at this point I think they’re at least low on functional vehicles.”
“For now.”
They let this hang for a minute. Oscar broke the silence. “By the way—you really could have told me about the rifle.”
“Oh yeah? What would that have changed?”
“Nothing, but—that’s not the point. I should have known about it, that’s all.”
“That’s exactly the point. Certain things, knowing them can kill you.”
Dawn relaxed a degree, nestling her head deeper into the crook of his arm. He pressed his face against her hair and breathed in.
“How odd,” she said, “that one thing just leads right to anoth
er and another. And then there you are.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Oscar said.
They lay down together in the tent, in the pleasant smell of plastic and bug spray mingling with the smell of the fire that their clothes carried. In a few short moments he could tell that Dawn was asleep by her breathing—not snoring, only even and deep.
To calm himself and take his mind off the pain, Oscar imagined himself as his own ancestor, some man who had built boats, hewn keels and planks and masts from pliable trees and assembled them into vessels of warfare and trade.
Did such a man, in that line of work, also possess knowledge of the stars and how to set a course by them? Probably not. But in this vision, Ur-Oscar drags the boat he has made with his own hands out to the edge of the water. He is dressed in a resin-stained jerkin. It is nighttime, like now, and the stars are even brighter, not yet robbed by science of their mystery, and he launches himself into the dark chop by straining with an oar in the sand (physics here not accounted for—the long, deep-walled raiding boat of Oscar’s imagination certainly too large to be dragged or launched by one man).
Oscar tried to see through Ur-Oscar’s eyes as he lies down on his back in the night in the boat he built and looks up at the stars as they yaw in his vision framed by the sides of the hull, adrift in a current that he chooses not to let concern him, and falls asleep.
25
Oscar awoke in an instant, before dawn, and found himself under a pall of dread, the interior of his sleeping bag slick with sweat. He fished his phone out of the little pocket of his swim trunks—no reception, but it still had a charge. Quietly, without waking Dawn, he extracted himself from the sleeping bag and stood up. The pain was somewhat less than yesterday or at least dulled by familiarity. He stepped out of the tent and began to walk up the hill in the lightening dark to where he had found reception the day before.
As he walked he felt more than ever that he was not in control—this was the script and he was an actor, or not an actor but an audience member, his body merely a prop.
When he crested the hill, he looked around at the other nearby hills furled in tall grasses, blue in the dark, their motion in the breeze slowed by dew. There was very little sound here.
He took out his phone and looked at it. Somehow, he knew it would ring, and then it did.
Something terrible became known to him. Oscar understood that he was having one of those moments, he figured you might only get one in each epoch of your life, where the massive clockwork that ticks just outside the boundaries of perception in order to maintain the motion of reality is revealed for a single instant, and something totally inexplicable and impossible becomes perfectly, obviously clear.
Some berm that had been holding on within him twisted against itself and shattered.
He answered the phone.
“Hi, Gracie.”
“Oh my God, Oscar, thank God you picked up. I don’t know what to do.”
“Calm down and tell me what’s happened.”
“I found something at Dad’s. A note—a letter. He wasn’t picking up his phone so I came over here and the door was locked, you know they never locked the door, I had to go back and look for my key, I forgot I even had one—”
“And there was a note,” Oscar said.
“It’s a few pages long. It was sitting right here on the kitchen table, addressed to you and me. Handwritten. God, I’m really scared.”
“Can you read it to me please?”
In a frantic voice, short of breath, Grace began:
To my dear children,
First of all, I want you to know that I tried my best, like I’ve always done, like your mother and I taught the two of you to do. You should know that I had always kind of counted on me going first (most men do), and it turned out I was just totally unprepared to be without her. That sounds selfish, and I guess it is, but I couldn’t believe how blindsided I was. Even still, sitting here writing this, it doesn’t feel real.
What I’m trying to say is, life is different once the light has gone out of it. This is something that I’ll never be able to explain with words and I hope you’ll never know it, because feeling it is the only way to know it. And I know you might say, give it some time and things will improve, and I would respond that I am quite certain that that’s not true.
And the fact that she was taken from me—it just drove me nuts. Sitting here in this empty house thinking about how I failed to save her, how she spent the last of our time together seeking out help from another man.
I know he isn’t responsible, not really, for her death—it was such a freak, random thing—but also, in another sense, not the kind of sense that holds up in court, I know that he was. Again, it’s hard for me to explain.
There is more to say—so much, that it’s pointless to try.
I’m sorry, more than anything else.
Anyway. That’s it, I guess. I keep trying to find a good ending so instead I’ll just end it here. You know I’ve never been much of a writer, like your mother was.
Christ, this looks like a suicide note! I don’t intend to die. But if you haven’t heard about something happening and you find this note, please direct the police to the following address:
“And then there’s an address in New Mexico,” Gracie finished. “Oscar, what the hell is in New Mexico?”
Oscar knew.
“Grace, I need you to do one more thing,” Oscar said. “The closet in the kitchen with the .308...”
“I’m in the kitchen right now,” she said.
There was a rustling on the line.
“It’s gone! Jesus, Oscar, it’s not here! What is going on? Should we call the police?”
“No, don’t do that. That address—please read it to me slowly.”
She did.
“And when was the last time you saw him?” Oscar asked.
“Yesterday morning.”
“Okay. Stay calm. Don’t do anything until you hear from me.”
He made her promise and then said goodbye.
* * *
As he ended the call he heard gravel crunch, and he turned around and saw that Dawn had followed him.
“You should be resting,” she said.
Her face became worried when she looked into his eyes.
“Who were you just talking to?”
A wave of pain rolled out from Oscar’s wound and he crumbled to his knees and sat down on the ground.
She called out his name and sat by his side.
“It’s all real,” Oscar said.
“What? I don’t understand,” Dawn said. She had one hand on his hip, the other held his cheek so she could look into his eyes.
“All disasters are inevitable. Now or later, what’s the difference?”
“Oscar...you’re scaring me.” She began to cry. “Who was that? Your family? Let me see the phone.”
Oscar kept it away from her. He could barely believe how much sorrow and anger could exist inside himself at the same time. “Reality has come up alongside my life.”
He looked into her eyes. “We really came close to pulling this off. Can you think of a world where we might have ended up together?”
She put a hand to his forehead. “Jesus, you’re burning up. We need to change your bandage. Stay right here, okay? Please.”
Dawn ran down the hill in the direction of the Quonset hut.
After another moment, Oscar stood up. He watched her moving away, slipping in the gravel, and felt a fathomless sympathy for her, and a sadness that he would never truly know her, just as he would never truly know anyone.
When she was out of sight, he went down the hill from another angle and approached the trailer from the rear. From a laundry line outside, he pulled a too-small bathrobe and donned it over his bare chest. Inside, he found a notebook and a pen and the keys to
the car. Amani appeared to be gone.
He felt himself to be gliding from place to place, lighter, either totally depleted or totally purified.
Back outside, he got in the driver’s seat and jotted down the address Grace had read to him, although he would not have been capable of forgetting it. He keyed it into the GPS and examined the route. It would take all day, but to Oscar it felt as if he was unbelievably, miraculously near, and had been all this time. Then he tested out the route with his father’s address as the point of origin—twice as long, but he had had up to a full day’s head start. It would be close.
He remembered that Ramos was in the trunk when he heard him stir.
“Time to wake up,” Oscar said.
Ramos’s head popped up over the partition, rubbing his eyes. “What time is it?”
Oscar jumped out of the driver’s seat, went around back to pop open the trunk, and pulled Ramos out by his ankles.
“The fuck?” Ramos said as he spilled into the dirt and tried to right himself.
Dawn appeared right as Oscar got back behind the wheel and shut the door. “Where the hell are you going?” She dropped the bandages she was carrying and pulled on the handle to the door but Oscar had locked it.
He lowered the window enough that she could hear his voice. “Please,” he said, “I need to go. I think I can still save him.”
“Save who?”
“You’ll be safer this way. I only fuck things up,” he said, not looking at her. “Amani can drive you back in her car.”
Their faces were six inches apart. Dawn had both of her palms on the glass. “What are you doing? You can’t just leave me!”
Oscar started the car. “I have to. I’m sorry.”
Dawn had fresh tears in her eyes. “Whatever you’re thinking about doing—you have a choice. I promise.”
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 18