“It’s Rosemary,” Rosemary said. “How are you feeling?”
“I need my medicine,” she said, looking around. “Where is Betsy?”
A moment later Geraldine returned from the kitchen with a glass of iced tea for Rosemary. She sat in the rocking chair beside Ruth and crossed her legs.
“What brings you out here?” she asked.
“We were driving around and I thought of Ruth,” Rosemary said. “So we decided to stop by and see her. This is Sequoyah.”
Geraldine gave me a look that was a forced smile, but she didn’t say anything to me, so I kept quiet.
“How’s she doing?” Rosemary asked.
“About the same,” she said. “Wait a minute. When was the last time you were here?”
“Last summer.”
“Right,” she said. “It’s progressed.”
“The Alzheimer’s?”
“Yes.”
Ruth was now going through the papers on the table beside her. There was a newspaper, some other papers. She shuffled through them.
Out of nowhere I felt a strong desire to laugh. The thought of it mortified me, laughing at such a serious, sad time. I put my head down and stared at the shag carpet. Rosemary and Geraldine kept talking, about people they both knew, about Ruth’s health, the Alzheimer’s, and constant nurse care. The whole time they talked I found myself staring at the floor, frightened at the thought of laughing. Geraldine must’ve thought I was strange.
Then Rosemary went over to Ruth and took her hands, but Ruth withdrew them and looked up at her, horrified.
“I just wanted to stop by and say hi,” Rosemary said. “Are you feeling okay?”
I saw Ruth’s jaw trembling.
“We’re going now, but I hope you take care,” Rosemary said. She leaned forward to try to hug her, but Ruth seemed to pull away. Rosemary’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see her face.
Geraldine walked us to the door. “We expect she’ll get worse,” she said. “That’s what they’re telling us. The next step is the nursing home.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Rosemary said.
“There’s nothing to say.”
“I’m so sorry. I have such good memories. It’s so hard to think about.”
“Take care,” Geraldine said.
I heard the door close as we walked to the car. We got in and Rosemary lit a cigarette. She backed out of the drive and we headed south in the last light of the day. I stared out the window at the trees and old wood-framed houses, and Rosemary cried the whole drive home.
That night in bed, in the dark, George was having trouble sleeping and kept me awake. He talked about wanting to buy a necklace. He thought he would look good in a necklace with his shirt off. “Our Osage neighbors, the Kagachees, make bead necklaces and bracelets,” he told me. “They make them from rocks and the sticky substance found in porcupine quills. I bet they would make me one.”
I sat up in bed and looked over at him. He was lying on his back, talking to the ceiling.
“Mr. Kagachee is so cool,” he said. “He cuts the skins of rattlesnakes with a boning knife. He makes belts and hatbands. I want to be like him. He wears ceremonial feathers in his hair and chants traditional Indian songs. You should meet him. I mean you should meet them since you’re an Indian too.”
The remark felt racist, but I refrained from telling him.
He went on to talk about a festival in town with live music, food, and T-shirts designed and sold by the Kagachee family.
“Go to sleep,” I told him.
“The Raider Halfway House out on Mulligan Road hosts karaoke. There’s a pancake breakfast at the Methodist church sometimes.”
“Go to sleep, George.”
Five minutes later he finally did.
In the middle of the night, Rosemary woke me, placing a finger to her lips, and I followed her downstairs to the dark basement, where Harold always worked. She turned on the light and walked over to his desk, opening a drawer. I stood watching her, still half asleep, unsure of the time or what I was even doing.
“Jackpot,” she said, and held up a baggie of marijuana.
I was still squinting from the brightness of the room. “Is that Harold’s?” I asked. “Harold gets high?”
“Yep.”
“Why did you wake me?”
“Why do you think?” She sprinkled the weed into a rolling paper.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Almost three.”
She stopped and looked at me, full of pity or disappointment. “When is a better time to smoke than the present? You can sleep in tomorrow.”
I sat across from her, and she told me she fell asleep easier when she was high. She lit the joint and handed it to me. We shared the joint, passing it back and forth, neither of us speaking. Quickly I felt high and waved the rest of it away.
We talked for a while, about nothing serious or important. She told me about a dream in which her teeth fell out. She told me about waking up some nights in a panic without understanding why. The thought of dying in a car accident excited her, being thrown through a windshield. She was more afraid of living than dying.
I started looking through Harold’s desk drawers, flipping through papers, looking for something, anything. I don’t know what I was searching for. I saw numbers and figures written everywhere in pencil. I saw lists of names and phone numbers. I saw dollar amounts next to some names, check marks next to others. There were pro football teams and college teams with numbers next to them. Patriots minus six and a half. Raiders plus three. Bulls minus ten. The writings of a bookie, everything documented in notebooks. Records over the past few years. There were lists of names for several pages.
In another drawer he kept nasal spray, a bottle of aspirin. In another I found a can of foot powder. In another a pornographic magazine of older women. I flipped through it but found myself bored by it. “These women,” I said.
“Yeah, they’re gross,” Rosemary said.
“All the makeup. The guys are disgusting.”
“It’s all so gross. Put it away.”
Soon we were bored and went back upstairs, still high. “I’m going to bed,” Rosemary said. “What are you going to do? Are you coming?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a snack.”
She waved me off and went upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where I found part of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a plate that George hadn’t finished earlier. The room was blue from the moonlight in the window. I held my hand up and looked at it. The walls, the cabinets, everything was blue. I picked up the sandwich and peeled the bread apart. Then I took a knife from the drawer and sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, stabbing the bread into shreds before devouring it.
At school, a few students told me they were in love with Rosemary: there was Farah LeClaire, who was pale and wore black lipstick and who evidently practiced witchcraft in the middle of the night with a group of girls from nearby Broken Arrow.
There was Valerie Day, a senior who worked part-time at the Whittington School for the Blind and had been suspended, twice, for masturbating in class.
And then there was a boy named Jerry Hock, who told me he had developed an anomalous obsession with Rosemary and had been watching her for months. Jerry was sixteen and washed dishes at a diner that served fried-onion hamburgers, and he suffered from heart tremors and told me he had only a year, maybe eighteen months to live, and that the one girl he planned on marrying in heaven was Rosemary.
“She’s the real thing,” he told me in the school hall. “I hope she hasn’t fucked a lot of folks.” Jerry played bass guitar in a gospel band every Sunday at a small nondenominational country church located in an old warehouse near the highway. He was thin and tall and slightly bucktoothed. He had an annoying habit of sucking his teeth sometimes when he talked.
Jerry said he had a stack of books on Indian tribes I could have and invited me over to his house, so after school George and I rode bikes all the way over there, past the Shell station and Jimmy’s Auto Parts, past the coffee shop where old men always sat inside drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, over the railroad tracks and down Union Street to Jerry’s house at the end of the block. Mr. Hock, Jerry’s dad, invited us in and sat across from us in the living room. He told us we could call him by his first name, Jim, if that would make us comfortable. Mr. Hock wore thick-lensed glasses and a burgundy cardigan and spoke in a gentle voice.
“Would you boys like tea or milk or anything?” he said. “We have snacks. You must be thirsty.”
A young girl peeked her head around the corner of the recliner where Mr. Hock sat. The girl was holding a Barbie doll and seemed to be studying us. She wasn’t smiling. We declined the drinks and asked if Jerry was in his room.
“He is in his room,” Mr. Hock said. “Are you sure you’re not thirsty? We have juice or milk. I think we have orange juice.”
The girl made a mean face and hid behind the recliner. Mr. Hock stood and fingered one of the buttons on his cardigan. “You’re both perspiring,” he said. “I should turn the heat down.”
The girl behind the recliner was hitting something against the floor. Mr. Hock inhaled deeply through his nose as if thinking very seriously about something.
“Jerry’s room is downstairs,” he said.
We followed him through the kitchen and downstairs to the basement, where Jerry apparently slept and spent most of his time. Mr. Hock went back upstairs and left us in the dim room. There were no windows down there. In the corner of the room was Jerry’s bed, which was unmade and had clothes piled on it. On a nightstand next to the bed there was an alarm clock, a roll of paper towels, and a spiral notebook. Clothes were scattered on the floor. A bass guitar was leaning against the wall next to an old amplifier with lots of knobs. Yearbook photos of Rosemary were pinned up on the walls. Jerry didn’t seem surprised to see us. He showed us a pile of comics and sat on his bed and played his bass while George looked through them.
“Take any you want,” he said. He sucked his teeth. “I’m not a collector. I just like to draw.”
“What about the tribe books?” I asked.
“Sorry, I don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “My dad must’ve donated them or something since nobody ever read them. No offense.”
He put his bass down and opened a drawer full of notebooks and colored pencils. He opened a large notebook of plain white paper and showed us a number of cartoon characters he’d drawn in pencil: Sylvester the Cat staring up at Tweety Bird in a birdcage; Yosemite Sam pointing a pistol at Bugs Bunny; the Road Runner tied to a railroad track and holding up a sign that says “Help!” as Wile E. Coyote, a napkin tied around his neck, stands over him with a fork and knife.
And then there were the more disturbing drawings, the ones of naked women and animals. There were several drawings of a girl with long hair in submissive poses. One showed her on her knees with her wrists tied behind her back. I wondered whether it was supposed to be Rosemary. George went back to the comic books and grabbed a few to take. Somehow, eventually, we were on our way back upstairs, out of the filthy and windowless den. Mr. Hock walked us to the door and held it open for us.
“You boys come back,” he said.
Poor strange Jerry Hock. I was secretly fond of him. I expect we could be friends after all these years if I only knew where he lived.
As the days passed I continued to have headaches and feel nauseated. Agnes took me to the doctor, where I was given a blood test and was diagnosed with a small ulcer. The doctor prescribed pills and I had to change my diet to less caffeine, no spicy foods, and no smoking.
I was told to relax more and keep myself busy: cleaning, organizing, drawing sketches. On a sick day home from school, I cleaned the upstairs bathroom, wiping down the sink and tub and shower, scrubbing the toilet, and spraying the mirror with Windex. I put the dirty towels in the hamper in the hallway, then folded the T-shirts in my dresser. I folded George’s T-shirts, too.
Agnes stayed downstairs, leaving me alone. I spent the whole afternoon drawing at the desk while it rained outside. I decided to draw various things for Rosemary to show her I, too, had an interest in art, like she did. I wanted her to see I possessed a desire to paint and maybe even win an award like she had. I considered myself an average artist—I’d done well in junior high art, particularly with cartoons, and I had even won honorable mention in a contest at the school one year when I’d drawn a cartoon wolf with bandages on his nose and a patch over one eye. The inscription underneath it read: “Do What’s Right! Don’t Fight!”
I drew landscapes, objects of my desire, things to represent my longing for companionship in my time of sickness. This is how I remember it. I drew buildings on fire. I drew a clown holding a machine gun, and a dog frothing at the mouth. I drew an old man dead in a rocking chair. His head was slumped over and he was bleeding from his chest.
This went on all afternoon, during the rain and after it stopped, until George returned home from school. In the end, looking over them all, I elected not to give them to Rosemary, and instead ripped them all to shreds, ripping and ripping, tearing them into tiny pieces.
I took my pills and bore the stomach pain. I had also contracted some sort of slight head cold, I remember, because I was running a fever and had a sore throat. Those few days I missed school were mostly spent in boredom. I lay in bed all day, and when I wasn’t sleeping I was lying there feeling drowsy and sensitive to noise. When I opened my eyes I longed to hear the sounds of birds outside, or Agnes moving around downstairs, sounds that helped me feel at peace and unafraid.
Most importantly, I recall being at Rosemary’s beck and call, willing to do anything for her. I drifted in and out of fever dreams. I thought of warm summer afternoons, walking through a garden or sitting in the sun. And I dreamed of yellow leaves covering the bedroom, flying in through an open window. In the dream I got up and walked downstairs and found the whole house covered in yellow leaves. The windows downstairs were open and a flock of birds flew in, perching on the fireplace mantle and the backs of chairs and on shelves. The whole house was covered in yellow leaves and birds. I woke feeling hot and feverish. I was drowsy and weak and went downstairs for water and aspirin. Agnes made me chicken noodle soup. I went back upstairs and slept.
One late night Rosemary came to the doorway of my room and waved for me to follow her. George was asleep, so I got out of bed quietly and went into the hall. I followed her into her room and she closed the door.
“Agnes told me about your stomach problems,” she said. “Sorry you’re sick.”
“I’m feeling better,” I said.
She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted despite doctor’s orders. We smoked and I stared at her through the pale smoke.
“I wanted to share a secret with you,” she said. “I was in juvenile detention a few years ago. It wasn’t a big deal, I spent a weekend there and on Monday the judge released me to my caseworker.”
I remembered what I’d read in her journal about being locked up. I pretended to act surprised by it.
“Really? What did you do?”
“We stole clothes from the mall. My friend Farah and I. They arrested us in front of everyone. It’s a secret.”
“Farah.”
“Yeah, Farah. Do you know her?”
“No,” I lied. “I think I know who she is. She’s tough? Gets suspended?”
“Yeah, pretty much, but I don’t talk to her anymore. She’s supposed to stay away from me. Long story I won’t tell. Anyway, in the detention center they restrained me. Then they put me on my stomach, facedown, when I began crying and yelling at them to stop because it hurt. Restraints aren’t supposed to be painful unless you resist with a great s
truggle. I apparently did. They took my arms behind my back and put the leather restraints on my wrists, which put pressure on my head against the cement. The floor was cold and hard against my cheek. I must’ve been in shock or panic because I suddenly felt nothing, I remember not feeling anything, like everything around me disappeared. It sounds weird, but it was like I’d become in some strange way actually attached to the floor.”
I leaned forward a little. “They did that? It hurt?”
“Yeah, it hurt,” she said. “I heard a rushing sound of wind in my ears like the roar you hear when your head is completely out the window of a car on the highway, and this massive roar didn’t go away until the pain from my arms went away, even though I continued to kick and yell and gag while they put the restraints on my ankles. I mean, even the kicking didn’t do any good. I mean somebody must’ve been sitting on my legs, because I felt weight there and also on my back. Then I felt a hand near my mouth, so I bit someone’s hand. Then I felt pressure on my whole body and heard the voices all around me saying, Settle down! and if I struggled to move I wasn’t aware of it until I managed to close my eyes. I gave up finally. It was terrible. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever been through.”
“Why did they restrain you?”
“I threatened suicide,” she said. “They have to give girls razors if they ask for them in the shower so they can shave their legs. I broke down and told one of the officers I was going to start cutting my wrist with it. After they let me out I had a delinquent offense, but it was erased after I did community service.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
“So that’s my secret. Now you tell me one.”
The only secret I knew was that Harold kept a lot of money hidden in the shed, which I told her about. “George found it,” I said. “He’s known about it for a while and showed it to me. It’s obviously a hiding place.”
“I already knew about it,” she said. “He keeps hundred dollar bills in stacks. I don’t know why he’s hiding it in the shed.”
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