The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove

by Paul Zimmer

  When I finally woke up into the half light of intensive care, I felt like I’d been cut open, had all my bones pulled out, and had them placed in a dirty bag—where the docs cracked them with a hammer, and then stuffed them back into my body.

  It wasn’t just pain I felt—but lonesomeness that washed over my spirit. I knew this empty drill from my childhood, but now I was into the big time. I was doing this all alone and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the whole expanding universe—just me, those wires and cords poked down my throat, and all those goddamned blinking little lights.

  When finally they pulled the tubes out of my throat days later, nurses brought me warm drinks and pills to swallow. They listened to my heart all the time, every thirty seconds, it seemed to me. They checked my IVs and drips, and chattered at me, but I couldn’t respond much.

  I kept thinking—why me? I suppose everyone thinks this. But, hell, I never hurt anyone! I’d only slipped out for a few Leinenkugels and got nabbed by some maniac. The whole thing made me angry. If I could have talked I would have given all those doctors and nurses some lives of chill demigods like Caligula or Hitler or Dick Cheney—just to show them how being cold and alone really feels.

  After a long time I was moved to a regular hospital room. Several times a day the nurses hauled me out of bed and made me walk up and down the hall while they held on to me. There really wasn’t much to say, my jaw was sort of locked up, so I stayed quiet. I slept a lot and had strange dreams.

  When this sort of thing is happening, it’s just you and the darkness whispering mysteries back and forth. I recall one crazy dream: There was this big, abstract mural painting that was sliding over the ceiling and down the walls of my room—icebergs and frozen clouds oozing down sky blue walls. I watched for a long time and decided I would try and put myself into that painting. Maybe it would slide me all the way out of this hospital and I could get back to my lives.

  I got out of bed and started feeling my way across the room toward the picture, canes in hand and dragging my rolling IV stand behind me, unplugging it from the wall as I moved. Out of my room I went and down the hall, following the painting as it slipped along the walls and ceiling. I was unable to understand why the nurses at the desk were so upset when they looked up and saw me. Suddenly they were grabbing at me and scolding, hustling me back to my bed.

  “But those icebergs,” I kept saying, “don’t you see them? They’re melting all over the place. There’s going to be a flood. You better get some mops!”

  “It’s okay, Cyril,” they said as they tucked me back in. “Don’t get yourself worked up. You’re going to be fine. Just don’t be getting out of bed by yourself.”

  A lot of doctors came to look me over, sometimes whole parades, young and old folks in white jackets, asking me questions out of the dim light. It seems like I had survived some of the lowest body temperatures possible. Perhaps I’d set a new record.

  I tried to point out the iceberg painting to them, but none of them could see it. They assured me that I was doing fine—amazingly well, they said, despite my itches and aches. In time I started to believe them. Then they asked me more questions. Instead of giving them answers, I tried to give them a few brief lives. These little biographies meant more than any facts I could give them, but they couldn’t understand this—that my lives could be so meaningful. When I started one of my recitations, they would usually head for the door. I had a reputation: I was the man who apparently hadn’t had much of a life, but represented everything with accounts of other people’s lives.

  How do you cure a guy of this strange affliction? Duct tape and aspirin, maybe a little Super Glue. Okay, I admit it, I am a strange case.

  The sheriff and his deputy came to my bedside often and tried to ask me questions about Balaclava. Hell! I didn’t know who that goddamned fur-face was, I told them—he was some monster who’d grabbed me! He’d driven off toward Readstown after he’d stiffed the Mobil station and kidnapped me. Then he dumped me halfway in the snow, that’s all I know, and it’s enough!

  Later the sheriff told me that Balaclava had forced another car off the road, causing it to spin out on the ice and crash into a tree. Two people had been badly hurt, but Balaclava kept going. He didn’t care. He wounded a clerk in a robbery attempt near Knox, Illinois, so it seems like he really was headed toward Peoria. He doesn’t care. Maybe his parents were alcoholics. God knows where he is now. Out there somewhere, a full-time pissed-off monster pointing that ultimate gat at people, threatening to pull the trigger and blast their faces off if they don’t do as he tells them.

  Some television people and big-time news reporters picked up on my story. When they found out what I had survived they started calling me on the phone at the hospital; one of the national networks sent a guy with a microphone and a whole camera crew to question me about my ordeal. I was the famous old guy who’d been dumped out of a truck by some hoodlum to die in a blizzard—then I almost made it all the way back home on my own. My story slipped onto the screens for a day among all the batterings, bombings, beheadings, and ballbustings. I was a sort of amusing relief from the slaughter, an old guy who had actually beaten death. How unusual and endearing.

  A high-toned foundation in the East got wind of my tale and decided to give me its annual award for bravery. They called me on the telephone in my hospital room to grandly give me the news of their benevolence. Fifty thousand smackers, they said. Fifty thousand big ones just for stumbling around and almost getting frozen to death! Now that’s bravery!

  The dear, grand hearts even arranged to pay the taxes directly on their award to me, so that I cleared the whole $50,000. They invited me to rent formal clothes and attend their annual award banquet in New York at their expense. I would have been a hell of a curiosity—a bandaged twig in a tuxedo—but I couldn’t make it. So they sent me their check anyway, express mail, fully insured, with a number on it. They arranged to have my picture taken holding it up in my bed. At the ceremony in New York, Mayor Bloomberg accepted the award in my name and said a few nice things about how some big stories could happen—even far out in the boonies, away from the show.

  And that check—$50,000 it read! Fifty thousand clams—and it was the real goods. What does a poor, old, half-melted Klondike like me do with that kind of dough? I hadn’t figured that out yet. But I didn’t want to just stick it in some bank account. I wanted to take care of that dough myself, all those crinkly bills—I wanted to riffle them through my fingers—maybe once a month, and then hide them away again. Why should I give the wad to some bank bozo in a three-piece suit to punch in as numbers into his computer?

  When the UPS guy brought the check to the hospital and asked me to sign and verify receipt, I recognized him from around town. This guy had never paid any attention to me before. One time I’d tried to tell him a life and he ignored me. But now you’d have thought I was the latest deluxe pizza. He even arranged to have his picture taken with me. When everybody was gone I just stuck the envelope in the drawer of my bed stand for a while and didn’t talk to anybody about it—not even the Empress Theodora. More on this in a little while.

  Later, when I got out of the hospital, I took the check to the little bank in Soldiers Grove and told them I wanted to cash it. Everybody stepped out of their glass cubicles to look at me like I was bananas. The bank director invited me to come into his office and had a quiet chat with me. He had all kinds of fancy ideas about how I could invest it or deposit it. But I insisted on the cash, and finally they agreed to do this for a small handling fee. It took them a few days to produce all that lettuce—500 one-hundred-dollar bills—that’s how I wanted it; but eventually they came up with the whole load and I handed over the endorsed check.

  I didn’t know how to act as they counted out all that cash for me. When they had finished, I was numb. I asked, “Can you give me a paper bag?” They gave me a couple of big envelopes. My hands felt like they were burning when I took up all that moolah. I took the fat envelopes bac
k to my room in the rest home and took a nap beside the cash; finally I stuffed it into two big old sweat socks, put them under my mattress and started trying to forget about them.

  But that would be many weeks later. There was a pretty nurse who had the afternoon swing at the hospital. I’ve always been sort of flustered by women, but this one was so nice; just looking at her helped to warm me out of the permafrost. I’d wake up from one of my naps and there she’d be, her beautiful face, as she gave me some kind of treatment, tapping my IV tubes with her fingernail, or giving me pills to take. I’d never learned how to flirt—but I thought maybe I could learn with her. It was best when she was taking my pulse and holding my wrist.

  I always wanted to give her a life to think about. That’s what I do best. I could think of a hundred beautiful women she resembled, but I had to get it just right. Finally I said to her, “I’m trying to figure out who you look like-—maybe Désirée Clary, or Elinor Wylie. Is it Vera Hruba Ralston or Sigrid Hjertén?” I meant to flatter her, but she didn’t know any of these names. She gave me her wonderful smile, though, and that was very nice.

  Was I flirting okay? I wasn’t sure, but I was trying hard to learn.

  Another kind of young woman showed up by my bed one day with a clipboard; maybe she was twenty years old, but she acted like she was running the whole show. She looked kind of snippy like Bette Davis, but if I’d told her this she wouldn’t have known who I was talking about. Anyway, she was too snooty to be given a life. I had no desire to flirt with this woman.

  “Cyril,” she said in her superior voice, “we don’t seem to have any past records of you in the hospital. Have you been here before?”

  Damn—I hate this new familiarity that young people have! No twenty-year-old snot has any business calling me by my first name! What kind of a world is this? Even though I might look like roadkill, I deserve some respect.

  “My name is Mr. Solverson,” I corrected her. “No, I have not been here before.”

  She blinked once when I corrected her, but went on. “We need some information, Mr. Solverson. Do you have insurance?”

  “I’m a resident of the care home in Soldiers Grove. They have my insurance records.”

  “Do you have any information with you?”

  I told her my billfold had been stolen by Balaclava.

  “Your clothes are here in the locker. I’ll make a list of your belongings and you can sign it. But do I have your permission to look in your wallet for your medical card, Mr. Solverson?”

  “I told you, there’s no wallet. It was taken by the man who abducted me.”

  “Do you remember your social security number?”

  Now how the hell am I supposed to know my social security number while I’m lying on my frozen ass in a hospital bed, half out of my noggin?

  “6086245731,” I say off the top of what’s left of my head. I think it’s my phone number, but can’t be sure; it is the only number I can remember for the moment—and it is good enough for this sniffy kid.

  “Mr. Solverson, there are ten digits in that number. Social security has nine.”

  “How did that happen? There’s mysteries everywhere around this place,” I said in mock wonder.

  “Maybe you’ll remember later. Who is your next of kin?”

  “I have none.”

  “Who is your nearest relative?”

  “I have none.”

  “Can you give me the name of a close friend?”

  “I have none.”

  “Surely there is some distant relative somewhere?”

  I think hard, but I can think of no one. I decide to invent a relative so that this prissy missy will just go away.

  Who would I like to be my distant relative? Lots of people. But today I think of . . . Thurman Tucker. He was a reserve outfielder for the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians in the 1940s. He had a couple of pretty fair seasons for the Sox. He had a huge mouth like Joe E. Brown, and I saw a picture of him once in the Sporting News with half a dozen hardboiled eggs stuffed into his mouth. He wore steel-rimmed specs and I thought he looked like a pretty good guy. “Thurman Tucker,” I said. I spelled it out for her.

  “And what relationship is Thurman Tucker to you?”

  “He is my cousin three times removed. He might even be deceased by now.”

  Pause. “Do you know his phone number?”

  “011-43-6841.”

  “Cyril,” she said. “That does not sound like a phone number. Is it your social security number?”

  “You said you wanted nine numbers. My name is Mr. Solverson!”

  “Mr. Solverson,” the young woman’s voice had gone very, very cold. A gap of about sixty years yawned and opened its abyss between us. “Where does Thurman Tucker live?”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Eva Braun?” I asked her.

  “Where does Thurman Tucker live, Cyril?”

  “Do you want me to tell you about Eva Braun?”

  “No, Mr. Solverson. Where does Mr. Tucker live?”

  “France.”

  Pause. “There is no one in the United States who is close to you?”

  “Balaclava.”

  “Who is that?”

  “He’s a gunman. He’s the guy who almost aced me. Is that close enough?”

  “Cyril!” she said wearily. “You need another nap, you’re not being nice. I’ll come back later,” and she struts off, wriggling her officious butt.

  Here I am laid out like frozen broccoli in a hospital, and she’s bouncing around, trying to make me think of numbers I don’t remember.

  I suppose I should admit that young people generally piss me off these days. Maybe I should just say that I don’t feel much connection. I can’t recall much about being young—except that it wasn’t pleasant. I remember hustling to avoid the loud brouhahas of my drunken parents, and trying to make myself invisible on school playgrounds that were more like prison yards. I remember being punched around in high school halls.

  I did a lot of dreaming about other people’s lives when I was young.

  My memory has gone off the rails. I’ve been completely discombobulated by all that has happened to me—the abduction, the miracle of the policemen finding me in the snow, the saving of my life. All the drugs I take seem to shave off my ability to remember things.

  I recall sneaking out of my room to go over to Burkhum’s Tap and have a few beers. I remember talking to some people at the bar. Then I went out into the storm, ran into Balaclava and he pulled a gun on me that looked like a howitzer.

  Then that bastard left me out in the blizzard. Maybe he was the one who shot off my toes before he sent me off in the snow. It’s all became such a muddle—too much cold reality for me to deal with.

  I was ill-tempered, just wanted all the probing, pricking, pilling, and questioning to stop. Suddenly, because of certain circumstances, some folks—after decades and years of not even knowing I existed—have decided that my life is now important enough for them to preserve.

  There were chilblains on my hands and ear that were driving me nuts; they had to tie my hands back on the bedsides so I couldn’t scratch or rub. The chilblains hurt like the very devil, but it was the ones that were on my feet that really set me off. I couldn’t reach them, and they itched all the time so that I would start to howl. The nurses came in and scolded me, told me to stop making so much noise—I was disturbing other patients. I tried to get them to scratch my feet. I recited Job’s life for them—all that stuff about sores and boils and suffering—but they didn’t know who Job was.

  I woke up one morning and Bonnie, the good nurse, was in my room holding my wrist, taking my pulse. Maria Montez? Gussie Moran? Alexandra Kollontai? I was still trying to think who she looked like so I could give her a life. I was running through some beautiful women in my mind. Then I got it for sure: “The Empress Theodora of Byzantium,” I said out loud. “That’s who you look like. Just like the mosaic of her on the wall of San Vitale at Ravenna.”r />
  “How’s that?” Bonnie asked.

  “She was the wife of Justinian, emperor of Byzantium, and then she got to be empress when he died. Pretty good for a gal whose old man was a circus bear keeper, who had to become an actress and occasionally take to working the streets just to make a few bucks. But one day Justinian saw her on the street and really got a load of how beautiful she was, and that was it. He couldn’t think of anyone else. They had to rewrite the laws in Byzantium which stated that emperors could not marry actresses. Theodora was gorgeous but, much more than that, she was smarter than everyone else. Justinian used to take advice from her, and one time she convinced him to make a stand with his guards and save Byzantium from some bozos who were attacking the city. Everybody else had run away, but Justinian’s guards were able to hold off the attackers. Theodora’s advice had saved the most beautiful city in the world from being sacked. The Empress Theodora—that’s who you look like, Bonnie. That’s not too bad.”

  Bonnie listened to me carefully—not like some other people who get nervous or suspicious when I put a life on them—and she liked what she heard. I started calling her Theodora when she came into my room, and it always made her smile.

  I told her lots of other lives and she always listened carefully as she checked my IV or took my temperature. Sometimes I’d be asleep when she came into my room to give me a treatment, and she would brush her fingertips on my cheek or the back of my hand. When I opened my eyes—there would be the sparkling face of Theodora. What a way to wake up! It was like a Sinatra song.

  I started to act kind of strange. Lovesick is probably more accurate. A warmth in my cold body. A crush. By God, I had a senior crush! I didn’t know what to do, but it was damned exciting, I was thinking fast, and I always think in lives.

  Theodora especially liked to hear the lives of women, so one day I told her about Nila Mack: “She was born in a little town in Kansas around the turn of the twentieth century. She lost her parents early and got married to an actor when she was a very young woman. He taught her a lot about the stage. She went to New York with him and eventually got a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System. She impressed people and they decided they wanted to put her in charge of children’s shows, and she became the first woman director at CBS. She put together a show using kid actors, called, Let’s Pretend. She broadcast it on Saturday mornings; it became famous and ran for twenty years.