My intestines were their own continent of horrible. Upon hitting the cabin clearing, I loosed myself in the purple outhouse and then walked up to the back door and knocked shave-and-a-haircut. A show for a lonely gal. I mean a gal alone.
I waited for no answer. I opened the door. I crawled inside and got on the back bottom bunk in the people smell and lay there, surrounded by Haw’s castoff clothes, looking up at the roof, its raft patch, the blue tarp. Later it rained briefly and when it did, the roof began to leak once more. Each leaking drip sent me deeper into misery. In the pain—which ran along my limbs and throbbed heartily from nose on out to skull—I was alone. No cat, no pal, no enemy. It is an only child’s burden: to have the feeling of deep solitude husbanded by parental psychic noise. And now here I was, not a child. Just an only.
At some indeterminable point, my pain fell beneath my need to piss and eat. That evening, I pushed myself vertical and squatted in the shower cube. While doing so I saw on its wall a small blot of old cat blood on the vinyl, and shook.
On top of this I got my period. As if my innards wanted to be clean and forceful for this new version of life. I washed all of my bodily issuances into the drain and then washed myself.
The prospect of fresh air felt like a threat. For each time I shifted, my skin opened up at a different scabbing wound: I bled. I dripped and ached and smarted. Where? Oh, everywhere.
After dressing in the front room, I looked at my old piles of stuff. I found the tampons, a sign of comfort and preservation sent by my past self. Everything was cruel and possible. I ate in maintenance. I chewed in a daze. I consumed bars and nuts and anything I didn’t have to cook. My hunger was endless and I tried to meet it but it rushed away to deeper and deeper crannies of my gut. I sighed, and knew it was time to leave. My first idea was to crawl gingerly up the creek, find the caves once more, and then die.
But you must by now know this: I am a bending branch who’d sooner snap than rot in place. So I—drinking water and pissing in the cube, trying to forget my endless hunger and pain—decided that I would sleep again, well as I could, and then go out and try and find some people to help me. I was weak and added weakness to my idea of self.
This time I lay on the couch. Everything in the cabin was dusty and dirty and smoky and skunky. I was disgusted and ashamed, and it was only with the last bit of a pain pill, found in the gutter of a pants pocket, that I was able to greet sleep.
IN THE MORNING I dressed slowly and went out into the world. It was cold but not upsettingly so. The deciduous trees were dull yellow, or flame red, or brown and sloughy. The evergreens were darker. I dragged my body in between their trunks, all day, until I hit a hiking path. There I leant up against a tree. I wanted to be dined upon by some animals: What better penance could I offer to the world? I did not and do not believe in a higher organization of the cosmos. And still I asked an ant if it was interested in my flesh. It went on crawling by. “Didn’t get her when she was a pup,” I remembered Gene saying. “But I still trained her.” Then—unbit, in solitude—I slept in place, pinned by my fatigue.
IT WAS A half day later or more, when two trail custodians found me there. They wanted to call the Rangers. I begged them not to, said I could walk, said I was fine, if they could just give me a ride down-mountain.
Later they transferred me from the trail vehicle to the truck, where I sat between the skinny one and the fat one such that my knees were touching theirs as we bounced down the provisional road. The skinny one talked, but I didn’t listen. The fat one hummed quietly. When we got to the visitors center, he helped me out. “You got anyone to call?” the skinny one asked. I nodded and recited Earl John’s number without thinking why.
Once we got to the visitors center, I used the restroom and jerry-rigged a pad with toilet paper. I’d left the tampons in the cabin. My inner thighs were covered lightly in my blood. My period was thin as a crick and would end soon after. As if my body were now doing only what was needed, no more. I avoided the mirror.
Later a chatty woman fetched me in her hatchback and drove down-mountain. She was the wife of the skinny man or the fat one, and a nurse practitioner, so asked me should she take a look and see how I was doing. A Christmas tree air freshener, pineapple scented and the color of a Post-it, swung from the rearview jolly. I said no thanks. She gave me a clean sweatshirt with the name of a corporation on it. I watched the mountain trees cede to broad roads and low houses. She made a turn onto a dirt road where a double-wide, a prefab shed, and a garage stood together across from an open field. “Here we are,” she said. As if that meant anything.
When we rolled up the gravel drive, I saw that Earl John was out front wrapping his plants in burlap. A warm bath of a sigh pressed through me.
“I know honey, it’ll be cramped, but they keep a nice house. I was there last Easter and EJ made a great corned beef you wouldn’t turn down.” I did not like her though she had done me a great favor. She waved at him and stopped the car and I got out and she backed the car back onto the dirt road and drove away.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said, and led me into the house.
The woman from the outfitter was doing the bills at the kitchen table, wearing reading glasses. As we entered, she finished a jot before looking up. “Nice to meet you proper,” Janey said, and waved with her hand, which was dry looking and small. Looking at her face I could see now the wide-set eyes, the landscape cheekbones. Planes of faces built by the same genes. She was petite, though. A whip of a woman in flannel, corduroy. A splinter in the world. I shuddered privately.
She put the bills away. We sat down together. They got me a beer and a plate of pizza bites and a dish of Bugles and I ate them quickly, lucky not to choke. I told them then about the tree falling on the roof, said I’d gotten lost in the woods trying to get off the mountain. In minor ways the story was true. Did they ask questions? Only if the latrine was still standing. I said yes; Earl John nodded to himself.
I said if they didn’t mind I could sleep the night on the couch and start for home the next day.
“Well of course it’s your decision and I’ve got your truck in the garage but I don’t think you should head out so fast,” he said.
“No, you should stay here and rest a couple days, call someone to come up here,” Janey said.
I said yes I would call someone, but I did not then call anyone. My body reminded me of its weakness. I needed to rest and would do so poorly. I did not ask any questions, then, did not ask anything a person in my situation might want to know, but later I gathered from conversation that Janey was indeed Haw’s mother and that Haw usually came and went as he pleased. Though I worried he no longer did anything, that he had never left the cave, that he was a carryout snack for any creature who happened by. I did not, did I, blame myself; I did not, did I, sleep very well: up all hours still and watchful in this warm strangers’ place. The trailer was faux wood paneled in a honey color and the rug that ran through it was an orange shag. Like being in a safe flame.
EACH MORNING EARL JOHN would ask how I was doing. Each morning I would say that I was doing better. Each morning I would be lying. He’d go out to his woodshop and out on errands and wherever else. “Going to the cabin?” I’d ask in an overly light manner. No, he’d say. Wanna get you squared away first.
For most of this duration I slept in the days, huddled in Janey’s recliner opposite a space heater. Earl John, every once in a while, would come in from the shop and rouse me with some soup or hot Ovaltine. I wondered if he still had the jigsaw his wife had been so good with. I wondered if his nerdy son had found some off-line friends. I took showers, and shivered wetly afterward, dressing tightly in Janey’s spare sweats. Winter was closer. The old man did not ask after my supposed art. Looking back, I can’t explain why he was so kind to me. I suspected Janey had some ideas about where her son had recently been.
And when I was alone, sometimes I wondered if Haw, alive, would crop up like a bad penny. And Gene
did seem gone for good, but who knew. Undeniably I was vulnerable to such bedevilments. The trailer door looked like it was made of steel, and I tried to let this comfort me. At night I sweated into the couch, thinking about how thin the boundary was between my abdicating heart and the busy world. There was a window above the couch, by my head. Its glass chattered in the frame. Often I’d wake to hear a bird’s caw and startle down to my gut.
What did I think of myself, as I watched Janey move about her home, watched her leave each morning scrubbed for the store, and return each evening muzzy at the edges? I worried my empty dental socket with the tip of my tongue. I had the runs; I pressed on my injuries; I would not—though she offered several times—allow her to dress my wounds with ointment and bandages. I did this myself, even as it was twisting or awkward to do so.
After four days my body was feeling a bit better and my mind was clearing and I had logic-summoned the reminder that, dead or alive, Haw was no great prize. In fact he was, I believed, a dangerous man. I wondered whether his father had been dangerous to others or just to himself. I resisted any collection of information regarding Haw, only watched the trailer’s lamplight lick his mama’s face, the pitted complexion transforming into a clarity of hospitable warmth, as she knitted or did Sudoku, sitting there in her recliner. I could leave. He would never find me. I’ve found in this absence a rare mercy.
Soon I was well enough to help Janey or Earl John with dinner, chopping cucumbers for the salad and setting the table like a teen. One night after dinner I asked them if I could use the phone. “It’s long distance,” I apologized.
“Honey, everything’s long distance from here,” Janey said, and went and fetched the cordless.
As the phone trilled my chest hurt. I realized I was holding my breath. I pushed myself. I thought: one day, madam, you’ll strangle at the gates of your own closed mouth. Then I inhaled. Swept the overgrown feeling from my eyes. Ken answered.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hey, Ken.” I bent my voice submissive and soft.
“Well, shit,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
He asked where the fuck I’d been. He said that he’d told my folks I was fine, on a trip without a phone. He’d told them: she needs space, a break, give her a little time and she’ll be back home lickety-split. Pop had said, Can you blame her? They had made a story for me. I had so many terrible faces.
But meantime Ken knew how lost I’d been. I felt sorry that he’d been alone in this. But I didn’t say so. Instead I asked: “Think you can take the bus here and help me drive home?” Like a peach, no hesitation, he said he would. Said he could take the bus soon as Saturday and come and meet me. I was ripely embarrassed. We hung up and I felt myself make a single puff of a sob. My body was a high-pressure system. A storm I wouldn’t let break.
TWO DAYS LATER Earl John went down to fetch Ken from the station. While I waited for their arrival I decided to take a shower. The thought of the water calmed me. Some things don’t change. I was just done dressing when Ken came through the door. He looked like himself, tidy and whole next to tattered old me. He hugged me from behind, my shoulders in his armpits, cooping me with his long solid limbs. I was a lizard sunning itself on a hot rock, to be in such a hug; again I did not cry, this time in joy, but thought of it. I pressed my chin into Ken’s arm. We hadn’t said hello.
“How long was I gone?” I asked Ken finally, twisting my neck to look up.
“Month and a half,” he said. Something I noticed then but did not comment on was the fact that he had finally fixed his broken eyetooth.
Forty-five days: I took this duration into what my future would feel like. Some things happen quickly, then nothing happens for a long time. I would have to get used to this human hurry-up, this human slow-down, for once more I seemed to have a future. “Anything happen while I’ve been gone?” I swallowed a sandy breath.
“He’s still around,” he said.
I tried to read his face but it was shut for the season. So I unknotted myself from Ken’s embrace and gathered my belongings: my thin wallet, my keys from Earl John’s hook, my hummingbird knife, one sweater which I put on. I left my jeans, shredded to shit, and that corporate sweatshirt. Janey, appearing from the kitchen, informed me I could “wear the sweatpants out.” I thanked her heartily and loudly, for I could be no churlish troglodyte, anymore.
Ken followed me outside and we stood in the driveway with Earl John and Janey. On the other side of the road was the long inert pasture, its grass cut down to the quick. Its sight depressed me. “Take care of yourself,” Janey said. Grimly I nodded my chin all the way to my chest. Then I thanked them again, and apologized belatedly about the state of the cabin.
“Ain’t no thing,” Earl John said, somewhat merrily. “We’ve had bikers up there, seen worse.”
“It’s pretty bad,” I said.
“We’ll slide my son a couple bucks to go straighten it up,” Janey said, like a mother would.
I thought then that I had been wrong about her understanding of my state and its cause. I thought, what if Haw was alive and paid to clean the old abode. I thought of this possibility: Haw drudging his broken body all over the cabin, our atrocious mess. But then I thought of this probability: Thingy up there in the cave, or, Thingy’s body, nibbled and nested and consumed by animals small and large. I exhaled, and smiled slightly, and looked back over to the field, its blank bristle. My neck muscles released their crimps.
BEFORE I REALIZED it, Ken and I were on the open road, sitting beside one another, quietly, silently, as the world washed by us. He petted my shoulder, one hand on the wheel. He smelled of chemicals, or of chemical fragrance, that note of city living. I breathed it in, felt pleased, fell asleep.
Throughout the trip I’d wake to watch the landscape, to see the man-made marks, then fall asleep again. We traveled on, across one or two state borders. We did not, as I had, take the country roads, but rather: a long series of interlocking highways wide and beckoning for use. Signs assured us of direction and distance. I slept.
When I woke again the truck was stationary, in a gas station next to a Super 8 Motel. It was dark. I got out and saw Ken, through the wide window of the mart, turned away from me. Still his movements struck me like family. I walked to the building. I went in.
In this fluorescent light box I felt part taxidermy. But otherwise I was not notable. There was a man in a cap with his back to me, surveying magazines, and Ken was standing in the chips aisle with no apparent understanding of his predicament. The slushie machine and the hot dog carousel together made a cozy harmony. The taquitos shivered, rolled. Everything around me looked equally ridiculous and sincere. I wondered if Ken would notice me, or if anyone would, here, or in any public. I walked the aisles of food bags with the other unnotables. Were we all really drooling, or was this simply what it felt like to be back in a peopled landscape? I felt ornery, gooey, itchy, sinister. I tucked my knife away into my pocket. I followed Ken to the candies, made my presence known.
“You woke up,” he said.
“That’s true.” I had a sudden clawing hunger, and picked up a king-sized bag of chocolate-covered peanuts. “Can you cover me?”
Ken said he could. This felt kind, if remote, so I took more advantage and asked: “Did you tell them anything else?”
He said: “That seems like your job.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened up there?”
“Not really.”
I did wish otherwise; withholding’s less profound when no one’s asking you to give. “Do you think they’ll be angry at me?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I ripped open the bag of candy and began to pour it down my gullet, then offered it to Ken while I waited for him to answer. It tasted like, what, motor oil mixed with confectioner’s sugar and pebbles. Had my biomechanics wilded? No. Maybe I was just actually paying attention.
He cut his eyes sharp. “I told Dan, ‘Your daughter loves you. Even i
f she’s not here.’”
“Ouch,” I said. And meant it precisely, for it was an injury scooped and pangy. The man in the cap walked between us and we divided then re-adhered.
“You can not care,” Ken said. “And that’s a fine way to be. But you can’t not care and care at the same time.”
“I can,” I said as he walked toward the register.
He got a pack of Marlboro Lights and added, “Those,” waving back at me. I held up the candies. Then I poured them out on the ground, followed him out to the music of their skitter and roll.
When we got back in the car, Ken didn’t turn the ignition key directly. “I’ll be better to you,” he said. “But you’re going to have to wait.” Like a kid I wanted to ask, “How much longer?” Instead I bounced my head, looked out into traffic, said I understood. We went the rest of the way home.
I WAYFARED INTO my own old life. I had to relearn convenience. Alone I sat in the bath or on the toilet and felt four starred. In the mornings there was a moldy frost across the lawn. In the mornings there was wheat toast, heavily buttered, with a knife on the butter plate in case I wanted more.
I found for the first days I wanted mostly to stay in bed and not be bothered. I parked the pickup on the street and left it there. It was selfish to set the limits of my own days yet I could not rouse. Though by the second or third week there would come a new and vigorous balance within me. Then I would brightly escort my father into his last days, as my mother approved from the margins.
But first: Ma marched me to her GP. The doc pronounced me “banged up but, overall, fine.” This felt accurate to all of us. In the dentist’s waiting room I watched videos of porpoises set to sunny instrumental plonks; later they recommended an implant and I promised one day I’d take the time. Until then I’d be fine to chew on the one side.
In my absence, little had changed. Well that’s not true. Pop was less of a body, or less embodied. I was never sure which. I did recon slowly, dawdled at the door of my parents’ room, asking Pop at last: “How are you?”
Hard Mouth Page 18