by Matt Dean
I would have to walk, and hope for a bus.
* * *
A teenager stood at the corner of University and Simpson, in front of the Spin Cycle Coin Laundry. Tucked under his arm he carried a stack of bright yellow leaflets. He wore a gigantic black parka and, under that, a tight white T-shirt short enough to reveal a little tuft of hair below his navel. As I approached, he offered me a leaflet and a gap-toothed grin.
"Love is all around, bro," he said. His voice was throaty, laryngitic.
The leaflet advertised an Election Day prayer vigil at a church in Golden Valley.
Protect Freedom
Preserve The Family
Save America
Pray For President Bush And Vice President Quayle
In the middle of the page there was a big block of text. It began:
Join us for an evening of praise, worship and prayer for the future of our Great Nation. The Liberal Media is falling all over itself to declare Bill Clinton the next President of These Great United States of America, but according to our sources, he is nothing but a Liar, a Cheat, and a Whoremonger.
Tiny type at the bottom read:
Vote for Perot if you must, but if you love God, you must not vote for Slick Willy Clinton!
Below that, in even tinier type:
Copyright 1992, Sam Stinson Ministries, LLC.
I heard yelling, a man's voice, deep and sharp like the woof of a big angry dog. A woman's anguished bawl answered him. On the other side of University, in the Rainbow Foods parking lot, a tall, bone-skinny black man strode away from a short, plump white woman. He was bare-chested. He wore bleach-stained sweatpants and slippers, or perhaps sandals. She was barefoot. Her pink peignoir flapped in the wind; grime blackened the hem.
The woman extended her hands and raised her voice in an apotheosis of desolate pleading. I could hear her wailing, but the noise of passing traffic obscured her words. The man turned. He shambled backward a few steps. He stopped, then moved around her, crabwise in widening circles, as if she were an explosive device set to detonate at any moment.
Stopping some yards away from her, he said something that struck her-doubled her over-like a kick to the gut. He turned on his heel and, with a snap of his wrist, disappeared behind a row of cars.
The woman, too, turned, but staggered toward the street, away from the man. Just watching the heavy tread of her bare, grubby feet made the bones of my own feet and ankles ache. She flung herself to the ground, onto a muddy strip of lawn alongside the Perkins. She clawed at the grass, dug her fingers into the earth, scratched at it like some kind of wounded animal digging its own grave. Her mouth opened-in a silent scream, I thought, until, belatedly, I heard her howling, her ululant sobbing.
And then she seemed suddenly to calm herself. She sat on her haunches and regarded the ragged gash she had made in the ground. She began again to scoop away the sod, but in a more methodical way, squaring off the sides of the hole she'd made.
As I stood and watched the woman dig meticulously in the mud like an archaeologist searching for a few mire-caked shards of her pride, a bus rolled to a stop along the curb in front of me. Hydraulics hissed as the bus knelt; by luck or skill the driver had stopped the bus so that the lowest step was even with the curb, with a gap of just a couple of inches. I waited while a stooped, gray-haired man with a three-footed cane doddered off the bus.
A cluster of passing cars stirred the air, and the sharp black stink of the bus's exhaust struck me like a slap. My eyes watered. The smell of diesel exhaust had pervaded my dream. Or rather, there had been a smell, and diesel exhaust had been part of it-diesel exhaust mixed with tar, sweat, rotting fruit, and something else I couldn't name. The stench welled up in the back of my throat. My stomach lurched.
I still held the prayer vigil leaflet in my hand. As I crumpled it into a knot that fit in the palm of my hand, I glanced back toward the boy who'd handed it to me. I supposed the heavy-lidded head shake he gave me was intended to convey pity, but it succeeded only in making him look a little stoned.
* * *
The bus windows were misty, and the bus was so crowded that I had to stand in the middle of the aisle, clutching the overhead railing. I couldn't see very clearly where we were, but as we approached what seemed like our fortieth stop, I thought I spotted the Arby's at Fairview and University. I pulled the cord, and the bus eased to a halt in front of the Griggs-Midway building.
Dr. Bell's office lay on the other side of Fairview in the Midview Center, an old strip mall that had been converted into professional offices. Dr. William Andersen, MD. Ralph Estes, DO. George Bell, DDS. Venetian blinds masked the last window in the row. At eye level, the name of Eliot Moon, MA, formed an arch, a half moon. "Family And Individual Counseling" inched across underneath, like a kind of horizon over which the moon rose.
Eliot Moon's door opened, and a man emerged. Thickset, of no great height, a small bear of a man in baggy jeans, rumpled flannel, and shiny Doc Marten boots. He wore an unruly blond goatee. His head was shaved and shining. Our eyes met. He smiled and nodded by way of greeting or farewell. He ambled away, hands in pockets, whistling.
I opened Dr. Bell's door. It moved stiffly, with a shivering creak. Empty of people, the waiting room was barely large enough for the furniture it contained, though it contained only a round glass coffee table and two leather-and-chrome sling chairs. The walls were cinderblock, a shade of pale green that reminded me of hospitals and breath mints.
Dr. Bell himself sat at the reception desk. He looked up and smiled through the sliding window. Since my last checkup he'd grown a mustache. His hair seemed thicker, with a little more gray in it. He was everything I was not. Tall where I was short, dark where I was pale, bulky where I was lean. Every six months or so, I fell in love at first sight.
"I didn't expect to see you sitting there," I said.
"We're short-handed," he said. "Jonquil should be here any minute." He handed me a clipboard. "Just check that everything's current, if you please."
The door groaned. A tall young woman with calamitous posture and ruinous fashion sense clattered into the waiting room. Her calf-length jacket-or was it, God forbid, a dress?-had apparently been adapted from someone's grandmother's prize quilt, cut into pieces and dyed black. She wore her platinum hair in an odd hybrid of a bob and a high-and-tight. In the front, two curving locks-one tinted blue, the other green-framed her face and pointed like arrows to her cleft chin.
"Speak of the devil," Dr. Bell said, "and she shall appear. How was breakfast?"
In two steps Jonquil reached the counter, where she set down the remnants of her breakfast-a crumpled white paper bag and a Styrofoam cup.
"I devoured it on the way back," she said. She turned to me. "I'm totally compulsive abozut hash browns. Fried potatoes in any form, really. As you can see." She planted a hand on each hip, as if to demonstrate her girth, when in point of fact she was at her broadest point not much wider than a sheet of notebook paper. "I'll be back in a sec," she said, and disappeared through a narrow door.
I handed the clipboard to Dr. Bell. I surveyed the furniture arrangement. The room was so cramped that I didn't dare sit. Surely I would stub a toe or bark a shin in the attempt. There wasn't room enough for a coat rack; it hardly seemed there could be room for a person. I slipped off my jacket and laid it on the back of one of the chairs.
"Sorry to say, no magazines," Dr. Bell said. "We don't have any delivered now. All that paper makes the earth weep." He rolled his eyes.
I stepped to the counter and peeked into Jonquil's Styrofoam cup. It was half-filled with black coffee. "On the other hand, I heard that Styrofoam makes the earth giggle."
Dr. Bell smiled. "Come on back," he said.
Beyond the little door lay a warren of tiny rooms-two exam rooms on the left, a restroom and a filing closet on the right. Dr. Bell pointed me into the first exam room.
"I'll be right with you."
The exam room was miniscule, roughly s
quare. Here, instead of green, the walls were yellow, perhaps a shade too close to the color of mustard. On a poster pinned to the acoustic ceiling, a kitten hung by its claws from a tree branch. A caption read, "Hang In There!"
I settled into the exam chair. The vinyl was smooth from many years of use, cool to the touch. Again, the sickening smell of my dream filled my nose. I leaned over the porcelain cuspidor. Water trickled into its honeycomb drain. The freshness of the water and the clean scent of astringent cleared my head.
I lay back in the chair. Dr. Bell stood just inside the door, a file folder tucked under his arm. Staring absently at the ceiling, he tugged at the cuffs of his smock. I wondered how long he'd been watching me lean over the cuspidor. Perhaps for so long that-as a passenger of a crowded bus might hide behind a newspaper, on the off chance that the people surrounding him might at any moment begin raving or hallucinating or quoting Bible verses-Dr. Bell had invented a way of occupying himself, of ignoring my eccentric behavior.
But then he said, "I had to remind Jonquil to do some billing, otherwise she'd spend the whole morning fixing her makeup."
So he'd been distracted with personnel issues. Perhaps he hadn't even noticed me leaning over the cuspidor. He sat on a stool, rolled it toward the exam chair.
"Black lipstick and eye shadow," he said, shaking his head. "Black. I just don't get it."
"These kids today," I said.
He opened the folder. "No X-rays today. Great." He spread out the open folder on the cabinet. "Shorthanded, as I said. You're stuck with me for your cleaning."
"What happened to Miss Morton?"
"Retired," he said. "She was overdue, I think."
From a drawer in the cabinet Dr. Bell took a bib, fastened it around my neck with alligator clamps, and smoothed it down across my chest. I touched the bib, imagining that the warmth of his hand remained in the thick tissue.
"How's your mother?" he asked me.
He half-stood to position the dental light. Sitting, he flicked the switch, and the reflector filled with an amber glow.
"My mother is ? my mother."
He arranged his tools on the instrument tray. Mirror, hand excavator, explorer-he laid them side by side, exactly parallel to the sides of the tray. In his thick fingers the tools looked slender, delicate, precise.
"Actually," I said, "I haven't talked to her in a while."
"When you do talk to her, tell her I miss her show. It was the best thing on the radio."
"I'll tell her. She'll probably send you a balloon bouquet."
"All right," he said. "Let's have a look."
I turned my face toward him, but locked my eyes on the kitten poster. The dry warmth and the girth of his bare fingers as they eased my mouth open had always suggested a deep intimacy between us. A fantasy, of course, part of a puerile crush, perhaps, but I delighted in it. I felt my breath coming a little rougher.
But he wasn't ready yet. "What did she think of that mess with Howard Stern?" he asked.
"Howard Stern?"
"The FCC just hit him with a big fine. The biggest ever, I heard."
I looked at him. His eyes were hazel. For a moment I stared into them, lost among the pale striae and flecks of green. "I hadn't heard about that. I'm sure she has opinion to spare on the subject, though."
He laughed, shook his head. "I'm sure she does."
Mirror in one hand, explorer in the other, he leaned in. I opened my mouth. I stared at the poster on the ceiling, fixing on the kitten's pink nose. Dr. Bell's warm hand brushed my chin. He tucked the mirror between my teeth and my lower lip.
"Oh, bother," he said, and withdrew. "I will never get used to this."
I had no idea what he meant. I lifted my head. He had rolled away on the stool. He rummaged in the storage cabinet and pulled from it an unopened box of latex gloves.
"I usually leave them out on the counter, so I don't forget," he said. "But then, when I run out-." He plucked two gloves from the box. "You're not allergic to latex, right?"
The gloves appeared to be a couple of sizes too small for his hands. He spent considerable effort and time wriggling his thick fingers and thumbs into the latex. Once his left hand was covered, it was even more difficult to slip a glove onto his right. The ring finger of the second glove split at the tip, and he had to start over. He grinned at me-bashfully, I thought.
At last both hands were gloved. "By the way," he said. He tugged and snapped the latex down toward his wrists. "What's going on with Tom? He missed an appointment last month." He wiggled his fingers. They moved stiffly, like corseted ladies trying to bow. "Jonquil swears she called a 'million times'"-he made quotes in the air with two fingers of each hand, and the latex creaked-"but you two don't have an answering machine, so-."
Again I stared up at the poster. Suddenly, it irked me-the triteness of it, the cuteness, the soft focus, the absurdly unnatural cobalt blue of the kitten's eyes. The smell from my dream rose once more in my throat. I must have eaten something foul, but what? Surely I would remember eating something that smelled like tar and diesel exhaust.
I managed to say, "He-," and then no words would come. Only that damned stench, and the tang of latex and antiseptic on my tongue.
I covered my face with my hands; tears soaked my fingers. All at once, I was leaning sideways out of the exam chair, hugging the cuspidor, sobbing. My body heaved and shook. Choking noises ripped my throat.
Around me, whole worlds seemed to spin and churn, lost in murk. I saw only the blur of chrome at the bottom of the cuspidor. Dimly, I heard casters squeaking, doors banging, water running-not the trickle in the cuspidor, but a faucet gushing, wide open.
Then Jonquil was there, beside the chair. The patchwork thing had been a coat after all, I saw; she now wore a blue smock with a mini-skirt underneath. She placed a damp cloth on my forehead. I was leaning back, my head on the headrest. When had that happened?
"It's only a cleaning," she said. Her voice was so kind, so solicitous, that I broke out in fresh sobs. She smoothed the bib over my chest. She stroked my arm, held it so that I couldn't lean over into the cuspidor again. "It's okay," she said. "Whatever it is, it'll be okay."
I meant to protest, to say, "It won't, it won't, it won't," but the words came out in a slur of random vowels.
Jonquil moved away. I heard whispering at the door. "He's saying something about a boat," she said.
"A boat?"
The boat? Had I mentioned the boat?
Suddenly I went numb. I lay still. Jonquil wore the expression of a mother sitting vigil beside her child's deathbed. I closed my eyes.
The door opened with a protracted squeal. Dr. Bell whispered, "He's here."
I opened my eyes. A man sat in the stool. I noticed his hands first of all. He held them on his knees, plucking at his the creases of his khaki trousers. His fingers were long and slender. Whorls of flesh puckered at the knuckles, as if they were made of knotted rope. The pads of his thumbs were fat, though-or broad, rather, slightly flattened. A crescent of grime darkened one thumbnail. His face seemed to be formed of ill-fitted pieces-high cheekbones, thin lips, eyes set too far apart, eyebrows so pale they seemed not to exist. Crooked bangs covered his forehead. He smiled. "I'm Eliot," he said.
Eliot Moon, MA, Family and Individual Counselor. Now I was mortified. Like the batty maiden aunt in an old film, I had become completely unhinged in public, compelling the management to cry out for any doctor who might be in the house. By now, in some psych ward somewhere in the Twin Cities, a bed surely had my name on it.
"They tell me there's something about a boat," he said. "I doubt there's much I haven't heard, but that's a new one." Again, he smiled.
I pulled the bib off and scrubbed my face with it. I wasn't sure I could trust myself to talk, but I sat up and with a few deep breaths primed myself for the effort. "I'm sorry. I think I should just go." My voice was thick, sluggish.
I stood. Eliot put his hand on my forearm. "If you need someone to tal
k to, I have some time."
Jonquil appeared behind him. "Did the boat sink?" she said.
With an urgent whisper I couldn't quite understand, Dr. Bell pulled her away from the door. His hand and arm reached into the exam room, like a hook dragging a vaudeville juggler from the stage.
Eliot spun in the stool and, standing, closed the door. The stool squeaked. The door squawked. I discovered that I was gritting my teeth. I sat in the exam chair.
"Maybe some privacy wouldn't be a bad thing right now," he said. He sat on the stool, his fingers gripping the seat between his splayed legs.
"I appreciate your offer of help," I said, "but I'm really so embarrassed about all this that I think I should just sneak out of here and-and find a new dentist, I guess."
"Would you like me to create a diversion?"
In spite of myself, I smiled. "Why don't you start sobbing like a little girl, and I'll make a break for it."
"What's this about a boat, then?"
"There's no boat." I paused, rubbed the whiskers on my chin. They were coarse; it almost hurt to touch them, like stroking finely ground glass.
"I didn't think it was really about a boat." He seemed relieved.
"Well, there was a boat, but I never-." I was about to say that I'd never told Jonquil or Dr. Bell about the boat, that they wouldn't know about the boat, but really, did I even know myself what I'd said and hadn't said?
"Okay. Tell me about the boat." He shrugged, as if to suggest that the idea of the boat made him slightly weary, but he was resigned to it.
I said, "Do you have issues with boats? Did you get jilted on a cruise, or were you made to watch The Love Boat as a child?"
He squinted as if focusing on something at a great distance, or as if enduring some dull pain. His forehead bunched up in the middle, making his wide-set eyes seem closer together. "Tell me about the boat."
I told him. The shell, brand new, senselessly destroyed. The ruined boathouse. The smell of ash. Somehow in the telling I ended up recounting my dream. Suddenly it occurred to me that the figure melting into the shadows on Nicollet Mall had been the arsonist.