Hello, Miss Yummy, Dave thought, and then: Once you did a lot better than that. The memory made him laugh.
She laughed in return. This he saw but could not hear, although she was close and his ears were still sharp. Then she walked behind the fountain . . . and didn't come out. Yet Dave had reason to believe she would be back. He had glimpsed the life-force down there, no more and no less. The strong beating heart of beauty and desire. Next time she would be closer.
V
Peter came into town the following week, and they went out to dinner at a nice place close by. Dave ate well, and drank two glasses of wine. They perked him up considerably. When the meal was done, he took Ollie's silver watch from his inner coat pocket, coiled the heavy chain around it, and pushed it across the tablecloth to his son.
"What's this?" Peter asked.
"It was a gift from a friend," Dave said. "He gave it to me shortly before he passed on. I want you to have it."
Peter attempted to push it back. "I can't take this, Dad. It's too nice."
"Actually, you'd be doing me a favor. Because of the arthritis. It's very hard for me to wind it, and pretty soon I won't be able to at all. Darn thing's at least a hundred and twenty years old, and a watch that's made it that far deserves to run as long as it can. So please. Take it."
"Well, when you put it that way . . ." Peter took the watch and dropped it into his pocket. "Thanks, Dad. It's a beaut."
At the next table--so close Dave could have reached out and touched her--sat the redhead. There was no meal in front of her, but no one seemed to notice. At this distance, Dave saw that she was more than pretty; she was downright beautiful. Surely more beautiful than that long-ago girl had been, sliding out of her boyfriend's pickup with her skirt momentarily bunched in her lap, but what of that? Such revisions were, like birth and death, the ordinary course of things. Memory's job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.
The redhead slid her skirt up farther this time, revealing one long white thigh for a second. Perhaps even two. And winked.
Dave winked back.
Peter turned to look and saw only an empty four-top table with a RESERVED sign on it. When he turned back to his father, his eyebrows were raised.
Dave smiled. "Just something in my eye. It's gone now. Why don't you get the check? I'm tired and ready to go back."
Thinking of Michael McDowell
There's a saying: "If you can remember the sixties, you weren't there." Total bullshit, and here's a case in point. Tommy wasn't his name, and he wasn't the one who died, but otherwise, this is how it went down, back when we all thought we were going to live forever and change the world.
Tommy
Tommy died in 1969.
He was a hippie with leukemia.
Bummer, man.
After the funeral came the reception at Newman Center.
That's what his folks called it: the reception.
My friend Phil said, "Isn't that what you have after a fucking wedding?"
The freaks all went to the reception.
Darryl wore his cape.
There were sandwiches to eat and grape drink in Dixie Cups.
My friend Phil said, "What is this grape shit?"
I said it was Za-Rex. I recognized it, I said, from MYF.
"What's that shit?" asked Phil.
"Methodist Youth Fellowship," I said.
"I went for ten years and once did
a flannelboard of Noah and the Ark."
"Fuck your Ark," said Phil.
"And fuck the animals who rode on it."
Phil: a young man with strong opinions.
After the reception, Tommy's parents went home.
I imagine they cried and cried.
The freaks went to 110 North Main.
We cranked up the stereo. I found some Grateful Dead records.
I hated the Dead. Of Jerry Garcia I used to say, "I'll be grateful when he's dead!"
(Turned out I wasn't.)
Oh well, Tommy liked them.
(Also, dear God, Kenny Rogers.)
We smoked dope in Zig-Zag papers.
We smoked Winstons and Pall Malls.
We drank beer and ate scrambled eggs.
We rapped about Tommy.
It was pretty nice.
And when the Wilde-Stein Club showed up--all eight of them--we let them in because Tommy was gay and sometimes wore Darryl's cape.
We all agreed his folks had done him righteous.
Tommy wrote down what he wanted and they gave him most of it.
He was dressed in his best as he lay in his new narrow apartment.
He wore his bellbottom blue jeans and his favorite tie-dye shirt.
(Melissa Big Girl Freek made that shirt.
I don't know what happened to her.
She was there one day, then gone down that lost highway.
I associate her with melting snow.
Main Street in Orono would gleam so wet and bright it hurt your eyes.
That was the winter The Lemon Pipers sang "Green Tambourine.") His hair was shampooed. It went to his shoulders.
Man, it was clean!
I bet the mortician washed it.
He was wearing his headband
with the peace sign stitched in white silk.
"He looked like a dude," said Phil. He was getting drunk.
(Phil was always getting drunk.)
Jerry Garcia was singing "Truckin." It's a pretty stupid song.
"Fuckin Tommy!" said Phil. "Drink to the motherfucker!"
We drank to the motherfucker.
"He wasn't wearing his special button," said Indian Scontras.
Indian was in the Wilde-Stein Club.
Back then he knew every dance.
These days he sells insurance in Brewer.
"He told his mother he wanted to be buried wearing his button.
That is so bogus."
I said, "His mom just moved it under his vest. I looked."
It was a leather vest with silver buttons.
Tommy bought it at the Free Fair.
I was with him that day. There was a rainbow and from a loudspeaker Canned Heat sang "Let's Work Together."
I'M HERE AND I'M QUEER said the button his mother moved beneath his vest.
"She should have left it alone," said Indian Scontras.
"Tommy was proud. He was a very proud queer."
Indian Scontras was crying.
Now he sells whole life policies and has 3 daughters.
Turned out not to be so gay, after all, but selling insurance is very queer, in my opinion.
"She was his mother," I said, "and kissed his scrapes when he was young."
"What does that have to do with it?" asked Indian Scontras.
"Fuckin Tommy!" said Phil, and raised his beer high.
"Let's toast the motherfucker!"
We toasted the motherfucker.
That was forty years ago.
Tonight I wonder how many hippies died in those few sunshine years.
Must have been quite a few. It's just statistics, man.
And I'm not just talking about
!!THE WAR!!
You had your car accidents.
Your drug overdoses.
Plus booze
bar fights
the occasional suicide
and let's not leave out leukemia.
All the usual suspects is all I'm saying.
How many were buried in their hippie duds?
This question occurs to me in the whispers of the night.
It must have been quite a few, although it was fleeting, the time of the freaks.
Their Free Fair is now underground
where they still wear their bellbottoms and headbands and there is mold on the full sleeves of their psychedelic shirts.
The hair in those narrow rooms is brittle, but still long.
"The Man's" barber has not touched it in forty years.
No gray has frosted it.
br /> What about the ones who went down
clasping signs that said HELL NO WE WON'T GO?
What about the car accident boy buried with a McCarthy sticker on the lid of his coffin?
What about the girl with the stars on her forehead?
(They have fallen now, I imagine, from her parchment skin.) These are the soldiers of love who never sold insurance.
These are the fashion dudes who never went out of fashion.
Sometimes, at night, I think of hippies asleep in the earth.
Here's to Tommy.
Drink to the motherfucker.
For D. F.
In 1999, while taking a walk near my home, I was hit by a guy driving a van. He was doing about forty, and the collision should have killed me. I guess I must have taken some sort of half-assed evasive action at the last moment, although I don't remember doing that. What I do remember is the aftermath. An event that occurred in two or three seconds beside a rural Maine highway resulted in two or three years of physical therapy and slow rehabilitation. During those long months spent recovering some range of movement in my right leg and then learning to walk again, I had plenty of time to reflect on what some philosophers have called "the problem of pain."
This story is about that, and I wrote it years later, when the worst of my own pain had receded to a steady low mutter. Like several other stories in this book, "The Little Green God of Agony" is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I'm not in the business of confessional fiction.
The Little Green God of Agony
"I was in an accident," Newsome said.
Katherine MacDonald, sitting beside the bed and attaching one of four TENS units to Newsome's scrawny thigh just below the basketball shorts he now always wore, did not look up. Her face was carefully blank. She was a piece of human furniture in this big bedroom where she now spent most of her working life, and that was the way she liked it. Attracting Mr. Newsome's attention was usually a bad idea, as all of his employees knew. But her thoughts ran on, just the same.
Now you tell them that you actually caused the accident. Because you think taking responsibility makes you look like a hero.
"Actually," Newsome said, "I caused the accident. Not so tight, Kat, please."
She could have pointed out, as she had at the start, that TENS units lost their efficacy if they weren't drawn tight to the outraged nerves they were supposed to soothe, but she was a fast learner. She loosened the Velcro strap a little while her thoughts ran on.
The pilot told you there were thunderstorms in the Omaha area.
"The pilot told me there were thunderstorms in that part of the world," Newsome continued. The two men listened closely. Jensen had heard it all before, of course, but you always listened closely when the man doing the talking was the sixth-richest man not just in America but in the world. Three of the other five mega-rich guys were dark-complected fellows who wore robes and drove around desert countries in armored Mercedes-Benzes.
But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting.
"But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting."
The man sitting next to Newsome's personal assistant was the one who interested her--in an anthropological sort of way. His name was Rideout. He was tall and thin, maybe sixty, wearing plain gray pants and a white shirt buttoned all the way to his scrawny neck, which was red with overshaving. Kat supposed he'd wanted to get a close one before meeting the sixth-richest man in the world. Beneath his chair was the only item he'd carried in to this meeting, a long black lunchbox with a curved top meant to hold a thermos. A workingman's lunchbox, although what he claimed to be was a minister. So far Mr. Rideout hadn't said a word, but Kat didn't need her ears to know what he was. The whiff of charlatan about him was even stronger than the smell of his aftershave. In fifteen years as a nurse specializing in pain patients, she had met her share. At least this one wasn't wearing any crystals.
Now tell them about your revelation, she thought as she carried her stool around to the other side of the bed. It was on casters, but Newsome didn't like the sound when she rolled on it. She might have told another patient that carrying the stool wasn't in her contract, but when you were being paid five grand a week for what were essentially human caretaking services, you kept your smart remarks to yourself. Nor did you tell the patient that emptying and washing out bedpans wasn't in your contract. Although lately her silent compliance was wearing a little thin. She felt it happening. Like the fabric of a shirt that had been washed and worn too many times.
Newsome was speaking primarily to the fellow in the farmer-goes-to-town getup. "As I lay on the runway in the rain among the burning pieces of a fourteen-million-dollar aircraft, most of the clothes torn off my body--that'll happen when you hit pavement and roll fifty or sixty feet--I had a revelation."
Actually, two of them, Kat thought as she strapped a second TENS unit around his other wasted, flabby, scarred leg.
"Actually, two revelations," Newsome said. "One was that it was very good to be alive, although I understood--even before the pain that's been my constant companion for the last two years started to eat through the shock--that I had been badly hurt. The second was that the word imperative is used very loosely by most people, including my former self. There are only two imperatives in human existence. One is life itself, the other is freedom from pain. Do you agree, Reverend Rideout?" And before Rideout could agree (for surely he would do nothing else), Newsome said in his waspy, hectoring, old man's voice: "Not so goddam tight, Kat! How many times do I have to tell you?"
"Sorry," she murmured, and loosened the strap.
Melissa, the housekeeper, looking trim in a white blouse and high-waisted white slacks, came in with a coffee tray. Jensen accepted a cup, along with two packets of artificial sweetener. The new guy, the bottom-of-the-barrel so-called reverend, only shook his head. Maybe he had some kind of holy coffee in his lunchbox thermos.
Kat didn't get an offer. When she took coffee, she took it in the kitchen with the rest of the help. Or in the summerhouse . . . only this wasn't summer. It was November, and wind-driven rain lashed the windows.
"Shall I turn you on, Mr. Newsome, or would you prefer that I leave now?"
She didn't want to leave. She'd heard the whole story many times before--the important meeting in Omaha, the crash, Andrew Newsome ejected from the burning plane, the broken bones, chipped spine, and dislocated hip, the twenty-four months of unrelieved suffering that had followed--and it bored her. But Rideout was kind of interesting. Other charlatans would undoubtedly follow, now that all reputable relief resources had been exhausted, but Rideout was the first, and Kat wanted to observe how the farmer-looking fellow would go about separating Andy Newsome from a large chunk of his cash. Or how he would try. Newsome hadn't amassed his fortune by being stupid, but of course he wasn't the same man he had been, no matter how real his pain might be. On that subject, Kat had her own opinions, but this was the best job she'd ever had. At least in terms of money. And if Newsome wanted to continue suffering, wasn't that his choice?
"Go ahead, honey, turn me on." He waggled his eyebrows at her. Once the lechery might have been real (Kat thought Melissa might have information on that subject), but now it was just a pair of shaggy eyebrows working on muscle memory.
Kat plugged the cords into the control unit and flicked the switch. Properly attached, the TENS units would have sent a weak electrical current into Newsome's muscles, a therapy that seemed to have some ameliorative effects . . . although no one could say exactly why, or if they were entirely of the placebo variety. Be that as it might, they would do nothing for Newsome tonight. Hooked up as loosely as they were, they had been reduced to expensive joy-buzzers.
"Shall I--?"
"Stay!" he said. "Therapy!"
The lord wounded in battle commands, and I obey.
She bent over to pull her c
hest of goodies out from under the bed. It was filled with tools many of her past clients referred to as implements of torture. Jensen and Rideout paid no attention to her. They continued to look at Newsome, who might (or might not) have been granted revelations that had changed his priorities and outlook on life, but who still enjoyed holding court.
He told them about awakening in a cage of metal and mesh. There were steel gantries called external fixators on both legs and one arm to immobilize joints that had been repaired with "about a hundred" steel pins (actually seventeen; Kat had seen the X-rays). The fixators were anchored in the outraged and splintered femurs, tibiae, fibulae, humerus, radius, ulna. His back was encased in a kind of chain-mail girdle that went from his hips to the nape of his neck. He talked about sleepless nights that seemed to go on not for hours but for years. He talked about the crushing headaches. He told them about how even wiggling his toes caused pain all the way up to his jaw, and the shrieking agony that bit into his legs when the doctors insisted that he move them, fixators and all, so he wouldn't entirely lose their function. He told them about the bedsores and how he bit back howls of hurt and outrage when the nurses attempted to roll him on his side so the sores could be flushed out.
"There have been another dozen operations in the last two years," he said with a kind of dark pride.
Actually, Kat knew, there had been five, two of those to remove the external fixators when the bones were sufficiently healed. Unless you included the minor procedure to reset his broken fingers, that was. Then you could say there were six, but she didn't consider surgical stuff necessitating no more than local anesthetic to be "operations." If that were the case, she'd had a dozen herself, most of them while listening to Muzak in a dentist's chair.
Now we get to the false promises, she thought as she placed a gel pad in the crook of Newsome's right knee and laced her hands together on the hanging hot-water bottles of muscle beneath his right thigh. That comes next.
"The doctors promised me the pain would abate," Newsome said. His eyes were fixed on Rideout. "That in six weeks I'd only need the narcotics before and after my physical therapy sessions with the Queen of Pain here. That I'd be walking again by the summer of two thousand ten. Last summer." He paused for effect. "Reverend Rideout, those were false promises. I have almost no flexion in my knees at all, and the pain in my hips and back is beyond description. The doctors--ah! Oh! Stop, Kat, stop!"