Nadine had been a couple years behind us in school, although I can’t say I remembered her. Maybe Big Ed did, I don’t know. She was driving her father’s John Deere lawn mower to the Gas Farm that day for repairs at about 3 MPH. I’d just pulled my cruiser in to the pumps and James was about to fill ’er up. Big Ed was backing up his tow truck out of the garage and Nadine was riding so low he never saw her coming and backed right into her. James and I heard the crunch. Tipped the John Deere right over, but Nadine leaped off that thing like an acrobat before it hit the ground. She’d been a gymnast in school, but I didn’t remember that either.3
Big Ed jumps out and runs over to help her, terrified and concerned, and she saw that expression on his face and, I guess, mistook it for something like, who knows with her, romantic longing? I guess nobody’d looked at her exactly that way before. She keeled right over and Big Ed caught her before she hit the ground. So I hurry over in my official capacity, since I’m an eyewitness, and I saw her jump clear right before impact and stick the landing so I know she’s not injured. But Big Ed doesn’t know that, and he’s stricken, like he’s crippled or killed this poor girl, and there goes his business and everything he’s worked his whole life for. So he’s holding her, eyeballing her face for signs of life with all those concerns ping-ponging around in his head, and her eyes flutter open and she sees Big Ed’s dreamy rugged-handsome mug staring down at her. And it’s not like Nadine is unattractive or anything. She’s actually kind of exotic-looking, feline-like, and dressed beatnik fashionable with a silk scarf and a low-cut leotard thing going on.
And the first thought that goes through my mind is, well, that’s that, she’s in love with him now. And my second thought is, maybe this’ll take Ed’s mind off Norma. I’m concerned for my friend, right, I want him to be happy. This is all before any one of us—little James is standing there, too—realize who this person is.
So the first thing she does is hug him, ’cause she knows exactly who he is—we find out later she’d had a crush on Big Ed since junior high, like most of the girls—and Big Ed’s just so damn relieved she’s alive he hugs her right back. And I know, instantly, watching the medicine flow between them, what with his vitality and her rocking gymnast physique, this thing is gonna end up between the sheets and fast. I get this big grin on my face, like an idiot, and James is staring at me like, what’s up with you? I tell him I’ll explain later.
Big Ed keeps asking her if she’s sure she’s all right, and she keeps telling him she is, and he keeps apologizing and she tells him it’s okay, the mower needed fixing anyway, and then she kisses him, impulsively, and he breaks into this goofy grin, since when’s the last time that happened, and at that moment he realizes he’s got a hot little live wire in his arms and all the lights are green. And we still don’t, neither one of us, remember who she is.
So, exercising my official capacity, I ask, “What’s your name, miss?” and she says Nadine Gertz, and that rings a bell for Big Ed and it’s a good memory—he remembers her in a gymnastics meet, vaulting over a horse. The name rings a dim bell for me, but I can’t quite place her, so I go on to obtain her vitals: her dad lives a quarter mile away, and she’d been living down in Spokane for a while, working as a seamstress, which is why we hadn’t seen her around town, but she was thinking of moving back home and opening a shop so she was staying at her dad’s and noticed his lawn was overgrown and he told her the mower was on the fritz so that’s how she came to drive the John Deere to the Gas Farm.
Big Ed tells her not to worry about that, it’s all his fault—like he’s never said those words before—and he’ll fix the mower for free. So in my official capacity, given that both parties are in resolution, I declare there’s no need to file an accident report, and since they’re still stuck to each other like Siamese twins, I suggest they exchange contact information, and then I nudge James and have him help me push the John Deere—which wasn’t that badly dinged up—into the garage.
What’s going on? James asks quietly, once we got it inside, glancing back at his uncle. Both he and Nadine are on their feet now, shaking hands, and neither one is letting go. They’re feeling the mystery, I tell James. What mystery, he asks. The mystery of life, I say, which you’d know about if you’d read more books like your uncle tells you. James grins like he gets it now. Good kid, James. (Except his favorite book is still Charlotte’s Web.)
Ed and Nadine got hitched three weeks later, at the Chapel-in-the-Woods. Boom, just like that. Same place Norma and Hank got hitched.
All the Bookhouse Boys turned out for this one, minus Hank, who’s perma-nently scratched from the roster. Turns out the rest of the fellas vaguely remember Nadine from school, too, but it’s not until the reception at the Grange Hall after that the new guy Sheriff Truman just brought in as deputy, Andy Brennan—a few years younger than the rest of us, and greener than grass—whispers to me he was in Nadine’s class at school and, oh my gosh, don’t I remember what happened back then? I say no, Andy, I was too busy getting my ass shot off in ’Nam by some tiny dude in black pajamas.
Andy waves me outside, like anybody was gonna hear him in the Grange Hall with the rented cover band playing the greatest hits of the Young Rascals. Nadine’s mother, Andy tells me, had “health problems of the mental variety,” and her father wasn’t a picture of stability either. Big drinker. They moved to town from somewhere in Idaho when Nadine was in seventh grade, and when she was a sophomore Nadine had “an actual, honest-to-gosh nervous breakdown” and had to take off school for the spring semester. Really, I say, watching her slow dance with Big Ed through the window.
Yes, says Andy, she went away to one of those places where people go to rest up and collect themselves. I say, you mean the puzzle house? Not the state one, says Andy, a privately owned facility—her parents had a little money; her old man had invented some kind of industrial flame retardant way back. How long was she gone, I ask. She came back for the fall, so I guess about six months, says Andy, but nobody ever knew why. She wore a beret and a scarf all the time and told everyone she’d been a foreign exchange student in France. How’d you find out about it, I ask him. Andy says, I don’t know, people just have a way of telling me things.
(Andy, it turns out, owns some kind of ninth-degree black belt in gossip, which is about his best quality as a law enforcement officer, and I mean that as a positive. Or as he put it to me later, “You know, Hawk, I never think of myself as a gossip. I think of myself as an oral historian.”)
Do you think your friend Big Ed knows about Nadine’s history? Andy asks me.
I doubt it, I said, my heart sinking as I watched them dance—she had her feet on his and he was twirling her around like she weighed a feather.
No, Big Ed didn’t have a clue about what was ticking away inside his sparkly new bride. And even though he now devoted himself to her happiness without a glance backward, it wasn’t long before, somehow, Nadine put two and two together about Big Ed and Norma and his old torch, and hairline cracks started showing up in Nadine’s psyche. Small remarks at first, then an endless stream of questions, followed by angry outbursts—a few of them public—that totally buffaloed him, since the only thing he was guilty of was having a life before he met her. And then she started following Ed whenever he went to the Double R. Just staring at him and Norma through the window while he’s at the counter minding his own business. By now he’s getting the idea his little firecracker might be carrying an extra load of powder, and of course he doesn’t know what to do about it or who to talk to, so he doesn’t tell anybody.
That fall, Big Ed and Sheriff Truman go bird hunting, like they do every season. Nadine followed Big Ed then, too, fifteen miles into the woods, thinking—who knows what—that he was sneaking off to meet Norma at four in the morning for a rendezvous at a duck blind?
That’s when Big Ed accidentally shot out her eye. He had no idea she was even out there, creeping right into their line of fire, and she startles a bunch of ducks and they rise up
and shoot and a single stray pellet of buckshot catches her smack in the eye. How was he supposed to know? A big fat heaping load of Hurley luck. Harry was right next to him when it happened, so everybody knows it was a righteous accident, including Nadine. But Nadine lost the eye.
Of course Big Ed blames himself, when the only thing he did wrong was marry Nadine before doing his due diligence, but now he’s bonded to her by industrial-strength super guilt. He nurses her back to health and devotes himself twice as hard to making her happy. But the loss of Nadine’s eye put a permanent zap on her head. She starts wearing that pirate eye patch, and gets stuck on this idea she’s going to invent something like her old man did, to help save the world, and help save Ed from a life of drudgery at the Gas Farm. Except she doesn’t realize that’s the only life he wants, the one he chose and made for himself, and that included her. And now he had to live with it.
So we have a confluence of events: Andrew Packard blows up in his boathouse, and Hank gets arrested and sent up the river and two months later Nadine loses the eye and most of whatever remained of her grasp on reality. One night, then, at the Double R, Big Ed is sitting at the counter, the weight of the world on his shoulders, and Norma sees him, for the first time, like she hasn’t really seen him in years. It’s a slow night and she comes over with two cups of coffee and an extra piece of pie and the two of them get to talking. Really talking, like they haven’t talked in years, not since Ed came home. Commiserating. Consoling each other, about Hank, about Nadine. About what a hash they’ve both made of their lives and their marriages.
It’s starting to snow outside, the first big storm of the season, about three days before Christmas, and over the next hour and a half these two fall in love all over again—no, not even that, actually. They both realize they’ve never been out of love. Ed finally pours his heart out to her about all the letters he sent from Vietnam, and she tells him she never got them, and she looks down where that day’s mail is sitting next to the register—where Hank used to work—and she puts it all together. I know, I was there, in a back booth grabbing a bite after my shift, watching it happen with a big old grin on my face.
They don’t take any action, of course. No stepping out, no sneaking around. Big Ed stays “true” to his burden. But he and Norma are in it—whatever it is—together from here on out, no doubt about that. He starts coming into the diner almost every night, after the evening rush, and they have these long conversations. Nadine’s stopped following him by this point ’cause she’s back in her workshop like a mad scientist—okay, poor choice of words—working on her invention, a “completely silent set of drape runners,” around the clock. And Ed and Norma tell themselves it’s only a matter of time before things work out and they’re finally together again.
We’ll see. Knowing Ed, he might even get around to doing something about it in another fifteen years or so.
1 Verified. This one was written by Sheriff Truman’s chief deputy at the time, Thomas “Hawk” Hill—TP
2 A detail of interest: Tommy Hill was a full-blooded Nez Perce whose parents left their reservation years earlier—just before the Hanford nuclear site came online, lucky for them. His father, Henry, was a fearless, legendary tree-topper—guys who climb the highest trees with cleats on their boots and trim the tops. Henry tree-topped for the Packard Mill his entire career—which is, according to the Department of Labor Statistics, the most dangerous job in the world—without ever suffering an injury—TP
3 Verified—TP
*5* Doctor and patient1
After losing her eye, while recuperating in Calhoun Hospital, Nadine was assessed for the first time in her adult life by a licensed psychiatrist. Dr. Lawrence Jacoby had returned to Twin Peaks from the island of Oahu in Hawaii in 1981, after the death of his mother, Leilani, and established a private practice in town, as well as a consulting residency at the local hospital.
Jacoby had garnered a controversial reputation in the 1960s and ’70s after publishing a series of research articles and then a book based on his work entitled The Eye of God: Sacred Psychology in the Aboriginal Mind.2
In the book, Jacoby proposed a theory for the evolution of spirituality in early native people through the ritualistic use of psychotropic plant life by shamans or tribal healers. The book developed over a decade of anthropological fieldwork Jacoby conducted with aboriginal tribes all over the South Pacific and South America. Work that he freely admitted--the sound you hear is Margaret Mead rolling in her grave--included his participation in the rituals he describes throughout, including at one point a short-lived marriage to a chief’s daughter. (The list of drugs the tribes shared with him, including peyote, ayahuasca and various Amazonian mushrooms and rare frog venoms, would be enough to knock anyone’s cerebral cortex into the next dimension.)3
Here is a small example, from the medical establishment’s perspective, of the kind of long thin branch Jacoby was crawling out onto in his book:
DR. LAWRENCE JACOBY
One of the strangest components of the tribe’s pharmacopeia was a thick liquid compound they would let me try only once. It was reserved for the use of veteran shamans and I only earned their trust to sample it after many weeks of attentive study and participation in their daily rites. They called it ayahuasca, and never would reveal its source to me, although from what I observed as they prepared it—a daylong process which involved both rendering and cooking—it seemed to me to include both plant and animal extracts. I was the only person to use the substance on this occasion, with the shaman and two apprentices attending me, and only after a two-day fast as the sun went down on the second day.
At one of their holiest places, near the river, I was instructed to strip to a loincloth and kneel, while both my wrists were secured in loops of rope that were held by the two apprentices. The substance, contained in a gourd, was raised to my lips by the shaman as he uttered an indecipherable chant. It gave off an odor that was almost unendurably foul and I gagged once as it neared my face; one of the reasons for the fasting, I realized. Tilting back the gourd, he poured the substance into my open mouth all at once and I quickly choked it down, attempting with all my might to ignore the urgent signals my body was giving me to reject it. I realized the other reason for the fasting; it hit my empty body with paralyzing force and speed. My nervous system immediately felt as if I’d set it on fire and sweat seemed to simultaneously squirt from every pore of my skin. I closed my eyes in terror, my heart pounding, and as the substance overwhelmed my conscious mind I lost all track of time, or of even being in time. I believe I almost immediately vomited but no longer possessed any way of knowing how quickly this happened, or, indeed, if it did happen.
When I opened my eyes, two things occurred: I realized that I was no longer where I thought I had been, and at the same moment no longer knew who “I” was. My vision was both clouded and somehow enhanced, and at some level I registered that what I was “seeing” was not what was physically in front of me. I also knew that the veil of “reality” had been rent, split or torn away and that I was looking into a different or perhaps deeper dimension, one that either underlies ours or that coexists with it side by side, separated by the thinnest margin imaginable, one that our relatively primitive neurology prevents us from perceiving.
As I “looked” deeper—an inadequate description for a kind of seeing that involved all my senses, although not necessarily on the physical level—I realized there were living beings before me in this field of energy. As they drew closer to me, I realized that they could “see” me as well and that my presence had drawn their interest. This alarmed me slightly, as I could not discern their intent. They might have been angelic or demonic, or perhaps hybrid creatures, and there were many of them moving toward me, tall and humanoid. I realized that their interest in me felt cold, reptilian, neutral but shading toward malevolence, lacking all compassion.
A shining figure, much taller than the others, suddenly appeared in their midst and it gave off a violet light so
bright and powerful it washed away everything else in my field of vision, nearly “blinding” me. I cannot honestly remember anything else about its appearance, which may or may not have been humanoid—my memory holds it closer in shape to a sphere that emanated a powerful impression of “beauty,” but in an almost purely abstract sense. The other figures seemed to either defer to this figure or recoil from it in fear; it occurred to me that the figure might have been drawn to me by some protective instinct. As the other figures withdrew or receded, the new figure moved closer, and as it neared, all my own fears subsided and I felt a benevolent calm wash over me, an energetically soothing rush of peace and then a sense of joy that swelled up in my chest until I thought it might burst. A wholly inadequate phrase arose in my mind at that precise moment to fully describe this experience, and it was this: I am in the presence of “god” energy.
The next thing I remember: waking, lying facedown in the mud beside the river, alone and naked, the ropes still loosely attached to my wrists. It was dawn, light filtering through the forest canopy. I rose and staggered back toward the village, shivering and drained, but still carried and filled by the joyous wonder I had experienced. The shaman welcomed me by the village’s central fire, smiling, and they wrapped me with a blanket, sat me down in the shaman’s hut and gently let me sip from a bowl of water and fed me some kind of bland root paste. I felt weak as a foundling and unable to speak. The shaman sat down beside me and leaned in and repeated the same phrase to me, more than a few times, which, roughly translated, I heard as: “You are reborn into a new world.”
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
As a result of provocative material like this, Jacoby’s book was fiercely attacked by the American medical establishment as lacking scientific rigor, but he rejected their criticism on the basis that their traditional methods and standards were outmoded. “Scientific objectivity is one of our most deeply held, and crippling, illusions,” he wrote. He also claimed that all true spiritual insights and experiences were by necessity profoundly disrupting, and deeply personal to the individual and therefore entirely subjective. For some visionary sociologists and anthropologists, and a big percentage of the then-emerging “New Age” culture, Jacoby’s work became one of the signature works for a new way of comprehending human psychological evolution, and it enjoys cult status to this day.4