by Jim Nelson
Kyle peered up at her from his plate of food. He had the plate in hand. His hand was wrapped around the fork handle.
"Since the accident, I've tasted not a bite of food," he said. "Food has no flavor. I blamed the pills the doctors gave me, but it's not really that. I've been missing…something." In only the few moments she'd been away from him, he'd eaten most of the remaining rice and beans. "Your cooking is the first time I've tasted food since the accident." He put the plate to his nose to appreciate the last remains of aroma from the cooling meal. "My sense of smell has returned. I can savor my meal for the first time in years—"
Beneath the blanket, his colostomy bag gurgled.
She pulled a chair beside his bed to keep him company while he ate. He'd muted the television set when she flew into the room. She took the remote from the table and turned off the set. Silently, she listened to him eat. Did he say years? He must have meant weeks. His jaws clicked and creaked as he put away her cooking a forkful at a time.
"Henry finished the last of it," she said. "I can make something else if you want."
"I'm good," He belched quietly under his breath. "I'm good."
Ruby gingerly brought up the question of guns one more time. "Is your hunting rifle upstairs? The one you took when—" She motioned to his legs. "When this happened?"
"Yeah," he said. "All present and accounted for."
"How did you get them up there?" she asked.
"Oh, I had Alice do it. When she first started taking care of me."
"Alice?"
"I've taken her hunting many a time," he said. "She's a crack shot."
Ruby imagined the squat, rotund Alice in the woods wearing hunting camouflage and handling a rifle. It was easy to imagine, she discovered.
Thirty-three
Alice arrived at nine the next morning. Ruby stood alongside her just as she'd promised herself. Alice had presumed Ruby was a trained nurse. After all, she'd appeared at the house wearing a nurse's top and was introduced as one by Dr. Benford. She was suspicious, then, when Ruby asked her to demonstrate changing Kyle's bed sheets.
"You've never changed a bed before?"
"Not with this model." Ruby indicated the hospital bed. Alice gave her a sour-lemon face of disbelief.
Ruby blanched when it came time to empty Kyle's colostomy bag. Seams of stiches and scars ran like scribbles across his belly. A bumpy ring of gray intestine protruded from the front of his body, three inches above his belly button and offset right. Through the clear plastic bag, Ruby could see down the dark tube into his body.
The bag itself was glued to the ring. Alice undid the bottom clip and squeezed the feces into a tray. The room filled with gas and stench. Once empty, Alice clipped its end and flushed the waste down the toilet. Ruby would have to perform this task two or three times daily.
"It's convenient," Ruby said weakly, half-joking with Alice in the bathroom. "He never has to hold it in when there isn't a bathroom around."
"He can't hold anything," Alice said flatly. "There's no muscle to 'hold it in.' The bag fills on its own."
Kyle could empty his bladder on his own. A row of plastic urine bottles with hooks lined the bed rail, hung like Christmas stockings. These too had to be emptied. After dealing with the bag, handling urine seemed innocuous.
Ruby asked about medications. Kyle had been prescribed antibiotics and pills with names Ruby did not recognize. Alice went through them one by own, going over the schedule printed on their sides but not explaining their purpose. Ruby felt the lesson Alice was imparting was simply this: Make sure he takes these pills. Don't listen to his excuses. Period.
While Alice prepared to leave, Ruby refilled and topped-up all the water bottles on his side table.
"He must stay hydrated," she told Ruby. To Kyle, she said, "Still not taking for pain?"
Kyle had been prescribed morphine in pill form. The tablets were the size of horse pills. This was the one medication Ruby did not need explained to her.
"No," was all he said.
"Don't force the pain meds on him," she said to Ruby when they were away from the den. "But I always remind him they're available."
"How long will he be in pain?"
"Months," Alice said. "Years maybe."
"He never takes them?"
"He worries about addiction."
Ruby said, "But the doctor knows what's best, right?"
"You ever seen someone hooked on morphine?"
Ruby could not be certain it was morphine, but she'd seen plenty of Hagars hooked on chemical junk of all varieties.
“Kyle Weymouth is a man who can chew through the pain," Alice said. "And trust me, he's in a lot of pain." She added, "He's been in pain for six years now."
Lea, Ruby thought.
At the front door, Alice cinched up her nurse's bag.
"And that's it. Any questions?"
"Do I need to empty his bag before you come back?"
"He'll let you know."
"What about the urine?"
"Check every few hours. Make sure he always has empties ready in case he needs them. Hydration is important," she said. "There are two problems you must keep an eye out for," she intoned under her breath, chin pressed against her spacious chest. "Infection is one. The other is if he stops peeing. You call for an ambulance if either happens."
Ruby double-checked the list she'd been keeping as she followed Alice. Kyle's doctor's phone number and the hospital's 24-hour line were at the top of the sheet in bold, underlined numerals. She knew how to monitor his urination…but infection?
"Fever," Alice said flatly, suspicions rising again. "You watch for a fever."
"Well." Ruby extended a hand to shake. "That wasn't too bad."
"Oh, not so fast," Alice said with a grin. "We change bandages tonight." She flung open the door with a flourish. "See you in six hours."
Thirty-four
Kyle refused to apply for food stamps, or any manner of public assistance. Ruby was well aware of assistance available in California, especially the city and county programs offering a meager amount to Hagars who could demonstrate need. What did that exactly mean, though? What Hagar was not in need? California offered state-run housing for Hagars, provided they checked in regularly and submitted to substance abuse tests and so on. Ruby could not imagine such assistance in the nascent Free State of Jefferson.
It did not matter. Kyle was too proud to apply for disability assistance. He had three credit cards. Henry carried a fourth with the warning it could only be used for essentials. but Ruby suspected he was using it for after-school pizza and tacos. After Alice left, Ruby spent an hour going through the mess of bills and payment due notices piling up on a side counter in the kitchen.
"No, I won't apply for unemployment," Kyle said, disgusted with her pestering. "And, no, I can't apply for benefits from the state. I never worked full-time for either Jefferson or California. I was a contractor. The state disbursed a packet of tags to thin out the deer population. I was paid for every buck I bagged."
"They paid you to kill deer?"
"If you let the deer population grow out of control, it encourages the mountain lions." He spoke tiredly, as though he'd explained this numerous times before. "Mountain lions are territorial. The older ones push the younger ones down out of the mountains. If there's too many of them, they start moving into towns. You don't want that, trust me. Thinning the deer population is a good thing." He added, "None of the deer is wasted. All of it's consumed."
She fanned his credit cards in one hand, a poker player with a losing hand.
"I'm going to the supermarket. One of these days, one of them will run out."
"Some of them already have," he said. "If they turn down one, try another." Exasperated at her stare and her pestering, he said, "I've been laid up, all right?" He detached two car keys from his jangly ring. "If it's low on gas, there's a station down the way from the supermarket."
Ruby held a driver's license, a fake she'd lifted from
a purse accidentally left behind at a restaurant she worked in for a few months in Long Beach. The woman in the photo didn't look much like her at all, save for her dark brown hair. Ruby was even losing that with the gray tinges across her bangs and down her temples. And the license was expired. She might be able to talk her way out of it in Southern California, where the cops were known to look the other way if you begged your job was at stake. And, she thought, if you looked like a Hagar.
The keys Kyle gave her belonged to a four-by-four GMC parked under a rickety shelter attached to the outside of the garage. Leaves and a thick patina of baked-on dirt made the shelter's cheap green corrugated plastic roof black. One key opened the door, the other key fit the ignition. The Jimmy started on the second try. Fortunately, it was an automatic. Ruby never learned to drive a manual.
She carefully eased the truck onto the state highway and headed toward Angels Camp. She did not have a lead foot and kept the truck's speed under the limit. The truck was low on fuel. She hoped she had enough to make it to the market and back. She did not want to tax the credit cards.
Ruby encountered little traffic at all on Highway 4. Mostly she worried about a state trooper pulling her over. It was hot and dry out, a stark difference from the night before. She'd slept with the comforter over her after all. Even with the withering daytime heat, the temperature plummeted after sunset.
The supermarket was cool, busy, and well-stocked. It did not have the fancy food aisles or the mouthwatering deli displays of the upscale Central Coast markets Ms. Abney-Rance shopped at, but the basics Ruby sought could be had from its shelves.
Over the years, she'd learned to stretch small dollar amounts into several meals for herself. While she could have applied similar skills here, skimping on herself was unlike skimping on Kyle and Henry. She wanted the best for them. She wanted to fill their plates with large portions and make sure there was always enough for seconds. She never wanted to know Henry had gone to bed hungry on her watch.
Assiduously, she pushed the cart up and down the aisles, carefully selecting foodstuffs and mentally estimating the bill for the items she added to her basket. She found herself picking up and returning packaged food to the shelf. She told herself to stick to the outer aisles of the market, to make meals from fresh produce and dry or canned goods rather than frozen prepared meals sealed in space-age trays. She went heavy on red meat from the butcher's cold case, knowing both the men would relish it, then returned the cuts in favor of economical chicken. Everyone in that house knew money was tight. No one was expecting prime rib.
She never enjoyed shopping, now or before. She found supermarkets stultifying and claustrophobic. Besides, rare was the occasion to have a place to store food. Usually, she could only purchase a bare amount to keep in her backpack, or perhaps in a footlocker at a Beers House. Some of the Beers Houses had community kitchens, but food left in the fridge had a knack for walking off. Now, in Angels Camp, Ruby had her own pantry and cabinets and a refrigerator and a freezer. It felt delicious to fill a produce bag with six apples and know she wouldn't have to lug them around on her back everywhere she went. She had a car—no more buses. She had a bedroom to sleep in without being buzzed awake by Ms. Abney-Rance. She had a stove to fry eggs and an oven to bake bread. When was the last time she baked bread? Twelve or thirteen, the cinnamon raisin bread she made for her mother and sister.
She began to notice people staring at her. She brushed it off at first, concentrating on the restrictions she had to meet on her first big shopping trip. The staring was bold, however, pronounced enough she knew it was designed and not unintentional. Older woman were staring at her. Young women made sideways glances as they passed.
She noticed many of the older women in town had cropped and practical haircuts, like Alice kept hers. Many of them wore boot-cut jeans and T-shirts with motorcycle logos or the American flag across them. Tees with the Jefferson state flag were even more popular. They didn't seem to wear make-up. They looked like women who could hold their own in a beer-and-whiskey bar. Women like this could be found in Southern California, but not in such preponderance.
The other type of older woman were also dressed in boot-cut jeans and shirts, but with frills and softer touches. These women wore a preponderance of makeup—aqua-blue eyeliner, candy-apple red lipstick—with brassy hair dyed platinum and sprayed into place. They also could be found in Southern California, but not in these numbers.
Ruby scanned herself discreetly. She wanted to know what they were staring at. She was dressed casually too, but her torn Levis and beach sandals gave her away. After being separated from her mother, she'd never again gone to the beach for pleasure. Living in Southern California for years now, though, she'd naturally tanned. Even as hot and dry as it was in Angels Camp, there were few tans about town.
It wasn't her clothes, Ruby thought, and it was not her tan. These women are mothers, she told herself.
Mothers knew a Hagar. It was uncanny. They could just see it. It was a superstition spread among Hagars, an urban myth they shared with any bridge daughter who came asking for worldly advice. A mother knows these things was how it was often communicated to younger bridges. Certainly mothers could spot a bridge daughter, even if she was not showing and not adorned in the usual bridge daughter dress. For whatever reason, Mother Nature imbued earthly mothers with a sixth sense toward bridges and therefore Hagars. Gefyrologists were pretty good at telling if a woman was a Hagar too, but they specialized in bridge daughters. Gynecologists—sometimes they could tell. Men were oblivious. Dr. Benford was an exception.
In a supermarket in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Diego, a mother would wonder if Ruby was a Hagar, shrug it off, and move on. Here, Ruby realized, there was not going to be any shrugging off. In Southern California, a Hagar was part of the background noise. Here, she was a suspect.
The teenage checkout boy paid no mind to her. He scanned and tallied her basket of goods in under a minute. While he bagged it up, Ruby tried the credit card at the top of the stack. The machine buzzed and flashed a DENIED sign.
She glanced down the line behind her with embarrassment. Mildly annoyed faces stared back at her. People in line at the supermarket always look annoyed, she assured herself.
The second card went through. Ruby breathed relief. The total came to a little over sixty dollars, which seemed outrageous to Ruby's highly conservative financial arithmetic. She accepted the charge, though, and pushed the cart of bags out to the truck. She wanted to stop there in the parking lot and go over every item and amount on the receipt ticket, convinced the supermarket had ripped her off. She felt the pressure of a dozen pairs of eyes following her, and so she hurried to load the groceries in the rear of the four-by-four.
Thirty-five
As she drove, a sinking feeling descended upon her. She'd not packed Henry a lunch.
Get your head in the game. Her twin sister used to say this to her. You need to keep your eye on the ball. Cynthia was the only one who played ball. They weren't playing ball when Cynthia would say this to her.
Growing up, they were more alike than different. Cynthia matured when they were eleven, and she grew more distant when they were twelve and thirteen. Cynthia grew independent when Ruby still loved cuddling. Cynthia held herself erect with her elbows out and her chin jutted forward. She seemed to need no one. Ruby, a girly-girl, could not imagine life without the comfort of mother, home, and hearth. Ruby talked to her baby dolls.
Ruby looked at herself in the rearview mirror. "Get your head in the game." She was caring for two people now.
Using her phone's map, she drove to the only high school in Angels Camp. In the visitors’ parking spot, she opened the tail hatch and assembled a quick lunch from an apple, a stack of canned potato chips, and a sandwich of off-brand white bread surrounding a peeled slice of American cheese. She had not thought to buy paper lunch sacks, so she cannibalized one of the plastic produce bags.
The high school was an array of single-story
flat-roofed buildings separated by open-air walkways and patchy lawn. The main office was smaller than Ruby expected. Behind a short wood counter, two women sat at desks with computers and binders and paperwork. One was typing when she entered. The other looked up and asked, "Can I help you?"
In her mind Ruby, heard how silly her request would seem. Henry's school schedule was stuck to the refrigerator at home. They magnet holding it in place advertised a feed lot in town. She'd not even read the schedule over. It was past one o'clock. Certainly she'd missed Henry's lunch hour. Get your head in the game.
"I forgot to give Henry Weymouth his lunch this morning." She held up the produce bag. Its clear plastic revealed the meager meal inside. "I'm pretty sure it's too late, but I want to make sure he's not hungry."
"Let me—Dr. Forrester, this lady's brought Henry Weymouth's lunch."
A man in his thirties had emerged from a door behind the desks. The door was marked VICE-PRINCIPAL. His dark thick-rimmed glasses matched his dark brown goatee and flat mop of hair. He wore a short-sleeved button-up shirt, which accentuated his muscular arms.
He approached the counter bearing a manila folder. He offered Ruby a questioning but supportive expression.
"And you are…?"
"Cynthia." She almost flubbed the alias she'd chosen for herself.
Ruby caught herself staring at his arms. His short sleeves partially covered a dark green tattoo.
"How do you know Henry?" he asked.
"I'm caring for Kyle, his father."
"You're working with Alice, then?"
"Yes," Ruby said, then, "You know Alice?"
Forrester grinned. "Angels Camp is a small town." He made a motion toward the wall clock mounted behind him. "Well, lunch hour is over. He'll be in class."
