Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “I bought the land twelve years ago,” he said. “There’s twenty acres, total. I built this cook’s shed and was going to live in it until I built my house.”

  “And lo and behold?” she said.

  “Yep. Now it’s Home Sweet.”

  “What did you run out of,” Geneva asked, “money or will?”

  “Neither, really,” John said. “I just got a feeling I was pushing the river. I got as far as the slab,” he said, pointing out the door toward a cluster of trees some two hundred yards away.

  Geneva looked but couldn’t really see it.

  “Won’t you sit?” he said, motioning to the table in the middle of the room. On it were two simple, but crystal, wine glasses and a good bottle of Shiraz. One of the glasses was a quarter full. John picked up the bottle and presented it like he was a wine steward.

  “Please,” Geneva said.

  John poured her a glass and handed it to her. Then he lifted his own glass and extended it to her for a quick chink. After taking a sip, John put down his glass and picked up a towel and opened the lid of the pot on the stove.

  “Can I help?” Geneva said, a reflex.

  John turned in her direction and shook his head no with a small smile. He replaced the lid and excused himself to go check on the meat. Geneva let her eyes take a lap around the shack, rooting out the revealing details. Under the nightstand, there was a stack of books, a mix of Eastern religion, Louis L’Amour, and construction how-to’s. A postcard on his fridge was of South Dakota’s Black Hills. Behind the bed tacked to an exposed two-by-four was a photograph of a sunset that was likely taken right outside the door. Her eyes dropped to the bed. The quilt looked old and handmade, gingham squares bonded by ties of blue yarn. The bed was built high off the floor. If he comes in, she thought, takes my hand, and leads me to it, I’m going.

  But best, she thought, not to be caught contemplating his bed. She turned her attention to the man, the rear view of him, standing at the grill. He held his body like a man with decades of physical labor under his belt. She could sense both its power and the creaks and glitches that caused him to lean into his right hip, his left shoulder pulled up slightly toward his ear.

  John turned and returned to the shack, a platter of chops in one hand.

  “I’m married,” Geneva blurted. “He’s in Parkview Home with Alzheimer’s. He hasn’t recognized me for seven years.”

  John stared at her, his face serious. He shifted his body weight to the side.

  “So what you’re telling me,” he said, “is that if he finds out about us, it’s okay, because he’ll probably forget in pretty short order.”

  Geneva buried her face in her hands, pleasantly embarrassed.

  “Pork chop?” he said.

  Geneva nodded without looking up. John put the platter on the table and drained the pot of potatoes. He placed them in a bowl and put that on the table too. He retrieved the butter from the refrigerator and put a loaf of ciabatta on a cutting board.

  “I’m sorry,” Geneva said. “It’s just, you know, full disclosure.”

  “Full disclosure?” he said, pulling plates from an open shelf.

  “You know, marriages, diseases, outstanding warrants.”

  John placed silverware beside the plates and took a seat. He lifted the platter and extended it to her.

  “Pick your pork chop.”

  Geneva looked them over and took a small one with burnt edges.

  “Have you ever been married?” Geneva asked him, dropping it onto her plate. “Or rather, are you married and maybe she’s locked up somewhere too?”

  “No one in lock down,” John said. “Nothing current.”

  “But ever?”

  John shifted in his chair.

  “Married the first one at nineteen,” he said, “and divorced the last one at forty-two.”

  “And the grand total was?”

  “Three.”

  John picked up his pork chop with his fingers and bit into it, ripping the meat off the bone.

  “How do you do that?” Geneva asked.

  “What?” he said, chewing.

  “Get married over and over,” she said. “I always thought that if I didn’t make it in the one I had, I’d never do it again.”

  “So you’d blame the institution.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I think I’d blame myself, though, mostly. I’d be the one who couldn’t do it.”

  “My parents were married for sixty-three years,” John said, getting up and grabbing a couple of paper napkins off the top of his refrigerator. “They were happy. Maybe that’s why I think it can be done. When it comes to what we can and can’t do,” he said, “I think it’s a bad idea to look to evidence. There’s never evidence that we can do something we haven’t done yet.”

  “True,” Geneva said. She smiled. “I like that. I like counterintuitive things that make sense.”

  “I thought you might.”

  John poured the rest of the Shiraz into their glasses. The next bottle, a cabernet, was already breathing on the table.

  Geneva lifted her glass but didn’t take a sip.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder if a husband or wife getting Alzheimer’s is any different than any other change that makes you feel like you don’t know them anymore.”

  “At least it’s a change,” John said. “I’ve always thought that you either have two people changing all the time, two people never changing, or you’ve got a problem.”

  “One changing and one not?”

  “One changing and one not.”

  Geneva briefly wondered if her own problem was that Ralph had changed, and she was the one lagging behind. But it’s not what she said.

  “I think the problem with marriage,” Geneva said, shifting the subject slightly, “one of them, anyway, is that when a woman gets married, she doesn’t get to be irresistible anymore.”

  John made a face that indicated he might disagree. He reached for another pork chop.

  “It’s inevitable,” she said. “Not because he falls out of love or thinks she’s unattractive, it’s simply that at some point, sometimes, he can take it or leave it. He’s too tired, too irritable. Sometimes he just doesn’t want to give her what she wants to prove he doesn’t have to. It’s inevitable. It’s life. But that doesn’t negate the loss.”

  “So because he may not find her irresistible all the time it means she’s no longer irresistible?”

  “Exactly,” Geneva said. “If you’re not irresistible all the time, it means sometimes you’re resistible, thus, you’re not irresistible.”

  John rolled the wine in his mouth and then swallowed.

  “Sounds like math,” he said. “What if a man other than her husband found her irresistible?”

  “Well, unless she’s going to cheat on her husband, it doesn’t matter, because she won’t be able to experience the irresistibility because he’ll have to resist, see?”

  “You think all women feel this way?” he said.

  “I don’t pretend to know what all women feel,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know if you’re right,” John said, “but it does make sense.”

  Something warm flickered in Geneva’s chest and then spread throughout her body. I don’t know if you’re right, but it does make sense. It struck her as the most marvelous thing anyone had ever said to her.

  Their plates were empty, and no one was reaching for more.

  “How ’bout a fire?” John said.

  Then, he stood and covered the food but left it on the table. Night was falling, deepening the purple of the mountains and turning the snow-capped peaks to pink icing. John tucked the wine bottle under his arm and picked up both their glasses. He motioned out toward a fire pit surrounded by a log and tree stumps.

  Outside the shed, away from the stove, the air was cooler. They made small talk as they
stepped across the prairie. Geneva thanked him for dinner. They agreed on a preference for pork over beef. They discussed sunsets, not any one in particular, and the herd of elk that passed through from time to time.

  At the pit, they settled in, Geneva seating herself on a stump. John handed her a glass and placed his own on the stump beside her. He pulled matches from his hip pocket and lit the prepared paper and kindling.

  “I think the problem with marriage,” John said, returning to the subject, “is that if there’s a lot of love, it’s going to bring up a lot of scary stuff. The problem is, the amount of love it takes to bring the scary business up is only about half the amount you need to figure all the scary business out. You never know going in how much is in the well.”

  “I think a lot of people, most, maybe, never figure it out,” Geneva said.

  John added two larger logs to the fire and blew on the kindling. He picked up his wine glass and took a seat on the stump beside Geneva. The dry pine slowly took the flame.

  “Not me,” he said. “I can’t just keep covering the same ol’ ground.”

  “But don’t you have to keep covering the same old ground until it breaks and you can move on?”

  He looked out at her from under a heavy brow.

  “Like maybe I’ve just quit too soon?” he said.

  Geneva shrugged.

  They were quiet as the fire kicked up, crackling, and finding momentum.

  “I’m happy to be here with you,” John said.

  He leaned forward on his stump. He held his wine glass between the fingers of his upturned hands. He looked like an ancient creature, not so much old as from another time. Sitting there, Geneva had the sense that his fires were not for company only. She could imagine him alone, sitting on a stump, contemplating the orange glow traveling through the wood, snake eyes, opening and closing.

  “Before he got the Alzheimer’s,” John said, “was it good?”

  “Yes,” Geneva said, but not firmly. “Ralph expected absolutely nothing of me, but that I be there, happy to see him when he showed up.”

  “Oh,” John said. “He kept you.”

  “He set me free,” Geneva corrected him. “He never tried to keep me from anything I wanted to do.”

  “As long as you were there when he got home.”

  “No,” Geneva said. “It wasn’t like that. It was more, ‘whenever you’re with me, no matter what, let it be enough.’”

  “Don’t want,” John said.

  “Don’t want more,” Geneva corrected him, “or different.”

  “Don’t change.”

  “Kind of.”

  “And was that something you managed to do?”

  Geneva looked at him. The firelight licked at his face.

  “No,” she said. “I did change. I pretended I didn’t. But . . . ” she looked away and shook her head. “If you feel you’ve changed on the inside, but on the outside pretend you haven’t, which is the lie?”

  “Good question.”

  Geneva smiled at him, but then her lips flattened in thought. She blinked. Then shrugged.

  “Ralph didn’t want to be pushed to do, think, or talk about anything he didn’t want to do, think, or talk about,” she said. “That’s reasonable, though, isn’t it? Nobody wants to do something they don’t want to do. That’s why we call it something we don’t want to do.”

  “So he said go forth and do what you want.”

  “He did.”

  “As long as what you wanted was what he wanted.”

  Geneva half-laughed.

  “I guess it was a lucky coincidence,” she said, “that for a time, anyway, the two were the same.”

  John shifted on his stump.

  “How ’bout this?” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Geneva’s brows drew together.

  “He said ‘do what you want,’” John said. “I’m saying, ‘What do you want from me?’ There are people to whom I doubt I could give anything they wanted. But you? I could. Not because you don’t want much, but because anything you’d want would be good, something I’d want in myself too. Or for myself. I know I’m not omnipotent,” he said, crossing a giant leg over his knee, “but my gut tells me I can grant any wish that it’s in you to ask.” He looked not at her but the fire. “I would trust what you want,” he said.

  His face was serious. He was no frat boy in a bar making movie promises that he lacked the self-knowledge to keep. Geneva knew that she, herself, had never been as certain about anything as John seemed to be of what he offered to her. She was attracted to the certainty, and she was attracted to the man, and she tried to force herself to distinguish between the two.

  And, she wondered, what would she ask of him, if she were to take up his offer? He turned to face her just then, as though he had heard her thought and was waiting.

  Would you kill for me? She could say it with a wicked flick of the brows, deflecting the weight of the moment and escaping her own discomfort. Or she could lift her glass in his direction. Pour me some wine, she could say, imperiously. But it seemed a sin to waste wishes out of fear they’d come true.

  The fire snapped and spit up ash.

  “Why?” she finally said.

  “‘Why’ what?”

  “Why do that for me? You don’t even know me.”

  John lifted the bottle from beside his stump. Geneva extended her glass, and the neck of the bottle chinked against the rim.

  “From the first time I saw you,” he said, “I’ve been considering it. That afternoon in the coffee shop with your little friend, it wasn’t the first time I saw you. I’d seen you in the Grounds before. Thinking. Staring. The idea grew inside me over time.” He smiled sheepishly at her. “I’m not spontaneous.”

  John then reached down, picked up a nearby stick, and poked at the fire. He turned to face her again but rolled his head farther to see the sky. He pointed a finger upward, and Geneva’s eyes followed. The moon hung above them silver, like a quarter tossed to the sky. Darkness pointed at Geneva’s back, and warm light illuminated and warmed her face from the front. No stars fell. Geneva didn’t wish. A log shifted, sending up a cloud of wood smoke and a spray of hot cinders.

  Geneva watched the orange spray vanish in the night.

  This is what it’s like, she thought, not to be alone.

  “I don’t want you for a friend,” John said. He reached over and placed his hand on hers.

  Geneva looked to him. She didn’t want him for a friend either. Nor had it ever been what she had wanted from Ralph. Friends don’t stretch us, she thought, the way lovers do, or lead us to those inner cliffs that we must leap from alone, not knowing whether or not those that brung us will be there when we land.

  John took his hand from the top of hers. He lifted the stick and poked at the fire. There was nothing more to say. John was there with a decision, and Geneva was there with a choice.

  The fire kept its own counsel, burning down, singing softly to itself. They drank to the bottom of their glasses.

  John walked Geneva to her car in the unsettled silence of indecision.

  “You call me if you want to,” he said.

  Geneva turned when they reached her car door. He was taller than her by nearly a foot.

  “Kiss me,” she said, and he did. He smelled of flesh and wood smoke. His lips were cracked, but his flavor, sweet. Their mouths opened to each other’s. The land around them stretched out wide, and it felt to Geneva like they were its warm center. Each cell in Geneva’s body came to life, lit up by an illicit sense of grace, illicit because it was stolen, stolen from the beautiful and young, the crime witnessed by the moon.

  John was the one who broke away.

  “It would change who I am,” Geneva said, a fact, not a complaint, nor a reason one way or the other.

  Her chin dropped, and her body slumped. John stepped back. Geneva turned and slid into her car. She hesitated with the key at
the ignition but then turned it over.

  She backed onto the dark road, put the car into gear, and turned into red taillights in the night. But she didn’t make it far — fifty yards? — before her foot shifted from the gas to the brake and the car rolled to a tentative stop. The road before her was empty, dark and narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The headlights lit up the dirt and gravel. What difference could it possibly make, she thought? She’d practically been declared a rapist as it was. Why not a cheater, or a whore, to boot?

  She eased into reverse, looked over her shoulder, and gave the car the slightest bit of gas. She tried to shake the image in her mind of Ralph in his pajamas lying in his bed, his fragile mind sensing a frayed rope snapping as she traveled that one more irrevocable inch. Once snapped, she and Ralph would continue to drift apart, lost in space, pulled apart by separate forces. Even if she continued to visit, continued to make cassette tapes, and place flowers at his bed, he would be alone.

  She couldn’t do it. She pressed on the brake and shifted back into drive.

  But driving forward meant going back. Geneva thought of the duplex. She thought of Tatum, hand wringing in the face of everything she wanted. She didn’t want to be like Tatum, walking away from her desires. It was bad juju. It misinformed the powers that be.

  She hit the brake, put the car into reverse again, and threw her arm over the back of the seat. The time for finding happiness in concepts was over, she thought. It was time to choose it in touch. This was her thought when she slammed on the brakes as the shadow stepped out into the center of the road.

  John came around to the passenger side of the car and climbed in. They mauled each other like teenagers.

  “Back this baby up,” John said.

  Geneva did.

  

  Geneva’s bra was stuffed into her purse. It was four a.m., and she felt thoroughly fucked. Turns out John was a horse. She didn’t know her insides extended that far up. Another inch, and it would’ve been unpleasant, about size and nothing more, maneuverability lost to sheer bulk.

  But it had been perfect. Glorious. The universe did not collapse as she thought it might, which wasn’t to say that it didn’t change everything. She could have never called his number. She could have never gone. Never moved to the fire. Never tasted his breath. But well enough isn’t meant to be left alone. The effort to leave it alone is futile. Moments press on moments. One cell replaces another. We are re-created against our wills. How can the re-created self be held responsible for the choices made by a being who has since self-destructed?