Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Ron Rash

  Dr. Blanton leaves and Ellen goes in to make sure the Skype camera works and that the chat is set up. I go to the storeroom and fill up the mop bucket, then add the bleach and set it in the lobby. It’s time for Kerrie to call so I go into Dr. Blanton’s office. Ellen’s in the chair and I stand behind her. When the box comes up, Ellen clicks “answer.” Kerrie appears on the screen and it’s like every other time, because a part of Ellen and me that’s been knotted up inside all day can finally let go.

  Since it’s already Thanksgiving over there, Ellen asks if they’ll have turkey and dressing for lunch and Kerrie says yes but it won’t taste nearly as good as what Ellen makes. When I ask how things are going, Kerrie says fine, like she always does, and tells us she has two more days before she has to go back out. Ellen asks about a boy in her unit who got hurt by an IED and Kerrie says he lost his leg but the doctors saved the sight in one eye.

  For a few moments, nobody says anything, because we all know it could have been Kerrie in that Humvee one day earlier. Ellen asks about school. And Kerrie says the head of the education department at N.C. State is matching up the tuition costs with the army’s college fund. They’ve been really helpful, she says. I tell her about the books and Kerrie says to be sure and thank Professor Korovich.

  Maybe it’s because the picture’s a little blurry, but one second I see something in Kerrie’s face that reminds me of when she was a baby, then something else reminds me of her in first grade and after that high school. It’s like the slightest flicker or shift makes one show more than the others. But that’s not it, I realize. All those different faces are inside me, not on the screen, and I can’t help thinking that if I remember every one, enough of Kerrie’s alive inside me to keep safe the part that isn’t.

  We stay on awhile longer, not saying anything important, but what we talk about doesn’t matter as much as seeing Kerrie and hearing her voice, knowing that she’s made it safe through one more day and night. Afterward, we clean up the office, mopping the waiting room last. The bloodstain’s a chore. We get on our hands and knees, rubbing the linoleum so hard it’s like we’re trying to take it off too.

  We finally get done and Ellen picks up the two twenties and the five on the receptionist’s desk. The money we get from Dr. Blanton goes into an envelope we’re giving Kerrie the day she gets home. It’ll be nearly two thousand dollars, enough to help her some at college. On the way home I turn on the radio. It’s a station Ellen and me like because it plays lots of songs we heard while dating, songs we listened to when we were no older than Kerrie.

  Several stores already have their Christmas decorations up, and they brighten the town as we drive through. As I wait for a light to turn, I think about Ellen being more scared the closer we get to Kerrie coming home. It’s like Kerrie’s been lucky so long that the luck’s due to run out. I can’t help thinking that we can still get a phone call saying Kerrie’s been hurt. Or even worse, a soldier showing up with his cap in his hands.

  The light turns green and I pass the clock tower, behind it Cromer Hall. The office windows are all dark, but there are lights on at the student center. Some students won’t be going home for the holidays, and because of that someone in town has a phone close by, ready if it rings. I think about a young woman who’s hurt and scared making that call, and how someone will be there to listen.

  A Sort of Miracle

  Baroque wished he and Marlboro were back at the house watching medical shows with their sister, Susie. Instead, they were in a truck with Denton, their brother-in-law. Baroque wasn’t used to Denton being this close. Denton was an accountant, and Monday through Friday he was at work all day. When he came home, he usually disappeared into the back bedroom after dinner. Of course Saturdays and Sundays Denton was around more, and often in the front of the house, and it was starting to take just a little thing like opening the refrigerator door for their brother-in-law to give Baroque and Marlboro a look, a real unfriendly look. One night Denton had called him and Marlboro lard-asses and claimed they lacked ambition and would never amount to anything if that didn’t change. He’d said it just the one time, but Baroque could tell Denton had thought it more than one time. He and Marlboro had even sat on the porch for a few minutes yesterday, just to get somewhere Denton wasn’t.

  But they were with him now and they sure couldn’t get away from him in a truck cab, and the three of them were riding up a bumpy dirt road in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, doing something that Baroque was pretty sure wasn’t just a little illegal, like smoking pot or running a stop sign, but a lot illegal, like getting sent to prison, regardless of Denton saying it was a public service. When Baroque asked why they had to go bear hunting this particular day, Denton said this cold spell would soon send the bears into hibernation. Marlboro had asked what hibernation was and Denton had answered that it was when dumb, lazy creatures laid around for months doing nothing.

  The dirt road came to a dead end. Cinder blocks marked the parking lot, and there was a trail on the other side. Denton told them again everything they were supposed to do and handed Baroque the cell phone, then left with the pistol and knife strapped around his waist. Once up the trail a few yards, Denton was suddenly gone, like the woods had just swallowed him up. It made Baroque feel spooky, but everything about this bear business had been spooky. Like the way two weeks ago Denton had brought a big carton home after work and pulled out a steel trap, a pistol, a yellow box of bullets, and then a knife. A big knife, the kind Baroque had seen only in movies where maniacs hacked people to death, maniacs who always had some mask or hood covering everything except their eyes, which made it worse, because it could be anybody who was the maniac, even the person in the movie who seemed most normal.

  Like Marlboro, Baroque wore only a regular shirt and a sweatshirt. The warmth from the heater seemed to have whooshed right out the moment Denton opened the truck door. Baroque and Marlboro hadn’t been with Denton when he set the bear trap, but Baroque wished now that Denton had made them come then instead of now, because it had to have been a lot warmer that day. His breath clouded the windshield and Baroque felt his body start to shiver. He looked at the trail, then cranked the engine and put the heater on high.

  “Denton said we shouldn’t do that unless we got real cold,” Marlboro said.

  “Well, I am real cold,” Baroque said, “aren’t you?”

  Marlboro nodded and clapped his hands together and rubbed them.

  “How cold do you think it is?”

  “Eighteen degrees,” Baroque said. “That was the number on the bank sign.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever been in weather like this,” Marlboro said.

  “No,” Baroque agreed. “It’s probably never been this cold in Florida, except maybe during the Ice Age.”

  “I wish Susie could have come down to Florida to help us get a job there instead of up here.”

  “That would have been better,” Baroque said, “but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “I guess this is our first job,” Marlboro said, “being here, I mean.”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  “You think we’ll lose our nose and fingers, like that guy on the medical show?”

  “No,” Baroque said. “That guy was stuck on a mountaintop three days. We won’t be here that long.”

  “I sure hope not,” Marlboro replied. “I don’t think I could eat if I couldn’t breathe through my nose.”

  “You’d learn to get used to it,” Baroque said.

  They listened to the heater hiss against the cold.

  “You think he’s really going to kill a bear?”

  “That’s what he said,” Baroque answered.

  As the cab warmed, the breath fogging the windshield evaporated, but all Baroque could see were woods, woods where someone or something could be watching him and Marlboro right now.

  “It’s sort of spooky when there aren’t any streets or houses around,” Marlboro said, evidently feeling the same way.<
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  “It wouldn’t hurt to lock our doors,” Baroque said, “just to be on the safe side.”

  They pressed down the locks and for a few minutes didn’t speak. It was Marlboro who broke the silence.

  “He wouldn’t just leave us out here, would he? I mean, he’s not acted very friendly lately.”

  “No,” Baroque said. “He’d have made us get out of the truck and driven off if he was going to do that.”

  Denton felt better as soon as he left the truck. Being that close to his brothers-in-law made him feel like a fungus was starting to grow on him. They both had a moldy sort of smell, like mushrooms. Which was no surprise, since Baroque and Marlboro moved about as much as mushrooms. They never left the house, and got up from the couch only to eat or go to the bathroom. Hell, mushrooms probably did more than that. They actually grew. They were finding nutrients, some kind of work was going on down there in the soil.

  Baroque and Marlboro had been with him and Susie two months, up from Florida to find jobs, they claimed. Evidently they expected the jobs to haul themselves up to Denton’s front porch and wait for Marlboro and Baroque to step out the door and be whisked away. Denton blamed a lot of it on their being from Florida. He’d never met anyone from the place who didn’t get on his nerves, like all the Florida retirees who drove ten miles an hour on any road that wasn’t straight and wide as an airport runway. Admittedly, Denton hadn’t been around many younger Floridians, but his brothers-in-law were indictment enough. Baroque, whose name sounded a lot like a roach to Denton, was the older of the two by eleven months. Their father was a self-proclaimed “free spirit” who’d drifted like a spore—that’s the way Denton always envisioned it, anyway—into Colorado and attached himself long enough to find Susie’s mother and have a baby with her. Then the three of them drifted on down to Florida, where Baroque and Marlboro were born. It was the father who’d named the two boys. Susie didn’t know how the name Baroque had come about, but Marlboro had been named after the Marlboro Man, the cigarette cowboy. Susie said it was meant as a comment on society. Thank God that Susie, at thirty the oldest by six years, had been named by the mother. Susie wasn’t a Floridian, in Denton’s view. She’d been born in Colorado and had gotten out of Florida quick as she could, earning a scholarship to Gulf Coast College, in Alabama. She met her first husband there, a fifty-year-old admissions counselor. As soon as Susie graduated, they married and moved to North Carolina, so mountains could blot out some sun. The first husband had problems with psoriasis. But he had at least gotten her to North Carolina, where she and Denton met.

  Susie’s first marriage hadn’t worked out any better than Denton’s. Her first husband had made Susie wear his dead aunt’s Sunday church hat every time they had sex. An awful thing, but Denton’s first wife had been even worse. The admissions counselor’s aunt might’ve been dead but at least the man hadn’t lain there like he was dead. Denton’s first wife was so frigid that each time they had sex she might as well have been embalmed. Eventually, every time they did it he’d hear organ music inside his head, the same kind that oozed out of funeral home walls. It was a wonder he and Susie could ever touch another naked person after the two partners they’d had.

  The two of them had overcome a lot, no doubt about that, but now they had a nice marriage and a fine house and Denton had a good job as an accountant and Susie was the head nurse at the county clinic. Which was why she’d let Baroque and Marlboro come up from Florida in the first place. She’d wanted to help her brothers improve themselves, and Denton couldn’t blame her for that. After all, hard as it was to believe, they were her brothers. She was even trying to get them, or at least Baroque, interested in medicine. Baroque was sort of smart, Susie claimed, and if Baroque got a job as a med tech maybe Marlboro could be an orderly or something. She’d taken them to the clinic with her for a day, and now she had them watching the medical shows. It might inspire them, she claimed, though Denton was of a mind that a good kick in their lardy asses would inspire them more.

  Susie watched the medical shows as much as she could. She might need to know this sometime, she always said when Denton complained. He understood it could be helpful to someone in the medical field, but Susie didn’t watch the shows about a heart transplant or a knee operation or a woman having a baby. Susie watched shows with names like Medical Mysteries or I Survived, shows about hundred-pound tumors or people who’d lost all their toes to frostbite or who internally combusted, and it all gave Denton the willies. He would go in the back room and watch the fourteen-inch TV on the bureau, catch the news on CNN and then maybe one of the business shows, or get on the computer, where he’d been doing the bear research. Anything was better than the medical shows. The worst thing to Denton was how they always ended. There’d be upbeat music and the announcer would talk about miracles, and the person who’d had the hundred-pound tumor or the man whose leg had been snapped off by a shark always acted like it was a good thing this had happened. Now Susie had Baroque and Marlboro watching them every night, probably even a few about bear attacks.

  They did at least watch them. Whenever Denton ventured into the front room, their eyes were always on the screen. They weren’t talking and seemed to be paying attention. Of course Baroque and Marlboro never did talk a lot anyway, not to Denton, or even much to Susie. They just sat next to each other, in the exact same posture, like twins. Part of that was surely their being less than a year apart in age, and also because Baroque and Marlboro did look like twins, at least in the face and especially their eyes, which changed when they shifted them in a different direction—less green to more brown or vice versa. It reminded Denton of his twelfth-grade biology project. The teacher had given every student in the class a jar of fruit flies, and after a while the fruit flies’ eyes were supposed to change, and everybody else’s fruit flies had changed eye color except Denton’s. His just crawled around on the glass for an hour and then died. He got a D- on a major nine-week project, which was totally unfair. Denton hadn’t picked out the flies or put them in the jar. He hadn’t asked for them. They were just there on his desk one morning. He got no college-scholarship offers like Susie, and instead had to work his way through. The damn fruit flies had made sure of that.

  Susie saw Baroque and Marlboro’s interest in the medical shows as a step forward. Still, neither of them had actually left the house to apply for a med tech program or orderly job, and though Susie hadn’t actually said it, Denton suspected even she was tired of her brothers being around. It had pretty much shut down their sex life, because their house was a fine house but a small one. Baroque was in the spare room with just three inches of drywall between him and their bedroom. Marlboro was on the couch, and if Denton and Susie could hear the springs squeak whenever Baroque or Marlboro turned over, then they sure as hell could hear what he and Susie were up to. After the nightmare sex of their first marriages, there had been issues to work out, which they had. Until the brothers-in-law showed up, Susie tended to moan some and rock the bed a good bit, but there wasn’t much of that anymore, and now Denton was starting to have some problems, and Denton had never had problems, at least with Susie.

  He stopped to rest a moment, checked to make sure the double-ply plastic bag was still in his coat pocket. Paws and gallbladder—that was all he needed. Denton had to hand it to the Chinese. They were smart, and had been smart a long time. They’d invented gunpowder and a lot of other things, even spaghetti. The Chinese also knew how to cure certain male problems without having to explain them to a doctor and then after that having to take the prescription to a pharmacy where some eighteen-year-old cashier would stop chewing her bubble gum just long enough to do something stupid like say your name and the name of what you were picking up out loud, maybe even say it over a speaker like it was a frigging pep rally. No, the Chinese understood better how to do things than Americans. They explained what cured a problem and explained where to get the cure and even how to prepare it. It was the right way of doing things, which was why they
pretty much owned the United States now. The way he’d been feeling the last few months, Denton wasn’t sure he’d mind the Chinese taking over America completely, because everybody over there worked. If they didn’t they starved. Sure, times were hard here. Denton understood that as well as anyone. He’d barely survived a layoff himself. But unlike his brothers-in-law, he’d have found something to do if he’d been laid off, even if it was picking up cans and bottles out of ditches.

  Denton moved on up the trail, wondering if a caught bear would stay quiet or make a ruckus. The only sound was the water, and not even that except where a waterfall or rapid was, all the stream’s slow parts covered with ice. No other sounds like a chain saw or car or dog, because this was real wilderness he was in now, and it was so cold the birds and squirrels were using their energy just to hunker down and survive. Denton felt cold even with his thermal underwear, gloves, and wool coat, and it would only get colder, because though it was midafternoon, the sun would soon start to fade behind the mountains. At least the cold would be good for preserving the bear paws and gallbladder. Denton wouldn’t even have to stop and get ice for the cooler, which meant five minutes less time before he could get some distance between him and his brothers-in-law.

  Denton looked down through the trees to see if he could glimpse the truck but didn’t see it. All Baroque and Marlboro had to do was sit and wait, that and lean on the horn if a ranger appeared. Even they would have trouble screwing up those directions. Then again, Denton wouldn’t put it past them to drive over to Bryson City for something to eat or a six-pack of beer, then forget where the hell they’d been parked. That was the worst of it. Most people were smart at something. There were guys Denton had known in high school who weren’t able to spell cat, but at least they could change their spark plugs or replace a blown fuse. Baroque and Marlboro didn’t even possess smarts like that. Having clogged up the commode three times, Marlboro, it was clear, couldn’t even figure out how to properly wipe his ass, and Baroque had driven the truck like a drunk ten-year-old the one time Denton allowed him to take it to town. Denton thought about calling them, just to be sure they hadn’t driven off, but then he remembered they would actually need money to buy a hot dog or six-pack. Still, Denton was beginning to feel uneasy about bringing them along.