By this time, back at the palace, you were probably loading up your van and waiting for me to come back with your car. Instead, I was driving to my hostel only to find they locked it at ten p.m. Fascists. I had someone drop my pack through a window, then, back in the car, I buckled my pack into the passenger seat and draped Günter over its shoulders. We talked for hours as I drove south. At first about you. I didn’t like the discovery of the pistol; I no longer liked your shouting; I didn’t have any sympathy for needing to photograph before the light faded. Someone was injured and you remained behind. So I thought I’d leave you behind as well by taking your BMW for a little drive. Had you not given me those moments of pleasure, staring out at the girls on their bicycles, I might never have written to tell you where to find your car. You’d have made me a true thief. Anyway.
It is unjust that one can go through an entire life driving compacts and hand-me-downs while others purr along in cars like yours. That’s one of life’s injustices that Günter and I talked about. Also discussed: the probability of life on exoplanets, what the speed limit was, and whether your car took gasoline or diesel. In a sharp turn that caught me unaware, Günter leaned into me and put his left sleeve on my leg. Cheeky.
After a frustrating fill-up, Günter and I flashed through the Alps during the night, then into Italy, which was immense and flooded with a diffuse pre-dawn light that disappointed me, even with it coming at me at two-hundred kilometers an hour. I’m not certain why I felt disappointed. I was possibly expecting arches. Roman columns. Aqueducts. Elysium.
While I’m thinking about it, those nicks around the gas tank of your car? They can be polished out and touched up. Took me forever to figure out how to open the dang cover.
I needed to sleep, so I pulled over at a roadside filling station, parked out back, and caught a few solid hours with one of Günter’s sleeves over my eyes, blocking the sun. When I woke, the cafe was open. I picked up a couple of hitchhikers there. Probably something you’ve never done. Always pick up hitchhikers, the safe-looking ones, anyway. They usually make you feel immensely better about your situation in life. I didn’t learn this until about ten years ago. All those years I’d been passing them up, hundreds of them, their thumbs feeling my tailwind because I was afraid.
The hitchhiking couple were young. He was thin with a nearly shaved head, while she had hair enough for the both of them, straight down to a belly about to burst. Pregnant, in other words. They tried talking to me using their Italian guidebook, but I don’t speak any Italian except musical Italian, forte and legato and allegro, etc. They spoke a few words of English. They had hitchhiked all the way up to France and now they were on their way back home to Albania, via Italy. I was surprised to learn that they hadn’t known each other until meeting in France. Or perhaps I misunderstood. But if they’d only met this month, I have trouble believing there’d transpired much of anything carnal between them. I didn’t really catch their names all too well then, and now my brain has muddied them to something like Razkzksk and Terrliz which I’m confident isn’t anything close to their real names. So let’s call him Richard, and she, Terri.
In the car, Terri sat up front while Richard and Günter sat in back. I don’t think they exchanged more than a few words, (Richard and Terri, I mean) though Richard was massaging her shoulders with near-obsessiveness. They looked like brother and sister, which, I’ve noticed, is easy to do with people from the same European countries. Back home in the States, it’s a gene sea, a roiling Atlantic of DNA, but here you can tell that the genes have led more pool-ish existences.
I treated my companions to lunch. I offered them beers, but Richard abstained, mostly because Terri did. He ate something Schnitzel-like that made me shudder. His knuckles were hairy. Terri had a ring shaped like a butterfly on her pinky. And though I don’t remember the hitchhiker’s real names, I do remember the name Lule. That’s not something you forget.
Terri looked uncomfortable while we drove, even with the BMW’s seat nicely reclined and Günter rolled up as a pillow in the crook of her neck. I wanted nothing more than to take them to the nearest Italy-Albania ferry crossing and get them off the road and into their families’ arms. But I’d let slip something about Venice and they insisted that I drive there. I had daydreamed about the canals—and of all the re-arranging the real thing would do to the imaginary construct of Venice I had in my head. My lizard brain drove while I daydreamed, and as a result I got as lost as one can get without a GPS, a man’s digitized voice saying “Neuberechnung” at nearly every highway juncture across the flat, empty farmland. I was studying the map when Terri hissed, then squealed. I swear I could hear my name called over a hospital speaker. Knowing when you’re needed is an intuition you don’t lose on retiring. I glanced over and saw Terri pressing her hands into the seat between her legs. The seat’s leather looked freshly skinned as her water pooled around her knuckles.
On the GPS’s screen, we were a little silver image of a car amid almost nothing but solid green. There was a town up ahead on the map, but the car icon was barely moving, even though I was racing. Neuberechnung, the GPS said. I passed a baby-blue Alfa Romeo with lights on the roof like a police car before realizing, as the lights flashed on, that it was a police car. The police didn’t grasp our miming, even though Richard and I were making fairly obvious pregnant shapes and gestures. I pointed forward at an imaginary hospital, but the polizia were having none of it. We got a chuckle out of Terri from our antics until a contraction gripped her. I slowed, got behind the Alfa Romeo, and pulled up alongside again, this time with Terri across from the driver, who was now talking to us over a speaker, a ramble of indecipherable Italian, then broken German. I lowered Terri’s window and she shouted something long and damning at the police, even arching herself up so that her stomach could be seen.
“Ospedale,” said the horn, and we got the nod we’d been waiting for. The Alfa Romeo pulled out ahead of us with the full treatment, the siren sounding different, the lights all the more urgent, the highway parting its imaginary traffic for us. The thing was, I could see we were still a good fifteen minutes away from the town and even five minutes might be too late.
“How long?” I asked. “When are you due?” She’d told me August earlier in the cafe, but I could see that had been a fib. There was no postponing childbirth for a summer fling.
“Eight month,” Terri spat out.
I squeezed her knee, then put both hands back on the wheel and gave thanks that you, Mr. Photographer, had purchased a car with plenty of get-go. Your BMW passed the police’s Alfa Romeo, not once, but twice. I’ve never heard an engine sound like the BMW’s. We hit 250 kilometers an hour and that was it, the needle wouldn’t budge further though there was still room to move. Richard, panting, said it was the car, something about the car’s computer limiting us. The entirety of my will—to go faster, to deliver Terri to the closest maternity ward as I’d seen it in my head, the car sliding right up to the entrance with just minutes to spare—was outdone by a microchip. Terri screamed.
I pulled off the side of the highway and was out and at Terri’s side. I moved her seat back and reclined it, then got her stripped down from the waist before the first police officer was at the car. I yelled at him to turn off his siren and lights—Terri needed calm right then. She was panicky but I held her hand and pointed out the call of what sounded like meadowlarks in the grasses alongside the highway. Richard massaged Terri’s shoulders until she just reached back and gripped his fingers, wringing them bloodless as she screamed again. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to scream, to put all her energy into pushing at my instructions, choosing intervals I hoped would slow the birth. But she was crowning in no time, her strong arms pushing against the ceiling. (Note the slight bulge on the metal roof of your BMW. Look at that bulge and, if your mother is still alive, tremble a little.) I dug through my backpack for my pocket knife, then made an incision to the perineum to give her room to deliver. It was then that Richard vomited
all over the front dash and even into my hair. I pulled Richard out of the car and pointed to the tall stand of grasses. He scared out a cloud of birds that settled down again just as Richard crouched down to the dirt, breathing heavily. It was best he didn’t see his Terri deliver a bloody and chalky-white baby, or those endless gushes of blood and amniotic fluid, or the rubbery blue coil of umbilical cord. Even though I think it’s the greatest sight on earth. It’s a marvel.
The baby was having some trouble breathing, so I sucked out the fluid in the baby’s mouth with my own, then spat and placed the now-crying baby girl on Terri’s chest. I left the umbilical cord to the medics in the ambulance, which I could hear coming then, in the distance, even as I delivered the placenta. I waved Richard away when he tried to return. Who knows what bodily function the sight of the afterbirth would have weakened in him.
“Lule,” Terri said. Terri was red and soaked with sweat. I kissed Terri on the forehead and put my favorite sweater, the borrowed and returned one, over the two of them before the morning chill crept in. Putting what Euros I had into Richard’s hand, I hugged him. Escorted by the police car, the ambulance took them all away. Once more I was alone. Just me and Günter (and your BMW) and the meadowlarks and the haze lifting off the gray-green fields, and transmission lines in the distance held aloft by steel giants; each country, I’ve noticed, has its own way of hoisting up the necessary and the deadly. Back on earth, I was teary-eyed. Which I am again, now, writing this, thinking fondly of the three of them: Terri, baby Lule, even Richard. I imagine they’re back in Albania now. No, I wasn’t just teary-eyed. I wept. Wept with thanks that I’d been given another opportunity to help deliver a baby, wept because I knew that Lule would likely be my last. Wept.
In the end I did see Venice, with Günter as my aimless guide. Was it worth paving over my construction of the city with the reality of the place? It was. Lordy, it was. Now, about your pistol: I dropped it over one of the bridges spanning the Grand Canal. My personal constitution doesn’t allow for guns. As for the location of your BMW, see the parking garage I circled on the map. Go have it cleaned, stripped—whatever you need to do to return it to the condition it was that night when girls in tall white wigs rode bicycles and you stepped into a fountain and made your assistants laugh, and I, I slept within a palace’s walls and your car wasn’t yet bloodied and rank and ruined. Do it now while you can still pull off the trick.
It’s done just…like…this.
I’m still here.
See?
To read the other stories in this collection, please purchase Promises Of The Head To The Heart on Amazon.
FACTS ABOUT BLAKEY
Blakey lost his wife to a fast-moving cancer named Dr. Kevn Foley. The doctor shared the news with Blakey on an Octoberfestless October afternoon in Blakey’s basement pool room where the doctor seemed completely at home expounding on his love for Blakey’s wife, only pausing when lining up, and usually making, a shot.
FACT: This was the first time Blakey had ever met the doctor.
FACT: The doctor knew trick shots.
FACT: Blakey was terrifically high.
Later, in the shower, a sober Blakey thought of a myriad different ways to harm the doctor. He could shoot him, gouge him with some fine German cutlery, disfigure him with bleach, or: knock him unconscious and put him in a car (stolen, of course), drive the car to an abandoned meat-packing district, perfume the entire car in gasoline and—spark—compact the doctor’s existence into just a midnight plume of crematory smoke. TV was educational.
At the time of the revelation, Blakey had been incapacitated by the doctor’s newscaster looks and hypnotist voice. The M.D. made Blakey feel almost guilty for being the impediment to a full-bloomed romance between the doctor and Blakey’s wife Lizzie. Great things would happen after his wife moved in with the doctor, Foley assured him. Life would be better for everyone involved. Blakey envisioned them running for a thankless political office, or starting a charity, or simply exploding with sweet intentions, like a struck piñata. When the doctor finished his spiel, Lizzie came downstairs and told Blakey the truth about those out-of-state conferences, the gym membership, and all the other excuses she’d used to spend time with the doctor (who was now performing trick shots in the background). Blakey wondered if the doctor had shown his wife a thing or two on the felt? That would explain The Stain Lizzie blamed on sweaty ceiling pipes. He asked, they said yes, but not before looking at each other, thoughts bumping back and forth so loudly Blakey could almost hear them. Was it the pool table or the living room table? Was it this pool table, or that other one? And remember that one table where you got up and I and you and then we…?
The hot water gave out. Blakey dressed and within five minutes was speeding, stop sign to stop sign, to the doctor’s house in the Heights. He replayed more of the doctor’s visit in his head. The doctor’s hightops coated in chalk dust. Him standing there, grinding a cube onto Blakey’s favorite cue stick. Was that some kind of Freudian thing? He couldn’t help but see Dr. Foley’s kind stare as the front to a med-schooled mind diagnosing the deficiencies in Blakey that had driven his wife from him. He probably looked at cancer patients that way. The stricken, terminals. Blakey felt asymptomatic. How had he failed his wife? Was he a bad conversationalist? Did he not work, keep the cars clean, do the yardwork (until he caved and used the three Ecuadorian brothers who did the neighbor’s lawn—great, great, great decision!)? He’d even lost his love handles earlier in the year by going on that Cajun diet where the sheer amount of cayenne pepper made it too painful to overeat. Was he a bad catch when it came to other appetites and affections? But how would his wife know? It had been many weeks, fortnights, since they’d even slept with each other, forget sex for the moment. He had timed them once and discovered they only spent fifty minutes in the same room together—for a week. Nights were even more separate. She slept in the other bedroom because she couldn’t take his snoring. But Blakey had tape recorded himself and other than the necessary farts, coughs and side-to-side shifting and realignments, he hadn’t heard even a cursory snort from himself. Meanwhile, he could hear his wife inside her bedroom, turning the crisp pages of magazines and watching movies and always typing on her laptop. Now, though, knowing about the doctor, Blakey realized the spastic plastic clicks were less than innocent. They were not “work taken home,” but:
DRLOVE: MMM.
LizzieBoredom: That feels so good, doctor. I love it when I pretend to touch myself where you tell me to touch myself so I can pretend to arouse myself, so that I arouse you. My husband could walk in at any minute. Counterclockwise, Doctor?
DRLOVE: MMM.
LizzieBoredom: You should have taken typing. Here’s to you Mr. Shaninatitsch, middle-school typing teacher, toupee king, and letch. Oh yes. Almost there, Doctor (but thinking of Mr. Shaninatitsch, the hunting, the pecking. The touch typing.)
DRLOVE: NNN
DRLOVE: I NEAN MMM
DRLOVE: MEAN. I MEAN. SHIT. BATTERY LOW.
Or, perhaps more likely:
DRLOVE: Just leave him Liz. He’s not making you happy. I am a doctor. I have money. I am good-looking and work out. My cholesterol is 170. I will make you happy. I have motherless children and you are not yet a mother and no longer 30.
LizzieBoredom: You’re right. I deserve to be happy. I don’t love him. He doesn’t love me. Any more. We’re like strangers in the same house.
DRLOVE: It would be needlessly cruel to let your lives continue this way.
LizzieBoredom: It’s a given. This marriage is over. But you better watch it. Blakey’s in the know. And he’s heading to your house now, clear-headed and angry.
Blakey: I am.
Left turn, another left, right, left, right, right—there. So close, so startlingly close! Only 3.4 miles! The doctor’s neighborhood was golden, pumpkin-strewn, and there seemed an unusual number of children scattered about. It might be Halloween, he wasn’t sure. He pulled his wife’s car up to the curb (she had t
aken his car earlier to go see a movie because his car was blocking hers in the driveway) and stormed up the walkway, a gonna-kill-him rush pumping the pistons of his heart. A stone path wound past the three-car garage (well, no more blocked car scenarios with the doctor, Blakey noted), then past the combination lamppost/mailbox, then curved so that it was impossible not to take in the whole enormous house, the immaculate wood shingle siding, the painted shutters that seemed functional, the roof littered with sycamore leaves, the sycamore tree itself the post-sunset hues of oatmeal and cream and full of cawing crows, a murder of crows, Blakey noted. The entrance had been swept clean of the leaves by a broom and a pair of gloves now duncing in a corner. As soon as he heard the musical doorbell Blakey regretted not having strode right across the lawn to the door and once there, issued a violent knock, maybe even kicked it. But it was too late, now.
The door was opened by a remarkably dexterous golden retriever—no, wait, by kids just behind the door, TV-cute kids. One was a bumble bee, another a pirate. And behind them, entering what could only be called a foyer, Dr. Foley himself appeared and removed a small girl from his shoulders, a ballerina.
“Who are you supposed to be?” asked the pirate.
“Say ‘trick or treat,’” said the bumble bee.
The ballerina held her tongue.
During the drive over, Blakey had settled on trying to break the doctor’s jaw. Seeing the kids, plastic jack-o-lantern’s in hand, their faces candy-starved, Blakey felt his need to inflict physical violence on the doctor reduced to something small, but still bitter. He needed recompense for the loss of his wife. A rough shove, a trip of the feet. Perhaps giving the doctor a bad cold, but one that only inflicted him and didn’t get passed on to his patients. But with the kids watching him and asking their father when he would take them out trick-or-treating, Blakey felt entirely impotent.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 33
