by Hugh Sheehy
“Yes. Rest your thumbs on the indicators when you are ready.”
Mason felt nervous. The things were probably rigged so that your stress reading was through the roof. The man regarded him with the detachment of someone confident of his superiority. He was probably selling herbal remedies or something. Mason put his thumbs on the steel buttons and looked down at the stress meter. The red arrow swung rapidly through the blue field and into the rightmost quadrant of the red field and wavered there at a spot between the numbers seventeen and eighteen. Great, he was probably about to have a heart attack right here.
“What the fuck does this mean?”
The man took the wands. “It means you have a great deal of stress in your life.”
He thought of Wendy again and felt the clamp of guilt. He was getting irritated with this stranger. It was none of his business. The certainty in the man’s voice disgusted him. “How the fuck does this machine know?”
“You carry the stress in your muscles. It stores up in your nervous system and affects everything you do. The process is unconscious, and it determines how you hold your body and a whole host of things, including how healthy you feel.”
“That’s a load of shit,” Mason said. “Let’s see you press the buttons.”
The man blinked once, casually accepting the challenge, and placed his thumbs on the buttons. The arrow moved past zero into the second quadrant of the blue field. “Do you see? Six point eight? That is a very healthy level of stress.”
“According to whom?”
“Dr. Hubbard has written a book that explains it all.” The man brought a thick black paperback with the title Dianetics from behind the stress meter. “It is all in here.”
It was rigged somehow. Mason looked down to see if some kind of foot pedal controlled the stress meter and saw only the guy’s brown loafers against the mall’s drab green carpeting. “What the fuck do these numbers even mean? This shit isn’t real medicine; it’s all made up!”
“Sir, you seem to be aware of your stress,” the man said coolly. “There must be things in your life that make you feel strain, things and people. You could cut these out.”
It had been a while since Mason felt like he could punch someone. He folded his arms to hide his shaking hands. His heart, beating fast, felt sick to its stomach. “What do you know about me?”
“You could one day live stress free,” the man said. “Think about it. You would feel weightless, happier than you have ever been. It would be better for you.”
“Fuck you,” Mason told the man. “You don’t know a fucking thing.”
He had grabbed his bags then and gone straight to the nearest men’s room stall for two quick snorts from the baggie and then had hurried out to the mall parking lot, where the snow was really starting to come down. The coke helped him feel better, and he convinced himself that he should be proud of his response to this unpredictable nuisance. But as he crossed the border into his home state, he began to doubt that his words had made any impact on the salesman, who had been so sure of himself.
“Motherfucking asshole,” he said, clearly envisioning the calm brown eyes floating in the man’s impassive brown face, then checking to ensure he was still on the road. “Fuck you, mother-fucker!”
When he came to the overturned minivan, the snow flowed down so heavily that he almost didn’t see it lying in the right lane. Its red color helped it stand out it in the light of his headlights reflecting off the falling snow. It was past five now, and he had been traveling at just under thirty miles an hour, and he reckoned he had another thirty miles to go. There was nothing out here but farms and a few small stands of trees. He braked slowly until he was hardly rolling and steered his car to a stop near the shoulder. It seemed more likely that he would be stuck in the snow than that another vehicle would come along and hit his car. He switched on the hazards before getting out.
Wind rose loudly along the dark road, blowing snow across settled snow and against steel dividers with a sound like tinkling glass particles. Snow fell in his hair and on his face as he trudged through the slush on the highway. A whirling gust packed snow under his chin and down his collar. Soon it would be too cold for the salt on the roads to work. He shouldn’t wait out here until help came, and anyway he was too deranged from coke and sleeplessness to talk to cops. Still he had better make sure someone was coming. He grew nervous as he approached the dark hulk of the minivan, glancing back to see his car’s hazards, tiny red lights blinking in the rippling gray quilt of snow.
He went to the front end of the van and knelt in the cold snow by the window, which was mostly broken out, and turned on the penlight on his keychain. The thin light revealed a plaid, blue blanket with a tousled lock of white hair sticking out from under one end. The person underneath shuddered. “Jim? Is that you?” She sounded tired and cold. He wondered if she could move, if the van was at risk for combustion flipped over as it was.
“No, I’m Mason,” he said. “But it’s okay. I’m here to help. Is Jim your husband?”
After a few strained breaths she said, “He went for help. To find us a phone.”
“I have a phone,” he said. “I’m going to call 911 right now. Are you hurt?”
“My shoulder hurts,” the woman said. “Where’s Jim?”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let me call them. I’ll go find him.”
“Get Jim,” she said. “Tell him to come back here. It’s not safe to be running around out there. He’s not a kid anymore.”
He walked away from the van to make the call, covering his phone with his free hand to protect it from the snow. He was afraid there would be no connection, but the signal patched through on the first try. A man answered, his voice flat, and Mason wondered whether it sounded different tonight from any other night, heavier, more resentful. Probably not. He’d heard the holidays were an especially violent and sad time of year for many people. Until recently, he had been one of them. He explained what he had discovered on the highway.
The operator wasn’t sure how long it would take for the ambulance to arrive. “I’d be able to guess better if I knew exactly where you were. At least you’re on 77. Forty minutes? Maybe sooner. It’s pretty bad out there.”
“That’s too long,” Mason said. “The man with this lady, he went off looking for a phone. He’s got to be lost in all this snow.”
“Just stay with the woman,” the operator said. “Back your car up to the minivan and wait with her.”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “The minivan’s upside down. Couldn’t it catch on fire? Shouldn’t I get her out of there?”
“Sir, I recommend you leave her where she is. She may have a back injury. If there’s not a fire yet, maybe there won’t be. But now that you mention it, you might want to keep a distance from the vehicle.”
“Is that your advice?” Mason couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A 911 operator should know exactly what to do.
“It’s really up to you, sir. The police are on their way. Just sit tight.”
He went back to the window of the overturned van and shined his light on the woman under the blanket. She was shivering, and it sounded like she was crying. “Is that you, Jim?”
“No, it’s Mason again. I just called for an ambulance.”
“Thank heavens. How long did they say?”
“They said soon,” he said. “They’re coming as fast as they can.”
“Where’s Jim? Someone’s got to get him before he gets too far,” she said. “Someone’s got to tell him he doesn’t need to call.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “Okay. What about you? Are you going to be okay here?”
“I’m fine,” the woman said. “Go find Jim for me.”
“Okay, I’m going.” He wished he had another light to give to her, to keep her company. He would have given her his keys with the penlight, but it would be suicidal to leave the highway without any way of seeing his tracks. He rose from the window and took a few steps onto the road, astoni
shed by how quickly the snow covered her presence and he felt alone again. He could walk out into the snow, stand right next to the old man, and never see him. He shined his light along the shoulder until he found a pair of half-filled footprints leading down into the shallow ditch beside the road and up the far side to a snow-filed space that was probably an open field. He hesitated, the edges of his feet already going numb. What if the old guy had already fallen or sat down out there, had given up? What if he’d already died? It would be much easier to stay here on the road and wait for the police. It would be even easier to walk down to his car, get in, and drive away. No one could fault him for that. He had already done a great deal here, perhaps saved the life of the woman in the minivan. Those people shouldn’t have been on the road tonight; they were lucky he even came along. He thought of the man with the stress meter telling him how easy his life could be if he abandoned his obligations to others. He thought of his parents, of Leonard and Tanya and the kid listening to his hero story, how hollow it would sound if he never told them how he ran away at the last minute. Or what a terrible secret it would be if he never told them at all. Letting out a self-pitying sigh he stepped down into the deep snow of the ditch.
In early November he had come in around dawn and found Wendy. He was tired from working a double, he later told the police, which made it hard to remember details, but the truth was that he had stuck around after the bar was clean with a cool new guy, doing shots and telling stories, making brief retreats to the bathroom to make use of his baggie. The sun was coming up over the low slanted roofs of Burgundy Street when he found his townhouse’s front door unlocked and became angry enough to wake Wendy and lecture her about protecting herself and their things.
Only afterward did he notice the disaster area of the shotgun house’s front room and kitchen, the takeout containers lying open on the countertop and table, the empty bottles and ashtrays everywhere, couch pillows lying on the floor. It was if they had been living in a crime scene all along.
Since kissing him good-bye at midnight, she had apparently had quite an adventure, bringing any number of people back to the house. She’d even left the little sliding mirror from the medicine cabinet out on the coffee table with powder smudges on top. He went to the bedroom and found the bedclothes in the usual tangle. He tried to stay calm then, telling himself she’d gone back out, was possibly opening another beer right now in one of their friend’s living rooms, so blitzed she’d never recall leaving the door unlocked. He was already on his way into the bathroom, pushing open the door, seeing the water on the tiles.
She had been packed into the bathtub fully dressed. Her dirty feet hung over the edge. Someone had tucked her elbows in at her sides, tilted her head back under the faucet. Her hazel eyes looked up emptily. Her clothes and hair were soaked, her pallid face rinsed with water, looking almost clean and innocent but for the marks on her cheeks where someone — a man, he first assumed then and simply came to believe afterward — had slapped her repeatedly to wake her up.
He kept walking long after he could no longer make out Jim’s tracks in the snow. He was chilled through the bones of his feet and hands, and his teeth were chattering in his ears. His clothes were all wrong for this mission. By now the paramedics and police had surely reached the scene of the accident, and things were under control. Maybe Jim was back by now, too, standing among the uniformed men, soberly speculating about where the well-meaning, if foolish, Samaritan had gone. He didn’t believe this version of things; it was too tidy. He was going to die out here, and so was Jim. They both were going to die out here. So much for the prodigal son, he thought, though something in him refused to accept it.
He reached for the baggie of coke he had transferred to his coat pocket and ran up against a man standing upright in the field. Small but sturdy, the man stood turned away from him, bundled tightly in his old trench coat and hunching against the cold, with tiny drifts of snow piled up on the brim of his fedora. Mason touched his shoulder. “Jim?” he said. He laughed morbidly. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
When the man didn’t respond, Mason tried turning him by the shoulder. Something under the coat was hard and bulky. He reached out to take the hat, and the head rolled back, revealing the black stitchwork connecting the head to the burlap sack body. The face under the frayed hat brim was featureless sackcloth, frozen stiff and stained with dirt. A wind came up and one of the scarecrow’s arms flew around, throwing flecks of ice against his cheeks, and Mason let go to cover his face with his unfeeling hands.
He stumbled forward and saw something large and dark looming ahead, a mass to which the falling snow conformed. He hurried forward, getting closer, fighting through a drift to his thighs, until he came up against the frozen wood of a barn wall. As a boy he used to look at them from the backseat of his father’s car, half curious about these relics of the cornbelt days, so many of which had been used as billboards for chewing tobacco. He had never been this close to one. Holding his hand against the icy grain of the wood, he made his way around the structure, hoping to find a house on the other side.
The farmhouse stood in a ring of naked maple trees whose branches were thrashing in the wind. The dark shapes of cars stood in the driveway. A light was on inside, within the front door. He hurried through the snow, falling once, and used the iron railing to pull himself up the front steps. Exhaustion and drug withdrawal were catching up with him. He did not know what he would say when he began to ring the glowing, orange doorbell, which he pressed over and over. After a while, a man opened the inner door and looked out.
It was almost ten when he finally called his parents. He was sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse, the presents he had picked out for his family laid out on the table before him. The couple who lived there had been very kind, giving him dry clothes to wear and offering to let him stay the night in one of the spare rooms upstairs. After talking with the local sheriff, the farmer had taken Mason in his truck with a snowplow to retrieve his car, which was now parked in the driveway, behind the sedan that belonged to the couple’s son and his wife. Mason had talked to the police, who seemed to take his state of mind for confusion and panic and cold. They too had been kind, thanking him for his help. They had found Jim on the freeway, wandering in the wrong direction, confused and upset. He had mild frostbite on some of his fingers and his nose, but he was otherwise okay. By now he and his wife were at a hospital somewhere.
The farmer was a serious man with a strong air of religiosity, and in the course of taking Mason back to his car and offering to put him up he had repeatedly and pointedly made references to God, to whom he clearly felt Mason owed his life. The farmer was courteous but also wary and faintly disapproving, having detected something he didn’t like in his unforeseen guest. Now that he had fulfilled his obligations as host, he had left Mason in the kitchen and gone back to the living room, where his grandchildren were up past their bedtimes, opening presents. From the archway to the brightly lighted room came the sounds of paper tearing and the chirpy voices of small children, the reluctant admonishments of moderately drunken parents.
Mason sipped hot tea from a mug, which announced in cartoon font, The Early Bird Gets the Worm!, and depicted a smiling bluebird in a nobleman’s blouse uprooting a pale worm from the ground. He wanted another bump from the baggie in his coat, but he thought he’d let it wait until he was off the phone.
His brother answered. There was a pause in the space after Mason spoke his name. Leonard said something to people in the background, and suddenly he heard his father and his mother speaking to him. A little girl asking a question and being told to hush. That would be Tanya’s daughter. They had him on speaker phone and were trying to take turns talking to him. His father went first, in a voice steady and calm, almost subdued. His mother, too, sounded so careful. To hear their caution made him wince, but he answered their questions as best he could. The connection was poor. He listened to their voices, trying to see their faces through their tones. Af
ter a long silence on Mason’s end, his father remarked that the call had been dropped, and they should hang up and wait for him to call back.
“Wait,” he said, in a voice that sounded desperate to him. He said he was there, though it had already dawned on him that it would be tomorrow before he could prove it to them. He said a few things about the severity of the storm, then promised to tell them his story in the morning. When he hung up, he knew by the sound of their voices that they had not believed him completely. It was not disbelief he had heard, or even skepticism, but an awareness of who he had always been.
He carried the presents up to the guest room as quietly as he could, hoping the groans of the steps beneath him blended into the storm. He was looking forward to another snort, but then he changed his mind, thinking instead to pass out and take the shortcut to the morning. The air in the room smelled like mothballs, and a layer of cold air drifted over the floorboards. He did not bother to turn on the light. The window was dark, crusted with a layer of snow, visible only by the faint violet light outside. He climbed into the bed fully clothed, pulled the quilt to his chin, and gazed at the dark ceiling above. The mattress was narrow and lumpy, and all he could do was lie there and wait for sleep. He thought of Wendy again, and in the painful instant that followed it seemed that it was, this feeling he had run from thirteen years ago, the fear of the way life unfolded in this place, with slow and unflinching inevitability. He opened his eyes and saw the presents lying in a neat stack beside the bed, their wrappings gleaming faintly. After a moment, he remembered what each contained but could not say why he had chosen them. He let out a sigh and felt his body start to relax. Sleep was closer than he had imagined. Tomorrow he would drive home and see his family. Whatever happened after that, happened.
HENRIK THE VIKING
Six weeks, seven. Perhaps one-third of women experienced light bleeding or spotting during the first trimester. About thirty percent of them miscarried. This last fact should not scare them, Dr. Kornblum elaborated in her California monotone, but give them hope: consider the 70 percent who got their babies. The odds were with them. Who knew where this blood came from? The body was a mystery, an ancient adventurer. Without brazen biology, none of them would be there in the clinic, listening as computer speakers amplified the whisper sound of the baby’s heartbeat.
