“Oh man,” I said.
I stopped the car and we got out. The cat lay in a heap on the road.
“Shit,” I said. “Fuck.”
“I think it’s dead,” said Lenore.
“I know it’s dead,” I said.
I took a blanket from my car, the blanket I’d been intending to use for our picnic, and scooped the body up as best I could. I placed it in the trunk. I didn’t want anyone else to run over it.
There was a house nearby and Lenore said, “I guess that’s where he lives.”
“He or she,” I corrected her.
“I bet it’s a male cat,” said Lenore. “Only male cats do things like that.”
Together Lenore and I walked up to the house so that we could give the owner some bad news.
“You walk pretty well with that fake foot,” said Lenore.
“I’m getting better at it,” I said.
The house had a tidy appearance with an American flag flapping in the wind atop a metal pole. When I knocked on the door we heard noises from inside, but no one came out to see us.
“Maybe we can just leave a note?” I suggested.
“No, no. We can’t do that,” said Lenore.
It sounded like someone was moving furniture around in there.
“No one’s answering,” I said.
“Hello?” said Lenore.
The door flew open and a wiry bald man appeared before us. He was holding a shotgun at his waist. He pointed it first at me and then at Lenore.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked.
“I believe we hit your cat,” I told him, pointing at my car back on the road.
“My cat?”
“Right. It ran out in front of me. I’m sorry about this. Can you put down the gun?”
“Is that your car?” he asked me.
“Yes, it is. The cat ran right in front of me,” I repeated.
“He’s missing his leg,” said Lenore. “He just lost his leg and couldn’t stop in time.”
This didn’t seem relevant, or a particularly good excuse, but I suppose Lenore was trying to be helpful.
“Let’s take a look,” said the man.
I thought he meant to take a look at my leg, so I bent down to roll up my pants, but the wiry man poked me with the tip of his gun.
“What’re you doing?”
“Showing you my leg.”
“The cat,” said the man. “Let’s see the cat.”
We walked back to the car, the man still pointing his shotgun at us.
“Do you think you could put that away?” I asked him again.
“No, I don’t,” said the man.
I opened up the trunk and uncovered the dead cat.
“Jesus fuck,” said the man.
“I’m sorry,” I said, again.
“You sure are. Where are the keys to this rig?” he asked me.
“The car keys?”
“Yes.”
“Right here.” I held them up.
The man snatched the keys out of my hand and said, “I’m taking these.”
“Hold on,” I said. I stepped forward and with surprising swiftness the old man swung the butt end of his shotgun around and struck my leg, the new leg, right where the joint ended. The prosthesis snapped loose and I fell over. I still hadn’t gotten the fittings right. It was embarrassing.
“Hey!” said Lenore. The man pointed his gun at her and Lenore put her hands up in the air.
“It’s just a cat,” she said to him.
That’s when the man noticed that Lenore had an artificial limb as well. She was wearing her rubber hand, the less practical of her artificial limbs, but of course harder to distinguish. “Aren’t you two a fine pair?” said the man.
“Listen,” I said, “I already told you I’m sorry about your cat.”
The man walked up and yanked off my prosthetic leg. He tucked it under his arm and then said to Lenore, “I want yours too.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
Lenore removed her arm and handed it to the man. He got into my car and drove away with both of our limbs, the picnic lunch I’d prepared, and that dead cat as well.
Lenore helped me up and I hopped over to a tree so that I could lean against it.
“That old shitfuck,” said Lenore.
“At least we know where he lives,” I pointed out.
“He better come back here,” said Lenore. She was really mad. With her remaining arm she picked up a rock and threw it down the road in the direction he had gone. Her empty sleeve, the one which had covered up the artificial arm, waved about in the breeze.
* * *
We waited around for nearly an hour. I found a sturdy stick and used it as a crutch to assist with my walking. Lenore and I examined the man’s house and thought about breaking in but a large dog lay asleep in the living room. He seemed friendly enough, but we opted not to take our chances there.
Instead we made our way down the road, me hopping with my arm draped over Lenore’s shoulder for support. After a short distance we arrived at another house, this one less well kept than the old man’s. Lenore knocked on the door and a hefty woman in a smock answered.
“We got robbed,” said Lenore.
“Out there?” said the woman.
“We hit a cat,” I explained, “and the owner stole my vehicle.”
The woman let us inside, shaking her head. Her house smelled of cat urine and there were felines running everywhere.
“That was Henry who took your car,” she told me. “Me and him don’t interact much.”
It was like a zoo in there! Cats pranced about on every surface, the shelves, the countertops, the stove. There were plates of stale food sitting on the floor.
“I don’t suppose it was one of your cats I hit?” I asked her.
“It wasn’t Henry’s,” said the woman. “He has a dog.”
“Some people with dogs have cats,” Lenore pointed out.
“Henry doesn’t have any cats,” said the woman.
“It was a black cat,” said Lenore, “with some white spots.”
“That was Elliot,” said the woman. “He’s deaf.”
“Then I’m afraid he’s dead as well,” I said, “if that was him.”
“I told you it was a male cat,” said Lenore. She had been right!
The woman let us use her phone and I offered her $25 for the cat. I hoped she wouldn’t take it, but she did. It was all the money I had.
The police arrived and the woman made us talk to them out front so that they wouldn’t see all her animals. There was likely an ordinance against such hoarding. The police were unimpressed by the entire incident, including our lost limbs, but they gave us a ride back into town.
* * *
Lenore invited me to her apartment and we ended up having sex on her couch. It wasn’t as enjoyable as I had previously imagined it might be. Perhaps we were both tired. It was a wool couch as well, so the fibers scratched our skin and made things itchy.
Afterward Lenore said, “I have a husband, so I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now.”
“A husband?” I said. “Where is he?”
“He’ll be here in a few hours. He works late. He’s a professional bouncer, so you really should leave.”
“When did you get married?” I asked her.
“A while ago,” she told me. It was a vague answer but I didn’t feel like pressing the issue.
I called a taxi and as we were waiting Lenore told me something else. “I was born without my arm,” she said. “I know I told you it was a car accident, but actually I was born this way.”
“You told me it was a van accident. You said a van rolled over on it, not a car.”
“Well, either way, it’s not how it happened.”
The taxi arrived and Lenore helped me down the stairs. They’d given me a crutch back at the police station but it was the wrong size and those stairs were pretty tricky.
* * *
About a week later
a police officer showed up at my house with a package for me. It was Lenore’s arm.
“This isn’t mine,” I told him.
The officer looked down at his notepad. “It says here you lost a prosthesis.”
“I lost a leg prosthesis,” I said. “This one belongs to my friend.”
The officer looked down at my leg. I’d gotten a replacement by then. It was an ill-fitted temporary thing.
“Well, I don’t understand this, then,” he said, holding up Lenore’s arm.
I convinced the officer to leave the arm with me and I made arrangements to bring it over to Lenore myself. When I arrived she was sitting on the wool couch with my leg attached to her arm. She waved it at me and smiled. A funny joke! We exchanged limbs and I tried to kiss her again but she wasn’t having any of that.
“I’m moving to South America,” she told me. “I’m going to work in an orphanage there.”
“What about your husband, the bouncer?” I asked.
“He’s gone. I’m not married.”
“Oh,” I said.
Her South America plan impressed me and I asked if I could join her, permanently. It sounded like a good, wholesome life. Lenore said it would be best if I thought things through before making such a move.
“That’s a big decision,” she told me.
And she was right! I had no business in Ecuador, or whatever country to which she was moving. Visiting Lenore was an option though, she made that clear, and lately I’ve been thinking I might take a trip down there to see just what’s going on.
ORDERLY
It was an irresponsible thing to do. I even knew it at the time, but still I went ahead. I was working as an orderly at a facility called Riverwood Retreat, which wasn’t really a retreat. It was a mental institution and a place for people with mild disabilities who couldn’t function well in the outside world. Originally my job was to clean the residential areas, mop floors, disinfect bathrooms, and so on. But they were short on staff and after a few months I began to assist the professionals with the care of the residents. I would help lift someone from his wheelchair to the bed, or walk with a resident to the cafeteria and help him choose his food. I enjoyed these tasks more than the cleaning.
One of the residents was a strikingly pretty woman named Elsa. I couldn’t figure out why she was there. She seemed to be in control of herself most of the time, though she did walk with a limp. She had a shock of gray hair running from the top of her forehead and very intense piercing eyes. Several times when I was in the cafeteria I noticed that she was looking at me. Her face had these sharp features and at first I thought she was angry with me about something. But then I began to understand that it was a look she always wore. Some people are just like that. They look angry even when they are feeling calm, or merely curious. I wondered if this was part of the reason Elsa had found herself residing here in the first place. One time I took Joseph, the resident whom I was accompanying, over to her table and we sat down next to her. Joseph had a visual disability and would feel all of his food with his fingers before he ate it.
“I hope you wash his hands before he does that,” said Elsa.
I said, “We always wash up before we eat, right, Joe?”
“That’s right,” agreed Joseph, though now that I thought of it we had neglected to do so on that day. Elsa regarded his dirty fingers with disdain.
“My name is Georgie,” I told her.
“I’m Elsa,” she said.
I was going to extend my hand for her to shake, but I hadn’t washed my hands either, and I figured she could tell. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.
Joseph told me that Elsa was “mental,” that she would fly off the handle sometimes and then she would have to be restrained.
“They give her drugs now,” he said, “and she’s more calm.”
I hadn’t had much experience with women up until that point. In school, my advances had been met mostly with amused dismissal and it wasn’t until later, when I fell in with the bass player of a local band, that I had what could be described as a relationship with a woman. That bass player was ten years my senior and left me for another woman, a turn of events which I took hard. I realized then that I had developed an attraction to older women. Elsa was perhaps thirty-five years old, and I found myself thinking about her quite a lot.
I suppose she could sense my interest. One time when I was eating with Joseph she walked by and brushed her hand across my back. I was very startled by this. I followed her out of the cafeteria and she handed me a folded-up paper towel and then turned away.
On the square of paper towel she had written, in crayon, “I am not crazy. Meet me. OK?”
By the time I had read it she was gone. I tried to figure out where she wanted to meet me and was frustrated at the vagueness of this request. But then, that afternoon, as I walked away from the main building toward the bus stop to go home, I saw her sitting on the side steps smoking a cigarette. Most of the residents were not allowed to smoke. She had permission though.
I walked up to her. “I read your note,” I said.
“Good,” she said.
“What did it mean though?”
“I can’t discuss that right now,” she said, looking away.
“Okay,” I said.
We talked a while longer about things unrelated to the note. She told me she was from Wisconsin. She fidgeted a lot. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, she stood up and limped back up the stairs and went inside.
Like I said before, I knew it was irresponsible to be flirting like that with a resident. But she didn’t seem “mental” to me. She just seemed nervous. And she was older than me. At that point in my life I assumed that wisdom came with age.
A few days later I was working an overnight shift and she startled me. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. and I was on the covered walkway between the residential halls. She darted out from the shadows and took hold of my arm.
“This way,” she said.
We went into the exercise center and there she removed my clothes and then she took off her pants. I wanted her to take off her shirt too, but she wouldn’t. She lay me down and climbed on top and we had very quick, hurried sex on one of the firm vinyl-covered mats. When it was over she grabbed her pants and shuffled off, leaving me there naked. I gathered up my clothes and finished my shift.
From that point on, whenever I had a night shift, we would meet up in the exercise room and have awkward, half-clothed sex. We rarely spoke and when my shift was over I would walk home in the dim morning light wondering if it hadn’t been a dream.
This pattern continued for perhaps two months and then she stopped meeting me. I tried to catch her eye in the cafeteria during the day but she wouldn’t even look my way. I was sad and a little heartbroken, but took it in stride. I was beginning to notice a pattern in my relationships with older women, or so I thought.
Elsa and I hadn’t spoken or made eye contact in over a month when she approached me in the hallway and shoved another folded-up paper towel into my hand. This time she stayed there and waited for me to read it.
It said “pregnancy test.”
“You took one?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I need you to buy one,” she said. “Buy one for me.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“I need you to buy a test,” she said, “from a drugstore.”
“Okay…” I said.
I fretted over this for hours until my workday was done. Then I went to the pharmacy and picked out the simplest-looking test. I was mortified to be seen buying such an item. I looked over the directions and it explained that the woman had to pee onto a strip of paper. The paper would show one red line if she wasn’t pregnant and two if she was. What was it about pee that told you a woman was pregnant? I considered tampering with the test, peeing on the strip of paper myself so that the result would come out negative, but then I realized this wouldn’t actually change things. I wasn’t thinking rationally.
I returned to Riverwood and slipped the testing kit to Elsa. She thanked me and went on her way. I wanted to wait around for the result, but there was no good excuse for me being there after the end of my shift. So I went home and didn’t sleep at all.
The next day Elsa handed me the little plastic tube which held the all-powerful strip. I took it from her, trying to gauge the results by the look on her face. I couldn’t tell what was going on behind those pale eyes, though. I realized then, as I looked at her for an answer, that she really was crazy. By that I mean she wasn’t living in the same world as the rest of us. Something about her gaze suggested an irrational state of mind. And then, a minute later, I stood alone in an empty closet looking down at the strip of paper she had peed upon, and I saw the two red lines declaring she was pregnant with a child we had made together.
I was terrified. I ran out of the closet and searched the hallways for Elsa. That crazy woman! We were going to have a crazy child! A nutcase baby! She was gone though, and people were staring at me running around like that. I left work early, without telling anyone, and I considered never going back.
I returned to the hospital a few nights later though, and I had a talk with Elsa. She sat on the cement steps looking up at me with her wide, shaky eyes, smoking one cigarette after another.
“I don’t think you should smoke now,” I told her.
“It calms my nerves,” she said.
“It’s bad for the baby.”
“Babies don’t smoke,” she said, as if that somehow refuted the facts.
I asked her if she would consider having an abortion.
“No. Never,” she said.
I felt the blood rush from my head and had to sit down. I sat next to Elsa and put my head between my knees. I know they say it is a miracle, the act of creating life. I know they say it changes you forever, for the better, when you see your first child born into the world. But I felt only fear that night, fear and some kind of awful wrath unleashed upon me for the things I had done. I began to cry and Elsa rubbed my back with the heel of her hand. She hummed a song too, a strange song I’d never heard, and it made no sense at all.
I wondered when the doctors would know about this. I wondered when I would get fired and if what I’d done was against the law and if so would I be put in jail. Over the next few weeks, as I watched Elsa walk around, I was sure I could see her belly growing. Other people must be noticing, I thought. I moped along thinking, When, finally, is the shit going to hit the fan?
Turtleface and Beyond Page 5
