Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  “Okay, Mr. Tom,” Smitty said. He hobbled on his unsteady pegs out of Tom’s blurry field of vision. Out in the shaggy grass, Ingy pushed Dar in his wheelchair along in the haphazard echo of a cabbage moth’s flight path. They were enthralled with something unseen.

  In a moment, Ocean View’s back screen door squeaked open.

  Smitty dropped a bag on the table in front of Tom. Only it wasn’t Smitty. He scurried off to Ingrid and Dar. The hand which dropped the frozen veggies had long red fingernails. From behind Tom, Nurse Karen’s voice rose like the static on a badly-tuned television finally catching signal on its rabbit ears. “Fidela doesn’t have peas. Only French cut beans. What’sa matter, you and your tart have a fight?”

  She circled around into view and put her hands on her hip. Again today, as all days she visited the Ocean View house, Nurse Karen was dressed head to toe in white. Only her red lips, red nails and fake blonde hair wore colour. “And don’t gimme that look, you little piss ant. I know about you and your girl.”

  Tom only groaned. He reached for the beans and pressed them into his hip.

  “Those are coming out of your paycheque. Don’t think I’ll forget. Okay?” she said, turning to the big kids playing in the back lawn. “Enough about you. We’re having guests for dinner tonight. A new tenant. We just have to have him tested and make sure his family can afford us. You gonna be okay, kid?”

  “Yeah,” Tom grunted. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Good. We need you looking able and competent. That last part might be a challenge.”

  He ignored the dig. It was an art with Karen, just as much as it seemed an art for her to find the digs and make them. “Where we gonna put him? The new guest?”

  “Gonna re-jig things. Turn the dining room into a bedroom so the new girl can be on the main floor. She needs more care than the others,” Karen said, putting her hands up on her hips again and surveying the tall grass. “For a while, it was Zeke’s digs. He’s down in the basement now and we need to put that space to use if we’re going to make ends meet. Fucking B.S. from Roundtree. He called yesterday. He’s recommending a withdrawal of funding—”

  “Sorry,” Tom said, his breath still hitching.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Karen said. “Sorrys are good for one thing. Nothing. You know what I always say? I always tell Christopher, I always tell ‘im, ‘The world’s a shitty place. You gotta make your own way. No one else is going to make your bed for you.’ That’s what I say.”

  She turned and looked at the house now, as if sizing up where she could have Tom throw on a fresh coat of paint before dinner was served. “Well, back to work. Enough slacking. You can rest when you’re dead.”

  And with that, she trotted off and back through the kitchen door, leaving Tom to suffer in the shade with his freshly-purchased half pound of French cut beans melting on his hip.

  9

  Zeke burst up from the roiling shallow water. Blue specks floated in it like a galaxy of stars, but they were faded during daylight. Not the electric blue they were at night. He ejected hot water from his lungs first, coughing and wheezing it out until it turned to long, tendrils of mucous with blue-lit krill-critters trailing along in it. He turned to where Mary lay under the water and reached out to her.

  Before he could touch her, his stomach heaved. His diaphragm lurched. He pushed away from her, not wanting to vomit his badly coloured liquid into the pool near her. He was able to get most of it over the rocky side of the shallow pool. It bore an awful, wrenching force and the most awful sound. Some measure of pride followed because Mary didn’t see, smell or hear the nastiness.

  He hadn’t dreamed exactly, but there was now an image stuck in his repaired head. A series of them, really, that stood in stark contrast to the bright day around him. Green trees and brilliant blue sky versus the darkness and the enclosure of his images—

  A thought struck Zeke. He needed to check on Mary. He went back to where she lay motionless beneath the moving surface. Just a painting touched by the ripples he brought with him. He had no idea how long it would take for her first treatment. He reached out to her and felt the warm skin of her arm under the water. He rubbed her like one feels a rare penny he has just found in his pocket change. Then his fingers went to the Hawaii Five-O place on her throat.

  He fumbled when he couldn’t catch the throb in her throat. He thought he must have the wrong place. Despite his clarity of mind and ability to process the information, he was used to doubting himself. For most of his life, after all, he’d had a badly broken thinker. He was usually wrong about things and most people seemed gleeful to tell him of that.

  Still, Zeke couldn’t find Mary’s pulse.

  His own rose in a growing panic. The bubbling water had stopped its work. When he still couldn’t find the spot in her neck, he dove his arms into the shallow water. He scooped her up easily and pulled her from the water. She lay limp in his arms, no movement, no protest. Water dribbled from her lips. The tiny semi-transparent krill-critters were abundant on her shirt and her shorts. They were heavily collected at the hem of her shirt and down her legs. “No,” Zeke said. “No-no-no-nooo.”

  He shook her. But nothing changed. She lay in his arms.

  He sat her up and pressed wet thumbs to wet eyelids, propping them open. Nothing.

  Another episode of Hawaii Five-O showed a man resuscitating a woman who had fallen from a yacht. He had lain her back on the shoreline and breathed into her. Calling to mind this image from a show he’d seen a year ago, he got to his feet, still wobbly from a water coma that may have been four hours long. Other sunbathers may have come and gone without realizing he and Mary had been in suspended animation underneath the glass cage of the highest and least visible of the three pools.

  He stepped out of the shallow pool and down into the middle pool. He rushed through the water to the edge and then climbed out, his arms straining with the dead weight of Mary Smithson. He couldn’t drop her, wouldn’t drop her.

  He took at least a dozen paces to the grass and laid her down in it. And when he pressed his lips to hers, he breathed. A harsh gurgling sound started in her. Dark liquid bubbled up from her lips. It tasted awful and Zeke pulled back. More drained from her nose.

  But then her back arched. She started coughing and her eyes opened to the sky above and to Zeke. She couldn’t stop coughing and more of that dark goo came up and out of her, pouring down her shirt as she sat to regain herself.

  Finally, her coughing eased. It was Mary again. No smile, but a look of relief and confusion. Zeke threw his arms around her and she returned his hug.

  Zeke got up and looked again at the hot spring. Then at the sky. He called to mind those images he awoke with. His mind was clear and calculating, better than even the last time. The sun made it about noon. Zeke knew it. He knew so much now.

  And he knew he had to go to Tom.

  But first, he needed to visit his daddy’s acre... and get the axe.

  10

  Tom struggled to get his shirt on. Every movement was an excruciating bolt of pain. His pants had been murder. The golf shirt was less. He’d classify it as assault. He got it pulled over his head and when he popped his melon through the collar, there was Zeke, standing at the foot of his bed, the late-afternoon sun coming down the stairs, lighting the furnace room doorway and framing him in a brown-orange silhouette.

  He was holding an axe.

  Tom jumped and that sent a fresh shaft of pain rippling through his rump, up his back and down his leg. “Jeezuz, Zee!” he shouted, out of breath from the fright. “Damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  Zeke didn’t move. He said, “Did you know, Tom?”

  Tom fell back on his cot, the wind knocked clean out of him. Fresh sweat sprang out on his scalp. Given that Ocean View was having guests for dinner, he’d shaved and had a shower this afternoon, a rare occurrence for him the last few days.

  “Did I know what?” It was genuine confusion. Zeke took a step forward. He didn’t r
aise the axe like a murderer or anything. But he did hold it up, as if to show it to Tom. Tom’s heart started to hammer. What was going on here?

  “Did you know what Nurse Karen put in those pills she gives us?” Then he stepped out of silhouette. His face looked strained and red, damp with his own sweat. “They ain’t vitamins Tom. Did you know that?”

  Tom blew out a breath and ran his fingers through his hair, his go-to expression of either exasperation or nerves.

  “Course I knew. I mean, I was pretty sure. She sent me to buy them for her, remember that, champ?”

  “Don’t call me ‘champ’ no more, kay, Tom?”

  “Uh, okay. Zeke.”

  “You can call me Zed. Like Mary does. If you want.”

  “Alright. Zed. You like that nickname, huh? Why don’t we put down the axe? Are you staying for supper? We’re having a guest. A new tenant at Ocean View.” Tom was babbling again.

  “So you knew? About the vitamins?” He was pressing. This was new.

  “Well, sure. You don’t go to that part of town and pay cash for vitamins from a guy, out his back door, smoking whatever he was smoking. Those are never vitamins.” He was talking in a way he knew Zeke wouldn’t understand. But he didn’t know that Zeke did understand him. Every word.

  Zeke leaned forward. He lay the axe on the old, chipped dresser that Tom had kept his clothes in this summer. In the light of Tom’s bedside lamp, the axe looked old and rusted. The paint was nearly worn off its handle and the wood showing beneath was grey and wide-grained. It was the one Zeke had found on the chopping block in the back acre of his Daddy’s property. He and Mary had gone to get it before returning home to Ocean View after their treatment at the hot spring today.

  “Why’s she giving Mary more than me?” Zeke said.

  “M-more vitamins? I-I really don’t know that part, pal, champ, I mean, Zed,” Tom said, his voice filled with an uncharacteristic stammer. Nurse Karen often threw that term around, lucid, like she was some kind of expert on dementia, like she had any right to wear doctors’ whites at all. But that’s just what Zeke was now. Normally withdrawn, normally shy and tough to get a read on, you had to tell him something three or four times for it to stick. And, even then, he might forget it twenty minutes on. But now, he was lucid. His eyes were clear and his speech was nearly impeccable—for him, at least.

  “Look me in the eyes,” Zeke said, leaning further into Tom below him on his unmade bed. “Look in them and tell me you’re not holdin anything back.”

  Tom shrugged. He had always been an earnest lad. Truth told, Zeke had liked him from the start—for that and a lot of reasons. “I really am,” Tom said. “Telling you the honest truth, I mean. I really don’t know anything more than that. The vitamins—they’re some kind of benzodiazepine. They call em submarines—subs—on the street. When I got back from the mainland, from buying the last load, I looked them up in the library... but they either don’t officially exist or they’re a hybrid. A special sauce of some kind. They’re probably hand-made. Each one is a bit different and so they’re inconsistent. Karen gets ‘em dirt cheap. And I think she uses them to keep you guys... easy.”

  He looked past Zeke, as if to confirm Zeke was alone. “Mary has so much energy. And you know how Karen hates noise. Hates it. And she got pissed off when Roundtree was here, you remember, from the agency? Mary was so loud. I think Nurse Karen might have gotten a bug in her hat about keeping Mary... I dunno... in her place. She’s vindictive like that.”

  Tom was babbling again. He knew Zeke would only get about ten percent of what he was saying. But you don’t get a crazy guy, dumped in a care home for the protection of himself and others, coming in to ask you these questions with a rusted axe every day, now do you?

  It’s bound to make anyone a bit jumpy.

  11

  After sitting down on his own cot and contemplating in silence for a good number of minutes, Zeke finally spoke up. He considered Tom’s words. Tom eyed him, no longer nervous about the axe, but still ready to explain what he could. Zeke seemed to get more of it than Tom expected. It was taking him some time, but not nearly as much as it usually did.

  “Why’d you do it?” Zeke asked him.

  “Do what?” Tom said.

  “Why’d you give us all the vitamins? You put them in our cubbies every week.”

  “Uh-huh, I do,” Tom said. “But, honestly, Zeke, what else am I gonna do? This is Nurse Karen’s house. Chris’s too. She’s my boss. She hired me to do a job, right?”

  “Right,” Zeke said slowly, letting it sink in. He thought it over.

  “What if you were told to go pick flowers instead of just trash at your job—?”

  “But flowers are pretty,” Zeke said. “People like ‘em where they are. A lot. They’s in pots and troughs and along the road in town. They make the town look real nice.”

  “Right,” Tom said. “But what if your boss told you to do it?”

  Again, Zeke hesitated. “I guess I’d do it,” he finally said, with grudging admission.

  “That’s where I’m at, champ,” Tom said, though it suddenly didn’t feel right to use the diminutive pet name he usually used with the guests. Somehow, right now, after Zeke marched in on him with that rusted old axe, it didn’t seem the right way to talk to him. And Zeke was so lucid today. Again, Karen’s word. Tom had a flash of a thought. What if Zeke wasn’t nearly as problematic as everyone thought? What if he wasn’t nearly as dumb as everyone thought either?

  And what if the submarine vitamins were not only keeping him and the rest docile, but also dumb and forgetful?

  He pushed that out of his head. Zeke was looking at him like he was from another planet.

  “Zeke, buddy?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Did you have your vitamins today?”

  “Yup.”

  Tom didn’t believe him but he didn’t press it. “Listen, champ, we’re going to be late for dinner. Nurse Karen is having guests. We’re supposed to dress nice. You gonna wash up?”

  Zeke didn’t answer. Tom was used to this. He’d learned patience this summer. Or some measure of it.

  “I don’t want to go to supper time,” he said. “I don’t want to see Nurse Karen.”

  “Zeke? Did Karen do something?”

  “Yeah. I can see it in my head. Since the hot pool, I see it all again.”

  “Did she do this thing to you today?”

  “No.”

  “Recently?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It wasn’t... done to me.”

  “What did she do, bud?”

  “I can’t use the right words.”

  “Can you try?”

  Zeke let out an exhausted breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I can try.”

  And so he did. And the two men were late for Nurse Karen’s important dinner.

  12

  I seen her, Tom. I remember it as plain as day—even though it was the middle of the night. She made me take my truck—I’d just washed my truck—and I had to take it to Nurse Karen and Mr. Chris’s house. They live in a big house on the avenue, bigger than Ocean View, you know. They’s only about two minutes’ drive from here. She had the neatest old bed and she asked me to move the old bed. I needed to take the old bed from Nurse Karen and Mr. Chris’s basement, up the stairs and put it in the back of my truck. I was awful careful, Tom. I didn’t want to scratch my truck. I love my truck.

  I did what she wanted but she yelled. It was hard to do. It was dark out. Nighttime makes it dark out and Nurse Karen said we had to be more quiet. I couldn’t be more quiet. It was heavy and I lifted it all myself. I had to get the bed into the truck without using lights neither.

  It was weird, Tom. She gave me three of those... submarine vitamins. She said I needed all my muscles and the vitamins would help give me muscles just like Popeye the sailor man. Only that wasn’t quite right cuz Popeye the sailor man, he gets his super big muscles when he
eats a can of that yucky spinach. I tried eating that awful spinach one time when I was a boy, and I made a puky mess. I didn’t get no big super muscles. And I didn’t get them that night with Nurse Karen either after I had them extra vitamins. I just got sleepy.

  But I did what Nurse Karen asked me to do. I didn’t fuss and I didn’t backtalk even though she was yelling and worried. My daddy always said I had a problem with backtalk but I’ve learned that if I’m not sure if I have backtalk coming, I should just keep quiet and not say anything to anyone.

  I drove the bed in the back of my truck up north of town to those new places. You know them places? They’s new bungalows north of the bridge. They was gonna build a hundred new places all the same for all the workers at the mine... oh... about fifteen years back. But the workers never came and the mine went into, what do they call it, a shutdown.

  So Karen and Mr. Chris, I think they must own one of those houses because we went right up to one. Just like the house on the avenue, this one was all dark. No lights on and it was hard to find the lane and not hit the trees and the big rocks. We had flashers. You know, torches with batt’ries in em.

  I hurt my back getting the big old bed into the house. And I did scratch my truck. It made me mad. She yelled at me more.

  We put the bed into the big empty room at the back—all the rooms were empty, except in the living room. There was some of them big steel filing cabinets. But there wasn’t even a table or chairs in the kitchen. No couch and no TV anywheres neither.

  So then we and Nurse Karen, we got back in my truck and we drove in the dark again, all the way back home. Her home, I mean. On the avenue.

  And she told me to wait. I waited for an awful long time. I was getting sleepy. But I kept myself awake. Nurse Karen told me to wait and I did.