And do we ever really know where we stand? At this moment, in this breath—which way the scale tips?
Square your debt. Start over fresh.
The whale surfaces. Mouth slightly open, light glinting on the points of her teeth. You’re breathing heavily, held up by pure adrenaline. Run a hand over the smooth cone of her snout. She gurgles low in her throat, angling her head to expose the soft seam of her mouth. Stare into that huge black eye, search for some sign of recognition.
“I’m tired, girl.” You slap her tongue. “So let’s do this thing.”
Taking your signal, Niska moves out into open water. She describes a quickening path around the pool, past the handicapped pavilion where, some million years ago, a young girl with an inscrutable smile watched you rocket into blue summer sky. Niska’s dorsal fin dips below the surface. Give yourself over to the current, its power and possibilities. A locking sensation, all things in balance. Moon an unblinking eye and beyond it a million stars, around which revolve untold worlds.
Water surges beneath you, a thrilling push. Tiny bubbles trail to the surface, bursting with a fizzy club-soda pop. You hear yourself say, “I’m so sorry,” though to whom or for what reasons you will remain forever unsure.
ON SLEEPLESS ROADS
GRAHAM LOVED THE WAY his wife moved. While out walking he used to fall a half-step behind, just to watch. Her hips—but more than that. Legs, arms, the faint bob of her head. The way it all came together, the way it meshed. She loved to dance with her long black hair tied up on top of her head. She wore a moonstone on a leather thong that glimmered in the soft swell of her throat when the light from a mirror ball caught it. Seeing her like that, a snatch of song always came to him: My girl don’t just walk, she unfurls. The photos Graham kept in his dresser gave a sense—weightless, beyond gravity—but didn’t do justice to the way she once moved.
She didn’t move that way anymore. Her limbs jerked erratically or not at all. Her body shook, an abiding shiver. Bradykinesia, the doctors called it, caused by a lack of dopamine in the brain. She’d lost all sense of equilibrium: when she fell she did so heedlessly, the way a chest of drawers pushed from a second-story balcony falls. Pills with names like Sinemet and Comtan and Requip. Sometimes she didn’t take them. At first it was an act of defiance: she’d sit in a kitchen chair facing the wall, fingers white around the armrests, teeth clenched and muscles bunched along her jaw. Now it was an act of exploration: she wanted to see how strong the disease was, sense its power, her own powerlessness against it.
“Like slowly going blind,” she once said. “Better to be born that way, don’t you think?”
When things got really bad Graham held her down. Her wrists escaped the gentle manacles of his fingers, fists striking his chest with a resonant thump. Her body held a mindless strength: as though he were grappling with a possessed bundle of sticks, those brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Only her steady gaze, those blue eyes darkened indigo by the drugs, expressed understanding. He’d jam a leg between hers, thigh pressing her hips. At these times he’d recall those days when she’d visited his bachelor apartment—TV on a milk crate, cinderblock bookshelves—making out on his sagging futon, his leg between hers and the friction of denim on denim, eyes half-closed and her voice whispering, Yes, like that. Just … like … that. He’d look down at her body, her now-body, the flailing limbs and skeletal rattle of her teeth and yet always those eyes, that calm indigo gaze.
“I’m heading out, Nell.”
She was sitting in a recliner beside the television tuned to an old episode of The Beachcombers. A book lay open on her lap. She tried to turn the page. Soon Graham turned it for her.
“You’re not watching this?”
“S-suh-seen it a-ah-already,” Nell said. “Relic steals Nick’s l-l-logs in t-thuh-this one.”
“Relic’s always stealing Nick’s logs. Turn it off?”
“It’s uh-o-okay. Something to luh-luh-listen to.”
A sheen of sweat on her face, glittering her skin like frost in moonlight. She was always sweating: the drugs, mainly, and her body never truly at rest. Still gorgeous. She’d never lose that. When Graham first saw her, the words Nordic beauty came to mind: those blue eyes and high cheekbones. He’d pictured her face framed by a white fur hood, a range of snow-topped mountains rising in the distance.
Graham set The Plunger on the hassock beside her recliner. He’d bought it—a saucer-sized disk connected to a phone line running to a jack in the wall—at a medical supply store. When pushed, it automatically dialed 911 to dispatch paramedics. They didn’t have the savings to hire a private nurse while he worked. So … The Plunger.
Graham kissed his wife. The warmth of her lips, that faint tremble. He checked his watch: 11:00. Night pressed to the living room window and beyond that a few stars, very faint, very beautiful.
“See you in the morning.”
“B-buh-be c-caref-ful.”
The clean raw air of the late October night left a taste of winter at the back of Graham’s throat. Snow fell through the arc-sodium glow of a nearby streetlamp, flakes touching his hair and melting in streams down his neck. He opened the door of a ’95 Freightliner tow truck— the words Repo Depot stenciled in blue above the fender—keyed the ignition, and pulled out onto the street.
He worked at night. Safer that way. As a rule, people didn’t react favorably to having their possessions spirited away—their ugly sides tended to present themselves. Graham worked while the city slept. Ninety-five percent of the time, he avoided confrontation.
The remaining five percent … those were interesting times.
He’d been slapped, punched, kicked, stabbed, smacked on the head with a blackthorn shillelagh. A .22 round lodged behind his left kneecap, a .40-caliber round stuck in his clavicle, ass and thighs pocked with rock-salt scars. He’d been bitten: dogs mostly, though once by an incensed deadbeat. In the late ’70s he repo’d a tractor left overnight in a fallow field. At the first rumble of that Cummins diesel engine the farmhouse lights snapped on. Moments later the screen door banged open and the entire family was racing at him like the hammers of hell. A man, a woman, two kids dressed in sleeping flannels. They carried shovels and mattocks and pitchforks; the woman hefted a wheat scythe that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Grim Reaper’s skeletal hands. As he worked the clutch feverishly, Graham had a dim inkling of how Frankenstein’s monster must’ve felt, hounded by maddened villagers. The man hurled the pitchfork. A tine punched through the heel of Graham’s boot, severing some muscles and nerves. His limp was faint, but noticeable. Not bad for twenty-five years on smash-and-grab duty. A lot of repo men had caught worse.
He drove through the city’s industrial outskirts, past oil refineries surrounded by razor-wire fences and lit by a stargazer’s constellation of halogen bulbs. He merged with the Trans-Canada Highway, hooking around the city’s northern flank. Flat frost-white fields, fences, barns, the knuckled swells and dark contours of the distant hills beyond. Some feral creature—a coyote possibly, maybe a wolverine—slunk across the frozen fields. The Freightliner’s 8.8-liter diesel engine sent a steady vibration through the cab. Johnny Cash sang about Fulsom Prison blues. Cattle asleep in the pastures, plumes of steam puffing from their nostrils. A low autumn moon cast a burnt orange glow over oak and birch.
Any thrill associated with his profession had long since worn off. It was different when he was young. Back then, he had it down to a cold science: five seconds to slide a slimjim between the driver’s-side window and rubber lip, another five to pop the lock; thirty seconds to get at the ignition switch—he wore motorcycle boots with steel heels: one deft kick and the assembly snapped right off—another ten to jam a Phillips screwdriver down the ignition collar. In less than a minute any car in the city was his.
The tally of his repossessions over the years was impressive. ’82 Lamborghini Countache, midnight black, sticker price a quarter-mil. Vintage ’57 Chevy, candy-apple red with lozenge headli
ghts, glasspack muffler, Great White tailfins. Many years ago, when they were dating, Graham flew Nell to Cape Cod to repossess a houseboat. They sailed it down through Bridgeport to New York, where Graham returned it to the dealership. Not just vehicles: coin collections and silverware, Royal Doulton figurines, a nineteenth-century Japanese musket. He’d shimmied up a rusted drainpipe to snare an antique weather vane in the shape of a codfish, hotwired a ’77 Harley Softtail in the parking lot of a biker bar, squeezed through a half-opened window to reclaim a funerary urn.
For a few soul-deadening months he’d repossessed medical equipment: electric wheelchairs and cases of dialysis mixture and sphygmomanometers. He even nicked some poor soul’s prosthetic arm. Nell was in and out of the hospital those days. The initial diagnosis was brain parasites: they were eating the lining of her brain so it pulled away from the inside of her skull, causing seizures. Graham suffered terrible nightmares: he found himself inside Nell’s head, shrunk to microscopic size on the teeming surface of a brain eaten away to the size of a chimpanzee’s by parasites—eight-legged tick-looking creatures with needlish mouths—and Graham powerless to stop them (this was better than the dream in which he himself was a parasite feasting on the jelly of his wife’s brain). The tests weren’t covered under their health plan, so Graham was forced into the ghoulish line of work to clear a few extra bucks. As soon as Nell was diagnosed with Bradykinesia, he begged off the assignment.
THE HOUSE WAS A DILAPIDATED BUNGALOW with an eccentric roofline, chipped marigold siding, front yard strewn with unraked leaves. The wooded cul-de-sac was located in a quiet neighborhood in the city’s north end. In the bordering yards, the outlines of bikes and skateboards could be seen under a powdery dusting of evening snow.
Graham backed up the narrow drive and killed the engine. He double-checked the reclamation papers, dimmed the domelight, grabbed his toolbox, and swung down from the cab.
The truck was a Dodge Ram dually, V-10 engine, chrome running boards and rollbar. Graham fished a set of keys from his pocket—no need for slimjims or coathangers these days; dealers kept key-casts for every vehicle sold—and unlocked the driver’s door. The steering wheel was bolted with a red Club lock. Graham rooted through the toolbox for the canister of Freon. He sprayed the assembly, enjoying the sound it made: rapidly freezing water. Frozen metal shattered with the tap of a hammer. After checking the VIN number on the dash, Graham keyed the ignition—a brief blast of Dwight Yoakam’s “Takes a Lot to Rock You” before he found the stereo’s volume knob—and, dropping into neutral, rolled the truck down the driveway until its rear wheels were set in the tow jack’s sling.
He’d nearly secured chains around the rear axle when a man stepped out the front door. The porch light was off and he moved silently, materializing from the spiderweb of shadows thrown by a leafless maple tree.
“What are you doing?” he said. “You’re … you’re thiefing my truck.”
Graham bent over his toolbox, grabbing the second canister he always carried: mace. Sometimes it was the calmest ones who ended up causing the most grief. He looked the guy over: short and thin with the sort of engorged belly Graham associated with starving Ethiopians, wearing a pair of camouflage pants and a T-shirt the vague color of boiled liver. His whole body was canted awkwardly to one side: right shoulder sagging, left shoulder hiked nearly level with his ear, the odd plane recalling a teeter-totter.
“I’m not stealing anything, and I’m sure you know that, Mister”— a quick glance at the reclamation papers—“Henreid. Do this quiet as I can, try not to wake the neighbors, okay?”
Henreid stood on the unkempt lawn, a sullen grimace stamped on his face. It never ceased to amaze Graham how people reacted: as though he were an agent of a shadowy agency whose heinous modus operandi was to bring misery upon hard-working, law-abiding, god-fearing folk. Surely Henreid knew this day was coming, unless he’d ignored the threatening letters and phone calls. He’d likely been expecting this for a while, but, true to the nature of such people, had hoped, with the unwarranted anticipation of a death-row inmate, to receive divine reprieve in the form of a bank error in his favor, an unexpected windfall bequeathed by a dead aunt, a butter-fingered clerk slopping coffee on his payment records, absolving all debt and responsibility.
“I’m only a month or so behind. Can’t you let it slide? I’m good for it.”
“I got no say in the matter. Sorry.”
Henreid disappeared inside. Graham crawled under the truck chassis, doubled the chain around the axle, clipped it to the sling. While he worked the winch motor, lifting the Dodge’s two-ton frame off its back wheels, Henreid reappeared with a child.
“Say hello to the nice man, Charity.”
The girl was dressed in a blowsy violet nightgown, protuberant belly swelling the fabric, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She looked at Graham and smiled, maybe because a child’s natural instinct was to do so, maybe at her father’s coaching. Her teeth were in awful condition: jagged and bucked, lapping one another like the shingles on a shaker roof. She was the kind of woebegone child one couldn’t help but forecast a grim future for—eating lunch on the schoolyard’s fringe, dateless on prom night—a girl earmarked for a lifetime of bitter experience, the inescapability of which enveloped her in a diffuse aura of melancholy.
“He’s taking away Daddy’s truck,” Henreid went on. “Now Daddy won’t be able to drive you to school, or … to the ice cream parlor.”
“The city’s got a great school-bus system, sweetheart,” Graham said to Charity. “And it’s better to walk to the ice cream shop. Good exercise.”
The girl’s eyes held a faintly panicked cast, likely for no other reason than her father had woken her in the dead of night to converse with a burly stranger. Her arms found their way around Henreid’s waist, head burying into his paunch.
“I know, sweetie, I know,” Henreid said. “Maybe if you ask the man, ask him reeeal nice, he’ll let Daddy keep his truck.”
“I can’t do that, Charity.” Graham’s eyes were fixed on Henreid. “You might want to ask your Daddy why he’s driving such a spiffy truck when he could spend a few bucks to put some braces in your pretty mouth.”
“Hey, don’t you talk that way—got no damn right!”
Graham raised his hands in the manner of a surrendering PoW. “You’re the boss. Come up with the truant payments, your truck’s back at the dealership.”
He stepped up into the tow truck’s cab. The engine caught with a full-bodied rumble, the diesel’s tik-tik-tik breaching the dark silence. Graham pulled out onto the street. Henreid and his daughter dwindled to morose specks in the rearview.
THE SNOW LET UP, leaving the streets slick with a brilliantine shine. Graham drove through quiet neighborhoods, postwar Normandy houses banded by hawthorn hedgerows interspersed with modern flatroofed structures that stuck out, as Nell might say, like cocktail olives on an ice cream sundae. In the early morning hours the streets seemed remote and unreal, a dreamscape envisioned by someone of limited imagination. The only sign of human life glimpsed through the windows of all-night diners and coffee shops, a rogue’s gallery of sunken-eyed loners and insomniacs, men and women who’d reached the end of their tether and hadn’t quite realized it.
The first time Graham noticed his wife shaking, they were dining at an Italian restaurant. Waiting for their meal to arrive, Graham heard a sly tinkling: his wife’s hand trembled atop her cutlery, knife fork spoon arrayed neatly upon a white tablecloth.
“Honey, you’re shivering.”
Nell glanced at her hand, flattened her palm to the table. “Drafty in here.”
Graham agreed it was. A few minutes later, her hand shook again. Nell jammed it between her legs and pressed her thighs together. When the food arrived, she couldn’t hold her fork. In desperation she clutched it in her fist, the way a child might. She set it down with a clatter and ran a hand through her hair, that hand quaking badly, laughing, saying, “Silly, silly, silly,” under her breat
h.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes, fine. Just … stress. Work’s been hectic. It’s so damn cold in here.”
Graham placed a hand on Nell’s arm. Her body vibrated faintly, a deep-seated tremor originating at the very heart of her. Graham’s childhood home had been within earshot of a busy railyard. As a precaution, his father taught him to place his hand on the tracks before crossing: if the track trembled, it meant a train was near. That’s how Nell’s arm felt: a section of track trembling before an approaching locomotive.
“We should go home.”
“I’m okay.” She smiled, then lowered her eyes, as though embarrassed. In that moment, Graham knew she’d suffered with this for some time—a few days, a week, a month?—without telling him. Tough, proud, foolhardy woman. “Finish your dinner, Graham. It’s getting cold.”
The Dodge dealership hung suspended in a wash of halogen light. Showroom garlanded with plastic flags the shape of baseball pennants, fluttering faintly in the night wind. Two prices soaped on the windows of cars and trucks, a slash run through the higher one, suggesting the salesman, in a fit of improvident and potentially bankrupting bonhomie, had elected to cut his customers a rare deal.
Graham unlocked the impound lot’s gate and nosed the Freightliner through, parking Henreid’s truck between a Ford Bronco and a Jeep Cherokee. He dropped the keys in the nightbox. The next job was on the other side of town. A mobile home. He poured a cup of Nutrasweet-laced coffee from a silver thermos and set off southwards.
After Nell was diagnosed with Bradykinesia, their relationship changed. A distance developed between them, expressing itself in small ways. They didn’t touch one another as much, where before they always squeezed shoulders, patted bottoms, held hands. Graham knew this was because Nell didn’t want him to feel her shaking; after one particularly ugly argument, he’d entered into unwilling accord. They passed hours together in silence, where before they’d discussed every daily triviality—again, this was at Nell’s instigation, as she was self-conscious of her worsening stutter.
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