Black Eyed Susan

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  indigo

  (adj)

  Definition:

  1. a blue dye made from a tropical plant of the pea family

  2. of deep purplish-blue color.

  My definition:

  1. the sensation I get when I hear ABBA.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After breakfast the next morning, we packed up and left the hotel wearing our modern street clothes. Calliope asked to borrow my white J. Crew shirt, and as I took in the sight of her, I realized the further we got from Vegas, the less she looked like her other self. Her hair was a bit smarter, her shirts were a bit bigger, and decent jeans replaced stretchy miniskirts.

  When I glanced at Will’s bag, I noticed something sticking out of one of his books and I picked it up.

  So Will’s father was not alive and well. And he’d died only two days before we’d shown up in Wendover. Obscuring Will’s view with Calliope’s bag, I quickly read what I’d found. I recognized the quote. It was John F. Kennedy’s response to an inquiry about how he became a hero. Its presence on the funeral program was no doubt a tribute to Will’s father’s love of history and his obvious sense of humor. On the back was a self-written obituary, which must have been prepared ahead of time by Michael Hudson himself.

  I’d been so consumed by my own grief that I’d overlooked Will’s. No wonder he’d been drunk and depressed when we met him. He’d watched his father die, and, to help make ends meet, had been masquerading as a knight.

  “Hurry up, Suze,” Will hollered.

  When I got into the front seat, I tried hard not to let on about what I’d seen, but I wanted to comfort him.

  Will looked at me and touched my cheek. “Everything all right?”

  I leaned over. After I kissed him long and hard, he laughed and said, “So I got that going for me.” He stared at me. “What I’d do? Because whatever it is, I can do it again.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just took his hand in mine. “Gonna drive this thing, or what?”

  Calliope was ready to resume our game, and desperate for a change in mood, and so was I. “Okay, Leo, are you ready to get this party started?”

  While Leo rubbed his hands together in anticipation, I noticed he was peacefully coexisting with Eternity, who was snuggling up to me. And though Leo wasn’t asking to hold him, he also wasn’t freaking out.

  “Okay, radio waves, tell us where we’re headed,” I said with the atlas on my lap. I immediately recognized Sly and the Family Stone’s classic. “‘Everyday People,’” I said with confidence, because I already knew where we were going.

  “Piece of cake. We’re all everyday people, right?” I picked up the atlas and pointed to an upcoming town on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, which was also the direction I needed to go. “Hudson, Wisconsin. For Will!”

  Leo challenged me. “But look, there’s a Susanville, California. How do you know we’re not supposed to go there instead? For you!”

  I wanted to say, “Because I can’t help myself, I’m in dire need of a New York shaman, little man,” but I just frowned. Damn it, Leo was unconsciously ruining my plans.

  “Yeah, are you trying to say I’m more ‘everyday’ than you, darlin’?” Will asked with a smile.

  Coming to my rescue, Calliope leaned forward from the backseat, grabbed the map, and looked to see where Hudson was, as if she had a plan of her own. “Nonsense, you two. It’s the most obvious connection.” She pointed to her heart. “You’ve got to really feel what the lyrics are steering you toward.”

  Wow, she was really full of shit. What was she up to?

  “No problem, it’s your game,” Leo said. “Hudson it is.”

  We’d been driving for an hour and a half, and looking for warmth, I stroked Eternity’s head. He’d fallen asleep next to me a while ago, and I wondered if dogs could dream. But before I even had a chance to bring up the topic of dreaming dogs, Eternity sputtered out three labored breaths, followed by a long sigh, and died on my lap.

  “Guys?”

  Everyone ignored me and sang along with the radio.

  “Guys!”

  Instantly, Eternity seemed colder, like his lifeless body was already adjusting to the temperature of the air. Will looked over to see breathless Eternity, eyes shut, in my arms.

  From the backseat, Leo confessed, “I should’ve been nicer to him.”

  “Nonsense, Leo,” I said. “Eternity died here with people who loved him, instead of dying in a lonely cage.”

  As soon as I said it, Calliope, who was usually calm in her muse-like way, began to bawl like a toddler.

  “Shit,” Will said, acknowledging the tension. “Don’t panic. Hudson’s the next exit. We’ll give him a proper burial.”

  I didn’t want to alarm anyone, but he was starting to stiffen and it was creeping me out, so I grabbed a blanket and swaddled him in it. I knew what was happening under that blanket. It was the end of all life processes. Individual cells were still living—they would be for several minutes—but in about three minutes, the brain cells would begin to die and he would be undeniably dead. The last things to die would be the bone, hair, and skin cells, which would keep growing for several hours.

  Note to self: Get hair trimmed before dying.

  We took the next exit to Hudson, and when Will said, “We’re here,” none of us answered. For obvious reasons, the mood was quiet and melancholic. We passed a small sign announcing “Hudson, Wisconsin: Pop. 15,763,” and Will turned onto River Ridge Avenue, a tree-lined road that followed every meandering bend in the St. Croix River, which flowed right through the middle of the city. We passed a marina, a historical museum, and a riverfront park—all snuggled safely among the lush and scenic pines of the St. Croix River Valley.

  As our doggy hearse carried the expired Eternity through such a verdant, flourishing environment, it seemed bad-mannered to enjoy the beauty of the scenery, but the river, a tributary of the Mississippi (according to several signs), was so breathtaking. All signs of city life disappeared, and I almost imagined a carefree Huck Finn running between the trees.

  But then, as it often does, death reminded me not to get too cozy with the life abounding around us. As we passed the Hudson Dinner Theatre, the sign advertised the current production: “The Cemetery Club: A Comedy about Three Grieving Widows.” Sounded hilarious. And if that wasn’t enough of a somber reminder, the significance of “St. Croix” hit me. I didn’t need to consult my Truck Driver’s French Dictionary to know that “Croix” was French for “cross,” and as Will slowed the car, I realized there would be no time to repent for my whole lifetime of sins and regrets.

  Will turned onto a small gravel road that led us to the outskirts of town, and when he came to a turnout at the beginning of prairie land, he said, “This is pretty. Let’s do it here.”

  Trying to be a good leader in tough times, I rallied the troops. “Okay, Will, prepare a few words. Cal, make him look nice. And Leo, you just try to look sad.”

  It’s a good thing Wisconsin’s soil is rich and fertile. It made it easier for me to dig a hole with a fork. It’s the only digging tool I could find in the glove box (we could hardly ask a nearby lumberjack for a shovel to bury a dead dachshund on his property). As I dug, Calliope took Eternity to the back of the hearse for a makeshift makeover, and a sober Will stared off into the horizon, composing a canine eulogy.

  When Calliope was finished, I saw her rummage through my bag.

  “Need something, Cal?” I asked.

  She was up to something. “Nah, just thought I put my lipstick in your bag—my mistake.”

  “Okay, bring him over,” Will said, now standing in front of Eternity’s final resting place between two rows of shoulder-high corn stalks. Calliope leaned into the front seat of the car for a moment, opened all the car doors, and delivered the star of the show. By the time she got to us, I realized what she’d been doing.

  “You mentioned that you had the tape in your bag—the one you used to listen to as a girl—and it
seems … right.”

  The ceremony had officially begun. A familiar song, the soundtrack for our impromptu funeral, drifted out of the car.

  “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

  And what’s on the other side?”

  I looked into the Wisconsin sky, hoping to see a rainbow, the symbolic bridge between earth and heaven, but there were only clouds.

  Calliope had used part of an old box she’d found in the back to make a little sign, and she placed it in the ground. In thick lipstick letters it read, “Here lies Eternity, the best pet I ever had.” Then she gently lowered Eternity into his shallow grave. Will and I glanced at each other when we saw Eternity’s unique appearance.

  Calliope was defensive. “It’s all I had.”

  In all my life, I had never seen a dog in a tube top. With Cal’s favorite tube top stretched twice around his little torso and his fur shiny with some sort of hair product, he looked as handsome as a dead dog could.

  “Let’s bow our heads,” I said. “Will, don’t you have something you’d like to say?”

  He did. When Will looked down at the ground, I noticed his eyes had no spark. “There are certain souls you meet in your life who are there to guide you, teach you, even when the lessons aren’t ones you want to learn.

  “This soul,” he said, putting his finger in the air, “was important to me.” Will’s eyes moistened just enough for the daylight to catch it, and Leo, Calliope, and I looked at each other, wondering if we should continue for him. But what they didn’t know was that he had not yet said goodbye—not the kind of goodbye that allows you to move on.

  Will stared at Eternity’s grave, and I could tell there was a part of him that wanted to bring him back to life, and another part of him that wanted him to rest in peace. “To keep you here would be selfish, because you’ve given me what you can. Everything I know about life, about humanity, I learned from you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, staring at the ground. “For everything.” And then, from memory, he recited the final lines of a poem I hadn’t heard for a long time:

  “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

  Time held me green and dying

  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  After a moment of silence, we all raised our heads, and I looked at the faces surrounding me. Dylan Thomas was right. All of us were simultaneously alive and dying. From the second we’re born, we begin to die. But if we’re smart, we focus on the living part, and fight the death lurking in the shadows with any amount of hope we can muster.

  But hope doesn’t always show up when you need it.

  Right then, the clouds burst, raining down on us all the sorrow that had been building for miles. As raindrops soaked Calliope’s sign, the words slowly began to bleed down the cardboard, and the memory of Eternity began to fade, too.

  Will saluted Eternity, and said, “Onto every sunny dog day, a little rain must fall. Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” Something about the simplicity of the message made me choke up, but I didn’t let anyone see.

  After all, it was just a dog.

  While I contained my emotions, Kermit sang on.

  “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,

  The lovers, the dreamers, and me.”

  Will covered Eternity’s grave with fresh earth and placed random field rocks in a circle around the grave until he ran out, leaving a small patch of the circle empty.

  And just as I was left wondering if Eternity was a lover or a dreamer, his story ended.

  “Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,

  And rainbows have nothing to hide.”

  I had something to hide. And I was doing a fine job of hiding it until I looked up and saw the purest act of destiny to date: Hope announced itself in the form of a rainbow in the Wisconsin sky. Thank God it had been raining, because my tears and the raindrops could merge, an invisible marriage of pride and grief, and no one would know.

  “Done?” I said, looking at Will.

  “Done.”

  We all began to walk back to the car, Will following, leaving a little piece of himself in the town that shared his name.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Can you put me back together?” Leo sat in the backseat next to Calliope, holding a small button that had fallen off his shirt.

  Calliope pointed to the glove box in front of me. “There’s a mini-sewing kit in there, Suze.”

  I took it out while Will drove us southeast on I-80 through the heart of Illinois.

  “I’m really good at this,” Calliope said while she waited for me to give the kit to her. “My buttons used to pop off all the time.”

  I retrieved a small spool of thread from the tiny plastic box and said I could help Leo just fine.

  “Whoa, Suze. Hand it over,” said Calliope, leaning forward, smiling, and winking. “I make a better Clotho than you.”

  Once again, Calliope the muse was trying to convince me of fate’s existence.

  “Who’s Clotho?” Leo said.

  “Infamous dog killer?” Will said.

  I turned around to explain to Leo. “In Greek mythology,” I said, “Clotho was one of the Three Fates—they were in charge of men’s destiny.”

  I remembered the painting from art history class—Goya’s Atropos. In the picture, I explained, three women, the Three Fates, hovered in the air draped in old world robes. On the left was Clotho, who held a spindle of thread. In the middle was Lachesis, who carried a rod. The last one was Atropos, who held a tablet. A fourth mysterious person lingered in the background, awaiting his fate.

  Just then, Will groaned, “Suddenly everything makes sense.”

  As Calliope unraveled the thread, I continued, “Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis chose how long it would be, and Atropos …” I gasped for a breath, as deep as my sick lungs would allow. “Atropos was the most feared, because she cut the thread and wrote the person’s fate on a tablet.”

  Will alternately watched the road and glanced in the rearview mirror to see Calliope unleash thread.

  “Cut it right here, Suze,” Calliope said, pointing to the spot.

  I leaned into the backseat with the small plastic safety scissors and snipped.

  Calliope noticed my pensive look. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  I hesitated. What I was thinking would only make her think I was warming up to the naïve notion of destiny.

  “Nothing, really,” I stammered, but then Will answered for me.

  He gave me a look that only someone you’ve had sex with can give you—that look that says, “I know you, I’ve seen you naked, and I want to analyze you.”

  “Susan’s just had a revelation,” he said with confidence.

  “Oh, really? And what’s the revelation?” I said, turning toward him in the driver’s seat.

  He smiled. “She’s just surmised how we all fit into the Three Fates paradigm.” He looked back at Calliope. “Cal is Clotho, the spinner, the weaver,” he said, raising his finger in a dramatic sweep and continuing in a loud, projecting stage voice, “the storytelling muse, if you will.”

  “And tell me, O Wise One,” I said, “who are you?”

  “I am Lachesis.” He interrupted his dramatic flare with a “duh” under his breath. “I decide how long the metaphorical thread should be. I’m the measurer. I size people up.”

  Leo was now naked from the waist up while Calliope sewed the button back on his little person shirt. In mid-stitch, she stopped sewing, looking as if she’d just solved a riddle. “Ah … and Susan is Atropos! Her list is like Atropos’s tablet—her physical manifestation of destiny.”

  I wanted to say it was all hogwash, but Will was right. It was exactly what I was thinking. “What about Leo?” I balked, flashing an insincere pout. “Are you implying he doesn’t have a part in this storyline?”

  A half-naked and vulnerable Leo mumbled in a nervous tone, “I don’t want a part. I hate parts. I’m afraid of pa
rts.”

  “Au contraire,” Will interrupted, raising his right index finger for effect. “Leo not only has a part in this story, he is the story, the one whose fate will be delivered.” Will smiled at Calliope. “Start spinnin’, sweetheart.”

  A terrified look took over Leo’s sweet face. “Spinning what? Stop spinning, please. I thought I was in charge of my own destiny.”

  I turned around, grabbed Leo’s hand, and assured him, “You are, Leo. They’re just trying to rile you.”

  Will smirked, hand resting so loosely on the wheel it was as if the car was driving itself, and I knew what he was about to say was supposed to irritate me. “This is all part of the plan, Leo—you resist change, and are fearful of everything in your path. One day, one day soon, you’ll be shown a different path …”

  The combination of Calliope’s cherubic, supple cheeks and her determined, all-knowing stare made her look like a deranged angel when she spoke in her poetic cadence, “A path totally opposite from your usual, comfortable path, but it will be the key to your happiness, and you must take it. It will happen with a snap, a slap, or maybe a clap.”

  “Or when someone special gives you the clap,” Will said with one raised eyebrow.

  Calliope told me to turn the radio on. When we heard the Doors sing “People Are Strange,” Calliope said, “I have just the antidote to strangeness—look!” And she pointed to Normal, Illinois in the atlas. She took out some sort of brochure she must have gotten at our last gas stop, trying not to let us see, and glanced at it for a moment. “Perfect.”

  When we arrived in Normal, things were … weird.

  Calliope, portable muse, detour director extraordinaire, was up to something—again. I should’ve known how easily we came to Normal. She consulted the brochure again, and started barking out directions until we arrived at the edge of town.

  Calliope, Will, and I got out of the car and, standing shoulder to shoulder, read the sign. It was a ten-foot long antique rectangle affixed to the side of an old-fashioned trolley car, with animated curves and raised molding that screamed “circus,” and although I couldn’t make out the colors, the vintage design was reminiscent of P. T. Barnum’s spirit of mystery and adventure. The whimsical font read, “The Nine Muses’ Enchanting Traveling Circus.”