The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  When I wake up. I am surprised I’m in bed. It certainly seemed like a real TV show.

  . . .

  “My mom is sending me to Europe.”

  Corey said it as if moms do that sort of thing, like they do laundry or nagging. Was it a summer vacation or something? I didn’t know.

  If you show me a map of Europe, I can name the countries. I can even name most of the capitals. In France the students riot and cars burn in the streets. In Spain the monument to the people killed by terrorists is peaceful. In England the endless stream in honor of the dead princess doesn’t work very well and kids play in the water. Somewhere, protesters dye the water in a fountain red. What are they protesting? Animal fur in fashion, maybe? Or was it the genocide in Africa? I don’t remember.

  “I’m leaving next week,” he said.

  I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

  “If I could take you with me I would, my pet,” he said while he stroked my hair. “In a little pet carrier. I could get you a little pink collar with rhinestones on it. No— rhinestones and spikes—alternating. It would suit you better. During the day, I’ll take you out for walks, and you can spend the nights whining in my room.”

  I knocked his hand away from my head so fast I pulled some of my own hair out. “Stop it. You don’t have to be a jerk. I get it.” I could hear him breathing in the dark.

  “No, Pet, I don’t think you do.” Everything he says is so matter of fact—or so full of bullshit.

  “Screw you!”

  “That’s right,” he said. All I could hear was the tone. It’s all, ‘Who’s a good doggie? Who is? Who?”

  “Just leave me the fuck alone”

  “That’s what’s happening, Loa. I’m leaving. I’m a jerk, and I’m leaving. And you’re staying here. You’re gonna hate me. Let’s just get it started sooner.” He was very matter of fact while he said this.

  I just wanted to get away, but I’m clumsy, so I fell off the pool table and I couldn’t find the light switch.

  “Loa,” he said, “Find your way out. We can see each other in the world someday.”

  I didn’t stop to find out if he meant find my way out of his basement or find my way out of my crappy life and into the world where he was going.

  I was glad his mother wasn’t home so I didn’t have to pass her, sitting in the dark, on my way out. I didn’t have to seek her approval or disapproval or figure out what the hell was up with her. I just had to find my way out into the dark, and then I had to figure out what to do for the next few hours until it was time for school.

  Twenty-four-hour restaurants are made for times like this.

  I’m relatively clean. I had enough money to buy a cup of coffee, and I had something to read.

  I didn’t have enough money in my pocket to justify hours in a booth, but the waitress didn’t know that. I’m not homeless or raving. She just filled my coffee cup and moved on. I had enough money to order some toast around 6:00 A.M. When I left, I put what change I had down for a tip. It wasn’t much, but I had bought a place where it was warm and light and I could use the bathroom. I wanted her to know I appreciated her help. She might not have noticed though. Waitresses who work the graveyard shift must have their own problems.

  . . .

  Corey wasn’t in class the next day. Just like that, he was gone. And that was the end of the good old days. Again.

  Debate was over for me. It was almost the end of the season anyway.

  For a while, people who used to say “Hi” to Corey and me still said “Hi” to me without him, but I’d never really taken time to figure out who they were, and without Corey around, conversations just died.

  A year before, Asta had died and left behind the emptiness where she had been. Now Corey had left behind another emptiness. It seems like emptiness shouldn’t feel like anything, but I can tell you, when you touch the edges of emptiness, it aches.

  My dad lost his job at the mill in April.

  There have been rumors and talk for ages that the company was selling out. Things were going to change if that happened, everyone agreed on that. Nobody thought things would change for the better, and they didn’t.

  First, the mill was shut for twelve weeks so the new company could “evaluate their needs.”

  When that was over, they decided they didn’t need my dad. He wasn’t the only person they didn’t need, but he wasn’t really old, he wasn’t a drunk, and he was a steady worker. My dad thinks he has it figured out why they didn’t “need” him. He thinks it’s because someone at some desk saw that there were a lot of medical bills for a child, Asta. Then they saw that there were more children on his policy. To the person at the desk, we must have looked like ticking time bombs waiting to explode in the mother-of-all insurance claims.

  Fuckwits. If The Bony Guy didn’t already install his magical destructive genes, we’re safe.

  We are welcome to continue our medical coverage, as stipulated by law. All we have to do is come up with $1,032 a month. Thank you so much for that. Can I just point out it might be a little hard, now my dad is out of work?

  Fuckwits.

  . . .

  Mom got a job right away at Cozy Pines Residential Care. Lots of people must have applied during those first weeks after the mill closed, but most of those applicants had never given a sponge bath or a nasogastric feeding. Most of them probably didn’t offer to take on-call work or say that the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift was just fine.

  Mom was such a good worker that they put me on weekends in the kitchen and dining room. It was not an enjoyable job, but I was lucky to have it, and that was quite clear every single time I got a paycheck.

  Mom would sit at the kitchen table with the checkbook, a piece of scratch paper, and any bills that were waiting to be paid. It is one thing to be good at theoretical math; it’s another thing, probably better, to be able to figure out how to skate from one week to the next without pissing anybody off or getting stuck in the Payday-Cash-Now-Check-Into-Cash hamster wheel of economic hell.

  . . .

  When summer came, I started scraping pre-chewed food into the garbage five days a week.

  There were always four types of meals served at Cozy Pines: Regular, Soft, Whiz, and Liquid. The only meals that were ever finished completely were the Liquids, because those were poured directly into the resident, who had no more choice about it than a baby bird.

  In the dining room, I served plates of Regular and Soft. I had to make sure there was never a saltshaker on the low-sodium table. Suicide by salt, can’t have that. It would undo the dietitian’s careful work. Each resident must have the healthful meal prescribed. A few could have coffee, a few more could have decaf. A few were never allowed grapefruit juice because it would interfere with their meds. Suicide by grapefruit juice, can’t have that either.

  I had to know who sat where and what they were permitted to eat. I had to know who was only permitted a blunt plastic butter knife—and I had to remind the cooks to cut things up on that plate.

  I was not responsible for patients. It was up to others to get the residents to their places at the tables. It was up to others to make sure that there were no “events” during meals. In fact, while the actual eating was happening, I was allowed to return to the kitchen and eat my own meal. That was one of the fringe benefits of the job. We in the kitchen got meals for free.

  Maybe it was because they thought we would steal food if it weren’t allowed. Maybe it was a crude method of quality control. If so, it didn’t work. The food was terrible, and the cooks, with keys to the walk-in freezer and the storeroom, were smart enough to stick to ice cream and peanut butter sandwiches. I ate the chopped meat patties (what animal? Who knows? “Meat” animal) and the overcooked veggies (soft enough for the Softs) and drank a quart of low-fat milk.

  Then it was time to clear the plates, do the dishes, and mop the floor. Sounds snappy-fast when I say it like that, but I left out the details like stacking and carrying heaps of dishes in
big rubber tubs. And washing the tables three times. And wiping up any spills before someone wandered in and slipped.

  The next step was scraping the gobs off the plates and salvaging the occasional pair of dentures. It was much easier to capture those before they got moved to the dumpster. If I missed a pair of choppers, I would start my next shift in the dumpster picking through the bags of trash looking for the kitchen garbage and then feeling around blind until I found something hard in all that squishy crud.

  I was a highly motivated worker.

  Fill a rack, spray the dishes, slide them in the machine, fill a rack, spray the dishes, slide it through, but now it’s twice as heavy because you have to push the clean dishes out.

  Eventually, all the dishes are on the clean side and it’s time to change aprons, take off the gloves, wash hands, and start returning stacks of plates and bowls to the shelves for the next meal. Silverware holds heat. My hands got used to it, the heat.

  Then it was time to wash the pots and pans and serving items. Then it was time for the mop bucket and the three mops: one wet, one dry, one damp with disinfectant. Then I could shut the doors, turn off the lights, and leave. Unless I got done with my work too soon. I needed to put in a full four hours per shift. So if I hurried or if things weren’t too messy, I had to spend any remaining time helping the cooks with prep for the next meal.

  It was an experience worth avoiding. I did not have much in common with the cooks. I am not a widow, for example, and I’ve never found my husband pinned under the axel after the rig he was working on slipped off the blocks. I am not fascinated by whippets or Judge Judy or the guy in the blue and white trailer who is running a meth lab.

  I just wanted to get out of the kitchen and get on my bike and enjoy a free ride down the hill to the highway. I could pick my own path: easy, hard, virtually impossible? Highway, skid road, deer path? Riding to work was never as much fun as riding home. I couldn’t pooch around all night, but it was my free time.

  . . .

  Dad picked up gyppo work as an independent sawyer when he could, but there were a lot of other guys trying to do the same. The woods are crawling with guys with chainsaws and shit-all chances of finding a job. Especially now with so many guys cut from the mill, and on top of that, they close the woods down for weeks in the summer to prevent fires.

  Things would pick up when a fire broke out, because then Dad could get on a fire crew and bring in some money. It is weird to think about a forest fire as good luck, but that’s the way it is. A fire means they need guys on the fire lines. A forest fire means a shot at a job for a while. A forest fire is way better than a scratch-off lottery ticket.

  So far, only Texas and California were burning up— grass fires and urban fires—not my dad’s area of expertise. So he and Little Harold were roaming up and down the creeks fishing. Judging by the remains in the frying pans, the two of them were living on trout. It’s good food for cheap, if you have the time, and they had nothing but time.

  . . .

  We had our new orbits. Things were reasonably settled.

  Then I screwed it up.

  . . .

  I’m a little late for work, so I just blast down a hill from a gravel road onto the paved highway. In front of a car. Really. Or maybe I hit the car. I don’t know. I will be the first person to admit that all I was watching was the patch of dirt directly in front of my bike tire, and I wasn’t even thinking about that. The next thing I know, I’m in the barrow pit on the opposite side of the pavement. My bike is halfway back up the hill. One wheel is still spinning, and the other one is bent like a fortune cookie.

  Some guy is leaning over me saying, “Loa! Loa! Are you OK?”

  And I’m thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?” and “How does he know my name?” He’s a nice guy, though. And he seems genuinely worried. He’s so worried that I start to worry myself: Do I have bones sticking out of me? Are my brains leaking out of my ears? I manage to get up on my hands and knees and then wobble up onto my feet. I can’t see any bones sticking out.

  “Are you OK?” The guy is still asking. He still looks worried. He looks familiar.

  I realize he was in my sophomore English class last quarter of last year. We even made a video together. It was a stop-motion movie about mannequins in a park. Mannequins feeding squirrels, mannequins throwing away trash, mannequins mugging and murdering people. Don’t ask me what it was about. I wasn’t the director. Neither was the nice guy who is hovering over me all worried. I can’t remember his name. I remember I thought he was stupid as a rock balloon at first. Then I thought he was kind of funny.

  “I’m OK,” I straighten up and look at my bike. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “You should go to the hospital. You might be really hurt. I’ll give you a ride,” says the nice guy from film class.

  “No. I work right up there.” I point to Cozy Pines Residential Care where it sits overlooking the river

  “I’ll take you there then,” says nice guy. And I let him because I don’t want to drag my mangled bike down the barrow pit and up the driveway to Cozy Pines.

  But when I actually walk in the service entrance to the kitchen, I’m not feeling so good. The adrenaline has drained out of my muscles and left me sore and shaking. The cooks look at me funny. So I look at myself. My kitchen uniform is all dirty, ripped, and bloody on the shoulder and all down one leg. The head cook says to see the nurse at the desk, and the nurse at the desk says I do have to go to the emergency room to be checked out. It’s OK, she says, because I’ve got worker’s insurance, but I will lose my wages for the day’s work. One of the aides will drive me, and they will call my mom and tell her what’s going on.

  I just go because missing work seems OK at the moment. I’m sick of work.

  At the emergency room, they check me out and say nothing is broken. I don’t have a concussion. I’m no emergency. I’m no big deal. I’m just some scrapes and bruises and muscle strain. A nurse wearing scrubs with palm trees and smiling suns in sunglasses bandages me up and gives me a prescription for painkillers. When she hands me the prescription, she gives me the stern stink eye for a moment and then says, “This is for you, not anybody else.”

  Like people get in bike wrecks for pain meds. Come to think of it, maybe they do, but it doesn’t seem worth it to me.

  Then I’m well enough to wait in the lobby until my mom comes to collect me. The TV is on twenty-four-hour news. The world is burning down, melting, and flooding. Pretty much like yesterday and the day before that.

  When my mom comes in, she is all pale and rattled— until she sees me—then she is just mad.

  “How the hell are we going to pay for this?”

  I don’t know. I don’t say that. I don’t want to say anything. Does everyone in the world think I get in bike wrecks on purpose?

  “The charge nurse said I have insurance.”

  “The charge nurse has insurance. She is full-time professional. You are not. Shit! I don’t even have insurance from Cozy Pines.”

  Mom goes to the desk to talk about payment. Little Harold comes close and gives me a hug. I don’t know what hurts worse, my shoulder or that Little Harold wants to take care of me. Who am I kidding? Ripping some skin off is nothing compared to the idea that he wants to take care of me. I should be taking care of him, and we both know it.

  . . .

  “Did they give you a prescription?” Mom asks. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white, but the rest of her hands are chapped and red. It’s an occupational hazard of nursing home work. Endless hand washing, gloving up to change diapers, placing bedpans, harsh disinfectants, cold weather, hot water. Whenever I see red hands, I remember Asta. I don’t want to remember Asta.

  I pull the prescription out of my pocket and hand it to Mom.

  “You don’t need this,” she says, “Just take some aspirin. This crap will make you sleepy and constipated.” Then she puts the prescription in her coat pocket.

&nbs
p; I choose to believe that my mom is not one of the people at Cozy Pines who takes the old people’s meds for fun or profit. I know they exist. They peel the pain patches right off those old achy bodies. Sometimes they cut up the patches and scrape out the inside. Sometimes they just pop the whole patches in their mouths and chew on them like gum. It’s easier to come by than Oxycontin, and not everyone enjoys meth.

  God knows, my mom probably hurts. She could probably use a little release. But I choose to believe that she would never leave someone else hurting by stealing meds—not even me.

  After my accident, the new deal was this: Mom drove me to work, but I had to walk home.

  The new deal was also this: my shoulder hurt like hell.

  It was really hard to carry the tubs of dishes and push the racks through the machines. That was my problem.

  My visit to the emergency room cost two weeks’ wages. That was the whole family’s problem.

  Walking home sucked.

  My problem.

  When a truck pulled over on the shoulder in front of me and the door swung open, that seemed like a great deal.

  I was hot and sweaty and I smelled like Cozy Pines, which isn’t good. The truck door was open, and there was Esther, smiling. Her brother, Abel, was in the driver’s seat. Abel never smiled, but he had pulled the truck over, so I climbed in. It wasn’t cool in the truck, but the air moving through the open windows felt good.

  Where were we going? I didn’t care anymore than the dogs running from side to side in the bed of the truck. I was so happy not to be walking down the ditch by the highway, I wouldn’t have refused to go to their weird-ass church with them at that moment if it meant I could get a ride home afterwards. As it turned out, though, church wasn’t where we were going.

  . . .

  There were seven or eight rigs at the campground. It amounted to a pretty good-sized crowd. Most of them were people who had gone to the same grade school. I recognized people who had used me like a sled dog when I was little. Seriously, the big kids used to tie us to sleds with baling twine and make us mush, dragging them along. I’m not a puppy anymore, I guess. I’m running with the big dogs now.