by Adam Rapp
Corinthia says, “They weren’t penguins; they were geese.”
“Geese, huh?”
“I said birds were coming, but I saw them the other day, and they’re geese.”
“You saw them where?”
“In my head.”
“Another vision.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Thousands.”
“And what are these geese gonna do, Cori?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “but they’re coming.”
This new subject seems to have weakened Brill Bledsoe, worn him down even more. He hunches again, then gently forces the heels of his hands under his brows and presses upward.
“You okay?” Corinthia asks.
“My left arm’s all fulla sand,” he says, ceasing the pressure on his eyes, now jiggling his hand. “Pins and needles.”
“I’ll let you sleep,” Corinthia offers.
“If I’m lucky,” he says.
“Maybe you should put the kitchen table in your bedroom,” Corinthia offers, half joking.
“Prolly not such a bad idea.”
“’Night,” she tells her father, taking a step toward him and kissing the crown of his head.
“’Night, sweetheart,” he says, squeezing her hand.
After she uses her basement bathroom, Corinthia lurches up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom, where she takes off all her clothes and puts on her noise-canceling headphones.
She cues up Ariel Pink’s “Put Your Number in My Phone” and lies there, on top of her covers, letting the air cool her.
She imagines dancing with Lavert Birdsong. Even though the Ariel Pink track emits a poppy jubilance, she envisions them slow-dancing at Homecoming, in the Lugo Memorial Connie and Dillard Deet Field House. A disco ball refracts spinning discs of silver light, and they are at center court, embracing, barely swaying, Lavert Birdsong’s slightly balding head pulled close, just below Corinthia’s breasts.
Corinthia wears a peach dress that fits her perfectly, and Lavert sports a handsome powder-blue tuxedo with frills and flourishes, and everyone encircles them, looking on, in less unique attire, their mouths agape, their classic tuxes and gowns appearing stiff and uninhabited. Her Lugo Memorial peers can only wish they could feel what she and Lavert are feeling.
She plays the song five times in a row, basking in her Homecoming fantasy, relishing the slow revolutions she and Lavert Birdsong make at center court of the Connie and Dillard Deet Field House, and then she falls asleep, her heart full, all her aches and pains far, far away.
She sleeps as deeply as she has in months and doesn’t dream of tornadoes, geese, or other apocalyptic phenomena.
The thunderstorm ceases just before dawn. Birds chirp in the damp trees. The last slicks of rainwater skirl through gutters and drain into mounds of gravel and soil and landscaping mulch. Dogs relieve themselves throughout the neighborhoods of Lugo. As the sun rises up the eastern sky, its new light silvers the faces of the ceramic deer, rabbits, and garden gnomes populating the yards, pathways, and vegetable gardens of Stained Glass Drive.
Chet, the Bledsoes’ FirmaMall Dalmatian, almost seems to change expression as his face slowly brightens out of the darkness.
On the kitchen radio, which was left on by Brill Bledsoe, the local news report says that four more deer carcasses have been discovered in the woods along the frontage road.
“Those gray wolves appear to be at it again,” the newswoman says.
In sports, the St. Louis Cardinals are six games out of the Central Division lead and had to place one of their starting pitchers on the fifteen-day disabled list. The weather forecast promises bright-blue skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies.
Not quite an hour later, Corinthia sits on the floor across from Lavert Birdsong as he attempts to relax in a latte-colored pleather recliner. Before she was allowed past the reception area of the modest chemotherapy center in nearby Belleville, she was asked to fill out a visitor’s form. One of the questions asked that, if necessary, would she be prepared to drive the patient home. Corinthia checked the “Yes” box even though she had no idea how she might negotiate her legs under the dash in order to properly operate Lavert’s compact car. Another question asked about her relationship to the patient. In the blank answer space, in all capital letters, after some deliberation, Corinthia wrote FRIEND.
The bright little room smells faintly of a chemical burn, something perhaps more appropriate on the outskirts of a power plant than in the interior of a medical facility. The floor that she sits on is so immaculate that she can practically see her reflection in its linoleum surface. There is lemon-colored vinyl wallpaper, and a cat calendar on the wall features an orange kitten staring into a fishbowl containing an equally orange goldfish. A dehydrated spider plant hangs from the ceiling. Next to the recliner is an iPod dock centered on a Salvation Army – quality side table with no apparent power source. There is also a visitor’s metal folding chair with a cracked and faded St. Louis Cardinals seat cushion that’s been mended here and there with bits of silver duct tape. The lone window provides a view of the parking lot, which is filled to capacity with fuel-efficient compact cars not unlike Lavert Birdsong’s Dodge Neon.
For obvious reasons, Corinthia elects not to sit on the metal folding chair and instead chooses the floor.
An intravenous tube connected to a medical port has been attached to the back of Lavert’s hand, just below the peaks of his knuckles. Its insertion was executed by a quiet middle-aged nurse named Mary, whose kindness reminded Corinthia of Sister Josephine, a nun from Dubuque, Iowa, who came to speak to her junior high Community Service Club about volunteer work in Africa.
Even though Corinthia was still standing, Nurse Mary didn’t flinch encountering her as she entered the room. She simply smiled and said hello and introduced herself and went about her business. She’s obviously seen much worse than your run-of-the-mill local giant, and Corinthia appreciated the normal treatment.
After Nurse Mary attached the tubing to Lavert’s chemotherapy system she injected a clear substance directly into Lavert’s port with a hypodermic needle that seemed to materialize out of thin air. She then quietly asked him how his stomach was feeling, and he said, “Fine,” and then she pressed a few buttons and asked him if he’d like a deck of cards, per usual, and he said no, that he was getting tired of solitaire, and then she smiled and told him to hit the assistance button if he needed anything, and he thanked her and she left.
Lavert is wearing a generic gray sweatshirt and old-school Adidas tracksuit bottoms — black with gold stripes. He’s taken his low-top Nike Air Force I’s off to reveal bright-white athletic socks. He rubs his hand over his thinning woolly hair. As he told Corinthia during the short drive to Belleville, this will be his sixth chemotherapy session, the final one of his second cycle.
“This’ll all be gone soon,” he says from his recliner, pointing to his hair. “I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
“You should shave it,” Corinthia offers.
“Maybe I should,” he says. “Like my boy Tupac.”
During the three-hour session, they talk about many things. They talk about his dwindling appetite and how his grandmother usually brings him to his treatments but doesn’t dare remain in the room with him while the chemo is being administered anymore because she just gets too upset and downright mad at God, and how she’ll usually just stay in the car for the three hours and listen to the radio and pray on her rosary despite her recent feelings about the Almighty Father, and how the idea of going to a movie at the nearby Cineplex is just too hard because she wouldn’t be able to focus on some big goofy actor’s face anyway or going to eat ice cream or looking at puppies in that little store in the mall either, so she just hunkers down in the car for the whole three hours and when she comes up to get him at the end of his sessions, she cries anyway, even though she swears to Jesus on the Cross that she won’t and her crying is really more like t
he inconsolable wailing of Italian matriarchs in overly serious early eighties mafia movies and invariably Nurse Mary has to come in and give Florida Birdsong a hug and provide her with aloe-rich tissues and help her sit in that metal folding chair with the St. Louis Cardinals seat cushion while a male nurse known as Steady Eddie Always Ready has to come in and take over and remove Lavert’s IV and extract his port and help him to the toilet because Lavert usually has to go pretty bad immediately after a treatment and sometimes he also has to change into another shirt because he’ll get sick to his stomach before the session is over, and, yes, he does receive medication for the nausea and his body temperature changes so often and so extremely that he’s taken to mostly wearing sweat suits lately because they make for easy layering and the convenient shedding of garments and sometimes after a session he’ll sleep for so many consecutive hours that he forgets what day of the week it is and he apologizes to Corinthia in advance if he should start to say something but not be able to complete the thought and then there’s this moment where his face twitches just the slightest bit like an invisible fishhook has snagged the corner of his mouth and Corinthia gets the sense that this “medicine” that is mingling with his bloodstream — this mysterious chemotherapy substance — is an indiscriminate force of such serious power that it could break down even the mightiest lion king of the greatest jungle and when Corinthia asks him about his mother, the one who used to work for that brewery in Milwaukee, and about his father, whom he’s said nothing about thus far, Lavert simply replies, “They ain’t around no more,” and when Corinthia asks him if they’re dead, he says, “They might as well be,” but he says it without pride and without asking for pity and the very absence of these two qualities makes her heart fill with so much love for this man who sits before her that she would like to reach behind herself and force her hand into the flesh of her back and remove her own non-cancer-riddled sixteen-year-old pancreas and offer it to him.
But instead she takes his hand in hers; his left hand, the one that isn’t attached to the chemotherapy delivery system. She covers it with both of hers and stares into Lavert’s eyes, and he stares back. They simply look at each other. For a brief moment, it feels as if the entire world has gone away. There is no sound. There is no treatment room. There is only the two of them. And then it happens. A inevitable feeling as certain as sunlight overtakes Corinthia. She can feel it filling her entire being. It’s the first clear, absolutely unimpeachable thought she’s had in a long time, and it’s this:
Sometime very soon, Lavert Birdsong is going to ask me to help him die.
In an aluminum-bodied Airstream Classic, just beyond the fringes of the Cornelius Harlow Football Stadium, where three other Airstreams have been arranged, Guidance Counselor Denton Smock sits across from freshman Billy Ball. They are comfortably arranged on Naugahyde banquettes, a small Formica dinette table between them.
It’s the final period of the day, and the temporary student – guidance counselor meeting space is nothing like Mr. Smock’s office in the basement of the main school building, where Facilities Manager Shoreland Splitz has been allowing Mr. Smock to go feed his favorite clown fish (Rodney) a few times a day.
A quiet oscillating fan, which has been set in a small kitchen nook, blows warm air around the thirty-one-foot-long, nine-and-a-half-foot-wide recreational vehicle, which, if Denton Smock’s sweat-stained light-blue oxford-cloth shirt is any indication, offers little relief.
It’s the last day of classes before Labor Day weekend, and since the Airstreams have been brought in, there is the general sense that Lugo Memorial High School has been transformed into a kind of utopian campsite, where teachers, students, and staff are somewhat adrift, overly smiley, and confused about their relationship to the main school building, which is still in the process of being brought up to standard operating level by scores of electricians, contractors, plumbers, supply vendors, and a small team of potbellied, tobacco-chewing, sunburnt window glaziers in tie-dyed T-shirts.
All lunches still take place in the cafeteria, one of the few sections of Lugo Memorial that’s been deemed safe by Shoreland Splitz, Principal Ticonderoga, and various municipal leaders, but a rigid particleboard hallway has been erected, which is accessed through a pair of side-entrance fire doors and extends some seventy feet or so, directly to the cafeteria. It’s believed by the powers that be that the corridor limits the amount of student curiosity and unproductive sneaking around during this all-important phase of repair. Principal Ticonderoga has assured faculty, students, and staff that the temporary Airstream system will be necessary for only a few more weeks.
All twelve aluminum trailers have been enumerated with handsome crimson-and-cream stencils, as well as a decal of the beloved Lugo Memorial Fighting Mastodon. The one that Denton Smock has been given for this particular period is Airstream number four. He is armed with his trusted notebook and mechanical pencil as well as a portable cardboard box containing student files. The physical relationship between guidance counselor and student — the small Formica table bisecting the two banquettes — isn’t that much different from the one that exists in his basement office. But the sessions aren’t the same. The conversational focus — the simple level of student concentration — just isn’t up to snuff. And in all fairness, Denton Smock has found that he’s also been guilty of being easily distracted. During recent sessions, he often catches himself staring out one of the three vista windows overlooking the football field’s south end zone, where students are allowed to mingle, talk on their cell phones, and sit in the grass.
Speckled throughout the football field are wreaths, colorful signs, bouquets, and myriad handcrafted missives that say BRING HOME THE HEAT and COME BACK, CHANNING! and WE LOVE YOU, HEATSTER! The expanse of the football field, end zone to end zone, has been transformed into a kind of visual prayer for Channing Bledsoe’s safe deliverance back to Lugo. This was, of course, approved by Principal Ticonderoga, Shoreland Splitz, and Head Football Coach Virgil Task, the only stipulation being that the various “Channing” pieces be portable enough to be easily struck from the field on game days and not damage the turf. The football team practices on the nearby practice field, after all, almost a mile away, just off Route 14B.
Denton Smock has been trying to talk to Billy Ball about the current cafeteria situation and how, earlier at lunch, he noticed him sitting with Durdin Royko and Keiko Cho.
“Have you made friends with them?” Denton Smock asks.
“We’re civil,” Billy replies, “but I wouldn’t say we’re friends, exactly.”
“How often do the three of you eat together?”
“Every day.”
“So it’s become a ritual.”
“The Sioux were really into rituals,” Billy offers.
Denton Smock adjusts his glasses, and although he’s somewhat frustrated with Billy’s continued obsession and romanticization of Native American culture, he asks him if he would say more about this.
“They would do these things called ghost dances,” Billy explains. “Enacted to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and protect them from the white man’s bullets.”
“Protect whom from the white man’s bullets?”
“The living,” Billy says. “The Sioux would dance in a circle and go into trance states.”
“Interesting,” Denton Smock says.
“They had a particularly fascinating relationship to death. The nagi’s journey to the spirit world involves a perilous test.”
“The nagi?” Denton Smock says.
“The shadow of the Sioux,” Billy Ball explains. “The spirit. He must cross a great mythical river on a very narrow log. If the nagi is afraid of this test, or fails it, he must return to our world and wander forever as a lost or forlorn ghost. There are few things they fear more than being lost in this world in the afterlife.”
“Who is the nagi in your life?”
Billy Ball doesn’t answer.
“Is it your father?”
“Do you see yourself as the nagi?” Denton Smock asks.
“I know where the log is,” Billy Ball says.
“The log on the mythical river.”
“Yes, that,” Billy Ball says. “It’s in the forest by the frontage road. The wolves are protecting it.”
“What wolves are you talking about?”
“The wolves from the newspaper. The ones killing all the deer. They’re protecting the log.”
“But there’s no river in that forest.”
“It could be a river of dirt,” Billy Ball says. “Or leaves. There’s water in everything. You’re mostly water.”
“So are you,” Denton Smock says.
“Maybe one of us is the river,” Billy Ball says.
“What about your dad?” Denton Smock says. “Do you think he was able to cross the log? Do you think he was able to pass the test?”
“Sometimes I think he’s still in my mom’s garden,” Billy Ball says.
“Doing what, exactly?”
“Looking for his watch,” Billy Ball says. “In the lilac bushes.”
“So he hasn’t crossed the log yet.”
Billy doesn’t respond.
“Do you think your dad is having trouble finding the log?”
Again, Billy Ball doesn’t respond. He is wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a falling green leaves design on it. Denton Smock notices that the green in the leaves matches his hazel eyes.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Denton Smock says to Billy.
“I’m thinking that once he finds his watch, he’ll be able to cross the log.”
“Do you ever think about reuniting with the spirit of your father?”
Billy’s pupils seem to momentarily surge. They overtake his irises. But the expression marking the rest of his face is one of blankness, the profound absence of thought or emotion.
“I’m going to help him find the log,” Billy says.
