by Bella Pollen
The first time she brought Sean to meet us, he walked into the barn with the jerky motions of a man who’d exchanged his daily shot of home brew for a snort of Clorox. Whatever his tipple, it wasn’t doing much for his health. He was so skinny he could have hired himself out as a draft stopper, and in the harsh mountain light the whites of his eyes looked as if they’d been poached in saffron.
Pamela was smitten. The boob tubes were traded in for sprigged blouses that, tied girlishly over the leggings, resulted in a fashion statement dangerously close to Laura Ingalls Wilder let loose on PCP.
On discovering we were avid fans of “collectibles,” Sean, who had a burgeoning career in This&That, decided to take over sales. “I got some real good shit,” he boasted, dragging a sticky burr out of his beard and examining it curiously. Within a week he’d turned up with a set of cotton sheets printed with buttercups that appeared to have been extracted from beneath his dying, incontinent grandmother. “Bargain at a hundred and fifty,” he stated.
“Pamela, you sure about this guy?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Ya think you can count on your friends to be happy for you, but in the end, jealousy bites everyone in the ass.”
Pamela’s billing became increasingly erratic. “I’m charging you double the hours I worked,” she announced, openly taking a slug of tequila from the bottle we kept in the cupboard, “because that’s how long a regular person would take to get around the place.” When I demurred, she asked for a raise. “People like me don’t just grow on trees ya know!”
Besides, Sean needed to make bail. Sean needed to make a down payment on his La-Z-Boy. Sean could really use a mini-break in Reno.
“Pamela, this guy is bleeding you dry,” I told her.
“Hey,” she retorted. “It’s a helluva man that lets a girl pay his bills without getting all edgy.” Pamela was nothing if not street-smart, but loneliness can get the better of anyone. We knew Sean was to blame for her ripping us off, just as he was to blame for her knavish timekeeping and distillery breath, but after every last drop of alcohol had finally disappeared from the house, we knew something had to be done.
When it came to firing her, I practised in front of the mirror all morning. However, as soon as I heard her car belching up the track to the house, my nerve deserted me and I came over all politically correct.
“Whaddaya mean you’re letting me go?” she demanded. “Go where?”
“Um, we need to try something new for the house.”
“Like what?” she snorted. “Not cleaning it?”
I mumbled something.
“You know your problem?” she said, and I cowered at what might be coming. “I know what I want, and I ain’t afraid to go out and get it, but you—” She pointed a prophetic finger at me like the wicked godmother at a doomed christening. “You will never be happy.”
Charlene came next. She was a chatterbox, the kind you end up sitting next to on planes when you have a career-making presentation to deliver on landing. Tonya was obese and ate only coleslaw from large rancid vats she kept in the fridge; Meghan, Chinese by way of California, had bouncy Herbal Essences hair and came with references from a family restaurant in Los Angeles. When the proprietor said to us, “Oh, she’s a conscientious one, all right—a real busy bee,” we failed to detect the irony in his voice. Meghan lived in for the summer, and by day she was marvellous. As soon as we’d gone to bed, though, she’d emerge from her room to unload the dishwasher and aggressively pass a broom across the floor.
“Hey, Meghan,” I said, the first time this happened. “You really don’t need to be working so late.”
“Is working hard a problem?” she replied, her voice rising dangerously.
Night after night, to the noise of the oven being dismantled or the floorboards re-grouted, Mac and I lay upstairs blinking wretchedly into the darkness of our bedroom—the ugly employers trying to get their beauty sleep while poor Cinders toiled below. It felt so churlish to complain. Two weeks into her contract, Meghan was gone, hitching a lift back to California with the FedEx guy, who must have been moved by her tales of domestic slavery.
Just when I was ready to concede that there wasn’t a single Mary Poppins left in the world, Tom showed up. One moment the old black camper van in which he kept his life was parked outside the barn, and the next there he was, on the deck, explaining the intricacies of bow stringing to the children. They made their first kill within minutes, and even though their target was a ratty cork deer with three legs and a singed ear, they were hooked.
Tom had thick black hair hanging in waves down to a pronounced hunch on his back. He was, as he was fond of reminding us, 25% Cherokee, though he was more reticent about the remaining 75%. His nose was aquiline and his features so pointed that even when not in profile he reminded me of the Flatiron Building in New York. He’d been a boxer in his younger days, but there wasn’t much muscle left on him, only a sinewy cabling threaded under his skin that did a barely adequate job of connecting limbs to torso. His movements were so out of concert with one another it looked as if invisible hands were working his arms and legs with strings and a paddle. When I asked him what happened to his boxer’s frame, he looked sad and said, “I lost it”—as though it were a bottle of duty-free bourbon he’d carelessly left on a flight.
As soon as the kids became proficient with their bows, Tom asked permission to take them to the woods, in which sacred environment he intended to impart hunting methods gleaned from his Indian ancestors. I thought this was an outstanding idea, and it certainly beat their regular entertainment—committing multiple homicides on Grand Theft Auto whilst listening to Slim Shady endorsing lesbian rape on the CD player.
For weeks they returned forlorn and empty-handed, until one evening Tom slapped a baby grouse—wretchedly premature and out of season besides—onto the kitchen table with such pride and gusto anyone would have thought he’d felled the mighty bison.
“Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the wind,” he intoned, “hear my thanks for the harvest of one of your creations.” He plucked an arrow from the soft leather quiver slung around his neck and ostentatiously began cleaning it. “May your hand be always steady and this arrow tip forever straight.”
This last was too much for Sam, who leaned forwards and whispered, “Mum, just so you know, he caught it with a butterfly net.”
Tom liked to take local schoolchildren on what he called “wilderness adventures,” a program billed as “an invigorating way for the earth’s sons and daughters to better get to know themselves in a safe environment.” If the first part of this statement was true, the latter definitively was not. Tom was the kind of man who alerted you to the presence of a banana skin only once you’d slipped on it and shattered your pelvis. There was also something dodgy about his eyesight—dodgy in a way that might have benefited from a white stick and a dog.
We grew very fond of Tom, but you sent your children outward bound with him if not at your own risk then certainly at theirs. Students could look forward to an instructive week of camping in the desert—inadvertently shacked up with a nest of rattlesnakes that he’d mistaken for old coils of ranching rope. Others had to be winched up from the bottom of a slot canyon whose narrow opening Tom had admired as a sliver of shade in the hot desert sun. If these exciting overnight packages were too free-range for some parents, they suited our family well. Tom was the embodiment of the children’s wilderness-survival fantasy, even if, in terms of survival, he was also their greatest threat.
When the boys grew tired of whittling arrows, Tom pulled two pairs of old red leather boxing gloves out of the bottomless carpetbag of his van.
“I had these from way back,” he told us, “and I never let ’em out of my sight.”
Boxing is all about technique, and though Tom’s instructional punches were about as intimidating as puppy ears, his inspirational cries of “I could make you a champ!” were taken by the kids as an open invitation to pull on the gloves and beat him t
o a pulp.
The Cherokee were a horse and warrior people, too busy migrating and organising war societies to cultivate trays of wheatgrass. Nevertheless, according to Tom the ancient code of his tribe decreed that a vegetable smoothie was the antidote to all of life’s ailments. Whatever the diagnosis, irrespective of the colour-code of emergency, the cure could be found in the dregs of Tom’s Cuisinart. “That mean ol’ rattler git ya? Arrow through the eye? Crop failure? Heck, I can fix that,” he’d murmur, handing over a glass of sludge that tasted like puréed Middle Earth. Only with hindsight is it easy to appreciate how ahead of the curve he was.
Another thing Tom was excellent at was fixing backs. He was a certified practitioner of a physical therapy known as the Trager Approach. As explained, this treatment had something to do with “mentastics.” In practice, it translated as a vigorous all-over body shaking. Broken neck? Tax bill? Pancreatitis? Tom would probe deep inside you and then toss the offending body part from one bony hand to the other. I like a good shaking as much as the next person, but there was a downside to spending an hour having my back fixed by Tom. It’s dangerous to make assumptions, particularly in the landmine area of another man’s politics, but the mud cocktails, the Cherokee wisdom, and the peripatetic lifestyle all pointed to Democratic sensibilities. Tom, however, was a fully indoctrinated Tea Party bigot, the kind mandated by Rush Limbaugh, and his massage table was the place where he most liked to expound his extremist views.
“George Bush?” he’d say, grasping my head and dribbling it from hand to hand as though practicing a fingertip drill. “Oh, sure, he’s a great guy. He’s doing a wonderful job killing all them 9/11 people. Then he’s gonna blow up that whole country.”
“You don’t mean that, Tom. What about the women and kids?”
“Oh, the kids’ll throw anthrax in your face,” he’d say, in his melodious voice. “Sooner we get rid of them the better.”
If your neck hadn’t been the problem before, it would now be locked in a vicious spasm. “Rumsfeld?” Tom would continue, pulling on my earlobes as if they were Play-Doh. “Just the sorta guy you’d want your daughter to bring home to meet the folks. Cheney’s a sweetheart too.”
There were choices. Toss him off the property or accept the principle of the First Amendment and engage in the argument. But if you imagine it’s easy to hold a coherent debate while your head is being mentasticked from side to side, think again. It’s all I could do to keep my tongue in my mouth, let alone use it for political protest. If I had a stronger moral backbone, I would have refused treatment and taken a Tylenol. Of course, if I’d had a stronger moral backbone, I wouldn’t have needed Tom in the first place. And the fact was,—phantom back pain, unfinished manuscript, bored kids—Tom fixed them all.
This was the post-9/11 world, though, and not much could fix that. Even the famously clean air of southwestern Colorado was polluted by suspicion. Neighbours of twenty years viewed each other warily over the fence, and in spite of the pride Tom took in his Cherokee bloodline, there was nothing he mistrusted more than a hint of colour in another man’s face, especially should that face happen to surface in our local town. Hunting down newborn grouse was all very well, but Tom’s dream was to personally prove himself to President Bush by ripping out the heart of a fully matured terrorist cell.
“By the breath of the Great Buffalo,” he said, knocking back a shot of cabbage juice. “Just once before my time’s up.”
It was during these difficult times that we saw less and less of Tom, and once again progress on the writing slowed, the nerves in my back flared, and the kids turned snitty. As in the post-Pamela era, I realised how much I’d banked on those quiet hours when the children were roaming the forest living on mildly poisonous berries and Cherokee lore. In terms of word count, Tom’s patriotism was costing me dearly.
What drove him, I wondered? If I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my own back, I might have pondered the strange configuration of Tom’s. Had past disappointments formed that hunch of his?
“See, I was never a champion boxer,” he told me one day. “And only an adequate healer. All I ever wanted was to succeed.”
I empathised on so many levels. I was never a champion designer either. I’d stumbled into fashion with no training, and it was luck I lasted as long as I did. I started my company when I was nineteen, and for a while I was ahead of the game, but I’d been no match for the deadening mindset of corporate strategy. My friends had graduated from university to take over the world, while I’d been left behind, woozy and bloodied against the ropes. Starting over can be tough. I knew all about the desire for a comeback.
But if my work had stalled, Tom’s perseverance was about to pay off. One day, in the town’s hardware store, he came across a man of “dubious” colour, browsing the industrial-adhesive aisle. Given that our local town is peopled by an even ratio of Navajo, Mexican, and white ranching families—the last of whom are unfamiliar with the concept of sunblock—it’s disconcerting to work out how Tom came to the “dubious” part of his diagnosis. I’m guessing a definitive black person would have been fine, but those troubling tones in between?
“Uh-oh,” Tom said, “I can fix that,” and lost no time alerting the FBI. Agents of that august bureau reacted swiftly to this potential terrorist threat. They subpoenaed the till receipts from the hardware store by e-mail, then rang up the individual in question and left a message on his answering machine, the transcript of which went something like this:
Hey, sir! How are you today? It’s come to our attention that you are a dubious individual! We can’t say how we came by this information because, you know, it’s classified. But if you are one—uh, that is to say, an individual who is dubious—could you please call the FBI at your earliest convenience on our 1-800 help line. Thank you, and have a good one!
The recipient of this message was Japanese. There are no secrets in small towns. Ridicule can kill ambition faster than anything. Tom quickly lost his zest for the business of terrorist hunting and disappeared out of our lives, leaving a note on top of a stack of zucchini. Oh, Great Spirit, when a man outlives his usefulness, let him sing his song and surrender like a hero going home.
One day in Walmart, while cruising the pain-relief aisle, I bumped into Pamela. She was sheathed in a Denver Broncos tank top tucked into a pair of perforated nylon shorts. She had a new green sun visor on her head, price tag still swinging off the back.
“Well, look what the coyote’s spat up!” She gave me the once-over. “You look like shit.”
I muttered something about my back being sore.
“Ha! All that picking up after yourself I suppose.”
I mumbled something else.
“You were a fool to forsake me.”
I managed a third non-committal grunt, but Pamela was on a roll. “House still standing?” she demanded, legs quivering with schadenfreude.
“Sean still around?” My tongue—thank God—there it was.
“That book you was writing done yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Oh yeah? How those kids growing up?”
“Time will tell.” I plucked a box of Tylenol Extra Strength off the shelf and snapped five capsules into my mouth.
“You was always crap at identifying what really matters. I was the best thing that coulda happened to you.”
“Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t.” I checked Pamela’s basket: Gatorade, bananas, and Pall Malls. This was the old Pamela, the pre-Sean Pamela. Her hands had made it to her hips now. My God, she was magnificent. Skinny, stringy-haired, straight-backed. The most gorgeous, hideous Wonder Woman I’d ever seen.
Pamela pursed her codfish lips. She’d always had a sharp eye for weakness. “You know ya want me back, so you might as well come clean and admit it.”
I shrugged.
“Whatever, but let’s get one thing clear, lady. I’m gonna have to put up my rate.”
Two days later she arrived at the barn with a green re
cycling bag slung over one shoulder.
“Here ya go.” She unknotted the top and tipped four pairs of boxing gloves onto the long table.
Something small flipped in my heart.
“Where did you get these, Pamela?”
“I told ya. Folks who don’t need ’em no more.”
I picked up the gloves and held the worn red leather to my cheek. What price Tom’s ambitions? The stakes are high and failure leads to dark places. Maybe he’d made the mistake of punching above his weight. I knew all about that one, too, but what of it? Give up dreaming your dreams and your dreams begin haunting you.
“So, you want ’em or not?” Pamela demanded.
“Sure,” I said. “How much?”
WITH APOLOGIES TO SAM SHEPARD
The night before we left London to spend the summer out West one year, Mac and I were invited to a play by some acquaintances. If the date was something of a mutual butt-sniffing exercise, their suggestion of the theatre was hardly auspicious. I don’t like the theatre. It’s not the lack of popcorn, or even those seats that encourage deep-vein thrombosis in anyone with legs longer than a terrapin’s; I don’t enjoy the theatre because I’m not seduced by the medium of the play. The coy subtlety of the metaphor, those sneaky idioms, soliloquies of all things, when you least expect one. I’ve never considered myself a person with literalist sensibilities, but I have only to see a wooden stage and a safety curtain for suspension of disbelief to fail me. All that flying spittle and hot breath pluming under the lights like genie smoke. Onstage it’s only too obvious that actors are, well, acting.
