Frozen Assets

by Lee Schultz

  Fade to black.

  42

  The next thing I remember was waking up and thinking I’d died and gone to heaven and the Angel Gabriel was sitting next to my bed. Once my eyes focused, I could see that Gabriel was just a standard-issue male in a dark suit. Agent Walters. But right then I thought he was the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen. And he was looking at me. Parts of me started tingling which hadn’t showed up for roll call for years.

  He saw that I was awake and pulled a chair close to the bed. " You up to talking a bit? " He smiled and moved his hand to where I could reach up and grasp it. Nice and warm, firm grip, but he wasn’t trying to prove how manly he was by using too firm a grip. Men can be such idiots sometimes.

  He released my hand after a moment. "What can you tell me about what happened to you the yesterday? I’ve got the point of view of the agents who were on the scene, but I’d like to hear it from you."

  I told him how I had just been meandering around my property with the dog, and got knocked on my ass when I ran into the fence. His face became very serious and he leaned forward.

  "Describe the fence exactly to me."

  "Well, it was around, I don’t know, maybe nine, ten feet high, completely covered with a huge photograph of winter woods - you know, bare trees, snow, stuff like that. "

  "What else can you tell me about the fence and the area around it?"

  "Well, the brush was cleared back from the fence towards my property, a couple of feet. "

  "What else?"

  "What do you mean, ‘what else’? It was a fence with a perimeter. I suppose it could be cleared for purposes of patrol, but since when do people patrol their hunting camps? But then since when do people put up that kind of fence......Y’know, when I can’t get to sleep, I fantasize about winning the Powerball or the Megamillions jackpot, and one of the things I would do would be to buy a gazillion acres and put up a ten foot electrified fence. Maybe somebody’s done just that!"

  He smiled, then asked, "Was anything attached to the fence or fence poles?"

  I frowned, concentrated on conjuring up the picture of what I had seen. I closed my eyes and stepped into the picture. Something odd....I opened my eyes. "I’ll bet the fence was electrified - all the branches from the trees next to the fence had been pruned - MY trees, by the way. That fake forest went as far as I could see on both sides. But that makes no sense. First off, it would have to be one huge tarp – or maybe whole lot of little ones – but why would...." My voice trailed off. If you wanted to hide something from prying eyes, yet have it under peoples’ noses, you would make it look like its surroundings so no one would notice it. I chewed on that one a moment, then looked at him again, puzzled. I was starting to hurt again and wanted nothing more right then than a hit of painkiller.

  He was making some notes in the small wirebound book he took from the breast pocket of his shirt. His brows were furrowed in concentration as if he were trying to puzzle out a particularly difficult math equation. I let the silence hang there. My head was buzzing again and my thoughts wouldn’t cooperate and form themselves into something coherent. I squirmed, trying to ease the pain in my rear.

  Walters rose and reached for his coat. "I have to go find some information. You get some rest and hit that morphine pump." He bent down and kissed me lightly on the lips, then walked through the door. Nice man. Real eye candy. As I drifted off to sleep again, I had one of those waking dreams where everything is all screwed up - I was making out with Nate, who turned into Cal, then Teddy tapped me on the shoulder. "Can I cut in?" She nudged me out of the way and took my place. I started to object, but was spun around to face Nate, who said "Cheating already?" Then abruptly I was in the woods, running, terrified, gasping for air, not making any progress as something rapidly overtook me. I almost cheered when I realized I was actually dreaming, but sinking into unconsciousness.

  Fade to black.

  43

  You might be a Yooper if you install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked

  They wouldn’t let me go home when I started getting antsy. They mainly wanted to make sure nothing was going to be infected, and that none of the blood vessels the bullet ripped through were going to start bleeding again. Apparently the bullet that lodged in my buttock was drastically slowed down by having to penetrate a denim-and-sheepskin jacket, denim jeans, and longjohns (well, it WAS winter.) But in its travels, it took a lot of fiber with it and they had to dig pretty deep to get everything out - mangled bullet and lots of denim and sheep fuzz. Then a couple of days of IV antibiotics, wound drainage and pain meds. Try to imagine having a drainage tube stuck in your butt cheek - every time you even wiggle your toes waves of pain go crashing through you like surf on a rocky beach. Not to mention not being able to sit, or lie on your back, or lie on one side, or....well, you get the picture. It hurt to stand up. It hurt to walk (well, more like shuffle, since I didn’t have the courage to lift my foot all the way off the floor) and it hurt to do damn near anything. Don’t even ask about sitting on a toilet.

  I wanted to be home with my dog and my cat, wrapped up in warm afghans sitting by the fire with a glass - hell, a gallon – of red wine and a good book. Or even a bad book.

  Oh, who am I trying to kid here? I was in so much pain even with the morphine pump they gave me there was no way I could sit even in my comfiest chair (remember the old Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition, where they torture the grandmotherly lady with "THE COMFY CHAIR!" That’s what it would have been like to try and park my sorry ass in even the most comfortable chair ever made. Pure-dee torture.) So I slept a lot (on my stomach), ate very little (the more I ate, the more trips to the toilet and that little trek made my whole body scream with pain) and in the few hours I spent awake, I tried to figure out what was happening in my life.

  Teddy and Cal came in after I had come out of the anesthetic haze and was at least able to string together enough words to constitute a sentence. Although later Teddy told me some of my sentences were pretty weird. Like when they first came in I looked at them hazily and asked "Who stepped on a duck?" Don’t ask me where that one came from. Morphine is a lovely drug, but in doses high enough to adequately deal with major pain, it severely hampers the mental processes. Cal and the Friday Foursome Minus One had taken it upon themselves to make a couple of trips out to my cabin to take the dog for a walk and clean the catbox. Bless them They reported that the critters were doing okay and that so far they hadn’t detected any interference, damage, strange tire tracks, or anything else out of the ordinary. After bringing me up to date on local gossip, Teddy began to wax eloquent about Agent Walters.

  "This guy makes my nose run!" she said, wiggling her eyebrows and leering a bit. (Have you ever seen a leer on a sixty-plus woman? Not a pretty sight....) "He’s got to be around fifty, built like a brick – well, whatever, he’s got a body for days. Wish I were ten years younger."

  I grinned weakly at her. Even as much as I was attracted to Nate (when had I started calling him by his first name? Not a good sign.) I hurt too much to even think of any activity involving men. "Hey, would you do me a favor?" I asked Teddy.

  "Sure, whaddya need?"

  A half hour later she came back into my room and handed me a plastic grocery bag containing two boxes of semi-sweet baking chocolate – my drug of choice – and a bag of shelled walnuts. She watched me tear into the packages, shaking her head when I stuffed a square of the chocolate and some walnuts into my mouth. I sank back onto my pillow, closed my eyes, and sank into ecstasy.

  Chocolate serves many purposes for me. It is a primo antidepressant. It has healthy things in it – theobromines, I think they are - and it stomps down those cravings for undefined things to stuff in my face. Sometimes I get the urge to just eat everything that won’t run away in terror, until I get sick. As I’ve got older, I’m better at managing those cravings, but I tell you, I can really relate to a drug addict. When you want it, you want it NOW
and nothing better get in your way. Chocolate is my crutch. And it’s legal.

  Okay, so I’m probably wearing the last ten years worth of chocolate around my waist, but I have a great personality.

  Cal had brought me a bunch of black-eyed-susans and daisies. If it had been summer, he would have picked them from his yard where they grow wild. Since it wasn’t, he had actually gone to the florist and bought them. Sweet man. A nurse found a vase and we put them in water - well, Teddy did - and parked them on the windowsill. They added a little bit of cheer to the standard bland hospital room.

  I managed to be civil for about a half hour, then the pain blossomed and I hit the morphine pump and zoned out. I don’t even remember them leaving. I do the "fade to black" thing better than movie directors.

  44

  You might be a Yooper if you think the phrase "To open a can of worms" means "we're going fishing."

  That afternoon my daughters walked into the room. Thoughtfully, they had swung by my place and picked up a couple of my knitting projects. They know that next to chocolate, knitting is what keeps me in some semblance of sanity. I usually have three or four projects going at any one time, usually one colorwork, one using Irish fisherman or Viking patterns, one small project like a scarf, and a sock project. I liked to knit things which catch my eye and then figure out who to give them two. I own lots of vests and handknit socks I like to wear with my Birkenstocks. Yes, I wear Birks. Definitely not much of a Yooper shoe, but in dry weather they’re great and I admit I like to show off my socks. I even have a pair of clear plastic boots I wear in winter so you can see my socks in all their glory.

  Knitting, as I’m fond of saying, soothes the ragged edges of my soul. Agatha Christie, I think, said that everyone’s life has a tempo. I try to keep mine adagio, but all too often it speeds up to presto. When that happens, the regular movement of the knitting needles and the flow of fabric through my fingers helps to slow things back down to a manageable pace. When I die, I want to plagiarize an epitaph that knitting diva Elizabeth Zimmerman once wrote as a gag. It will say "Molly sat knitting, cat on lap. She put down her needles and took a nap."

  My youngest child, Olivia, called Vee by her siblings, is thirty, tall and slim and has copper-colored hair which she usually twists up and fastens with those alligator thingies that are so popular. She is an OB-GYN in Green Bay, Wisconsin, about three hours’ drive from where I live. She has three boys aged three, six and eleven and her husband, Neil Connolly, is one of my favorite people in the world. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites among your kids, but Olivia and I have the closest mother-daughter relationship of anyone I know. I love to knit sexy lingerie for her, and apparently Neil appreciates the items, too. You should see her in the bustier and fishnet hose I knit her for her birthday!

  My three grandsons, Eric, age three, Sean, age six, and Ethan, age eleven, are Irish imps. Eric and Ethan have the fair Irish complexion with freckles and red hair, but Sean is what they call black Irish, with black hair instead of red. Got it from his daddy. But all three have startlingly blue eyes which become almost purple when they get angry. They’re a rowdy bunch, and they love it in my woods. Their dad likes to come up for hunting season, and he’s teaching them how to stay still and quiet for hours on end - a Herculean task, if you ask me – in a deer blind. Every couple of years they come up for turkey season, so the kids know what a real wild turkey looks and tastes like. Wild ones are smart and wily, not like the mass-produced white ones that you get in the grocery store, so bagging one is something to be proud of. I’m not much of a hunting fan, and I freely admit that if I had to kill my own food, I definitely would not have a weight problem.

  Fiona, my eldest child, is thirty-nine, and is, like me, short and round, with a smile that lights up the room. Divorced, with one daughter, Bailey, age 19, a Rottweiler, and four ferrets. Bailey has a boyfriend who’s a real loser, as is her dad. Fee is a veterinarian in Duluth, Minnesota, and Bailey is a vet tech going to veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  Bailey is what I want to be when I grow up. She is physically beautiful, with waist-length black hair, slightly Asian black eyes, and creamy skin with a touch of coffee, the legacy from her Japanese father. Ever notice how mixed-race children are always beautiful? As if they took only the beautiful parts from each race and discarded the not-beautiful. Bailey is smart, with a MENSA-eligible IQ, and a drive for success that puts her at the top of the class in everything she does. Though currently she wants to be a veterinarian like her mother, I suspect that she will quickly tire of inseminating cows or whatever they do, and look to bigger and better things. She doesn’t seem to be aware of the effect she has on men. Although she doesn’t adopt a sexy strut, or use much makeup, I’ve seen her walk through a grocery store and every man she passed stopped what he was doing and stared after her until she was out of sight. And some of the women, too. I’m closer to her than the others, perhaps because of the age differences in the children. As a toddler, she insisted I teach her to knit, so we get along beautifully. She loves the midriff tops and boyshorts I knit for her, as well as the colorful vests and sweaters. I suppose I’d better start knitting her spicy undies for the day she decides to get married. Or maybe even a wedding dress....

  And then there’s my son, Keiran, the one I thought would never make it to adulthood. A pugnacious, aggressive toddler, he got kicked out of so many preschools and day cares I lost count. His idea of getting even with a sibling who had offended him was to take a dump in the sibling’s bed, then remake the bed. I kid you not. Keiran thought shit was an art medium, and I don’t think there was a wall in the house that didn’t get "painted" at one time or another.

  Then suddenly, at age 7, he turned into this mellow, agreeable little angel and I kept wanting to ask "Who are you, and what have you done with my Keiran?" Tall and lanky, he played basketball in college and ended up going to Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, where he’s now an associate professor teaching corporate law, and a partner in the firm of Meagher, Morrison and Clooney, a very chi-chi law firm in lower Michigan. At 37, he still has a full head of hair worn longish, with just a touch of gray, and he still walks like the goofy teenager he was two decades ago. After 14 years of marriage, he and his wife, Ilona, had an amicable split and she remarried two years later. They have two daughters and a son, ages 13, 10 and 7. They have joint custody, and the kids have thrived. Keiran and Ilona have worked hard to give the kids two homes, rather than two half-homes. They live a few blocks apart so no matter with whom the children are staying at any given time, they are around the same friends and in the same school. They have a half-sister, age 6 months, whom they all adore. I am in absolute heaven having a baby to knit for, even if she’s not my blood grandchild..

  I’m not much of a grandmother. I don’t have a lot of patience for bratty undisciplined kids. I think everyone should be sterilized at birth, and only after lengthy training and a rigorous examination, allowed to procreate.

  I cheerfully admit that if that were the case, I would never have been allowed to have children. My own parents put the "dys" in dysfunctional, and where else do we learn to parent, except from our own? Fortunately, my children and I were able to become friends as they grew older, and we managed to avoid many of the pitfalls other dysfunctional families encounter.

  I see my grandchildren several times a year. They love to come to the U.P. because when they’re at my place, they can run around and make all the noise they want, throw all the rocks they want, and get into all the mud they want, without having some adult have a hissy fit. Long ago they learned my rules, and as long as they remember them, we have a great time together.

  But they all have something in common - something knitted from Granny Molly is always something to get excited about. I’ve got enough knit projects planned that I’m going to have to live to be a hundred and twenty to get them all finished.

  This day, however, all three kids were wa
nting me to go live with them while I recuperated from getting shot in the ass. I respectfully declined. No way was I going to leave everything I had put together to the mercies of people who apparently had none.

  Besides, I had a nephew to find.

  45

  You might be a Yoooper if you’re proud that your region makes the news 96 nights a year as the coldest spot in the nation

  Alice and Dallas (I love saying that) picked me up at the hospital the next day. On the way to my place we stopped at the Jubilee to get some groceries. Everything seemed different, out of joint, off kilter. Probably the absolutely lovely drugs in my system.

  I can really understand why people get addicted to opiates. There is nothing quite like the feeling of complete well-being you get from stuff like Vicodan. Not only does it make the physical pain manageable, it either kills the mental and psychic pain or makes you just not give a damn, I’m not sure which.

  People I knew greeted me, asked how I was doing and wasn’t it awful that you could get attacked in your own yard and it’s too bad that all the budget cuts in Lansing have reduced our police forces so they can’t even protect you in your own home, yada yada yada. I smiled, nodded, said "Uh huh," a lot and finally was able to escape with my groceries and head for home

  Nobody made jokes about me getting shot in the ass.

  I nearly burst into tears when we pulled up next to my cabin. I really, really love that place and I was so glad to see it I wanted to kneel down and kiss it. The girls carried my groceries in over my protests. "Just shut up and sit your ass down," growled Alice. "Quit trying to show us how macho you are. This is US, not some guy you’re trying to impress."