by Nic Brown
“What is in that box is hard to understand if you’re not a scientist.”
Wendy looked so confused that her expression was almost one of pain.
“What’s in that box is data,” Pat said. “You see what I’m saying? It’s a medical study. It doesn’t mean anything, nothing other than just me looking at some scientific photos.”
“But it’s sick,” Wendy said.
“Oh, I know it is. I know. What’s in that box, it shouldn’t be seen by anyone who isn’t scientific. I hid those photos for a reason.”
“But those aren’t even animals,” Wendy said.
“I’m studying life,” Pat said. “All animal forms. Their perversions, the abnormalities. Humans are animals, Wendy. They fall into my field.”
“These,” Wendy said, pointing to the box, “aren’t for studying.”
“Well that’s what I’m doing, Wendy. I’m studying life, OK? I am just curious about animal activity. I don’t want to get into it, really, because I’ve only just begun this study. But trust me, some experiments you leave in the abstract. Some questions you only ask in the hypothetical.”
“What are you talking about?” Wendy said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that these are just photos. What? Wendy, what?”
“So, do you like this? Boys?” Wendy said.
“Jesus!” Pat said. “Do you even understand what I do? You don’t even understand half the words I’m using! Hypothetical! See? Abstract! See? Watch this. Empirical data! Jesus. Just trust me, Wendy. I’m doing stuff you can’t even understand.” He paused, then said, “Oh God. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. Hey.”
Wendy looked at him as if he were a stranger.
“What?”
“You did it,” Wendy said.
Fear had ambushed all of Pat’s operating mechanisms. He could only shake his head. Finally he said, “Did what? These are just paper!”
Wendy shook her head.
“Are you still talking about Graham?” Pat said. “Because you were the one who told me that he had made all that stuff up. Remember?” He sat on the opposite end of the couch. “We’ve talked about this.”
“No. I don’t think so,” Wendy said.
“I would never do anything to Graham,” Pat said. “Come on! Who just led Confetti through a goddamn flood? Who pays your bills? I love you, Wendy. Keykeyu,” he said, the Cherokee word for love. “Hey, keykeyu.”
Wendy just looked at the carpet.
“You want me to go back over this?” Pat said. “Listen. Kids make up stories, Wendy, especially when they don’t have a father. He also, and I don’t want to bring this up, but he also probably resented me somehow for paying for everything, you know? He had to become reliant on a new person. Because, and again, I don’t want to bring it up, but neither of you could have even stayed in your neighborhood, let alone paid the bills, if I hadn’t been able to help. He knew that. And still, Wendy, I love that I am fortunate enough to help you. Keykeyu.”
Wendy was silent for a long time as the cats continued to meow throughout the room. One began rubbing against her leg, then Wendy sighed and said, “That doesn’t have anything to do with this. Nothing.” She looked up at Pat. “Tell me you did it.”
But Pat didn’t say anything.
“Say it.”
Pat slowly shook his head.
Then Wendy stood and walked across the dark living room, cats scurrying out of her path. He heard her open the back door, but he knew she had nowhere to go.
Pat thought about what Wendy now knew. There wasn’t actual proof. Unconnected photos are not proof. His pulse was racing and he could hear dogs barking upstairs. The rabbit hopped from under the couch and looked at him.
He decided he needed to act like their discussion wasn’t that big a deal. He stood, but his balance was off and he wavered a bit. The Ketaset had begun to work. He carried the bin of photos to the coat closet, just to get it out of sight, then walked into the kitchen. He was feeling very strange, very loose. The pain was receding. He looked out the back window and saw Wendy standing in the garage doorway, rubbing Confetti’s nose. There was an apple on the counter, and Pat took one of his small, good knives off the knife rack and sliced it in half. His hand was feeling much better and he almost cut the splinter out right then, but decided to wait for the Tetracaine’s full effect.
Outside, the air was a solid form of rain, drops replaced by more drops, small rivulets of water forming everywhere in his driveway.
“Maybe some apple?” Pat said, stepping up behind Wendy. He was already soaked from walking only the fifteen feet between the garage and his house.
Wendy moved into the darkness, silent. Pat couldn’t see her face.
“Hey, boy. Yeah,” Pat said, as Confetti rubbed his nose against Pat’s chest. He held his good hand open and Confetti’s soft lips brushed Pat’s skin as the horse lifted the apple. “I thought this might make him feel better,” Pat said. “What about you? Are you OK?”
Wendy sighed and said, “I don’t know.”
He could tell she had been crying.
“You want me to get you some apple, too?” Pat said, laughing slightly. He felt nauseated. He hadn’t made his sister cry in decades. Wendy didn’t answer, and Pat said, “OK. Come inside soon.”
He could barely feel the rain now as it landed on his flesh.
Back in the kitchen, he stood at the counter and thought about what he could do to make Wendy feel better. He would cook the venison now thawing in the dead freezer, maybe open that bottle of zinfandel. She loved good wine. He took the venison out and set it on a plate, then looked closely at his palm. He poked it with his finger. He could barely feel the pressure now. He lifted the knife from the counter and tried to focus. He felt funny, light, but steady enough to make a small incision above the splinter. As soon as the blade sliced into his flesh, though, pain shot through his arm. Pus and blood came rushing out of the opening, pressurized by the swelling. He pressed a clean dish towel to his hand and walked to the couch. He felt unsteady and thought he should lie down. As he reclined, a calico jumped onto his chest, purring. Pat closed his eyes, then opened them, and now there was a different cat on his chest—a black cat meowing. Time was condensing. He thought about the number of seconds it took to make one mistake. He had probably spent a total matter of minutes touching Graham. Minutes. Maybe a few hundred seconds. He thought about the grown dogs he had seen humping teddy bears, human legs, puppies. People laughed. A man can make a mistake.
It was growing difficult to keep his eyes open, and he felt himself falling asleep when Wendy came back inside. He heard her moving stuff around in the kitchen, banging and scraping, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw her coming towards him out of the darkness. Her clothes were completely soaked and water dripped from her cocked head. She was moving slowly, carrying the kitchen knife that he had used to cut the apple.
“Oh!” Pat said, the sound stretching much longer than he had intended, eerie and loud and uncontrolled in the silence. “Please. Wendy.” He tried to stand and felt himself going sideways.
“Pat. You need to calm down,” Wendy said. She was standing over him now. “I’m going to get that splinter out.”
Pat tried to stand again slowly, dizzy.
“No. Lie down,” Wendy said. “What’s wrong with you?” She gently pushed him back down.
“Aghh!” Pat screamed.
“Pat, cool it.”
“I have always done what I could to keep you safe,” Pat said.
Wendy sat on his chest and grabbed his arm. Pat tried reaching around with the other, but then Wendy said, “Don’t move, Pat. Don’t! I’m serious.”
He froze.
“I have done everything,” Pat said, “everything, to show you I loved you. Keykeyu, Wendy. Keykeyu. Keykeyu. Keykeyu.”
He couldn’t see what she was doing with the knife, but he felt her cutting into his flesh. There was no pain—the Ketaset had finally taken care of t
hat—but still he screamed in terror, silencing all animal noise.
“Shhhhh,” Wendy said.
Then she stopped cutting and turned to him. Blood dripped off her hand and onto Pat’s chest. She held the splinter aloft, pinched between two fingers. It was a dark, bloody intruder.
the gypsy
Cotton’s eyesight was still good, and as he squinted, peering down the narrow basement stairs, the situation slowly became clear. The flashlight beam was reflecting off the surface of water. He should have checked earlier. Always check the basement in a storm, Cotton thought. Always.
He bent to remove his orthopedic shoes, then rolled up his slacks and started slowly down the stairs, the flashlight slicing erratically through the darkness. His scrapbooks, his photo albums—all of his genealogy research was in the basement. He needed to get it out before the water rose that high.
As he descended, he could hear the rain drumming on the roof and now also dripping inside. He had expected Hurricane Hugo to bring enough rain to wet the floor, perhaps. That had happened before, but this? The water was already covering several basement stairs, and as the fleshy sole of Cotton’s foot came down on the first submerged step, it slipped out from under him and his body lifted briefly into the darkness.
He awoke with water lapping at his sternum. His back was propped against the bottom two stairs and his legs stretched onto the concrete floor, almost completely submerged in the shallow water. The steps bit at angles into his spine, and his head felt as if large pockets of air needed to be released from it immediately. Worst off was his left leg. Something was horribly wrong with it. Even the slightest movement was unbearable.
The flashlight was now underwater, throwing an undulating series of dim lights onto the concrete wall. The rest of the room was dark and his eyes began to adjust to minuscule rays of daylight shining through chinks in the floorboards above.
He tried to rise, putting his weight on his arms and good leg, but there was a terrifying, paralyzing pain as soon as he began to move.
He had seen this injury before.
From 1955 to 1977, Cotton had been a NASCAR crew chief. The driver for his 1962 team, a young man named Scooter Matthews, had broken his hip in a rollover at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It had been bad enough on a twenty-year-old, but in the years since, Cotton had seen what it had done to friends his own age. A surge of nausea rose as he imagined ivory chunks of hip and femur floating around the marbleized gristle of his thigh. He closed his eyes and exhaled.
From his experience with injuries on the racetrack, Cotton knew not to move an injured body, but his muscles were tense with the chill and beginning to spasm. He tried to remain still as the prospect of the next few months spread itself before him. The wheelchairs, the surgery, the scars, and the painkillers. He didn’t know how he was going to afford it, how he would care for Lee.
Lee was Cotton’s grandson, the only son of his only daughter, Laura. Laura was autistic and lived in Green Valley Assisted Care off of Highway 220. God only knew how they had let it happen, but Green Valley was also where she’d gotten pregnant. That had been in 1979, the father another autistic boy who lived there. There had been a settlement and quite a bit of brouhaha, including talk of abortion, but this was a grandson, Cotton had thought. He knew there wouldn’t be another chance. After spending so many years near bodies hurtling towards metal and asphalt, Cotton had come to believe in a profound sanctity of life. He had pulled so many drivers out of mangled stock cars that the last thing he felt he could do was kill off a grandson before the kid even had a chance.
So Cotton was now a single grandparent with a nine-year-old boy. His wife, Nora, had been dead for three years before Lee was even born, and Cotton knew no other single fathers in Lystra, let alone grandfathers. But he was happy to have Lee. He’d seen what happened to other friends who’d retired and lost wives. There was a general decline, a closing in and surrender, but Cotton felt the urgency of imparting all knowledge to this boy, of staying alive long enough to do so.
He called out, but his voice was weak and Lee wasn’t home to hear it anyway. School had been cancelled because of Hugo, and Cotton had agreed to let Lee go down the street to his friend Donnie’s house.
The face of his watch was still visible in the dim light and he saw that it was only a few minutes after two o’clock. Lee wouldn’t be home until three.
Cotton had found that as he aged, the greater his desire was to create a clear picture of his family tree. He began studying genealogy at the library, even ordering a family tree assemblage kit out of the back of Parade magazine. When it arrived, though, it was basically just an empty photo album with loose-leaf charts full of blanks that Cotton couldn’t fill. He would have called his distant relatives, but there was no one living to call. He organized all the family photos into the album. He had a handful of portraits from Nora’s side and a few of himself as a child, but the majority of these photos were of Laura as a girl. There had been a period of parental ignorance—from birth until she was three—that had indeed been bliss. It was during this time, a span when it was not yet clear that Laura had any serious abnormalities, that it seemed Cotton and Nora’s new family was off to the perfect start, and they took the photos to prove it. Trips to Myrtle Beach, Tweetsy Railroad, Grandfather Mountain, Pensacola, and so many racetracks. After the diagnosis, however, the photos stopped being taken. They seemed a willful creation of future painful reminders.
Cotton now prized those photos and wished there had been more. More of Laura, more of Nora. More even of himself.
With Lee, Cotton had documented everything. He thought of this as a practical matter—he simply knew that he wouldn’t be around to tell stories of Lee’s childhood, so he wanted the photos to be there when he wasn’t. He also felt strongly that it was important, regardless of the difficulty, for Lee to have a relationship with his mother. This was why, a few times a month, Cotton drove Lee to Green Valley Assisted Care.
Green Valley was not unlike a nursing home. There were apartments and caregivers and roomfuls of zombified bodies looking up towards the walls of white brick lounges, but Green Valley was assisted care for those who were incapacitated not only by age. The last visit had been warm and sunny. That had been a week earlier, and mid-September was still holding on to August’s humidity. Cotton had taken Laura outside and arranged her in a lawn chair. She slumped a bit over the right arm, mesmerized as Lee spun in a slow arc across the lawn, performing a series of karate kicks and tumbles over the short grass. Laura laughed loudly, in snorts and gasps, as Lee jumped and kicked and then fell to the grass and rolled before popping up again. Cotton wondered where Lee had learned this. Did they teach karate in fifth grade now? After finishing his routine, Lee approached Cotton and Laura, and Laura put up her hand for a high five. This was a move she had picked up from one of the male nurses, and it seemed to put Lee very much at ease. Cotton held his hand up, too, and Lee slapped it.
On the car ride home, Lee said that his friend Donnie had taught him the karate, and Cotton explained that there were other sports that were more rewarding. Team sports. Lee said karate was more of a sport than NASCAR. Cotton knew this to not be true. He explained that most people didn’t think of NASCAR as a team sport, but that it was. That it’s teamwork that creates wins. Cotton knew that he didn’t have forever to set these examples, to teach these lessons. Probably only single-digit years.
By the time the flashlight died, the stairs felt as if they had permanently formed Cotton’s spine into a W. The pain in his hip had become almost funny, a ludicrous scientific experiment. He couldn’t see his wristwatch anymore, but when last he looked, it had been about half till three. The water had risen up to his lower neck now, and although he knew it was rising slowly, he worried that it might eventually reach his face.
He was trying to remove himself from the moment—this was what he had always told his injured drivers to do—but his attention turned to the increasingly unavoidable needs of his bladder. He quit
trying to hold things indefinitely and just began to relieve himself right there on the stairs. This was when he finally heard the front door open, and a thrill, an electric jolt, shot through him, making the warm urine shoot out even more rapidly into the cold water.
Footsteps crossed the floor above. The house was small and old, making it easy to follow any movement. The steps creaked loudly inside, were more muffled in the carpeted living room, then pulsed down the hall, pausing at Lee’s bedroom, and finally stopped in the vicinity of Cotton’s bedroom.
“Hello!” Cotton called. His voice sounded alien, a high and panicked warble. “Hello! Lee?”
He heard the footsteps move tentatively. Two, three steps. Then stop. Nothing. The water continued to drip.
“Hello?” Cotton called. “Hello! Who’s there? Lee?” Even to his own ear, his voice sounded pitiful and scary. “Please! Lee? Come here!”
Nothing. No footsteps.
“Could you please help me? Hello?”
Cotton was scared and cold, the pain dangerously close to overwhelming him. He felt it like a stain seeping into his otherwise clear thoughts.
The footsteps started up again. They crossed back towards the front hall. Now they were in the kitchen. Now they stopped. Again they were coming closer. Cotton looked up the stairs, towards the open door, and a dark form slid into view, backlit against the dim light. It was the silhouette of a large man holding a plastic trash bag.
“Hello?” Cotton said.
The man said nothing. He just stood there.
Cotton’s nausea returned and this time he actually vomited. Barely a mouthful of liquid shot onto the stairs.
“Please help me.”
The man continued to stand in silence.
“You can take whatever you want,” Cotton said. “There is a very nice clock right beside you on the counter. You can take that. Please.”
Cotton could make out nothing other than the man’s silhouette. It was too much to hold his head at the angle required to look at him, though, and he finally just lay in the tiny pool of vomit.
