“You can this time. I’m saying you can. Because it isn’t like I’m with you. You’re just being the postman, picking up a package, so what? What I need is the reefer that’s in my closet. It’s in the lining of my winter coat. Bring it here quick. That’s all I’m asking, bring me the coat. Also, my radio. I’m being soft-rocked to death in this damned hospital and the crappy transistor your mother bought me is a piece of shit.”
“I can’t go to your house. They’ll see me.”
“Oh Christ, don’t be so dumb! It doesn’t matter who sees what—”
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“It’s just clothes—”
“But the pot—”
“Cut me some slack! It’s a coat as far as you know, okay? The pot is in the lining, about which you officially know nada. It’s in the lining because I have to hide it from my roommates. They always steal my good bud. It’s hidden, see? Nobody will know a damned thing.”
“But they’ll see me. Whoever answers the door—”
“—won’t care! They won’t ask anything. They’re assholes. They can not think.”
“I can’t get there. The police might come.”
“What police? There are no police. I said you could use some of my money. Get a taxi!”
“I don’t have any of your money.”
His heart was pounding; he wanted to yell. He listened as the phone beeped a warning that he was almost out of credit. Please insert coins if you wish to continue, please insert coins…“Hang on!” he shouted, then wrenched himself up, causing his pelvis to hurt like hell, and pushed in a couple of quarters.
He heard her say she had to go. “No, don’t!” he yelled, a little louder than he ought to have. “For fucksake, Barbara, use the money to get a taxicab, you know what a taxicab is, don’t you?” He imagined her with his money, buying all the stupid bullshit she liked—pastel T-shirts and makeup and toe socks, or pet fucking rocks—God, he hoped she hadn’t blown half of it already. “I’m not pissed off, okay? I respect what you did; it was almost professional. But you got caught. I caught you. If you want to steal from me, you’ve got to kill me. And try as you did to make it so, I. AM. NOT. DEAD.”
“I didn’t try to kill you!”
“Then I hate to think of what would happen if you had tried!” he said. He thought about what to say next, what would scare her. She’d always moaned about who might see them and what she should say and how she should act. She’d always worried about being in trouble that way. Well, he’d show her some trouble. “Listen, missy, you’re lucky I’m not talking to the cops—yet—because they do want to talk to me,” he said. “I’m not going to tell them you tried to kill me, but I know it, and you know it.”
He paused, letting that sink in. She’d be going crazy with the thought she might be arrested for attempted murder. “It’s really very simple. I want the pot—I mean coat—and I want my money, but you can use some of my money for transportation. Isn’t that simple? Isn’t that easy? So how about it? We’ll call it quits after that, no more arguing about you trying to kill me. No point staying mad at each other.”
She didn’t say anything and he felt it again, that anger, charging up from inside him. “Oh come on!” He wondered if she’d hung up, actually hung up on him. She couldn’t possibly hang up on him; he was the victim, the one in the hospital, institutionalized among an army of vicious nurses and remote, untalkative doctors who sleepwalked through their rounds. Besides, she’d never before done anything of the sort. He yelled into the phone, “Goddamn it, answer me! It’s not too late for me to go to the police, you know!”
And then he looked up, and there were the two cops that he’d seen before, almost as though he’d summoned them. He had no idea how long they’d been watching him barking orders at Bobbie about drugs, his hand curled so hard around the phone there were sweat marks on the plastic so that he even looked like a junkie. He’d seen these cops before, lurking in the hospital, staring at him through the window of his room: a freckled young Irish-looking one in a crisp dark blazer and a black guy with an open-neck shirt and acne.
“Are you for real, Salt and Pepper?” he said. Though he’d been avoiding them for some time by feigning sleep whenever they came around, he wasn’t entirely sure if he’d invented these two. Back when he’d first been admitted to the hospital, when he hadn’t really understood what was going on and people were sticking him with needles and prying through his skull and wheeling him down hallways to darker and smaller rooms, attaching him to machines, he’d seen them—or thought he’d seen them. His brain hadn’t been operating smoothly for quite some while. He had to admit that he was in an advanced state of fucked up. There had been times over the past week when he would forget words. Not dictionary words but common, ordinary words, words like pee, for example. He’d get only so far in a sentence, I need to…, and then draw a blank and finish the sentence with you know! A nurse would then race from the room to find a doctor, who blared a penlight in his eye and asked questions like whether he knew his own name and what the hell day it was, and he never knew the answer to that one because every day was the same to him now. It could be Tuesday seven times in a row—what the hell difference did it make?
He narrowed his vision on the cops now. “If you are real, are you looking for me?” he asked. He hadn’t been a hundred percent on that, either, whether the police were seeking him specifically, or whether for some reason they just hung around hospitals. Perhaps they were present in the wards all the time, like fuzzy dice hanging on the rearview mirrors of roadsters. It was hard to tell because time jumbled in his mind so that a day could be super-elastic and last forever or disappear altogether, plucked from his life without his ever having being informed, taken from him as his eye had been. For days, he wasn’t sure about the eye—had it really been removed? It had been, he’d finally understood, just as he understood now, as the police came toward him, that these cops were real.
“Hey, can you hang that up for me and call a nurse? I think I’m going to throw up,” he said. Since the removal of his eye there was always something draining into the back of his throat and it could be relied upon to provide a kind of emergency vomiting situation if needed. Leaning over the mattress, he moaned and writhed, making it appear that only the weight of his broken arm anchored him in the bed. Like this, he hawked up a sizable dollop of fluid; it made an impressive splat on the floor.
Sure enough, the head honcho, Esther, came rushing. She told the cops they needed to wait somewhere else. That she needed to attend to him now.
“Thank you, Nurse Esther,” Craig said. “I’m about to throw up again. I need my machines. These good folks will have to go away now.”
“Oh, please!” Esther scolded.
“What?” He let out a long moan, farted loudly, then began breathing in a shallow irregular way. He was actually very good at this, he decided. He was beginning to feel nauseous and light-headed. Now he really did feel terrible, his skin hot and cold at the same time. He could feel the sweat beneath his bandages, the deep ache low in his right buttock where he’d broken his pelvis. “I’m going out!” he called.
Esther let out a long breath, then turned to the police, seeming positively apologetic that she had to ask them to leave. “I would love for you to arrest him and take him away,” she sighed, “but I got to get him on a drip now. If he loses consciousness we have to revive him. That’s just rules.”
“But he is faking,” the black cop said.
Esther smiled. “I know.”
The police would eventually speak to him, of course, but he couldn’t figure out why that would matter. What was the great crime anyway? He’d driven his car off a road, nearly killed himself, but he hadn’t hurt anybody else. Altercation at a motel? The manager had stolen from him. And he couldn’t even remember who threw the first punch. Pot in the car? There was some pot in the car, but not much. Someone left it there, you know the radio biz. The porn in the trunk was legal. What the hell
had he done wrong? Not a damned thing, so let them ask what they liked.
HOW ARE YOU, BARBARA?
1978
He called three weeks after the accident. Even before she got off the school bus, hauling a stack of books and a PE kit from which she’d purposely lost the shorts, keeping her scabby legs hidden in sweatpants, she’d felt a dull warning inside her. This internal alarm had proven correct in the past, and she was not surprised when she walked into the house and heard the phone.
It was him. And while she knew it was impossible, the noise of the phone seemed personal to her and had a forbidding, accusatory feel. It may as well have been his voice, shouting at her from inside the house, calling her name louder and louder until at last she gave in, and came to where he ordered her, and stood before him. The ringing phone meant he was here in her life once more, just as she’d known he would eventually be, and the days between the crash and now collapsed at once, so that he was again present—inside her, even—like a monstrous second head that directed her every thought. Pick up the damned phone, Barbara, his voice said. You don’t even know for sure it’s me.
The next time he called, she was in her bedroom, sitting by the record player, trying to get an earring to go back in. The ear piercing had gone wrong despite being done by the jeweler. He had used something resembling a staple gun, shooting a gold post cleanly through the lobe. She still recalled how he had scowled into the measuring device, so close she could smell his face and his hairy little mustache, and then declared she had very small lobes and that this was a problem, the lobes. Now there was a hot swelling and a persistent localized infection in both ears. She wanted the little gold studs so badly, however, that she dabbed alcohol onto the weeping holes where the posts rested and hoped a scab would form, and that she would soon look like the other girls who seemed to take no notice of their earrings at all, not even when they knocked the dangling ones by accident as they brushed back their hair.
The phone rang again, but she didn’t answer this second time, either. Instead she held her breath, her heart ballooning inside her chest, the sound of Elton John on her little stereo unable to drown out the noise of the ringing. She twisted an earring post into her ear, feeling it stick against the dried blood, and the small, pinching sting knocked her thoughts away from Craig a fraction. He was probably seething at the other end, thinking how she would not pick up the phone, would not do one goddamned thing he wanted. She could imagine how he’d sound if she were to answer, his breath heavy in the phone. How are you, Barbara? he’d say, the greeting sounding more like a curse.
And that was as it always had been, him hating her at the same time as wanting her. If she answered now she could pretend she’d been out when he rang before, but if she didn’t answer this time—this critical second time—he would know she was avoiding him.
She might have answered if it would have put a stop to whatever dark attraction was developing between him and her mother, but she knew already that it was too late. Craig was the prize her mother had set her sights on. And so, as the phone rang downstairs, Bobbie stayed in her room, sang along to the record, tried to worry less, to sing louder, shouting out the lyrics. And butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye, bye!
It happened again toward evening, the sound of the phone splitting the air with urgency. By now, she’d gathered some courage. “Not on your life,” she told the phone.
She imagined his response: Why are you being so mean to me, Barbara? What have I ever done to you?
She didn’t feel mean, not exactly, but she did feel as though she were breaking rules. She paced the kitchen. With every ring, her steps quickened, her heart beat faster. She glared at the phone, telling herself she could not know for sure it was him. But it was him; she would not be fooled. She stared at the receiver, a slim wall-mounted aqua push-button. “Scream your head off, for all I care,” she said.
She counted twenty-five rings, then a brief silence, long enough for someone to dial again, then another five minutes of ringing. She could imagine Craig at his end, the phone cocked up on his head, the fury in his face, punching at the plate of numbers. His body was a stored battery of pain. His injuries had been described in detail to her many times by her mother, who explained how the pelvis meant he could not walk, and the single eye meant he’d lost his depth perception, which would make him extra unsteady once he was on his feet. What she couldn’t understand was how he managed to get to a phone in the first place. She thought of him on a gurney in the hospital struggling with the sticking numbers on the metal keypad, and listening helplessly to the lonely ringing on the other end. Growing angry, his fury making him sweat in his backless gown, he would plan a revenge she could not imagine and dared not think about.
“You are a peckerhead,” she told the phone. “Say it. Say, ‘I am a peckerhead.’ ”
She imagined her mother had never seen that side of Craig, the one that terrified Dan at McDonald’s, the one that drove a car as though they were inside a pinball machine and could bounce off trucks the way a pinball bounces off paddles, the one that spread her legs and wiped spit on himself before plunging inside her.
“Nobody is home,” she told the phone. But she could hear his voice inside her head, as though he were planted there with direct access to her brain. Grow up, Barbara! she heard him say. Pick up the goddamned telephone! And with that voice came all his stored hatred, all his resentment. If only she would follow his logic; if only she would come to see his reason. That was what all the fights were about. His problem, he had often explained, was that he was smarter than other people. That was how he saw himself. He had a set of questions to which there were exact answers and she was supposed to agree to these answers because he had already thought it all through, thought of everything.
She walked outside, letting the porch door slam and holding her ears against the phone’s shrill echo. The sky was closed and dark, the moon hidden behind clouds. She remembered how when she was a very young child, before she’d even gone to school, she’d come out on a night like this and seen her father, a flashlight balanced on a tree stump, the wooden stem of a rake in his hand, gathering bits of bark and slivers of wood around the chopping block where he worked. He’d always been doing chores. He chopped logs and dug up the lawn when burst drainpipes caused a flood, laying new clay ones. She remembers him sitting in the living room with a cup of coffee while she watched cartoons, waving to her as she went off to bed in her flowery pajamas.
She felt a raindrop splash on the part in her hair, another on her shoulder. She listened for the phone but everything was quiet now. “I’d better go inside,” she said aloud, as though her father were there in front of her.
—
LATER SHE TOLD Dan about what had happened—how the phone had rung and she’d known it was Craig and had not answered it.
“Maybe he’ll give up now,” he said. But neither of them believed Craig would give up. There was no stopping him. He was a bull on a slow charge, but he was on his way.
“From now on, when you call me, let it ring twice, then hang up,” Bobbie said. “I’ll call you back.”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t you, was it?” She was sitting on the floor in the kitchen, the cord looped around her legs, a tall glass of Coke on the floor beside her.
“No.”
She sighed. “Maybe he’ll die after all.”
“I doubt it.”
“Or have some other problem.” She kept hoping something would happen to Craig, that a medical mix-up would cause total amnesia and he’d forget all about her. Or that he’d need to go out of state for rehabilitation and decide never to return.
But the damage to his arm was healing and she’d heard from her mother that he was regaining feeling in the numb areas. His wrist was better, too. The pelvic fracture turned out not to be unstable—just a slab of broken-off bone they had to retrieve surgically. It wouldn’t be long before he was able to walk.
“Unfortunately,
every passing day brings more good news,” she told Dan. “The best I can hope for now is a hospital fire.”
She heard Dan’s laughter through the phone. She imagined him in his house. He always called from his father’s office, a boxy room with a mahogany desk and fat medical books stuffed into the shelves. He’d described it to her just like that, and she pictured him sitting in the wingback chair, his long legs tucked beneath the desk, the phone in his hand. In her mind’s eye there was an antique clock and eggshell blue walls, an atmosphere of enduring calm like a membrane that held everything in place. She thought of him there in that room and the image of him in her mind was like a talisman, a good luck charm.
“Maybe you can feed him underdone chicken?” Dan said. “Or some poisonous mushrooms?”
She repositioned herself on the floor, leaning against the kitchen wall with its splashy pattern of flowers climbing above her head. She took a long slug of Coke and said, “He’d make me taste it first.”
“My father once told me it is easy to slip poison into strong drinks.”
“Your father told you that?”
“Doctors know this kind of stuff. I’m surprised there aren’t more cases of murder in the profession.”
He made her laugh. That was the first thing. With Dan she did not have to explain all the things she felt, nor the crazy way she’d become entwined with such a man as Craig, nor how difficult it was now to extract herself. Nor did she have to lie.
They understood the problem; they did not talk about the problem. They did not discuss what had happened or had not happened with Craig. They did not talk about the sex. She did not tell him all the things she’d done, about how she’d been pushed always that little bit further, or about the shame. It was as though they agreed that life before the day they met was a prehistory not worth mentioning. They liked to kiss and hold each other. They liked to lie face-to-face wherever they could find soft ground: on the clay banks that cradled a creek, on a cushion of grass in a field bordered by brambles. He would touch her cheeks and stroke her hair while she stretched out against the length of him. She’d touch the swell of muscles at his shoulder, smooth a finger over the great ledge of his collarbone. His hands went to her back, then to her breasts, his lips following. She knew him by scent and touch and voice. It was enough for them. And here was the surprise she could never have imagined: that with Dan it all felt new.
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