Catch & Release (26 page)

It's raining. Odd is shivering. I am not. Not yet. But I'm getting damn tired. This worse than steering a drunk. If Odd were drunk I'd worry less about him falling down. He is growing heavier and heavier. He's too much for me to carry, but that won't matter if I have to do it. We are both drenched by the time we hit the last little switchback in the trail.

 

The other cars are gone from the parking lot, but D'Elegance is waiting for us.

“Can you stand?” I ask. I don't get any real answer, but when I move his arm from my shoulder to the hood of the car, Odd props himself up. I don't know how long that's going to last. I steady him while I reach into his pocket for the keys. The wet denim of his jeans, the angle of my reach, my fingers have to fight their way into his right front pocket. There's nothing in there but a gaping hole at the bottom. I imagine the keys . . . squished into the mud on the trail someplace . . . shiny and invisible as water in the creek . . . in the other pocket . . . please, please. My fingers are cold and stiff, but the keys are there. I fish them out, hooked on my little finger.

The door to the plush interior of the car is wide open. I want to just push Odd in that direction and be done. My body is really ready to be done. I'm starting to feel the cold myself. The sound of drumming rain drowns out the sound of traffic on the interstate. The rain soaking my head is stealing the heat from my body. If we stay wet, the energy is going to bleed out of us. I'd feel dumb as hell if I let myself die of hypothermia in a parking lot.

“C'mon, Odd. Let's get you warm. OK?” I pull his wet T-shirt off him. He's gone all pale and blue and shaky. Then I unbutton his fly and start fighting the wet jeans down his legs. When I get them down around his ankles, I look up, right into the most vulnerable thing on the planet. Poor, pale, wet worm. Poor Odd. “Sit down in the car now, Odd. I need to get your boots and socks off. Here, let me look at that knee.”

The cut isn't wide, but it might be deep. It's right under his kneecap. One of those sharp black points of rock got pushed up under there when he fell. Someplace else it might have just left a bruise, but in that place it caught somehow and broke the meat open. The nerves there, the tendons, who knows? Red-stained rain is following gravity in little rivers all the way to his ankle.

I've seen what I can see. I untie his boot and pull it off. I fumble around until his stump is free from his robot leg. I take off the robot leg so his stump won't be left sitting in the cold, wet socket. I nudge Odd's legs around until he's completely in the car. I shut the door. Then I just want a minute, but I can't have it.

Daylight doesn't last forever, not even in the summer, and it's starting to bleed away. With every minute the air is getting murkier and the world is getting flatter as the shadows dissolve. I wouldn't be surprised to see Herman the Sturgeon glide by outside the car in the remaining green light. It's that wet.

I open the trunk and grab the sleeping bags. Then I climb in and get Odd as covered up as I can. Odd does nothing to help.

We've got two choices: stay here in the Elowah parking lot or get back on the interstate and head to a place with food—maybe even a twenty-four-hour clinic if Odd doesn't perk up. How, exactly, is sitting in the parking lot doing nothing going to make things better? It's mostly open road, I figure, so I jack the seat into place and turn the key.

All I have to do is get to the on ramp and merge. I can merge. I can see what's coming. They'll have the lights on. And I can wait as long as I need to—I can wait until there are no lights. Then I just stay in the right lane until I get to a place that has what Odd needs, whatever that turns out to be. There isn't much traffic. It isn't super busy. But shit, the semis. They blow by me so hard the wake nearly pushes me off the road.

The rain comes down harder. The crappy blades can't push it off the windshield fast enough. The car wants to hydroplane. The tires are probably bald. Everything is original except the oil and gas. Thank you very much Gramma Dot, you sentimental lamebrain. If we die here, it's your fault, Gramma Dot—and you won't ever know. Or if you do know, you'll forget it, Gramma Dot, lucky you.

 

Troutdale is the first place that looks like it will work. Or at least the first place with more than one exit so I don't miss it by the time I should have turned.

Welcome to Troutdale, where all I have to do is drive around until I come to a place that sells Neosporin or Betadine and Tylenol—and maybe cough syrup if I can get the kind that puts me to sleep. And there's a fast-food place open in the same mall. And parking isn't a problem because I pull into the wide-open spaces in the back forty, where nobody in their right mind would park on a rainy night. Lines shmines. Straight schmaigt. I kind of coast forward until I bump up onto the concrete median and it's good enough.

I turn to Odd. He looks pale in the watery light coming through the windshield. “You OK?”

“Not great.”

“I'm going to get some stuff. You want to get dressed and come with—or you want to wait here?”

“I'll wait.”

“I'll be back fast. You want me to leave the heater on? The radio?”

He doesn't answer, so I guess not. I leave the keys if he changes his mind.

 

“Look. Drink some of this. It's decaf. They didn't have tea, but I put a lot of milk in it so it should be cool enough to drink right now. And take these,” I shake out two nighttime pain tablets into my hand. He doesn't reach for them, but when I put my hand by his mouth he opens up and I tip them in. He lifts the coffee up and drinks by himself, though.

“I got you a burger and an apple pie if you want to eat.”

“Maybe later.”

“You want me to look at that cut? Make sure it's clean and dry? I got some stuff to prevent infection.”

“Maybe later. The cut doesn't hurt. But my robot leg is on fire.”

His robot leg isn't even connected.

“Those pills were for pain,” I say. “They'll help.”

“Not like the good stuff they used to put in the IV. That shit worked fine. Is there any whiskey left?”

“I don't think so.”

“Could you check in the trunk? It could take the edge off.”

“No. I won't. You can't mix Tylenol and alcohol. It will ruin your liver. Tylenol is dangerous that way. If you take too much it will kill you. Just because you can buy it everywhere doesn't make it safe.”

“Really?” Odd picks up the Tylenol bottle from the dash and looks at it like it's suddenly more important. I take it away from him.

“This is the p.m. kind. You'll fall asleep pretty soon. The pain stops when you sleep, doesn't it? Give it a half hour.”

“I could smoke a bowl.”

“Yeah. I guess. If you want.”

“I do. But it's in the trunk.”

“That's OK. I'm already wet.”

When I'm at the trunk I look at the Tylenol bottle in my hand. I shake out a couple for myself. They taste good, like vanilla tea. Then I dump the rest into the water that's streaming through the parking lot. It will go down the drain and into the river, like all the birth control and antidepressants and antibiotics. It will be in the water and nothing good will come of it. But there's no chance Odd will poison himself with it, either.

I find the ziplock with his pipe and prescription bottle in the Lucky Charms box. Whatever else he can do with this bud, he can't kill himself directly. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is good medicine. But I'm so wet, cold, and tired I don't have enough sense to get out of the rain. I should not operate a vehicle. I should not be practicing medicine without a license.

 

Odd is asleep. I will be soon. The rain is drumming on the car. The windows are fogging up. When we breathe, Odd and I, we breathe out water. The car is an aquarium at the bottom of the river. We are aquarium trout. Our fins are dissolving. Sad white lumps are growing over our mouths, over our eyes.

A shape moves by in the water outside of the windshield. Then it comes closer. The sturgeon's barbels move like gentle fingers over the wet glass in a blessing. The glass is no barrier, it dissolves, pulled apart by water and gravity. I can feel the barbels on my cheek, caressing my scar.

“You are beautiful, Polly.” It's Odd, his hand on my face. He's half asleep. Probably delirious.

“Rest now, Odd. We both need to sleep.”

“Could you sing, Polly?”

“I'll turn on the radio . . .”

“No, Polly, just go ahead and sing. I just need to hear your voice.”

So I sing. . .

 

“Come away, human child

To the water and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.”

 

I stop. Odd doesn't say anything. I listen to the rain and wait for sleep to come again. I wait, and I think about sturgeon. Their plan worked for millions of years, so they kept moving up the current into the future. Then the dams came and the future wasn't where it used to be. The old plan doesn't work anymore. I think about MRSA, too, the latest generation of something older than sturgeon. When the world changes, MRSA changes. It adapts. Try to kill it, and it reinvents itself. I wonder if maybe there is a sturgeon somewhere that is thrashing up a new channel to a new future. I wonder if, maybe, I can do that too.