Day Out of Days (21 page)

My dad’s grave gets no maintenance at the Veterans Cemetery. It sits out flat white in the red dust and hot Sangre de Cristo winds. In winter you can’t even find it in the blue banks of snow. You go kicking around through powder as though searching for lost coins. Your hands get red and numb, digging. Your breath grows short from the altitude. You end up drinking.

Once, a flaming young Spanish woman came right up to me in a bar and simply declared that her grandfather, Filiberto Lujan, occupied the grave right next to my father’s. She quickly vanished before I could fall in love.

Sitting here. Watching my heart pump in my right ankle. Bump, bump. Next door, a woman cackles madly. Entertaining her children. Making up crazy voices. Changing faces. She runs from room to room. The kids are going nuts trying to catch her.

You circle all around your life, but do you find it? You circle from above. Like a hawk. Below the ozone. Looking down. On the hunt. From Pecos to Healdsburg. Carlsbad to Reno. Do you find it?

Sitting here in a straight-backed chair. Staring down. Pump, pump. Looking just like the same panicked kid from your Duarte yearbook. The year you never graduated. Am I looking? Am I seeing this? The sun lighting up my naked leg. Wrinkled veins. All the coarse hairs swirling around my red horse scars. Battles. Knives and guns. The kids next door. Screaming. Can’t tell if they’re happy or scared.

You circle all around your life, but do you find it?

I’m back.

Well, look at you. I guess you’re back.

Yeah—I’m back.

Well, well, well—For how long this time?

Um—Don’t know.

Right. So—How was it out there on the dumb American highway, days on end? Have any revelations?

No—

Epiphanies?

No—

Divine manifestations?

Look—

What? You have some sort of confession to make?

No—Why?

Guilty conscience?

About what?

How many pathetic women did you leave out there—dazed and bewildered, turning in circles?

Can’t we just—

What?

Get along?

Depends.

On what?

Your availability.

I’m going to stay here for at least a week.

Not that.

What then?

Never mind.

What?

I have to go down to the post office.

Wait a second—

What?

I don’t know. I just get back and now you have to go down to the post office?

Yeah. Life goes on.

I know but—

What?

I don’t know—

Oh—Would you mind moving your Chevy off the lawn, please? It kills the grass.

Sure. Where do you want it?

I don’t care—down by the lake, maybe. No—not down by the lake. I don’t want to be looking at it in the morning, out the kitchen window.

Where then?

Put it way back deep in the woods. Somewhere. Back where I can’t see it.

Somebody’s shooting deep in the woods. Wind is out of the north and somebody’s out there shooting. A hawk struggles through it, ducking and diving, doing his best. Two loons. Wind makes the water race in dark bars. Across the lake somebody keeps shooting. Light keeps shifting. You can feel all kinds of weather in it. Weather from far off, rolling in. The gun makes the dog cringe. Dog crinkles up with every bang. Boat knocking up against the dock; tethered to it, just rocking. Water slapping the aluminum hull in little claps. Faraway thunder. You can see it coming.

She sits down beside me now with a big white bowl of peaches in her lap. She makes my heart sing. Her lap and her peaches. Gun keeps going off deep in the birch. Saplings squeak. Tamarack. Black butterfly struggles in the wind. Dog keeps her one good eye on the loons. Red sumac. Indian plumage. Shoshone. Arapaho. Someone keeps shooting. Far off. Must be just practice, for something big. Something coming up.

I do regret not opening up my eyes and allowing him to see into me, just that once. I do regret that now. I should have been more generous. If I had it to do over again perhaps I would. What in the world did I have to lose? I’d already lost my entire body. What was left? Fear I guess. Of what? Of him seeing me? I guess. But what? What in me could have been so terrible? So impossible to behold. God knows I carried it around inside me all my many days. Carried it like a faithful slave. But he was a different kind of man than me. Such a gentle soul. Kind. You could see it in his eyes. Not a mean bone in his body. Kind enough to stop on his Sunday walk and pick me up at least. Carry me all that ways. He wasn’t obliged to do that. He wasn’t under any orders. He just found it in the goodness of his heart. The goodness of his heart. And mine had long left me. Nothing there but this gruesome head. It must have been truly terrifying to him. I doubt he ever even brought himself to tell the story. Tell the tale. Who in the wide world would ever believe a thing like that? A head in a ditch that talks? That pleads for forgiveness. That moans and groans with self-pity. At least that part of it’s over. No more bobbing to the surface. I wonder about him, though, sometimes. My last contact with the tribe. I wonder if he ever made it back to the wife. The little lady. The love of his life. Or if he’s still wandering up and down those roads, poking at things in the ditches; talking to trees. I should have let him see into my eyes. Just that once. It might have been a help to him. It might have brought him some peace. To know the two of us were entirely separate. Complete opposite ends of the stick. There was never any danger of him becoming me. Falling into the pit. He was entirely himself. It was me that was split. It was only me.

Floating flat on my back in the bare night sky, rippling yellow pool lights in stripes across the deep end. Staring up at the wide splash of desert stars as my son tries to sink himself to the bottom, exhaling all his wind, like he might become a dark boulder. He won’t sink. He can’t get himself to sink no matter what he tries. He’s like a dry stick, blond hair streaming out as though he might have fallen from this very sky. I remember the two of us jumping into the bass pond on the ranch back home. Middle of summer. Temperature up in the high nineties. We were diving down deep into the slimy green water trying to retrieve an old sunken raft. I came up gasping. That was the very first indication I had something seriously wrong with my heart: Desperate breath. Ache in the armpit. Ropes in the neck. The panic, although I kept it hidden from my son. He kept right on diving while I pulled myself onshore, facedown, spitting dirt.

Now the clear world floats way above. Cassiopeia in a perfect
3
. Desert wind. Us below. Lipitor. Zetia. Ramipril. If this were 1876, I’d be dead in a heartbeat.

“Funny how some little impulse, some notion like that can pop up and here you find yourself suddenly snowshoeing across the Wisconsin wilderness in dead winter.” This was the thought that came to him in the midst of his heart pounding, breath gasping, eyes locked down on the brand new pair of bright orange Atlas snow-shoes he’d bought at Fleet Farm. He’d seen a pair just like it hanging in the back porch of his brother-in-law’s place, prompting this whole new adventure. The real spur, of course, was his little “almost” heart-attack experience going back to October on the West Coast; that was the real catalyst—”an event like that;” “out of the blue.” One minute he’s eating sushi on Sutter Street, the next he’s collapsed at the bottom of the glass steps of the hotel, tourists brushing past him with their black luggage. None of the classic symptoms; no pressing pain in the chest, no stabbing in the left arm, just flat out of air and the back of his neck tied up in deep knots. It seemed to him he still hadn’t quite caught up to the full impact of it. Caution regarding the unseeable organs was something that had never occurred to him. You can only imagine the heart inside there, pounding away in its red cage. He’d seen the ghostly tomographic images after the failed stress test but they resembled nothing like his mental image of a heart—
his
heart. The gangly left anterior descending artery dancing out across the page like some Japanese fighting dragon with two very noticeable constrictions, thin as horsehair. But to actually feel himself to be the possessor of a diseased heart was almost impossible. His new idea
now was that he thought he needed to push himself physically to some brink to find out exactly where the boundary was. He’d followed all the doctor’s admonitions about not smoking, avoiding fried foods, stressful situations (that one seemed next to impossible since the very knowledge of his new condition seemed to turn every situation into a possible threat). He religiously downed his daily dose of five colorful pills: anticoagulant pills, cholesterol reduction pills, ramipril, Zetia, a specially coated 325-milligram. aspirin and now, here he was intentionally going out of his way to exercise and raise his heart rate like some aerobic moron—the kind of dutiful citizen he used to hold in highest contempt. He could hardly believe his about-face. What a man would do when he had a gun to his head. How he could suddenly forsake his most sacred obsessions, abandoning entire aspects of character he had taken to be immutable. He had been a solid, deep-inhaling smoker since he was twelve, pilfering Chesterfield butts from his old man’s ashtray. That pitted musky teakwood memento hand-carved in the Philippines in the figure of a native man squatting in his loincloth gently embracing a chicken in a wicker basket. It had been part of his father’s booty brought back from World War II in a green army duffel and shuffled from house to house during his peripatetic childhood. The black bowl of the thing always overflowing with half-smoked delicious butts he’d carefully straighten and preserve in a Yuban coffee can buried out behind the tangerine tree. At night, from the blue foothills, he would draw deep gusts of smoke, squatting in the same posture as the little native man; staring deep into the broad valley, eyes tracing the snaking car lights along US
66
. He became dizzy with nicotine and imagination. By the age of sixteen he was totally addicted and indoctrinated into the strong belief that manhood and smoking were synonymous. There was nothing he did without a cigarette clenched between his fingers or his teeth: mowing lawns, working under cars, saddling horses, even necking with girls, the ubiquitous cigarette became a prop of necessity. Now he’d actually managed to cold-turkey for
two and a half months. He could still feel his tongue yearning for the bright sting of smoke.

He remembered the collegiate-looking doctor in a red bow tie hovering over him the morning after the stent procedure saying, “You’ve already gone twenty-four hours without one cigarette. Why don’t you just try stopping altogether?” He remembered wondering how many times the doctor had used this exact same ploy on other victims; hitting a man when he’s down. He had flopped the hospital sheets back away from his legs and saw the cloudy deep bruises turning a ghastly green on either side of his crotch where they’d inserted the long catheter, probing it up through the artery, searching for the dangerously collapsed areas. He remembered watching the eyes of the surgeon as he worked. The eyes following the path of the catheter on an overhead monitor while the hands manipulated the journey in some strange dance of high technology and raw human coordination. On the morning after, there wasn’t much pain at all. Just a deep vague ache like what happens when you get hit with a hardball in the soft inner part of the bicep. An extremely black nurse came in with his street clothes draped over her left shoulder. She laid them out on a metal chair and told him he could get dressed now, they were releasing him. He remembered this woman from the day before with another nurse who could have been her twin. They kept firing questions at him in a singsong way as they prepared him for the procedure in a small curtained anteroom: “Where’s your home, honey? Where’s your family? What kind of work do you do?” None of these questions made any sense to him in the face of his current health predicament so he said nothing and meekly smiled at them as though he’d temporarily lost his mind. He took out his Wisconsin driver’s license and told them they could take down all the information off that. That was the best he could do at the moment. He hadn’t brought anything with him. This whole heart business had caught him completely off-guard. He’d just climbed into his white Suburban and driven straight from downtown San Francisco,
across the Oakland Bay Bridge right directly to the clinic, halfway praying he wouldn’t have a heart attack in the middle of traffic. He thought that might be a terrible way to die. Reminded him of that old Beatles song where someone from the House of Lords dies at a traffic light. All kinds of random dumb things were going through his head and he panicked at the idea that his mind was not going to come to the aid of his body; that these two aspects of himself were, in fact, completely divorced. One of the extremely black nurses cast him a wry grin and said, “Don’t worry, darlin’, we’ll be your family if you haven’t got one.” He felt strangely reassured by this. After he’d stripped down and managed to drape the open-backed blue hospital smock around himself and push his cold feet into the ridiculous terry-cloth slippers they’d provided, the nurses ushered him out through the curtains to a chrome gurney. He remembered a certain sense of humiliation climbing up on the thing with his bare ass sticking out and then lying down on his back seeing his white chicken legs ending in the silly slippers. Now a set of male nurses took over, outfitted in green pajamas, white shower caps, sheer latex gloves, and plastic baggies encasing their feet. They had the physiques of men in their mid-to late thirties who avidly work out with weights as though terrified of suddenly losing their youth. It bothered him slightly that such personal concerns outside their medical profession could distract them from the business at hand; that they might easily mess up a minor detail in the procedure that would prove fatal or worse—make a cabbage out of him, on life support. He tried to tell himself calmly that none of this mattered; he was in the hands of fate. His mind wouldn’t listen.