Harsh Oases (36 page)

As soon as he limped through the door, Woody felt at home.

A blond boy with a large, lopsided head tore himself from a young aide named Holly Cupp and dashed over to clutch Woody’s leg.

“Missa Payne! Missa Payne!”

Woody patted his head. “That’s my name, Cole—don’t wear it out”

Cole cackled at the familiar joke. Woody gently disengaged and went over to Holly Cupp.

Holly favored patterned clothes: stripes, dots, paisleys, checks, pineapples and cows. Woody had rarely seen her wear a monochrome garment She dressed her brown hair into a floppy fountain perpetually geysering atop her crown. Her glasses resembled those worn by Woody’s octogenarian Aunt Helen.

Holly beamed. “Good to have you back, Woody.”

“It’s good—no, it’s great to be back. How’s everything?”

“Well, Florence finally managed to master Legos. You should see some of the wild things she’s built Burt’s on a helpful new med. Cole here is drawing up a storm. We’ve got four new kids—I’ll tell you all about them in a minute. And oh yeah, Pawpaw had a new litter.”

Woody looked over at the terrarium sheltering the class’s guinea-pig colony. He scented the animals. “Getting kinda crowded in there, isn’t it?”

“I’m working on finding some foster homes for the new ones. But the kids really love seeing the babies.”

Woody sighed. “If you say so. Introduce me to the new guys.” The morning passed in a blur of activity. Woody had little time to think, which suited him fine. He had already thought more than enough about what had happened to him.

In the hospital, after regaining consciousness, Woody had weighed his Spanish disaster. Having gone openhearted to a new land, a holy place, following his faith and expecting a miracle, he had instead met hatred, violence, and destruction.

At first he was fiercely angry, cursing both mankind and God. After many tears and imprecations, he entered a period of feeling utterly drained and colorless. A dawning realization, however, succeeded this emotional slough.

After all, he had gotten his miracle. It just hadn’t taken the form he had assumed it would: much more cataclysmic, with daunting collateral damage and wasted lives, but a miracle nonetheless. Here the old adage, “God works in mysterious ways,” supplied the only possible comfort

Woody meditated on the bombing’s lessons and eventually, with Father Tierney’s help, reached an accommodation with his personal history. The feelings he had divulged to Steve Dresser came to dominate his outlook. He even experienced transitory twinges of forgiveness for the bomber. Nothing had happened as he had expected. This, in itself, offered immense room for growth.

By early afternoon of his first day, the children all fed and down for naps, Woody was exhausted. He ate lunch alone, distractedly mulling the morning’s activities, things he planned for later, adjustments in his approaches based on what he had encountered. When the day resumed with some mild gym activity, Woody felt sufficiently refreshed to imagine surviving to quitting time.

But as he tossed a big lightweight ball among a trio of children, Holly dispelled his calm: “Woody, quick! Josh is seizing!” He rushed over to a mat where she cradled a thrashing skinny dark-haired boy in shorts and t-shirt.

“Get the nurse!” Woody’s dashed cane clattered away as he dropped to his knees and took the boy’s galvanic body in his arms.

Instantly the boy’s spasms ceased. His egg-white eyes rolled back to normal register and focused on Woody’s face. “Mister Payne—what’s wrong?”

“Josh—you’re okay?”

Josh broke free and jumped up. He threw his arms ceilingward like a triumphant athlete, grinning broadly. “Okay? I feel great!”

Holly returned from her aborted errand.

Woody extended a hand and said, “Help me up?”

Eyes wide, Holly reached down slowly, as if fearful of his touch.

Father James Tierney loved to read. Tottering piles of books filled every flat surface in his study. Woody had to clear off a chair in order to sit.

The white-haired priest brought Woody a beer. His hand exhibited a small palsy. “Here, son. You probably need this.”

Although Woody was not supposed to mix alcohol with his meds, he slugged the beer anyway.

Father Tiemey sat. “Let’s consider this matter calmly. You seem more rational than when you called me earlier.” He tented his fingers. “You still think you performed a miracle today upon this boy? Such a claim is no small matter.”

“I don’t know. All I can say is, he’s never come out of a seizure like that before.”

“We’re not doctors, Woodrow. We don’t know what’s possible. Isn’t it plausible that some seizures could be shorter and milder than others? You may’ve intervened just as he was about to snap out of it anyway.”

“He didn’t look ready to snap out of it.”

The father shrugged. “How clearly do we see during stressful moments?”

“I—I don’t know. It’s just that—” Woody fingered the depression in his skull.

“I thought we’d worked through that idle speculation, Woodrow. There’s no way to positively identify that splinter in your brain. Out of all the flying debris that horrible day, to assume you received such a special piece—no, it’s too unlikely. And even if we could be sure that a fragment of the True Cross had lodged in your brain, what of it? The Lignum Crucis is the holiest of relics, but no more than that It’s blasphemous to imagine you could receive mystical powers from mere proximity to the holy rood. The legacy of Jesus doesn’t inhere in mere common matter.”

Woody frowned:
proximity
was an awfully bland word for the intimacy of the contact between his brain and the unknown splinter.

The week after Josh’s seizure, Cole had a birthday party. Everyone, even the most severely impaired children, sensed the day’s excitement. Cake and juice awaited them after naptime.

Cole could not stop exclaiming, “Cake’n hoose, cake’n hoose!”

Woody had provided all this fare himself. Such out-of-pocket expenses marked the teacher’s life.

Holly tied on bibs. She shuffled paper plates and sippy cups as Woody sliced and poured. After some confusion, they had all the children served and enjoying their treats. Holly dabbed spills and cleaned faces. Woody turned back to the desk where the cake rested, to clear away the leftovers.

The cake remained whole, uncut. The plastic juice jug showed full.

Woody pushed everything off the desk and into the trash. He shoved the cake box atop the mess to hide it.

Would the cake reform intact beneath the box? Would it, in fact, remain pristine in the landfill, ready to be excavated a thousand years hence?

Holly approached Woody. “Got a slice for me?”

“Sorry—nothing left.”

Holly stood dumbfounded. “But I thought—’’

Something in Woody’s expression stayed her tongue.

On this weekday, the interior of St. Jude’s church held no one but Woody. Father Tierney had let him in and, at his request, departed.

Woody knelt in a pew and prayed. There was a cross on the wall, of course, but a thoroughly modem one. The atmosphere carried no scent of antiquity.

He prayed for many hours, the light growing dim, darkness flooding in, then light returning, until at last he knew.

“Holly, would you run this form to the front office?”

“Sure.”

Once Holly had gone, Woody gathered the children on the floor around him. In the knot of warm bodies, some contorted, he spread his arms as if to embrace them all. The children sat unmoving during this strange new ritual.

“Dear Lord,” he prayed aloud, “please drive the demons out of these children.”

From the guinea pig cage arose a commotion. Furry bodies thumped against the glass. One wall of the terrarium shattered, sending glass to the floor. The agitated guinea pigs, young and old, ran en masse down the countertop toward the open window, crashed through the screen, and plummeted three stories.

Woody looked back at the stunned children, their eyes bright and focused, their crazed limbs, if any, now whole.

“Mister Payne,” said Cole. “The guinea pigs all jumped. Shouldn’t we go see about them? They could be hurt.”

“No, Cole,” Woody said. “I’m not done yet.”

Common wisdom has it that a beginning writer seeks to emulate his literary favorites. Only by so doing can he or she ultimately achieve a unique voice. While this observation is certainly, demonstrably true, it is also false, insofar as it seems to imply that there comes a point where a “mature” writer no longer has any models uppermost in his mind when starting a new story. Each writer is supposed to be a nonpareil, guided only by his unexampled vision.

If so, then I am far from a “mature” writer. For I often choose to be inspired by the writers whose work I admire, deliberately modeling a story on what I perceive to be their style and virtues and concerns. (Heck, that’s what my entire collection titled
Lost Pages
is all about!) Like an evangelical wearing a “What Would Jesus Do?” wristband, I don and remove similar invisible wristbands all the time. “What Would Pynchon Do?” “What Would Faulkner Do?” “What Would Heinlein Do?” And so on.

Anyway, aside from the obvious inspiration to be found in the Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans disaster, the impetus for this story stems from wanting to emulate or borrow the admirable mind of Lucius Shepard.

As I once titled a review of Lucius’s work, “The Shepard is my Lord!”

FEMAVILLE 29

La Palma is a tiny mote in the Canary Islands, a mote that had certainly never intruded into my awareness before one fateful day. On La Palma, five hundred billion tons of rock in the form of an unstable coastal plateau awaited a nudge, which they received when the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted. Into the sea a good portion of the plateau plunged, a frightful hammer of the gods.

The peeling off of the face of the island was a smaller magnitude event than had been feared; but it was a larger magnitude event than anyone was prepared for.

The resulting tsunami raced across the Atlantic.

My city had gotten just twelve hours warning. The surreal chaos of the partial evacuation was like living through the most vivid nightmare or disaster film imaginable. Still, the efforts of the authorities and volunteers and good Samaritans ensured that hundreds of thousands of people escaped with their lives.

Leaving other hundreds of thousands to face the wave.

Their only recourse was to find the tallest, strongest buildings and huddle.

I was on the seventh floor of an insurance company when the wave arrived. Posters in the reception area informed me that I was in good hands. I had a view of the harbor, half a mile away.

The tsunami looked like a liquid mountain mounted on a rocket sled.

When the wave hit, the building shuddered and bellowed like a steer in an abattoir euthanized with a nail-gun. Every window popped out of its frame, and spray lashed even my level.

But the real fight for survival had not yet begun.

The next several days were a sleepless blur of crawling from the wreckage and helping others do likewise.

But not everyone was on the same side. Looters arose like some old biological paradigm of spontaneous generation from the muck.

Their presence demanded mine on the front lines.

I was a cop.

I had arrested several bad guys without any need for excessive force. But then came a shootout at a jewelry store where the display cases were incongruously draped with drying kelp. I ended up taking the perps down okay. But the firefight left my weary brain and trembling gut hypersensitive to any threat.

Some indeterminate time afterwards—marked by a succession of candy-bar meals, digging under the floodlights powered by chuffing generators, and endless slogging through slimed streets—I was working my way through the upper floors of an apartment complex, looking for survivors. I shut off my flashlight when I saw a glow around a corner. Someone stepped between me and the light source, casting the shadow of a man with a gun. I yelled, “Police! Drop it!”, then crouched and dashed toward the gunman. The figure stepped forward, still holding the weapon, and I fired.

The boy was twelve, his weapon a water pistol.

His mother trailed him by a few feet—not far enough to escape getting splattered with her son’s blood.

Later I learned neither of them spoke a word of English.

One minute I was cradling the boy, and the next I was lying on a cot in a field hospital. Three days had gotten lost somewhere. Three days in which the whole world had learned of my mistake.

They let me get up the next day, ostensibly healthy and sane enough, even though my pistol hand, my left, still exhibited a bad tremor. I tried to report to the police command, but found that I had earned a temporary medical discharge. Any legal fallout from my actions awaited an end to the crisis.