The Trouble Way (40 page)

“Jake, I have the perfect name for our team, the ‘Lakeside Steaks’.”

I lay there thinking of all that weird shit, about Roy, and even about the stupid Frap, and, weirdest of all, the Lutheran Church. I hadn
’t truly come to the realization I was in a hospital. I was positive I was dead and the Lutherans had come to get their due, me. It was probably all the drugs that were being siphoned through those tubes and needles in the back of my hands. I was nearly convinced it was formaldehyde.

Being dead didn
’t cure me of always trying to think of original similes.

Nor of often thinking of opposites too. I wondered if that would continue too, if I were dead (alive). Like (hate) I (you) always (never) think of what is (isn
’t) the opposite (same) of something (nothing). Sometimes I wish I were dead (alive) to stop (start) that little (big) mind game of mine (yours). It can waste an unbelievable amount of time if you don’t catch yourself doing it, I (you) shit you (me) not. What (?) really (?) wastes (conserves) the (?) time (?) is (isn’t) if (?) I (you) can’t (can) think (?) of what (?) the (?) opposite (same) is (isn’t). To top that off, if I couldn’t think of an opposite, I’d visualize a question-mark. I wonder if there is a medical term for the condition, like when people have a fear of going out of their own home. If there were, I’d probably spend my time trying to think of its opposite. I fear getting into an infinite loop over this where there is no opposite to the opposite and I can’t think of anything else and end up thinking of only question-marks. Maybe the term is “A Bubble Off Plumb.”

Another thing, and you
’re not going to believe this, I figured out what I’d agonized all these years over, since I worked in the woods with good old Uncle Wendell back in high school. It was about time and tide. I figured out how to make a perpetual motion machine using a float attached to a ratchet mechanism that would propel a flywheel which, in turn, is connected to a generator. When a wave came in, the float would rise, propelling the flywheel in one direction. When the wave passed and the float sank, a transmission gear would reverse and the weight of the float would propel the flywheel in the same direction. Each wave that passed, the motion would keep the flywheel going which in turn would drive the generator. The tide and waves never stop so, voilà, a perpetual motion machine. A lot of good that’s going to do a dead guy.

I laid there for an agonizingly long time. Days. Nobody familiar came into that room. I kept waiting for Priscilla. What I did see were angels floating by the door. None of them ever looked in the wide-open door or at me like a normal, curious person would. Obviously they were angels.

I don’t remember ever passing an open door on a patient’s room without looking in to see what retched old sick person was trapped in there.

It didn
’t occur to me that the angels floating by were just tired, overworked nurses, too exhausted for casual conversation with someone in a cold, skinny hospital bed.

I thought there was an angel sitting with his back to me hunched over a computer. I stared at him for hours and never once saw him lift his head from the screen. Not even when that good-looking nurse with the big rack walked past him. Must have been a heavy day for dead people. I assumed he was working on the admittance log and that I was obviously on the list and I was just waiting to be notified of my future.

I kept passing out. I guessed that when you are dead, you can still pass out and have dreams and have pain.

One time, I saw my Mom (I assumed she was an angel too. She died twenty years ago.) stick her head around the door and say,
“Ye Gods, Jake, what are you doing here. Where’s your sister?” She is the only one that had talked to me. My sister is older and I suppose my mom thought my sister would be the one to die first. That pretty-much confirmed that I had drowned and never made it out of the river alive. My brain didn’t seem to be working too good.

I kept wondering where Priscilla was and why she hadn
’t been here visiting my body in the hospital or where ever I was. It occurred to me that maybe dead people can only see other dead people and that is why I didn’t see Priscilla looking at me. Then, I thought Bella had died too and I would see her toddling past my door and I’d start to cry. Apparently dead people cry because I was doing my share of it. It didn’t feel like I was dead when I cried. It hit me then, maybe I didn’t see Bella because she wasn’t dead. But, I didn’t know for sure, it seems like it was bloody unlikely she made it out of that river, especially since I hadn’t and I had a pretty firm grip on her.

I thought nobody cared. Maybe they were too mad at me to visit my body because I didn
’t keep Bella safe. I kept passing out. I was glad to pass out when I cried, crying hurt more than dying.

Several times, buzzers would go off and then another beeper would sound and I would see an angel float silently in and flip a switch or two and the alarms would cease. Sometimes an angel would come in and lift the cover up and look at the catheter. Weird. The angels never talked or looked me in the eye. I have to admit I have no clue what color the eyes are of that angel with the big rack, I never looked in her eyes either.

When I looked out of the window, I could see several feet of snow on the roof of the building in the other part of eternity. I guess I wasn’t in Hell unless it had frozen over, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Wherever I was, it was sure painful, my heart hurt, my head hurt, and feelings sure hurt. And that catheter felt as though it had been dipped in Bella’s sandbox before the doctor or mortician inserted it or maybe it was that nurse getting even for not looking her in the eye.

I looked at my chest and saw where someone used industrial size wire to stitch what looked like a nasty wound created by a mad Viking who took a swing with a battle axe at my chest. The stitching looked as though it was done by his brother using baling wire. Below that, the soaker hose protruded from my abdomen. Next to the hose were two wires sticking out of two cuts nearly an inch long each. It occurred to me the hose was draining out the stuff inside of me before they buried me. I couldn
’t figure out the wires, maybe it was the a/c current to work the pump draining the inside of me. I couldn’t come up with a reason for the catheter. Maybe I was in Hell and the buff guy with piercing black eyes in the smoldering red suit inserted it for shits and grins. LOL.

Crazy things go through your mind when you are dead. Illogical stuff shows up right alongside the normal crap. Go figure.

On the second or third night after I drowned (There’s a prime example right there.) Anyway, I was visited by my sister, Karen. She didn’t even pretend to be an angel. She tromped into my holding-room in purgatory, looks left, then right and, when she spots me on the only bed in the room, she saunters real slow up the foot of my bed. Without a word of greeting, she immediately starts giving me a bunch of guff. All of a sudden, I’m not in a bed and she’s not at the foot of it and she is no longer talking to me.

I
’m on the floor of a living room, (I think it is at my sister’s house. It’s hard to tell. It could have been a barn.) cramped into a small space between the furniture and boxes, trying to work on my new computer. The old computer is on a bookshelf. It is a pain to try to work because Karen is sitting on the couch listening to the TV which she has turned up to “deaf.”

Dogs and cats wander around the living room, their toenails clicking on the linoleum. A Pekinese with a bone in his mouth is behind a stuffed chair, furiously scratching the floor. He
’s digging a hole to bury the bone. When he figures the hole is deep enough, he places the bone in the hole and covers it over with imaginary dirt. Satisfied the bone is safely buried, he walks away. The bone is sitting in plain view on the linoleum to everyone to see except for the Pekinese. The dog fits right in.

What is most bothersome, is not the noise from the TV, or even the dirt on the floor, or the clutter, the toenails clicking on the floor, or being cramped in an area where I have to lay, it is the chicken sitting in a messy straw nest on the shelf where the old computer is. It keeps clucking and scratching, scattering straw everywhere.

If that isn’t enough, Karen is giving me hell. I don’t even remember everything, but she was really giving me what for. It was something political. She’s and her husband are Republicans and that’s about as crazy as it gets. That right there proves she is no angel.

I mentioned it before about their situation and by all that is reasonable, they ought to be Democrats.

The gist of the chewing out was something about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. As if she knew shit about the Middle East. She’s one of the relatives that call the Midwest, “Back East.” Some atrocities that occurred against American diplomats in Libya, Benghazi I think it was. Anyway, it was in the news during the presidential campaign. We had some heated words about me thinking she should vote Democrat because they are the ones that take care of people in her situation. She gets food stamps or something.

She said,
“What the hell do I care about taxes when all this shit is going down in Benghazi.” Something to that affect. When she gets excited, she cusses a lot. I don’t think she could put a finger on a map and show me where Libya is if it were the only country on the map colored red, if you want the truth.

But, even more than Karen
’s absurd take on the Middle East, it’s the mother hen clucking right in my line of sight. The hen has five or six chicks that are in yet another straw nest right next to the keyboard of my new computer. They keep peeping and jumping around on the computer, jamming keys with straw, causing errors and distracting me.

I got so frustrated with the clucking and peeping and the TV, I decide to take the chicken and her nest, the chicks and their straw nest, and put them outside in the woodshed.

So, with my hands full with the two nests, the hen, and the chicks, with no help from Karen, I get up and start walking through the kitchen.

The straw is falling all over the living room and kitchen floor from the disintegrating nests. I try my best to hold the mess together and get out the door in one piece.

“They will be back in here as soon as you leave,” Karen says.

“
They darn well better not be,” I say.

She said,
“When all this shit is over with in Benghazi, you’re going to have to pay for the chick’s ballet lessons when they grow up.”

“
I don’t see how it’s my responsibility for the chicken’s damn ballet lessons,” I said. “I’m retired, I can’t afford that.”

You
’d think that would have given me a clue that I was dead, but no, I had to argue with her.

How about that for Hell? My sister worrying about who
’s going to be responsible for giving the chicken ballet lessons instead of the Republicans raising her taxes and cutting her welfare. It was too much like talking to her when I was alive. When I think about the past conversations with my sister, maybe I’ve been dead a lot longer than the two or three days I thought.

Now I have to worry about what happened in Benghazi and am going to have to pay for ballet lessons for a bunch of stupid chickens.

Sometimes I would lay there and I’d see Bella. Only we weren’t in the hosta-piddle. I knew deep down that I was but I went along with it anyway.

One time we were walking down the street in the East Village in Des Moines. I
’d carry her everywhere. I didn’t mind at all. I loved the way she would put her hands under the lapels of my jacket to keep warm. She leaned close to my ear and said, “I love you.”

Another time, we were lying on the couch and she was telling me about the animated movie we were watching.

“This is the ‘not happy’ part.”

I can relate to that right about now.

Sometimes she would rattle on about nothing in particular and would switch topics willy-nilly.

“
When I get older and have a baby, I’m going to bring him over for you to take care of Grandpa.”

I would like nothing better than to take care of a child Bella had. I will look forward to that if I can ever figure out my current situation.

She once explained to me how babies were born. She stuffed Lonesome, the stuffed puppy, under her shirt and said, “Ow, ow, ow, then he is born.” With the final “ow,” she pulled the stuffed dog from under her shirt.

I came from a long line of mean-teasers. I never appreciated being on the receiving end of that sort of humor so I try not to do that with Bella, but I do kid her a little. Sometimes she toots and I ask her if she has a duck in her pants because I just heard a toot. There she is, sitting at the kitchen counter and she said.

“There’s not really a duck in my pants. The duck is just poop.”

“
I was just teasing you sweetie.”

“
I know what you were up to Papa, You were up to teasing. I very knew you were teasing me.”

The scene changed and she was at the piano and turned to me and said,
“I have a new song, it’s called, ‘Dava Goes to Papa’s House’.”

It was when she was performing that sweet song that she made up as she went along that I woke up. My face wet with tears. I was still in that cold
hosta-piddle
bed.