Chapter Twenty-Eight
Farewell to Carlos
After Sheriff Parks took Walt away, Victoria went over to help Stretch inspect the damage. Charred stubs of wood, broken glass, and blackened pipe protruded from the still smoldering ashes. Everything was wet and steamy from the rain and the torrents expelled from the fire hoses; it smelled like a campfire after dowsing with a bucketful of water. Through the smoking ruins, there was just a trace outline of what used to be Stretch’s cabin. Stretch knelt down and turned his head sideways like he was listening to the ashes. He scanned the scene. “Hah!” Stretch said. He found his aluminum coffee pot in the rubble, reflecting the sun. He loitered around awhile and found nothing more, but seemed satisfied finding the coffee pot. His possessions were now back nearly to what they had been when he first arrived in Northern Michigan from Texas. Other than his Kubota tractor and contents of the pole barn, he had his pickup, his dog, the clothes on his back..and his coffee pot. Flash seemed totally unconcerned about the loss of the cabin, and rumbled out of the pole barn with his tail wagging, happy to see Stretch, wheezing a bit from the exercise.
Back at Nick’s place, Nick and Zizi were alone for the first time since the evening before when Victoria had rammed them with the house boat. They swam in the river for a bit, then sat down on the deck wrapped in beach towels. Zizi pulled her wet black hair behind her, and it flowed back like ribbons of eels. They sat barefooted, looking out on the river. The river ran urgently, heavy with spring runoff. The smoke-filled air carried a silvery mist veiling the late afternoon light. Zizi reached for Nick’s injured arm, with the presumption of a physician examining a patient.
“How is your arm, Ick?” Zizi said, her Arabic tongue struggling with an English consonant.
“Still hurts a little.” Zizi pressured his arm in different places with a doctor’s touch.
“I’m sorry...in Egypt they call me ‘The Scorpion,’ because I sting when trapped.”
“Did you just call me ‘Ick’?”
“Yes...best I can do for now...my Arabic tongue does not want to touch the roof of my mouth when I say certain letters like ‘n’ in Nick.”
“Well, call me ‘Ickey’ then...sounds a bit more friendly than ‘Ick’.
“Good! “Ickey” will be your pet name just like Hepburn called Bogart, ‘Pinkey,’ in The African Queen.”
“Very interesting connection...two people fall in love while taking a boat down a river...and...” Zizi had held his arm this entire time, and now the pressure increased to the point of hurting. Nick responded to the pressure as Zizi’s grip tightened. “You have powerful hands,” Nick said, flinching his arm.
“I’m a surgeon, and before a surgeon, a rug maker.”
Zizi kept going back and forwards between opening to him, and closing him out by hiding behind her professional credentials. As for NIck, Zizi’s compassion for both Stretch and Walt over the last two days triggered in him something deeper than appreciation and attraction, not yet love, but a kind of admiration leading in the direction of love.
After a silence, he said quietly, “I know you’re a surgeon. You’re also a beautiful woman, smart, compassionate, and probably a lot of other good things.” He reached over with one hand and wrung out the back of her hair, dripping water onto the deck.
“We smell like the river,” she said.
NIck drew a handful of Zizi’s hair to his face, “Yes, the river smells good.” He looked at her face from the side, and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face.
They were silent again until Zizi spoke. “I must go. I have work tomorrow.”
Zizi also had feelings for Nick, but wanted to leave them unexpressed for now. Her acquaintance with him was too new. She wanted more repetition and recurrence of her impressions to help her warm to him. She still did not trust men, even seemingly nice men. He appeared to be better than all the men she ever knew outside of her father and brother, but doubt and mistrust still seized her. She needed to develop trust very close to certainty, before letting down her well-constructed defenses, and if ever she did, the shame of her rape would still haunt her. Developing a relationship with Nick, or any man, would be a long march.
As she turned away from Nick and stepped towards the screen door, his hand caught the hem of her blouse sleeve as she passed, and he gently tugged her close enough to kiss the wet hair on the side of her head. She stopped, turned to him, and bowed her head towards him, bending her body in the form of a question mark. Nick spoke to the top of her head, “In case you’re available next weekend, do you think we could spend more time together...we’re planning a burial service for Carlos on Saturday...maybe you could stay awhile afterwards?”
Zizi turned her head abruptly up towards Nick, and like closing a door too hard from breeze gusting through windows, she said, “I’m not your type!” She tried to shut out the feelings from his kiss on the side of her head with the dull thud of her comment.
“I’m not a type. Please don’t lump me in with your notions of men.” Nick sounded indignant, but not angry. The blue in Nick’s unblinking eyes seemed to be bluer. His push back pleased Zizi, and she felt a pleasant melting sensation in her eyes. Her face softened, and she smiled and enlivened her tone.
“Will you promise not to fall on me again?”
“Yes, will you promise not to pinch me?”
“No...but if I do, it will be a little pinch, like this.” Zizi reached up, and tweaked Nick’s cheek in a mildly flirty way, then softly kissed it. She laughed and Nick smiled. She wanted to say more, but there were no words.
Nick drove Zizi back to her apartment in Petoskey. They held hands lightly, thinking their own thoughts until Nick turned his truck onto the foot of Mitchell Street. On the left was a large hole in the ground surrounded by fencing, a failed construction project. His face hardened. Nick quietly said, “I hate that crater.”
“Why do you use the words ‘hate‘ and ‘crater’ for a hole in the ground?”
“Every time I come into town...every single time, the hole reminds me of the photograph of the crater the truck bomb made in Iraq...the bomb that evaporated Michael, my son. He was my son, and now he’s gone...I worried about him when he was over there, but I didn’t think he’d be killed. I thought other people lost their children in war...not me.”
“I am sorry you lost your son. Someday, I will fill up this hole so you will not have to see it anymore,” Zizi said.
Nick parked his truck, and walked her up the narrow wooden staircase to her apartment. After they kissed a friend’s kiss, she said, “Ickey, when I see a man’s face, even yours, I feel like he’s ready to pounce, and I have the urge to smash his face in.”
“Please don’t smash my face in...I’ve had enough injuries lately. You said you liked me... but you don’t know me if you think I’m that way.”
“You are right...I need to come home to me from where I have been, so I can know you...for who you are.”
“When you come home, I’ll try to like you for yourself, and not just your black eyes and long black hair.”
“We may not like each other then.”
“I doubt that...go on and get rid of what weighs you down...then we’ll see about us.”
“Yes...weight is what I feel. I often dream I am carrying a heavy earthen jar full of water on my head, and I must remove it...I’m so used to carrying the weight, balancing the jar, walking to keep in balance, moving my legs the way my mother taught me.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere...when you remove the jar from your head, I will be here.”
“When I remove the jar from my head, I may fall flat on my face.” Zizi gently smiled at Nick, then said, “Good night, handsome Ickey.” She shut and double locked the door. She stood there for a moment shivering in the dark, and listened through the door to Nick creaking down the steps. She adjusted the thermostat, went over to her kitchen table, lit a candle, and watched its trembling wick and ragged flame as the furnace fan kicked on. She went to bed feeling sad and empty.
The following Saturday, Sheriff Parks temporarily released Walt from the county jail so he could see the ashes of Carlos buried. Nick arranged to have Carlos’ remains interred at an Indian Cemetery on a hill outside Harbor Springs. Amid the simple crosses in a field of ancient hardwoods, Zizi, Nick, Victoria, Stretch, Walt, and Parks stood graveside. In the bright morning sun, the crosses and gravestones cast precise angles of shade across the bare ground. The air smelled of new-cut grass. All around squirrels muttered impatiently, complaining about the interruption to their work day.
Walt knelt down over the simple metal box, pulled out a dirty white handkerchief for his red eyes, and said,
“Carlos, remember when you thought you was killed many years ago on that ridge in Nam...but you weren’t? That’s when I about got my foot shot off. Back then, you asked me to say a few words at your service. Remember what I said? I said, ‘Carlos, that’s askin’ a whole lot.’ I didn’t refuse... but you was askin’ a whole lot, and it pisses me off now to fog up how I feel with words...but here goes. (Silence, then slowly). I think you probably know by now you’re dead... and I’m heart broke you’re gone. We done a lot of things together, some good, some bad... mostly bad...but we did the best we could and stuck together most of the time.
“I suppose you’re floatin’ around somewhere out there, and yeah, I hope there’s some Jesus up in there. And God (I guess I’m prayin’ now), I may be out of line askin’ this, but...I just hope there’s enough room in Heaven for ordinary, practical folks like us, people that’s screwed up over and over again. And I hope Heaven doesn’t have much to do with religion, ‘cause I don’t give a spit for religion, especially the sermons part--just give us a Heaven for people like us who don’t expect much. Aaa-men. Now back to Carlos...good bye, Carlos, I know death is a set back, but try to keep your chin up, and don’t start any trouble ‘til I get there. I guess life will go on without you,...’cause it just goes.”
Behind Zizi, Nick, Victoria, Stretch, Walt, and Sheriff Parks, a dozen mourning doves stood in the twilight with their wings folded behind their backs like hands in prayer, cooing in their plaintiff tones: oo-wah-hooo, hoo, hoo. Draped over the wooden crosses, white ribbons and birch wreaths blew quietly in the cool evening air.
On the way out of the cemetery, Nick, Zizi, Walt, Parks, and Victoria followed the path back to the cars single file. Victoria lingered awhile to read the grave markers--so many and so old. She came across a poem on an Odawa woman’s gravestone:
Do not stand at my grave and
weep
I am not there I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that
blow
I am the diamond glint on
snow
I am the sunlight in ripened
grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
when you wake in the
morning hush.
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circling
flight
I am the soft starlight at
night
Do not stand at my grave and
cry
I am not there I did not die.
Victoria shivered as she walked towards the cars to join the others. She always seemed to be at the end of a parade, on a float driven by a car with a small engine, bad brakes, and running on empty. She lived in a linear world with length and width, but no height...at the end of a line.
When she returned to the cars, Nick said Mikage had called him on his cell phone. Tom, her long-suffering patient, had died in the nursing home. She returned the call on her father’s phone.
No comments:
Post a Comment