She was a decent, kind, sweet person. I guess that’s why she had to go to the hospital. I told her stuff, boring everyday stuff about my life, and she liked it. She’d laugh. I liked the way she assumed that the two of us could be friends even though she was a good Christian girl and I was a sad, cynical pothead.
Do you want me to comb your hair for you, I asked her. No, she said, it hurts too much. Can I rub in your moisturizer, I asked her. No, she said, that hurts too. She had a thin layer of white Noxzema skin cream covering her face.
Should I wipe it off with a soft wet cloth, I asked her. No, she said, I’ll be okay like this. Are you tired, I asked. She smiled. Should I go, I asked. She shook her head. Can I get you an extra blanket, I asked. Lydia likes extra blankets because she feels cool breezes all the time. Sometimes she asks me to feel the walls for her to find out where the air is coming from. If I’m in a patient mood I feel all the walls all over and then pretend to find the wall with the breeze and then move her bed as far away from it as possible. Sometimes I say Lids, there are no cool breezes in here at all. She likes rooms to be incubator-hot. Sometimes she wears winter scarves around her neck in the summer. I asked her again if she wanted an extra blanket. Her eyes were still closed. She shook her head.
A nurse came in and said: How’s the princess and the pea? But not in a nice way. I stared at her. She’d said that because Lydia was lying on a bed that had two mattresses on it instead of one because just one was too hard for her bones. It’s a beautiful day, said the nurse, and a young healthy girl like Lydia should be outside in the fresh air. Right, Lydia, she asked. Right, Lydia? Lydia opened her eyes and smiled and nodded and then closed them again. The nurse sighed. I would kill her on my way out of the hospital. My friendship with Lids was often about protection. Or it was a shared desperation. Or it was about recognizing the familiar flickering embers of each other’s dying souls. When it was time for me to go, Lids pointed to the table next to her bed. She’d written a poem for me about two girls playing together within some castle’s walls. In the left margin she’d experimented with various spellings of the word requiem. My mother would have drawn a horse’s ass.
five
After supper me and Travis drove around town and ended up at the pits. Saturday nights you’d have a hundred or more kids down there drinking, dropping, smoking, swearing, screwing, fighting, swimming, home-made-tattooing, passing out and throwing up right up until an hour or so before church the next morning when everyone would be back in the pew with Mom and Dad wearing nice (ugly) dresses and buttoned-up shirts flipping through Deuteronomy and harmonizing to “The Old Rugged Cross.”
Me and Travis were parked on the windmill side of the pits staring at the water and listening to the radio. We both reached out to turn up the volume at the very same time when the guitars kicked in in a Cars song. That means we’re meant for each other, I said. We had a conversation that resulted in a fight. I asked him what he was thinking about and he said nothing. No, what, I said. Well, he said, about floating around in a kind of, you know, vortex of sleeping, drinking and fucking — never quite coming into consciousness. I said oh (we’d never fucked) and he asked me what I was thinking about. Horses, I said. Getting a small horse I can ride but not be scared of. I like to have fun but not fun mixed with fear. I guess it just bugged him that I was thinking about horses while he was thinking about consciousness and fucking and he said he was going to get out and walk over to the diving-board side of the pits to see if The Golden Comb or Eldon was hanging out over there and he’d be back in a bit. Great, I said, because I like sitting alone in a truck staring at gravel. Which was the unsarcastic truth. After he left I got out of the truck and wandered over to the water and saw Sheridan Klippenstein standing there. He wore a Ludwig drum shirt with cut-off sleeves and camouflage pants. He had square brown hands and very thin wrists and a little muscle definition beginning in his upper arms. He cupped his cigarette against the wind and spit a lot.
He and I used to be neighbours before a series of deranged events befell his family. He was also the grandson of this old woman whose leg wounds my mother used to dress. Her name was Mrs. Klippenstein. She lived in a big old farmhouse out on Garson Road. I once wrote a short story about her house and Mr. Quiring corrected me about some detail in the kitchen and I asked him how he knew about old Mrs. Klippenstein’s kitchen and he told me that he’d once changed some fuses for her, that he was a friend of the family. Small towns.
In the summer Sheridan and I ran like giant biped mice on spools of hydro wire that were kept in a yard next to his house. In the winter we slid off the roof of his bungalow in shovels. In junior high we kind of lost track of each other.
What are you doing here, I asked him. He told me that his dad had left home to play bass in a cover band from North Dakota. Not a cover band, I said.
I know, said Sheridan. He gathered up a mouthful of saliva and horked it far across the water. It got caught up in a gentle breeze and hung suspended in mid-air. It sparkled in the sun like a tiny chandelier before it dropped softly and disappeared.
He left me an adding machine, he said.
Get out, I said.
No, it’s true, he told me. He said he won’t know where he’ll be for a while.
That’s it? I asked.
Okay, he said, I also inherited an umpire ticker. Obviously his dad had enjoyed keeping track of things other than himself. The last time I saw him he was juggling pickled eggs in the rain outside the Kyro, a bar on the other side of the town limits, beyond the reach of Jesus, Menno “Sexy” Simons and Uncle Hands. The not-so-mellow triumvirate. My dad had said don’t look, but I’d already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil’s snack.
Remember when you climbed door frames in your bare feet, I asked him. I looked at his feet. He was wearing Greb Kodiaks. Everybody in town wore Greb Kodiaks, as though we were a people in need of a serious grip, perpetually on the verge of falling to the ground without a sound. Divided we fall politely and modestly.
So what are you doing these days, I asked him. He said on weekends he worked in the Sandilands at Moose Lake.
Yeah? I said. Do you like it?
He said it kind of gave him the creeps because that was where his mom had killed herself years ago. But you know, he said, there are fun things to do there too…fishing, hiking, waterskiing. I nodded. She hadn’t been aware of her options. I vaguely remembered his mom. She was the first person I’d ever known with highlights in her hair. She owned toe socks. She called Sheridan her little man and made us Nestlé’s Quik with extra powder. She taught us skipping rhymes. When she was sweeping and we were in her way she would say get out of my road. She once told me she liked the freckles on my shoulders, they were like stars in the sky. And she let us draw all over the drywall in the basement.
We talked a bit about how we used to say goodbye in all the languages we could remember and some we made up. That was bent, he said. He spit some more and offered me a drag. We’d stand by our front doors yelling stuff like shalom and Faloma and nice aroma let’s build a snowma in the dark, we’d just go on and on, in early Menno rap style, until his dad asked him if he wanted a smack. A smack attack jack? Get back on track! He didn’t mean it. He was a gentle guy with Brylcreemed hair. We’d hear him laughing his head off somewhere in his house. We’d see Merv Griffin’s face reflected in the living-room window. Sometimes we’d hear his dad arguing with his demons in the old language of our people.
What made him go into hogs, I asked. Sheridan shrugged. I thought about how he used to stick his shoulder blades out like little wings.