* * *
I was annoyed when we got two post-op patients — pages of orders, just as I was having all these insights. That blast of love I got from room 4420, Bed Two, it was indistinguishable from all the others. Kentshereve, my palimpsest. An older intellectual with a sardonic wit, obsessed with food and sex. He started a lifetime of cookouts that ranged from Zihuatanejo to upstate New York. Hamburgers on top of a Zuni grave with Harrison, that fraud.
None so delicious and scary. Since he was able to read he could tell that the fire we built could mean a thousand-dollar fine or imprisonment. Not for us, for our parents, he chuckled, tossing more pine cones onto the blaze. Massé nipple cream, heat lamps to the perineum, Americaine spray for hemorrhoids, sitz baths TID. I flew through the orders so I could get back to smelling pine, to tasting his chipped beef on white bread. The sauce was a bottle of Jergen’s hand lotion — honey and almonds — and no sweet-and-sour sauce since has rivaled it. He could make pancakes in the shape of Texas and Idaho and California. His teeth were black until Wednesday from Saturday’s licorice, blueberry blue all summer long.
We tried to duplicate the sexual act but gave up and concentrated on hitting targets with our pee. Of course, he was better, but it’s no mean trick for a girl to aim. He gave me my due, with a nod, a glint from the slits of his eyes.
He took me to my first trout pool. Only trout pool. Empty pool, I mean, at the hatchery. Only a few times a year would they drain these shallow pools, but he knew just when to go. He saw everything even though his eyes looked closed, like wooden Eskimo sunglasses. The trick was to get there on a warm day before they cleaned out the empty pond. There was about three inches of gelatinous mucusy trout-come slime lining the pools. I’d give him the first push, shooting him off to the end when he’d ricochet back into me, a jet-propelled toad, and off we’d go careening from the walls like greased pneumatic tubes, shimmering with trout scales.
We’d wash our hair in tomato juice to get the smell out but it didn’t. Days later, when he’d be at school and I’d be lying there making toe shadows on the wall I’d get a whiff of dead fish and I would long for him, for the moment when I could hear him coming up the hill, his lunch pail banging against his leg.
* * *
We hid in the shed back of J.R.’s kitchen, watching him and his skinny wife doing it, an act so monumentally hilarious it has since ruined many a blissful moment of my life with a giggle fit. They would sit at the oilcloth table, glum, smoking and drinking away, just smoking and drinking, silent, and then he would rip off his miner’s hat with the lamp, holler “Doggie style!” and flip her over the kitchen stool.
Most of the miners were Finns and when they got off work they would shower and sauna. There was a wooden pen outside the sauna and in winter they would run out and jump into the snow. Big men, little men, fat men, skinny men, all pink men, rolling over and over in the snow. At first watching from our hole in the fence, we giggled at all the blue peckers and balls but then we would just laugh too as they did with the joy of it, with the snow and the blue blue sky.
* * *
The night quieted down at work. Wendy, the charge nurse, and her best friend Sandy doodled at the desk near me. Really doodled, practicing writing 1982 and their names if they married whoever it is they are going out with now. Grown women, in this day and age. I felt pity for them, these lovely young nurses, who had not yet known romance.
“What are you daydreaming about?” Wendy asked.
“An old love,” I sighed.
“That’s neat — that you still think of love at your age.”
I didn’t even react. Poor fool had no idea of the passion that had just occurred between me and 4420, Bed Two.
His bell had, in fact, been ringing away. I answered it. “Your nurse will be in soon.” I told Sandy that he wanted to get back into bed. Because I knew him by now, just by letting in those Kentshereve eyes. Sandy had me page the orderly to help her. Dead weight.
I’ve always been a good listener. That’s it, my best quality. Kentshereve had all the ideas maybe but I was the one who heard them. We were a classic couple, like Zelda and Scott, Paul et Virginie. We made the Wallace, Idaho, weekly paper three times. Once when we got lost. We weren’t lost at all, just out in the woods after curfew but they drained the ditches anyway. Then we found the dead hobo in the woods. Heard his death first, from way down in the clearing, the flies buzzing. The last time was when the ladder fell over Sextus. At least the paper appreciated it, our folks didn’t at all. Kentshereve had to babysit Sextus (the sixth child, only a month old). Just a soggy little bundle and he slept all the time so it didn’t seem to matter if we took him out to the shed. We decided to swing from the rafters, left the little bundle on the floor and climbed the ladder. Kentshereve never once blamed me for kicking over the ladder. He took such things as they came. What came was that the ladder fell over the baby, the rungs just missing him on all four sides and he didn’t wake up. A miracle, but I don’t think we knew that word yet. There we were, for hours, on the narrow two-by-four, far above the ground, hanging from it by our knees as it was too scary to sit up. Blood-red faces, talking funny upside down. No one heard us holler. Both our families had gone to Spokane and no other cabins were near. It got darker and darker. We figured out how to sit up and inch our way to the edge, took turns leaning against the wall. We played owl and spat, aiming at things. I wet my pants. Sextus woke up and began to wail and wail. Loud, above the baby, we listed all the things we wanted to eat. Bread and butter with sugar on it. Kentshereve ate those all day long. I know he’s a diabetic by now, sneaking Jergen’s lotion and going into shock. He always exhaled, his plaid shirts sparkled with sugar in the sun.
He had to pee, got the idea that if he aimed just next to Sextus it would warm him and cheer him up. That’s what he was doing when my father came in and screamed. I got so scared I fell off the rafter. That’s how I broke my arm the first time. Then Red, Kentshereve’s father, came in and grabbed up the baby. Nobody got Kentshereve down or even noticed the miracle of the ladder missing the baby on all four sides. From the car, shivering with pain, I saw Red beating up Kentshereve. He didn’t cry. He nodded at me across the yard and his eyes told me it had been worth it.
I spent one night with him, the night my baby sister had her tonsils out. Red sent me and my blankets up the ladder to the loft where the five older children slept on straw. There was no window, just an opening in the eaves covered with black oilcloth. Kentshereve poked a hole in it with an ice pick and there was a jet of air like on airplanes only icy cold. If you put your ear to it you could hear icicles in the pines, chandeliers, the creaking of the mine shaft, ore cars. It smelled of cold and wood smoke. When I put my one eye to the tiny hole I saw the stars as if for the first time, magnified, the sky, dazzling and vast. If I so much as blinked my eye it all disappeared.
We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can’t tell which is which. Must be something like that he said.
* * *
I didn’t go to the cafeteria on my break, but went outside the fourth floor onto the terrace. Cold January night, but already there were Japanese plum blossoms lit by the streetlamps. Californians defend their seasons by saying they are subtle. Who wants a subtle spring? Give me an Idaho thaw any old day with Kentshereve and me sliding down muddy hills on a flattened cardboard box. Give me the blatant blast of lilac, of a surviving hyacinth. I smoked on the terrace, the metal chair making cold stripes on my thighs. I yearned for love, for whispers on a clear winter night.