21
HAD I LEARNED ANYTHING? I’d learned that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience. It wasn’t until I lay in a hospital bed fingering a near fatal wound that I gave any thought to mortality. Then I knew that the spiritual component of my self, while small, was inextinguishable. My mother had instilled in me a longing but populated it with figures I found unbelievable: the omnipotent old man with the white beard, the sad boy with the crown of thorns, the virgin mom, the board of directors called the saints. I never succeeded in differentiating them from the equally compelling characters in my collection of comic books. I confused God with Space Man, whose battles with the robot monster that controlled outer space formed my first cosmology; meanwhile my compassion for Christ caused me to submerge him into Naza the Stone Age Warrior, who returns to kick Herod’s ass and work mayhem on the Philistines.
Another thing occasioned by my close call was a vivid remembrance of childhood friends. I’d built the tree house with Chong Wells. His real name was Don Wells, but his admiration for Cheech and Chong supplied a nickname which followed him all the way to the Persian Gulf, from where he did not return. Dave “Second Hand” Smoke moved to Miles City, where he had a backhoe business. When I get out of here, I thought, I should give Second Hand a call. Childhood friends call me “Hook” for Captain Hook, which was a reference to my love of fishing.
What was left of my rudimentary religiosity? Only my question: What was far-fetched about the continued existence of the human spirit? Why was mankind in all places and all ages convinced of it? Fingering my knife wound, I went on believing that the real me could shoot out of this tiny hole in the event of a shutdown.
But most emotions attending the long hours of daydreaming were occupied with thoughts of Jocelyn, some remarkably impure, but most idealistically pastel and conceived as operatic scenes of reunion and promise. In the encounters I pictured it was only remarkable that the players were not winged. This might have been a reference to Jocelyn’s flying, but I didn’t think so. I pictured her in the cockpit with the headset pulled down over her International Harvester cap, and as I dragged her from the fuel spill at the crash site, then at the hospital in White Sulphur when I was a still-employed caregiver offering diplomatic advice in the bailiwick of another physician. In short, I could hardly wait to get my hands on her.
This grueling need so pervaded my imagination that it encouraged me to think about a long-term relationship with Jocelyn; and here I hit a wall because her air of independence betrayed a smidgeon of aversion directed either at me or, more likely, at any form of predictability. Too, I found her lack of sentimentality over the burning of the old homestead and her generally harsh remarks about home and family to be a tad extreme. Her strictly genital approach to sex could, I dimly supposed, grow thin without a larger view, but I could always supply that — thought I foolishly. As was so often the case, romance was well to the rear of the united front of thighs, breasts, etc. The little twang in her voice had me shivering with ecstasy. My most elevated thoughts were of the clean lines of her cheekbones, her smooth, round forehead, her full and insolent lips. At the moment, I could not picture her nose. Fidgeting under the sheets, I worked away at recalling the nose, then finally left it that she had one, and that was that.
She must not have known I was in the hospital.
Alan Hirsch came in to see me with his athlete’s bounce and sat, one leg on the floor, on the edge of my bed. “I think it’s time you blew this pop stand, Irving.”
“I do too.” I couldn’t mention that I had nowhere in particular to go, or that seeing him and other physicians speeding past my doorway had given me an insurmountable heartache compared to the longing for Jocelyn.
“You look blue.”
“I am blue.”
“Nothing to do with your injury, I hope?”
“I want to work.”
“You want to work? Are you crazy?”
Alan was just trying to cheer me up. He liked to work, I knew that. His needy athleticism had led him down the path of extreme sports, but he was always on the job, always good, and the huge Kodachromes of his rock climbing and of his son on the Miles City football team which adorned his office walls seemed to reassure his cardio patients. He gave me a protracted, considered look and then tapped me with his clipboard. “You’ll get through this. You have my word. I personally don’t think this ever needed to happen, but Wilmot used all his grease to get the law involved.”
“He hates me, but he is my patient.”
So I went home, and I felt fine; but my first thought at entering my house was, “What am I doing here?” There were reentry issues, which I met by housekeeping and replenishing food supplies. A nap helped. I found a baseball game on the radio. Still under a legal cloud, I concentrated on the everyday. I ran the vaccuum. Then for several days I was just lost.
I’d been rattling around there for a day and a half, only occasionally staring at the telephone, when Jocelyn burst in. She filled up the room with her anger. She said, an inch from my face, “They’ve arrested Womack!”
“They… who?”
“Womack! You described him perfectly, thank you very much, down to his pants, his hair, and his boots. You get down there and tell them Womack didn’t stab you.”
“But this is just entirely a—”
“Stop talking and get down there.”
I was just beginning to feel indignant when Jocelyn’s face softened. “I’ll be here waiting,” she said. I gave her my best doofus smile.
Here was addiction. I didn’t seem to care that my soul was shrinking to some meager artifact: I scuttled down to the police station to liberate Womack, I was too late, though. Lieutenant Crosby took me into his office to show me the results of Womack’s background check, which included a raft of unpleasantries that cried out for resolution. Before affirming his innocence of my stabbing I was obliged to view Womack glowering at me from behind bars and declining to return my wink. Back in Crosby’s office, I said, “That’s not him. A lot like him. But not him. The guy that stabbed me is still at large.” Crosby nodded wearily.
“Be that as it may,” he said with exaggerated slowness, “I’m going to extradite Mr. Womack to Texas. He’s got a lot of problems in Texas.” Crosby searched in the desk. He produced a long, thin object and held it aloft. I stared at it. “You like beef jerky? I made this myself. Be my guest.”
I walked out into the street, stunned and carrying my treat. What on earth was Jocelyn doing with this bird? I quickly figured it out: Womack may have had some issues with the law, here and there, but his skill as an aircraft mechanic was indispensable to a pilot doing high-risk work. I admired Jocelyn for keeping such a worrisome yet useful man at arm’s length. Such nuanced and practical talent for management was something I could do no more than admire from afar.
I’m just saying all this.
I went back to my house, and the waiting Jocelyn, on speeding legs that seemed to have a life of their own. I thought it best to manage the information and confine my remarks to a plain statement of vindicating Womack of any responsibility for my injury. I myself would be like O. J. Simpson looking for the real killer. I understood that news of Womack heading south on a rail might reveal itself as glee on my part: my good thing, my love, would go up in smoke.
I tugged Jocelyn down the hall to my bedroom. We undressed quickly and without teasing delays. I noticed for the first time that she had had her breasts enhanced; they were lovely in their gravity-defying shapeliness. I was repressing unwelcome mirth based, I suppose, on some combination of relief and adoration, but also on an old memory of Alan Hirsch dancing around his office, a silicone implant in each hand, doing a terrible rendition of Dean Martin singing, “Mammaries are made of this,” to a kind of muted Latin shuffle. I had to push that one well to the rear. I came from an era when breasts just happened, were not built to suit.