Blood&Gasoline: Chapters 1-4

CHAPTER ONE

After he burned the car Cody would sometimes look back at the beginning of the summer, when he spent all his free time rebuilding what was eventually destroyed. He would run his fingers lightly across the scars on his throat and smile, thinking of the baby monitor that once sat on the cracked and stained driveway along with the empty quarts of motor oil and the used shop towels. He thought of how the tiny bulb on its face stood out as a single glowing red eye against the gathering black clouds of the coming storm.
This is what happened, before the fire.
The monitor stood in stark contrast, a pink plastic anomaly among the old chrome of his tools, lording its simple perfection over the worn sections of thick black hose and the greasy, busted gaskets. The wind picked up, flipping the pages of his Chilton.
No matter though, he knew this car like he knew his own heart. Every cylinder, every point, every belt, the rumble of the engine so much like the thunder above, the movement of the pistons, all of it working together in such perfect harmony. It explained to Cody the universe and his own role within it.
He lay on his back, the warmth of the pavement seeping into his body and calming him. He closed his eyes and finished the last few turns, the rapid clicking of the ratchet like tribal music in his ears. This finished, he turned onto his side and worked his way out from under his car and cast a quick eye to the darkness above. He pumped the handle of the jack and dropped the beast back onto its black rubber paws. When he climbed inside and brought the engine to life, the clicking sound that had prompted this afternoons work was no longer there.
There was a flash of lightning. He gunned the engine and though it blended seamlessly with the thunder he could tell the sound of his car among a thousand, as a parent can tell the wail of their own child in the middle of a playground teeming with others.
The first few fat drops of rain fell on the windshield. Cody switched off the ignition and stepped out of the car. He gathered up his tools and another explosion of thunder nearly drowned out the first sound the baby monitor had made all day. He knew what the sound meant, and he tried to ignore it. He knew what he would find at the other end, where the twin to this monitor sat. He knew what he would find, and he hated it. Another low noise came from the small speaker and he turned the volume knob until there was a soft click, carried away by the wind. The noise was cut short and that single red eye glowed no more.
The simple joy he’d gotten from his work was gone, because there was nothing more he could do until the storm was over. When the weather cleared he would rinse the car, soap it, and rinse it again. He would wax it and buff it until it gleamed with its own inner light. He would shine all the chrome and scrub clean the tires. He would wash the grill with a toothbrush and smile when he saw his reflection distorted in the wild horse emblem.
But this storm might last awhile.
Cody hurried now, his annoyance gone, familiar anxiety settling in its place. He shouldn’t have cleaned up first, he should have gone in to check. What if there was really something wrong?
He stepped inside the trailer and just barely had time to duck. The other pink monitor bounced off the wall and dropped to the floor and he knew there was nothing wrong.
Not this time.
Not anything worse, anyway.
“The fuck you been?” his father croaked, his profanity steaming the cheap-looking plastic of his oxygen mask.
Cody ignored this monster of tubes and slack, hanging flesh. He picked the baby monitor up and inspected it. Satisfied there was nothing wrong he crossed the room, looking at the floor, and set the monitor back on the end-table. He ignored more profanity, and when his father grabbed his wrist, Cody pulled away from the cool but clammy grip, so much weaker than it had been all those years ago. Back outside he slammed the door to his car and turned the key so hard the starter ground and screamed, the angry sound digging into him, digging into his teeth and bones.
He wanted to drop the car into reverse and back out of the driveway, the trailer park, his life. He wanted to push the engine until it started to smoke, until the pistons were cranking so hard they began to melt. When the car would go no faster, when he reached the absolute pinnacle of speed, he wanted to steer the car off a cliff or into the ocean. He wanted to choke on the stench of his own searing flesh, drown on the salty mixture of his blood and the sea that was now so, so far away.
He wanted to, but he didn’t.
Instead, Cody leaned back in his seat. The shadows of the rain running down the windshield almost hid the tears as they ran down his face.

* * *

The insides were really the only thing left that needed any work, and it needed a lot of it.
In the year since he’d adopted the ‘67 hardtop he’d rebuilt the engine and replaced the destroyed radiator. The entire front end had been a mangled mess. The grill was the first new part he bought for it, impractical though it was. He’d kept the grill on a shelf in his room until he could put it on the restored front end of the car. While it was still on the shelf he would fall asleep looking at it. Sometimes he would take it down and polish it or hold it and try to puzzle out the secrets it held.
Then there was the paint job, of course. Sure, it had all been washed off but he’d seen it before it was washed and he could still see it, that black stain, even when he closed his eyes he could see it. In his dreams, he could see it. So the paint, that was next.
So he sanded it, added a coat of primer, all the time working odd jobs and waiting for the check to come so he could go out and get it painted, really painted. Painted by someone who thought it was an art, not something to be done on an assembly line. Fuck MAACO, he remembered thinking with every dish he washed, every pallet he loaded, every time he pulled the forklift up to the truck, every time he opened the mailbox, looking for that check. Finally the check came so he’d taken it in to a shop he knew of and paid a large sum of cash to have it sprayed and coated and glazed and detailed to perfection.
Then there was the windshield, and that was something he also dreamed of. He’d seen it, blown out, the spider-webbed glass sagging pathetic in its frame. The windshield had now been replaced.
So, he thought. The inside.
The back seat was trashed, and no wonder, it was the same seat that had been installed on some Detroit assembly line just over thirty five years ago. The upholstery and the springs were shot, not from anything specific, just from simple neglect and age, the dry Colorado air and the hot Colorado sun.
So, the first thing he did when the tow truck dropped the car off in the driveway was pull the back seat out of the car and toss it into the dumpster in the rear of the trailer park.
That was a start, but on the inside at least, there was plenty more that needed to be fixed, repaired, replaced.
The outside was cherry, but it was the inside that needed work, and soon.
The tires were new.
The body was finished.
The paint gleamed.
The engine ran perfect.
But Cody knew a car was only a thing until someone got inside and drove it. It might be nice to look at, and cost thousands of dollars, but if there was no one behind the wheel, it was just as useless as an unloaded gun. Or a dull knife. Or his father.
He didn’t want to think of his father, but how could he not? He was tethered to the miserable old man by a medical grade plastic hose hooked to an oxygen tank and a thin thread woven of guilt and duty.
How could he not think about his father when the man needed help getting in and out of the shower, when a list of fifteen different medications had to be kept next to the phone for those invariable times when the ambulance needed called, when he had to go and wait endless hours in the pharmacy to get those prescriptions filled?
The pharmacist knew him by name and the pretty girls behind the counter whispered about him when they thought he couldn’t hear, and sometimes, not often, one of the pretty girls would come up to him with the bulging sack of rattling orange bottles and tell him how terrible it was that his dad had cancer, or how wonderful it was of him to be there to help.
How was Cody not supposed to think of his father when he looked into the old man’s eyes every time he looked into the mirror? Most of all he hated thinking about his father, because it made him think about his mother, too.
Cody turned the engine off and went inside the pharmacy with his list. He took a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye out of his back pocket and read it while he waited. After a while, a pretty girl who worked behind the counter carried a bulging paper sack like you would get from a supermarket over to him.
He thanked her and when he stood she leaned in just a little closer and whispered into his ear, “I think it’s terrible what happened to your father.”
For the first time Cody said, “He did it to himself.”
He might as well have slapped her, from the look on her face and the way she kind of jumped. He snatched the bag from her long delicate fingers and walked out, fast, feeling the red creep across his face.
He’d never said that aloud before.
He sat it in his car and said it again, “He did it to himself.”
Cody angled his rearview mirror so he could look the old man in the eyes. He scrunched his eyebrows together and the effect was almost perfect.
“You did this to yourself.”
“I know, Cody, and I’m sorry, son. I never meant for this to happen. I never meant to hurt you, or your mother.”
“Don’t you talk about my mother.”
Cody watched the tears form in his father’s eyes and turned the mirror away from himself, wiped the wetness off his own cheeks. He dug through the galaxy of pills until he found the bottle he was looking for. He opened it and shook a few pills out and while he did this, he worked up a good wad of spit between his tongue and the back of his bottom row of teeth. He placed the pills in the puddle of saliva and swallowed them. He wondered what it felt like to die.
“The fuck ya been?” the old man croaked, when Cody walked in, carrying the bag of pills and salves and creams and breathing treatments. He ignored the old man and went to the cupboard, putting the pills away.
“Did you eat yet?” Cody asked his father.
“Why don’t you eat the shit outta my ass?”
“Because then there wouldn’t be any left in your head.”
It wasn’t always like this.
But in a way, it was.
There wasn’t always the slow chug of a second-rate oxygen machine paid for by the state medical assistance program. There wasn’t always an entire cupboard filled with antibiotics and antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills and sleeping pills and pain killers and iron pills to treat the anemia and steroids to strengthen the lung. There wasn’t always a tangle of clear plastic tubing following the old man around the trailer.
But there had always been the trailer. There had always been the bitter exchanges and held tempers and lost tempers and terrible profanity. There had always been some form of abuse, although before it had been both of the physical and verbal kind. The old man was weak now, that had changed. He was no longer able to cause the kind of pain that left a mark or made you piss blood for a week, the kind you had to tell the police over and over was caused by an unfortunate and entirely accidental and non-parentally inflicted incident. However, he was still able to cause the kind of pain that made you lie awake questioning yourself when you should be sleeping, the kind of pain you had to tell yourself over and over wasn’t really there.
Cody opened the freezer and pulled out a plastic rectangle that was stuffed with vitamin-rich, brightly colored food. He put it in the microwave and the old man yelled because it always fucked up the satellite reception when you used the microwave and he was trying to watch the game, god dammit.
The microwave dinged and Cody pulled the steaming dish out and set it along with a paper towel and a knife, fork, and spoon, on the old man’s TV tray.
The old man; the monster, the dead thing that wouldn’t stop talking, he cursed his son and the food and god but eventually the hunger was yelling even louder, so he contented himself to dig the food out of the little plastic compartments and stuff it into his mouth, grimly, without joy, as would a man all day shoveling coal into a furnace that would heat every home but his own. The old man wanted to be dead, but he didn’t want to starve to death, and this was the only reason he would eat.

CHAPTER TWO

The last time Cody had really spoken to his father before he came back home had been the time he told the old man he was leaving. They had been bumping along some dirt road on the way to some state owned land where they could legally shoot their guns.
“Fine,” the old man said. “It’s about time, too. Don’t know where you think you’re going, though.”
“California.”
“California?” The old man laughed his mean laugh. “Not in that piece a shit you call a car you won’t. You’ll be riding your thumb not fifty miles past the county line.”
“I fixed it up. It’ll make it.”
The cab of the truck was silent except for the country music station with the poor reception that was forever playing in his father’s truck. After a few miles the old man spoke again.
“You’ll be killing your mother. You know how she’s always liked to baby you.”
The silence settled in once more, this silence that sat between them like a constant but not always welcome houseguest. They turned off the dirt road and just drove across the open land of northern Colorado. All the land they could see in any direction, and it only took up one small square inch on the large atlas map of the state.
They set up their targets and loaded their pistols and shot them well. The conversation began again when the old man offered his brand new .45 to his son to try out.
“Easy now, t’aint much pull on’er, not like on that nine.”
Cody barely touched the trigger and the gun bucked in his hand. A small hole of sunlight came through just north of dead center on his target. The old man was right, there was miles of pull on the 9mm compared to the .45, but the gun shot true. They emptied clips and reloaded them and had a little laugh now and then. They discussed calibers and loads and any poor bastard that tried to break in. The fact that there was damn little to steal remained unspoken.
Then the wind picked up and the sun came out from behind the clouds and the pistols were hot to the touch. They had another laugh as they walked around, bent at the waist, retrieving their spent brass so the old man could reload them.
They left. They had a sort of post-shooting euphoria about them, a contented air that never lasted long enough.
“Lots a crazy bastards in California,” the old man said, after another half an hour of slightly more companionable silence.
“Yeah?”
The old man nodded. “Goin out there, I guess you should probably take that nine. You shoot it a little straighter than the other.”
At that moment, along with the shake and rattle of the truck and the wind coming in through the windows, drowning out most of the music except the music of the road, the two of them were father and son in a way they so rarely were, even when Cody had been a child.
“I can have it?”
The old man nodded and lit up another cigarette.
There was more silence, and then; “Thanks, Dad.”
“And god dammit, don’t tell your mother.” The old man took a drag and turned up the radio and unrolled his window a little more, making conversation next to impossible. This time, the silence was good, and they didn’t speak the rest of the way back to town.

* * *

When the old man was done with his microwave dinner he balled up his paper towel and dropped it on the floor and turned the television up a little louder. They watched the rest of the game, including the extra innings. The old man cursed the Rockies when they lost. Because there was nothing else to do Cody got out a faded deck of playing cards and a notepad filled with two endless columns of numbers. They played their millionth hand of Rummy. When they finished their one million and fourteenth hand it was time for the evening breathing treatment. Cody took a waxy little plastic tube from its silvery bag and twisted the end off and squirted the contents into the nebulizer which, when fully assembled, looked sort of like a peace pipe made of clear medical grade plastic. He pugged it in and the old man sucked on it until the contents had evaporated into his lungs. The apparatus was then disassembled, rinsed clean, and left in a Tupperware container to air dry until the next treatment was due. Cody draped a quilt over the old man and turned off the lights and retired to his room, neither one saying “good night” or “see you in the morning” or even “go to hell” to the other.
Late that night or early in the morning depending on your perspective Cody awoke to the sounds of terrible coughing like an engine burning up because some careless shit has let all the oil leak out and he is standing in front of his father wearing only boxer shorts with no memory of running into the living room. His father has a hand cupped to his mouth, muffling the coughing if only a little. Cody calls the ambulance when he sees the first rivulet of bright red blood seep from in between the old man’s fingers and run down the old man’s unshaven chin. When the ambulance arrives Cody has put on a pair of pants and a shirt and his father is blue around the mouth and at the tips of his fingers. His heart is beating but he no longer appears conscious. One of the EMT’s works on his father while the other fires questions and Cody gives them the old man’s medical history.
“He was diagnosed with lung cancer about a year and a half ago and they did surgery, they removed all of his left lung and part of his right. It had spread to his throat and they took out about a foot of his stomach and part of his esophagus, but they got it all. They did chemo and radiation, the radiation weakened the sac around the heart and they had to do surgery on that, oh about three? Three and a half months ago? Put a window in?
“He’s not allergic to anything.
“Here’s a list of everything he’s on.
“Is he...still...”
“Don’t worry,” the other EMT said. “I got him breathing again.”

* * *

On the way to the hospital Cody rode in front of the ambulance. The EMT that had questioned him was driving. From the back, over the siren, the other EMT called; “I’m losing him, Joe! Get me to the fucking hospital!”
Cody found himself wondering vaguely what kind of engine was under the hood and hated himself for it. He tried to think of his father as he was years ago, when Cody was a child, but instead of the strong and sometimes cruel giant of a man all he could see were blue fingertips and blood trickling slowly through a forest of gray and black whiskers. He didn’t want that. Even a monster is better than a discarded husk. All the fists and all the fights in the world were better than seeing that one bright red, movie-red, trail of blood as its course was changed by the geography of wrinkled, whiskered skin.

* * *

Cody sat in the brightly lit emergency waiting room. It was four in the morning.
Five.
Dawn.
It was six in the morning and he couldn’t remember how many cups of shitty coffee he’d drunk. He went to the nurses station again and asked them what was going on. They said, “Sorry, dear, but you’ll have to wait for the doctor.”
When it was six-thirty the doctor came.
His father was alive. It seemed a piece of the stump that used to be a left lung had come loose and that was what had choked him. It most likely was dislodged during a “coughing spasm”. He was not conscious, nor was he breathing on his own. He was on a ventilator. Cody could see him now, but he was heavily drugged to keep from gagging on the tube going down his throat, feeding the one little scrap of remaining lung. His heart had stopped once, for about thirty seconds, during the procedure. The likelihood of brain damage was not high, so that was good, but, the doctor cautioned, neither was the likelihood of recovery.
Cody thanked him and sat drinking another cup of shitty coffee, wondering if a doctor at the good hospital across town would have told him the same thing.

* * *

Avery opened his eyes and the room was dark and he was under water and couldn’t breathe there was a monster on his chest a beast with one long plastic arm shoved down his throat trying to squeeze life into his lungs and Avery didn’t want that he didn’t want more life he’d had enough life and true he’d had enough death too but that was what he really wanted sweet soft quiet release from the failing body and failing world and no more pain no more hidden tears and no more terrible words hurled at people that didn’t deserve them words he spat out like a mouthful of shit he had no choice it was a reflex he didn’t want to hurt anyone he never did even as a child he’d never pulled the wings off flies but his tongue had always been a stiletto razor finely-honed covered with poisoned rust and with a life of its own he couldn’t stop it from cutting anymore than he could stop his own heart from beating or his mind from thinking and that was the worst all the memories the memories of loves lost and memories of the strong powerful young man he’d been so many years before his majesty on the football field catching fifty-yard passes and running another thirty for that goal line weaving his way through defenders as though they were trapped in mid-air and not even moving always forward always toward that beautiful white line chalked across infinity that he was running for even now on his back in bed but when he got there this time the line would be black.
Forever black.
And he would be nothing cease to exist a puff of foul air in the middle of a hurricane that would never even notice he had been there nor notice when he was gone and it was this long stretch of eternal anonymity that he wanted nothing more he knew heaven was out of the question and he couldn’t believe in hell because it was what he expected but he was sorry for everything he’d ever done and he could only hope that was enough.

* * *

Cody ate a greasy breakfast in the cafeteria and then ran the half mile home, showered, got a pocketful of quarters and the list of phone numbers, and drove back to the hospital, wild-eyed and sure his father was now dead.

* * *

Relatives were called. Most of them couldn’t, or wouldn’t come. A security guard came to ask what the problem was when Cody started screaming into the receiver that the doctors said the old man was on the way out.
“Good,” the uncle on the other end said, and hung up.

* * *

By six that night Cody’s aunt, his mother’s sister, was the only one to arrive. She was the only one that would arrive. Cody had not seen his aunt since the day they had buried his mother, or what was left of her. His aunt offered to spend the night with him at the hospital but when evening came he drove her back to the trailer and told her to make herself at home. He then went back to the hospital to sit vigil in the uncomfortable hospital chair next to his father’s bed.
He was wires, all over him were wires. Going into his hands and elbows and attached to his fingers, taped to his forehead, running up under the sheet at the foot of the bed. The wires and tubes all lead to machines or bags of fluid, some going in, some coming out. Everything seemed to make a noise. The sound of it was the sound of his father being kept alive. Cody sat in the chair staring at the old man. His father’s eyes were closed and his mouth was slack around the tube of the ventilator. The only movement was the mechanical up and down of the chest as the machines turned his father into a kind of machine himself; a dying machine, perhaps a dead machine, but a machine still running nonetheless. Cody would stare at the old man, looking for signs of life, knowing there would be none, knowing his father was far too sedated to do anything more than he already was. Cody watched the old man’s chest go up. Pause. Hiss from the machine. The old man’s chest went down. Puff from the machine. Up. Pause. Hiss. Down. Pause. Puff.
It was that little pause that got Cody, every time for the eternity he spent sitting there awake, waiting for something to happen. Every time his father’s chest went up, he knew the old man was dead, and just when he was about to call for a nurse, the Machine would hiss and the chest would fall and there would be that pause, just long enough to where this time, for sure, he knew the old man had finally given in and the tears would near and all the kind words never spoken between them would rise in Cody’s chest as a sob and just before that sob was released, the machine would puff in another breath and the chest would rise and the cycle would start over again. For hours this went on. All night. When his legs would ache and his ass was numb from sitting or he was thirsty or had to piss Cody would rise and leave the room, walk past the desk of emergency room nurses who all seemed to pity him in a nice but professional kind of way, and he would walk the corridor to the bathroom or the water fountain, or the endless pots of shitty coffee.
He soon found himself taking a detour past the Nursery.
Each time he left his father’s room and each time he went back, he would walk past the Nursery and Birthing Center, where the new babies were born. He stood at the glass and looked in and saw a tired-looking Hispanic woman holding a little pink ball of love, beaming down at the wrinkled but beautiful baby in her arms. This one glimpse got Cody through the rest of that long, long night.

* * *

Cody woke the next morning when the nurses changed shifts and the morning nurse came in to check on his father. She put her stethoscope in her ears and put the round metal disc against the old man’s chest. A concerned look crossed her face and she repositioned the stethoscope by a few inches and the concerned look turned to worry.
“What is it?” Cody asked.
“It’s just...I’m not getting any breathing sounds from his left side.”
“There isn’t a lung there.”
“Pardon me?” The nurse took he stethoscope out of her ears.
“There’s no lung on that side.”
“Really?”
“Uh, yeah. Really. He had lung cancer. They removed it. Isn’t that in his chart?”
The nurse gave Cody a dirty look he didn’t feel he deserved and she checked the chart and then shrugged and did the rest of whatever it was she was supposed to be doing and then walked out of the room without another word, nose in the air and Cody sat there, wondering if a nurse in the good hospital across town would have said the same thing.
An hour later Cody’s aunt came in, looking tired. He still couldn’t believe she had come. He knew she was really there for him, not the old man, and he had to be thankful for whatever help and support he could get.


* * *

Later that day his father regained consciousness for a short while. He made slow, unsteady movements, charades, asking for a pen. Cody found one, and a notebook, and handed them to the old man, who made one long, nonsense scribble across the page, and then passed back out again. The doctor told Cody and his aunt that he was frankly amazed the old man had regained consciousness for even the brief period of time that he had.
A few hours later he woke up again, and once more asked for the pen and paper. Once more Cody gave them to him, and the old man squinted and cocked his eyes and pulled the notebook closer, moved it farther away, found the right distance and began to write. It seemed to be an epic struggle. A thin sweat broke out on Cody’s back. He knew, he just somehow plain knew the old man was finally going to admit fault in this one line, fault or love or perhaps some deep secret that had shamed him into living the life of a bastard; and Cody knew that while he read that one line, his father would die.
The old man dropped the pen and held the notebook out in a shaking hand that dropped to the bed like a lead weight in water as soon as Cody took the notebook. In the straggled, pained script of a child who has just begun to write, this is what Cody read: WHY IS THAT FAT CUNT HERE?
Cody tore the paper out and crumpled it up and wanted to smash his fist into his father’s face. He wanted to rip out all the tubes and wires that were keeping him alive and then help the process along by wrapping his hands around that wrinkled, unshaven throat.
His father passed back out.
“What did he write?” Aunt Faye asked from her chair in the corner.
“Nothing,” Cody said, and dropped the crumpled wad of paper into the trash.

* * *

Over the next two days Cody’s father regained a loopy kind of consciousness. He still had the ventilator shoved down his throat so it was still necessary to keep him doped up, But, Cody reflected, the old man always did have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing.
On the second day the doctor drained a full liter of fluid from the old man’s chest cavity. It seemed the fluid had been responsible for restricting the functioning of the lung. Later that afternoon they took the ventilator out, and did all but pronounce his recovery a miracle of both science and life. When she heard her ex-brother in law was awake and would most likely be home by the end of the week, Aunt Faye hugged Cody good-bye.
“Remember, if you need anything, you can always call me.”
` Cody nodded, and then looked her in the eye. “How come nobody else came?”
“They wanted to. They all wanted to be here, for you, but... I think you might know why they couldn’t.”
Cody nodded his head and looked away and promised himself over and over that he wasn’t going to cry, he wasn’t, not this time, not now. Aunt Faye left and Cody walked down the back stairs and found a dark corner to hold him up from collapsing. The tears followed him all the way there, and it was there that they overtook him, beat his stomach and throat and eyes and ribs, robbed from him all the faculties and strength he normally possessed.
Cody didn’t notice the pretty girl on the stairs above when she stopped her descent upon seeing him. To him the quick echo of her footsteps had been the hammer of his pulse. She stared for a moment, just long enough for her heart to break, and then silently she left.

CHAPTER THREE

Perla stopped, one foot hovering just above the next stair down. Below her, on the landing, was a young man. He was collapsed, half on the floor, half against the wall, and crying. She had seen too many people crying the way he was now, like the tears were acid and each sob was a lead pipe, crying like the end of the world. She’d cried like that herself once, many years ago, when she was just a little girl.
Well, she supposed, technically, that was my first day as a woman.
The young man hadn’t noticed her, not yet, anyway. He was still right in the thick of it, and she knew it would yet be awhile before he was aware of anything but his pain.
She wanted to comfort him. She could walk the rest of the way down the stairs without him hearing, and the first thing he would know of her could be a warm hand on the back of his neck and a whisper in his ear.
Wasn’t that the way people fell in love? Perla didn’t know. She almost went for it, almost crept softly to him like a guardian angel but then the overhead lights flickered and brought her back to her senses. Fall in love? He’d probably be humiliated and hate her for finding him like this. For the most part, the men Perla had known were all macho pigs. A large part of that was just the Latino culture, she used to think, but she’d learned over the years that the term applied to men in general.
Perla looked at the sad figure below her one more time and felt an aching deep inside her, an almost physical need to go to him. Something about him told her he was not like the other men she’d known. She said a short prayer that did not consist of words, just a hope that he would be OK, and then she did exactly what she didn’t want to do; she turned and quietly left.
Perla walked up a floor and the growling of her stomach made her decide to take the elevator back down to the cafeteria, where she’d originally been headed.
She left her duffel bag with a few of the nurses she knew from the ER and went through the line, hoping the salad would be better than last time.
She sat with the nurses, and they were joined by Frank, an EMT that Perla was often paired with. Frank was not a macho pig. He was kind, he was handsome, he loved his job, and of course, he was happily married and had three beautiful children.
“See you up there?” Frank asked.
“Give me ten minutes,” Perla said.
Perla finished her meal. The ER nurses were having coffee, just about to come on their shift, same as Perla, so they made plans to meet for a drink afterward and then Perla cleared her tray and went to change.
Frank was waiting for her, leaned against their ambulance. With a dramatic sigh and a hidden smile he tossed her the keys without argument. They both knew it would have done him no good.
Nobody argued with Perla anymore, not about driving.

* * *

Their first call of the night came from an elderly couple. The couple had been about to go to bed when a commotion in the street drew them to their front window.
“Must have been, five, six of them,” Perla heard the old man telling a police officer as she closed the door to the ambulance behind her.
“He’s over here,” another cop called, waving to them from the middle of the street. “Bring the stretcher.”
Perla knelt by what was left of the young man. He reminded her, as all severely beaten men did, of the last time she saw her Uncle Carlos.
She’d just been getting home from the hospital with her mother. Perla had watched as her father, her older brother, her older cousin, and two of her other uncles picked Carlos up off the lawn and stuffed him in the back seat of her brother’s car. They all climbed in the car, which backed out of the driveway, and headed West, toward the mountains.
None of them ever spoke about what happened that day. All she knew was that when she looked out her bedroom window three hours later at the sound of Caesar’s car returning, Uncle Carlos was not with them.
They checked the young man’s vitals. He was alive but unconscious. Severe head trauma. They put a collar on him, carefully loaded him onto the stretcher, and then put the stretcher in the back of the ambulance. As she drove toward the hospital, Perla wondered. Was he a victim of some brutal, random attack, or had he deserved what happened, just as her uncle had?
Either way, it wasn’t her job to judge, and either way, she didn’t care. She just hoped the kid would be OK, that they’d gotten there in time, stopped the bleeding from the stab wounds in time.

* * *

This is something Perla hadn’t told anyone for a very long time: When she was a child she knew she was her uncle’s favorite. He treated her different than the other children, always bringing her small gifts with no occasion and demanding another hug. He would always take her places and buy her new clothes and go with her to the park. Even now, all these years later, part of her still loved him, and part of her was able to look back on some of those memories as treasured moments of childhood.
But even when she was a teenager she started to suspect his motives were not quite pure. He still treated her as a favorite, but as her body changed she would catch him looking at her with a different dark light in his eyes, and he always seemed to hug her just a little longer than was comfortable for her. As she grew and her eyes were jaded by hormones and television, she was able to recognize these things for what they were; not the awkward love of a man that had never had any children of his own, but the strange lusts of a sick old pervert. She started avoiding him, she stopped accepting his gifts, she always had someplace to be when he was coming over.
But on the day of her quinceanera, she was unable to avoid him. Her entire family was there, and all her friends, and Michael, whom she wanted to be her boyfriend. She could still smell the meat on the grill and hear her little cousins playing in the yard. She had been in her room, putting on her white dress. She got lost in her own reflection; today was the first time she had permission to wear makeup. Her own mother had helped apply it, pretending she’d never seen the traces of lipstick her daughter had inexpertly removed before coming home from school.
Her bedroom door creaked open and Perla was about to protest when she saw her uncle’s face reflected in her bedroom mirror. He slipped inside her room, leaving the door open but only a crack.
“Perlita,” he called her softly, as he always had. “My little pearl.”
“Mi tio,” she said, and tried to return his smile.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.
“Tio Carlos, no--”
“Si, si, Perlita. But I understand. A young girl needs her privacy. She needs to be alone.”
She tried to smile again, and turned back to her mirror, pretending to check her makeup, hoping he would leave her alone. Before long those hopes would turn to prayers.
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve missed my Perlita.”
“We should get to the party, tio. Everybody’s waiting.”
“I’m the one who is waiting. I’ve been waiting a very long time.”
The air in her small room seemed to change, it chilled despite the open window and the warm spring temperatures of the afternoon.
She smiled and walked toward the door, but he wouldn’t move. She laughed like she had as a child and he had been playing a game, but when she tried to move around him he stepped in front of her. The look in his eyes told her it was not a game.
“Carlos,” she said, using the same tone she had as a child, the tone of voice that had never failed to win him over.
She tried to squeeze past him and into the hall but he put his hands up to block her path. They wrestled briefly as she tried to squirm around him and then she felt his hands over her budding chest and a long slim rock in the front of his jeans pressed hot against her thigh. It was everything she could do not to vomit on her shiny black shoes.
Then she felt something worse. If it had stopped there, if they could have laughed it off as a joke and forgotten about everything and went down to the party she would have grown up a different woman, and she would have had a different job. But he didn’t stop. Instead he pinched. He closed his thumb and forefinger down hard on her left nipple, and the pain shot through her chest, up into her neck, down her arm until the tips of her fingers tingled. Outside la mariachi started playing her favorite song. She stepped back and slapped her uncle across the face, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Everything human went out of her uncle’s eyes.
“Smile, Perla,” he said, advancing on her as he unbuckled his belt. “Today you are a woman.”
An eternity later she was running down the stairs, past her mother who had been on her way up to hurry her along down to the party, out the front door, across the freshly mowed and decorated front yard, and into the streets. She knew her friends and family were calling her name, their voices confused and angry. She knew she was almost hit by a car, and she knew the horn blared and the tires screeched. She knew all these things, but she heard none of them. All she could hear was the low animal panting of her uncle in her ears. She could still feel his strong, hard fingers on the back of her skull, buried in her hair, shoving her face down into her pillow until her nose bled. Just when she was afraid she might be dying, suffocating to death, maybe drowning on her own blood, it was over. She’s felt the hot blast of his poison inside her and the way his whole body seemed to flex as one single muscle.
So she ran. Blindly, she ran. Forever, she ran. When she could run no more she found she still had the breath to scream and the tears to cry. She looked down at her shoes and they were no longer fresh and shiny and new, they were beaten and dirty and used. She could no longer see her reflection in them as she had this morning, instead she saw only her broken heart.
Running down her thigh past the hem of her white dress was a trickle or orange against her caramel skin. It was blood from her maidenhead mixed forever with the rotten liquid soul of her uncle.
What if I’m pregnant, she thought. What if I have his baby?
The sound of an approaching vehicle drew her attention once more to the street. It was an ambulance, cruising, lights off, no siren, going just under the limit, mindful of the children that would sometimes play in the streets of the neighborhood. Snot running out her nose and her eyes still leaking, Perla staggered off the sidewalk and in front of the ambulance, holding her hands up. It slowed to a stop. This time there was no danger, no screeching tires or blasted horn. Perla crumpled more than sat, right there in the middle of the street. She watched the hem of her dress absorb the orange stain from off her thigh and she folded up on herself, a flower that has decided not to bloom.
She heard the slam of the ambulance door and the soft click of footsteps on the warm pavement and then her world was filled with the only face she could see without screaming right now, the kind face of another woman. Perla knew it was the just the sun but still this woman’s blonde hair glowed like the hair of the angels in the stained glass windows of her church. The little metal plate pinned to the woman’s blouse read; JENNIFER WILCOX EMT
Perla watched the woman’s eyes as they left her own, traveled down her body, landed on the tiny spot of orange on the hem of her dress. Perla sniffed and looked up into the woman’s eyes. The woman whispered in her ear and took her hand and helped her to her feet. She put her in the back of the ambulance while her partner drove. The woman rode with Perla all the way to the hospital, and all the way she held her hand. She helped Perla inside the emergency room, talked to the doctors for her, stayed with her when the police arrived, didn’t let Perla’s hand go until her mother pushed through the curtain surrounding her bed.
Perla was no longer wearing her dress. Her hair was down, her makeup had been cried off. She was wearing blue socks with rubber traction soles and a paper hospital gown, and her mother began to cry.

* * *

The last call of the night died on them. Heroin addict. OD. It had been Frank’s turn to give the adrenaline shot, but all it did was wake the girl up long enough to vomit and have a seizure. The girl died right there, in the dirt of an apartment complex parking lot, where one of her friends had been kind enough to drag her when she started foaming at the mouth and her eyes rolled back.
Perla looked up at the apartment windows. Most of them held a figure or two, watching from above. She wondered which one had called 911, which one had maybe cooked the shot for her or helped her inject it.
They loaded the girl’s wasted frame into the ambulance. Perla could have done it herself, the girl was that skinny. They rode back to the hospital in silence. No lights, no siren, no hurry. It was always bad when they both rode up front. It meant something, somewhere, had gone very wrong.
After clocking out Perla offered to buy Frank a drink.
“No, thanks. I want to go home and see my kids.”
She gave him a hug and walked to the parking lot by herself. She wondered if the dead girl had family, if they had been notified yet, if somewhere there was a mother crying in that same, full body, full soul way as the young man she’d seen in the stairwell. Perla thought about him off and on for the rest of the night, hoping he was OK, not knowing that soon she would see him again.

CHAPTER FOUR


Avery sat like a golem in his wheelchair with a scowl permanently affixed to his face. He was glad to be out of the hospital, but he was not happy to be alive. He wished again he had the strength to kill himself. If his son were able to take care of himself, he might. Avery eyed the boy with a mixture of scorn and a confused kind of love. Here was a boy that should have been listening to country music and starting on the varsity football team in high school. Instead, he listened to that god-awful punk metal shit or whatever the fuck it was they called it. Instead of a cowboy hat, he had earrings in both ears. And the cars, all the cars. It was one thing if the kid had wanted to be a mechanic, have a practical use at it, for he was skilled, Avery would admit that, though never to his son. But Cody had no interest in taking a loan out and opening up a shop here in town. Truth was Avery didn’t really know what Cody wanted, only that it seemed for so long to be in California, fucking liberal hippy-hell hole. Nothing there but fucking spics and commies. Avery no more wanted to visit California than he did Russia, or France, or Nazi Germany. No, things were fine right here in Colorado. They had been, anyway. Then he’d lost Kat, his sweet kitty cat Katherine, gone forever, and no one to blame but him. Of all the pain and aggravation the boy had caused him, Avery knew this most serious of hurts was his own fault. He could still remember the last words he said to her. He could hear the song on the radio when he realized, once and for all, that she was gone.
“I aint gettin in that car,” Avery said.
“You have to,” his son told him.
“I don’t have to do a fucking thing, boy, and you’d do best to remember that.”
His son took a deep breath. Little pussy.
“Mr. Dean, why don’t you just get in the car, hmm?” the nurse asked nicely. “It’s such a nice looking car--”
“And you don’t know a fucking thing about it,” Avery said, then turned and looked again at his son. “Take this fucking deathtrap home and come back in my m’truck.”
“You can get in the car or you can crawl home, it’s up to you.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? And bossing around a man with fucking cancer. Thank Christ your mother’s not here to see what a sorry piece a shit her son turned out to be.”
“Get in the fucking car or I’ll put you in the trunk, OK?” Cody walked around to his side of the vehicle and got behind the wheel.
Not bad for a little pussy. Lugging his portable oxygen tank Avery climbed out of the wheelchair, snatching his arm away from the nurses helping hand, and used every last bit of will left to his command to climb into the car unassisted. He simply sat down and faced forward, ignoring the others, until the nurse closed the door.
The sound of it was like a coffin lid closing, as heard from the inside. The car was tiny, microscopic, hardly bigger than Avery’s shirt. The dials seemed to stare at him. He could see black stains that had never existed on this dashboard. He turned his oxygen up and gripped the door handle tight, until his knuckles started to burn and felt like they would explode in his hands. Avery could smell blood now, choking him. He could taste it, drowning him. He could hear his wife, her sharp short breaths that would be her last. These sounds were imagined though, part of his mind. They told him she had died instantly, but he always pictured a few moments of consciousness and a glint of hatred in her eyes before the lights went out of them.

* * *

They got home, and home was where they stayed. Cody hadn’t had much time to work on his car; on the insides, the interior. Truth was he had nothing but time, but couldn’t bear to be outside, even with the baby monitor.
He hadn’t been able to sleep. Every time his eyes began to close he would jerk awake and look for his father. He always expected blue fingertips and more blood on his chin, but this time the blood would have dried to a crust and most of him would be blue, not just the fingertips, because Cody had fallen asleep and now it was too late and his father was dead.
But every time he jerked awake and went to find his father, he either found the old man peacefully sleeping or interrupted something he was watching on TV, evoking a stream of profanity and testaments to what a useless pussy of a son he was. For now he welcomed these words. Any words. The old man could call him a useless mistake of a mother-fucking cock-sucking diseased pus-bag bloody anal wart flying menstrual chunk and it would be poetry compared to that hiss and puff of the ventilator.
When Cody was finally able to sleep, he dreamed. He was standing in the center aisle of a funeral parlor looking down a long burgundy carpet at a coffin the color of gun metal. On each side of the aisle were rows of metal folding chair. In the chairs and standing around the room were all the people in Cody’s family, both his mom and his dad’s side. There was a low murmur of conversation and general tension in the air. Everyone was sighing heavily or tapping their foot or checking and rechecking their watch. His mom was standing next to the coffin, but he was afraid of her. Despite his fear he walked down the aisle and peered into the open casket. His father was there, wasted away to an even greater extreme, just a skeleton with one layer of thin skin stretched over the bones, stuffed in a suit and tie.
Cody stared down into the coffin at his father and then heard the puff and hiss of the ventilator from the hospital and saw his father’s chest rise spasmodically. The old man’s eyes fluttered and he squirmed in his coffin like a bug on a pin.
“He’s still alive,” Cody said.
“I know,” his mother said. “And shame on all of you.”
Cody watched as his father began to have a kind of seizure, pulling loose tubes and wires Cody hadn’t noticed before, the bones grinding together in protest. Cody was about to ask someone for help when his father suddenly sat up, leaned over the side, and unplugged his coffin. Somewhere a light went out, and the old man collapsed. The room was filled with the long low beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep that means flat-line, which got the attention of everyone else. Those sitting stood, and everyone began to clap. Cody looked in horror at his mother who was shaking her head in disgust. Only then did Cody realize he was clapping loudest of all.
Then he woke up, and it was a very long time before he tried to go back to sleep.
A week went by. Two. The dreams stopped. Cody was able to sleep for two hours at a stretch, provided he woke himself up with an alarm to check on the old man. After the third week he was able to go to the store without running up and down the aisles and thinking the whole time that when he got back, the trailer would be empty of life. After a month he started working on his car again, always with the baby monitor outside with him. If he was under the car, it went under with him. If he was under the hood, it sat on the battery. If he was in the car, it was there, in his lap, and the stereo was off. The inside was getting a little better.
His father had doctor appointments, and Cody drove him, always in the old man’s truck. He had, despite his harsh words, been kicking himself over driving the Mustang the day his father was released. Cody knew how much the old man hated the car, and knew his reasons for this, if for nothing else, were valid.
Other than his disposition, his father seemed to be on the mend. The doctors were amazed. They showed his file to med students. Dr. Lee, the cancer guy, told Avery patients like him were the reason he became a doctor. Dr. Lee planned to write and publish a paper on Avery, and told Cody his father was a miracle unexplained by science.
Then, one evening, about two months after that last visit to the hospital, Cody brought dinner in to his father only to find the old man gasping like a fish out of water and clutching his chest.