David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

He touched his tie, fat tight knot, stripes white and red.

To get him to maybe postpone moving that house, so we could get those lawyers from what is it? Save the Earth? Preserve the Land? You know, the folks who go around buying land and then just let it grow to meadow or second-growth forest, or swamp. Just to give them a couple of days. Because that restraining order, the one the land group, the one about the river basin and all that, might’ve come through. He’d still be there. And the house still being there might sway the judge. You know. The house hadn’t been moved, yet, and the whole thing is still in process, judge might just throw it out. Judge Janson, is it? Janson’s old blood, tied to Congers, believe me; blood going back to old King George himself, right? He comes to me for a physical. The man knows the whole county. Says Janson, I know we’re different, politically, but when it comes to my health I trust you like you’re one of our own.

Along the curbside a motorcycle was parked; two getting off in leather jackets.

Is that Janet? she says, her voice catching. It couldn’t be Janet. Could it be Janet?

For a moment they watch the girl remove her helmet, speckled azure with a heavy dark visor to cover her face, slowly lifting it off, shaking a waterfall of black locks around her shoulders. How did she tuck so much hair up there in the helmet? They both wonder. Then they think: that’s not our beloved Janet, our daughter, who is lost to the elements, general wildness, not too wild, but always on the move and going from one place to the other. Our Janet.

Sloan took a deep long sip of his drink, and then another and then a quick little one and decided there would be no point in going further with the topic. Not that he wanted to shield his wife from the truth; just keep some balance between what was in his mind and what he spoke aloud. He didn’t tell her the following: that there had been that afternoon a small sliver of time between when he felt his throat begin to constrict and when he made the proper diagnosis (of the ulcer resulting most likely from the pain medication he was on for his joints); that in that small fraction of time he had panicked (looking out through the trees, falling every which way) and a void had opened up, a wide space revealing what might eventually yawn into a crevice and, with oncoming years, become an immense chasm: a loss of his abilities at making a brisk, proper, correct diagnosis, a careful balance of professional opinion with the symptoms available. In that panic came, he felt, what can only be called (as he sat drinking his vodka) the first slippage in his talents. Beneath him, life was giving way. Night was descending. The waitress came up and cleared the plates and offered up several desserts: cream puffs, cocoa mousse, ice cream cake. It went unsaid. The fear that he was reaching the end of his long career; the deep welling sense of loss he had when he felt his throat at that moment. His utter confusion over the whole thing.

Between them the silence contained his throat problems, Congers’s house moving, the parcel of land that was being sold, and Janet. Janet stood unspoken between them. The dew point was rising. The glasses of ice water were dappled with sweat. Sloan ran his finger along the side of his glass, tracing a small cursive s , and looked past his wife to the street. Behind them the Hudson palisades rose weighty against the back of the restaurant. The river, down past the other side of the street, moved with the grand solemnity of incoming tidal currents.

Janet, he began, softly.

No, she said. Let’s not go there. Not now. Please.

The mention of her name conjured up an image of his daughter standing on the corner of 4th and Bowery, the violet light-wash of sky overhead, pale and delicate with long shoulders and hair that seemed perpetually wind-tangled, deep, dark brown against the paleness of her face. With this, he recalled the fine little shells of her ears along her head and her hair, as a child, flaring with static as he ran the brush along the full length, taking care not to press the bristles down too hard — her bony little body taking the weight of his brush strokes, hips without a waist, straight on both sides, holding herself prim and firm.

He raised two fingers against each other to summon a second vodka, this one with a smidgen of tonic.

Another man came in for an appointment that afternoon with a pain in the gut, which Sloan immediately thought — pushing his index finger deep into the right spot — was most likely a seed stuck in his diverticuli, a sesame seed, or a poppy seed that had gone its way down the intestine only to lodge in the one of the little extended bypasses (he’d questioned the man long about his eating habits, not finding seeds, except perhaps a buttered roll he had eaten — he wasn’t sure — for lunch a couple of days ago in a deli off 42nd, that might or might not have had poppies); the man’s pain wasn’t acute, but a dull throbbing with small peaks of acute, hard to quantify … and he’d said to wait a day or two and then, if the pain continued, they’d have to go in to explore — putting, as he spoke, one hand on the patient’s shoulder. Sloan wasn’t a touchy-feely doctor, but he felt it was important to impart at least one physical contact per visit, to translate his concern for the well-being and general health of each patient into something solid, a handshake that lingered a moment, a touch of the shoulder (as with this patient), even a rub of the knee in the right cases; for the really old, close patients, those who had been coming in regularly and to whom he had a rapport built on bad colds and broken bones and cancers treated and cured, rectums with fissures, scrotums with lumps, backs with humplike formations, jaw infections spreading in the brain cavity, stress fractures and torn tendons from gamesmanship — to these souls he often gave a departing hug, or a hug in greeting and a departing hug; and to his close friends, male and female, he thought, at the café, taking a second very quick sip of his vodka (hardly a bit of tonic in this one), he did give a kiss, on the lips or cheek, or both. As with his daughter the last time they met for dinner, he had given her a handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a hug, and a kiss on the cheek, and then the forehead; then, crying, he kissed the very center of her forehead where he used to put his lips freely when she was a small child (and so on and so forth), and then he kissed her lips, a real kiss, firm forward pressure lasting a few seconds, and imparted on her his words of advice, his warnings to take care, his hope that she would find some secure place in this world and, if need be, call on him for any kind of help she might need.

But really, I suppose we must not avoid it, she was saying, regarding Janet, the word, the name itself. There had been an immeasurable silence when the waitress delivered the drink. Silence between sips. The girl with the motorcycle helmet was back, putting her hair up with both hands, her elbows cocked in the air; her boyfriend, or friend, was beside her in a long black leather coat, helping; he had two rubber bands around his wrists, and he clutched the mane of hair, the girl’s hands helping, too, and drew a rubber band down his hand and into her hair, twisting it around, doubling it, and then doing it again until that spot was tight; then he folded the ponytail in half and slid a second rubber band down (her hands all the while padding, adjusting the formation, entwining with his hands), until the whole arrangement was ready, and he lowered the helmet gently onto her head — both hands holding it from the sides — making small adjustments in the lowering process as he moved it down. She lifted her foot slightly in what seemed to be the beginning of an arabesque (many ballerinas lived up in the palisades, with large windows giving way to a view of the Hudson, the lights of Westchester, and from some vantages, the city itself). Helmeted, framed by the safety device, her face divine and pure in the candlelight thrown up from the tables, the girl turned and kissed the man, who in turn put his open hands around the thin bottom of her jaw and held her for a moment. He then straddled the bike, kicked up the kickstand, which gave way to the heavy sway of metal beneath him and made his arms stand out strongly on the handles. He gave it a firm jounce. The engine roaring (and it did roar, ear-popping mufflerless roar), she got on and hooked up her legs and, slickly, despite the noise, almost as if in silence, they cut out into the road and were gone, lost forever, the two of them, rest assured, never to be seen again by Sloan or his wife, who hadn’t watched a bit of this scene, her back to it, and was still talking about Janet (what might or might not happen to her), stating emphatically that they must not put aside their pains; that pain must be dealt with head-on, her voice a bit drunk, that it was very important that he, Sloan, face the fact that their daughter might be a junkie (as if he hadn’t), and also face Congers, go tell him to his face how you’re feeling, gallstone be damned. The whole while he — not hearing much of what she was saying — kept his eyes down the street, on the place where the taillight of the motorcycle had slid away into the dark.