Catch & Release (18 page)

 

The back of the tanker is silver and shiny and warps the reflection of D'Elegance's big square grill into a crazy grin. There's a happy, winking cartoon cow painted on there. It's smiling back at D'Elegance and waving a hoof at us. “No BHT!” I guess this should make us happy too.

“Fuckers!” says Odd and hits the steering wheel with both palms.

“What? The trucker? He seems fine. He didn't cut you off or anything.”

“Not him. The fuckers with the hormones and antibiotics. He must feel pretty guilty, your dad.”

“What?”

“Well, he's there shoving the antibiotics. He probably created the fucking MRSA. He turned some simple crap bug into what ate us.”

“That doesn't make sense. I wasn't the first one to get sick. If my dad's work had anything to do with the MRSA, I would have been the first one. I would have been exposed first . . .”

“Don't be stupid. You know it's not like playing tag. I know and you know where it comes from—too many fucking antibiotics—and we know it brews in livestock as good as it does in people. And we know who goes around pumping antibiotics into animals: Your dad.”

“My dad isn't the only one.”

“That doesn't make it better.”

“My dad does not think he did this to me.”

“Did you ask him? Did you talk to him?”

 

I avoided talking about it—not just with my dad. I tried to ignore everything about MRSA. I started going LALALALA in my head as soon as I overheard a nurse talking about how the CDC was really interested in this particular strain because it worked so fast—

“It's like Ebola,” said the nurse, “but they rot instead of bleed out.”

That was the last thing I learned about my MRSA. That was the last thing I wanted to learn about my MRSA.

I never read the obits in paper for Cases One, Two, Four, Five, and Seven. I never visited the chain-link fence by the school where the streaky goodbyes were still written on big sheets of white-painted plywood and where the helmets and shoulder pads of the players who died were rigged up like some gad-awful scarecrows over the football field. After the first trip to the grocery store, I learned to shut my eyes while we drove past. I learned to shut my eye.

After a couple of trips to the grocery store, I learned not to go at all.

People wanted to mourn. They wanted to remember. But they didn't want to be reminded while they were picking out a cantaloupe. They didn't want to glance up and see me touching the bananas. Everybody in town was a MRSA expert by then. They knew how it moves. Everybody in town knew it wasn't like playing tag. It wasn't going to jump through the air into their grocery cart. Everybody knew it, but they couldn't swallow down the instinctive fear. So I stopped going to town.

It would have been easier on the town if I'd just died too. It would have made the whole thing less random. Random is scary. If a stranger with a gun kills four people, that is way scarier than when four people die in a rollover on the interstate. It's because people die in cars every day. People adjust to the fear, the way deer in a zoo get used to the smell of a tiger. But random is scary.

But I didn't die, I just—randomly—lived.

What if I had died? What would my memorial have been? How would the world remember Polly-That-Was? I didn't belong with the empty-helmet scarecrows. But, then, neither did lunch lady or baby. Was there a wall in the cafeteria where they hung up the lunch lady's picture? Were her ladle and tongs retired? Probably the whole kitchen was gutted and everything she ever touched was incinerated. And the baby? Was it even old enough to have something that it used on purpose? Did its mom ever sit on the floor and cry into a little blanket or a pair of tiny socks?

What about my mom? Could she have lived through it if I died? How would she have remembered Polly-That-Was?

I don't know. I don't want to know. I wouldn't have known.

 

“I'll find out what's working,” says Odd as he pulls in at a casino-cafe-gas-flyshop-saloon. All bases covered, pretty much. He walks toward the flyshop entrance. I guess I'm supposed to wait in the car, but I want the bathroom, so I slink in through a door between the casino and cafe. If I was going to put a bathroom someplace, that would be it.

The sign on the bathroom doors says “Women,” but there is also a picture on it. It's a trout dressed up like a saloon-girl in lipstick, mascara, a big purple hat with feathers, and a dress that morphs into a tail. It's a trout. It's a whore. It's every guy's fantasy. And if I step into the bathroom to go pee, I guess I'm buying into it myself. But the other door has a trout wearing a cowboy hat and a gun belt, so there's that.

After I wash my hands, I try to pull my fingers through my hair so I can braid it. It's too late. The back of my head is a prickly mat. I pull a pine needle out of it, but it's a lost cause. I'm a lost cause.

 

“Free Trout Aquarium,” says the sign pointing toward the cafe-giftshop. It might be the only living trout I see all day. Can't pass that up. So I turn my face to the wall and sidle along in the direction the signs lead me.

There's a big trout hovering in a tank that's big enough for it to turn around, but that's it. It's alive, but it probably wishes it wasn't. A fleshy pink wad of something totally wrong is growing on its nose. Do fish get cancer? Is that growth just going to slowly swallow it up? Will they change the sign to “Free Tumor Aquarium”? Then I see the next tank. It is full of smaller trout. One of them, I guess, will grow up and be moved into the front tank and then live out its days in captivity. Free trout my ass. I want to snatch a mass-produced howling wolf-head sculpture and bash it through the glass. I want to scoop up a couple of little trout and run toward the river before they drown in the air.

I'm in a pretty terrible mood when Odd gets back to the car.

“Green Drake, Yellow Sallies, Pale Duns—both morning and evening,” says Odd, listing the fly patterns that are working. “You got any of those?”

I just glare at him.

“A Bitch Creek works almost always, so you're set,” says Odd. His mood is better than mine, and I hate him for it, big time.

 

Someone is coming down the path to the river. This is it, I decide. This is the person. This is the place. I'm going to unleash my full-on ugly on this guy—not just my face, but the new deeper-than-skin-deep ugly that is me. I don't have to plan anything. It will be instinctive, like a rattlesnake, because I'm just that full of ugly. It is dripping from my imaginary fangs.

Every step I take up the path I feel stronger, and meaner, and uglier. It feels intensely good.

He's a very old guy. I'm close enough to see that now, he's moving slowly, slowly, down the path. He's using two hiking poles. He's wearing a hat. I might give him a heart attack—accidentally. If he dies, it will be an act of nature, just like if he slipped off the bank and drowned or hit the trip wire on a coiled snake. I am not responsible for what I am.

“How's the river? How are the trout?” He calls out before I'm ready to engage.

“Can't complain.” I keep climbing toward him. I take off my hat. He should be able to see me now . . .

“A beautiful girl on the beautiful river . . .”

What the fuck? Is he fucking blind? One of the hiking poles is slender, white, tipped in red. His eyes are pale and unfocused under the wide brim of his hat. Yes. He is fucking blind—or good as.

The old man starts to talk, but in a moment I know he's not talking, he's reciting. And I remember the words as I hear them. “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” I memorized it for my snazzy-dazzle English project.

 

“I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

“When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

“Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.”

 

“Yeats,” I say.

“Yes, glimmering girl,” and he smiles. “Perhaps the world isn't so full of weeping after all.”

I don't know if he is talking to me or to himself. He is a very old man. Whatever his eyes see, they do not see me. There is room for me to walk easily past him on the trail while he stares in the direction of the river. The air is still, and I can smell him as I step around him. He smells like an old man. He smells like unwashed clothes and old happiness.