The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (27 page)

confusion

T
h
e last time I took the kids to see the ducks at Battle Point, Janet wasn't with us. It was late in spring, and the clinic was busy as usual. For the third week in a row, Janet didn't take her long lunch that Friday. She had a one o'clock with a rich lady's terrier. Or a tabby with a tapeworm. Or maybe it was a mixup in billing.

Th
e treetops are swaying in a stiff breeze.
Th
e sky is mottled, as low clouds hurry east. Jodi is asleep in his car seat on the lawn beside me as Piper wades in the reedy shallows to the top of her red rubber boots. Before I can scold her for standing in the water (she knows the rules), she backpedals onto the shore.

“Something's wrong,” she proclaims, pointing across the water, where she's intent on a lone duck drifting along the far bank.
Th
e hen is brown and gray but for a brilliant blue blaze on each wing. One of her wings is disfigured, bowed unnaturally above the radius. She flops the appendage uselessly, batting the water, as she drifts toward the rest of the clutch, grouped like an armada on north edge of the pond.

“Can we help him, Daddy?” she says.

“It's a her.”

“Can we bring her to Mommy to fix?”

“Mommy only works on pets, honey.”

“What if we keep her as a pet?”

“It's not that simple, sweetie.”

“Why not?”

But before I can address the complexities further, a riot of furious squawking erupts from the far bank. Suddenly, a swarm of four or five drakes rise from the clutch in a blur, descending upon the injured hen.
Th
ey begin nagging and pecking at her.

“Daddy, what are they doing?”

“I can't tell.”

“
Th
ey're hurting her!”

Th
e green-headed mob drives the hen to the shallows, where they begin stomping her in concert with their webbed feet, forcing her head beneath the water time and again. In all my duck-watching days, I've never seen such a thing.

“Make then stop, Daddy! Daddy, make them stop!”

I jump into action. “Keep an eye on your brother,” I say. “Don't you budge.”

I circle the area madly, looking for something to hurl, a rock, a stick, anything to run interference. And when I can't find anything, I sprint down the asphalt walkway, around the bend toward the far bank.

“Watch your brother!” I shout over my shoulder. “Don't move!”

My sudden arrival on the scene, chest heaving, arms waving madly, triggers a winged explosion, as the drakes scatter in the air all at once, disrupting the surface of the entire pond. Squishing my way through the swampy shallows toward the injured hen, I find that I'm too late. She floats in the shallows at the edge of the reeds, ringed by a garland of gray feathers, her lifeless body bobbing slightly on the choppy surface. Piper is knee deep in the water on the other side, slump-shouldered, head hanging. Behind her, swept up in the wind, I can hear Jodi wailing in his car seat.

On the drive home, Piper presses her face to the side window, gazing dully at the trees through tear-streaked eyes. I reckon aloud in an attempt to soothe her. I reckon that the hen must have been very old and very sick and very injured, which is no comfort at all. I reckon that her suffering is over, though I cannot justify the existence of the suffering in the first place. I reckon that there's a logic to the brutality of the universe, but I can't account for that, either. Nobody can. All I can do is buy Piper an ice-cream cone on the way home.

the daze

I
'm only dimly aware of the desk clerk gaping at me from behind his computer terminal as dazedly I trudge across the tropical courtyard toward the elevator in my Speedo. But for an icy sting burning distantly in either palm, and the fact that I can't move my neck, I am only marginally aware of my body. Mechanically, I summon the elevator, rocking slightly on my heels as I wait. Only one way to go from here. When the doors lurch open, the cleaning woman pushes a linen hamper out of the elevator, lowering her eyes as she passes me.

Th
e elevator is restful in the way of a tomb. Gazing at the mirrored sidewall, a face looks back at me, slack, colorless, eyes open like a dead man.
Th
e inside of my head hums with the trilling of heat-dazed crickets. Arriving at the second floor, I step out into the foyer, ponder left or right, choose left, and plod down the carpeted corridor past rooms 214 and 212 to room 210. Clutching my cell phone, I am without card key and without towel, but when I knock on the door Dot opens it.

“Whoa, what happened to you?”

“I fell.”

She takes me by the wrist and coaxes me into the room, where she seats me on the edge of the bed.

“Dude,” says Trev, muting the TV. He buzzes toward me around the foot of the bed.

Dot promptly proceeds to the bathroom, returns momentarily with a wet washcloth, and begins dabbing my knees.

“
Th
ere's a first-aid kit in the big black bag,” instructs Trev. “Dude, what the hell? You're a mess.”

“It's nothing.”

“No, really. You're a mess.”

Dot rummages around in the black bag. “What does it look like? I can't find it.”

“Left side pocket,” I intone.

Awakened no doubt by my entrance, Peaches emerges from the adjoining room, sleepy-eyed, wrapped in a blanket.

“What's wrong?”

“He fell,” Trev and Dot say in unison.

“Oh no. Poor thing.” Peaches lets her blanket drop to the floor and kneels at the foot of the bed in men's boxer shorts and a T-shirt, both of which look too clean to have ever belonged to Elton. Prying my clenched hands open, she inspects my shredded palms.

Dot returns with the first-aid kit. “Ouch,” she says of my palms.

“Are there tweezers in there?” says Peaches.

Dot spreads the kit open on his lap and Trev begins clumsily picking through its contents for tweezers. When he locates them, he fishes them out on the third attempt and dangles them over his lap for Peaches, who begins cutting away the ravaged skin of my palms, blotting the scraped portions with hydrogen peroxide and a washcloth, wincing herself as though she can feel the sting.
Th
en, mindfully, she applies ointment, dresses my palms in gauze, and wraps them with athletic tape.

Dot begins cleaning up my bloody knees, plucking out the gravel.

“Stay still,” she says. “
Th
is may hurt.”

It doesn't hurt. Not like I want it to. I wish it would. I deserve to hurt. But all I can do is sit on the edge of the bed, my damp Speedo soaking the duvet, gazing numbly at the big screen, where the Weather Channel plays silently. It's sixty-one degrees in Albuquerque, fifty-seven in Lincoln. I make no move to answer my buzzing cell phone. After a moment, it goes silent. Almost immediately, Trev's phone begins ringing. He arches his back and hoists his arm, then lowers his hand like a scoop into his side pouch. By the fourth ring, the device is in his clutches, and he raises it unsteadily to his ear.

“Oh hey, Mom,” he says, cautioning the girls to keep quiet with a finger to his lips. “Great . . . Yeah, Butte was great . . . No, we didn't have time . . . ”

Trev wheels toward the bathroom and stops beneath the threshold, where he winks at me.

“Oh, he's in the shower,” he says. “Yeah, uh huh . . . I did . . . Yeah, I'm about to . . . ”

I have to admit, he makes a pretty convincing liar. Calm. Collected. Cool as a ticket taker. His performance is almost enough to make me smile. But then I imagine Janet, slumping on the edge of a bed somewhere in Portland as she wonders whether she failed her children. And for once I hope Jim Sunderland is there beside her.

the long haul

E
ight bucks buys a decent breakfast in Missoula. Twelve buys a thick foam cervical collar at the Missoula Rite-Aid.

“You want a helmet with that?” says the girl at the register.

“Very funny.”

“You look like the Michelin Man,” says Trev upon my return to the van.

Just east of Missoula, the valley tapers abruptly like a funnel, and the mountains close in around us, broad-faced and sudden, just as the interstate begins its dogleg to the south through Bonner, then Turah, then Clinton. Now and again a slice of the Blackfoot River shimmers along the roadside, cut crosswise with a rusting train trestle. Here a fat kid in a skiff. Some guy in a broken down truck. A barking dog lashed to a tree. A waft of steel guitar in the air.

Th
e weather continues to baffle. It is eighty-one degrees at 9:30 a.m. I'm driving with the window down, my neck sweating profusely beneath my neck brace.
Th
e itching is unbearable. My rib cage aches. My mangled hands and knees, freshly dressed by the girls before breakfast, are mummified in athletic tape, so that I've little choice but to grip the wheel cautiously, as though it's hot. We have a gruesome day of travel in front of us if we intend to make West Yellowstone by evening.

Dot is cheerful between over-the-shoulder glances out the rear window. She has yet to utter a word about dropping her off in Butte. I wonder if Trev knows something I don't.
Th
e Skylark, which picked us up not two blocks from the C'mon Inn and has abandoned all stealth and pretense, now pursues us boldly like a starving wolf.
Th
e driver is of little concern to me, whoever he is. I have nothing left to fear. Any harm the stranger may wish to visit upon me would be welcomed at this point.

We cleave our way through the mountains until the interstate dips into a wide basin brimming with blue sky, broken by dusty roads and rocky saddles strung out along the southern horizon.
Th
is is our first real glimpse of the famous big-sky country to come, and I couldn't care less. For all its grandeur, the landscape does not move me. And why should it?
Th
e sky may be big, it may be blue and limitless and full of promise, but it's also far away. Really, it's just an illusion. I've been wasting my time. We've all been wasting our time. What good is all this grandeur if it's impermanent, what good all of this promise if it's only fleeting? Who wants to live in a world where suffering is the only thing that lasts, a place where every single thing that ever meant the world to you can be stripped away in an instant? And it
will
be stripped away, so don't fool yourself. If you're lucky, your life will erode slowly with the ruinous effects of time or recede like the glaciers that carved this land, and you will be left alone to sift through the detritus. If you are unlucky, your world will be snatched out from beneath you like a rug, and you'll be left with nowhere to stand and nothing to stand on. Either way, you're screwed. So why bother? Why grunt and sweat and weep your way through the myriad obstacles, why love, dream, care, when you're only inviting disaster? I'm done answering the call of whippoorwills, the call of smiling faces and fireplaces and cozy rooms. You won't find me building any more nests among the rose blooms. Too many thorns.

Beavertail, Bearmouth, Gold Creek, Phosphate, the signposts ebb, the landscape whizzes by, a blur of scrub grass and crumbling hillsides. Somewhere around Deer Lodge, we begin to discern the infamous Big Stack in the flats to the southeast, a gray monolith rising at a gentle taper to a height of nearly six hundred feet from atop a bald hill.
Th
e stack draws us like a beacon but seems to recede as we draw closer. For something so blunt, Big Stack is elusive.
Th
is industrial relic, all that's left of the massive smelter that once belched arsenic into the surrounding valley, represents a milestone in our journey, as it will be the first stop since George, Washington, that is actually on our itinerary. Exiting at Highway 1, we work our way south through the knobby foothills of Anaconda huddled in the shadow of the Rockies. Big Stack continues to elude us, now and again flashing its gray tip around corners, then disappearing around bends. Somewhere along our circuitous path we've managed to lose the Skylark, or it's just dropped back.

Cresting the final rise, Big Stack reveals itself in full, gray and lonesome atop the bald hilltop, stretching stupidly halfway to the sky, like some towering landlocked lighthouse.
Th
e perimeter is fenced off with chain link, circling a wide buffer of dead soil, maybe a hundred yards in diameter.
Th
ey cordoned off the area in the 1980s because the stack was still bleeding trace amounts of arsenic. Back in the day, the smelter was the engine of Great Falls. Now it's the world's tallest tombstone.

Dot unbuckles Trev as I ready the lift. Trev rolls out of the van, and the girls duck out after him.
Th
e wind sweeps in hot gusts across the barren hilltop as we cross the vacant lot toward the interpretive area. At the fence, we diverge. Trev and Dot gravitate to the east in tandem, their voices trailing in the wind behind them. Peaches drifts to the west, where she stands with her back to the fence, hands on her swollen belly, and looks not at Big Stack but out across the foothills toward the interstate in the distance, running like a zipper down the center of the valley. I wonder what possibilities she sees down there, what future she envisions for herself and little Elton, as the shadow of a lone cumulus engulfs the valley. I wonder what Trev and Dot are talking about twenty miles from Butte. I can see by Dot's frenetic movements and Trev's bobbling head, that they are jovial. And though I know their merriment is perishable, that it cannot survive a thousand realities, I can't help but wish them a lifetime of it.

As I'm watching them, Dot breaks away from Trev and begins ambling slowly in my direction, pausing several times along her way to make cursory appraisals of Big Stack. Finally, she stations herself right beside me at the fence, where she remains silent for ten or fifteen seconds, as a warm gust of wind rockets past our ears.

“So I was thinking,” she says, at last. “Even though it looks kind of stupid and touristy in the postcards, I wouldn't mind seeing Yellowstone.” She fishes her cigarettes out of her jean vest, lights one up, hooks one hand through the chain-link fence, and exhales a plume of smoke straight at Big Stack. “I mean, you know, since you guys are driving through it or whatever. I've got money.”

“Did you ask Trev?”

She turns her attention to Trev, who sits perfectly still at the fence about fifty yards downwind of us, straight-backed, still-headed, staring through the chain-link hexagons across the dusty expanse at the moldering brick remains of a boomtown. I don't know what Dot sees, but to me there's something achingly desolate about the scene, as though the whole world were dying before my eyes.

“I'm asking you,” she says.