The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (12 page)

I
T WAS IN ALL
the papers. Two even carried the same headline: “
FRIEND’S BEST MAN
!” But I didn’t see any of that until long afterwards; until I was home from the hospital a while and the shock had begun to wear off.

After it happened, scores of eyewitnesses suddenly appeared. But I didn’t remember seeing anyone around that day; just Friend and me and a very long freight train.

Friend is a seven-year-old Jack Russell terrier. He looks like a mutt: stubby legs, indiscriminate brown and white colouring; a very plain dog’s face topped with intelligent, sweet eyes. But truth be told, Jack Russells are rare and I ended up spending a wad for him. Although I’ve never had much money to play with until recently, one of my quirks has always been to buy the best whenever I could afford it.

When it came time to buy a dog, I went out searching for a real dog. Not one of those froufrou breeds that constantly need to be clipped and combed. Nor did I want one of those chic things that came from Estonia or somewhere strange that looked more like an alligator than a dog. I went to animal shelters and kennels and finally found Friend through an ad in a dog magazine. The only thing I didn’t like about him on first sight was his name: Friend. It was too full of kitsch and didn’t belong to a dog that looked as if it would be very comfortable smoking a corncob pipe. Even as a puppy he was built low to the ground and looked fuzzily solid. He was a “Bill”, a “Ned”. “Jack” would have suited him, too, if he hadn’t already had that as a breed name. But the woman who sold him to me said he had that name for a very specific reason: whenever he barked (which was rarely), it came out sounding like the word
friend.
I was sceptical, but she was right; while his brothers and sisters yapped and yelped, this guy stood solidly there and said, “Friend! Friend! Friend!” time after time while his tail wagged back and forth. It was a strange thing to hear, but I liked him even more for it. As a result, he stayed “Friend”.

I have always marvelled at how well dogs and people get along. They move so comfortably into your life, choose a chair to sleep on, figure out your moods, and have no trouble bending themselves to a curve that should be completely strange and inappropriate. From the first, they fall asleep so easily in a foreign land.

Before I go on, I must say that Friend never struck me as being anything more special or rare than a very good dog. He was excited when I came home from work, and liked to rest his head on my lap when I watched television. But he was not Jim the Wonder Dog: he didn’t know how to count, or drive a car, or other marvels you sometimes read about in articles about dogs that appear to have “special” powers. Friend liked scrambled eggs, too, and would go jogging with me so long as it wasn’t raining out and I wasn’t going too far. By all accounts, I had got exactly what I wanted: a dog-dog who staked a small claim on my heart with his loyalty and joy. One who never asked much in return except a couple of pats often and a corner of the bed to sleep on when the weather turned cold.

The day it happened was sunny and clear. I put on my sweatsuit and shoes and did a few stretching exercises. Friend watched all of this from his chair, but when I got ready to go out, he hopped down and accompanied me to the door. I opened it, and he took a look at the weather.

“Do you want to go along?” If he didn’t, his usual procedure was to collapse on the floor and not move again until I had returned. But this time he wagged his tail and walked outside with me. I was glad of his company.

We started down the hill towards the park. Friend liked to run alongside, about two feet away. When he was a puppy, I’d tripped over him a couple of times because he had a habit of running in and out of my legs, fully expecting me to keep tabs on where he was at all times. But I’m one of those joggers who watches everything but my feet when I go. As a result, we’d had a few magnificent collisions and mad yelps that left him wary of my sense of navigation.

We crossed Harold Road and ran through Ober Park towards the railroad tracks. Once we got there, we’d go about a mile and a half along them until we reached the station, then circle slowly back towards home.

Friend knew the route so well that he could afford to make stops along the way, both to relieve himself and to investigate any new interesting sights or smells that had appeared since our last trip there.

Once in a while a train came along, but you could hear it from far off and there was lots of time to move off to the side and give it a wide berth. I liked it when trains came through; liked hearing them lumber up behind you and pass while you picked up pace to see how long you could keep up with the engine. A couple of the engineers knew us and tooted their shrill whistles as they passed. I liked that and I think Friend did too, because he always stopped and barked a couple of times just to let them know who was boss.

That morning we were about halfway to the station when I heard one coming. As always, I looked to see where Friend was. A couple of feet away he ran jauntily along, his tongue a pink sliver out of the side of his mouth.

As the train’s giant clatter approached, I watched a car cross the tracks a couple of hundred feet in front of us. How dumb of the driver to do that when he knew a train was so close! What was the hurry? By the time that thought passed, the train felt close over my left shoulder. I looked to my right to check on Friend again, but he wasn’t there. I whipped my head this way and that, but he was nowhere around. In a complete panic, I spun around and saw him in the middle of the tracks sniffing at some small animal body, all of his attention concentrated on it.

“Friend! Come here!”

He wagged his tail but didn’t lift his head. I ran for him, calling again and again.

“Friend! Goddamn it, Friend!”

The tone of my voice finally got through to him because, when the train was only fifteen or twenty feet away, already putting on its brakes, he looked up.

I ran as fast as I could and felt stones fly out from beneath my sneakers.

“Friend, get out!”

He didn’t know the words, but the tone told him he was in for a hell of a smack. He did the worst thing possible; tucked his head down into his small shoulders and waited for me to come get him.

The train was there. In the instant before I jumped, I knew I had one choice, but I’d already made it before I ever moved. Lunging for my Friend, I bent down and tried to grab him up and roll out of the way all at once. And I almost succeeded. I almost succeeded—except for my leg, which stuck straight behind me as I jumped and was sliced cleanly off by the huge wheels.

I met Jasenka in the hospital. Jasenka Ciric. No one could say ya-ZEN-ka very well, so people had been calling her “Jazz” a long time.

She was seven years old and had spent most of her life connected to one or another ominous machine that helped her fight a long, losing battle against her undependable body. Her skin was the colour of a white candle in a dark room, lips the violet of foreign money. Her many illnesses made her serious, while her youth kept her buoyant and hopeful.

Because she had spent so much time in bed in hospital rooms, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, white walls, and few pictures on those walls, she had only two hobbies: reading and watching television. When she watched TV, her face contracted and then set into complete solemnity and concentration: a member of the family reading someone’s will for the first time. But when she read, no matter what the book, that face was expressionless and empty of anything.

I met her because she had read about Friend and me in the newspapers. One of the nurses came to my room a week after it happened. She asked if I would be willing to have a visit with Jazz Ciric (CHEER-itch). When she explained about the girl and her situation, I envisioned an ill angel along the lines of Shirley Temple, or at least Darla in “The Little Rascals”.

Instead, Jasenka Ciric had a peculiar, interesting face, where everything was pointy and too close together. Her thick black hair curled like the stuffing in old furniture and was just about the same colour.

The nurse introduced us and then went off on her rounds. Jazz sat in the chair next to my bed and sized me up. I was still in great pain, but had earlier decided to be a little less self-pitying. This visit was to be my first move in that direction.

“What’s your favourite book?”

“I don’t know. I guess
The Great Gatsby.
What’s yours?”

She shrugged and tsk’d her tongue once, as if the answer were self-evident.
“Ladies with Their Nightgowns on Fire.”

“That’s a book? Who wrote it?”

“Egan Moore.”

I smiled. My name is Egan Moore. “What’s the story?”

She looked at me very carefully and proceeded to spin out one of those endlessly rambling tales only a kid could love.

“Then the monsters jumped out of the trees and took them all back to the evil castle where Scaldor the Evil King ...”

What I liked about it was the way she acted out the story as she went on. Scaldor had a nasty squint which Jazz demonstrated to perfection. When someone got crept up on, her fingers curled into a witch’s grip and tiptoed like little devils across the air separating us.

“... And they got home just in time for their favourite TV show.” She sat back tired but clearly satisfied with her performance.

“That sounds like a terrific book. I wish I had written it.”

“It is. Can I ask you a question now?”

“Sure.”

“Who’s taking care of Friend now?”

“My next-door neighbour.”

“Have you seen him since the accident?”

“No.”

“Are you mad at him for making you lose your leg?”

I thought for a minute, deciding whether to talk to her as a child or an adult. A quick scan of her face said she demanded adult standing; she had no time to fool around.

“No, I’m not mad at him. I guess I’m mad at somebody, but I don’t know who. I don’t know if it was anyone’s fault. I’m sure not mad at Friend.”

She came to visit me every day after that. Usually sometime in the morning when both of us were fresh from sleep and chipper. I was all right mornings, but not most afternoons. For some reason, the enormity of what had happened to me and how it would affect the rest of my life came in the door with my lunch tray and stayed long after visiting hours were over. I thought about things like the bird that stands around on one leg all day. Or the joke about the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. I thought about the fact that words like ‘kick’ would no longer be part of my body’s vocabulary. I knew they made remarkable prosthetic legs—Science On The March!—but that was little comfort. I wanted back what was mine; not something that would make me, at best, “as good as new”, as the therapist said every time we talked about it.

Jazz and I became good friends. She made my days in the hospital happier and my perspective wider. I have known only two mortally ill people in my life, my mother and Jasenka. Both of them looked at the world through the same urgent yet grateful eyes. When there is not much time left, it seems the eyes’ capacity to see broadens tenfold. The things they see are more often than not details that were previously ignored but are, suddenly, an important part of what makes the scene complete. On her visits to my room, Jazz’s observations about people we knew in common, or the way the light came through the window in different-sized blades ... were both mature and compelling. Dying, she had fast developed a poet’s, a cynic’s, an artist’s eye for the world around her, small as it was.

On the first day I was allowed outside, my next-door neighbour Kathleen surprised me by bringing Friend to the hospital to say hello. Dogs weren’t normally allowed on the premises, but an exception had been made because of the circumstances.

I was glad to see the old boy, and it was a surprisingly long time before I remembered he was the reason for my being there. He kept trying to climb into my lap, and I would have liked that if his scrambling to get there hadn’t hurt my leg so much. As it was, I threw his ball for him a few thousand times while I chatted with Kathleen. Half an hour later, I asked the nurse if it would be possible for Jazz to come down and meet my friends.

It was arranged and, bundled to her ears in blankets, Ms Ciric was introduced to His Nibs, Friend Moore. They shook hands gravely (Friend’s one and only trick—he loved to “Shake!”), and he allowed her to stroke his head while the four of us sat there and enjoyed the mid-afternoon sun.

I had been encouraged by the doctor to take a small walk on my crutches. So half an hour later, while Jazz kept Friend by her side, I tried out my new aluminium crutches with Kathleen right alongside just in case.

It was the wrong time to try it. In happier days, I had passed many pleasant hours fantasizing about what it would be like to live with Kathleen. I think she liked me too, despite the fact that we were relatively new neighbours. Before the accident we had been spending more and more time together, and that was fine with me. I’d been trying to figure out how to move in closer to her heart. But now, when I dared look up from the treacherous ground in front of me, I saw that her face was full of all the wrong kind of concern and compassion. More than any other time before or after, I was aware of my loss.

The day was ruined, but I tried hard to hide that from Kathleen. I said I was tired and cold, so would she mind if we went back to Jazz and Friend? From a distance the two of them were so still and serious; they looked like one of those early photographs of people living in the American West.

“What’ve you two guys been doing?”

Kathleen looked quickly at me to see if she’d done anything to deserve this not-so-subtle dismissal. I avoided her eyes.

Twenty minutes later I was back in bed feeling nasty, impotent, lost. The phone next to me rang. It was Jazz.

“Egan, Friend’s going to help you now. He told me that today when you were walking with Kathleen. He said I could tell you.”

“Really? What’s he going to do?” I smiled, thinking she was about to launch into another of her wacky stories over the phone. I liked hearing her voice, liked her being in the room with me then.