The Freak Observer (11 page)

I just go because missing work seems OK at the moment. I'm sick of work.

At the emergency room, they check me out and say nothing is broken. I don't have a concussion. I'm no emergency. I'm no big deal. I'm just some scrapes and bruises and muscle strain. A nurse wearing scrubs with palm trees and smiling suns in sunglasses bandages me up and gives me a prescription for painkillers. When she hands me the prescription, she gives me the stern stink eye for a moment and then says, “This is for you, not anybody else.”

Like people get in bike wrecks for pain meds. Come to think of it, maybe they do, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.

Then I'm well enough to wait in the lobby until my mom comes to collect me. The TV is on twenty-four-hour news. The world is burning down, melting, and flooding. Pretty much like yesterday and the day before that.

When my mom comes in, she is all pale and rattled— until she sees me—then she is just mad.

“How the hell are we going to pay for this?”

I don't know. I don't say that. I don't want to say anything. Does everyone in the world think I get in bike wrecks on purpose?

“The charge nurse said I have insurance.”

“The charge nurse
has
insurance. She is full-time professional. You are not. Shit!
I
don't even have insurance from Cozy Pines.”

Mom goes to the desk to talk about payment. Little Harold comes close and gives me a hug. I don't know what hurts worse, my shoulder or that Little Harold wants to take care of me. Who am I kidding? Ripping some skin off is nothing compared to the idea that he wants to take care of me. I should be taking care of him, and we both know it.

. . .

“Did they give you a prescription?” Mom asks. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white, but the rest of her hands are chapped and red. It's an occupational hazard of nursing home work. Endless hand washing, gloving up to change diapers, placing bedpans, harsh disinfectants, cold weather, hot water. Whenever I see red hands, I remember Asta. I don't want to remember Asta.

I pull the prescription out of my pocket and hand it to Mom.

“You don't need this,” she says, “Just take some aspirin. This crap will make you sleepy and constipated.” Then she puts the prescription in her coat pocket.

I choose to believe that my mom is not one of the people at Cozy Pines who takes the old people's meds for fun or profit. I know they exist. They peel the pain patches right off those old achy bodies. Sometimes they cut up the patches and scrape out the inside. Sometimes they just pop the whole patches in their mouths and chew on them like gum. It's easier to come by than Oxycontin, and not everyone enjoys meth.

God knows, my mom probably hurts. She could probably use a little release. But I choose to believe that she would never leave someone else hurting by stealing meds—not even me.

After my accident, the new deal was this: Mom drove me to work, but I had to walk home.

The new deal was also this: my shoulder hurt like hell.

It was really hard to carry the tubs of dishes and push the racks through the machines. That was my problem.

My visit to the emergency room cost two weeks' wages. That was the whole family's problem.

Walking home sucked.

My problem.

When a truck pulled over on the shoulder in front of me and the door swung open, that seemed like a great deal.

I was hot and sweaty and I smelled like Cozy Pines, which isn't good. The truck door was open, and there was Esther, smiling. Her brother, Abel, was in the driver's seat. Abel never smiled, but he had pulled the truck over, so I climbed in. It wasn't cool in the truck, but the air moving through the open windows felt good.

Where were we going? I didn't care anymore than the dogs running from side to side in the bed of the truck. I was so happy not to be walking down the ditch by the highway, I wouldn't have refused to go to their weird-ass church with them at that moment if it meant I could get a ride home afterwards. As it turned out, though, church wasn't where we were going.

. . .

There were seven or eight rigs at the campground. It amounted to a pretty good-sized crowd. Most of them were people who had gone to the same grade school. I recognized people who had used me like a sled dog when I was little. Seriously, the big kids used to tie us to sleds with baling twine and make us mush, dragging them along. I'm not a puppy anymore, I guess. I'm running with the big dogs now.

I don't know who arranged for the beer, but there it was, an aluminum keg on a stump. The sun was starting to drop behind the mountains, but it wouldn't be full dark for hours yet. The creek running through the clearing was bone-shocking cold, but it felt good when I splashed my face and arms.

Out of nowhere, things had suddenly improved.

After the second cup of beer, my shoulder didn't hurt so much anymore.

I sat on the tailgate of Abel's truck with Esther. She was drinking too but a lot more slowly. We didn't talk. Esther always had kind of a gift of silence. She never said much, and she never made me feel like I had to say anything either. It's sort of uncommon, the ability to be quiet.

By the time the moon came up, I had a pretty good buzz. Some of the kids decided to go into town, so I caught a ride down the road and had them drop me off near home.

Nobody was there when I got to the house.

Mom was at work.

I had no idea where Dad and Little Harold were.

It didn't really matter.

I took a shower and some aspirin and went to sleep.

I didn't dream at all.

I was the luckiest girl in the world.

. . .

“How did you spend your summer vacation?”

I spent the morning doing housework at home and afternoons working like a machine at Cozy Pines. Then I spent the nights out in a bunch of different hidden places along the logging roads drinking beer and being as normal as I could figure out how to be.

Mostly, I got there with Abel and Esther.

I never really understood how beer and bonfires fit in with the rules they had to follow. The closest I ever came to asking was one night when Esther and I were sitting on the hood of the truck watching the stars come out.

“Star light, star bright,” I said.

“And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.' And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars,” said Esther.

I pointed to the brightest light in the sky and said, “That's Jupiter. It's a planet.”

“In the Bible, it's a star,” said Esther, and she smiled and took another sip of beer.

She looked happy. She was happy. There was no good reason for me to make her unhappy, and insisting that the Bible had it wrong or asking questions about her home life and her parents would probably have done just that. So I let it go.

I doubt that Abel and Esther provided all the details to their dad, but I didn't go out of my way to tell my mom and dad exactly how I was spending my time either.

It wasn't like we were the first kids to get drunk in those places. Our parents probably had keggers there twenty years ago. This isn't a deep mystery or new development. They probably figured we were safer at a campground or some logging road than we would have been on the highways.

There were some driving miscalculations, to be sure. I thought it was kind of fun when someone got high-centered or backed up too far and dropped a wheel off the edge of the road. There were always enough of us that we could work it out. It feels pretty cool, actually, to be working with people and to be able to move a rig back up on the road.

Of course, we were out on the highways too.

. . .

That, actually, was the one thing my parents would have been hard-assed about, drinking and driving on the highway. It isn't an irrational concern, and honestly, I avoided it.

I have no death wish. I do not think I am bulletproof. Since the bike wreck, it is pretty clear to me that mistakes happen. So I was cautious. But I was also happy to have a life of my own. I liked seeing people. I liked drinking beer and being out in the woods. And I really liked having something to look forward to when I was washing dishes at Cozy Pines because, without that, the job would have been even worse.

Then, in late August, the sun turned red behind a skin of smoke. There were fires in Idaho. It was the break we had been waiting for all summer, and Dad needed to go.

“Good-bye, Dad, make lots of money and don't get caught at the wrong time in the wrong place.”

I never really said that. It's too real, the chance that a guy, a crew, will get caught when a fire blows up when the wind shifts.

All the guys on the fire lines carry shelters now. That's what they call those flimsy little tube tents of shiny foil— shelters. When the fire is coming, it's time to scrape a bare spot in the mineral soil and climb in. The shiny surface is supposed to reflect the heat. As long as you don't move, as long as you stick your nose in the dirt and don't try to run when the fire starts to roar overhead and blister your skin, and as long as the fire doesn't steal the air right out of your lungs, the fire shelter is supposed to keep you safe. The guys make jokes about baked potatoes. I say nothing about baked potatoes when I say good-bye to Dad.

A fire could take off right here at home, of course. If it does, we get the hell out fast. That is all. No heroic stand with a gravity-feed garden hose from the creek. I don't have it in me. I saw a deer once that had been caught in a fire. It was rigid and black and something pink—brains? blood?—had boiled out of its nose after the burning was done.

I have no interest in dying like that. I have no interest in dying at all.

. . .

I don't think Little Harold had been in the shower for a month. He smelled like a hot puppy rolled in angleworms and trout slime. He was very brown, even after I got the dirt washed off. Dad didn't take the whole sunscreen thing very seriously.

It was fun to be with him again, to tickle his skinny ribs and watch cartoons on TV with him. The last few days of summer slid by like that: work, home, the smell of burning forests, and a red cherry sun floating through the sky.

Sometimes I learn something new before I even get to homeroom. There are these glass display cases that clubs and teachers use to advertise their particular obsessions. For example, there is the giant bottle full of fruit flies. First, there were only two and now—Oh! The flymanity!—crowds living off corpses. It's a zombie-apocalypse movie but with fruit flies.

Today I notice a new display.

“??? Are you REALLY ready for SEX ???”

It's an interesting question. I don't have a condom in my pocket. I no longer have a friend-with-privileges.

“??? Am I ready for SEX ???”

Um, No. That's the answer they want, but not the reasons.

The case is filled with old kitchen and housekeeping stuff. A metal dishpan filled with china teacups and a cast iron frying pan, the kind of iron you had to sit on a wood-stove to heat, a washboard. . . . A washboard? What is the message here? Does sex lead to time travel or what? Have sex, spend the rest of your life so deep in the past you have to wash underpants by hand. There is a big cockeyed baby doll propped in the corner. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life changing diapers? And washing them with a washboard? Only if you're married. That's the point. Somehow, being married will make the cockeyed baby and the laundry and the cooking and the dishes and the diapers so much fun.

This is the sort of time when Corey used to say, “Take a moment to pity the stupid.” I hear his voice in my head. I miss him.

. . .

By the third week of this school year, the routine was clear. I rode the bus to school. I got off the bus and went to my classes. I got back on the bus and went home.