The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (5 page)

T
HE
HEAD
nurse from the care home called again to press me for a decision, and I have agreed to take their room. She visited my house with several assistants to have me sign papers. These women, I realized, were also taking stock of me. They were overly cheerful and laughed a great deal, but seemed puzzled, almost mildly threatened, by my houseful of books, recordings, and pictures. We sat in my living room and I gave them coffee. They admired the view from my windows.

I do not know what they concluded from their visit, but I felt myself being discussed as their car disappeared down my road. We made arrangements for their van to pick me up with a small load of my possessions, and they gave me an imposing pamphlet of rules and regulations with a color picture on the cover of relentlessly happy-looking elders opening gift packages.

I read everything carefully. There are a number of rules, some of them daunting, many of them threatening and cold. For instance, rule sixteen reads: “More than three (3) emergency calls in one month from an apartment to the switchboard shall be conclusive evidence to landlord that occupant is not capable of independent living. Landlord can then have tenant moved to such health care facility as available.”

C
HAPTER
3

Cyril

T
he sheriff and his deputy told me I looked like a quarter pickup load of grape popsicles when they found me on the road. They’d been looking for Balaclava after he jumped paying for his gas at the Mobil, and the station attendant had told them that he was pretty sure someone might have been abducted into the thief’s car before it went flying off into the blizzard.

So the officers put on their blinker lights and were sweeping with their overhead spots along the drifted berm when they saw a mound of snow. That was me. Luckily they found me before the snowplows started coming through or I would have been chop suey.

I’d actually made it back to within a couple miles of Soldiers Grove before I was not able to move anymore. The storm was still gnashing over the landscape and my legs finally played out. My brain was slipping away, and my gonads were freezing so that at the end I was waddling like a duck right out of a winter lake. Finally I went down face first in the snow. I still had enough sense to realize—this is it, Cyril, you are ready for the long nap.

I was so immobilized, aching with cold, it didn’t matter anymore. Bring it on! There are worse ways to go. You know the first thing I thought when I went down on the ground and felt the cold closing in toward my heart? Not about my miserable parents, nor my bar acquaintances in Soldiers Grove—and I was definitely not pleading to some preoccupied god and his angels. I was thinking about a life, about Captain Robert F. Scott and how he’d died trying to make it back from Antarctica. I was feeling probably like he must have felt on his last day—his bloodstream slowing down and his brain cells turning to frozen yogurt. He’d lost the race to the Antarctic Circle to Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian, and now he was going to lose his life, freezing to death in his tent. The final thing he wrote above his signature in his journal was, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more—R. Scott.”

It seemed a pity to me, too, that my life was going down in the below-zero drifts.

But the sheriff and his deputy swept the snow off me, hauled me stiff as a frozen lamb chop to their cruiser, and turned their heater up high. The sheriff drove as fast as he could on tire chains to the emergency room in Viroqua, while the deputy cuffed and slapped my cheeks, rubbed my hands, and thumped my chest in the backseat.

When they finally got me onto a cot in the ER my temperature was down in the eighties. I was ready to sign off, but I found out later that they covered me with some gizmo called a Bair Hugger—a big paper and plastic blanket with a hole in it. They fastened a tube into the hole and blew in warm air so that it hugged my body. They also strung me up with IVs of fluid, and gave me a warm enema. I think they did other things, too, to raise my temperature, but I can’t say for sure because I was way out there ice skating on a chilled dream, like Ted Williams in his frozen time capsule—but I’d never won any batting championships in my day.

When I finally woke up into the half light of intensive care, I felt like I’d been cut open, had all my bones pulled out, and had them placed in a dirty bag—where the docs cracked them with a hammer, and then stuffed them back into my body.

It wasn’t just
pain
I felt—but lonesomeness that washed over my spirit. I knew this empty drill from my childhood, but now I was into the big time. I was doing this all alone and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the whole expanding universe—just me, those wires and cords poked down my throat, and all those goddamned blinking little lights.

When finally they pulled the tubes out of my throat days later, nurses brought me warm drinks and pills to swallow. They listened to my heart all the time, every thirty seconds, it seemed to me. They checked my IVs and drips, and chattered at me, but I couldn’t respond much.

I kept thinking—why
me
? I suppose everyone thinks this. But, hell, I never hurt anyone! I’d only slipped out for a few Leinenkugels and got nabbed by some maniac. The whole thing made me angry. If I could have talked I would have given all those doctors and nurses some lives of chill demigods like Caligula or Hitler or Dick Cheney—just to show them how being cold and alone really feels.

After a long time I was moved to a regular hospital room. Several times a day the nurses hauled me out of bed and made me walk up and down the hall while they held on to me. There really wasn’t much to say, my jaw was sort of locked up, so I stayed quiet. I slept a lot and had strange dreams.

When this sort of thing is happening, it’s just you and the darkness whispering mysteries back and forth. I recall one crazy dream: There was this big, abstract mural painting that was sliding over the ceiling and down the walls of my room—icebergs and frozen clouds oozing down sky blue walls. I watched for a long time and decided I would try and put myself
into
that painting. Maybe it would slide me all the way out of this hospital and I could get back to my lives.

I got out of bed and started feeling my way across the room toward the picture, canes in hand and dragging my rolling IV stand behind me, unplugging it from the wall as I moved. Out of my room I went and down the hall, following the painting as it slipped along the walls and ceiling. I was unable to understand why the nurses at the desk were so upset when they looked up and saw me. Suddenly they were grabbing at me and scolding, hustling me back to my bed.

“But those icebergs,” I kept saying, “don’t you see them? They’re melting all over the place. There’s going to be a flood. You better get some mops!”

“It’s okay, Cyril,” they said as they tucked me back in. “Don’t get yourself worked up. You’re going to be fine. Just don’t be getting out of bed by yourself.”

A lot of doctors came to look me over, sometimes whole parades, young and old folks in white jackets, asking me questions out of the dim light. It seems like I had survived some of the lowest body temperatures possible. Perhaps I’d set a new record.

I tried to point out the iceberg painting to them, but none of them could see it. They assured me that I was doing fine—amazingly well, they said, despite my itches and aches. In time I started to believe them. Then they asked me more questions. Instead of giving them answers, I tried to give them a few brief lives. These little biographies meant more than any facts I could give them, but they couldn’t understand this—that my lives could be so meaningful. When I started one of my recitations, they would usually head for the door. I had a reputation: I was the man who apparently hadn’t had much of a life, but represented everything with accounts of other people’s lives.

How do you cure a guy of
this
strange affliction? Duct tape and aspirin, maybe a little Super Glue. Okay, I admit it, I am a strange case.

The sheriff and his deputy came to my bedside often and tried to ask me questions about Balaclava. Hell! I didn’t know who that goddamned fur-face was, I told them—he was some monster who’d grabbed me! He’d driven off toward Readstown after he’d stiffed the Mobil station and kidnapped me. Then he dumped me halfway in the snow, that’s
all
I know, and it’s enough!

Later the sheriff told me that Balaclava had forced another car off the road, causing it to spin out on the ice and crash into a tree. Two people had been badly hurt, but Balaclava kept going. He didn’t care. He wounded a clerk in a robbery attempt near Knox, Illinois, so it seems like he really was headed toward Peoria. He doesn’t care. Maybe his parents were alcoholics. God knows where he is now. Out there somewhere, a full-time pissed-off monster pointing that ultimate gat at people, threatening to pull the trigger and blast their faces off if they don’t do as he tells them.

Some television people and big-time news reporters picked up on my story. When they found out what I had survived they started calling me on the phone at the hospital; one of the national networks sent a guy with a microphone and a whole camera crew to question me about my ordeal. I was the famous old guy who’d been dumped out of a truck by some hoodlum to die in a blizzard—then I almost made it all the way back home on my own. My story slipped onto the screens for a day among all the batterings, bombings, beheadings, and ballbustings. I was a sort of amusing relief from the slaughter, an old guy who had actually beaten death. How unusual and endearing.

A high-toned foundation in the East got wind of my tale and decided to give me its annual award for bravery. They called me on the telephone in my hospital room to grandly give me the news of their benevolence. Fifty thousand smackers, they said. Fifty thousand big ones just for stumbling around and almost getting frozen to death! Now
that’s
bravery!

The dear, grand hearts even arranged to pay the taxes directly on their award to me, so that I cleared the whole $50,000. They invited me to rent formal clothes and attend their annual award banquet in New York at their expense. I would have been a hell of a curiosity—a bandaged twig in a tuxedo—but I couldn’t make it. So they sent me their check anyway, express mail, fully insured, with a number on it. They arranged to have my picture taken holding it up in my bed. At the ceremony in New York, Mayor Bloomberg accepted the award in my name and said a few nice things about how some big stories could happen—even far out in the boonies, away from the
show
.

And that check—$50,000 it read! Fifty thousand clams—and it was the
real goods.
What does a poor, old, half-melted Klondike like me do with that kind of dough? I hadn’t figured that out yet. But I didn’t want to just stick it in some bank account. I wanted to take care of that dough myself, all those crinkly bills—I wanted to riffle them through my fingers—maybe once a month, and then hide them away again. Why should I give the wad to some bank bozo in a three-piece suit to punch in as numbers into his computer?

When the UPS guy brought the check to the hospital and asked me to sign and verify receipt, I recognized him from around town. This guy had never paid
any
attention to me before. One time I’d tried to tell him a life and he ignored me. But now you’d have thought I was the latest deluxe pizza. He even arranged to have his picture taken with me. When everybody was gone I just stuck the envelope in the drawer of my bed stand for a while and didn’t talk to anybody about it—not even the Empress Theodora. More on this in a little while.

Later, when I got out of the hospital, I took the check to the little bank in Soldiers Grove and told them I wanted to cash it. Everybody stepped out of their glass cubicles to look at me like I was bananas. The bank director invited me to come into his office and had a quiet chat with me. He had all kinds of fancy ideas about how I could invest it or deposit it. But I insisted on the cash, and finally they agreed to do this for a small handling fee. It took them a few days to produce all that lettuce—500 one-hundred-dollar bills—that’s how I wanted it; but eventually they came up with the whole load and I handed over the endorsed check.

I didn’t know how to act as they counted out all that cash for me. When they had finished, I was numb. I asked, “Can you give me a paper bag?” They gave me a couple of big envelopes. My hands felt like they were burning when I took up all that moolah. I took the fat envelopes back to my room in the rest home and took a nap beside the cash; finally I stuffed it into two big old sweat socks, put them under my mattress and started trying to forget about them.

But that would be many weeks later. There was a pretty nurse who had the afternoon swing at the hospital. I’ve always been sort of flustered by women, but this one was so nice; just looking at her helped to warm me out of the permafrost. I’d wake up from one of my naps and there she’d be, her beautiful face, as she gave me some kind of treatment, tapping my IV tubes with her fingernail, or giving me pills to take. I’d never learned how to flirt—but I thought maybe I could learn with her. It was best when she was taking my pulse and holding my wrist.

I always wanted to give her a life to think about. That’s what I do best. I could think of a hundred beautiful women she resembled, but I had to get it just right. Finally I said to her, “I’m trying to figure out who you look like-—maybe Désirée Clary, or Elinor Wylie. Is it Vera Hruba Ralston or Sigrid Hjertén?” I meant to flatter her, but she didn’t know any of these names. She gave me her wonderful smile, though, and that was very nice.

Was I flirting okay? I wasn’t sure, but I was trying hard to learn.

Another kind of young woman showed up by my bed one day with a clipboard; maybe she was twenty years old, but she acted like she was running the whole show. She looked kind of snippy like Bette Davis, but if I’d told her this she wouldn’t have known who I was talking about. Anyway, she was too snooty to be given a life. I had no desire to flirt with this woman.