Читать книгу King - David S. Faldet - Страница 13

“Silent waters wash out banks.”

Czech proverb

The therapist opened the door at the top of the shadowy, closed-up-smelling stair to find a large, solid man with dark, tousled hair, twisting a stocking cap uncomfortably in his hands.

“Arnie?” She held out her hand. “I’m Mary Towers.”

“Hi,” the man faltered. “Arnie Mikesh. Thanks for finding time to work me into your schedule. That was short notice.”

She gestured him into the bright foyer and noticed that he nervously eyed the abstract red painting on the wall as he stood, parked tentatively in his jeans and his tan canvas coat, like an untamed animal sniffing the air for a reason to bolt.

The truth was she had spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed, cancelling her appointments to stay there again today. The news of Josh’s death had hit her system like a narcotic, slowing her reactions, dulling her senses, draining the energy from her so that her feet and hands, even her head, felt heavy. She slept through much of the past two days, and stood at the windows of her apartment, staring mutely at sky and streetlights for half the night. Then came the voice on her answering machine. It worked a kind of enchantment, piquing her interest, quickening her pulse. With men, her policy was to carefully screen them in conversation before she took them on as a client. But given the circumstances, this was a man she didn’t want to scare away.

“I cleared out my schedule for the day, because something came up. It didn’t take as long as I thought, so there we are. Have you had a massage before, Arnie?”

“Backrubs from friends. Nothing more than that. Come to think of it, that was in my university days.”

“University days,” she figured, were probably twenty years ago. He was in his early forties, with no gray in his rough black hair or thick eyebrows. His square face had seen plenty of weather and was showing lines. One of his cowboy boots had an elevated sole and heel. The imbalance in his legs showed in the constricted swing of his body when he walked. Mikesh’s worn cowboy boots called up a memory of her father’s hard hands and strong grip, the chin bristles that abraded skin, the smell of alcohol strong on his meaty breath. Her dad’s battered boots by the couch in the television room or the foot of the bed smelled of him, of mold, and of whatever animals he had most recently herded in or out of the trucks he drove. She cleared her head of the thought, and focused on the added lift on Mikesh’s left boot. There was nothing hard or abrasive about the man who stood before her. She could tell by the hunched twist of his shoulders that he was carrying a load of pain that went beyond walking through life on a mismatched pair of legs.

She asked the question she’d had on her mind since she received his phone message, “What made you call?” Mary Towers was one of my brother’s oldest friends. Mom talked with her and spent time crying with her on the day after the accident. From Mom, Mary heard the name, Arnold Mikesh, the person who found Josh, and my mother asked if she knew him. Nothing else about him. Now two days later the man himself had left a message on her answering machine.

“I’ve been having some bad headaches, neck pain, trouble sleeping, some difficulty breathing.”

Blinking in the stronger illumination of the reception foyer, Arnie was looking into her face with a lost expression. It wasn’t coincidence. His experience at the accident scene had left him knotted up, and he was reaching out for help. She again felt the surprising but welcome surge of energy for work she wanted to do.

“Sounds like you made a good call then. I’d recommend ninety minutes of therapy.”

For his part, Mikesh was having a hard time taking it all in. This woman with the red painting that made no sense was a study in extremes. Her skin was pale and freckled, but her eyes had the muddy blue cast of a newborn baby’s, and her hair, pushed loosely to the top of her head, was black enough to suck the light from the air around her. She was directing him through an entry, talking about “Swedish technique,” using phrases he didn’t understand, asking him to strip to his underwear. He hoped the name his neighbor Barbara gave him was not somebody’s idea of a prank.

A few minutes later Mikesh was sitting with a sheet wrapped around his waist on a low, padded table, feeling even more vulnerable. Taking off his boots and jeans meant the avenue of a hasty escape was gone. Though alone in the room, humiliation settled over him like an iron hat as he stumped unevenly from the chair where he left his clothes and boots to the table at the center of the room. He was relieved that the woman didn’t witness that sorry spectacle. He stared at the black hairs on his bright white legs, conscious of them in a way he had not felt since high school, and hoped the long shower he took before leaving home had cleaned away the worst patches of dead winter skin and whatever other visible horrors might be clinging to him. A kettle steamed quietly on a warming plate. He had a quick image of the woman with the mud-colored eyes splashing drips of scalding water on his exposed back. She entered in a technician’s coat, pushing up her sleeves. He noticed a trace of citrus in the air, and the sound of a radiator, hammering as it warmed; he hoped the radiator noise would cover the clanking in his chest and the banging fist that pounded harder inside the back of his head.

She had him lie face down. When she touched his back to rearrange the sheet, he twitched. As she began, his eyes were facing down and closed; still, he could see, in his mind, those energetic pale fingers. But there was no scalding water, no comment on his misshapen calves, his papery skin, his blue veins. No question about his uneven legs, the product of a quirk in his genetics that manifested itself at puberty, placing a kink in his adult body. She was telling him to relax, and how to do it, then asking him about pressure, tension, pain, and the way he imagined them: sharp, dull, throbbing, angry. As she spoke, she was leaning into her hands, pushing her entire weight into him with more force than he guessed possible. Kneading skin and muscle, her hands moved in arcs and circles, starting at the edges, but always inward: closer and closer toward his heart.

Through her fingertips Mary read the terrain beneath Arnold Mikesh’s skin, a frozen pile-up of muscle, tendon, and bone without capacity to properly shift or flow—a challenge for an hour-and-a-half of work. With so much seized up within him, she marveled that this man had smiled when he first spoke with her, red faced, with hat in hand, at her door. She needed this workout as much as Mikesh: reconnecting with her hands through an art that demanded she practice as regularly as a pianist or a dancer.

The anatomy that comprised the puzzle before her had gotten rearranged. Slowly but forcefully her hands learned the tangle of disorganized pieces, and located the places for which they were made, the ropes of muscle in their slots and the beadwork of bone in his spine—massaging the knots, testing the tension in cables of muscle, coaxing each piece into relaxed alignment. Mikesh was a man who used his back. Though he was neither trim nor defined, the calluses she saw on his hands, the firmness of his arms and shoulders, told her he was used to heavy lifting. She wondered where he came from, and what propelled him in the middle of a night when no one else was on the road to the lonely spot where Josh died.

Mary Towers was close enough to Josh that my mother chose her for consolation and several hours of shelter after we arrived from Des Moines to identify Josh’s body. Mary’s thoughts as she kneaded Mikesh’s muscle and skin were pulled to one of the last two times she had seen Josh. He had been in Decorah, holding a July gathering at the fairgrounds, healing people, laying hands on them, but it had gone on too long. When he tried to leave, there was a disturbance and he was hauled into jail. When she heard about it through a friend she felt troubled. She checked with the police and found Josh had gone to the home of a local minister. When she pulled up in front of the unfamiliar house in her compact Honda she was conscious of the heat and humidity: the kind of weather that made tomatoes swell and split. She heard voices in the back yard, and could smell barbeque. Slinging her workbag over her shoulder she walked around the garage to a deck where Josh was sitting in an aluminum chair. Peña, the minister and his wife, and three or four others, none familiar to Mary, were gathered around him. She could read Josh’s face, see that his mind was elsewhere. He needed time to himself. Josh may have been a healer, but who took time to heal him? Used to Peña’s aggression, she knew to ignore him, lest he order her away directly. She walked to Josh, crouched at his side and took his hand, explaining she’d heard about the day’s troubles. She knelt at his feet, and removed his sandals. Josh tensed, but said little. Pouring a sandalwood-scented oil over her hands, she ran them over the knobs of his ankles, cupped his heels, and then massaged the balls of his soles, squeezing, working back and then forward again to his toes. Conversation broke off. A woman joked, uncomfortably, that this might be something that would do the woman good too. More silence. Peña, agitated, his eyes narrowed, said that Mary had not been invited, that she was not “with” them. Mary had heard people describe the minister’s worshippers as “holy rollers.” She had heard the man’s voice on radio advertisements for Sunday worship. Now he was speaking about her.

“Joshua, you should be aware that this woman has a reputation around town.”

Mary felt her skin prickle and the blood rise to her head. The man did not deign to speak to her directly or to use her name. But she did not defend herself, did not speak angry words. She focused on moving the oil into Josh’s toes.

“Remember what being seen with her will make upright people think about you.”

Only then did Josh answer him: “She understood what I needed. You fed me. You welcomed me. But you didn’t do this.”

Josh having defended her, Mary looked to the minister and read the disgust on his face as he considered the image Josh suggested. She could not suppress a smile. She was burning at the words said about her reputation. She let her hair fall forward, dragging it back and forth across the upper arches of Josh’s feet wickedly, as if to confirm that she was the opposite of upright, to suggest that the minister also do this for Josh. Her unspoken taunt shoved the preacher out of his constrained comfort zone. The man rose in outrage, but Josh said, “let her be.”

She left soon after. Though she might have called Josh back into himself, she destroyed his welcome in that household. She had seen Josh only once since then, later in the summer. Then nothing. Josh carefully avoided her.

Mary refocused on her work with Mikesh. She sensed the healing inch forward. Spasmed muscles relaxed. The air Mikesh drew into his lungs pushed up more slowly and firmly against her fists. She methodically worked his back, his fingers, his face, his legs, his chest, the muscle of the shoulders that had pressed into the ground to get near to Josh before he died. This man exchanged last words with Josh. The man beneath her eased and quieted in his breathing. She had helped put him back into himself.

It seemed like barely twenty minutes had passed when Mikesh heard the woman saying he could sit up, get dressed when he liked. Mikesh felt like he had wakened from his first night of Christmas vacation sleep. His headache was gone. As Mikesh finished dressing, Mary Towers knocked, then sat on the massage bench, looking distracted.

Her work done, she felt the lethargy creeping back over her, dragging at her, and fought to keep it at bay.

“The one treatment may not do it for you, Arnie. Your back was twisted and balled up in a bad way. Any idea how that happened?”

“I don’t know. But it may have something to do with an accident. Did you hear about the car that left the road in the south part of the county on Friday night, the car driven by Joshua King?”

She woodenly bobbed her head. Helplessness broke over her like a gray ocean wave.

“I’m the one that found the car and called the ambulance. The man in the car, King, was still alive when I got there, but he died while we were waiting. It seems the experience messed me up.”

Still no response. Her eyes were closed. Mikesh grew uneasy.

She knew intimately the place where the shadowy waters would sink her and she would lose consciousness, and she knew she must fight, struggle to the surface where there was air she could draw into her lungs, air she could use to say something to this person seated before her, familiar with the source of her grief.

The words she found were, “Poor man.”

“I’m sorry. Are you talking about Joshua King?”

“Josh? No. No, I was thinking about you.” Her eyes opened.

“You called him Josh. Did you know him?”

She pulled back from the slope of her bereavement. “Josh was an old friend, someone I could talk to.”

She lowered her head, looking away. Mikesh was again struck by her hair’s intense blackness, its messy energy. His doubts, his earlier desire to flee, came rushing back.

“I’m sorry . . . about your loss.”

Mikesh rose and walked to her, wondering if his being here was a coincidence or whether half the people he met knew my brother. He remembered my mom’s request that he find out why her son was driving this direction.

“Was he coming here to see you?”

She had asked herself this question. My mother had asked it too.

“He hasn’t done anything like that for years. I haven’t heard from him since last summer.”

“Any reason he might have decided to see you?”

“Really, I don’t think so.” Josh carefully maintained his distance for reasons she did not fully understand or want to share with a stranger.

“Did he know lots of people around here?”

“Yes. Josh was here off and on over the years.” Her limbs felt heavy. “Jude Bailey down at the co-op,” she answered. “He worked closely with Josh just last year.” She thought of Peña, his rage on the minister’s deck. She thought of Josh, the waters lapping over her again, and kept silent.

“So what drew people to him? What sort of preacher was he?”

“Preacher?” She reminded herself that this man probably needed more than bodywork to resolve his issues. “I wouldn’t know about that. You’d have to judge for yourself.”

“Myself? That’s not going to be easy. Joshua King is dead.”

Her breath tightened.

“True. But there are videos.”

It was work for her to talk, to concentrate on connecting.

“I’ve heard that you can watch Josh on the computer.” She’d been tempted to go online. She added, “but I don’t have a computer.”

“Not into technology?”

“Not into video technology. Not into computers.”

“Is it a religious thing, like the Amish?” Mikesh wondered if Josh required the material life of his followers to stop at the exit doorstep of the nineteenth century.

“No.”

“Just something you aren’t into?”

This man was pushing her. Her depression see-sawed into anger.

“It bothers me how people stare at another person on a screen in a way they would never do in the flesh. How a grown woman or man gazes longer and closer every day into the face of a news reader than into the eyes of their own life partner.”

She could see the man’s skepticism. She saw, with relief, that he was drawing back. She pushed.

“Doesn’t it bother you how boys spend their nights and weekends in front of a computer, killing . . . ”

She was sounding shrill. Her recent temptation to find a computer was making her talk, partly, to herself.

“How boys use them for games where they get points for deaths?”

“I can’t disagree with you,” Mikesh said, “but it’s not bad to catch up on the news. A boy doesn’t necessarily have to pretend that his keyboard is a gun.”

Mikesh’s earlier uneasy sense that there might be something unhinged or threatening about this woman was returning. She handed him a business card and a bill. He paid and left, and the door clicked shut behind him.