Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 19

Wakelin and Caroline Troyer were back on the unpaved stretch, fifteen minutes into the washboard dance, when that rhythmic bump from the rear became enfolded by a sound more flubby and catastrophic. A flat tire.

Wakelin felt this was a job for himself, but he was too slow. Crouching beside her on the shoulder amidst blasts of dust and flying stones from the big trucks, he watched her forearms cord and soften as she loosened wheelnuts, one after the other. The nuts had seized, but she possessed the necessary strength, or more accurately the confidence of the strength and therefore she had the strength. What was this if not faith? Wakelin, extending the hubcap as a tray for wheelnuts, was tempted to make this point out loud, but when she took his tray and set it on the ground at her feet he remained silent, just continued to watch her hands and forearms, fighting an impulse now to reach out and touch them, to trace the perfection of blue veins in the backs of her hands as they worked, a desire that struck him as being exactly as creepy and inappropriate as it would strike her. But he knew that, he understood that, and was grateful to his genes, to his upbringing, to something, to be able to squat here in a state of as-good-as perfect control, blameless as your perfect gentleman, and just watch, while reflecting in a removed and dispassionate way upon the stubbornness of the physical world. And at that moment it came to Wakelin that paramount in a life in the country would be the physical problems, the small humiliations by intractable materiality, the cold-sweat stand-offs, and maybe he should think some more about this country-property thing.

The problem was, with a physical problem you really did have a problem. A physical problem was another order altogether from those issuing from the usual obstacles and defeats of money, work, and other people. When you had done all you could do and still something physical did not work, then it did not work. It was not like a magazine story, infinitely malleable given thought enough and time. Unless your name was Uri Geller and your physical problem was a shortage of bent spoons, you were not going to solve it by mind alone. When you had a problem writing a magazine piece you could always sleep on it, a fresh start. With a physical problem you could sleep on it as much as you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. For Wakelin, a fresh start in the physical world consisted of driving to Canadian Tire and throwing himself on the mercy of the first clerk who bothered to toss him a glance. It was buying a new one and paying extra to have somebody come around and set it up.

Caroline Troyer was speaking to him, telling him to fetch rocks for under the wheels on the passenger’s side, she’d be jacking on a grade.

Wakelin jumped up and jogged around the front of the truck and skidded down off the shoulder for two big rocks and clambered back up with one in each hand. They were bigger than they needed to be, the weight of ten-pin bowling balls, and twice he fell, embedding an elbow in the soft gravel, but he made it and jammed them in. “Done,” he said, squatting once more at her side, game as a puppet.

Now she unbolted the spare from under the bed and located the axle and positioned the jack and jacked the truck and removed the blown tire and lifted on the spare and tightened the nuts partway and unjacked the truck until the ground held the tire, and tightened the nuts the rest of the way and unjacked the truck until it came down fully onto its springs and the jack was loose enough to free it from under the axle and threw the blown tire into the bed. And this entire procedure Wakelin followed helplessly ever one step behind, not quite keeping out of her way, his thoughts lapsed to overexposure, his mind bleached, the small interior voice stuck meaningless back there with What was this if not faith? stuck and repeating. And the world as manifest on that dirt shoulder in that corridor of spruce and fir under the deepening blue of evening, a cooler breeze from the forest margin fragrant with fungus and conifer in mitigation of the vaporous gritty pall of dust and diesel upon that stripped road surface, the world rose up on its old elbows aggrieved, and seeing it that way Wakelin felt a need for redemption, or something like it, a need undiminished by his utter ignorance concerning what redemption could be or how to get it. Why it should be necessary at all.

And then she was taking the jack out of his hands (dismantling it as she did so) and the socket wrench, and this hardware she replaced behind the seat while he struggled to fit the hubcap back on, but after one glance she repositioned it and kicked it on herself. And so much further unnerved was he by the short sharp efficiency of this action in the midst of all that personal chagrin, all that despair of old helplessness, that he had climbed into the cab and buckled himself in before he realized that she herself was not getting in but walking around the back of the truck to kick away the rocks he had placed under the tires, except then when he glanced around, she was just standing there looking at them.

He struggled out of his seat belt and threw open his door. “I can do that!” he called. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot—” He jumped down.

“You put them at the backs of the tires,” she said.

Wakelin was not sure if this statement was descriptive or prescriptive. He checked the rocks. “Right,” he said.

She was walking back to the driver’s door.

Wakelin continued to stare at the rocks. Something was wrong, but what? And then he saw that he had wedged them under the upslope side of the tires, and a hot wavefront travelled his neck and cheeks and climbed his temples, and though there was no need at all he kicked away the rocks and did so with some energy.

They were on the road again. A few minutes later back on asphalt, moving once more down a corridor of spruce and fir, and that rear bump had not gone away.

Roused from his mortified flush, Wakelin looked over.

Her eyes were fixed down the road. “It’s the good tire blew,” she said.