Читать книгу Dead Cow in Aisle Three - H. Mel Malton - Страница 12

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As Becker had predicted, Vic had gone into delayed shock, brought on perhaps by the ecstasy of biting into one of Sophie’s lemon squares. He wasn’t unconscious or anything—he’d just, as he said, “come over all weak,” and Becker was doing his strong-arm act and ordering an ambulance. Vic’s protestations were half-hearted, and I don’t know about Becker, but I know I felt awfully guilty for not bundling him straight off to hospital in the first place.

Becker put his cell phone away in a pocket and turned to me. “They’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” he said.

“Couldn’t we take him? I could sit in the back with Bryan.”

“It might be tricky if he goes into cardiac arrest,” Becker said. “Best to wait for the professionals.”

“Twenty minutes is an awfully long time,” I said. “Do they have to catch the horses first?”

“We’re a fair distance into the park,” Becker said. “The closest emergency vehicle is the fire truck in Willis Creek, which could get here in five if we needed it, but Vic’s in no immediate danger.”

“Except he could go into cardiac arrest.”

“Which is why we wait for the ambulance,” he said. Members of the Camera Club stood around in various attitudes of concern or lack thereof, from Sophie’s worried hovering to the relaxed nonchalance displayed by two women piling their plates with potato salad and chattering about film speeds. It was sort of like a car accident in that respect. Those who are directly involved stand or sit by the side of the road, gazing blankly at the scene, or they kneel beside the injured, giving and taking comfort. Passing motorists slow down to gawk, checking for bodies and perhaps for blood, wondering if the victim is somebody they know, then rejoicing that it’s not. Still others drive past quickly, eyes averted, cursing the slow-down in traffic.

A fellow human being in distress is interesting, particularly if the situation is already being handled by an authoritative person, Becker in this case. There is no need to step in and do something. Everything that can be done is being done, so the natural adrenaline rush that turns some people into heroes isn’t a part of it. Morbid curiosity takes over, guilt dogging its heels. (Is your interest an intrusion? Is your gawking unwholesome? Sick? You’ll keep on gawking anyway, though. Betcha.)

Disaster has been packaged as a form of entertainment since the television was invented, and we’ve learned to be fascinated by it. Action movies, war reports, true crime stories and slasher films have turned us all into cold spectators. When faced with personal horror, we are truly frightened and often traumatized, but when the stakes are lower—the collapse of a colleague, for example, or a roadside fender-bender, it’s just another video clip.

The ambulance people arrived in fifteen, not twenty minutes, and quickly bundled Vic onto a wheeled stretcher and hauled him back along the trail. Some of us, including Sophie, followed.

“I’m going in the ambulance to fill them in on Vic’s accident and make sure he’s okay,” Becker said to me. “You drive standard, right? Can you take Bryan back to my place? I’ll meet you there.”

“Aww, Dad,” Bryan said. “I want to come in the ambulance too. I won’t touch anything.”

“Not this time, kid.”

“What about our hike?” Bryan said. If he hadn’t said it, I would have. I was as disappointed as he was.

“There are a lot of neat trails around my cabin,” I said. “Mark, why don’t I take him back there and we can go for a walk in the woods and then have a barbecue?”

“Cool. Can we?” Bryan said.

“I guess so, if it’s not any trouble, but don’t you have a meeting later?” Becker said.

“It’s barely past noon, and that’s not until six,” I said. “Plenty of time.”

Bryan scrambled into the passenger seat of the Jeep, calling to the dogs, who piled in on top of him. Becker drew me aside for a whispered word. “You don’t have any pot plants growing around your place, do you?” he said, quite seriously. I shook my head, not daring to open my mouth for fear of what snappish remark might come out. “No rolling papers or hash pipes left out on your desk?”

“Becker, give me a break,” I said. He usually completely avoided talking about that stuff. It was a silent agreement we had. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Now he was asking, and it made me very uncomfortable. I kept my stash hidden away at all times, and I bought my dope from a farmer friend. “Your son shall remain blissfully ignorant of my evil side,” I said. “I promise.”

“I know he’s only eight,” Becker said, “but he’s no idiot. We teach them about this kind of thing in the schools now, you know.”

“I know, Becker. Don’t worry. Bryan’s safe with me. Now go do your duty, Dudley-Do-Right. Oh, wait. How are you going to get down to Cedar Falls from the hospital? I’ll have your Jeep.”

Becker grinned. “I’ll get Morrison to drive me. He’s working today,” he said, referring to his beefy partner, Earlie Morrison. Earlie was a close friend of my Aunt Susan’s, and of mine, actually. He didn’t approve of my relationship with Becker at all (Susan’s opinion didn’t help), and he’d be just tickled to be asked to drive Becker to my place.

“I’m sure he’ll love that. Who’s his partner while you’re on vacation?”

“Marie Lefevbre,” Becker said. “She’s new, and they seem to get along okay. I think Morrison has a crush on her.”

“Marie? That’s not the young constable who was in charge of guarding us after the Steamboat episode, is it? The one who stood over us in the police station, writing down everything we said?” That had been some months ago, but the murder at Steamboat Theatre was still fresh in my mind.

“That’s her,” Becker said. I was surprised to feel a certain twinge of sisterly concern about Morrison falling for Marie, whom I remembered to have been rather pretty. Morrison was a large man, and more vulnerable than most people gave him credit for. What if she broke his heart? Would Becker be there to pick up the pieces? I didn’t think so.

“I’ve gotta get going,” Becker said. “I’ll see you back at your place in a while.” He gave me a quick peck on the cheek and climbed into the back of the ambulance, which accelerated out of the gravel parking lot with its lights flashing.

Bryan was silent for some time after we hit the highway. I tried very hard not to say the kind of things that grown-ups blither at times like these, when they’re forced into close, exclusive association with a small person they don’t know very well. I didn’t say “So, what grade are you in?” or “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Neither did I ask the kind of questions I was really dying to ask, like “So, what’s your mother like?” and “What kind of person do you think your Dad is?” I think children are much more comfortable with silence than adults are.

Finally, Bryan spoke. “Did that man die and then come back to life?” he said.

“Well, sort of,” I said. “He wasn’t breathing when your Dad pulled him out of the water.”

“What do you think about when you die?” he said. I immediately flashed on a moment the year before when someone had tried to shoot me. I had been so scared I’d wet myself. I wondered how much would be appropriate to share with an eight-year-old, precocious as he was.

“I think that sometimes, in an accident, anyway, things happen so fast there isn’t time to think,” I said. “Your thoughts probably go sort of like ‘Uh-oh’ and then that’s it.”

“Would you have time to pray?”

“I guess, if that occurred to you.”

“And then when you die, you get to see Jesus, right?” Yikes, I thought. I was not exactly the right kind of person to be getting into a theological discussion with an impressionable child.

“Maybe,” I said. I wondered if Bryan’s Mom was a churchgoer. Did Bryan go to Sunday School? Was he a “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” kind of kid? I was out of my element, and strangely, rather frightened. If Bryan had started asking questions about my sex life, I would have been able to handle it. Religion, on the other hand, was a loaded issue for me. Coming from an adult, questions about faith were easy to blow off. Coming from a child, they were important, and I didn’t think it right to be flippant.

“So, if you meet Jesus when you die, what happens when you’re brought back to life again?” Bryan said.

Why can’t he be talking about Jeeps and computers and food? I asked myself. I could deal with those.

“What do you think?” I said.

“On the Internet, there’s this website about near-death experiences,” Bryan said, sounding efficient, informed and forty.

“What does it say?”

“Some people see a light, and when they come back, they’re really sad,” Bryan said.

“Why sad?”

“Maybe they were happy meeting Jesus and God, and they didn’t want to come back here at all,” Bryan said. Or maybe, I thought, they were sad because they got the news that heaven was full of bored people in white robes who all thought they were better than you. I said “Hmmm” in a chicken-shit kind of way.

“My Sunday school teacher says that we all have a job to do on earth, and maybe they’re sad because their job isn’t finished yet, so they have to come back,” Bryan said.

I waited, easing up on the accelerator after I looked down, and discovered that I was speeding. Tension, maybe. I didn’t want to usher little Bryan into the next world before his job was done, and I certainly wasn’t ready to meet the Big Guy myself, seeing as I was very likely on his “Send to Hell” list.

“You’ve been thinking about this a lot, haven’t you?” I said.

“I was just wondering if the man you and Dad saved got to meet Jesus,” Bryan said.

“He didn’t mention it,” I said and immediately regretted my tone. Bryan’s face fell, and he remained silent until I pulled into the parking lot at the A&P in Cedar Falls.

“We have to pick up a few things for our barbecue,” I said. “Hamburgers and hotdogs okay with you?” Bryan became a normal little boy again, much to my relief.

“Can I get a chocolate bar?” he said.

“I don’t see why not,” I said. I sent him off to locate a bag of charcoal briquettes while I poked around in the meat bin. I don’t eat a lot of meat as a rule, not because I’m vegetarian, but because I don’t have a refrigerator. Instead, I keep my food cold with an old fashioned icebox, fuelled by big blocks of ice cut out of the beaver pond every winter and stored in a straw-filled ice-house at the back of the cabin. The icebox keeps things reasonably cool, but meat doesn’t keep for very long.

Bryan was fascinated by my place, as I’d expected. I showed him how the icebox worked and where the ice was stored. He seemed amazed by the concept of ice being kept solid in straw and sawdust in the middle of summer without electricity, just as I had been when I first tried it. I explained how I used propane to work the small, two-burner stove and how at night I lit oil lamps and candles. Bryan had never seen a wood stove before, which I thought was peculiar, and I explained the theory behind wood heat as well as I could. He wasn’t too impressed with the outhouse, but was more than happy to work the hand pump when I needed a bucket of water. After about an hour of explaining and justifying the details of my lifestyle to this twenty-first century child, I was beginning to feel like a pioneer museum exhibit.

Bryan sat at the kitchen table, cracking peanuts and watching me mix ground beef with onion, egg, oatmeal and spices for the hamburgers.

“Wrestling is on right now,” he said, nonchalantly.

“Sorry?”

“The World Wrestling Foundation. You know, wrestling. It’s on right now. I usually watch it.” His tone of voice was kind of hopeful, as if he were asking permission for something.

“Wrestling is on what, Bryan?”

“On TV, silly,” he said.

“Uh-huh. And how does television work?” I said.

“I dunno. You know. You use the remote and press the buttons. Like a computer. You turn it on.”

“It uses electricity,” I said. “Remember, I told you I don’t have electricity here.”

Bryan was flabbergasted. Gobsmacked. The tour of Polly’s cabin had been entertaining in its way, I suppose, but he was getting bored and was hankering for an electronic fix.

“You don’t have a TV?” He was thoroughly incredulous.

“Nope. No phone, either.”

Now he was looking at me as if I were an alien species, which was probably not far from the truth.

“Everyone has a TV,” he said.

“Not everyone. Look, why don’t you help me make the hamburgers? It’s sort of like clay—you roll it into balls and then mash them down into patties.”

“Okay, I guess. But I’d rather watch wrestling,” he said.

“Or you could draw a picture. I’ve got lots of art supplies in the corner,” I said. He gave me a look of pure contempt.

“I only use CorelDraw,” he said, “or Adobe Illustrator. You need a computer and electricity for that.”

Parenting? Count me out.