Fine Just the Way It Is (21 page)

There were many letters from Bonita, the words looping downhill across the page and ending with a two-line prayer. She always began the letter with news of Baby Verl’s progress with cutting teeth, crawling, standing up, how Verl’s old dog Bum had taken to him, following him everywhere and letting Baby pull his ears, how Verl had got another dog, Buddy, because Bum was getting old, and how Buddy loved the baby even more than Bum, and only when she had detailed every wonderful thing Baby Verl had done did she report on local events. Her sister Juanita had come from Casper for a visit and to show off her new husband, who worked in the gas fields for Triangle Energy. The first husband, Don, had worked for the same company. He had believed fall-protection gear was for pantywaists and died when he reached for a hoist-lifted pipe and missed. Big Verl, Bonita wrote, had quit his chiropractor and was now going to a fat woman who gave massages and charged terrific prices. “At least she advertises they are massages. If Verl wasn’t Verl I would think it was something else.” Dakotah felt a rare and even painful rush of affection mixed with pity for Bonita, although she suspected she was only writing out of a sense of duty.

A few letters came from Mrs. Lenski, alternately sardonic and cheerful. It seemed to Dakotah that as soon as she had left, the town started dying off. One of the Vasey twins had been killed and the other severely injured in a car crash at the intersection where everybody knew to slow down. Some truck with Colorado plates had blasted through and T-boned them. And, wrote Mrs. Lenski, two lesbian women with a herd of goats had bought the Tin Can house and planned to make cheese and sell it locally. Dakotah was shocked to see the word “lesbian” on the page of a letter like any ordinary word. Tug Diceheart and two other hands riding for the Tic-Tac had been caught making meth in the bunkhouse and arrested. Juiciest of all, Mrs. Match had left Wyatt and returned to California to become a real estate agent. Dakotah wondered if Verl was gloating.

Both Dakotah and Marnie changed their MOS to Military Police. They had become closest friends, closer than she had ever been to Sash. Dakotah, for the first time in her life, had someone to talk to, someone who understood everything, from rural ways to failing at tests. Marnie said maybe they were in love. They talked about setting up house together with Baby Verl after they got out. One day they were in a Humvee, Dakotah clutching a machine gun, on their way to a checkpoint to search Iraqi women.

“Yup, here we are with the fuckups. MP is where the dumb ones end up. Supposed a be the stupidest part of the entire army.”

“Don’t you think some of the officers could get that prize?”

“Yeah. So probably MPs come second. Second dumbest, something to brag about.”

They had learned that the checkpoints were intensely dangerous, and after a few weeks Dakotah developed a little magic ritual to keep herself alive. She rapidly twitched the muscles of her toes, heel, calf, knee, hip, waist, shoulder, eyebrow, elbow, wrist, thumb, fingers on the right side and then repeated the series for the left side. Bonita had sent her a silver-plated cross that she recognized. It had always been in the second drawer of the kitchen dresser with a tortoiseshell comb, a pot holder too nice to use, a pair of small kid gloves that had belonged to Verl’s famous great-grandmother, a red box with a sliding lid filled with old buttons. She wore the cross once, but it tangled with her dog tags and she put it away.

She hated searching the Iraqi women, knew that they hated her doing it. Some of them smelled, and their voluminous, often ragged and dusty burkas could conceal everything from a black market radio to baby clothes to a bomb. One young woman had six glossy eggplants hidden under her garment. Dakotah pitied her, unable even to buy and carry home a few eggplants without an American soldier groping at her. Never had the world seemed so vile and her own problems so mean and petty.

On the day the IED exploded under the Humvee she had not completed the left side of the protecting muscle twitches, choosing a third cup of coffee instead. It happened too suddenly for anything to register. One moment they were traveling fast, the next she was looking up into the face of Chris Jinkla.

“Moooo,” she said, trying to make a cow joke for the veterinary’s son, but he didn’t recognize her and thought she was moaning. She felt nothing at that moment and tried her magic muscle twitch sequence, but something was wrong on the right side.

“I’m fine, Chris. Except my arm.”

The medic was startled. He peered into her bloody face. “My god, it’s Pat, right?”

“Dakotah,” she whispered. “I’m Dakotah. I’m fine but I need my arm. Please look for it. I can’t go home without it.” She turned her head and saw a heap of bloody rags and a patch of skin.

“Marnie?”

Her right arm was still there though cruelly shattered, and the best they could hope for, said the doctor at the field hospital, was to amputate and save enough stump to carry a prosthetic. “You’re young and strong,” he said. “You’ll make it.”

“I’m fine,” she agreed. “How about Marnie?” She knew as she asked.

The doctor gave her a look.

She was shipped out to Germany with other wounded, gradually aware that there was some awful knowledge hovering, something worse than her mangled arm, which had been amputated, something as bad as losing Marnie. Maybe they had discovered she had cancer and wouldn’t tell her. But it was not until she was sent to Walter Reed that she heard the bad news from Bonita herself, who stood at her bedside with a curious expression of mingled sorrow and, looking at the stump of her arm, a ghoulish curiosity.

“Oh, oh,” she whispered, and then burst into streaming tears. Never had Dakotah seen anyone cry that way, tears pouring down Bonita’s cheeks to the corners of her mouth, splashing from her jawline onto her rayon blouse as though her head was filled with water. She could not speak for long minutes.

“Baby Verl,” she finally said.

“What?”
Dakotah knew instinctively it was the worst thing.

“Ridin in the back a Big Verl’s truck—” And the tears began again. “He fell out.”

The story came slowly and wetly. The eighteen-month-old child had loved riding with his great-grandfather, but this day Verl put him with the dogs in the open truck bed. Big Verl was so proud to have a boy and wanted him to be tough. The dogs loved him. She said that several times. The rest of it came in a rush.

“See, Verl thought he’d just sit with the dogs. They done it before. But you know how dogs hang over the edge. Baby Verl did that too, near as we can tell, so that when the truck went down in one a them dips it threw him out. It was a accident. He fell under the wheels, Dakotah. Big Verl is half-crazy. They got him sedated. The doctors are fixin it up for you to come home.”

Dakotah threw back her head and howled. She snapped her teeth at Bonita and began to curse her and Verl. How could he be so stupid as to put a baby in the bed of a pickup? The shouting and crying brought an irritated nurse, who asked them to keep it down. Bonita, who had been backing away, turned and ran into the corridor and did not come back.

“It takes a year, Dakotah,” said Mrs. Parka, the grief counselor, a full-bosomed woman with enormous liquid eyes. “A full turn of the seasons before you begin to heal. Time
does
heal all wounds, and right now the passage of time is the best medicine. And you yourself must heal physically as well as spiritually. You need to be very strong. What is your religion?”

Dakotah shook her head. She had asked the woman to write to Mrs. Lenski for her and tell her what happened, but the woman said it was part of the healing process for Dakotah to face the fact of Baby Verl’s passing and tell Mrs. Lenski herself. Dakotah wanted to choke the woman until she went blue-black and died.

She glared furiously.

“There are other ways for you to communicate. The telephone. E-mail?”

“Get away from me,” said Dakotah.

At the end of the summer she was still there, in a grimy old motel somehow connected to the hospital, getting used to the prosthesis. She sat in the dim room doing nothing. Dreary days went by. She struggled to understand the morass of papers about disability allowances, death allowances, Baby Verl’s support. One of the official letters said that support payments for baby Verl Hicks should never have been paid for, by or through Dakotah, but through the child’s father, SSgt Saskatoon M. Hicks, currently at Walter Reed Hospital recuperating.

That Sash was somewhere at the same hospital amazed her. That she had learned about it amazed her more, for the legendary confusion and chaos of lost patients was like the nest of rattlesnakes Verl had once showed her, a coiling, twisting mass under a shelving boulder. He had fired his old 12-gauge at them and still the torn flesh twisted.

One afternoon a volunteer, Mrs. Glossbeau, came to her. Dakotah saw she must be rich; she was trim and tanned and wore an elegant raspberry-colored wool suit with a white silk shirt.

“Are you Dakotah Hicks?”

She had forgotten they were still married. Sash’s divorce action had gone dormant when he left for basic training.

“Yes, but we were gettin a divorce. And then I don’t know what happened.”

“Well, your husband is here in the complex and his doctors think you ought to see him. I should warn you, he has suffered very severe injuries. He may not recognize you. He probably won’t. They are hoping that seeing you again will…sort of wake him up.”

Dakotah said nothing at first. She did not want to see Sash. She wanted to see Marnie. She wanted Baby Verl. She half-believed he was waiting to play patty-cake. She could feel his small warm hands.

“I don’t really want to see him. We got nothin to talk about.”

But the woman sat beside her chair and cajoled. Dakotah breathed in a delicious fragrance, as rich as apricots in cream and with the slight bitterness from the cyanide kernel. The woman’s hands were shapely with long pale nails, her fingers laden with diamond-heavy rings. Because it seemed the only way to get rid of the woman was to agree, in the end she went.

Sash Hicks had disintegrated, both legs blown off at midthigh, the left side of his face a mass of shiny scar tissue, the left ear and eye gone. It was almost like seeing Marnie, whom she knew was dead, although she kept on hearing her voice in corridors. Sash’s nurse told her that he had suffered brain damage. But Dakotah recognized him, old Billy the Kid shot up by Pat Garrett. More than ever he looked like the antique outlaw. He stared at the ceiling with his right eye. The ruined face showed no comprehension except that something was terribly wrong if he could only know what.

“Sash. It’s me, Dakotah.”

He said nothing. Although his face was ruined and he was ravaged from the waist down, his right shoulder and arm were muscular and stout.

She didn’t know what she felt for him—pity or nothing at all.

Words came out of the distorted mouth.

“Ah—ah—eh.” He subsided as though someone had unscrewed the valve that kept his body inflated and upright. His moment of grappling with the world had passed and his chin sank onto his chest.

“Are you asleep?” asked Dakotah. There was no answer and she left.

The trip to the ranch was hard, but there was nowhere else to go. She dreaded seeing Verl; would she scream and punch him? Grab the .30-.30 on top of the dish cupboard and shoot him? She felt a scorching rage and at the same time was listless and inert, slumping on the backseat of the taxi. Sonny Ezell’s old vehicle moved very slowly. Her prosthesis was in her suitcase. She knew they had to see the arm stump to believe, just as she had to see little Verl’s grave.

They passed the Match ranch, unchanged, and turned onto Sixteen Mile. The days were shortening, but there was still plenty of light, the top of Table Butte, layered bands of buff, gamboge and violet, gilded by the setting sun. The shallow river, as yellow as lemon rind, lay flaccid between denuded banks. The dying sun hit the willows, transforming them into bloody wands. Light reflected from the road as from glass. They seemed to be traveling through a hammered red landscape in which ranch buildings appeared dark and sorrowful. She knew what blood-soaked ground was, knew that severed arteries squirted like the backyard hose. A dog came out of the ditch and ran into a stubble field. They passed the Persa ranch, where the youngest son had drowned in last spring’s flood. She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and “unloaded” guns. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that canceled their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust and the sun set in haze.

When she got out at the house the wind swallowed her whole, snatching at her scarf, huffing up under the hem of her coat, eeling up her sleeve. She could feel the grit. Every step she took dried weeds snapped under her shoes. Sonny Ezell carried her suitcase to the porch and wouldn’t take any money. Someone inside switched on the porch light.

She did not attack Verl. Both of her grandparents hugged her and cried. Verl thudded to his knees and sobbed that he was sorry unto death. He pressed his wet face against her hand. He had never before touched her in any way. She felt nothing and took it to mean recovery. There was a large color photograph of little Verl on the wall. He was sitting on a bench with one chubby leg folded under, the other dangling and showing a snowy white stocking and miniature sneaker. He held a plush bear by its ear. They must have taken him to the Wal-Mart portrait studio. They had sent her a print of the same picture.