Light Lifting (10 page)

No sign of them for two weeks, but we can't be sure.

It's done, I say. They're gone. We made it.

Better be right this time, she says. Can't take much more.

My brain still teeming. The itch. It doesn't require proof or evidence. Thought is enough. You do it to yourself. Lice. Imagine them crawling on your head. Claws touching skin. They pass over us, across this family.

I wander the quiet house at night. Think I sense them everywhere, penetrating cushions and clothes and blankets. No place too intimate. Asleep in our bed. Her head against the pillowcase, hair fanned out. The girl with the Clash T-shirt. We get to choose each other, but kids have no say about the nature of their own lives. Two girls and a boy. Dead to the world. Separate beds. Each clutching a stuffed animal. What are we to these people? Genetics. A story they make up about themselves.

Can't sleep without the stuffies. Essential part of the night time ritual. Sacred objects made in a Bangladesh factory. The soft places where children dump their love for the first few years. Think of the crying and the frantic searches. What happens to us if one of these toys gets lost or left behind at the grocery store.

But the lice creep in. Even here. Wait it out for a chance to come back. I take the battered elephant and the patched monkey and the frayed horse. Pry them out of the kids' arms without waking anybody up. Bring them downstairs to the basement. Toss everybody into the deep freezer for the night. They sleep on a value pack slab of frozen pork chops. The only treatment guaranteed to kill.

This is what I have learned from Hans Zinsser. Lice need a regular temperature. Can't survive extreme shifts. Sensitive to the smallest change in the host. They can tell when it is time to move on. The writing on the wall. A bad fever sometimes enough. Lice know what you don't. Leave a body voluntarily the second it starts to cool. People who have lived through cataclysms – veterans from the war, victims of earthquakes, those who escaped the camps – they will tell you. Lice, like a cloud, like ink, seeping from the head and the groin of a corpse. Confirmation. They register it first, the cold taste, the stillness. Bodies on the ground, dropped in the exercise yard, leaking their insects.

We take it in shifts. Not smart to burn out two people at the same time. The room has one chair that can fold out into a very narrow single bed. One sits up with the baby, while the other goes home and tries to sleep. My turn, then your turn. Rotation. We pass in the hall sometimes. Exchange Tupperware meals. Concerned families waiting in different houses. The news. What the doctor said this time. Nothing happened today. She had a good night.

Medication. The baby wakes up, starts to come back to herself. Little by little. Gurgling and happy sometimes, but not out of the woods. She reaches out through the metal bars of the hospital crib. Holds my finger.

They have her hooked up to a machine. Tubes and wires. A long strip of paper, like a sales slip, scrolling out. Something inside draws a continuous erratic line over the narrow graph paper. It goes up and down. Sometimes rests for a long plateau. The nurses consult it every time they come in the room. We have no idea what it means. When we ask, they say: more data for the chart. There are numbers, too. Three of them. Two for blood pressure, we think, and then something else. A single flashing light, but no sound. The bulb is purple. Blinks on and off. Fluctuates. A silent rhythm, picking up and coming back down. Her heart, most likely, but it seems too slow sometimes.

I come to relieve her. 10:30 at night. Freezing outside. Other things will happen, but we will never live clearer than this. I take off my boots. She puts hers on. Car outside waiting in temporary parking. Meter running. The heater will stay warm if we switch fast enough.

She just went down, she says. Probably be up for something to eat in two or three hours. New bottle of formula in the fridge at the nurse's station.

Okay, good. There's spaghetti waiting for you.

I hold her. All her weight collapses into me and we both cry. Quiet empty corridors in the hospital. Nothing happening. All the overhead lights turned down.

When are they going to let us go?

I don't know. Have to wait till they say something.

She puts on her winter coat. Turns to leave.

I move to the chair. The upholstery is hard blue vinyl. Cleaning staff wipe it down every morning with a spray bottle of disinfectant. I push it back so the recliner part kicks up. It is about two-feet wide, hard metal support bars running below the surface. You can go down, maybe, but you cannot sleep here. The place where you wait for the next day to come.

I get one of the thin pillows from the shelf in the bathroom. Look up and see her at the end of the hall. Waiting by the elevator. Her head shaking. The numbers descending. I call her name as I move, almost run, down the corridor in my sock feet. Meet her on the way. Kiss.

Stay, I say.

Please stay.

She smiles.

We go back. Squeeze onto the vinyl chair. Her legs between my legs. Arms hanging over the side. Heads touching. Everything forced together. Darkness in the room. Our baby makes no sound. Only the bulb from the machine now. Inscrutable purple light flashing on the ceiling. Like a discotheque, maybe, or the reflection of ancient fire in a cave.

Light Lifting

N
obody deserved a sunburn like that. Especially not a kid. You could see it right through his shirt. Like grease coming through waxed paper. Wet and thick like that, sticking to him. Purple. It was a worn out, see-through shirt and the blisters he had from the day before had opened up again. Now they were hardening over for the second time, sucking the fabric into his back. I tried not to think about him taking that shirt off. He'd have to rip at it quickly – like a bandage – and that would tear away any of the healing that had already happened. Half his back would go. He had a sunburn bad enough to bleed.

I saw it coming the day before and I probably should have said something and stopped it. It was bright. One of those clear afternoons where there's just enough of a breeze to trick you into thinking it's nice and cool. On a day like that you can forget that the sun is still up there, on top of the breeze, still coming straight down. Most people have been caught at least once by a trick day like that and it's worse now. Now it's over before you feel anything. You can get permanently hurt if you don't pay attention.

I watched it happen. I watched that burn going into him – the pink blotches moving across his shoulders and down the backs of his arms. He was turning colours right in front of me and I didn't say a word. Instead, I thought about how it's strange that you really can't feel a burn like that when it's going in. Or you feel it only like a nice comfortable kind of all-over warm. Everything seems fine when you're out there in the daytime, but at night – when a bad burn starts to come out – that's a totally different thing. That's a special kind of trouble. I've been there. Probably everyone's been there.

First it's nothing. You flip over on your stomach and just try to stay still. You pick that one steady position and try to hold it. But it gets worse, and even though you take the cold bath and pile on the noxema, you still think you're going to come bursting right out of your own body. Your skin feels too tight. In the end you have to give up on sleeping because now it's four in the morning and you can see the sun coming up for another round. Every time you breathe there's a separate stretching pain.

I let him burn because I thought I'd never see him again. But when he came back the next morning – when he came back again, all scorched like that but still ready to go – that turned me around on him for good. I felt sorry for him now and I kept thinking that some of this was my fault. I felt like I did it to him myself – held him down and poured boiling water all over his back or pushed a plugged-in iron onto his skin. He had no way of knowing what he was getting into. His name was Robbie.

When Robbie came back on that second morning he didn't talk to anyone. He just did what he was told and kept nodding his head all the time. But at about eleven, when the real heat started up and the other guys had their shirts off, it looked to me like he was going to try again. I saw him tugging at the neck of his T-shirt, thinking about it.

“For fuck's sake,” I said. “Just sweat it out for a couple days. You take that shirt off today, you'll be in the hospital by tomorrow night. I guarantee you'll be in the hospital.”

That was the first thing I ever said to him.

“It's okay,” he said. His voice was flat and calm, like he already had this all figured out.

“I'm prepared for it today,” he said. “I bought sunscreen last night. A sixty-five. Nothing can get through that. I'm ready for it today.”

“Sixty-five.” He said that again, slowly, stretching it out. Like he was amazed. Like sixty-fucking-five was the biggest number in the history of the world.

“Never knew they went that high,” he said.

He had the lotion in his backpack and he took it out and showed it to me. There were two palm trees growing out of a little yellow island on the bottle. He wanted to do it right there. Take off his shirt and reach around and slather himself up. He took off his gloves, wiped the dust off his hands.

“Wouldn't go like that if I were you,” I said. “That shit will be worse than anything the burn can do. Oil in your hands doesn't go with bricks.”

He looked at me like I was joking with him.

“Do what you want,” I said. And I held up my hands like I surrendered.

“I'm only telling you the two things don't go together. When that grease sinks in, you can't get it out. Not like it's sticky, but it gets right in there and messes up your hands. Softens them. Makes the skin split. Doesn't even hurt at first when your fingers start bleeding, just feels wet. But by the end, your palms are all shredded up and the tips are worn right off your fingers. Goes right through your gloves.”

Everything I told him was true. When you wreck your hands they never come back the same way. I got my fingers so bloody and infected once that when they finally healed over again I could still see little chunks of stone trapped under my skin.

Robbie kind of smiled and he shook his head back and forth. He put the cream back in his bag.

“No lotion,” he said. Then he looked straight at me and for a second I thought he was going to quit right there. I could see two little veins pulsing in the middle of his forehead. But he didn't go for it. He looked up at the sky like he was trying to figure out if there was a better place to stand – a place with some shade.

“They say it's supposed to be very hot today,” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “That's what I heard.”

WE HAD A STRANGE MIX of guys on our crew that year. There were just three regulars – me, JC and Tom – and then we had summer kids who rotated in and out, a different one almost every day. Tom was our foreman. He did the estimates, set up the jobs and made sure that everything kept moving. JC and I laid in most of the stone.

The letters JC stood for Jesus Christ. His real name was Allan but we called him JC because he was born again. Before he came back to real life JC was a paratrooper in the military. He used to jump out of planes. His skin was covered with the kind of tattoos you can only get in the army or in jail. He had the regular naked-woman kind and a couple skulls and some crucifixes with snakes slithering around them. But he had the harder stuff too. Amateur tattoos that looked like a kid had drawn them in. There were a lot of shaky words written out on JC's body. Some of them were spelled wrong and sometimes the spacing was too tight and you could tell that they had to squish to get all those little sayings to fit inside their separate curling flags. On his back he had a picture of a bomb that was tied up to its own little parachute. It said “Death Comes From Above.” And there was another one that stretched right across the back of his neck, right over the bone of his spine. He had his old unit number there and the little flag said “Pain Is Unavoidable.” But somebody mixed up the O and the I, so it really said “Pain Is
Unaviodable.
”

JC was a little bit off. Something bad happened to him, I think. Maybe it was in those war simulations or something in the training that's supposed to break a guy down into just his basic parts. Once, Tom asked JC if he was sure that his parachute opened every time he jumped out of the plane. Tom acted it out for JC. He whistled a windy high note when he thought about JC falling through the air and then he slapped his hands together hard when he thought about him hitting the ground.

“Come on,” Tom said. “Think back. That happened to you at least one time. Whatever it was, you had to get whacked pretty hard to turn out like this.”

JC squinted a lot, like he was always staring into a lamp that was too bright. But I don't have a bad word to say about him. The guy was completely sound around me except for all his talking about God and the holy scriptures and the coming of the Rapture or whatever. He could really work too, almost like he was powered by the Almighty Lord or some other crazy magic. He could just go and go and go, no matter what time it was, or how hot it was, or if it was raining, or if it was snowing. During his lunch hour he prayed and he read the Bible to us out loud.