The Convalescent (12 page)

The car lingers for a moment, purring at the edge of my field, but when they see that I’ve got company, the Subdivisionists don’t stop to hammer the new sign; instead, they drive past us, speeding quickly around the bend. Mister Bis comes up behind me and watches them leave. He clucks his tongue.

“Chickenshits,” he says.

We sell out by noon. Everything goes. All the chops, shanks, loins. Mister Bis buys his half of it. “People need their carnitine,” he says, helping me dole out three steaks to a woman holding a baby.

“What’s that?” the woman says.

“It is the protein in meat,” says Mister Bis. “If you eat your carnitine, you’re good as gold. That’s why those vegetarians have terrible posture and go shuffling around in their goddamn clogs all day. Not enough carnitine. They can barely keep themselves upright.”

“Carnitine,” says the woman, and nods her head.

“Carnitine,” says Mister Bis.

At the end of the day, Richie arrives in Mister Bis’s truck to pick him up. He honks the horn. Mister Bis ignores him, and gathers a bundle of wax
papers that have been blown across the grass. Richie, impatient, honks again. This time he leans on it. An assembly of birds scatters from the trees.

“Get over here!” shouts Mister Bis.

In a sulk, Richie slides out the door of the truck and walks over to the meat bus, kicking at the grass as he comes. “
What
,” he says.

“Help clean up.”

Richie sneezes a dry, exaggerated sneeze. “I can’t,” he says and sniffles. “I have allergies. The stupid grass gives me allergies.”

“I’ll give you allergies, Anil,” says Mister Bis, and throws him a handful of tongues.

Richie jumps aside.

Mister Bis and I fill up his boxes with chops, roasts, steaks. Assorted cutlets. It takes a while, but eventually we get it all loaded up in the back of his truck. The grocer slams the door and wipes his hands. “I honestly do not know how you do it, Mister Pfliegman,” he says. “I do not know how you manage to do it all on your own. But I would be out of business without you.” He gives me a warm look. Then he opens the door of the truck to leave. “Where’s Richie?”

We turn around.

Richie has braced himself by the side of the bus, and is furiously tugging at Marjorie with all of his strength.

I make a run for it. I haul my bad leg across the field and throw myself upon the boy pharmacist.

“Hey!” he cries. “It’s a
weed!
It’s just a weed!”

I focus on his left hand, trying to pry Marjorie out from his insubordinate adolescent fingers, but Richie is considerably bigger than I am. He easily bends his legs around my legs until he gets a good grip on the bad one. He turns it.

“
Algh!
” I yell.

Then a man walks out from around the back of the bus. Stunned, I stop wrestling and stare at him. He’s wearing nothing but a tight Speedo. He has glistening pectorals, a trim, two-inch mustache. Around his neck hangs a shiny whistle, and he’s got a funny round helmet on his head that looks like he’s about to battle kindergarteners. He looks exactly like the Captain from
The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures
. As if cued, the Captain brings forth a yellow water polo ball from around his back. He begins expertly
tossing it back and forth between his palms. His leg muscles twitch excitedly. “Take him away from the two-meter area!” he cries.

I give him an incredulous look.

“Go for the goal!”

Sensing that I’ve let up, Richie seizes the clear advantage. “Take that!” he cries, and elbows me deep in the gut.

“Push him out to four to six meters!” the Captain shouts, and tweets his whistle. “Get and hold one side!”

Half-bent, I climb up one side of Richie’s body to his shoulder, and then, with my barnacle teeth, chomp down. Richie howls and grabs his shoulder. He begins whacking me on the head with his knuckles, then grabs my stylish woolen cap in his hands. He flings it across the field—

“Foul!” cries the Captain, jumping up and down. He blows the whistle, hard. “Use the legs!” he shouts. “Focus on the legs! Eggbeater, Eggbeater!”

I concentrate on my legs. I hook my good leg around Richie’s knee, and am fairly surprised as it turns, sending him sideways to the ground.

The Captain is so excited he takes off his helmet. “Attaboy, Pfliegman!” he shouts, and gives me a thumbs-up. Richie wiggles under my grip, but I don’t let go until Mister Bis throws an arm in and divides us. I look for the Captain, but he’s gone. Back into the slice of air he came from.

Mister Bis gives me a light shake. “Are you all right, Mister Pfliegman?”

Richie spits on the ground. “No, he’s not all right,” he says, and spits again. He pulls the collar away from his neck to show his father his fresh wound. “He bit me on the shoulder! I probably need a goddamned tetanus shot!”

I hobble over to the front of the bus, looking around all sides.

“Go back to the truck,” says Mister Bis.

Richie sniffles and wipes his nose on his shirt. “But I was bit!” he insists.

“I said go back to the truck!”

Richie rubs his shoulder and shouts at me: “Who goes around
biting
people? What are you, anyway? Some kind of
vampire
?”

“Get back in the truck, Teenager!” says Mister Bis. “Right now!”

“Fine!” Richie yells. He runs all the way back to the truck and jumps into the driver’s seat. He turns on the radio.

Rock music blasts across the field.

Mister Bis picks up my cap and approaches the bus. “Are you all right, Mister Pfliegman? Do you feel all right? What are you looking for?”

I beckon Mister Bis into the bus and point out the windows to the wide hanging arms of the pine tree, the muddy path leading down to the embankment of the Queeconococheecook. The Captain is meandering down the grassy side of the river, tossing the yellow ball between his palms—he slides into the water, disappearing into the froth and foam.

“What?” says Mister Bis. “What am I looking at?”

I go to my bookshelf and pick up
The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures
to show him what I’m talking about—I point at the Captain on the cover—but Mister Bis doesn’t look at the book. Although he has visited the field many times before, he’s never actually been inside. He looks at the rusted pots, the barely used sink. The diamond-shaped crack in the ceiling. He spots a tin can perched on the windowledge and picks it up—a large brown beetle spins his antennae—he quickly puts it down again. He folds his arms over his chest. “Rovar,” he says. “I think you should come and stay with me and Missus Bis for a while. I would have to clear it by her of course, and it would not be a permanent situation, but there is a cot and a few other things, and you’d certainly be comfortable. It’s freezing in here. You shouldn’t be living outside like this, next to a river. It’s not safe.”

I smile warmly at Mister Bis’s generosity. This is no everyday gesture, and I am truly appreciative. I pick up my writing tablet.

Thank you
, I write.
But no
.

He sniffs, and presses his hands together. “No? Why not?”

Please don’t be offended. I have no choice in the matter
.

“But it’s the least we can do for you, for everything you do for us—”

I shake my head.

“All right,” he says, and puts one hand on my shoulder. He fingers my filthy pink sweatshirt, the woolen cap. My everyday trousers, worn thin.

“Do you at least have a good coat?” he says. “I can get you a good coat if you need one.”

Oh, I have one
, I write.

Then Mister Bis notices the pile of unopened letters from the Subdivisionists. He picks one up and opens it: “
Due to re-zoning the zoning laws
,” he reads, “
this acreage is to be subdivided into eight elite, residential properties
.”

Outside, I watch the Captain climb out of the water and trod happily up the embankment in his bare feet, shaking the water from his body. When he reaches the bus, he grabs one of the Indian’s blue towels with the yellow pom poms, drying on the clothesline. He rubs himself with it.

“This is
bad
,” Mister Bis says, shaking his head at the letter. “Have you not seen this? They’ve got lawyers involved now.”

I slowly place the water polo book back on my bookshelf. There is no need for me to read the letters from the Subdivisionists. They always say the same thing. The pages are filled with all sorts of important-sounding words like
fiduciary
,
accrue
, and
facilitate
. I may not practice or appreciate language like
cost-effective
or
fiscal advantage
; I may not understand words like
accretion
or
adverse possession
; and yes, these may well indeed be modern words for modern times, but it seems that not all that much has changed from early medieval times, when people were most concerned with eating fresh meat, laying claim on land, and killing people right through the heart.

I once read that every person should live next to a body of water. That all forms of water represent change. Or the possibility for change. That landlocked people go bonkers. Living next to a river was an imperative for the early Hungarians, though purely for pragmatic reasons: these people of leisure, of vanity, fished and hunted along the many rivers which decorate the Carpathian Basin, and it’s probably for this reason above all others that their civilization evolved so quickly there. By 926
AD
, the Magyars had spread out over many thousands of square kilometers, a total combined area considerably larger than the area of present-day Hungary, which is thirty-five thousand square miles and roughly the same size as the state of Virginia. The original ten tribes had disseminated into hundreds of villages of smaller tribes, across various rivers, but mostly along the Tisza and the Danube, which divide the country into long and narrow thirds. But what is little known about the early Hungarians, even amongst the most fêted historians, is that among the Magyars who inhabited these rivers lived the best leg wrestler the world has ever seen.

Her name was Lili László.

Lili László, as the Virginians would call her, or László Lili, as the Hungarians called her, had long blond hair which coiled around her neck like a furry snake, and the largest thighs of any woman in camp. Lili would often challenge men to leg-wrestling matches, and everyone always came to watch. For an emerging, war-torn country, early in the tenth century? Entertainment-wise? It was the best bang for your buck.

This is the way it worked, as passed down from Ural Mountains to here, where we are now, in 926
AD
, this flat, wet, and thankless place called the Carpathian Basin: “
Two opponents lay on their backs, facing opposite directions, their arms intertwined
,” writes Anonymus. “
Their legs lifted and locked into each other. A struggle, for as long as the wrestlers could hold, ensued. The winner turned the knees of his opponent, hauling him over his head
.”

Lili László never leg wrestled for fun; it was always for grain alcohol or for extra portions of food, as Árpád had imposed strict rations in camp. Lili would pass through the food line with her tiny woman’s plate and sigh, looking hungrily at the men’s plates, piled with cold salted deermeat. She would bribe men out of their breakfasts by challenging them to a match and promising to allow them to
gurulni
her body if she lost.

She never lost.

One morning, she awoke to find a semicircle of men in their man-loins standing outside of her tent.

“You owe us,” one said.

The men behind the speaker all nodded.

“We’ve all wrestled you, and you won’t gurulni any of us.”

“Yeah!”

Lili reached into her tent and brought out her breakfast, a flank of beef from last night’s roast which she’d won by wrestling a one-legged deaf man. (And this was really the last straw, the men all thought, being that the man was deaf and one-legged and all.)

“So what?” she said.

“So we want a rematch.”

Lili listened to the men, and began gnawing at her bone, thoughtfully. It was rather odd, she was thinking, that they all wanted a rematch. It was all very cute. “What do I get if I win?” she said.

“You get to gurulni any man in camp,” one said.

Lili snorted.

The men looked at each other. “And you can eat with us every day.”

“Every day? For how long?”

“As long as you like! Eat as much as you want.”

Lili thought about it. She didn’t really feel like gurulni-ing with any of them. Your average medieval Hungarian male was no hot ticket, and the last thing she could afford to do for her health in all this rain was open up and let somebody jostle around everything that she would just have to set right again—but in the end, the promise of all that food was too much to pass up. She wiped her hands across her chest and grinned. “All right,” she said. “Who among you wants to fight me?”

The men smiled, and then, like a curtain parting, stepped aside as Szeretlek the Giant made his way through the crowd.

“If I can be of
use
,” he said.

Lili took one look at Szeretlek and wavered in front of the flap of her tent. She held the lip of meat in her mouth. This was not what she had agreed to.

“This is not what I agreed to,” she said.

Szeretlek grinned at Lili and sat down on the rounded earth in front of her tent. He landed with a thud. His legs unfolded beneath him, stretching out like fallen trunks—

The men practically danced around him.

Lili retreated into the solitude of her tent. How could she beat the Giant? She lingered for a moment and evaluated her resources. Although on the short side, with a trunked neck and an unimaginative bosom, Lili was not a completely unattractive she-pagan. She had blond hair, smooth shoulders. A playful soupçon of feminine beard. She could flirt with him, she decided. The idea wasn’t completely outrageous. She hocked a burr of phlegm into her hand and smoothed her hair. She pinched her cheeks for color, wrapped her braids around her head, and unbuttoned the top of her cloak like it was accidental. She practiced standing at various angles that called attention to her fattest, most flattering body parts, and when she emerged from the tent a few moments later, she looked softer, in a way, than she had before, and the look on her face was clear and desirable.