You Shall Know Our Velocity (12 page)

I tried to look up again but almost fainted from the pain. I sat up, head down, and wiped the blood with the butt of my hand. I looked around for a weapon. My back felt broken. It wasn’t a dull pain; it was acute, almost sweet.

One of them laughed. A laugh like a cough.

The toe of a shoe ripped through my stomach. I lost my lungs. I spit a wad of blood on the threadbare Indian rug Jack used to have in his bedroom. I just needed a second to catch my breath. Goddamn, I just needed a second—

“Answer me!” a voice yelled. I hadn’t heard the question.

On my knees but upright, I swung wildly, connecting with the metal wall of the unit. It made a small sound, quick and weak. Skin from my knuckles remained on the wall, white with red streaks. The near one laughed. And then kicked me square in the chest. My head hit the floor this time. I couldn’t break its fall. I tried to stop it but my hands felt so small. Then the end of the two-by-four came down on my right hand, like a shovel.

I blacked out. When I opened my eyes it felt like hours since I’d seen life. I felt like I was sucking air out of tiny crushed lungs. Lungs the size of thumbs. I didn’t see an end to it. I just needed a breath, though. Just a second. But to die this way—

I wasn’t recovering. My lungs were so small and burned when I
tried to yank air into them. I wanted a gun. They had the wrong guy. I tried to say something but when I tried went blind with tears. My lungs had been doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. What did they want? Everything spun beneath me.

My breath was coming back but my hands were crushed. And if I found something and used it on one of them, the other would be there. Only a gun would work here. Two guns. A knife. I would at least do some damage. I hated the odds. They’d blindsided me and there were two of them. I had almost no options. Where the fuck was Hand? Any second he’d show up with a bat and crack open heads. I longed for the sound.

One of them yelled something. I think it was “Answer me!” again. My hearing was filtered.

I started to stand up. The close one grabbed my hair. I slapped his hand away—I had more strength than I thought. A chunk of my hair went with his fingers. I took two steps back and tripped on fragments of a table. I was down again. The close one was still laughing. I tried to yell but it retched out in a whisper. My spine was a pole jamming into the base of my skull, a broom ramming into a ceiling.

“Fuck you!” the far one roared. It was so loud in the steel box I flinched. The far one stepped inside and turned off the light. The boot came from below and connected at the right side of my head and I was out.

I woke up alone. There were only my eyes. They felt as if they’d been removed, dipped in acid and then fastened to me with pins. The planks were oak, very old, rounded on their edges. My right palm met the wood and my cheek was set upon my hand, but the other hand I couldn’t place. I felt nothing in the direction I assumed it would be. I opened my eyes again. There was no dog. I thought I had heard a dog.

I tried to sit up but my head was too heavy. I could lift my cheek but not my skull. I was afraid to pull it away from the floor,
for fear I would tear something. I lowered my cheek again and slept. A crash woke me and I sat up quickly with the sound of ripping. I felt my head where it had been attached to the floor. I gagged and spit. I wiped my hand on a box behind me, not looking. I didn’t want to see anything white, any bone on my hands. I felt my neck, to see if blood was coming steadily, which meant I was dying, but it was not. I looked to the floor, where my head had rested, but there was only a small black pool, the edges dry. I couldn’t have lost much blood. A dog’s face appeared at the door and then was gone.

I was using my right hand but couldn’t feel my left. I realized I was not feeling my left. Where was my left arm? I looked to where it would be and found it, hanging from my shoulder like a wind-chime. It was dislocated or broken. My skull was something attached but so loosely. There was a pain so active and pulsating I was fascinated by it. It was unlike common head pain, which is dim and thudding; this was a constant cracking from within, a constant chopping of the inner walls of the cranium, by pickaxes.

To see things hurt my eyes. I closed them.

There were insects in my inner ear. Something rattled lightly. Then a high-pitched sound, like a whistle, though higher and more distant. I felt my face; the right side was numb. I shook my head slightly and the pain went stratospheric.

I slept for what seemed like hours. Finally I stood and immediately fell, as a flaming burst of glass shot up my left leg. The dog was there again. He was a collie, white and khaki, and stood in front of the door to the unit. I opened my mouth and closed it. The truck was in the same place. The windshield was cracked up the middle, one large split giving way to dozens of white tributaries. I was sitting down and had no idea how I could get there.

I heard his footsteps on the gravel. Hand.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he said. “What the fuck happened?”

I hated him. This was for him. They were here for him.

“Tell me!” he said.

“Where were you?” I breathed.

“What the fuck happened?”

I gathered my voice. “Where were you Hand?”

I raised my head and sat up. The beach was the same. Hand was farther out, swimming with his perfect stroke toward a small fishing boat. I stood and almost collapsed. I grabbed my knees and rested and rose again and waded in, still reeling, and the hands of the cold calm sea held my calves then seized my knees and wrapped its thick strong fingers around my thighs and its bony cold arms around my waist. I dunked my head and came back wet and stronger.

I pushed my hair from my face and smoothed it in back, letting the water exit my mouth and spread slowly down my neck. Hand lifted himself from the water so his head peeked into the empty boat. I couldn’t see what was there. But he was often finding things. He swam back; the boat was empty.

On the shore we dried in the sun. Far away, a fishing boat with an old man pulling from its side a huge fish, or a part of it. It looked like a swordfish, huge chunks torn from its sides.

“Scavenger fish,” Hand said. “They bite and disappear down.”

“Poor man.”

“Turn around,” Hand said.

“Why?”

“You didn’t show me that shit. Jesus.”

“What?”

“Have you looked at your back?”

“No. Sort of.”

“Fuck, man. You’ve got a huge bruise here”—he pushed his finger into the lower part of my left lat—“and right here”—he brushed his hand over my right shoulder—“it’s all red and scratched. It’s just nasty.”

“Doesn’t hurt back there.”

“Well, good. It’s nasty-looking.”

—You act like it wasn’t your fault.

—We’ve leapt over that.

—I’m not sure I have.

A strong-shouldered woman was playing with four small children by the water. They had buried the tallest of the kids and were giggling like henchmen. Their dog walked to us and waited for our attention. It was a small white thing with short legs, trailing a leash. This one was winking at us.

“He’s only got one eye,” said Hand. It was true.

I scratched the dog’s head. Half the animals in my life were missing an eye—growing up we’d fed nuts to a cycloptic squirrel, Terrence, that lived on our roof—and I couldn’t figure out if this was good luck or bad. The dog’s one eye was wide open and the other was closed tight around the vacancy. It was grinning, though—was accustomed to being appreciated.
Listen my friends, I have one eye, I’m winking at you, give me some of your love
. We scratched him everywhere, as he moved to guide our hands to his needs. When satisfied, the dog abruptly returned to his family. He had to get back to take care of some things.

As the tiny waves came to wet the sand with long hisses, I picked up my Churchill. Now he was at the Admiralty, whipping everything into shape, trying to increase the production of ships, honing his speechmaking skills, having the first of his children, writing beautiful letters to his Clementine. I’d never written a beautiful letter to anyone, and I had never fought the Boers, had never righted a derailed military train at Frere, never faced their artillery fire while loading wounded onto the cab and tender—

—Churchill what would you have done?

—When?

—In Oconomowoc.

—What? What are you talking about?

—I was beaten. They hit me with bats. I was in a storage unit, gathering Jack’s stuff, just going through it, I guess I was lost a bit and Hand was gone—

—Where was Hand?

—He went off, up the hill.

—Hand should have been there.

—I know. But if I allow myself to know that I’ll leave him, and I don’t want that. I do want it, so often, but I’m stuck with him, worse off without him, if you can believe it.

—I can.

—So what would you have done?

—I can’t say. The odds sound difficult.

—I would have fought next to you, Churchill. Anywhere. Did I tell you that? In India, I would have been there, leaping into musket fire. In Egypt, surveying the Dervish army at Surgham Hill, I would have been there. Cavalry, infantry, whatever—

“We should leave,” I said.

“Right,” Hand said.

We dressed quickly so we could drive through the countryside and tape money to donkeys. We’d been in Senegal for twenty hours and hadn’t given away anything.

I drove. I drove fast. The road was dry, passing through scrubland and the occasional farm, the roadside spotted with small villages of huts and crooked toothpick fences. The terrain was dry, the grass amber. We passed more blue buses bursting with passengers, staring at us, at nothing.

The donkey plan was Hand’s. As we drove, hair still wet, we looked for donkeys standing alone so we could tape money to their sides for their owners to find. We wondered what the donkey-owners would think. What would they think? We had no idea. Money taped to a donkey? It was a great idea, we knew this. The
money would be within a pouch we’d make from the pad of graph paper we’d brought, bound with medical tape. On the paper Hand, getting Sharpie all over his fingers, wrote a note of greeting and explanation. That message:

We saw many donkeys. But each time we saw a donkey, there was someone standing nearby.

“We have to find one alone, so the owner will be surprised,” Hand said.

“Right.”

We drove.

“This looks like Arizona,” Hand said.

“It was pretty lush in the resort, though.”

“Watch it.”

I had driven off the road for a second, with a whoosh of gravel and a tilt of the passenger side, then back on, level and straight.

“Dumbfuck,” Hand said.

“I’ve got it. No problem.”

“Stupid. Listen.”

There was a flopping sound.

“Pull over,” he said.

We had a flat.

We stopped. When we got out, all was very quiet. The earth was flat and the savannah was broken only by large leafless trees, bulbous at their trunks and muscled throughout. A bright blue crazily painted bus, full, drove by; everyone stared. The sun was directly above.

We got the spare and the tools and jacked the car up. We started on the lug nuts, but they were rusted and weren’t budging. We pounded them with the wrench with no results. We sat on the highway next to the car, suddenly both very tired. The pavement was so warm I wanted to rest my face on it. I imagined what lay ahead: hitchhiking to the next town, maybe catching the bus, then finding our way to some kind of garage, then negotiations with the mechanics, a tow truck back, then, hours later, the fixing of the flat. We’d waste the day. We’d already wasted too much.

A man appeared behind the car. In a purple-black dashiki, easily seventy, with a small square jaw and eyes small and black and set deep under his brows. He said nothing.

He inserted himself between me and Hand and, without a word, took over. He first placed a rock behind the back tire, to prevent rolling. We had forgotten that. Then, crouching, with hands that hadn’t, it seemed, seen moisture in decades, wrinkles white like cobwebs, he lowered the jack so the wheel rested on the road. He stood and with his sandaled old foot he kicked the wrench; the lug nut turned. He kicked again for each nut, and in a minute the tire was off.

“Leverage,” Hand said to the man, touching his shoulder. He was bursting and was about to say something stupid. “You are very good man!” he said, now patting the man on the back.

I put the new tire on, and the man allowed me to tighten the
lug nuts myself. When the job was done the old man turned and looked at my face and smiled and walked away. He still hadn’t said anything.

“Give him something,” Hand said.

“You think?”

“Of course.”

The man was now across the street, heading down the embankment and into the tall grass.

“You think it’s an insult?” I said.

“No. Go.”

I grabbed a bunch of bills from my thigh pocket.

I ran after the man and when I descended the embankment I realized I was barefoot. The rough earth scratched my soles but I caught him fifty feet into the opposite field.