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It ended like this.
"Get up, Doc!"
That woman's voice blistered me as I collapsed into the dusty whiteness.It started like this.
On a February day over twenty years ago, the anemic sky tenting the stickery fields of the Sierra Foothills as me and Heron, my young wife, a fleshy woman with shine, had just come to the same crossroads where, at eighteen, I'd escaped my mama's clutches by thumbing a ride with a semi hauling hay. That day so long ago I turned to steal a quick glimpse of my darling Heron, and reached across the car's seat and placed my hand on the pink cotton camisole covering her stomach to feel for movement our baby inside her.
Heron was hell bent on my mama seeing how I'd turned out. My sweet love smiled and said, "I just want her to know how much…" Because of that simple turn of my head, of my eyes, I didn't see the unexpected car sped round the corner, and in less than a breath we collided. Steel screamed and growled until its twisting hardness finally found the ditch and stopped. I could hear tires turn a revolution or two before stillness set in. The last thing I saw before the soft darkness settled in was faint auras spinning off chrome and spiders of cracked window glass.
Heron never did finish her sentence.
When I came to, she peered out from half-closed lids and the light from her eyes had drained. Her lips pursed open. She had faded to look like a rag left out in the sun too long.
"Baby, wake up," I begged, and gathered her in my arms. "Talk to me."
Later they told me I had to be sedated to get me to let her go. When I woke up in a hospital, my mama was peering down at me, the smoke from her lit Marlboro seeking its way past her face.
"No smoking, Mrs. Trent," said a hospital nurse. When Mama wouldn't put out the cigarette, she was asked to leave. She shrugged off the nurse's hand and whispered in my ear, "Hey, boy, don't forget your mama when you're a highfalutin vet!"
I used to tell people that the scent of cigarettes and bourbon signaled home to me because even between contractions I'm told my mama sipped bourbon and sucked drags from her cigarette.
When she had too many bourbons, she'd tell me how I got my name, Charlie Sebastian Paul Moccie Trent.
She'd pull me up close to her on the sticky, phony leather couch and we'd review the list. "I loved only three of 'em," she slurred. "Charlie, the Universal Life ordained minister...I swear that man could preach me right out of my skivvies." She'd fling her head back and let go her scrape of a laugh. "Now Sebastian, he sold tractors. I almost bought one!" If the bottle was empty, she'd feel under the couch where always hid another. "And Pauly. Pauly flipped hamburgers at the Dairy Queen. I used to love his cologne. I called it 'Midnight French Fry.'"
I'd try to escape from hearing about the others, but she'd clamp a hand tight on my shoulder and pull me right back down next to her. "Moccie boasted Indian blood and worked as a bouncer at the casino. My bet he were no Indian, though that skin of his did have the cast of terracotta. He had slow hands." Here came a burp. "Trent, the one whose name I took," she continued, "Trent looked like a movie star, but he were a shiftless son-of-a- bee hive. We never married. I came to hate that cowboy with a vengeance. I discovered he'd lifted my wallet, so took after him with a short-handled axe. Would've killed him if he hadn't torn off in that Chevy Celebrity of his'ins, kicking up a plume of dust a mile high until he hit the I-80 going south."
During those early years living with mama in the double wide, I managed to stay out of her firing line by keeping my head down. Her day to day temperament came from a homegrown anger rooted in disappointment. Living on the hard land, heating Chef Boyardee on a hot plate, and wearing skimpy cotton blouses and skirts with torn zippers from the Catholic Charities Thrift Store didn't reflect the image she had fashioned for herself. With the help of television soaps and dime store romance novels, she thought she had more coming.
Even as a small boy, I knew spending time on hope was a down payment on becoming a loser. So long about my sixteenth birthday, flooded with hormones which resulted in morning erections and acne outcroppings on both cheeks, I got down to business and aced every high school science class I took.
"Why you studying them books so damn hard, Runt?" Mama asked. "You ain't never gonna go no where but here." She laughed and squinted as the smoke from her Marlboro wound up, hot and toxic.
I landed a job with the unlicensed vet down the road where I shoveled piles of shit, held half-scared-to-death dogs during examinations, and had my clothes cat-shredded daily.
Then a couple of things happened.
First, on a day late in January, dryer than the season called for, I heard baby pleadings coming from inside the loafing stall. One of the week-old twins born to a dried up old Nanny goat lay curled in straw, forlorn, dehydrated, maybe with a fever. The diagnosis by my boss, the vet, who spent more time in the ongoing poker game in the corner of the feed store than doctoring critters, was the animal needed electrolytes. I gathered up the goat baby, and for a month fed the kid a cocktail of Gatorade, calcium and magnesium. At the end of three months, the puny thing, not only was still alive but trotted at the head of our small herd.
A few weeks later, while stuffing a flake of hay into the manger for the scrawny old draft who hadn't carried a rider or pulled a wagon in over ten years, I noticed a gash in the Percheron's hock. The flap of skin splayed bare tendons, tissues, and bloody muscle. I high-tailed it to the feed store.
Between hands, my boss spit out instructions to buy wound cleaner, enzymatic treatment, and vet wraps. In his cigarette voice he added to the list Banamine, a syringe, and needles.
He threw down his losing hand and scraped his chair back. "Check the draft's temperature and level of hydration before giving the injection." He shuffled out of the store.
I stitched them layers of tissue and in eight weeks the horse didn't even limp. That's when I decided to become a vet.
"You got a little something for your mama?" mama would ask when she found a paycheck from the vet lying on my dresser drawers. "I sure could use some nice hand cream, or better yet, a new dress." After I signed my last paycheck over to her, I raised my thumb at the crossroads, hopped a semi to Davis, and went to vet school on scholarship.
On a yellow afternoon, scalding valley heat slanting through Venetian blinds of the physiology classroom, where I studied a plastic model of a horse's left ventricle and made notes: 28 to 36 beats per minute resting. 1 liter of blood in each beat, when exercising, circulating adrenaline makes the contraction of heart more forceful so that...
I felt her gaze before I looked up. A pair of butterscotch eyes stared at me. They belonged to a creamy-skinned girl with galaxies of freckles, some clusters so dense they formed images like hearts or flowers. Plumpish and vibrant, a sparkle of sweat lay on her skin. She smiled.
"I'm Heron," she said. "Seems like you're really smart. Can I study with you?"
One cluster of freckles formed an image of a bird at that fleshy spot where her breasts began to mound. For whatever reason I've never been able to explain, except I felt it my right, more over my obligation, I reached out and touched the pigment.
My finger grazed her skin sparking the beginning. In the second semester, we thrilled at the knowledge that a tiny mass of cells the size of Heron's pinky lodged deep inside her, and we married. She called me Doc.
I finished vet school, but the loss of Heron and baby in the car accident left me wasted; my skin turned sallow, my eyes became red- rimmed, and the asthma set in dogging me for the rest of my life. Soggy with bourbon, more often than not I'd drive my car off the road in a state of reckless oblivion. I moved into a small cabin two counties away from where my mama lived, stocked a truck with medicines and large animal vet equipment, and managed to keep a client or two. Forced to take the cases no other vet would, more often than not I found myself at the ass-end of a horse in the middle of the night.
Any time I'd see a pretty girl with creamy skin and freckles, I couldn't stop myself from calling out, "Heron!" A husband or boyfriend would step in and suggest I go sleep it off. If I persisted, I'd wake up flat on my back in an alley, maybe a park. Once I found himself in the bed of a hay truck.
I lived in fear of complete sobriety, conscientiously filing down the rough edges of that aching gap in my gut with whiskey or pot or any kind of drug that dimmed the bright light of pain. I smoked Marlboros which made the asthma act up worse. Eventually I took to using an inhaler to keep my lungs from swelling to the point of closing. At night in my dreams I heard the sound of rolling waves. When I stood over the toilet to pee I'd realize them wave sounds came from the sound of phlegm breaking in my own chest.
One August when the sun hung in sheets of heat so parching that the land turned dry, brown, and brittle, I met J.T. Shaun at the Broken Spur Salon. J.T., a knock-about type with long hair and a sliver ring pierced in one ear, looked to be one of those no gooders who'd avoided Vietnam by manufacturing some cock and bull story that the government bought. That day, between beers J.T. said, "Hey, Doc. Come on out to my place. The beer's colder."
"Hell if I won't," I said. "My appointment book's as blank as my bank book." J.T. nodded and headed for the door. "That is if you don't mind hanging out with an old coot. I have a mite more years on me than you do, tadpole."
"Makes not a lick of difference to me," J.T. said.
Tuned out that J.T. not only had a small stake of five grubby acres, an old quarter horse named "Scat," a bottomless stash of pot, but a wife.
The first time I pulled into J.T.'s driveway, the wife tender-footed her way over to my truck to greet me, and I tell you, my breath stopped dead and I had to take a suck on my inhaler.
My Heron was back. Somehow she'd reassembled her cells and her tissues, put them all back together, and rolled them out like the sweet, soft dough of an apple strudel. She wore a white cotton top, little straps holding up back and front. Her creamy skin, fleshed up like a woman who ate more pastry than summer salad, shined and had freckles just about everywhere I could guess.
I peered at the spot where the clusters of freckles in the form of a bird should be. She followed my eyes and covered her skin with her hand where my stare bore down. But I'd seen. No bird there. Don't mean nothin'. I slid out of the truck.Maybe God took away that freckle tattoo before sending her back to me.
"Howdy," she said, and bit her lower lip. "I'm Heron." She thrust her hand and I took it. Felt like warm dough.
"Heron," I said. I chipped at a rust spot wearing on the paint of the truck's door. Then I turned away, gulping fast, trying to stave off the fall of gritty tears heading toward me. "Used to know a Heron. Long time ago."
She looked down, bare toes etched an arc in the dirt. "Yep," she said. The arc got bigger as did the rust wound I worked.
"You're younger," I said. I squeezed me off a shot of breath from the inhaler. "How old are you?"
"Nineteen," she said. "That would've been my older sister. Died in an automobile accident a year before I was born. My mama was trying to make another one just like the kid she lost. You know my mama?"
"Nope," I said. "Only knew Heron." It struck me strange that I hadn't heard of this girl with the same name as Heron's, but then I've been two counties away living in a fog. No reason for this detail to have cut through.
"Just as well. Mama was a loon."
I reseated my sweat-stained baseball cap a couple of times. They'd told this sweet thing a story. For whatever reason, they didn't want her to know she was my Heron.
From then on I found reasons to visit J.T.'s. "Got to check that nag of yours," I'd say, and end up staying long after the sun singed the horizon. Me and J.T. piled slices of beefsteak tomatoes and cucumbers from Heron's garden on molasses bread slavered with mustard and mayonnaise and washed it all down with beer. A toke for dessert. Whenever J.T. was out of earshot, Heron would ask me about her older sister, but I'd shake my head. She didn't understand. She was Heron.
Week after week, I stopped by the ragged place. One late afternoon, I wheeled into the driveway and discovered J.T. had gone to see the last game of the season played by his beloved River Cats he admired almost as much as his weedy stake and his wife. There was Heron on her knees in the garden. She looked up. Something was wrong.
"Things ain't lookin' so good. This damned old hose has seen its day." She stood. "I'm losin' my garden." Small sweaty rivers rolled down the sides of her face, and her halter, wet and transparent, stuck to her breasts and her nipples showed. "I gotta get another hose out of the storeroom and soak down the soil. Would you give me a hand, Doc?"
I followed her over the flag stone path, past the barn in a state of early decay, to a storeroom in the back. She tugged hard on the door, but it wouldn't budge. She tried again.
"Here," I said, and stepped around her, brushing lightly against her. I yanked hard on the swollen door. "It's a hummer," I said, and yanked again. It opened. She ducked past me and I could smell her scent of butter and cinnamon, maybe lavender. She flipped on a switch. From the back of the room a bare bulb shone dimly, enough so I could see the lace of cobwebs, unfinished walls, wine barrels, old tires, broken suitcases, a faded quilt hanging from a line of wire, and Heron.
In the half-light her skin turned to satin. My eyes wouldn't go no where but following the contours of her back, down to her waist, to her butt as she struggled to dislodge an old hose that had hardened over time.
"Let me do that," I whispered, and then I touched her waist, a gesture meant to say, step aside. But damn. My hands on her body. I sucked in. The chemical reaction of her softness under my hard, scarred hands jolted a course of blood straight to that place a roiling for her. No breath except for the phlegm-laden squirms of moisture filling my asthmatic lungs.
My Heron, my Heron.
All I knew was her creaminess, her dampness, the patterns of freckles. Felt like I was drinking a fizzy vanilla soda after coming in from a 100 degree pasture; my thirst bit deep, so enormous, I knew my throat couldn't hold the amount I craved.
On the dirt floor, rip of clothes. On top, drinking her in, thrusting, swallowing her tears, her saliva, hard -- so hard, deep. Love you, love you -- the roar of my need pounding in my ears so loud I heard no screams of help, no sobs of hurt, only the panting desire to surround her, consume her, bring her into me, to live inside me, until...the Goddamn exquisite shudder. Release.
And then silence.
When I pulled away and opened my eyes, for a split second: collision, grinding metal, the ditch. Heron looked at me out of half closed lids, her lips pursed open, as if she was about to finish a sentence.
"Jesus," I whispered. "I...I didn't mean...I didn't mean to do this." I stood, backed up. Drew a breath blocked by a dam of mucus. "Jesus." Now I knew. This woman on the floor weren't my Heron. My Heron was dead.
On my knees, the shreds of her panties in my hands. "I'm so...sorry.Forgive me."
I scrambled out of the dank room and ran to the truck. The engine screamed as I squealed into a sharp turn, railed down the road, rocks flying, tears stinging, fingering for the bottle of bourbon and the inhaler under the seat.
By the time I pulled up to my cabin, my legs barely held. Inside, I fell into the old, threadbare couch, and that gut-gaping hole of sadness spread so wide, it felt like the whole damn artic wind howled through.
Knocking...from a place so far away, I couldn't appraise the distance from there to here. It came louder and louder until I opened my eyes. The raps landed square on my front door.
Who in the hell...
I rubbed my sandy eyes. On the table a photograph of Heron smiled at me. I touched it, lurched, knocked it over. A woman crowed from the other side of the door, that voice full of Goddamn fear and vengeance. "Get up, Doc!"
Louder knocking. Time waved in front of me like shimmers on hot asphalt. Shit. When had I last been out? Days, a week? Jesus, not even a bath. Empty box of Sugar Pops, broken bourbon bottles, ashtray filled with butts, my jeans filthy, soiled with urine. Jesus.
"Sober up, old man. You got some doctoring to do!" she screamed from the other side.
I forced myself up and off the couch and I shuffled to the door. Muscles ached, disks in my neck rasped.
The knocking stopped. Thank the Lord she's gone. Turned back toward the dimness. A palm pushed through a pane of glass.
"Jesus H. Christ!" I flung the door open.
Heron stood on the doorstep. Not my Heron. The other Heron.
"Christ almighty, what're you doing here at this hour? It's the dead of night."
"Doc, you gotta come out and fix Scat," she said. "She's real sick." The girl standing on my porch morphed into the image of the woman lying on the dirt floor and shame threatened to strangle me.
"Jesus." My breath clotted, and I struggled to breathe. I grabbed the inhaler and took a desperate suck.
"About what I did..."
"Listen to me, Doc. I should've called the sheriff on you. Should've put you in jail, but I didn't cause...cause I guess I wanted to be the other Heron. The one everybody loved." She took a breath and stepped inside the door. "Yeah, well, if I didn't need you now to fix my horse, I think I just might put a bullet right through your pecker."
"Does J.T. know?"
"If he did know, you'd be a dead man. What about Scat?" "Scat?" "My horse, you damn fool."
My hand rasped over my chin. "When was the last time you got the nag up?" Again I sucked on the inhaler.
"Less than an hour ago. She managed to stand for about a minute, then her legs gave out."
"She hotter'n a pancake?" "Yeah, I guess." I sucked again, swallowed the mist. "My bet is it's the drat West Nile virus. Multiplies in the horse's blood system, crosses the blood-brain barrier. Infects the brain." Desperate for breath, I repositioned the inhaler. My words muffled. "That's why she can't stand. Her nervous system is screwed 'cause her brain's inflamed. She's an old one. Let her go."
"But Doc--"
I lowered the inhaler. "I want to help you. Don't you see, but I can't."
I shuffled through broken glass, backed her out and closed the door. I swigged out of a bourbon bottle. Maybe a third left, just enough to keep me lulled until I could manage to open another.
Suddenly the door exploded when the clang of a bullet hit metal. Splinters flew. "You gotta fix my horse, else she's gonna die." She stood there aiming the gun. "Get up, Doc."
I raised my hands. "So Goddamned ashamed. Forgive me."
A shuddering breath and the wheezing started. Slashes of sharp pain. I grabbed for the inhaler. Then a throbbing squeeze gripped my chest.
Images spilled in: high sun, hock flesh, lonely calls of winter geese, a coyote yipping in the brambles, Don't forget your mama when you're a highfalutin...the reach across the car to feel her abdomen, the tender life fluttering like a leaf on an Aspen tree, deep green on one side, diamond flashy on the other...
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