The Healer

He gazed at her with incredulous loathing.

She had thought of something. “He didn’t have dark hair, did he? Fine and straight—?”

“I don’t remember.” He looked away. “Maybe.”

“A blue turtleneck? Stained?”

“A dark turtleneck. I don’t know about stained.”

She clapped her hands. “I talked to him yesterday! At the restaurant! He’s looking for property!”

“He’s not looking for property. He’s another reporter.”

Ardis was musing. “Maybe. That’s what I thought. But eight hours, Ross. Eight hours. You know yourself she won’t give reporters the time of day any more. You practically have to—Well well well. It does seem like she got lost, all right. Lost in a truck ceiling. Just like the rest of them around here after all. A little slow to sort her ass from the heavenly bodies, but—” Ardis sat back in an attitude of relief. A moment later she leaned forward with her eyes googled and waggling her hands at the sides of her face. “Feelings! Funny feelings! Whooo! Must be from on high!”

“The reason she took him out,” he said carefully, his attention upon his plate, the food untouched, “I wasn’t there.”

“So you claim. But there’s nothing very new about that, is there, Ross? It’s never got her to take them out before.”

“I know what she’s thinking,” he said in an ordinary voice, although it no longer seemed to be his wife he was addressing. “I’m not fooled.”

“Look on the bright side,” Ardis said. “Even as we speak she’s out there solving our problem. Either she’s got off her rear end to sell property or she’s on her back arranging things another way—What are you doing?”

He was holding his dinner plate in his right hand, touching the rim of it to his left arm just below the shoulder. He was doing this casually, with his head tilted downward and to the side as if to regard the plate, and yet his attention seemed upon some object more remote.

Ardis’s hand went to her heart. She was silent now, and watched in a freeze of dismay as the plate moved swiftly rightward across his chest, his right arm extending, fingers releasing so that the plate sailed like a Frisbee through the doorway and across the space of the kitchen to explode against the oven door. There a gob of mashed potato adhered a moment to the Pyrex of the oven window before it fell away to leave a white pucker, and Ardis understood that the pucker appeared at that moment as white as it did only because the Pyrex was carbon-fouled inside a double pane, owing to an engineering flaw in that so-called quality stove, they get a reputation and the next thing you know immigrants working for chicken feed are asleep on their feet throwing together any old crap, and who pays—? She was on her feet. “Ross, honey, don’t!”

He now held his bread-and-butter plate in that same hand, the rim of it just brushing his left arm midway between the elbow and shoulder as if to indicate something there, and she looked to it hopeful, but his arm moved swiftly back, extending as before, and the wrist flicked, the fingers releasing, and that plate too travelled through the air, to smash against the hall-entrance door frame and scatter down the length of the hall to the front door.

“She doesn’t fool me,” he said again, quietly. “I know her.” And then he put his hands over his face and sat in silence.

Ardis lowered herself into her chair. It was as if she had been struck a blow to the stomach. She had no breath.

When he brought his hands away he was calm. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “And clear the table.” He pushed his chair back and with his hands on his knees, elbows spread, peered beneath the table at her stockinged feet, which were drawn together under her chair. The dog was still under there, and it looked out at him with frightened eyes. “Don’t walk.” He stood up. “I’ll get your shoes. You put the dog out and go straight to the room and wait for me there. Have the gear ready. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”

“Oh, Ross,” Ardis said, and sighed. Sighed so profoundly she could hardly speak. “I can talk a lot more like this than this, than, than, than—”

“No more. That’s enough. Where’s your fucking shoes?”

“My fucking shoes,” Ardis sighed and seemed about to faint in her chair at the table where she sat.

Wakelin and Caroline Troyer were back on the unpaved stretch, fifteen minutes into the washboard dance, when that rhythmic bump from the rear became enfolded by a sound more flubby and catastrophic. A flat tire.

Wakelin felt this was a job for himself, but he was too slow. Crouching beside her on the shoulder amidst blasts of dust and flying stones from the big trucks, he watched her forearms cord and soften as she loosened wheelnuts, one after the other. The nuts had seized, but she possessed the necessary strength, or more accurately the confidence of the strength and therefore she had the strength. What was this if not faith? Wakelin, extending the hubcap as a tray for wheelnuts, was tempted to make this point out loud, but when she took his tray and set it on the ground at her feet he remained silent, just continued to watch her hands and forearms, fighting an impulse now to reach out and touch them, to trace the perfection of blue veins in the backs of her hands as they worked, a desire that struck him as being exactly as creepy and inappropriate as it would strike her. But he knew that, he understood that, and was grateful to his genes, to his upbringing, to something, to be able to squat here in a state of as-good-as perfect control, blameless as your perfect gentleman, and just watch, while reflecting in a removed and dispassionate way upon the stubbornness of the physical world. And at that moment it came to Wakelin that paramount in a life in the country would be the physical problems, the small humiliations by intractable materiality, the cold-sweat stand-offs, and maybe he should think some more about this country-property thing.

The problem was, with a physical problem you really did have a problem. A physical problem was another order altogether from those issuing from the usual obstacles and defeats of money, work, and other people. When you had done all you could do and still something physical did not work, then it did not work. It was not like a magazine story, infinitely malleable given thought enough and time. Unless your name was Uri Geller and your physical problem was a shortage of bent spoons, you were not going to solve it by mind alone. When you had a problem writing a magazine piece you could always sleep on it, a fresh start. With a physical problem you could sleep on it as much as you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. For Wakelin, a fresh start in the physical world consisted of driving to Canadian Tire and throwing himself on the mercy of the first clerk who bothered to toss him a glance. It was buying a new one and paying extra to have somebody come around and set it up.

Caroline Troyer was speaking to him, telling him to fetch rocks for under the wheels on the passenger’s side, she’d be jacking on a grade.

Wakelin jumped up and jogged around the front of the truck and skidded down off the shoulder for two big rocks and clambered back up with one in each hand. They were bigger than they needed to be, the weight of ten-pin bowling balls, and twice he fell, embedding an elbow in the soft gravel, but he made it and jammed them in. “Done,” he said, squatting once more at her side, game as a puppet.

Now she unbolted the spare from under the bed and located the axle and positioned the jack and jacked the truck and removed the blown tire and lifted on the spare and tightened the nuts partway and unjacked the truck until the ground held the tire, and tightened the nuts the rest of the way and unjacked the truck until it came down fully onto its springs and the jack was loose enough to free it from under the axle and threw the blown tire into the bed. And this entire procedure Wakelin followed helplessly ever one step behind, not quite keeping out of her way, his thoughts lapsed to overexposure, his mind bleached, the small interior voice stuck meaningless back there with What was this if not faith? stuck and repeating. And the world as manifest on that dirt shoulder in that corridor of spruce and fir under the deepening blue of evening, a cooler breeze from the forest margin fragrant with fungus and conifer in mitigation of the vaporous gritty pall of dust and diesel upon that stripped road surface, the world rose up on its old elbows aggrieved, and seeing it that way Wakelin felt a need for redemption, or something like it, a need undiminished by his utter ignorance concerning what redemption could be or how to get it. Why it should be necessary at all.

And then she was taking the jack out of his hands (dismantling it as she did so) and the socket wrench, and this hardware she replaced behind the seat while he struggled to fit the hubcap back on, but after one glance she repositioned it and kicked it on herself. And so much further unnerved was he by the short sharp efficiency of this action in the midst of all that personal chagrin, all that despair of old helplessness, that he had climbed into the cab and buckled himself in before he realized that she herself was not getting in but walking around the back of the truck to kick away the rocks he had placed under the tires, except then when he glanced around, she was just standing there looking at them.

He struggled out of his seat belt and threw open his door. “I can do that!” he called. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot—” He jumped down.

“You put them at the backs of the tires,” she said.

Wakelin was not sure if this statement was descriptive or prescriptive. He checked the rocks. “Right,” he said.

She was walking back to the driver’s door.

Wakelin continued to stare at the rocks. Something was wrong, but what? And then he saw that he had wedged them under the upslope side of the tires, and a hot wavefront travelled his neck and cheeks and climbed his temples, and though there was no need at all he kicked away the rocks and did so with some energy.

They were on the road again. A few minutes later back on asphalt, moving once more down a corridor of spruce and fir, and that rear bump had not gone away.

Roused from his mortified flush, Wakelin looked over.

Her eyes were fixed down the road. “It’s the good tire blew,” she said.

It’s always this, Caroline Troyer reflected. The main thing about thought: move away. From anything it lights on. It doesn’t matter what it is. Like a fire or a Slinky, move away and start up again some place else. Move away and do it different. Do it as it should be. As things like this used to be. When they were better. Or if it seems to be a good thing it’s lit on, then do it as precious. Out of reach. Or better: do it sacred. That’s right, sacred, needing defending. Or do it lost forever, at any time now. That’s always a good one.

Now in memory, she is standing in her windbreaker and cap and rubber boots before her father in the yard, where blank gravestones lean among winter weeds along the chain link. It is a hard bright morning. The air is cool, the sun hot. He kneels on a foam pallet before a glassy stone, a drill in his hand. He is wearing sound mufflers, a dust mask, goggles. He switches off the drill. He pulls the mask and goggles down around his neck but not the mufflers, and the fine salmon dusting of marble leaves naked white goggles around his eyes.

I’m going up the hill, she says.

You should.

I’ll be back to make lunch.

I’d appreciate it.

And in memory she is climbing through the sumacs and among the pines above the war memorial and following the rising path along the ridge. Where the rock is exposed it is warm from the sun and the snow is granular and has been quick to recede. The air is cool in the shade where the snow lies deep yet in places, and the path is muddy but not where the shade now falls or has fallen upon it today.

Her destination is not the highest part of the ridge but almost. It is a sloped clearing several yards in diameter below, but not visible from, the path, south-facing, where no immediate green is visible as yet except the mosses and conifers. Neither is rock visible, but scratch for ten seconds and there it is. The clearing is surrounded by young hemlock and balsam. Higher up, above the path, a white pine. The clearing is sheltered and warm on days when few are. It is a place where animals bring their kill or perhaps are themselves killed here, for it is scattered with the intricate bones of small birds and mice and voles, and the skeletons of squirrels, and even a few of the vertebrae and what remains of the forelegs of a fawn, all bleached to the chalk whiteness of bone.

This is her sanctuary. No people come here. In this place it is possible to believe that no one knows where she is. Here she kicks off her rubber boots and spreads her white legs. At her feet is a screen of chokecherry and dogwood thick enough, even unleafed, to cancel the town. A brown creeper darts pecking through the winter stalks. Eastward the white meridial pain of the spring sun. South, the undulant bluish grey and lime-green horizon of forested hills. She can hear a killdeer, she can hear a Canada jay. A squirrel gone squirrelly at her trespass. She can hear the ravens, from the bluff on the other side of the summit, up in arms as ever, and she can hear the wind that moves through the white pine above her, a tunnel of soft roaring. And she feels smaller breezes on her face and arms, smells the insolate fragrance of the mosses, and as her fingers sift the pulpy till, her thoughts do not recede but slow and quiet to a sequence of resistances in her skull, small catches, palpable in their succession.

To go to that place is to wake from thoughts inspired by the dream of freedom that are not freedom.

She is not free now, only remembering her secret place on the ridge as she drives her father’s truck through the dusk listening to a man so reactive to himself, so blind, that a properly intuitive choice such as where he will spend his solitude is perplexed, impulsive, in the end will be the result practically of chance; that the nature of his relationship with a woman he lost nearly two years ago is no less complicated a mystery for him tonight than it was on the day he lost her, his suffering hardly diminished, his life snagged, twisting on that loss. And five minutes after she has delivered this lost soul to his car, she will stand before another baffled devious sufferer, her father, whose pain instead of a maundering aggrieved soliloquy will issue in old rage, because he is the one who long ago laid claim to the unpredictable, and how dare she by similar behaviour presume?

She should phone. Where on this stretch has she seen a phone?

Her passenger rambles on. First they sell you their version, done out in the way they imagine resembles your own, and then they sell you what they have come to sell you. This is why to hear him you would almost think his disappointment was a small huddled sadness and not a wail of self-pity and flailing rage at the one lost.

One of her headaches is starting. She attends to the pain as to distant thunder, and then she attends to herself thinking about her father’s rage, and that is when she notices a cast to this thinking, a cast familiar yet difficult to discern because obscured by its subject, or rather by his nature, by his own cast. And that is when she understands that these thoughts, although hers, although old catches in old succession, are kinetic with other energy that is not simply her own old emotion. And she understands that this other energy is not her own anticipation arising out of past experience. And she knows that it is another’s, that it derives from some other site that is finding repercussion here.