The Healer

Bachelor Crooked Hand, Wakelin thought. It’s got to be.

When one of the carpenters looked over at Wakelin, the other, taller man, the one speaking, turned to see who or what had caught the carpenter’s attention. But only briefly, too briefly for Wakelin to see his eyes, which required the merest glance to discover the utter lack of significance of this arrival. And so Wakelin found himself standing waiting for the man to finish telling a story, a rural incident, in which a child’s head had been sawed off in front of its mother, except that the sawer had got either the wrong child or the wrong mother, and this would be the lawyer’s plea: diminished guilt by reason of mistaken identity. Not so much grief caused as otherwise, your Honour.

Lawyers, fuck ‘em, Wakelin thought. And then he wondered what the teller was pretending to think: that a stranger would show up in an empty exhibition hall in out-of-season fairgrounds where nameless construction was under way and just stand around being pointedly ignored while eavesdropping on a leisurely recounting of some grisly local horror? And then he saw a look pass between the two carpenters and one of them glanced over, and that did it. He stepped forward.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The man stopped talking. The native considered Wakelin once more.

“I’m looking for Ross Troyer,” Wakelin said.

Now the other turned to face him. He was taller and older and better dressed than either his companion or Wakelin. He wore a collarless stitch-striped blue shirt with dress jeans and loafers. His face was handsome like a child’s, large and mild, and he wore his hair long and combed back in waves, like a movie star’s, except that there was something terrible about his eyes. It was as if they had been lobbed in on a dare from a distance of several feet, or as if it just happened to be human sockets they had landed in, it could as easily have been a wolf’s. The irises were milk-green, paler than the circle of the sun-beat face and paler still at their inside than their outside rims, a circumstance causing an impression of concavity, which in turn caused the pupils to appear to protrude, like rods. Rods that swelled and contracted, swelled and contracted, until they had got Wakelin just right. Then they stopped moving.

The man said nothing at all, just drilled Wakelin, just skewered him.

“Are you Ross Troyer?” Wakelin said.

In reply, heavy lids lowered slowly over the terrible eyes. Lifted once more.

“I’m Ross Troyer,” the other, hairless man said.

“Oh, really?” Wakelin cried and turned, so surprised he behaved like someone startled. “I thought you were—” Holding out his hand.

The hairless man’s hands remained in the pockets of his coveralls. He just looked at Wakelin. Face of iron, acid-pocked iron.

“What do you want?” the first man said, any impatience he might have felt at his companion’s little trick directed clean at Wakelin.

Turning back to him, Wakelin said stupidly, “You’re Ross Troyer?” and then, “I’m looking for some country property. Something—”

“You talked to her?” Troyer said quickly, a glance at his friend.

“Yes, I—”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me to talk to you.”

Troyer nodded. He seemed to wait.

And so Wakelin talked to him. He said what he had planned to say, the same thing he had said with fanatic earnestness to every realtor he had spoken to when he was up in this area last summer, in his hot hand the money Jane had left him, when he truly was looking for a place in the country. Or thought he was. Three months off and on, spring to fall, he had searched. Nothing. Until one airless September night in a cricketing motel room, not so far from here actually, he had leaned into the half-unsilvered mirror above the cigarette-burn scalloped dresser top and asked himself what exactly he thought he was going to do in the country. Get in touch with his grief? Commune with the chipmunks? Hang himself from a tall oak tree? When no answer came from the glass, he drove back to the city where he would rid his mind of all thought of sylvan redemption. Or try to.

The word Wakelin had used most often in his statement to realtors last summer when describing what he was looking for in a piece of property was silence. He used this word again now in his statement to Ross Troyer. Silence. Country silence. No neighbours, no traffic. No highway over the next hill. He told Ross Troyer that he had been searching for silence since early spring. He asked him if he realized how hard it is to find silence in the city. He told him how in his search for silence he had crossed and recrossed half the southern Shield, that he was serious, that he could pay cash. He told him exactly how much he could afford to pay (though he could afford a little more than what he said, because he still had the money from Jane). He did not tell Ross Troyer (and did not know himself) if he was talking about silence because silence was still, or ever had been, of genuine value to him, or because last summer he had talked about it so often that he was starting to believe in it himself, or because in the pressure of the moment he was mouthing bits of last summer’s speeches, and really this was nothing but words. Repeats, at that. Old words. He didn’t believe in silence and never had. And he did not tell Ross Troyer that the sole reason he was here—conscious reason—was to find a way to talk to his daughter in order to get enough new material on her healing activities, or on her having given them up, so that he could go back to the city and write the story and so move on to the next and after that the next, and all this talk about silence was really just a symptom of a private fantasy of respite from the mechanical round of the life of a man who had lost its compass when he lost his wife.

After Wakelin finished talking there was a pause while Troyer fixed him with his pupils before he said, “You’re not going to find much for that kind of money.”

“Yeah,” Wakelin replied wearily. He had heard this many times.

“Of course, if you could see your way to coming in a little higher—” But Troyer was already shrugging, and in the tired casual voice of one advising a fool he added, “Drop by the office tomorrow. I can show you what I’ve got.” And he turned upon Wakelin a look that might have been intended to say he was sorry not to be able to be more encouraging, but what the look actually said was, Now you get the hell out of my sight.

Wakelin glanced across at the hairless man to see if he might offer some sort of foil for this sentiment, but everything about the look he received from that quarter made it clear that it was not for one such as Wakelin to know how it was inside that balaclava of flesh.

Wakelin walked down the echoing hall and out into the bright heat of the afternoon. He knew he could climb into his car and be back in the city by dinnertime. He knew he could just write off this whole gig. Flop down in front of the tube in time for the ten o’clock news. Wake up tomorrow and start on something quick and clean and over with by the end of the week. Something without all this northern history. This cast of the repressed.

Except that as he drove south, approaching Grant, with every conscious intention of passing through and keeping going, he turned in suddenly at a motel called the Birches. There the grass had been trimmed to the bases of the slender white trunks of those trees and made a green carpet to the river. There, owing to the fine summer weather, all the tired woman on the desk had available was a cabin out back. “Sounds good to me,” Wakelin said, and a few minutes later he was unlocking the door of a mock-log shack hardly big enough for a double bed, a small hot space smelling of mould spores, Pine-Sol, and cigarettes. Tens of thousands of cigarettes, from the decades when every holiday traveller smoked and the scenery when viewed at all was viewed asquint.

Wakelin was in the trance that goes with doing the opposite of what you’d intended, when everything has to be thought about because nothing now is going to be easier than to start making mistakes. You are off-track, which is to say you are divided against yourself, and who better qualified to fuck you up? For ventilation’s sake Wakelin left both the door and the one small window of his hot shack wide open, took off his shoes and socks, and shuffled down the carpet of grass to the river in its narrow channel.

Divided or not, he was not, it seemed, ready to give up on this story, and not because things were going so well. All he had for tomorrow was a pretext for reentering the Troyer Building. To learn what her father had to sell him. Mind you, given the general tenor of his welcome around here, this could be considered a significant achievement for one day. Tomorrow morning he’d be waiting out front when she opened for business, her father would still be upstairs shaving, and this time she would talk to him.

Not likely.

So why was he still here?

For a chance, like a believer, to touch the hem of her garment?

Wakelin looked to the water, sliding with a constant force. So swift, so black. Universal magnet for despair. He sat down. Not one for rash acts or anything like that, but a single move could undo that favourite little idea about himself forever.

Something not kosher between the father and the daughter. Not to this day, maybe, but once. He could feel it. Something.

Was this what was keeping him here? The story behind the story?

The shore opposite was talus at the foot of a height of black rock with the disshevelled appearance of igneous toothpaste squeezed a hundred feet out of the earth and fallen back on itself with a great weight. The cliff was barely in shadow, but the shadow was headed this way, across that spill of rock. Wakelin lay down on the grass where he sat, an arm over his eyes. He was hardly sleeping these days. Compensated by being half asleep most of the day and dozing at any time. There on the grass he fell asleep and dreamed that he was back in the city, in the summer night. At that small hour when the commotion stumbles to rest, when the roar of human commerce subsides to a broken peace, when at any moment you are liable to be jolted upright by a muffler-less acceleration, by a window slammed shut against a drunk bellowing in the street, by cats yowling and hissing in the grey backyards of the morning.

In the city Wakelin slept with a pillow over his ear, a feather buffer, but for some reason the pillow made the fear worse, and most nights he woke afraid, sometimes with a cry or a shout, sometimes crouched by the bed, toes gripping the fibre mat, no idea why, no particular memory of a particular dream, just the fear. This had been going on so long and was so familiar and at the same time so fresh a condition that Wakelin had all but forgotten it had been no different when Jane was alive, that it had not started with losing her. With Jane, when he bolted up in terror, he had trained himself to pass straight into the follow-through, pillow in hand, a comforter pulled from the hall closet as he passed, and he was on the futon in the living room, already working at getting back to sleep, rocking his hips in a steady rhythm, something he could not do in the same bed with Jane, who felt every shift, heard every sound. If so much as the pattern of Wakelin’s breathing changed, she was wide awake. What’s wrong? she would whisper, and she would be talking to him.

Nothing, Love. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.

What was wrong? He blamed the city, he still blamed the city, but he knew the city was not it. Not really. Sometimes when Wakelin slept it was as if the sweet flow of his dreaming were a supersaturated solution the faintest ping could crystallize to terror. As he slept, his mind would pass out through the pillow pressed against his ear, and it would range across the ambient field until when the moment was ripe it would pluck one sound and swell it to a chime. Ping! Time for your fear, Tim! This was how it happened on the riverbank behind the Birches. In the distance somewhere, all but beyond auditory range, probably, the slam of a screen door exploded like a gunshot inside his head, and it was a detonation of sorrow, a bullet of fear and longing. He sat up on the grass in the shadow of the black cliff, and the blue sky above him was perhaps not cold but it looked cold. He got to his feet shivering, the arm lately over his eyes now numb and useless, brushing himself off with the other, and walked stiffly back to his mock shack, which had retained the heat of the day with the same shabby tenacity it had retained the cigarette smoke of its occupants and the spores of the mould in the carpet and the cheap curtains, and he curled up on the warm bed with a gentle rocking of his hips, and he was grateful for that warmth now.

Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.

Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.

And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.

In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.

Ross Troyer leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for his daughter Caroline, who climbed up and pulled hard at the door but not hard enough for the door to engage. It was an old truck.

He raked his fingers through his hair, observing in the rearview the effect of doing so upon the lie of it.

“Door’s not shut,” he said.

She tried it again.

“Who got in?” he murmured, his old joke. His eyes had left the rearview. She was clicking into her seat belt.

His hand went lightly to the handle of the knife in the sheath at his left side, as it often did. Then his hand went to the ignition. “Better wind down that window.”