Absolute Zero (13 page)

Jolene Sommer hung up
the phone and paused for a moment with her palm on the plastic receiver where his voice had been.

Broker, the guide.

She sat at the kitchen table, exhausted, taking refuge in a cup of coffee, staring out the window. At the edge of the backyard patio, a red cardinal was inspecting an empty feeder that dangled from a barren tree limb. She knew what Sharon Stone wore to the Academy Awards last year, but she didn’t know what kind of tree it was. She never caught the knack of feeding the birds. She barely remembered to feed the cat.

Hank had . . .

She looked away and restarted her thoughts. Broker. She had a notion of him from up north, paddling with Allen through the night in an effort to save Hank.

He was not smooth and all tucked in like Allen. He had a deep-set tongue-and-groove muscularity and he was at home in his body, which was important. He had a quiet voice; simple perhaps, but direct. She tried to remember his weathered face, the light, courteous touch of his hand that day at the hospital.

Jolene was good at first impressions. She was also good at puzzles, the ones with pieces. She wasn’t so good at crossword puzzles—yet—because her vocabulary needed work. She believed you liked a person in the first seconds when you met them or you didn’t. She had liked Phil Broker. He possessed a solid, old-fashioned quality, like he’d been made to last.

Her eyes moved across the spacious kitchen and back out the window past the bird feeder to a jumble of oak rounds strewn on the dead grass by the woodshed behind the garage. A heavy splitting maul was imbedded deep in one of the upright rounds. Rust had formed an orange scab on the wedged blade.

A muffled crash echoed up from the basement and that was Earl dropping his barbells on the carpet. Earl had installed himself downstairs, where, like a bilge pump, he’d siphoned away just enough of the bills to keep the house—and her—afloat.

Earl was a creature of habit. And so, to her regret, was she. When things fell apart, when she realized she was facing this crisis literally broke, with nothing for resources but a couple of credit cards—she’d reached out to Earl.

Which had been a large mistake.

Jolene rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. After all these years about the only thing she could say about Earl was that he’d peaked early and still looked good with his shirt off.

They just couldn’t seem to break the pattern—she’d go off on her own and wind up drinking too much. Earl would step in and pull her back from the brink. Her part of the deal was to manage Earl’s temper so he didn’t go berserk on people.

This dynamic spun in circles for more than thirteen years, since high school; except for the year and a half when Earl went off on his own tangent in the army. That was after the mess out in Washington. He’d signed on to Desert Storm, trekked deep into the Iraqi desert with the 24th Mech, eager to redeem himself. Spent six months battling nothing more serious than sand and fleas, and he came home without any real medals, just one sandy case of the clap. All his life Earl just couldn’t catch a break.

Until now.

Jolene finished her coffee and put the cup in the dishwasher, added detergent, and tapped the start button. Then she paced the kitchen, touching up the table, the island, and the counter with a damp washcloth. Her life had turned into one of those ads from a woman’s magazine at the check-out counter.
Be thinner, richer; live in a beautiful house . . .

Right.

The first few days she had been stunned and needed Earl to guide her. But now she was over the initial shock and not real sure she wanted Earl back in her life, living in her basement, playing his mind games, waiting for her to lose it and start drinking again so it would be old times again. Him calling the shots.

Well, she wasn’t going to drink today. She had fourteen months of sobriety in the bank. And not a penny more. Hank had tied up every cent he owned in the trust.

Trust had sure turned into a funny word around this house.

Jolene took a deep breath. Earl always started out intending to do it by the rules. Just trying to help, he’d taken Cliff Stovall off for a heart-to-heart, to convince him to open the trust. She didn’t know the details, but she could guess. Earl got mad. So far, no cops had come snooping around.

And the bills . . .

Jesus Christ, when she faced the idea of the bills she thought of the scene in
Jaws
when Roy Scheider first sees the shark and he jerks back—like whoa. Now, like Roy, she needed a bigger boat.

She shook her head and let her eyes drift back out the window to the woodpile. She could not imagine Earl yanking out the maul, splitting the wood, stacking it in tidy rows. He enjoyed watching it burn, all right, in the fireplace but it never occurred to him to go out and split more when it ran out. For all his pampered muscles, Earl refused to sweat outside a gym. He was the future, he’d said. In the future, the third-worlders would do the physical work. Mexicans, probably.

She looked out the window for a few more moments at the hungry cardinal and the brown leaves and the gray sky. The morning was like a moody song from an oldies station: sentimental. Perfect for feeling sorry for herself. Perfect for stinking-thinking.

It was one of her favorite alcoholic fantasies: being rescued. And a lot of men had come to grief on it, walking into a dark barroom and seeing her marooned on a bar stool.

That’s what had been so perfect about meeting Hank. She met him sober.
I know I was bad, but just give me this one chance and I promise I’ll be so good . . .

Hank had rescued her, all right, but Jolene saw right away that his ex-wife had handled the finances. Hank was lost around money.

The hammer fell about ninety minutes after she got to the intensive care unit at Regions in St. Paul. A neurologist had been called in to evaluate Hank; his workup and consulting was costing hundreds of dollars a minute.

Then this square-shaped lady in a maroon and black business suit had trampled though the blue-garbed medics like a rhino trashing a patch of petunias. She had pointed out that Hank Sommer’s Blue Cross policy had lapsed because of nonpayment of premiums.

Private pay.

Boy, those two words could empty a hospital ward of smiles real fast.

Well, no way could she keep him in the hospital at two, three grand a day. Milt Dane protested, said she couldn’t just take him AMA—against medical advice. Jolene, mad, said, “Watch me.” Hank had already had a feeding tube inserted, so Earl borrowed a wheelchair and they brought Hank home in Earl’s van.

A bad move that almost alienated Milt, which she could not afford to do. Now she was smoothing that over; in the meantime, until Milt put Hank in a fancy nursing home, she was working round the clock, playing nurse. And while she was sure that Milt worried about her not sleeping, the real reason he wanted Hank in that home was so he could check on him without running into Earl, whom he despised.

Riiiinggg.

An alarm went off. Every two hours alarms went off. Feeding alarms, turning alarms, range of motion alarms, bathing alarms. She heard Earl coming up the basement stairs.

“Great. Another nice guy who just wants to help out. Oh, I can drop off the Ford, no problem,” Earl said, mimicking Broker’s voice. “I hope him and Allen don’t trip all over each other.”

Earl wore an electric-yellow T-shirt with a
War Wolf
logo in Day-Glo blue. He’d scissored out the sleeves to show off his biceps. The shirt was a size too small and clung to his torso and wadded around his hips, clearly revealing the deep-cut ripple of his abdominal muscles and the curve of his belly above the tops of his jeans which he wore without underwear and very low on his hips, with a shadow of pubic hair peeking up and over.

Earl was unshaven and his hair was moussed and he was into looking like Brad Pitt in
Fight Club
this week. The stud in his ear and the cannabis shine to his blue eyes had the same tight sparkle. Jolene didn’t really care for Earl swinging his abs back and forth in her kitchen. “You’re losing your pants,” she said.

Earl smiled. “You didn’t used to mind that.”

“Why don’t you grow up,” she said.

“Aren’t we sounding grandiose today,” he quipped back. He knew all the AA jive and where all her buttons were. He’d started patrolling the house, peeking in cabinets and drawers, looking for hidden bottles of vodka.

A static sound between a dry-heaving pant and a raving growl shushed their little spat. The sound came from a white plastic baby monitor on the counter. The monitors were Jolene’s idea; she had placed them throughout the house to help her keep track of Hank.

Earl said, “C’mon, it’s feeding time.”

To him it was a fairy tale. He was Jack and he’d climbed the beanstalk and had stumbled on the mythic goose and now all he had to do was keep the goose alive until it squeezed out the golden egg. Hank’s care and feeding were a serious, round-the-clock commitment.

They went down a flight of circular stairs, through the bedroom, and out on the full-season porch that ran most of the length of the back of the house.

Hank was pink-cheeked and clean shaven, with spittle drooling down his chin. He wore a pair of diapers and a hospital gown and was propped up in a railed Hil-Rom hospital bed, fidgeting slightly back and forth. His neck twitched, his eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. He could move his lips and tongue. The feed bag hung on an IV tree above him and a strap buckled his chest as a precaution against pitching off the bed. Allen said the movements were just spasms, involuntary. Sometimes Hank’s eyes would burn on her so intensely that she was sure he was in there, watching.

Jolene squared her shoulders and went into the room.

Actually, it was good that he lurched around; it gave him a fighting chance against the bedsores. For the last five days she had followed a strict schedule that included turning and repositioning Hank side to side every two hours—feeding and hydrating him, manipulating his arms and legs in passive range-of-motion exercises twice a day, bathing him, constantly swabbing his mouth and gums with a suction wand, and changing his diapers, which Allen referred to as adult pads.

First she wiped his chin and checked his throat. She picked up the electric suction wand and cleaned away excess saliva and mucus from his teeth and gums.

Earl took a can of Ensure from a case of the product, opened it with a church key, and dumped it in the continuously running gravity drip which spiked off the bag that connected to his stomach tube.

He tossed the can at the wastepaper basket by the door. Missed. The empty clattered on the hardwood floor. Earl licked a finger. “Yum, yum. Prune dip, my favorite.”

“Knock it off, Earl,” Jolene said. “And pick up the goddamn can.”

Earl grumbled and retrieved the can and tossed it in the basket, backhanded. “He scores.”

She cut him with a stare.

He sneered back. He didn’t like it when she’d sheared off her hair. Or when she’d brought in the single bed to sleep next to Hank at night. He thought the hair and the single-bed routine were overwrought theatrical gestures.

“Hey, c’mon; we need a little gallows humor to break the mood around here,” he said. Laughing, he backed off and then, goddamn him—just to be coarse, he tipped a few books from the bookcase as he was going out the door, like a mean little kid.

Jolene smoothed a hand through her shorn hair, took a deep breath to steady herself, and, as she swung her eyes around the room, she met her reflection in the mirror framed in the bookshelves. She was sunken-cheeked, haggard. Red around the eyes like a speed freak on a long burn. Still . . .

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

She’d known she had it when she was about seven. By the time she got to high school it could ripple over her face like a dark wind.

Even now, strung-out exhausted, she had it. For half a beat she engaged the rare expression before it sparked away. It was something a good photographer had to sneak up on because she couldn’t duplicate it on cue. This was America—so the way you really knew you had it was if you could sell it.

She had logged some shoots and she had a portfolio. She’d been told that, if she put in the work, she could give New York a try. But she kept waking up in cheap rooms with a hangover and Earl in the bed next to her.

And then she met Hank.

Jolene turned from the mirror and studied the wreckage of her husband.

Once she’d thought the worst thing in the world could only happen directly, physically, to her. Now it had happened to someone else, and she was definitely feeling it. She’d cut her hair to honor the emotion.

“That’s a change. You taught me that,” she said under her breath.

As she reached over and eased the sweaty mop of hair away from Hank’s wild eyes she wrinkled her nose. She was getting used to the diaper smell. Dutifully, she changed him, and, as she wiped him clean, she noticed how the muscle tone was already turning to taffy. Her hard old Hank was spreading into a puddle of flesh.

She deposited the diaper in the diaper caddy and kneaded the residue of white talcum powder between her fingers. One of life’s safe things. For a moment, she almost remembered the fragrance from infancy, from before walking and talking. She pursed her lips. “Hank, you tough old fart, now that you’re not here anymore I think I’m starting to appreciate you.”

He’d grown up fascinated
with the war-soaked fiction of Hemingway, James Jones, and Norman Mailer; so, like many wanna-be writers out of that tradition, he’d conducted a love affair with near-death. He’d hung it out there more than most and returned from the edge with a fair scrapbook
.

Now he knew he’d just been a tourist.

There was only so much of him left. Left here at least. Portions of him were missing and sometimes he suspected they had moved on to somewhere else.

All he could manage now was the sensation that the inside and the outside were merging; that the things he thought were him were blending slowly with the things that weren’t. He had the distinct feeling that he’d been wearing his skin like a blindfold all his life.

Storms of human weather still took the form of shadows that brought food and nourishment. He vaguely knew the slosh was being inserted into his feeding tube. Inside, he felt his stomach ripple in anticipation and the drool beaded on his tongue but he couldn’t control his tongue, it just crawled around in his mouth, wagging at nothing.

. . .

Sometimes there was more than nothing.

Glimpses.

Damaged snapshots from a burned family album. All alone in the dark theater of his head, he became a child again, waiting for the show to start.

I remember . . .

And suddenly he was there with his first memory . . .

Mom.

She was strongly made, a dark-haired farm girl with large hands, on a rubber pad on red linoleum, scrubbing, down on her knees with a can of Babbo and a pail at her side. She’d put out the front page of the
Detroit News
to keep Hank off the wet floor, and the grainy picture on the newsprint was gritty black and white and showed soldiers raising a flag above a scrub of brush.

She was first-generation American, with cousins fighting for Hitler and a husband in the Pacific killing Japs. He remembered the cool, sticky scent of lipstick, powdery cosmetics on soft leather, and the smell of Chesterfields in her purse. The war was everywhere. Like fat, black victory germs, the endless factory smoke sprinkled down on the snowbanks.

At play in the summer backyard, among tomato plants that grew up in humid green waves down in the hot tickling dirt, under the leaves, in the emerald-filtered light, he dug holes for his toy soldiers. Tiny khaki vinyl men. Dappled shadows.

Like the island jungles on the other side of the world where his dad . . .

First song. An old scratchy 78
.

“Feudin’, Fussin’, and a Fighting” by Dorothy Shay.

The song played on the night his dad came home from the Pacific. Dad was hugs and tumbling on the floor, a smell of tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. Whiskers.

Two years later they were both gone, instantly, in a head-on crash. Mom’s sister raised him after that. Holy Roller Church four times a week to keep him out of trouble.

Sister Wolf at the young people’s meeting on Friday night would work her pimply congregation with guilt and shame, and then close the sale with cold-war terror. The bombers, she would say, have left Russia and are coming to drop their atom bombs. You better give your soul to Jesus tonight. And during the altar call he learned to go forward in the second wave, so the preachers were busy laying hands on the first rush and he’d slink on his knees right through the thrashing of the Holy Ghost and creep out the back door of the basement auditorium and sneak a cigarette in the alley.

First bike. Schwinn. Red. With fat, treaded tires pebbles got stuck in and clicked on the sidewalk.

First woman. Halloween night, 1960, his freshman year at Wayne State in Detroit. She was older, a high-breasted Canadian graduate student down from Toronto for a party, impressed enough with his persistence to take on his sexual education. Set the bar real high for all the slow American girls to follow.

. . .

The first man he killed . . .

. . .

But then he heard the words
. . .

“So here’s the thing,”
Jolene thought out loud as she ran the suction wand over Hank’s gums and around his tongue. “Whatever I did before, I haven’t done any of it since I’ve been sober.

“Remember what you said about drunks being lucky because they can reinvent themselves? How they can lump all the bad stuff they did together and flush it down the past. What I’m shooting for here is to see you through this thing to make my amends. The problem is goddamn Earl doesn’t seem to get it.”

She fluffed the pillows behind his neck. “Earl doesn’t think people can change. For sure not me. He’s sort of the original antipersonal growth hormone in that regard.” She fingered his chin and touched his cheek. “And you. I think you’re due for a shave.”

She left and returned with a plastic razor, shaving cream, a bowl of hot water, and a towel. As her hand glided the razor over the familiar contours of Hank’s face, her eyes wandered the room, remembering how they’d worked together, Sheetrocking and taping the walls, building the bookcases, both of them in T-shirts and jeans spotted with paint, eating ham and cheese on rye, drinking Cokes.

They both tried to quit smoking the first time in this room, after they’d fooled around on the floor amid piles of books.

All those books. Had he really read them?

Could she someday? Before she met Hank the most she’d read at one sitting was
People
magazine.

“We had a pretty good time for a while,” she said, carefully wiping the lather from his face and neck. She clicked her teeth and hunched her shoulders. The house surrounded her like an expensive train wreck.

Her
train wreck, goddammit.

She patted Hank on the cheek and walked over to the books Earl had tipped to the floor. She stooped, collected them, and methodically put them back on the shelves. That was Earl for you. He threw tantrums. He could be a violent child.

Then, after the temper subsided, he would be sweet. But he never apologized for the tantrums. The good and the bad alternated. There was no—Hank’s word—synthesis. No learning from experience.

Like she was trying to do.

Jolene felt the amputated craving for a cigarette. She shoved her hands in her pockets.

She and Earl had been born on the same day, the same hour, in the same hospital in Minneapolis. They had the same astrological pedigree. Mars conjunct Pluto. Biker stars, Earl called it. Deep, powerful urges for both good and evil. They were biker’s stars because Earl said the Hell’s Angel’s credo meant you had to know the difference between good and evil.

And choose the evil.

She knew all this because they’d had their charts done by Lana Pieri who lived down the block when they were high school sophomores in Robbinsdale. “This is some heavy shit,” Lana said. “You guys could go either way.”

“Or both ways at once,” Earl said, grinning.

There was this part of AA where you admit to God and one other person the exact nature of your wrongs, and she had told Hank how she’d had a part in killing a man once during her wild phase.

She knew about the jokes that Allen and Milt told about her and Earl being Bonnie and Clyde. Well, Allen and Milt were pretty perceptive guys. Because that freezing night outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, at that isolated convenience store with the one sorry gas pump out in front, that’s exactly who they were. Driving straight through from Minneapolis on no sleep and no food, a nickel bag of grass, two six-packs of Blatz, Earl’s guitar, an amp, and one suitcase.

They were hungry and broke, working mean drunk-dares back and forth inside a stolen ’89 Camaro. And it was so cold it made you crazy. Colder than Minnesota, if that was possible.

This time she was going in with the gun because she just wanted to get warm. So Earl handed her the gun he’d stolen from his uncle, a Colt .45 automatic, a big military keepsake that weighed as much as her mom’s klunky old handheld electric mixer.

So she went in and the guy behind the counter licked his lips and hitched his cowboy belt buckle up under his round cowboy beer belly and grinned at her like she was Sheena of the Prairie or something, for sure the best thing he ever saw come swinging into his graveyard shift. And she didn’t really enjoy the frog-eyed, dry-swallow gulp of sheer animal fear the big pistol produced on his startled face. And she understood exactly the problem with guns when instead of handing over the money from the till he reached right through his first fear and under the counter for a gun of his own.

The thing about guns was, if you took one of them out and pointed it at a person you better be ready to use it.

Which—bang—she did before he did, point-blank. Knocked him over into the racks of Skoal and Red Man chewing tobacco and beef jerky. Jolene didn’t see any blood but she remembered distinctly the gritty scuffed silver soles and the metal taps on the heels of his cowboy boots as the big slug knocked him for a flip.

“I killed him,” she explained to Earl who came running in as she was cleaning out the cash register.

“No, you didn’t, he’s still moving,” said Earl who took the pistol and sent her out to the car. And she could still remember how big and cold that night was, with the gas station lit up like a big candy machine under all those stars and how lonely those two last shots sounded, muffled behind the glass. She vowed she’d never go back to North Dakota, ever.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said.

“You didn’t kill him,” Earl said.

Jolene had hugged herself and shivered. “God, it’s cold.”

“Absolute zero,” Earl said. “At least it is for that guy back there.” Jolene had stared at him. And Earl had grinned. “The temperature at which everything stops—minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade. I got straight A’s in physics, remember.”

And they talked about it as they turned off the Interstate and drove a jigsaw down back roads north of Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt State Park where they ate bologna sandwiches on the shore of Lake Sakakawea and counted out $135.74, which was what that clerk’s number amounted to when it came up.

They’d talked about God and if he were there and always watching, and would he hold it against them, and about karma coming around on them, which was different than God, but still definitely payback.

They’d finished their sandwiches and both agreed. They’d take their chances with God and karma over witnesses any day.