Before He Finds Her (19 page)

Eric Pace, the guy he’d met up on the pole, volunteered to be Ramsey’s first mentor. Other than being a Jesus nut—A.A. had done it to him some years earlier—Eric was a regular guy with uncommon generosity. It drove Ramsey a little mad that his training would literally be “from the ground up,” and that out on the job site, his day-to-day was entirely earthbound: work site setup and breakdown, loading and unloading trucks, digging trenches for lines and holes for power poles. But he told himself to be patient for once.

He wasn’t someone who ordinarily quit things cold turkey, especially things he was good at like drinking and asshole-being, but because it all meant a lot to him—the job, his friendship with Eric—he found it not so hard, really, to keep those baser tendencies in check. And on the third Friday of his training, two very good things happened: He passed his CDL exam and he picked up his first paycheck. Obviously, it was time to celebrate. He decided on Chuck’s Main Street Tavern, because it was only a few blocks from his apartment and a DUI would be a real screw right now.

When 2 a.m. rolled around and Chuck kicked out the last stragglers, Ramsey stepped out onto the sidewalk feeling happy, which almost never happened leaving a bar, and invincible, which always did. The storefronts on his street were all closed, the windows dark in most of the apartments above them. A few Christmas lights drooped under windows, a few wreaths hung on doorways. And though the night felt too warm and sticky for early December, the weather didn’t stop Ramsey, as he ambled along the sidewalk, from singing a booming, belch-punctuated rendition of “Jingle Bells.”

Across the street from his apartment building, he sized up a power pole that he’d never really noticed before—simple three-phase subtransmission pole (forty-five-footer, from the looks of it) with a streetlight attached and an extra line to the nearest building.

He thought:
Yes. Yes, I will
.

Because it was bullshit, when he really considered it, how after three weeks he hadn’t even been allowed near the
practice
poles behind the main office. He removed his coat and laid it on the ground at the base of the pole. He didn’t have his spikes on him, of course (spikes that the company made him buy to the tune of ninety-five dollars), but by squeezing his legs around the pole, he was able to start creeping upward. In fact, climbing a utility pole, even without the spikes, wasn’t very hard at all—though he was pretty toasted, and by the time he was halfway up the pole he was sweating and sucking wind. His heart thudded. His hands felt raw and were cut with splinters. But he kept climbing—squeezing his legs, pulling with his arms—because he was on a mission. He belonged to that special class of climbers, those who felt more free up here than on the ground. It was total bullshit that he was only allowed to dig ditches and wash the fucking trucks.

He knew from his training and from common sense that you could get fried too close to the power lines, but the lines were still five or six feet above his head, which seemed far away until lightning slashed the sky and the lines above his head hissed in response. Seconds later another slash, closer this time (since when was there lightning in December?), and in his surprise Ramsey slipped an inch or two and felt a sharp pain in the meaty part of his left hand, where a large splinter of wood must have gotten lodged. Shit, he thought. He looked up again at the wires, then down again, and got a little queasy. Bed-spins. He hated bed-spins even when he was in bed.

He eased the pressure between his legs so his weight would carry him down the pole a few inches, but his left hand was nearly useless, and he almost fell. His legs squeezed the pole again. More lightning crackled, and the power lines started humming and hissing again, and thunder rolled across the sky, and these facts came to mind: Linemen on the poles always wore rubber gloves and insulating gear. Apprentice linemen were forbidden from working on live-wire poles until after an entire
year
of training.

The insanity of what he was doing came into sharper focus.

“Help!” he called. “Help! Anyone!”

He was calling out to God and to the cats that roamed his street, because there sure didn’t seem to be any people around. Everyone was probably watching him from behind their darkened windows. He should just climb down. But the ground was spinning hard now, and his hand...
shit
. He didn’t like what the nosy neighbors were probably thinking about him right now, but he’d forgive every last one of them if only somebody would pick up the damn phone and call for help.

The wind howled, and every flash of lightning made him brace for a taste of those 765,000 volts. His legs trembled, and the sweat on his body had turned cold. Then the rain started in—hard—-because of course it did.

When flashing lights finally rounded the corner and came his way, for the first time in his life Ramsey felt grateful for the sight of a patrol car. But when the officer approached the pole and shouted up to him about a bucket truck that’d arrive in short order
courtesy of the
electric company
, Ramsey shouted, “Fuck that!” and tried once more to scramble down on his own power. Damn, the hand hurt. But pain was only pain, and he gritted his teeth and lowered himself a foot, two, three. The hissing above him lessened, and he focused all his attention on this one thing, getting himself to the ground before the truck came.

Now his left leg was bleeding. What the hell? It only stung a little—what had he even cut it on? Probably a nail sticking out of the pole. The leg hurt less than his hand. But damn. Blood was definitely dripping down the one side. His pant leg was sticky. The worst part was, he couldn’t lower himself anymore. The cut leg didn’t allow it. If he were ten, twelve feet in the air, he’d have let go and taken his chances with a fall. But he was still close to thirty feet up.

“I cut my leg!” he shouted down to the officer. “I think it’s bad.” His whole body was shaking.

“Can you hang on? The truck will be here any second.”

“How about a fucking ladder?”

“Just hang on.” While they waited, the officer tried to keep Ramsey calm. “I’m Officer Ogden,” he said. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll just wait a—”

“
Bob
Ogden?” Ramsey said.

“Yes, sir,” the officer replied.

Bob Ogden was a year younger than Ramsey. They’d gone through school together, and now he was a cop with a cop’s uniform and a cop’s car, and Ramsey was trapped like a shivering cat in a tree, too stupid to know its own ass from third base.

Ramsey said, “You were a pussy in high school.”

“How about we just wait for the truck,” Officer Ogden said.

It was the only time Ramsey would ever stand in the bucket.

When he was finally on solid ground again, his legs were shaking so hard that he could barely stay upright. But that didn’t stop him, the second that Bob Ogden came over, from taking a swing at the officer. Ramsey ended up in the road, splayed on his back, with Officer Ogden standing over him and shaking his head—because he, being sober, already knew what was still hazy to Ramsey: that by morning, Ramsey would be facing a court date, no job, and a line of staples in his thigh.

The next day, thunderstorms gave way to a hard, steady rain. Ramsey’s roommate slept. On the muted TV, race cars looped stupidly around some track. Beneath the heavy disinfectant smell in the room, Ramsey detected traces of a thousand diseases. Hospitals always made him feel sick. Yet the doctors reminded him that it could’ve been much worse (electrocution, broken spine), and he knew he was damn lucky to be lying there, medicated on a soft bed. The pills, the pills, thank God for the pills, which insulated him from the sharpest pain and the bleakness that would otherwise be devouring him. His former self would’ve already been scheming ways to steal some of those pills for later use or profit. His current self was simply grateful that they were in his system.

Climbing was all he ever did well, and now they’d taken that away from him. The “they” in his thoughts were hazy and constantly changing: his supervisor at the electric company, Officer Ogden, his father, Gina, his teachers, karma, his own stupidity. He’d never climb again. His leg was a disaster, and apparently so was his constitution. He’d been terrified up there. Lightning and thunder had never bothered him when he was a boy in a tree. It thunders, you climb down. No big deal. You don’t clutch on for dear life and make a spectacle of yourself. Jesus.

There wasn’t even anyone to pity him. Eric had visited briefly, called him a fool, laid a hand on his shoulder, and left for work. His roommate, a teenager who’d been beaten to a pulp, was useless as a distraction, what with his jaw wired shut.

Late afternoon, a big female nurse with a man’s haircut shoved him out of bed and made him walk down the hallway.
Up, up, let’s go, just to the water fountain, just to the E
XIT
sign, just to the elevator and back, just to the far wall, just, just, just.
The two of them left Ramsey’s room, and he limped past the nurse’s station. When they got near the elevator, it opened. Its sole occupant stepped out, carrying a vase of flowers.

This was his future wife.

She was startlingly pretty, alarmingly so—with the sort of face you only ever saw when part of what you saw came from your own imagination: You’re in a bar when you’ve had a few but before you’ve had too many, when the jukebox is playing the right song and the lighting is dim and cigarette-fogged. You know that what you see isn’t real, that everything will change in daylight.

Well, it was daytime, and the only music came from some idiot doctor down the hall whistling to himself. Yet her green eyes were real, her smooth skin was real, every last thing.

When she smiled, Ramsey knew
.
That fast. He’d fallen for pretty faces before—who hasn’t?—but one thing those pills did was filter out the noise and let you perceive the essence of things. He could practically see the light within her—not purity, exactly, or innocence, but an essential goodness that her lived experience hadn’t quashed.

“What took you so long?” Ramsey asked.

She played along, looking at her watch. “I’m only three minutes late—I didn’t think you’d mind.”

She had on a white top and blue skirt, well tailored. Business attire, he supposed. Professional but snug-fitting. He was glad he had on the sweatpants that Eric brought him, rather than the paper gown. Glad he’d brushed his teeth. Glad he happened to look his best when he was a little scraggly with a day or two of razor stubble—something he’d been told by some girl once and chose to believe now.

What Ramsey did next was positively absurd, nothing he’d ever do in a bar at 1 a.m., let alone in a hospital corridor beside his overbearing nurse. He said, “I’m just glad you made it,” and doffed—doffed!—an imaginary hat. She’d obviously come to visit a sick friend or relative, making the next thing out of his mouth utterly inappropriate. “And how thoughtful of you to bring me those.”

She looked at the flowers, then back at Ramsey. “Just be sure to change the water every day,” she said. A small card was attached to the bouquet. She plucked it off and handed him the vase.

“Wait... what?”

“These aren’t cheap, either,” she said. “There are gardenias and lilies...” She squinted. “What am I saying? You’re a man, you don’t care. Trust me, though—they aren’t cheap.” She looked over at the nurse. “Will you make sure he changes the water every day? Otherwise, he won’t do it.”

It was nice to see his nurse speechless. She nodded.

“Excellent!” she said to the nurse. To Ramsey she said, “Well, take care now,” and pressed the elevator button. The doors opened, and she was gone.

The next day, she was back.

He’d spent hours thinking about her, the pills that worked miracles on a leg doing nothing to dull the ache of knowing he’d failed to get her name before those elevator doors closed. In the dark overnight hours, the error had grown enormous and irrevocable.

But here she was again, his only visitor since yesterday afternoon, when a policeman came by with a court summons. Three light-knuckled knocks on the door, the same knock of faux respect perfected by the attending physicians before they entered with whatever grim news they couldn’t wait to dump on you. But it was neither cop nor doctor. Today she had on blue jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt. Less makeup. She looked even lovelier. It was a word—lovely—he’d never considered in his life, yet it was the only word that fit.

He felt embarrassed. In the hallway, standing face to face, he could pretend he wasn’t an invalid. Now he lay in bed, same clothes on as yesterday, a frail patient with his mute roommate looking on. He hadn’t showered since the day before coming to the hospital. He propped himself into a sitting position, stifling a grimace of pain, and made a show of examining the new bouquet she’d brought, which was significantly larger than yesterday’s.

“Those are nice,” he said. “I like the...”

“You have no idea what any of these are.”

Taped to the vase was a cream-colored card with neat cursive writing:

To Ramsey Miller.

Feel better soon!

Your friend, Allie

“So me and you are friends now?”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” she said, smiling.

He nodded. “That one there’s a purple rose.”

“The purple part’s right—it’s an iris.”

“Huh. Looks like a rose.”

“Not really.”

“How do you know my name?” he asked.

“The nurse’s station,” she said.

He looked up at her. “Are you rich or something? These flowers cost a lot.”

“They seemed to make you happy yesterday. That’s what flowers do—so I figured, what the hell?” She noticed yesterday’s bouquet sitting on the table beside his bed. “They look good there.”

“Who were they for?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone. Don’t worry, she got her delivery later.”