The Hummingbird (13 page)

CHAPTER 9

NINETY MINUTES FROM HOME,
Michael spoke for the first time since our driveway: “Here.” He pointed to a cattle gate held closed by a rusted chain. When I braked, a cloud of dust billowed around us.

He placed both palms on the dashboard. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Positive,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” he said in a flat voice. He climbed out of the car and unhooked the chain. I watched his strong back flex as he lifted the gate and slid it back.

I’d driven us east up the Columbia River gorge, south into the forest, and every which way down increasingly rutted dirt roads. The whole trip, Michael sat as quiet as a tombstone. It was strange having him as a passenger. Before the road-rage arrest, he’d done all the driving. I was in charge of tunes, navigation, and snacks, and considered myself an expert. My motto was never late, never lost, never bored.

One rainy Saturday after his first deployment we drove hours east to Bend for an auction of car-repair equipment. He won the bidding on a hydraulic lift whose piston could hold twelve thousand pounds, and on the way home I read an entire book of erotica out loud to him. When he pulled up the driveway, we practically sprinted into the house.

Good times. Old times. Now my guts turned twists on themselves as he waved me through the open gate. I had never held a gun before, much less fired one. By trying to understand my husband this way, I was placing enormous trust in the wisdom of Barclay Reed, and the curmudgeon didn’t even know it.

As I idled past the gate, Michael held out a hand to stop me. “One more thing,” he said, holding the side mirror. “Joel.”

“Joel?”

“This is his place, and he’s got a mild case of scrambled eggs.”

I felt my insides flutter. “Which means?”

“One time in Vietnam he called in a napalm strike and was a little off in his coordinates. Pretty much fried his sinuses. So he has some breathing habits that are distracting at first, but you’ll get used to them.”

“That doesn’t sound like scrambled eggs.”

“His brain might have gotten a bit cooked too.” Michael scuffed a boot in the dirt. “Don’t take him personally though. Basically Joel is harmless.”

“Basically?”

“He does these rants. Like getting something off his chest? But there’s always a grain of truth in there too. Also, Joel loves military history. If you want to get on his sweet side, ask about that.”

He trotted back to close the gate while I drove a few yards ahead. After Michael flopped down into the passenger seat, I inched forward, dodging potholes. We passed one of those old factory safety signs: T
HIS SITE HAS GO
NE 1,000 DAYS WITHOU
T AN ACCIDENT
. But the zeros were actually bullet holes in the metal, each the size of a silver dollar. I could not imagine what weapon would punch a hole like that.

The house sat in a clearing: a pile of rough logs with 55-gallon drums beneath rain spouts on the corners. Two cars rusted in the side yard beside a refrigerator with no door. A port-a-potty listed at an angle by the shed. Half a dozen dogs lay flopped here and there in the dirt.

A tilted white pole flew, from top to bottom: the American flag, Oregon’s blue state flag, the black POW/MIA banner, and a yellow one with a red snake that read D
ON’T
T
READ
O
N
M
E
.

Standing on top of a picnic table was a noodle of a man with a thin ponytail of white hair who peered into the distance with one hand over his brow. He may have been the skinniest person I’d ever seen upright, which from a hospice nurse is really saying something. Since he wore coveralls with no shirt, his arms were on display like those long balloons that clowns twist into animal shapes. The man also wore a cowboy-style holster, which held a chrome-bright pistol with a barrel as long as my forearm. If he had heard us drive up, he made no sign.

As we climbed out, the hounds mooned up at us with mournful faces. One drummed the ground with his tail, another snapped half-heartedly at a fly.

“Damn,” Michael muttered.

I glanced over, and his face was blanched. “What is it, lover?”

“Dogs are out today. Can’t stand them.”

This was news to me. “Really?” I said. “Since when?”

“Since Iraq.” He veered to give the animals a wide berth.

Still the man on the picnic table had not turned. Motioning for me to wait, Michael approached the string bean in overalls. I almost called him back. I didn’t like the idea of him creeping up on an armed man.

When he reached the picnic table, Michael leaned over. “Hey Joel.”

“God almighty,” Joel said, right hand instantly on his holster. With his left he tugged a pair of ear buds down, and even across the dirt yard I could hear the tinny music playing. “Shouldn’t sneak up like that, Milk.” He held a finger over one nostril. “Knuh. Knuh.”

I winced. The sound was half cough, half sneeze, with a rawness like the respiratory version of the sore where a scab has been picked away.

“You might turn the headphones down enough to hear a car coming in,” Michael said blandly. “Or should I honk next time?”

Joel reached into a pocket to silence the music, then shuddered the length of his body. “Just waiting to hear from fat Leo. He’s been getting lazy, not walking all the way out to Pistol Park. But I don’t want him down range of you even one degree. Not with the big iron you bring.”

“It’s my wife who’ll be doing the shooting today.”

“Wife?” Joel turned and squinted at me. “No shit.”

I gave a meek wave. “Hi.”

Joel laid a look on me that was, to be plain, a flat-out ogle—shameless, thorough, top to bottom. “Hello, Betty,” he sang, tipping an imaginary hat.

A bang came from somewhere to our left, and I jumped. By the time I realized what the sound was—the report of a gun—its echo barked from the right. I retreated toward the car.

Coming here was clearly a mistake. I could sit calmly with a person dying of the worst disease imaginable, but this place pushed every anxiety button I possessed. My nursing training had included two ER rotations, and some of those Saturday nights had convinced me that guns were the most unforgiving of tools. One mistake, however minor, and you were maimed for life, or you had maimed someone else, or somebody was dead.

“There’s Leo now.” Joel clambered off the table. “Knuh. Probably cursing me for making him walk that far. Not that the exercise would hurt him any.”

Michael placed his hand on Joel’s shoulder, and somehow it calmed him. I liked seeing how the older man respected my husband, no words said but the message in their gestures.

“So,” Michael said. “What’s new in that busy brain of yours?”

“Well now, Milk.” Joel ducked his head.

“Go ahead. It’s been awhile.”

Joel tugged on his pony tail, then squared himself to Michael. “I’ve been thinking they ought to do away with the
D
in it.”

“The
D
.” Michael put his hands in his pockets. “Go ahead.”

“Well now, why would they call it disorder, when it is the correct response to repeated periods of intense and violent and traumatic stress? Knuh. A perfectly healthy person would be freaked out by war, right? To my thinking, that makes the freak-out healthy. Oh yeah. I think they should call it PTSN, the
N
meaning normal. Or PTSA, for appropriate.”

Michael nodded. “I hear you. Drop the
D
.”

“What about you?” Joel said, turning my way. “What do you think?”

“Me?”

“Not asking the dogs,” he said.

“Well,” I hedged, trying to forget how his eyes had undressed me. “There are many kinds of unusual behavior that we ought to consider normal.”

“There you go,” Joel said.

“But you can put ten people in the same warfare situation, and only one or two will develop post-traumatic stress symptoms. It’s true in plane crashes too, and in the area I know best, when people face terminal illness. Only a fraction of them have the recurring frights, jump at loud noises, or develop suicidal ideation. So we use the phrase ‘disorder’ because when most people experience trauma, eventually they are OK.”

Joel stared at me as if I were covered with bugs.

“I’ve even read theories about PTSG, where the
G
is actually for growth, because some survivors of trauma experience huge personal growth as a result. New jobs, new directions, deeper faith.”

He turned to Michael. “Is she bagging on me?”

“They’re only labels anyway,” I said. “I believe the important thing is how we take care of individuals, regardless of label.”

Michael released Joel’s shoulder and smiled. “This is Deborah. Ask her opinion, and you’ll probably get it.”

Without speaking, Joel extended his skinny hand.

I shook it, and it felt like grabbing a bunch of twigs. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, yeah. So, Milk.” He turned to Michael. “What’s your sport today?”

“The .50 at a hundred and fifty yards. With that scope I told you about.”

“German optics cost too much. Set your own targets?”

Michael kicked the back of one boot with the toe of the other. “Always happy to save an old guy some steps.”

Joel made a jangly laugh. “I can still out-mule you with a pack on, Milk, any day you like.”

“I’m not dumb enough to take that challenge.” As Michael went back to the car, I noticed he took the long way, keeping the shed between him and the hounds. Dog avoidance was a change.

Not that we’d had a pet of our own. But whenever we went to his school buddy Brian’s for dinner, Michael used to spend a good half hour throwing a slobbery tennis ball for Elvis—Brian’s square-headed black lab, a galoot as devoted as he was dumb.

Sometimes, too, when the agency provided a comfort companion for a patient, if the visit ran long, I would keep the animal overnight. Wrestling with the dog on the back lawn, sneaking it bits of supper when he thought I wasn’t looking, Michael used to love those nights.

But I caught myself. I needed to remove the phrase “Michael used to” from my vocabulary. My task—including the reason I was standing at that shooting range at that very moment—was to understand the new Michael, to know the man he had become. Today’s lesson, so far: No more dogs.

Joel and I watched Michael stride out into the high-mown grass. Another pistol report echoed from both sides. Then it was just us, not speaking, and a blue jay that screamed from the edge of the trees.

I looked down, and the ground around me was littered with shells, some brown and thinner than a cigarette butt, some brass and the size of my pinkie. Out in the field the mess was worse. There were dirt piles every fifty yards, with a hodgepodge of objects hung on posts or set on top: cardboard boxes, archery targets, bicycle helmets, furniture with the stuffing sprung. Every one of those objects was ragged with bullet holes.

A huge hill stretched across the back of the range, perhaps a mile away. I imagined it worked like a backstop for any bullets that went wild. Beyond that, it was Oregon timber country, giant trees for miles.

Joel stood beside me, and I could hear him wheezing. I imagined the thousands of scorched alveoli deep in his chest. With an injury like that, it was possible that every inhale hurt. I wondered how I would care for a patient like that. Pain can occupy a huge portion of a person’s brain. He took a deep breath and covered one nostril again. “Knuh.”

“Why do you call my husband Milk?”

Joel shrugged his bird-boned shoulders. “It’s his fighting name. Sometimes guys are called by how they act when everything is at stake.”

“Michael was milky?”

“If his face went all white, that was when he was most fierce.” Joel coughed, and it sounded as if his lungs had been scoured with steel wool. “So I’ve been told, anyways. Course I never served with him.”

An idea came to me then, not as a lightning bolt but like a window opening. “Michael says you know military history.”

“No more’n any other fool who’s served a hitch or two. I know textbooks ignore the Italian front of World War II, though it was some of the toughest fighting. I know the Armenian genocide really happened, a million and a half people slaughtered by the Turks in 1915. I know when I came back from Vietnam, nobody was stupid enough to spit on me, or any other soldier I knew, else they’d be dead and we’d be in jail. That spitting stuff was a bit exaggerated, maybe.” He rested a hand on the butt of his pistol. “Or are you going to prove me wrong about that too?”

I glanced over and he was smiling. Joel might be scrambled eggs, but he still knew what teasing was.

“What about the Japanese dropping bombs on the American Pacific Coast?” I asked. “Early in World War II?”

“Where’d you learn such a thing? I’ve never read one word about it.”

“Not necessarily from a book. But maybe somebody told you, or you remembered—”

“Do I really look all that ancient?” He laughed, slapping his concave belly. “How to hurt a guy.”

“I didn’t mean that you were alive that long ago. I just heard something about a Japanese pilot in 1942. I don’t know. He might have flown over the southern part of the state maybe.”