The Lost Saints of Tennessee (5 page)

Seven

1985

“I need a vet. Can you tell me where I can find a vet?”

“Who is this?” The voice is not the regular Logland Inn night manager.

“Room eighteen. My dog is sick. Really sick.”

“Sir, I'm sure you know it's the policy of this motel that no pets are to be brought on the premises and if you've violated that policy you will be liable for a minimum fine of two hundred and fifty dollars and any additional cleaning—”

I hang up, ripping out the phone book from the nightstand, keeping an eye on Tucker the whole time. He keeps nodding off.

“Wake the fuck up, Tucker.”

I go over to him, prodding him in the belly, scratching behind his ears, lugging him up onto the bed with me so I can hold him while I dial the Smoky Mountain Emergency Pet Hospital.

A friendly, vaguely familiar female voice answers.
When I explain a modified version of the situation, she says I need to come right away, every minute can make a difference. I scribble down the directions before carrying Tucker out to the truck.

“Hang in there, okay?” I tell him. “We're going to get some help.”

His head lolls in its usual way when he sleeps, but I take it as a sign of impending death.

“Wake up, Tucker!” I elbow him in the side with my free arm, trying to keep him with me.

It takes three illegal U-turns and ten minutes in the dim twilight to find the place, located on an isolated side street. As we pull into the driveway, a young woman in a white lab coat walks out to meet us. The porch light illuminates her. It is the McDonald's drive-through girl. My heart lifts the slightest bit. She is a nice girl. She will help us.

“Hey, I know you,” she says with a half smile. “Sausage biscuit, hash browns, and coffee, right? This is my night job.” She opens the passenger side door to get Tucker. “Let's get this big guy out.”

I step in front of her and carry the dog inside, rambling on about how I left him in the motel room and he got into the pain medication.

The vet charges into the exam room, rolling up his shirtsleeves as he comes through the door. He kneels down next to Tucker, placing a stethoscope on his chest. A perfectly round bald spot makes a crop circle on the back of the vet's head.

An eight-by-ten framed photo of Benji looks down on us from the wall. Benji tilts his head to the side in the way that made everyone say “how cute” during the movie. A black paw print is stamped in the lower right corner of the photo. Autographed by the star himself. Tucker lies on my feet, doing his best to ignore Dr. Hickman.

“Respiration is slow,” he says, flashing a light in each of Tucker's eyes. “How much and what kind?”

“What?”

“How much did the dog ingest? And what type of pain medication was it?” Before I can answer he asks another question, one that sounds discriminatory. “How old is he?”

He steps out of the room and yells down the hall. “Gina set up an IV.”

“Twenty pills of codeine, thirty milligrams each.”

The vet nods, frowning. “Has he vomited any of it?”

Tucker raises his head up, nailing me with a look. “No,” I reply.

“Can he walk?”

I stand up, gently pulling on the dog's collar. “Come on, Tuck. You can do it.” He makes it onto all fours but it takes a lot of effort. When he tries to walk, it's like the rear-wheel drive is blown out. His haunches collapse beneath him and he ends up in a heap on the floor.

Alarm bells explode in my head.
The dog can't walk. What have I done?

“He's already showing signs of an overdose—ataxia, miosis, and some mild respiratory depression. We're going to induce vomiting and then force-feed him charcoal to absorb the drug in his system.”

Tucker lets out a groan. Dr. Hickman pats his head. At least the man cares.

“It's going to be a rough night,” he says, looking at me directly. “If his breathing gets too slow or he loses consciousness, we'll need to put him on an artificial respirator. Lucky for you I took a second mortgage out on my house last year to buy one for this place. We're the only animal hospital for two hundred miles that has one. We'll do everything we can to save the dog, but I need you to know that what this old guy ingested was enough to kill a teenage girl.”

I nod, trying to keep my face together, and hug Tucker's neck before they take my boy away.

The waiting area has three metal folding chairs and pet magazines from 1981. I take a cigarette out. My hand shakes as I light it. Darkness has dropped down outside. An open window lets the sweet night air in, its fresh smell knocking against the antiseptic and animal smells of the clinic. A fat tabby cat with one eye wanders into the room, hopping on top of the front desk.
The clock above it reads nine thirty. Tucker and I were sup
posed to be dead by now.

The hours crawl past. A few minutes before midnight Gina appears by my side. She looks as worn down as I feel.

“Here. You need this.” She holds out a cup of coffee and a Snickers bar. “The dog's hanging in there.”

She does not meet my eyes as she speaks, glancing down at the scuffed running shoes on her feet instead. My stomach cramps as I swallow the bitter liquid. The girl lingers for a moment, as if she wants to make sure I drink it all.

“So, he's going to be okay?” I ask.

Her eyelids flutter down again. “Dr. Hickman is a good
vet. He stabilized Tucker's breathing, but now we're work
ing to get the drug out of him. Tucker's tough, but this is hard stuff, you know? Nobody likes to throw up. I better get back in there.”

Her small form disappears down the hallway, slipping behind the door where my dog is puking his guts out. She's right. Tucker hates to throw up. He once ate the better part of two dozen raw chocolate chip cookies, stole them right off the baking sheets before Jackie put them in the oven. As it all reappeared over my one good pair of pants, he stared up at me between heaves with a scowl that said it was my fault.

The coffee cup warms my hands, cold despite the humid warmth of the clinic. The words almost escaped my lips while Gina stood there.
I did it to the dog. I fed him the drugs. It wasn't supposed to happen like this.
But if I say that, they will take the dog away from me. And either way this goes, if he dies or if he lives, Tucker is coming with me.

A hand presses gently on my arm. “Zeke?”

I wake with a start and glance at the clock. One thirty. Gina stands next to the chair.

“Something happened a few minutes ago. Dr. Hickman wanted me to come out and give you an update.”

She wraps her arms around her chest before continuing. A loud buzzing sound in my ears threatens to drown out what comes next. I hold my breath.

“Tucker lost consciousness around one fifteen. He's on the artificial respirator right now to regulate his breathing.”

“Jesus.”

The one-eyed cat hops into my lap, preening and rubbing against my chest. The warmth is comforting but I swat it away.

“Come on, Jack.” Gina scoops the cat into her arms. “I'll keep you posted, okay? It's going to be a long morning. Do you want to go back home and I'll call you?”

“No.” I am not leaving without the dog.

“Maybe you'd like to borrow the phone over there.” She points to the desk. “To call someone?”

Gina thinks Tucker is as good as dead and wants to have backup in case I lose it. My mind gears up, sorting through people to call. The only person I can imagine sitting through this with me is Rosie.
Rosie.
Nashville is three and a half hours from Pigeon Forge.

Eight

1985

A little after 5
am
Rosie bursts through the door of the Smoky Mountain Emergency Pet Hospital dressed in plaid
pajama pants stuffed into purple cowboy boots. She wears
sunglasses despite the lack of sun outside.

“Jesus Christ, this place is hard to find.” She pushes the glasses on top of her head and wraps me in the scents of Virginia Slims and perfume that smells like freshly cut grass. “What's going on, Zeke?”

She pulls back and grips my shoulders. “How's the dog?”

A sense of relief floods through me, warming the muscles cramped from hours spent in the metal chair. I am not alone. The whole ugly story wants to spill out. But I won't let it. Not yet.

“He's unconscious. They've got him on an artificial respirator.”

Rosie's eyes, the same topaz color as Carter's and our father's, widen. “Well, shit.”

I turn my head away for a moment, trying to keep it
together.

The closing of a door in the back echoes out to the waiting area. Dr. Hickman walks down the hallway toward us. His green scrubs shirt is splattered with stains—a multicolored collage of yellow, black, and dark red. Rosie reaches for my hand, squeezing it hard.

“Tucker woke up. About five minutes ago.” The vet wears a bemused expression. “Surprised the hell out of me.”

The earth tilts and I fall, caught by the same chair I sat in expecting news of Tucker's death. Questions float in my mind but I can't form them out loud.

“Will he be okay?” Rosie asks.

“I don't see anything at the moment that makes me worry. But we need to keep him here today for observation.” He runs a hand down his face, trying to wipe the exhaustion off of it. “You're one lucky owner. I didn't have a lot of faith the dog was going to pull through.”

“I didn't think either of us was going to make it through,” I say. My whole body aches, the nerve endings tingling and raw. Rosie's hand makes small comforting circles on my back.

My words of thanks to the vet sound hopelessly insufficient.

“Thank me after you see the bill. Gina will be out with it in a minute.” Dr. Hickman's expression softens. “Tucker's a good dog. Keep that codeine locked up, okay?”

Rosie's questioning gaze burns down on me.

“Not now, okay, Rosie? Right now I need to see Tucker and then I really need to sleep.”

My sister inherited our mother's laser look—the one where she could narrow her eyes at you and cut through every­thing. I keep my gaze steady on the floor.

“I need some sleep, too,” she says finally. “See the dog and then let's get out of here.”

Gina emerges from the back and walks behind the
coun
ter, punching numbers into a calculator. Punching a lot of
numbers into the calculator.

“It all comes to $2,750.”

Tired as my brain is, it quickly figures the one credit card in my wallet cannot take a hit as big as that.

“We take Visa,” Gina says, trying to be helpful.

I slowly remove the wallet from my back pocket and go through the motions of looking through it. Before I'm done, Rosie slides her own Visa card onto the counter.

“I can't let you do that.”

“It's done.” She waves a hand to dismiss it. “Your little unapproved Smoky Mountain getaway has cost you your job back home, so pay me back when you get another one. It's a good thing I like that dog.” She nudges me with her elbow. “Go see Tucker.”

The dog lies stretched out on a stainless-steel table, not moving, looking dead. Bits of black are stuck in the soft fur of his muzzle. The charcoal. When I place my head near his, it is wonderfully warm. Alive. My boy made it through. We take in a couple of big breaths together. Inhale. Exhale. That's all it is. Inhale, exhale. We're still here together. The crater in my chest contracts, gratitude filling the hole part way.

The dog's eyes open. He tries to get up, ready to leave this strange place with its bad smells and horrible medicine.

“Take it easy, buddy,” I say, patting him back down. “The vet says you need to stay here a little bit longer, okay? You're going to be all right, though. Everything's turned out fine.”

• • •

Rosie and I grab breakfast at the Pigeon Forge Diner next to the motel. After we both eat large helpings of bacon and biscuits and gravy, she nails me.

“You going to tell me what the codeine was about, Zeke?”

The restaurant bustles with the early morning crowd. The thunk of ceramic coffee mugs hitting Formica tabletops. The scrape of spatulas against the grill as the cook manages a batch of hash browns. Truckers in baseball caps pulled low over their eyes curl over their cups, loading up on caffeine before heading out on the road. Our waitress returns to the table asking if we need anything else.

“You want some more coffee, Rosie?” I say, welcoming the distraction.

“Honey,” she says to the waitress, “I don't need anything else right now except for my brother to answer the question I asked him.”

“Afraid I can't help you with that,” the waitress says with a half smile, placing the check on the table.

Rosie sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. Her focus is legendary in our family. When she was nine, she spent six months selling boxes of Mrs. Leland's Golden Butter Bits candy door-to-door just to get the “500 boxes prize”—a transistor radio that broke a week after she got it. She has been known to wait weeks, sometimes years, to reach a goal when properly motivated. Her slow rise at KMG is a case in point. Getting to the bottom of big brother's latest disaster will be one of those goals.

A mother with two young daughters sits at the booth opposite ours. She looks in her twenties, nearing thirty. The girls could be six and four. The smallest one starts to whine for milk and the mother meets my eyes, shrugging, before signaling to the waitress. For a year in each of Honora's and Louisa's lives Jackie and I decided eating out was too much trouble. After a few meals where everything on their plates ended up on restaurant floors, we said we'd wait until they had reasonable table manners.

Those problems seemed so easy. Kid can't behave at a restaurant? Don't eat out. Kid not ready to sit on a potty? Keep her in diapers another six months. Now the complexities of keeping them safe, of keeping them whole, overwhelm me. Mommy's divorcing Daddy. Daddy's sad all the time.

There are two choices. Door number one: Spill the
whole thing to my sister. Door number two: Sell her the same story I told the vet's office. Maybe I should be honest. Tell her suicide is not for sissies. The scale of this latest failure reinforces my belief that there is nothing I can't screw up. My brother used to be confused by the word
sissies
. He didn't understand how it could be hurled at you as an insult and also be the name of three people he loved most in the world.

When I look back at what our family had—what
worked versus what didn't—it was an unspoken belief that each of us was valuable. That each kid had something to offer. Not in the “you will be president” kind of way, though maybe Mother did mean it like that for me, but mostly in a basic, human way. You are loved. You are valued. This was an elemental truth of our childhood. When Mother fractured that truth in the fall of 1960, all but throwing Carter away, it splintered through the family—traveling from Carter, to me, to our father, and our sisters.

“Zeke?” Rosie claps her hands in front of my face, causing me to blink. “It's Saturday, okay? I can sit here all damn day. I've got no other place to be. So you can talk to me now or you can talk to me after lunch or dinner. But you're not leaving until you say something.”

I take a sip of lukewarm coffee. “Thanks for coming.”

“You're welcome. Get on with it.”

“Remember when I got hurt at work last year?”
Door number two it will be.

She nods.

“Boss moved me from doing trim work to installing the Formica floors and I slipped. Banged the hell out of my shoulder.” This part was all true. “The doctor prescribed codeine for the pain. The shoulder got better but it's still not quite right. So I take a painkiller now and again. I brought them on this trip and did a dumb thing.”

She grabs a piece of bacon off her plate and munches, looking skeptical.

“Last night I came here for dinner and left the pills out on the nightstand with the top off. You know Tucker. The dog eats cow shit, for God's sake. I came back and found him lying on the floor with the chewed-up bottle next to him, all of the pills gone.”

My sister sifts through the words, calculating their accuracy. “That's a good story,” she says.

“What? You don't believe me?” I work on sounding outraged. “I don't need you to believe me, Rosie. Okay? What? You think I tried to do something else with the codeine? Like what? Go ahead. Say it.”

A few heads turn in the direction of our table. I feel bad for the mom and two kids who don't need to hear this.

Rosie leans over the table, voice low. “You want to know what I think? I think you came here to kill yourself. I think you called me to say good-bye. I think you took those pills yourself and maybe gave some to Tucker so he wouldn't be left without you, too.”

I laugh, throwing my hands up. “Then why I am here? Shouldn't I be dead?” I yell now, pointing at my chest. “I. Am. Here.”

She shrugs. “I don't know, Zeke. Christ. Will you calm the hell down? What's the matter with you?”

“You're calling me a liar, Rosie. And suggesting I tried to kill my own dog. Anything else?”

I throw money on the table and stomp out of the restaurant. Not bad acting.
Hill Street Blues
here I come.

“Zeke, wait!” My sister hurries to cover the ground between the front door and the truck. I forget she hasn't slept much in the past twenty-four hours, either.

The morning clouds drift past, carried by a light wind. Saturday. The dog and I have made it to another Saturday. For some reason the thought makes me smile.

“Tell me one thing, okay?” She puts a hand on my arm. “What are you doing here? Why did you leave Clayton?”

“That's two things.”

Her hand drops. “This isn't fucking funny.”

“You want to know why I came to beautiful Pigeon Forge?”

She nods.

Simple question. I stall and put my hands in the back pockets of my jeans, thinking of how to answer. My right hand hits the hard edge of something in the pocket. I pull it out. It's the postcard from the fudge shop.

I hold it out to her. “
This
is why I came here.”

Rosie takes the card and stares at it. “That's a picture of a farm in the Smoky Mountains. You came here to buy a farm?”

“I didn't come to Pigeon Forge to stay here. I'm on my way to somewhere else.”

“Really?” She is far from convinced.

“To Virginia. I'm going back to Lacey Farms. To see Cousin Georgia and Osborne. They sent me a letter a while ago and said they could use some help.”

Might as well make it sound good.

She hands the postcard back. “Why didn't you tell anybody that?”

I duck my head and try to look sheepish. “I should have. But I needed to get away from Clayton and think it through, you know? Clean mountain air and chocolate fudge never hurt anybody, right?”

“I guess.” A look of confusion still clouds her face. Against her intuition, she is inclined to believe me.

“I don't know about you but I've got to get some sleep. There are two beds in the motel room if you want to take a break.”

We leave the truck in the diner's parking lot and walk over to the Logland Inn. Rosie collapses on the first bed she sees and falls asleep with her boots still on. She's too tired to notice the stack of good-bye notes next to the phone, and I quietly pick them up and stash them in the bottom of the duffel bag, planning to throw them away somewhere down the road. In the bathroom I open the remaining pill bottles and watch their contents spiral down the drain. Today I see another possibility. Though it would be less risky if the Laceys
had
actually sent me a letter asking for help with the farm.

After a shower, I lie on the bed and let my eyes close at last.