Munson kept me overnight, then switched me to outpatient status, which suited me fine; my insurance, while decent, would not approve of longer than necessary stays in a hospital bed. By that time, my mood had altered. Hardened, in fact. After a night of alarming dreams that circled back repeatedly to a lonely crossroads, starless black skies, and a rusting cage-style gibbet that creaked and sighed under the hand of a bleak, moaning wind, I was no longer the least bit interested in reconstructive surgery. Remake my face? Never. I would soldier on, proud of the wounds God dealt, like Sisyphus or Job. I would accept, if that was what was required, being scarred and marred in the service of my holy work.
Not that I had an Old Testament image of the Lord in mind. My conception of the divine has always centered more on ethics than on Christian dogma or even overt spirituality. Six days out of any given seven, I’ll go so far as to cede the religious high ground to the Wiccans and that marvelous summation of the Rede, “An ye harm none, do what ye will.”
“Harm,” of course, being the definitional fly in the otherwise delightful Wiccan ointment.
Mid-morning Thursday, I checked myself out, leaving behind all the leaflets and web links the kindly staff tried to press into my hands. Plastic this, skin graft that. I refused them, every one.
Once home, I began, despite feeling highly exposed and depressingly alone, to clean up the wreck of my glass-spattered living room. Sweeping and straightening was easy enough, but what to do with Bonesy’s badly damaged frame? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Bonesy would be needing it, not just anytime soon but ever, period. But she had to go somewhere, assuming we ever captured her—and wasn’t the sheet of wrinkled, pierced black paper the only home she had ever, at least in rubbing form, known?
I settled on disposing of the frame, which shed crackling glass at every touch, but not the backing. In getting the paper free, I ruined the last of what had once been Sal’s perfect framing job, discovering in the process that the dimensions of the original rubbing had been greater than that shown in the frame. The lower section of the black backing paper had been folded under, and once it was loose, I found a white sticker reading, Swayfield-On-Witham, Parish Church, together with an additional brass-crayoned inscription, entirely disconnected from the rest but clearly part of the original monument from which the rubbing had been made. It read, Hic Iacet Feminina Relicta, 1497 – 1519
Latin again. Just as I had at the Neil House Hotel, when I’d attempted to decipher the local coat of arms and motto, I cursed myself for not having been a better student—for spending my youth on the Ramones and Ken Kesey-inspired chemistry instead of Latin grammar, as I should have. Feminina I could assume meant woman, or female, and Hic Iacet was straightforward, meaning “Here lies”. But what on God’s green earth was relicta?
I finished the glass removal portion of the cleanup, pitching the remains of the frame into a large outdoor trash can, but I couldn’t face the skewed landslide of books, so I hurried instead to my computer. My favorite online translator quickly revealed that relicta meant “forsaken”.
My fingers lifted off the keyboard, hesitant, hovering. I didn’t like the sound of “Here lies one forsaken”, not at all. Up until that moment, Bonesy had been, if only by rumor, an outlaw and a criminal. “Forsaken” suggested wrongdoing of an entirely different order.
After drawing a steadying breath, I checked the Traverse City online news, a habit I’ve developed that is morbid beyond all ken, as it centers on scanning the obituaries to see which of my parishioners has slipped through the cracks (as it were) and died without my knowing. It doesn’t do for a minister to be the last to hear of such events, and more than once, the Record-Eagle has provided me with vital early warning.
I never got to the obituaries. Instead, I was arrested by a headline reading, Local Bookstores Vandalized in Early Morning Attack. I read on despite myself, scanning quickly to find the extent of the damage to both of my favorite downtown shops, Horizon Books and Brilliant Books, and to see who, if anyone, had been arrested. The headline turned out to be misleading: the book shops had not been vandalized so much as upset, with nearly every title in the stores thrown, spilled, or knocked to the floor. Shelves had been cleared, tables emptied. Related products—note cards, CDs, and so on—had been left alone; only books had been targeted. Horizon’s owner, quoted in the article, said that hardly anything had been damaged, although a police inspector noted odd gouges in the wooden shelves and long rending tears in the carpet.
Odd gouges. Long rending tears.
My mind shot back to Bonesy rifling my bookshelves, and I knew at once that the police would never catch this particular perpetrator. On the plus side, I had new information. First, Bonesy had not, at least as of last night, decamped for San Francisco. Second, Bonesy, inexplicably, was searching for a book.
Entirely without my permission, my fingers had strayed to my face and were busy picking at my bandages. I pulled them away, muttering an old Swahili curse taught me by, of course, Iris Buckhalter. In rough translation, I had just accused myself of certain anatomical indiscretions, something I would never have said in English, not even in my less restrained Alphabet City days, but in Swahili it felt, if not permissible, then at least less debased.
My calls to Iris the day before had gone unheeded, though I had, blessedly, reached Angela and done my best to apologize for missing my promised Wednesday call. Angela didn’t hold it against me; in fact, she said not to think twice about it, since she hadn’t found the courage to call me, either. “We’re even,” she said. “Cowards together, birds of a feather.”
“Nice one,” I said. “It rhymes.”
“But life doesn’t,” she said, and she sounded so sad and faraway that if I could have leaped through the phone to hug her, I would have. We spoke for maybe ten minutes, and it cannot be said that we ended on an up note.
“I still don’t know what I’m gonna do,” she said, with our conversation all but exhausted.
“Let’s talk again tomorrow.”
“Okay. Unless we both chicken out.”
“Maybe we can trade off on being strong.”
She half-laughed, sort of. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”
As for Iris, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get through. Iconoclast that she was, she didn’t carry a cell phone, and refused to employ a landline at either her Starr King office in Berkeley or her home. That left email, which she professed to adore, although in truth she, like many curmudgeonly technophobes, loved email best when she wasn’t using it. Letters, those were Iris’s real forte, but there was no time for that, even though Bonesy’s bookshop forays suggested that my mentor was in no immediate danger—at least until Bonesy discovered the airport.
With my mail program open, I sent the only all-caps message I have ever sent:
IRIS, IT’S URGENT YOU REPLY TO THIS AT ONCE. BONESY HAS ESCAPED. SHE SEEMS TO BE SEARCHING FOR A BOOK, A BOOK I SUSPECT YOU HAVE. IT IS VITAL—VITAL!—THAT YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS. PLEASE RELY IMMEDIATELY. – RENNER.
I clicked “send” in the same instant that I spotted my typo—too late!—and only a split second before Dale barged through my (always unlocked) front door. In his wake, the mail slot clicked unhappily.
“Dale,” I said, “I’ve been expecting you.”
He let out a snort in response. “What you should be expectin’ is burglars. Maybe a couple dozen at this rate. When in God’s name are you gonna learn to lock up like a normal person?”
“When snowmen rule below,” I said, “although by that time, I don’t suppose either one of us will care much, one way or the other.”
That drew a grunt instead of a snort, which I elected to label progress. Why Dale hadn’t strode straight into the living room was, however, a mystery. Given how often he’d been to my home in the months since the Neil House, he was behaving now with remarkable reticence.
“Dale,” I said, “are you sure you don’t want to come all the way in?”
“Well,” he said, shuffling his feet, “the fact is, I’m kind of under the weather, and I’m thinkin’ that maybe I should really be outside. Don’t want to get you sick, too.”
Dale Quist, sick? The two concepts didn’t compute.
Reaching for the door, he said, “I meant to swing over here yesterday, I really did. To poke around, you know? See if I could work up a trail for Bonesy. But I couldn’t seem to get up the energy. And even now…”
He swayed slightly; the hand he’d put out toward the door handle missed.
“No, no, no,” I said. “You get in here and sit down before you fall down. Come on, I’m not taking no for an answer.”
I bundled him over to the newly glass-free couch, after which I bustled around like a flustered mother hen, draping him in a blanket and putting on a kettle for hot honeyed tea. Dale huddled on the sofa, watching my activity with hooded eyes. He didn’t look so unlike a fleshed-out version of Bonesy himself, with my blanket a substitute for her shroud.
“Looks to me,” I said, hands on hips, “as if it’s you that needs a turn in the hospital.”
That coaxed a wince. “It’s on-again, off-again. Mostly, I’m raring to go.”
“Oh, clearly. Raring.”
“Just give me a minute.”
“Do you want me to take you to see my GP?”
He crossed his arms over his belly and clutched his torso tight, as if somewhere inside, a plumber was working his guts with a wrench. “Got my own doc,” he said, through clenched teeth. “If I need her, I’ll go.”
“From what I can see, you need her now. Please let me drive you.”
“Tea first,” he said, as the kettle began to burble. “Then, sure.”
I truly could not believe my ears. If I’d offered beer or medicinal whiskey, of course Dale would have said yes, but tea? He was sicker than I’d thought.
Twenty minutes later, we were en route to the offices of a Dr. Sienna Green, a general practitioner of whom I had never heard. I had Dale squinched uncomfortably into my Bug’s front seat, his sinuses running freely and his eyes drooping. He gave poor, half-hearted directions, and I took two wrong turns as a result, one of which left us bypassing the massive funeral home on Sixth Street. Dale eyed it as if it were eyeing him, and we were both glad to put that Addams-style mansion behind us.
Dr. Green’s waiting room wasn’t quite overflowing, but it certainly was well-supplied with a crowd of under-the-weather patients who looked as if they were out to prove it was midwinter, not July. Nearly all those present were male. They sniffled and hacked, sighed and wheezed, and I had a distinct urge—one born of self-preservation—to abandon Dale and flee. I did no such thing. I checked him in, guided him to a seat, and waited with him while the nursing staff summoned the patients one by one with dispassionate, bored voices.
It took over an hour for Dale’s name to come up, and when he rose, he was unsteady to the point of keeling over. I had planned to remain in the waiting room (I had a copy of The Orphan Master’s Son waiting on my Kindle, plus Emerson’s “Self Reliance”), but since the nurse, a stern-looking creature dressed neck to ankle in teal scrubs, offered no assistance, I went with him into the office proper, Dale leaning on me all the way. I suppose this must have looked comical, given the dramatic difference in our statures, but in practical terms, it was merely painful. Not only is Dale Quist tall, he is inordinately heavy.
The nurse ran through her mandated diagnostics, then stowed us away in appointment room three. Dale fell asleep in his chair, his head resting against the wall, his mouth open and slack. I watched with a rising sense of alarm, suddenly afraid that his ragged breathing might actually cease—that he might die as I looked on. I told myself that this was paranoid beyond all reckoning, but he looked so pale, and with his head so far back, I could see every last minute motion in his distended, unshaven neck. When he shifted and swallowed in his sleep, his Adam’s apple took a gymnastic dive, and I shot to my feet, a heartbeat from screaming for help.
Before I could let out the planned yell, the door bust open and a tall woman in a lab coat swept in, a clipboard in one hand and an iPad in the other. Her ponytail swished as she dropped onto the room’s single wheeled stool and said, without making eye contact, “You’re not Dale Quist.”
“No,” I said. “I’m his minister.”
Her chin jerked up. I cannot think that I have ever had anyone’s attention, not even my mother’s or Angela’s, more fully than I had Dr. Green’s.
“I was going to ask you to leave,” she said, “but now…”
She rose, and raised one hand toward my face, her palm slightly cupped, as if to pat my cheek. As she did, I experienced the most remarkable urge to avoid her touch, and I stepped back, tripping over Dale’s enormous western-style boots in the process, which landed me in a heap up against the examining table. The white paper crinkled in protest, and Dale woke.
“Oh, hey,” he said, staring at the doctor. “Sorry. Guess I needed some shut-eye.”
Sienna Green’s eyes flicked from Dale to me and back again. Before she could speak, I said, “I’ll be outside,” and I slipped past her and made my escape.
I’m not sure I drew a full breath until the appointment room door shut behind me, but as to why that was, I could not have said. Nor could I explain my visceral reluctance to have Dr. Green—who was, after all, a doctor—touch my person. I did not have the feeling, but apparently that did not preclude a sense of outright revulsion, and this made me, in turn, angry with myself. We brethren of the cloth do not have the luxury of despising anyone, ever.
The waiting area was still crowded, though there were seats available, but I could not bring myself to do join the queue. The rest of those present looked as if they might never stand up again, and I escaped outside, where I turned my face to the incorrigible July sun and thanked my lucky stars that I had thus far dodged whatever nasty bug was going around.
A ways down the sidewalk from Dr. Green’s door, and perhaps ten minutes after I’d exited the building, I spotted a mother and two children headed my direction, one hardly more than a toddler, and the other doing her best to read a picture book—Bread and Jam For Frances—while walking. As they approached, I couldn’t help but overhear the mother exhorting her wayward daughter to stick to the task at hand and let the book be. “You can finish it when we get to the library,” she said, as if she felt duty-bound to insist on safety first—her bookworm daughter was veering all over the place—but was reluctant to deliver an outright order. “It’s not as if you have to return it the moment you get in the door.”
What the girl said in response I have no recollection, because in that moment I had an epiphany—a minor one to be sure, but an epiphany nonetheless. These children were going to the local public library, and what was a library besides a veritable storehouse of books? If ever I hoped to pick up Bonesy’s fast-cooling trail, then surely the library would, after dark, be the place to be.
Assuming, of course, that Bonesy was in any way predictable, logical, or otherwise regular in her habits.
I headed back to Dr. Green’s, excited to tell Dale of my discovery, but just as I arrived, the office door swung open and he emerged looking, to my shock, as fit as the proverbial fiddle.
“There you are,” he said, his tone chipper. “Thought you’d gone and left me to hitch.”
“No, no,” I said, “I just wanted some healthy air.”
“Don’t blame you. That waiting room crew, they look ready to kick the bucket, and maybe all together, too. But hey, we can split any time. I’d sure appreciate a ride home.”
Less than ten minutes before, I had believed Dale to be crossing death’s door, and now here he was taking the time to ask nicely for a ride home, and with a ready grin to boot. His complexion had returned to sunburnt normal. He wasn’t sweating. If his sinuses were running, I could see no trace.
“A ride,” I said, unable to think of anything more nimble. “Of course. Let’s go.”
One of the great perks of being a minister is that we, as a class, have carte blanche permission to be inquisitive. Nosey, even. It’s expected of us. In fact, a good many parishioners become quite unhappy when their minister fails to pry into their business. So it was that I set out to discover from Dale, as I drove him toward my home (where he’d left his truck), what exactly had gone on in appointment room three.
“Nothin’ much,” he said. “A headache pill and a glass of water.” He changed the subject by pointing out the window. “Look at that old Chevy,” he said, and he let out an appreciative whistle. “That’s a fifty-five or I’m a monkey’s uncle. I’d sure like to take her for a spin.”
“But, Dale—I mean, did you see yourself? Catch a glimpse in a mirror, as we went in?”
“Why, do I look better now? Oh, check it out. Must be a hot rod thing goin’ on this weekend.”
We ministers also know perfectly well when we’re being deflected. Still, I decided not to pursue my inquiries further, at least not right then. Instead, I explained to Dale where I thought Bonesy might show up next, most likely that night. I finished by suggesting we should “stake the place out”, which sent Dale into a roar of laughter.
“Stake the place out!” he hooted. “Renner, you take the cake, you really do. What are ya’ now, Sam Spade?”
I spun the Bug’s wheel to aim into my driveway—for once, Dale had parked his pickup at the curb instead of on my lawn—and fumed. “Call it what you like,” I said. “We should be there, before they close.”
“Fair enough,” Dale agreed. “When’s that at?”
“Nine,” I said. “So how about eight forty?” I shut off the engine. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
He threw me a wolfish grin. “Oh, me, too. Me, too.”
With Dale gone—back, I presumed, to Shelter From the Storm—I headed in to fix lunch (leftover tabouleh salad with low-fat yogurt) and check my email. I could have managed the latter on my phone, but I make it a point, where possible, to compartmentalize my life, to keep certain projects location-specific. In a digital world, and given my open-at-all-hours profession, this has proven to be a life-saving technique, and one that prevents me from being all things to all people at all hours of the day. Thus I take calls, at least from certain people, pretty much wherever I go, but I only deal with email at home, at my computer.
Alongside various updates from my board of directors, several petitions from Moveon.org, and a terse note from my mother demanding that I call, I found, to my great relief, a message from Iris Buckhalter. It read:
Renner,
I’ll refrain from making a joke about how much you must have been drinking before sending your email. Bonesy “escaped”? Please.
On the plus side, you’ll be happy to know I’ve been sleeping much better. No more nightmares about being stranded in a crossroads gibbet. That alone brings me one step away from my earlier premonitions. Le chiem!
All the best, take care of my friend,
Iris
Did I let out an audible squawk of frustration? Absolutely. Did I spit half-masticated tabouleh all over my screen? Of course I did.
I had never considered that Iris wouldn’t believe me, but now that I knew she required evidence, I didn’t waste a moment in gathering what proof I could. I set aside lunch, hurried outside to the garbage cans, and, using my phone, I took several photos of Bonesy’s shattered frame. That done, I returned to the living room and took additional shots of Bonesy’s black paper backing, now left with only a dusting of off-gold wax. With my camera at just the right angle, I could even pick out Bonesy’s original outline.
Fingers racing over my phone, I created a fresh email. In the subject line, I wrote I’m not kidding, and then I attached the photos and sent them to Iris.
I dithered for a minute, hoping Iris would write back immediately, but soon had to give up. I had a board meeting at six, and before that, at four thirty, a Q’ranic study group. If I expected to have any groceries in the house or any kind of home-cooked meal, a trip to Oleson’s could not be put off, so out I went, canvas shopping bags in hand. Just as I was clambering into my darling Bug, my mother called, and I made the mistake of answering.
“Renner,” she said, and I could tell she was on a tear just from those two syllables, “I’ve had it with Palm Springs, I really have. It’s time you found me a place there, near you.”
I almost dropped the phone.
“You heard me. I’m selling this dump and moving to Traverse City. You can expect me in about a week. Won’t that be perfect?”
My mother, living here with me, in Traverse City? Shy of crossing an international border, I had already run as far as I could. Where was I supposed to flee next, the moon?
“Renner, dear. This is the moment where you tell me how excited you are to hear this excellent, celebratory news.”
I drew a steadying breath—thank the stars I was already seated—and said, “Mother, we have talked about this. You have your city, I have mine. You may visit. With warning. You are not allowed to move to my town.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks. I can move where I like.”
“No, not in this case, and you know it—and don’t say ‘It’s a free country.’” Defending any course of action, no matter how inane or damaging, on the grounds that she lived in a free country was one of my mother’s most cherished hallmarks, with pathological selfishness being the other.
“I am not,” she said, “cheered by your reaction.”
“Sorry,” I said, which was galling, since I had years ago promised myself that I would never again apologize to my mother for anything. Ah, language, language and reflex, decorum and the niceties. One could say I was well brought up, after a fashion.
Sounding brisk, my mother went on. “Don’t think I’m going to change my mind. Not for anything as silly as you objecting to a perfectly rational decision.”
Years of therapy, some of it officially sanctioned and some on the side with Iris, kept my voice steady, or reasonably so. “Mother, I don’t care if you change your mind, so long as you don’t follow through. You can leave Palm Springs if you wish, but northern Michigan is mine. Stay out.”
“You’re being rude and childish.”
“No, I’m being firm.”
“Which in this case is rude. And childish and offensive and unloving. I’m feeling unloved.”
Hardening my heart one step further—a sin by any standard, and all but criminal for a UU pastor—I said, “I have a meeting, and you’re making me late. We’ll talk about this another time. How about Sunday night?” Sunday night was our official time to talk, but in reality, she called at random—often very late or appallingly early—whenever she pleased. Keeping me off balance, that was her goal; keeping me at her beck and call.
“Sunday at the latest,” she replied, and her words were followed instantly by a crashing din, indicating that she had driven all four cast-iron pots from the heights of the stovetop to the abyss of the Spanish tile. If truth be told, she always kept the pots in position expressly for that purpose. That she did this both over the phone and sometimes with company in the house blessed me with years of stress headaches, ulcers, and ringing ears. Is it any wonder that I grew up shy and retiring?
As the pots settled and the echo of their clanging plunge faded, my mother said, “Renner, I love you with all my heart, and I know you’ll be a good son and see the light. But before Sunday would be best, because I’ve already put this place on the market, and I don’t think you want to have a homeless parent on your conscience. Now, goodbye, and enjoy your ‘meeting’—if you really have one.”
“Mother,” I said, “ministers do attend meetings. They even have work, actual work. In fact, certain dedicated ministers such as myself…”
I let my thought trail off, since there was no longer anyone else on the line. My mother—my cantankerous, self-indulgent, likely plastered mother—had long since hung up.