The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

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СКАЧАТЬ “What properties?”

      He shook his head.

      In a musing tone she said, “It’s a long ways if she took it on herself to show him them two A-frames up by Biddesfirth.” “It’s not seven hours.”

      “Not any more.” She was looking at her watch. “It’s eight.” She was thinking again. “Of course there’s meals. If she didn’t eat lunch, she’d need dinner. You know how hypo she gets. Candlelight at the Coach House maybe?”

      His eyes came up to consider her.

      “Ross, relax. Eat something, for God’s sake. Stop looking like somebody just rammed a hot poker up your arse. It’s not even dark yet. I’m sure she’ll phone when she comes to one. She’s fine. Exploring life, we should hope.”

      His eyes had gone to the kitchen, to the clock over the stove. Now they came away from there.

      Ardis resumed eating. After a minute she asked, “How tall was he?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Well, when you talked to him,” she said in a lilt of exasperation, “were you looking up, or down, or what?”

      He gazed at her with incredulous loathing.

      She had thought of something. “He didn’t have dark hair, did he? Fine and straight—?”

      “I don’t remember.” He looked away. “Maybe.”

      “A blue turtleneck? Stained?”

      “A dark turtleneck. I don’t know about stained.”

      She clapped her hands. “I talked to him yesterday! At the restaurant! He’s looking for property!”

      “He’s not looking for property. He’s another reporter.”

      Ardis was musing. “Maybe. That’s what I thought. But eight hours, Ross. Eight hours. You know yourself she won’t give reporters the time of day any more. You practically have to—Well well well. It does seem like she got lost, all right. Lost in a truck ceiling. Just like the rest of them around here after all. A little slow to sort her ass from the heavenly bodies, but—” Ardis sat back in an attitude of relief. A moment later she leaned forward with her eyes googled and waggling her hands at the sides of her face. “Feelings! Funny feelings! Whooo! Must be from on high!”

      “The reason she took him out,” he said carefully, his attention upon his plate, the food untouched, “I wasn’t there.”

      “So you claim. But there’s nothing very new about that, is there, Ross? It’s never got her to take them out before.”

      “I know what she’s thinking,” he said in an ordinary voice, although it no longer seemed to be his wife he was addressing. “I’m not fooled.”

      “Look on the bright side,” Ardis said. “Even as we speak she’s out there solving our problem. Either she’s got off her rear end to sell property or she’s on her back arranging things another way—What are you doing?”

      He was holding his dinner plate in his right hand, touching the rim of it to his left arm just below the shoulder. He was doing this casually, with his head tilted downward and to the side as if to regard the plate, and yet his attention seemed upon some object more remote.

      Ardis’s hand went to her heart. She was silent now, and watched in a freeze of dismay as the plate moved swiftly rightward across his chest, his right arm extending, fingers releasing so that the plate sailed like a Frisbee through the doorway and across the space of the kitchen to explode against the oven door. There a gob of mashed potato adhered a moment to the Pyrex of the oven window before it fell away to leave a white pucker, and Ardis understood that the pucker appeared at that moment as white as it did only because the Pyrex was carbon-fouled inside a double pane, owing to an engineering flaw in that so-called quality stove, they get a reputation and the next thing you know immigrants working for chicken feed are asleep on their feet throwing together any old crap, and who pays—? She was on her feet. “Ross, honey, don’t!”

      He now held his bread-and-butter plate in that same hand, the rim of it just brushing his left arm midway between the elbow and shoulder as if to indicate something there, and she looked to it hopeful, but his arm moved swiftly back, extending as before, and the wrist flicked, the fingers releasing, and that plate too travelled through the air, to smash against the hall-entrance door frame and scatter down the length of the hall to the front door.

      “She doesn’t fool me,” he said again, quietly. “I know her.” And then he put his hands over his face and sat in silence.

      Ardis lowered herself into her chair. It was as if she had been struck a blow to the stomach. She had no breath.

      When he brought his hands away he was calm. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “And clear the table.” He pushed his chair back and with his hands on his knees, elbows spread, peered beneath the table at her stockinged feet, which were drawn together under her chair. The dog was still under there, and it looked out at him with frightened eyes. “Don’t walk.” He stood up. “I’ll get your shoes. You put the dog out and go straight to the room and wait for me there. Have the gear ready. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”

      “Oh, Ross,” Ardis said, and sighed. Sighed so profoundly she could hardly speak. “I can talk a lot more like this than this, than, than, than—”

      “No more. That’s enough. Where’s your fucking shoes?”

      “My fucking shoes,” Ardis sighed and seemed about to faint in her chair at the table where she sat.

      Wakelin and Caroline Troyer were back on the unpaved stretch, fifteen minutes into the washboard dance, when that rhythmic bump from the rear became enfolded by a sound more flubby and catastrophic. A flat tire.

      Wakelin felt this was a job for himself, but he was too slow. Crouching beside her on the shoulder amidst blasts of dust and flying stones from the big trucks, he watched her forearms cord and soften as she loosened wheelnuts, one after the other. The nuts had seized, but she possessed the necessary strength, or more accurately the confidence of the strength and therefore she had the strength. What was this if not faith? Wakelin, extending the hubcap as a tray for wheelnuts, was tempted to make this point out loud, but when she took his tray and set it on the ground at her feet he remained silent, just continued to watch her hands and forearms, fighting an impulse now to reach out and touch them, to trace the perfection of blue veins in the backs of her hands as they worked, a desire that struck him as being exactly as creepy and inappropriate as it would strike her. But he knew that, he understood that, and was grateful to his genes, to his upbringing, to something, to be able to squat here in a state of as-good-as perfect control, blameless as your perfect gentleman, and just watch, while reflecting in a removed and dispassionate way upon the stubbornness of the physical world. And at that moment it came to Wakelin that paramount in a life in the country would be the physical problems, the small humiliations by intractable materiality, the cold-sweat stand-offs, and maybe he should think some more about this country-property thing.

      The problem was, with a physical problem you really did have a problem. A physical problem was another order altogether from those issuing from the usual obstacles and defeats of money, work, and other people. When you had done all you could do and still something physical did not work, then it did not work. It was not like СКАЧАТЬ