The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

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СКАЧАТЬ enough and time. Unless your name was Uri Geller and your physical problem was a shortage of bent spoons, you were not going to solve it by mind alone. When you had a problem writing a magazine piece you could always sleep on it, a fresh start. With a physical problem you could sleep on it as much as you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. For Wakelin, a fresh start in the physical world consisted of driving to Canadian Tire and throwing himself on the mercy of the first clerk who bothered to toss him a glance. It was buying a new one and paying extra to have somebody come around and set it up.

      Caroline Troyer was speaking to him, telling him to fetch rocks for under the wheels on the passenger’s side, she’d be jacking on a grade.

      Wakelin jumped up and jogged around the front of the truck and skidded down off the shoulder for two big rocks and clambered back up with one in each hand. They were bigger than they needed to be, the weight of ten-pin bowling balls, and twice he fell, embedding an elbow in the soft gravel, but he made it and jammed them in. “Done,” he said, squatting once more at her side, game as a puppet.

      Now she unbolted the spare from under the bed and located the axle and positioned the jack and jacked the truck and removed the blown tire and lifted on the spare and tightened the nuts partway and unjacked the truck until the ground held the tire, and tightened the nuts the rest of the way and unjacked the truck until it came down fully onto its springs and the jack was loose enough to free it from under the axle and threw the blown tire into the bed. And this entire procedure Wakelin followed helplessly ever one step behind, not quite keeping out of her way, his thoughts lapsed to overexposure, his mind bleached, the small interior voice stuck meaningless back there with What was this if not faith? stuck and repeating. And the world as manifest on that dirt shoulder in that corridor of spruce and fir under the deepening blue of evening, a cooler breeze from the forest margin fragrant with fungus and conifer in mitigation of the vaporous gritty pall of dust and diesel upon that stripped road surface, the world rose up on its old elbows aggrieved, and seeing it that way Wakelin felt a need for redemption, or something like it, a need undiminished by his utter ignorance concerning what redemption could be or how to get it. Why it should be necessary at all.

      And then she was taking the jack out of his hands (dismantling it as she did so) and the socket wrench, and this hardware she replaced behind the seat while he struggled to fit the hubcap back on, but after one glance she repositioned it and kicked it on herself. And so much further unnerved was he by the short sharp efficiency of this action in the midst of all that personal chagrin, all that despair of old helplessness, that he had climbed into the cab and buckled himself in before he realized that she herself was not getting in but walking around the back of the truck to kick away the rocks he had placed under the tires, except then when he glanced around, she was just standing there looking at them.

      He struggled out of his seat belt and threw open his door. “I can do that!” he called. “I’m sorry, I completely forgot—” He jumped down.

      “You put them at the backs of the tires,” she said.

      Wakelin was not sure if this statement was descriptive or prescriptive. He checked the rocks. “Right,” he said.

      She was walking back to the driver’s door.

      Wakelin continued to stare at the rocks. Something was wrong, but what? And then he saw that he had wedged them under the upslope side of the tires, and a hot wavefront travelled his neck and cheeks and climbed his temples, and though there was no need at all he kicked away the rocks and did so with some energy.

      They were on the road again. A few minutes later back on asphalt, moving once more down a corridor of spruce and fir, and that rear bump had not gone away.

      Roused from his mortified flush, Wakelin looked over.

      Her eyes were fixed down the road. “It’s the good tire blew,” she said.

      It’s always this, Caroline Troyer reflected. The main thing about thought: move away. From anything it lights on. It doesn’t matter what it is. Like a fire or a Slinky, move away and start up again some place else. Move away and do it different. Do it as it should be. As things like this used to be. When they were better. Or if it seems to be a good thing it’s lit on, then do it as precious. Out of reach. Or better: do it sacred. That’s right, sacred, needing defending. Or do it lost forever, at any time now. That’s always a good one.

      Now in memory, she is standing in her windbreaker and cap and rubber boots before her father in the yard, where blank gravestones lean among winter weeds along the chain link. It is a hard bright morning. The air is cool, the sun hot. He kneels on a foam pallet before a glassy stone, a drill in his hand. He is wearing sound mufflers, a dust mask, goggles. He switches off the drill. He pulls the mask and goggles down around his neck but not the mufflers, and the fine salmon dusting of marble leaves naked white goggles around his eyes.

      I’m going up the hill, she says.

      You should.

      I’ll be back to make lunch.

      I’d appreciate it.

      And in memory she is climbing through the sumacs and among the pines above the war memorial and following the rising path along the ridge. Where the rock is exposed it is warm from the sun and the snow is granular and has been quick to recede. The air is cool in the shade where the snow lies deep yet in places, and the path is muddy but not where the shade now falls or has fallen upon it today.

      Her destination is not the highest part of the ridge but almost. It is a sloped clearing several yards in diameter below, but not visible from, the path, south-facing, where no immediate green is visible as yet except the mosses and conifers. Neither is rock visible, but scratch for ten seconds and there it is. The clearing is surrounded by young hemlock and balsam. Higher up, above the path, a white pine. The clearing is sheltered and warm on days when few are. It is a place where animals bring their kill or perhaps are themselves killed here, for it is scattered with the intricate bones of small birds and mice and voles, and the skeletons of squirrels, and even a few of the vertebrae and what remains of the forelegs of a fawn, all bleached to the chalk whiteness of bone.

      This is her sanctuary. No people come here. In this place it is possible to believe that no one knows where she is. Here she kicks off her rubber boots and spreads her white legs. At her feet is a screen of chokecherry and dogwood thick enough, even unleafed, to cancel the town. A brown creeper darts pecking through the winter stalks. Eastward the white meridial pain of the spring sun. South, the undulant bluish grey and lime-green horizon of forested hills. She can hear a killdeer, she can hear a Canada jay. A squirrel gone squirrelly at her trespass. She can hear the ravens, from the bluff on the other side of the summit, up in arms as ever, and she can hear the wind that moves through the white pine above her, a tunnel of soft roaring. And she feels smaller breezes on her face and arms, smells the insolate fragrance of the mosses, and as her fingers sift the pulpy till, her thoughts do not recede but slow and quiet to a sequence of resistances in her skull, small catches, palpable in their succession.

      To go to that place is to wake from thoughts inspired by the dream of freedom that are not freedom.

      She is not free now, only remembering her secret place on the ridge as she drives her father’s truck through the dusk listening to a man so reactive to himself, so blind, that a properly intuitive choice such as where he will spend his solitude is perplexed, impulsive, in the end will be the result practically of chance; that the nature of his relationship with a woman he lost nearly two years ago is no less complicated a mystery for him tonight than it was on the day he lost her, his suffering hardly diminished, his life snagged, twisting on that loss. And five minutes after she has delivered this lost soul to his car, she will stand before another baffled devious sufferer, her father, whose СКАЧАТЬ