The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

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СКАЧАТЬ “The only thing I haven’t seen much of around here so far is a lack of For Sale signs.”

      Old Frank turned swiftly away. Whether stung by such insolence or stumped for a comeback, Wakelin did not have a chance to discover, because Gail was already right there, setting before Old Frank a platter of fried eggs and toast with bacon in a charred and twisted stack.

      “You’re looking for property,” she told Wakelin, “you talk to Ross Troyer.”

      Ross Troyer, yes. Father of the healer.

      “Ross Troyer Realty,” Wakelin agreed, nodding. “I’ve been seeing the signs.”

      “You’ve been seeing the signs, have you,” Gail said. She was making sure Old Frank had everything he needed. This done, she toted Wakelin’s bill and slapped it down next to his plate. Then she stood and looked at him.

      Wakelin looked back. He wanted to reach up and square those shoulders. In the shower, with both hands, he wanted to straighten that terrible permanent. Later, in front of a bonfire he would make of those slacks, blouse, runners, socks, underpants, and bra, he wanted to nuzzle and bite every part of her. He tried to think of something to tell her, besides this. He squirmed for his wallet. She seemed to shake her head. He froze. She did not move. He resolved to say something, anything.

      “Pay at the cash,” Gail said from the corner of her mouth and walked away.

      After that, Wakelin spent some time sideways in his chair, holding the bill and his wallet, facing Old Frank’s hair-dense right ear as the old man chewed in the tentative, reactive way of the dentured, for whom all food is now laced with tinfoil.

      “So what’s the story?” Wakelin said.

      “Eh?” The head swung round. A column of yolk down the chin was a yellow thermometer. Delicate skin had formed on the bulb, which creased as the jaws with their electric dentures, their numb mouthparts, continued to chew.

      “A reporter,” Wakelin said, more loudly, “on what story?”

      The Grant Gemboree noise level might have fallen slightly when he said these words.

      Again Old Frank turned away. This time Wakelin did not know whether he had heard or not. Or, if he had, what.

      Gail was back. “You got some egg on your chin there, Frank!” she shouted.

      Old Frank’s fork clattered to his plate and both hands went scrabbling for a serviette. She helped him release one from the powerful dispenser and wiped his chin for him.

      “Lying scum-suckers,” Old Frank commented as she did this.

      “What was that, Frank?” she shouted.

      But she had finished wiping, and Old Frank was chewing again. She looked at Wakelin. Whether querying or accusatory, he did not know. There was no expression on her alabaster face.

      “I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Wakelin said lightly.

      She shrugged and glanced away as she removed a pack of Player’s Mild from the side pocket of her flannels. “Too late,” she said and fired one up. “Rush is over.”

      Old Frank was looking at Wakelin. “Had a cancer on my lung. Size and shape of a small grapefruit. Son-of-a-bitch doctors threw up their hands and walked away.”

      “I’m sorry,” Wakelin said.

      “Crushing other organs. Throwing off clots like a pinwheel.”

      “God.”

      Old Frank held Wakelin’s eye. “Seventeenth of last month she shows up at my place. I’m at the kitchen table, there. No knock. She just walks in—”

      “Who’s this?” Wakelin asked, and before he could stop himself, “Caroline Troyer?” Quickly he glanced to Gail, but she had already turned to look significantly at Ardis, who stood directly behind her holding a coffeepot in her right hand and in her left hand the chair she had taken earlier from Wakelin’s table. Ardis lowered the chair until its front legs rested on the floor. Gazing at Wakelin from around the chair was the black Lab, which had got to its feet. Gail’s eyes came back to Wakelin. Ardis’s had never left him.

      Old Frank had butted out his cigarette. Now he was rattling his knife and fork onto his plate. He pushed it across to Wakelin’s table and drew his coffee mug in tighter to his chest. This was how he had been sitting at his kitchen table. “Not dark yet. No lights on. Never heard her come in.”

      “Caroline would knock,” Gail mouthed above Old Frank’s head to Wakelin, nodding, mock-assuring, pointing to her ear. “He wouldn’t hear.”

      “First I seen the light,” Frank said. “Then I seen her.”

      “What kind of light was it, Frank?” Gail said, and Wakelin thought of a child asking to hear a favourite part.

      “Soft firefly glow,” Old Frank stated. He must have said this many times. It came out like one word. Softfireflyglow. “She was lit up in herself. That’s the only way to say it. Call me crazy, I know what I saw.”

      “You’re crazy, Frank,” somebody said from across the room, not unkindly, and it struck Wakelin that the entire Grant Gemboree was listening. Even the old cook, a wizened dissolute man with shiny skin and a ponytail in a hairnet, had come out of the kitchen to lean against the cash and smoke. The story must have been spinning off apocrypha for a month, and now here was Wakelin himself the occasion of a new authoritative telling. He couldn’t believe his luck.

      “She sits down at the table there. She takes me by the hands and she looks me straight in the face.” The old man stopped speaking. He sat and blinked.

      “Did she say anything, Frank?” Gail asked, prompting, leaning past him to crush her cigarette in his ashtray.

      “Not with words, she didn’t.”

      Again Old Frank did not continue. He took a small dry lump of tissue from his pocket and with shaking hands opened it and blew his nose.

      “Is that when you cried, Frank?” Gail asked at his ear.

      “Didn’t cry,” the old man said with surprising force. “Nobody cried.” He half-turned to Gail. “Stand behind me! Put your hands on my shoulders!”

      Gail positioned herself behind Frank and did as she was told. He had leaned slightly forward in his chair.

      “Now move them down my back—No, hell! not that way! Not thumbs together! The other—That’s right—Stop right there—Left on top of right. Not so much pressure. And hold it.” From his leaning position Old Frank surveyed the room. “Whole lung went hot-cold right through. Like Vicks VapoRub. Then she done the left one. Same thing. A couple minutes each lung, no more. I never felt anything like it in my life. The girl has power in the palms of her hands. She beamed that power inside there the way you’d go in with a storm light.”

      Again Old Frank did not continue.

      “And then what?” From the healer’s mother.

      Old Frank looked at Ardis. “That’s all she needed. СКАЧАТЬ