Welcome back once again, Patient Reader. Another installment of the Heidi story follows. Sit back and enjoy, tell your friends if you find it good enough to do so. Read on.
The Care
and Feeding of Bears, Part III
I wanted
to ask Heidi to run away with me, to run away that night, take her
away to some new place where she could start over, where we
could start over. Where we could be whoever we wanted to be.
But
she would never have done it, even fully knowing that she would only
suffer through this life.
I
left school at the end of Third Term, just as the Old Man promised.
Heidi dropped out soon after. “Eh,” she told me over the phone,
“school was boring
after you left . . . just not the same without you . . .”
“Can
you help me?” soon became the
phrase that defined us. “I love you”
long ago forgotten.
Heidi
moved away from home and into some guy's apartment. I moved out of
my own Hell, but in addition to being alone still, I was also lonely.
The Last Straw was when the Old Man pushed me through the glass
shower door. I was picking little glass slivers out of my long hair
for days. Then I turned 16.
I
finagled a job at the Medical Center on campus. “Sure I'm going to
get my diploma . . . Sure I'm going to night school . . .” I said
in my interview. “I just need a job to help my Dad take care of
things at home . . .” I was hired on the spot.
I
made enough to make the $210 dollar rent on a one-bedroom, and I
bought a Kawasaki 900 that got me from A to B.
Heidi
left the dirt bag she was with, whatever his name was. She called
him a “Shit,” and I wondered just when it was exactly that she
began to cuss.
“Can
you help me,” had changed our
roles, just four little words that shifted our duties and I did not
realize that this tiny phrase, geological in its speed, was the
Calving-of-the-Iceberg beginning of our aching, insurmountable rift. Samsara was breaking through, and neither of us interpreted this as
pain.
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0200 hours and she's calling me from some party. “Creepy guy keeps eye-fucking me . . . can you help me?” and I'm on my bike, ready to fight off a pack of wolves for her.
“Can
you help me?” and the cat to the vet, the three of us on the Kaw
winding down the streets.
Can
you help me,and her poor,
oft-battered heart, broken yet again.
Can you help me, holding her hand at the hospital as she lost the baby. A little boy
she planned to name after me because, “You know my heart best . .
.” and there I was, feeling my own stony heart rend into jagged
pieces.
Can you help me, and
her OD.
Can you help me . . . Can you help me . . .
Can you help me . . .
I
remember thinking about her, in my Algebra class at the time, giving
me her hand-written lyrics of “The End,” by The Doors, her
calligraphy as crisp and moving as her eyes.
My
heart beat softly in her hands, our dreams, hers and mine, really not
so different. We both wanted her to be happy. We were supposed to
change the world, not
the other way around.
But
the world was stronger than our collective will, and we bent beneath
its unrelenting weight.
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The Care and Feeding of Bears, Part IV
“Can you help me?” and the January after my 16th birthday. I'd gotten a better job at the hospital, moved into a$269 a month apartment with a balcony and fireplace, and I even bought a truck so I wouldn't have to ride the Kaw in the snowy months. My ass had grown tired of chewing bubble gum, you see. And believe me, riding a motorcycle in the snow will make your ass do just that.
I even got to wear suits
and a white lab coat. The real kind that went down to my knees and
had slits in the sides so I could reach into pockets without having
to unbutton it.
“I need
a witness to sign the Marriage License,” she told me. “Sure,”
I said, surprised. I am never surprised.
I didn't
know she was even seeing anyone, let alone some lame named Karl. She
said she wanted me there because I knew her heart the best. And it
seemed that, though I did know her heart the best, I knew less and
less of it as time rolled onward.
Three
months later, the Can you help me
was the ride to the pharmacy. Her arms about my waist, two-up on the
bike and the wind in our hair, and her promise to brush out my own long locks and
braid it when we got back to her trailer.
The
home pregnancy test was negative, and the crisis was averted. As
promised she braided my hair, first into three braids, then plaited
those into one fat one. I have to admit, I even thought it was kinda
cool.
I
played her a song on her beat up acoustic guitar in trade.
Three
days later and another motorcycle ride to the drugstore, this time to
pick up some birth control pills.
When
I was a little kid, my mother, a Shinto-Buddhist from the Old Country
warned me that my role was to be that of Bodhisattva. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, a Bodhisattva is someone
who is enlightened enough to attain Nirvana,
but forgoes this bliss in order to stay behind to help others achieve
it. I always thought that Mom was bat-shit crazy. I did not want
that kind of responsibility. Even at seven years old I knew that the
responsibility was far deeper and solemn than I wanted to bear. I
did not ask the IS for this. I asked the IS, if it be Her will, to
take this cup from my lips.
Could
I ever be that wise? Would I ever be that compassionate? I was
already drawn to and in the healthcare field. Wasn't that enough, and
how so? Could I really be more? There I was with all of this to
ponder as I watched Heidi not watching me. I was 16 fucking years
old and I drank like a fish and smoked weed like a DEA raid fire and
I dropped acid like my hero, John Lennon.
Was
I even helping Heidi, or were we just spinning this fucking dharma
wheel like a worn-out tire in red clay mud?
Karl
wanted her pregnant. Heidi was going to keep the pills a secret. “Why don't you drive?” I asked her. I had taken her to get her
license even before I had my own.
“Karl,”
she said, “doesn't want me to.”
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Can you
help me? And the divorce a few
months later. Can you help me? And
the string of men and heartbreak. Can you help me?
And Karl was on his way from the bar over to the trailer . . .
August,
now. Long ago, she told me, she had stopped calling the cops.
“They're useless,” she said, and I agreed. Besides I lived
closer to her than the cop shop was, and knew all the shortcuts, too.
I had a quicker response time. She trusted me. And I knew her
heart best.
I
withheld from her nothing she ever requested of me. Denying her was
denying my own heart. My heart, pinned and bleeding at her feet was
hers to devour, and she drank from it, thirstily.
And
now Karl was on his way. And Karl liked to hurt her.
The Kawasaki was fast, but the roads to her trailer were winding, and mostly dirt and gravel. The going was always slower than she or I needed it to be.
I climbed off my bike just as the headlights of Karl's Cadillac pulled into the drive. He was out of the car and running, racing me to Heidi's porch. I won.
Cold Steel, a Japanese company that manufactures blades, makes a 10-inch tanto, a dagger that looks like a miniature katana, or samurai sword. It is fashioned in the old way: a block of high carbon steel beaten and folded hundreds of times and tough enough to chop through concrete.
It was always easy for me to picture one of my mother's ancestors disemboweling himself in seppuku with a similar weapon, the ritual suicide that saved them from a life of shame. Shame, perhaps, in being unable to defend their woman.
Karl saw the Cold Steel tanto in my hand, saw the look on my face, and ran back to his car. As it turns out, a Cold Steel tanto can pierce the pretty sheet metal of a '70s model Cadillac door. It barely missed Karl's leg as it passed through effortlessly.
Heidi cried herself to sleep that night, curled up in my lap like a cat. Karl did not return. At least, not that night.
Two months later and I am at work when my beeper goes off. In the little window of the pager was Heidi's number, followed by “911.” Can you help me?
Fuck these patients . . . none of them needed me as badly as Heidi did.
She was more than 20 minutes away, and it was late September. The roads were going to be frosty.
He had arrived too many minutes before I did, already crossing the yard as Heidi picked up the phone to page me. He had kicked in her door. Hoarfrost sparkled in the light that spilled from her ruined doorway and the porch light in the cold air of twilight like Christmas glitter.
As soon as Karl saw the bike headlight he sprinted to his car. He almost made it.
Heidi's eyes in the porch light were barely visible through the blood and the tears and the pain. Karl didn't stand a chance. I was young and strong.
I beat him until I had to rest, and Heidi was frozen on the porch, her balled fists at her mouth as she watched in horror and fascination.
Hands on my knees, panting, I waited until I caught my breath. When I did so, I began beating Karl once again.
I was a raging sea, my mind a gale my fists the waves whipped up by it. My booted feet smashed on the shores of his curled up body. The squall of my ferocity laid waste to the shredded sails of reason, and I bashed him onto the angry reefs in my crashing surf.
Heidi's screams made me stop. She thought that I had killed him. For a moment, I thought so too. Part of me knew that I certainly wanted to, was even trying to maybe, and Shame and Pride were the feelings that I felt while I put that part away.
She knelt beside him, these two bloody people who were inextricably bound to one another by Karma. I stared at them, awash in stunned wonder, standing over these broken strangers, blood drying on my unclenchable fists.
The
Bear inside my heart was fully awake now, and I felt it stir and begin to
pace from lack of patience.
. . . to be continued . . .
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