26 May 2014
1152 hrs
Hello, PatientReader
Welcome to the last installment of the Heidi Story. Nothing needs to be said that isn't said as you read further.
To set up, Karl was on his way to Heidi's trailer, full of booze and cowardice.
So without further ado, I shall press on. Are you ready? Splendid!
Heidi and the Cunning Fennec Fox
conclusion
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 her terrified self 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, Heidi 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 un-clenchable fists.
The Bear inside my heart was fully awake
now; I felt it stir and begin to pace from lack of patience.
I got them both in the Caddy and Heidi
began to calm down, her sobs becoming the more controlled fits and starts and
hitches. I drove them both to the hospital where I worked as it was the
closest, and I knew and trusted the ER staff on duty. They would take
good care of Heidi, and, unfortunately, Karl too.
As I drove, I listened to the wind
whistling through the hole in the driver's side door made by my tanto
and me. The sound almost drowned out Heidi's soft weeping.
Heidi had been to this ER before, her thick
chart full of her “accidents.” What a clumsy girl she was; falling down
stairs and walking into doors, smashing bottles over her own head . . .
The ER staff knew me, as I said, and
they knew Heidi, of course. They'd never seen Karl before.
Suzanne, a nurse whom I had dated a
while earlier, saw the abrasions on my hands; saw my crime on my boots.
Like most medical professionals, she
abhorred violence of any kind. She placed a suture tray on the dressing
table and told us that the doctor would be in shortly. Karl was in some
other room getting X-rayed and prepped for surgery.
Suzanne took a quick sniff as if she
smelled our story on our scent. Her stern face softened and she whispered
to me on the way out the door. “Good for you . . .”
But all I felt was shame again.
And that Goddamn pride. Defending Heidi was right, but my methods were
wrong. I raged from revenge, not
defense.
A few minutes later the trauma
surgeon came into the room and sewed Heidi's left eyebrow back on. I told
her she looked like Spock from Star Trek, and when she laughed it tugged
painfully at the sutures in her lip. “Highly illogical, and Fuck You,
Captain,” she said.
How could I kiss her wounded mouth
without hurting her? I stayed put on the stool.
The cobalt blue of her eyes stood out
against the ever-blackening bruises of her battered face. They kept her
overnight to watch for ill-effects from the concussion. I held her hand
all night to keep her from falling asleep. I told her stories from work
and we reminisced about algebra class and world history and the time when I
Love You ruled our world. I sang to her softly, like a prayer, I
suppose, and I stared out the window long after that pretty sunrise.
(c) Properfessor
Karl's shoulder was dislocated. His
jaw, orbital socket, four teeth, three ribs, and a distal radius were
broken. His spleen was ruptured and removed overnight in surgery.
Before we left, Heidi went to visit him in the Recovery Room. I liked
hearing that word and associating it with Karl: Recovery.
Heidi told him he had been hit by a
truck. A simple hit and run and there were no witnesses. Karl knew
that this was my hospital; that my friends all worked here.
Karl knew I could quite easily come back. Karl nodded to Heidi in
agreement.
We took a cab back to my apartment
where Heidi finally fell asleep. I made myself a sandwich and a pot of
coffee and watched her dream. Her tears and her blood mixed pink on my
pillow.
I changed the pillowcase when she woke
up and went to the bathroom later that day. I made sure she didn't see
what she had left behind.
I filled the tub with hot, soapy water
and bathed her gently. I washed her hair, rinsing away the dirt and
blood. She was bruised all over. I changed out the water and filled it
again, this time rubbing her feet. They were the only parts of her that
were not sore.
“Son of a bitch kicked my ass,” she
said, trying to make a joke. The eyebrow eye had swollen shut, and I
cleaned away the oddly-colored fluids that oozed from it. Our gazes met,
and in hers I saw shame. I do not know what it was she saw in mine.
Later, drinking our coffee in silence,
and exhausted. She winced at the hot on
her swollen lips. Of course I didn't have any drinking straws.
We left the Caddy at the hospital and I
left my bike at Heidi's trailer. I called another taxi.
I stood by my bike after getting her
front door to close, kind of. I told her I'd get her another one and
bring it over in my truck, when I got it fixed. Or borrow someone else's,
maybe.
Before I got on the Kawasaki, I asked her a
question. “Will you move in with me?”
“No,” she answered. My heart
hurt, and I hated it for that. I always pay dearly whenever I love someone.
Love exacts a staggering fee.
“You'd be my Number One Choice,
though. You know my heart the best.”
One
week later and the knock on my door. “Can you help us?” one of the
detectives asked.
(c) Properfessor
Heidi's bruises hadn't even faded when
Karl showed up at her trailer for the last time. He shot her in her
wounded face then blew most of her torso away with the next four shots.
He tried to burn her trailer down before he ruined his own brainstem with a
self-inflicted gunshot wound. In my line of work we call that FBBP:
Failure to Be Bullet-Proof.
A neighbor had heard the shots and had
come over to the trailer, saw the small blaze, and put it out with the garden
hose. Then he called the cops.
The police had found my phone number in
Heidi's half-melted wallet. It did not surprise me that I was listed as
her emergency contact. I am never surprised.
“Are you a relative?” the homicide
detective asked me, her voice barely audible over the humming noise in my
head. After a moment I answered the only answer I knew was true:
“No,” I said, “I am just the one who knew her heart best . . .”
Am I like the detective, cold and jaded,
dispassionate, tardy and powerless? Am I not the Bodhisattva of Compassion? Does
the detective feel more or less than I?
Am I the tanto, long and cold,
deadly; more a weapon than a tool? Am I the car door that it pierces,
marred and broken? Am I not the Bodhisattva of Wisdom?
Should I not already have these answers?
Did whatever I have in the way of
Compassion even help Heidi? Did whatever I have that passes for Wisdom
ease her suffering? Did she ever not hurt, or ever not feel fear?
Did she ever love? Did she ever feel loved? Did she ever feel loved
by me?
One of the detectives asked me how old I
was, and I told her.
“Seventeen,” I said.
“Same as Heidi.”
Always,
The Cunning Fennec Fox
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