Bone Dance

“It’s all right. Tell me.”

The look didn’t quite disappear, but she began. “So. After sitting quietly for two hours in the dark on the sweet soft throne of a tar barrel and breathing in lungfuls of dead fish smell, I’d figured out my plan. I would have my methanol pirates take me straight to China Black’s safe place, where I would extort an irresistible amount of ransom money from the locals, and send it back in lieu of my note, to Beano. I meant to count out five thousand pounds or make some blood flow — do you know that song? The pirates, unfortunately, refused to accept changes in the script. They would boot me off just past the checkpoints, and they had to have a note to send back. I think they were afraid that if I stuck around, I’d talk them out of the trike.”

She sat a moment, her hands clasped lightly before her. “Do you know how hard it was to write that note?” she said in a new voice.

“It was very good,” I told her. “I knew it really was from you.”

“That’s not what I mean. The arrival of that note would start something I didn’t want started. I knew that. In the end, I couldn’t do anything about it. But I wanted you to know I tried.”

“I told you, he would have—”

“Done it anyway. If true, it still doesn’t change the way it seemed at the time.” She raked her hands through her hair. “So I made the damned cross-country trek here, where I found Sherrea and told her where you were. She coupled your name with a few choice bits of verbiage. She knew better than I did what you’d called down on your head. Then she worked out the Great Escape.

“You ought to try to appreciate it properly,” Frances added with a sigh. “Maybe you will later. I thought it was the stuff that caper movies were made of, but what do I know?”

“I can’t try until you tell me about it.”

“That’s better — it almost sounded like you. The plan was a variant of the plague trick. Sherrea and a fellow named LeRoy put three rather startled calves in a livestock trailer, hitched up the pickup, and headed in on I-94. No particular attention paid to them, since they were going in. They went to Del Corazón, found you, and hid you under the false floor in the trailer. Then they put the shockingly realistic latex sores on the calves and headed for the Cedar Avenue checkpoint.”

At that she stopped and looked expectantly at me.

“Sores?” I asked.

“Anthrax,” she said, savoring the syllables. “Spreads like wildfire, fatal, communicable to humans. Nobody searched the trailer. The only problem was that when LeRoy finally pulled off the latex, all the hair underneath came off, too. The calves are out in the pasture shooting accusing looks at anyone who comes near.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It would have been good in a movie.”

Frances leaned forward again and gave me the strange look; then she stood up. “Go back to sleep,” she said.

This time it didn’t work. For one thing, I hurt almost everywhere. And I was nagged by the feeling that Frances had wanted entirely different responses from the ones she’d gotten. I couldn’t think what they would have been — I’d been polite and attentive and cheerful, if not very emphatic — but that didn’t keep me from trying.

The next week seemed like one long series of disabilities and allowances made for them. I couldn’t remember ever having been bedridden before, or even very sick, so they all came as a surprise. Going to the bathroom was the most unpleasant; I insisted on hobbling across the room to the water closet long before I was really able, even if it meant having to lean on someone as far as the door. The alternative, after all, was much worse.

Eating was a trial; I had a loose tooth and stitches inside my mouth on the left side. Being bathed by someone else, as it turned out, was simply impossible once I was conscious. I was able to let Josh change dressings at first, while I was still too weak to get all the way through the process by myself. After that, I took care of it. I’d never realized how close to the full range of motion getting dressed required, until I did it when it seemed that none of my muscles would move through their full range of motion without pain. But I did it.

Josh insisted I call him that. He said since the only thing he had to call me was “Sparrow,” he was forced to give up on proper doctor-patient formality, but he would feel better if I would return the insult. He told me he learned his craft by apprenticing himself to a woman who had gone to med school and had a pre-Bang practice as a surgeon. He told me his wife had died two years ago and that he still missed her; that he had three children, ages sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one; that he preferred vegetable gardening to flowers; that the accomplishment he was proudest of was learning to play the guitar at the age of forty-six…

In short, he flung his life open in front of me without even seeming to notice he’d done it. I sat numb, patient, and politely silent under the fall of information, intending to forget it all as soon as the words stopped sounding in the room. I needed to do with his life story what he had done with the names: equalize us, achieve parity, balance debit and credit in the accounts of the Deal.

I couldn’t do it. The ring on his left hand reminded me of the wife I’d never met. Some skill of his in the sickroom made me wonder whether he’d acquired it during his apprenticeship. A row of flowers outside the window reminded me of him in negative. There was a slow corruption of my principles going on, that I could feel, but that I was helpless to stop.

He never mentioned what he knew about me, which I didn’t understand at all. He’d examined me when Sher brought me in, and he knew I was aware of that. That part of the wall of my privacy was already torn down. Yet he never raised the subject, as if it were still private, as if we were on opposite sides of that wall. What value did he think the knowledge had, when both of us possessed it?

Theo came to visit me several times. I found I almost couldn’t talk to him. I remembered sitting in his room in China Black’s house, feeling as if we were the only people in the world who understood the language we were speaking that day. We had traded secrets and painful admissions in that language. Now, looking at him, I felt as if someone had plucked the whole vocabulary out of my brain. I didn’t think it had had any words for explaining what had happened to me, anyway. Theo looked hurt when the conversation faltered. After a while he stopped visiting.

When I could walk that far, I took to sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse. There was enough to see from there to keep my mind busy and out of trouble, and when there wasn’t, I usually dozed off.

The front porch looked out on a makeshift village square with the corners filed off. It had one large tree at the center, and a scattering of smaller ones. There was a pump and a trough, and a few benches, and a charred brick firepit. There were also flowers — less thickly planted than in China Black’s garden, and less disciplined, but with something of the same feel nonetheless. It was pretty, and there was almost always something to watch: someone doing something to a flowerbed, or pumping water, or rocking a baby.

Other houses surrounded the square, in a confusion of styles and sizes. Some had been built there, some moved there from other places. Behind the first ring of houses, partially visible from my chair, was another. These, too, were a confetti of styles and materials, including cloth-and-tubing domes and some complex-looking tents. I put the number of dwellings I could see at about two dozen. If there was anything beyond those, I didn’t think about it.

One afternoon Sherrea came and sat with me. She’d been a regular visitor to the sickroom. More than that, she’d been an irregular volunteer nurse there, since her hands, for no clear reason, were among the few I could tolerate for the relatively impersonal services. But our conversations there had been short, and had brushed lightly over their subject matter.