Absolute Zero Read online

  Riiiinggg.

  An alarm went off. Every two hours alarms went off. Feeding alarms, turning alarms, range of motion alarms, bathing alarms. She heard Earl coming up the basement stairs.

  “Great. Another nice guy who just wants to help out. Oh, I can drop off the Ford, no problem,” Earl said, mimicking Broker’s voice. “I hope him and Allen don’t trip all over each other.”

  Earl wore an electric-yellow T-shirt with a War Wolf logo in Day-Glo blue. He’d scissored out the sleeves to show off his biceps. The shirt was a size too small and clung to his torso and wadded around his hips, clearly revealing the deep-cut ripple of his abdominal muscles and the curve of his belly above the tops of his jeans which he wore without underwear and very low on his hips, with a shadow of pubic hair peeking up and over.

  Earl was unshaven and his hair was moussed and he was into looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club this week. The stud in his ear and the cannabis shine to his blue eyes had the same tight sparkle. Jolene didn’t really care for Earl swinging his abs back and forth in her kitchen. “You’re losing your pants,” she said.

  Earl smiled. “You didn’t used to mind that.”

  “Why don’t you grow up,” she said.

  “Aren’t we sounding grandiose today,” he quipped back. He knew all the AA jive and where all her buttons were. He’d started patrolling the house, peeking in cabinets and drawers, looking for hidden bottles of vodka.

  A static sound between a dry-heaving pant and a raving growl shushed their little spat. The sound came from a white plastic baby monitor on the counter. The monitors were Jolene’s idea; she had placed them throughout the house to help her keep track of Hank.

  Earl said, “C’mon, it’s feeding time.”

  To him it was a fairy tale. He was Jack and he’d climbed the beanstalk and had stumbled on the mythic goose and now all he had to do was keep the goose alive until it squeezed out the golden egg. Hank’s care and feeding were a serious, round-the-clock commitment.

  They went down a flight of circular stairs, through the bedroom, and out on the full-season porch that ran most of the length of the back of the house.

  Hank was pink-cheeked and clean shaven, with spittle drooling down his chin. He wore a pair of diapers and a hospital gown and was propped up in a railed Hil-Rom hospital bed, fidgeting slightly back and forth. His neck twitched, his eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets. He could move his lips and tongue. The feed bag hung on an IV tree above him and a strap buckled his chest as a precaution against pitching off the bed. Allen said the movements were just spasms, involuntary. Sometimes Hank’s eyes would burn on her so intensely that she was sure he was in there, watching.

  Jolene squared her shoulders and went into the room.

  Actually, it was good that he lurched around; it gave him a fighting chance against the bedsores. For the last five days she had followed a strict schedule that included turning and repositioning Hank side to side every two hours—feeding and hydrating him, manipulating his arms and legs in passive range-of-motion exercises twice a day, bathing him, constantly swabbing his mouth and gums with a suction wand, and changing his diapers, which Allen referred to as adult pads.

  First she wiped his chin and checked his throat. She picked up the electric suction wand and cleaned away excess saliva and mucus from his teeth and gums.

  Earl took a can of Ensure from a case of the product, opened it with a church key, and dumped it in the continuously running gravity drip which spiked off the bag that connected to his stomach tube.

  He tossed the can at the wastepaper basket by the door. Missed. The empty clattered on the hardwood floor. Earl licked a finger. “Yum, yum. Prune dip, my favorite.”

  “Knock it off, Earl,” Jolene said. “And pick up the goddamn can.”

  Earl grumbled and retrieved the can and tossed it in the basket, backhanded. “He scores.”

  She cut him with a stare.

  He sneered back. He didn’t like it when she’d sheared off her hair. Or when she’d brought in the single bed to sleep next to Hank at night. He thought the hair and the single-bed routine were overwrought theatrical gestures.

  “Hey, c’mon; we need a little gallows humor to break the mood around here,” he said. Laughing, he backed off and then, goddamn him—just to be coarse, he tipped a few books from the bookcase as he was going out the door, like a mean little kid.

  Jolene smoothed a hand through her shorn hair, took a deep breath to steady herself, and, as she swung her eyes around the room, she met her reflection in the mirror framed in the bookshelves. She was sunken-cheeked, haggard. Red around the eyes like a speed freak on a long burn. Still . . .

  Mirror, mirror on the wall.

  She’d known she had it when she was about seven. By the time she got to high school it could ripple over her face like a dark wind.

  Even now, strung-out exhausted, she had it. For half a beat she engaged the rare expression before it sparked away. It was something a good photographer had to sneak up on because she couldn’t duplicate it on cue. This was America—so the way you really knew you had it was if you could sell it.

  She had logged some shoots and she had a portfolio. She’d been told that, if she put in the work, she could give New York a try. But she kept waking up in cheap rooms with a hangover and Earl in the bed next to her.

  And then she met Hank.

  Jolene turned from the mirror and studied the wreckage of her husband.

  Once she’d thought the worst thing in the world could only happen directly, physically, to her. Now it had happened to someone else, and she was definitely feeling it. She’d cut her hair to honor the emotion.

  “That’s a change. You taught me that,” she said under her breath.

  As she reached over and eased the sweaty mop of hair away from Hank’s wild eyes she wrinkled her nose. She was getting used to the diaper smell. Dutifully, she changed him, and, as she wiped him clean, she noticed how the muscle tone was already turning to taffy. Her hard old Hank was spreading into a puddle of flesh.

  She deposited the diaper in the diaper caddy and kneaded the residue of white talcum powder between her fingers. One of life’s safe things. For a moment, she almost remembered the fragrance from infancy, from before walking and talking. She pursed her lips. “Hank, you tough old fart, now that you’re not here anymore I think I’m starting to appreciate you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  He’d grown up fascinated with the war-soaked fiction of Hemingway, James Jones, and Norman Mailer; so, like many wanna-be writers out of that tradition, he’d conducted a love affair with near-death. He’d hung it out there more than most and returned from the edge with a fair scrapbook.

  Now he knew he’d just been a tourist.

  There was only so much of him left. Left here at least. Portions of him were missing and sometimes he suspected they had moved on to somewhere else.

  All he could manage now was the sensation that the inside and the outside were merging; that the things he thought were him were blending slowly with the things that weren’t. He had the distinct feeling that he’d been wearing his skin like a blindfold all his life.

  Storms of human weather still took the form of shadows that brought food and nourishment. He vaguely knew the slosh was being inserted into his feeding tube. Inside, he felt his stomach ripple in anticipation and the drool beaded on his tongue but he couldn’t control his tongue, it just crawled around in his mouth, wagging at nothing.

  . . .

  Sometimes there was more than nothing.

  Glimpses.

  Damaged snapshots from a burned family album. All alone in the dark theater of his head, he became a child again, waiting for the show to start.

  I remember . . .

  And suddenly he was there with his first memory . . .

  Mom.

  She was strongly made, a dark-haired farm girl with large hands, on a rubber pad on red linoleum, scrubbing, down on her knees with a can of Babbo and a pa
il at her side. She’d put out the front page of the Detroit News to keep Hank off the wet floor, and the grainy picture on the newsprint was gritty black and white and showed soldiers raising a flag above a scrub of brush.

  She was first-generation American, with cousins fighting for Hitler and a husband in the Pacific killing Japs. He remembered the cool, sticky scent of lipstick, powdery cosmetics on soft leather, and the smell of Chesterfields in her purse. The war was everywhere. Like fat, black victory germs, the endless factory smoke sprinkled down on the snowbanks.

  At play in the summer backyard, among tomato plants that grew up in humid green waves down in the hot tickling dirt, under the leaves, in the emerald-filtered light, he dug holes for his toy soldiers. Tiny khaki vinyl men. Dappled shadows.

  Like the island jungles on the other side of the world where his dad . . .

  First song. An old scratchy 78.

  “Feudin’, Fussin’, and a Fighting” by Dorothy Shay.

  The song played on the night his dad came home from the Pacific. Dad was hugs and tumbling on the floor, a smell of tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. Whiskers.

  Two years later they were both gone, instantly, in a head-on crash. Mom’s sister raised him after that. Holy Roller Church four times a week to keep him out of trouble.

  Sister Wolf at the young people’s meeting on Friday night would work her pimply congregation with guilt and shame, and then close the sale with cold-war terror. The bombers, she would say, have left Russia and are coming to drop their atom bombs. You better give your soul to Jesus tonight. And during the altar call he learned to go forward in the second wave, so the preachers were busy laying hands on the first rush and he’d slink on his knees right through the thrashing of the Holy Ghost and creep out the back door of the basement auditorium and sneak a cigarette in the alley.

  First bike. Schwinn. Red. With fat, treaded tires pebbles got stuck in and clicked on the sidewalk.

  First woman. Halloween night, 1960, his freshman year at Wayne State in Detroit. She was older, a high-breasted Canadian graduate student down from Toronto for a party, impressed enough with his persistence to take on his sexual education. Set the bar real high for all the slow American girls to follow.

  . . .

  The first man he killed . . .

  . . .

  But then he heard the words . . .

  “So here’s the thing,” Jolene thought out loud as she ran the suction wand over Hank’s gums and around his tongue. “Whatever I did before, I haven’t done any of it since I’ve been sober.

  “Remember what you said about drunks being lucky because they can reinvent themselves? How they can lump all the bad stuff they did together and flush it down the past. What I’m shooting for here is to see you through this thing to make my amends. The problem is goddamn Earl doesn’t seem to get it.”

  She fluffed the pillows behind his neck. “Earl doesn’t think people can change. For sure not me. He’s sort of the original antipersonal growth hormone in that regard.” She fingered his chin and touched his cheek. “And you. I think you’re due for a shave.”

  She left and returned with a plastic razor, shaving cream, a bowl of hot water, and a towel. As her hand glided the razor over the familiar contours of Hank’s face, her eyes wandered the room, remembering how they’d worked together, Sheetrocking and taping the walls, building the bookcases, both of them in T-shirts and jeans spotted with paint, eating ham and cheese on rye, drinking Cokes.

  They both tried to quit smoking the first time in this room, after they’d fooled around on the floor amid piles of books.

  All those books. Had he really read them?

  Could she someday? Before she met Hank the most she’d read at one sitting was People magazine.

  “We had a pretty good time for a while,” she said, carefully wiping the lather from his face and neck. She clicked her teeth and hunched her shoulders. The house surrounded her like an expensive train wreck.

  Her train wreck, goddammit.

  She patted Hank on the cheek and walked over to the books Earl had tipped to the floor. She stooped, collected them, and methodically put them back on the shelves. That was Earl for you. He threw tantrums. He could be a violent child.

  Then, after the temper subsided, he would be sweet. But he never apologized for the tantrums. The good and the bad alternated. There was no—Hank’s word—synthesis. No learning from experience.

  Like she was trying to do.

  Jolene felt the amputated craving for a cigarette. She shoved her hands in her pockets.

  She and Earl had been born on the same day, the same hour, in the same hospital in Minneapolis. They had the same astrological pedigree. Mars conjunct Pluto. Biker stars, Earl called it. Deep, powerful urges for both good and evil. They were biker’s stars because Earl said the Hell’s Angel’s credo meant you had to know the difference between good and evil.

  And choose the evil.

  She knew all this because they’d had their charts done by Lana Pieri who lived down the block when they were high school sophomores in Robbinsdale. “This is some heavy shit,” Lana said. “You guys could go either way.”

  “Or both ways at once,” Earl said, grinning.

  There was this part of AA where you admit to God and one other person the exact nature of your wrongs, and she had told Hank how she’d had a part in killing a man once during her wild phase.

  She knew about the jokes that Allen and Milt told about her and Earl being Bonnie and Clyde. Well, Allen and Milt were pretty perceptive guys. Because that freezing night outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, at that isolated convenience store with the one sorry gas pump out in front, that’s exactly who they were. Driving straight through from Minneapolis on no sleep and no food, a nickel bag of grass, two six-packs of Blatz, Earl’s guitar, an amp, and one suitcase.

  They were hungry and broke, working mean drunk-dares back and forth inside a stolen ’89 Camaro. And it was so cold it made you crazy. Colder than Minnesota, if that was possible.

  This time she was going in with the gun because she just wanted to get warm. So Earl handed her the gun he’d stolen from his uncle, a Colt .45 automatic, a big military keepsake that weighed as much as her mom’s klunky old handheld electric mixer.

  So she went in and the guy behind the counter licked his lips and hitched his cowboy belt buckle up under his round cowboy beer belly and grinned at her like she was Sheena of the Prairie or something, for sure the best thing he ever saw come swinging into his graveyard shift. And she didn’t really enjoy the frog-eyed, dry-swallow gulp of sheer animal fear the big pistol produced on his startled face. And she understood exactly the problem with guns when instead of handing over the money from the till he reached right through his first fear and under the counter for a gun of his own.

  The thing about guns was, if you took one of them out and pointed it at a person you better be ready to use it.

  Which—bang—she did before he did, point-blank. Knocked him over into the racks of Skoal and Red Man chewing tobacco and beef jerky. Jolene didn’t see any blood but she remembered distinctly the gritty scuffed silver soles and the metal taps on the heels of his cowboy boots as the big slug knocked him for a flip.

  “I killed him,” she explained to Earl who came running in as she was cleaning out the cash register.

  “No, you didn’t, he’s still moving,” said Earl who took the pistol and sent her out to the car. And she could still remember how big and cold that night was, with the gas station lit up like a big candy machine under all those stars and how lonely those two last shots sounded, muffled behind the glass. She vowed she’d never go back to North Dakota, ever.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Earl said.

  Jolene had hugged herself and shivered. “God, it’s cold.”

  “Absolute zero,” Earl said. “At least it is for that guy back there.” Jolene had stared at him. And Earl had grinned. “The temperature at which
everything stops—minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade. I got straight A’s in physics, remember.”

  And they talked about it as they turned off the Interstate and drove a jigsaw down back roads north of Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt State Park where they ate bologna sandwiches on the shore of Lake Sakakawea and counted out $135.74, which was what that clerk’s number amounted to when it came up.

  They’d talked about God and if he were there and always watching, and would he hold it against them, and about karma coming around on them, which was different than God, but still definitely payback.

  They’d finished their sandwiches and both agreed. They’d take their chances with God and karma over witnesses any day.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Allen, almost jaunty, swung a black satchel bag in his left hand. It was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, and he was on the kind of professional errand that surgeons never perform. Certainly not these days.

  He was making a house call.

  The bunched clouds threatened rain and the air was the color of damp cardboard. But the day was easy on his eyes. Every needle in every soggy spruce tree punched up bright as miniature green neon.

  Allen crossed the Timberry Trails Hospital staff parking lot and walked toward his car, thumbed his remote, and heard the door open with a snug chirp. It was a light-paperwork morning and he had offered to sit with Hank Sommer while Jolene went into St. Paul for her first office meeting with Milton Dane so they could restart their bumpy relationship and get Hank into a full-care nursing home.

  Seat belt. Ignition. He tapped the CD console as he steered his three-year-old Saab out of the lot into the tangle of midmorning traffic. He hummed and moved his shoulders experimentally along with the earthy cross-rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.

  He could learn to loosen up.