Touch
The
story takes place in 2003 when I worked as a nursing aide at Skagit
Valley Hospital. There's a lot of touching involved in nursing work --
hands on stuff. So I call it "Touch."
The
second part of the story takes place at home in LaConner when I
divorced my second wife. I wasn't too angry or too depressed -- I just
wished it had turned out better.
Both segments, the nursing work, and the marriage breakup, are pretty common experiences.
Seven years later,
in 2003, they still talked about Clyde at Café Culture, but it was getting old.
Fred Owens took the job at the Skagit Valley Hospital
that November, because it was the end of landscaping season, and he often
picked up work that way – just trying something. “Maybe I’ll like it,” he
thought. “I like to find out what people do. I don’t know a thing about health
care.”
The hospital hired Fred
as a kind of Wal-Mart nursing aide. This is how he explained it to Stuart at the Rexville Store. “You see, they have the
nurses, the RNs -- their trained and they give medication, and they run the
place. The doctors give orders, but they’re never around, so the nurses are
really in charge. And they get paid pretty well. After that comes the nursing
aides, and they don’t give medication or keep records, they just do chores.
They have a bit of training and they make about $12 an hour. After that comes
the Wal-Mart nursing aides, who have no training. They do everything the
regular nursing aides do, but for less money, and with no benefits or health
insurance. That’s what I am.”
Stuart responded with less than his usual
enthusiasm. What he didn’t say was, “Fred, you really ought to have a much
better professional level job than this. Nursing is sissy work, bedpans,
touching people, I don’t even want to think about it.”
Fred liked working at the hospital from the
first day. The nurses sent him into a room to take care of a patient – a young
man, but maybe older, maybe even close to 40, but of indeterminate age because
the patient was seriously schizophrenic, and had that pasty, puffy complexion
of a life largely unlived, except possibly in some other universe. His eyes
were wild and wide like a deer. His eyes, Fred noticed, were a passage to
another world. “But I’m not going there. I know enough about crazy people,” Fred
thought.
Besides, the task
was at hand, the patient was tied to the bed and thrashing in his own shit
pile, and had made a besmeared brown pungent mess that was kind of impressive
in its own way, and Fred realized
something really quickly. “This is it,” he realized. “I’m glad this happened on
the first day, and I don’t care. I’m just going to clean it up. I’m in – I’m in
the club. I belong here. Nursing work means cleaning up shit, and if it bothers
you, then go someplace else, but it doesn’t bother me, so now I know I belong
here.”
The cleanup took a
mountain of towels, wipes, re-wipes, and the patient’s wild, distant, uncaring
gaze on him the whole time. That was the job.
Fred settled into a routine quickly enough. He
was on call, so he could choose his hours, and he preferred the evening shift, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., because he liked
having his mornings to hang out at Café Culture, or fool around in his garden.
“People are just
like plants. They need attention in order to grow and develop.” he knew. “It’s
in my hands. I have very good hands. That’s what I learned all that time
landscaping and working on the farm – touching soil, branch and leaf. I could
feel the energy. That’s why I loved the work. It’s the same with people. Now I
put my hands on people. It’s incredible.”
He expanded on this into a theory, but he also
knew that he should never mention it to anybody at the hospital. That was a
hard won discretion for Fred – not saying something. “They’ll just think I’m a
kook if I say that people are like plants. They already know I’m a kook. A
white man, obviously educated, is working as a nursing aide – it has to be for
a weird reason, like he’s religious, or else he’s a pervert or a communist and
can’t keep a regular job. I know what they’re thinking.”
Which is what the
nurses were thinking, and he was being carefully watched, but he found out, in
time, that everybody was being carefully watched, and all the other nursing
aides, largely female, had something wrong with them too, because it was a
low-status job. Some of the nursing aides were religious women, with stout
figures, and no interest in a higher calling, and they were proud to be of
service and proud of their humble work – but it was wrong too. They hid behind
their Christianity. It was a defense against life – and surely a defense
against art. At the hospital in the evening, at the café in LaConner during the
day, Fred shuttled between two worlds. And each camp stated clearly that, “we
don’t want to know about those people,” referring to the “other.”
That was hard for Fred.
Maybe he was more transcendent, more tolerant, more adaptable. The other
explanation was that he was torn, divided, and he sloshed back and forth like
the tide in Swinomish Channel, and he couldn’t find that stillness – that calm
lake from his childhood.
The highest, most
transcendent workers at the hospital were the silent cleaning women, who glided
into the patient’s room like angel spirits and did their work for no tangible
reward. They had no shield. They didn’t need one. “I’m glad they use that kind
of soap that doesn’t smell,” Fred noticed. The cleaning fluids had no odor at
all. And the ventilation was impressive. Fred was used to working outdoors and he has a
tad claustrophobic, so he appreciated the fresh air. It never smelled like a
hospital. Even the patients didn’t smell like they were sick. Of course, they
reason they didn’t smell sick, was because Fred swabbed them down often enough.
“You would be amazed at the amount and variety of bodily fluids that patients
emit, “ he said to Stuart and Jim one
morning, and they really didn’t want to hear this, “Urine, sweat, blood, both
menstrual and regular, saliva, mucus, crap, ear wax, nose boogers, flaky skin, sperm,
the putrefaction of wounds, phlegm….” Jim covered his ears.
Fred wasn’t getting anywhere. The conversation
was competitive. “I don’t get any points for nursing stories. I even lose
points.” Nursing was just too gay. Walt Whitman nursed wounded soldiers during
the Civil War, Fred remembered. “Gay, gay, and gay…” he thought.
But he did have his African
wife. She was twenty years younger than Fred, and
the hottest babe in LaConner and all the guys knew it, although no one ever
said so, because Zodwa was his wife, and because she was black, not American
black, but deep, tribal African black, and Fred wanted to tell them what it was like to
have sex with Zodwa, but of course that was never going to happen.
Back at the
hospital, with the good, fresh ventilation, the large windows, and the extra
wide corridors for moving hospital beds, Fred was fairly at ease, despite being
indoors. “But it’s too bad they don’t have any dirt around here. Dirt makes you
feel good. I would like it, and the patients would like it too,” he thought,
but he couldn’t figure out a way to install dirt in a hospital setting, despite
the many hours he spent, sitting in a bedside chair, looking out the window and
thinking about things like that.
The other thing was
how different it was at the hospital, compared to the hippy/artist/tourist
world in LaConner. LaConner was about being carefree and creative. The hospital
was about pain, suffering, and death. The two worlds didn’t mix.
And the hospital
was religious. There were lots of ministers about and good Christian women,
with a sense of duty, honor, and sacrifice. It was something that Fred liked to
be around.
Back in LaConner, John
Kaguras, the fiery Greek architect, often held forth at Café Culture against all manner of religious
expression, and his secular view was dominant. Jim Smith felt the same way, although he didn’t
despise religion, he just didn’t care for it. And Stuart, over at the store, was a devout
secularist with a pronounced hedonist streak that he picked up from his years
in California.
“The unspoken rules
are the most important ones,” Fred knew. “Café Culture has a strict policy about this and I
could write them out and post them on the front door.”
Here’s what the rules were: It’s all right to
be a little bit spiritual, along the lines of Native American ways or Buddhist
teaching. Pagan expression was understandable, but a little bit loopy. Miraven,
the beautiful grey lady from Anacortes, came in weekly to read Tarot. She was
welcome because she was beautiful, not because of her mystic bent. Father
Touhy, a renegade Jesuit priest who lived on the reservation with the tribe,
was welcome at the café, but fortunately he never came. Kevin Paul was the only
Indian who came in on a regular basis, and he was a singer and drummer and very
spiritual. At times, he would bring his drum to the cafe and sing in the
high-pitched wailing voice of his people, and the café would become rapt and
silent.
That would be it –
native American singing, Buddhist texts, and poetry, and don’t call it religion
or Kaguras, the fiery Greek architect, would have a fit.
On that basis, Dave
the cop, who came in twice a week, was an intruder. He had every mark of being
a practicing Christian, but he knew better than to say so in that venue. It was
enough for the guys at the cafe to welcome a cop.
“Hey, everybody’s
got their way of doing things,” Fred knew. “Café Culture has its dogma, why
not? I don’t quarrel with that.”
But it wasn’t enough
for Fred. “I appreciate all this. I mean, I love it when Kevin Paul sings. I’ve
been to Buddhist meditation. Poetry is the song of my soul. I’m down with all
that.”
And yet Fred was
religious, and that was why he loved being at the hospital, working with hoaky
people and their Bibles.
“I never tell
anybody this. I like religion. I believe in God. It’s never been a problem for
me,” Fred thought. “I like being a Catholic. I hardly ever go to church, but I
like the Pope. He’s my main man – I just don’t ever tell anyone.”
Back at the
hospital, five nights a week, or even more often, Fred sat with the patients
and became a hero to the nursing staff, because he was in charge of the tough
ones – the wanderers and fighters, the ones who woke up out of a dead sleep and
said, “I’m going home now,” arising from their beds, bare-ass naked but for the
hospital gown, ripping out their IVs.
Fred’s job was to keep them in bed. Or the
patients who hit the call button every five minutes. “You go in and keep them
company,” Melissa said. She was the nursing supervisor for the evening shift.
Melissa had soft freckles and a wide mouth, a good figure too. Most of the
nurses weren’t very pretty, but Melissa was. “I like a little sexual tension at
work,” Fred told Stuart one day. “You know, a slight erotic buzz, not strong,
because then it would hurt, because you can’t actually do anything, but if all
the women are ugly, it’s kind of boring.”
“Yeah, the ugly
ones want attention,” Stuart responded. “And they’ll punish you if you ignore
them. But, hey, you’ve got the nurses, the beds, the intimate setting – you
could get lucky with Melissa.”
Stuart was right. Fred worked around women, beds, and nearly
naked people called patients. It was all very intimate.
“I’ve had my hands
on the private parts of more people than you can imagine,” he told Stuart.
“Aggh!” That was
Jim Smith screaming in the background. “Don’t talk about it. I hate hospitals.
I don’t know how you can stand working there.”
“Okay, let’s just
talk about the women there. Most of them are fat and unpretty,” Fred said. All
three men, Fred, Stuart, and Jim, were married, but on a theoretical level they
still pursued women.
Which reminded Fred
of Serena. “I had a fat girl friend once. She had a good figure, she was just a
lot wider -- she had very good
proportions.”
That wasn’t the problem
with Serena. Not her weight, but her obsessive, neurotic need to talk about it.
No matter how sincerely and how often Fred told Serena that he loved her just
the way he was, she punished him. “I had to pay for all the other guys in her
life who treated her like dirt, and told her to lose weight. I got tired of
that. We broke up. I just wanted to have fun.”
So, at the
hospital, Fred worked under and around women, and looked after old women in the
beds, and he got on well with them. He kept his head down. He eagerly
anticipated their demands. Not that eagerly, he just didn’t want to be shamed
by a bitch.
“I never say
bitch,” Fred thought. “I don’t even think that word. I respect women. I am
enormously interested in their bodies – true -- but I can rise above that. And
I’m nice to the homely ones. I pay attention to them, too.”
The guys at the
café would say “ugly” but Fred’s mother taught him to say “homely.”
“It’s bad to call a
woman ugly, it’s better to say that she’s homely, or that she’s plain-looking”
he thought.
And it was bad of
the nurses to put him down or make him feel small. “I’m a man. I don’t want to
take any crap.” He guarded his space at the hospital, he kept his stance, in a
woman-run world.
Fred had things to tell his friends at the Rexville
Store – some farmers and contractors, a
stone mason, another guy, Reilly, on Fir
Island, who made a living with his wife delivering newspapers way early in the
morning – things about nursing. Not the feminine part, which he knew they
didn’t like it, but the other part about sickness and dying. If you don’t think
about it or talk about it, then it won’t happen to you – that was the standard
at the café and the store. He spoke anyway.
“They have it
posted on the wall on the acute ward, the Patient’s Bill of Rights. What a load
of crap! Patients don’t have any rights. If you’re in the hospital, the nurses
own your ass. You’re sick, you’re helpless, and they take all your clothes
away,” he said.
Fred watched the nurses carefully, like the
way they brought a patient a glass of water, something as simple as that, but
there were several variations in the nature of power and control, different
aspects of body language. Fred was going
to be sitting in that room all day and so he had time to notice:
-- bringing it with
love and uncomplicated service
-- bringing it in a
matter of fact way. “It’s just my job. Don’t think anything of it.”
But,
-- bringing it with
a slight pause that meant power, that meant, “I have the water and you need it.
I control your life. You can’t live without water, and I’m the one who brings
it to you.”
Fred wasn’t cynical about this. Power is real
and being sick is powerless. If you’re sick, you’re in the hands of the nurses
and that’s that – you take your chances. “They’re not angels of mercy, they’re
human, that’s all,” he observed.
And it was about
dying. This was a matter of some interest to Fred. “I’m planning to become an
old man, but after that I’m going to die, so I want to see what it’s like.”
The most important
thing that Fred learned about dying was that it was all right. “I’m amazed
about this,” he told Marianne Meyer, who cut his hair, because dying was much
too strong for telling the guys at the coffee shop, and he told her because she
was a woman who touched him, and touched his hair, and he was very sensitive
about his hair. “My hair is my antenna. With my hair it’s like a sixth sense
and I can feel the universe,” he told Marianne, and she said, “I know just what
you mean. Hair is everything.”
“You fix my head,
darling,” he told her. “My life is in your hands.”
“Yes, I know,” she
nodded.
Marianne lived on
McLean Road, near the farms. She had a farmer’s attitude – working every day. A
waitress attitude as well, she worked for the money, tireless, determined, and
beautiful in many ways in Fred’s mind. Her face was a sculpture strong like the
granite of mountains. Her hands were the power of love, gliding through his
hair, as she stood behind him.
“I just love it,”
she sighed. “You’re hair is so nice and thick.” This was a fact Fred was
comfortable with. “I know,” he answered. “All the barbers love me, and strange
women want to muss it up.”
She sighed again
and pressed against him. “I’d screw her if she didn’t have such a bony ass,” Fred
thought, kindly enough because Marianne usually got the men she wanted anyway.
Fred was in the school of men who felt that
more was better, the evidence being his big ass African wife. “I don’t care for
the waif or the willow,” he knew. “My brother likes tall, thin women, so we got
it covered.” But he didn’t tell Marianne that, not that she was squeamish. She
would have called her hair salon the Flying Fuck except for the nice old ladies
from Shelter Bay who came for perms. No, Marianne was
a brassy dame.
Instead, Fred told
her, because they were intimate in that way, about people dying at the
hospital. “It’s amazing. They’re not afraid. It’s just another day. Some of
them are openly religious and some aren’t, but most of the old ones are ready
to go. There’s no whining. That’s what I learned. There’s never a good time for
whining. Everybody dies.”
“That’s right,” she
said. “We’re all going to die. I’m going to die and I have no idea what happens
after that.”
“Me neither, but I
know how I’m going to die. It will be in the parking lot of the 7-11 convenience
store, maybe the one over in Mount Vernon. I’ll be getting out of the car and
walking into to get some coffee or something, and I’ll be hit by a blinding
stroke and drop like a stone onto the pavement, stone dead, so dead my head
bounces when I hit, and the people will rush around and look at the old man
lying there.”
“You got it figured
out,” she laughed.
“Yeah, but I don’t
know when. Anyway, these old folks dying at the hospital -- I really like being
with them. My whole outlook on the human race has improved. We’re all good
people.”
Marianne’s shop was
a small building, very nicely lit with windows on three sides. She had all the
best magazines on her coffee table for the customers -- for herself she said,
being the modern woman who would not admit that she did things for other
people.
“Dying is so
interesting,” he said, and he let her finish the haircut.
But he had quit the
hospital in the spring because he was getting bored. He was locked into his
low-status job. “It’s a Catch-22. They know that if you’re willing to do that
kind of lowly work, then there must be something wrong with you,” he thought.
Besides that, Fred had an attitude problem, a rebelliousness and a call to
follow the creative imperative. Fred had
carefully concealed this from the hospital staff. His comportment was excellent
at all times – but the nurses knew, they knew… and Melissa the supervisor really
wanted to keep him, and give him a permanent position – with higher pay and
health insurance, but she was on the ward and actually worked every day. It was
the hard ones in administration that blocked Fred’s progress, and everybody knew that Fred would never “get on” there.
In August, Fred was
still collecting unemployment checks and passing the day vacantly. He did not
give into the depression of empty days. He collected old boards and made
paintings in the back yard while listening to the baseball game on the radio.
This was deeply satisfying.
He drove Zodwa to
work every morning and picked her up in the evening. She had wrecked her car
after getting drunk with her friend Jeannie. The court had suspended her
driver’s license, and she had to pay a large fine. Fred was really getting tired of all this.
Jeannie, another African woman from Burundi, was a new friend of Zodwa’s
and a very damaging influence. Zodwa’s drinking had become far worse because
she had Jeannie to party with.
She sullenly
dismissed Fred’s increasingly harsh judgment of her behavior. At home, she lay
on the couch. The TV was always on, a mound of beer cans, cigarette butts, and
chicken bones growing on the carpet near her feet.
“I can’t believe
you just lie here like this. You can drink beer for hours and never move – when
do you ever pee?” he accused her. “Why did you want to come to America? You can
drink beer in Africa. You can party all you
want in Africa. Why did you come here?”
Silence, no
response. “She lies there like a lizard,” he observed, “a crocodile.” That was
so stunning to Fred. “She does not think, I mean zero. I’m intuitive – I can
recognize mental activity, and I tell you that woman is pure instinct,” he
thought. Her instinct had been a source of wonder to Fred when they first met,
a palliative for his thinking. “But, you know, I don’t care anymore. It’s the
fucking beer. I can’t stand it.”
That evening, Fred
made more angry accusations to Zodwa. It had been driving him crazy for months.
Then he got in the car and began driving. He drove ten miles to Mount Vernon and went to
the Denny’s restaurant to drink coffee and read. He stayed up until he was
bleary-eyed, and he didn’t know what to do.
He didn’t want to
go to Jim and Janet’s house out on Pull and Be Damned Road. He had already
turned up there late at night several times with a sad story of marriage on the
rocks. They were sympathetic, but it was getting to be an old movie.
“I can’t even go to
my own fucking house,” he moaned, driving around aimlessly, getting very
sleepy. Finally he pulled into the parking lot of the Rexville grocery store –
that was Stuart and Joyce’s’s country
store, a few miles outside of LaConner in the middle of farm country.
He turned off the
engine and felt the quiet. It was 2
a.m. on a summer night. He opened the window of the Toyota and smelled the
cedar trees, seeing their dark outline against the horizon and felt a soft
breeze on his face. “I don’t know what to do,” he thought.
Fred tilted back the seat, put his jacket over
him like a blanket and fell asleep. He woke up about 4:30 a.m. with terrible cramps in his legs
because he couldn’t stretch his legs out.
It was awful. The store wouldn’t open until 7 a.m. Fred tossed
and fidgeted and cursed, but at least he was too tired to think about anything.
Stuart drove up to the store at 6:30 a.m. to open up and get the
coffee started – he didn’t notice Fred’s car parked in the back. By 7
a.m., Fred felt like complete shit. He had a foul taste in his
mouth and a funky smell in his clothes. He really didn’t want to walk into Stuart’s
store looking like that, so first he took a five-minute walk to breathe in some
fresh air and at least get past Stuart’s friendly scrutiny.
He took his coffee
and mumbled a few words to Stuart. He got back in his car and headed for the
university in Bellingham
– he wasn’t sure why, he was just going. “I’m losing my mind, I don’t know what
to do,” he said. His hands were shaking. His legs were in pain. He kept
switching stations on the radio as he drove, trying to stay awake.
When he got to the
campus, he went to the library, found a couch deep in the stacks, and slept for
two hours. Nobody bothered him. “At least I have survival skills, like an
animal, I know where to curl up and sleep” he thought, as he woke up and
stretched.
But he needed help
– instead of the constantly repeating images of his lousy marriage, instead of
watching those tapes play over and over, Fred’s mind had gone into a painful
seizure.
He went over to the student mental health
center on the top floor of the old administration building and they scheduled
him for an emergency appointment. “I guess they could tell I’m not making up
some story, I really do look like shit” he thought, as he flipped through
magazines in the waiting room.
The therapist turned out to be a pretty young
intern. “I don’t care who she is,” he thought. And he told her his story about
the marriage and Zodwa’s drinking, ending with the sleepless night in his car
and a plea for help.
The young therapist
said, “You really need to do something about this. You need to take action.”
“Yes, I do,” Fred
replied, too dumb to respond any other way.
Even in his exhausted
state, Fred knew he was hearing a message from angels. Experienced therapists
don’t give directions, but this young one didn’t know any better. That’s why
she said it so plainly, “Stop putting up with this crap and fix your life.”
That was it. Fred went home and had it out with his spouse,
either leave the house or quit drinking he told her, and he really didn’t care
which. Well, he did care, because she moved out the next day and stayed at a
women’s shelter in Bellingham.
Fred was sad and the house was empty.
It got worse. Two
weeks later Zodwa got a lawyer and served papers on him -- she wanted money. At
least Fred’s friends told him the truth. “Fred, you’re screwed big time,” Mike
told him over at the Rexville Store. Mike Carlisle was a stone mason, a
drinker, a cynic, with a warm smile and natural baritone voice. He was from Mississippi,
which didn’t make him wise in Fred’s eyes, but did make him a survivor. Mike
was one of those people who were never going back.
Fred appreciated the cruel directness of
Mike’s judgment. “I’m hosed,” he realized. “The money is all gone and I’m going
to lose the house too.”
Stuart said the same thing from behind the
counter, Stuart, with his round glasses and strong teeth. “If you get out with
your health and the shirt on your back, well…,” but Stuart was interrupted by a
customer’s need for a latte.
Fred looked for a lawyer “I need to find
somebody who will tell me the truth, but in a kind way, because this hurts too
much,” he decided. Ben Sakuma was a Japanese-American lawyer with a small
office in South Mount Vernon. It was not a
prestigious location, but the woodwork in Sakuma’s office was warm and the
receptionist was warm too. “That’s what I need from a lawyer – sympathy,
because there’s no way to fix this.”
Sakuma looked over Fred’s
financials and calculated that his own profit in this divorce case was likely
to be small, but he did not smirk or condescend, he just gave Fred the worst
case scenario with no talk of fighting Zodwa’s demands. Fred was very comfortable at hearing this,
like sitting on a good couch at a funeral parlor. But Sakuma finished his
assessment on a hopeful note, “You know, it’s just possible that it might not
be so bad. You might end up with a little bit more than this, something you can
use to start over.”
And he gave Fred a number.
“That’s it. I have it,” Fred said to himself as he left the office. He paid
Sakuma a consultation fee and never went back. That number – it was how much
money he would have after the house was sold and after Zodwa got her
share. That number was a wonderful,
beautiful fact, an anchor to Fred’s misery.
September came with
humiliating court appearance brought on by Zodwa’s demands for money. In
October, he finished his backyard painting project. With great love and hope he
arranged his “outdoor paintings,” as he called them, in his front yard for the
townsfolk to admire. Hardly anybody liked Fred’s latest effort, or even said
anything. “It’s too edgy for this town. You can’t make a painting except a
landscape or something about Buddhists. That’s all they like around here.”
The art exhibit was
a minor disaster. Nobody noticed, nobody said anything. “Crushed again,” Fred
thought, but all he did was send a nasty email to the director of the art
museum in LaConner, about how that museum, that bunchy of twitty, snobby art
patrons, had no appreciation, etc. and so forth. “I shouldn’t have done that,
but what the hell, I’m not perfect. I don’t like those people and they don’t
like me,” he thought, referring to the museum crowd.
But he had to
forgive his friends. “They like me, but they don’t like my art. There’s nothing
I can do about that, unless I want to do paint Tibetan mandalas,” he said.
In late November,
the winter rains came and Fred brooded in his empty house. He spoke to his
children often enough on the phone and they would be coming home for Christmas,
but then the roof started leaking – badly, in the laundry room, right where he
had fixed it last summer.
Fred made no self-accusation of his failure to
patch the roof. “I got up there, I spread the tar around. I thought I did a
good job, but I guess I screwed it up,” he realized. In fact, the leak had
gotten worse, not better. “I cannot fix anything that involves a ladder. I
don’t do anything high. I’m a ground person,” he stated clearly.
He mentioned the
leaking roof to his sister, Tessie, in California,
and she offered to loan him the money for a new roof. That was tough for Fred,
he had never borrowed money from her before, but he said yes – thinking that he
now had another reason to sell the house – in order to pay her back.
So, in December he
got a new roof and some bit of what was left of his family life at home when
the kids came back for a week or so. But January came, cold, wet, and dark, and
Fred still wasn’t working and he was still lonely too, rattling around in the
house.
Later in January, Fred
rented one of the bedrooms to Mike Heaton for $300 a month. Mike was part of
the Minnesota Mafia, a group of men and women who migrated to the Skagit Valley
in the 1970s from the frozen north lake country of Minnesota. They were
converts. They were never going back.
Mike was not more peculiar than some other
people in LaConner, but he was the only man in town that was peculiar in this
particular way -- he didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink but a little bit, he rarely
worked, and he never had a girl friend. He rode his bicycle and never owned a
car. Mike did practically nothing,
except hang out at the cafe and scrounge for places to sleep. He was very
intelligent. He graduated from college a long time ago. In the early 1990s he
went down to San Diego
and lived with his brother. While he was there, he went back to the university
and picked up a master’s degree in computer science, but he did nothing with
his advanced degree. He simply returned to LaConner after two years and
returned to his old ways, doing odd jobs here and there – when he could have
worked in a software company in Seattle
and made a fortune. People were a little surprised at that, but Mike offered no
explanation, so they let him be.
Mike
had quite a reputation as a cat sitter and house sitter, and he could sometimes
get a house to live in for months at a time. So Fred was surprised that Mike
accepted his offer for a room because he hadn’t seen Mike pay anybody rent in twenty years. Maybe Mike
had the money all along. “I’ll bet Mike has thousands of dollars squirreled
away someplace in a savings account, or maybe he plays the stock market. He
might have tons of money, but he keeps it hidden,” he thought.
Fred wasn’t that curious. He just figured that
Mike was quiet and wouldn’t damage things or bring people over to the house, so
he gave him the room and collected the money.
It was Fred’s last
effort to keep the house running, to get some income, and keep it from being
empty, but it didn’t work. Mike was
awfully dull to live with. “I’m still depressed. This isn’t going to work.
Zodwa was beautiful, sexy, exotic, demanding, and greedy. She was so many
things, and mostly bad towards the end, but God, she filled up this house,” Fred
thought. In contrast, Mike had no more life than a sack of potatoes.
In March, Fred put
the house on the market. In late May it was sold. Fred divided the money with Zodwa and it all
somehow worked out just right to the number that Benjamin Sakuma said he would
end up with – just that much money. The house was gone and so was Zodwa. As
soon as she got her share of the loot, she got on a plane to visit her family
in Zimbabwe.
“They’re very poor people. She’ll give them the money. At least some good will
come of it,” he thought.
Fred gave most of his money to his daughter in
Texas. She had a good job and she used Fred’s money to make a down payment on a house
down there. “I want you to have the money,” he told his daughter. “You can
benefit from my mistake. I screwed up and lost my home, but now you can have a
home instead.”
And it was all
over. It didn’t hurt very badly, except Fred felt really stupid – old and
stupid. He moved out of the house, sold or gave away most of his possessions,
bought a tent, and camped 15 miles away, in the forest at the edge of
Anacortes.
That first night
camping, he had the dream again, the Dream of the Fearless Old Man Heading out
to Sea, in important dream that came to him ten years before, and came to him
again like a beacon of light. In the dream he was on a small ferry boat with
twenty other passengers. The sea was getting rough and the sun was going down,
and the boat was headed back to the harbor. The wind began to blow whitecaps as
the boat came to the mouth of the rock jetty.
As the boat crossed the bar Fred and
the other passengers crowded the rail on the side of the boat to see a small
vessel – it was a kayak. An old man was paddling this blue kayak out to sea, as
calmly as if he were on a pond. He was paddling like he was going a long ways
and straight out to sea and going through the chop at a steady pace. He seemed
especially strong and sure. His hair was grizzled and his chest was bare. Fred watched this old man paddling his kayak
as he huddled against the cold wind on the deck of the boat.
That was the dream.
When Fred woke up he was elated. “I’m going to be that old man some day. I
won’t be afraid of the water anymore, not the tide or the wind or the current.
I won’t be afraid of anything.”
That dream secured
his old age. It was going to be a cinch, but there was a gap between now and
then and some living to do. Fred knew he
wasn’t getting any smarter, but it was just possible that he could avoid
becoming dumber.
He built a small
fire under the cedar trees, gathering small twigs and branches lying on the
ground near the salal and ferns. The fog horn on the point was a wonderful,
haunting OM sound that stilled the night. The
crows had gone silent. Fred gazed into
the fire and remembered. If he could piece out a pattern to his past…..”No,
that’s a waste of time. The best thing I can do is forget the past, leave it
alone, draw no conclusions, empty my head and face the wind,” he thought. Still
he remembered.
The End.
