134
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
move, switching places. Wendell backed up to the bed and sat. “I don’t like favors.” “Not doing you one.” Gene wrapped a cable with a metal box around Wendell’s neck. “I’m on double-time.” He hooked the batch of wire ends into the bottom of the contraption and laid it on Wendell’s chest. “You can move around if you want. Watch TV. Rest. I’ll be back before too long.” “I’ll be here.” Wendell pulled both pillows behind him and yawned. Plugs and conductors and the thing that held them steady weighed heavily against Wendell’s heart. Wires surrounded him like tentacles; the red eye of the camera blinked when he least expected it. He steeled for a night of gawking at green walls, white ceiling, a print of a tree-ringed lake with its frame tilting a smidgen right, but his eyes closed of their own accord, and there he was, first on the scene again, applying pressure. This time, he hoped to stop the man’s blood, but, like every time before, it spread beneath him like a velvet cloth. Under the flash of blue lights, they waited together – the downed man blue-lipped and cold but conscious, Wendell vomiting in the grass. Before help could get there, the patrolman reached up and grabbed hold of Wendell’s sleeve. “I just stopped the man to say he was about to lose a hubcap,” he told him. “And here he has went and killed me.” The things Wendell had seen since, God only knew, but that first horror, that was the one that got through and dug in, the one you had to live with. Everybody said so. Wendell wished he could get up and go pour himself a swallow of sweet milk. Instead, he found his baby aspirin and swallowed it dry. He found a Readers’ Digest in the drawer and went toward the bathroom. Not two shakes after he came out, Gene knocked. Considering all the surveillance, Wendell suspected this timing but said nothing. Gene reconnected the wires from the portable box to a bedside device. “Call out if you need anything,” he said as he turned off the lights.
number 22
this place, to a time before its spit and polish. Back in the day, Hamm’s Filling Station sat on this very spot – a three-stall garage used to stay backed-up with business. Hammy’s secret, not much of one, was the room in the back. Wendell’s father played poker there at least once a month, played and won. Hammy saw to that. One time, Wendell was sent in to collect his father. A young Wendell had peeped through the crack of the door at hard-drinking men, women rubbing up behind them, a fake blonde on his dad’s knee. His father had seen him, too, and Wendell turned and ran back to the car. His mother had reached over and wiped his cheeks with her cuff and told him, “I should have known better.” Even with such memories showing themselves, even with the dig from the clamp on his finger, the night finally wore Wendell down. He felt himself being transported as a last thought scooted by: How long from sleep to dream? He had the sense he moved from one straight into the other. Sleep came over him, and, next thing, he found himself in the old debate. This is a dream, he would tell himself, and the dream would say no, not this time. This time it’s real, and time was, he could be persuaded to believe it. But that was before the night he’d relieved himself, convinced he was in the bathroom. The warm brine of his own urine had not brought him to his feet. Only when the soaked sheet grew cold underneath him had he understand what had happened. Since then, he drank the smallest sip of milk after supper and, although shunted between distrust and longing, put no stock in what
The monitor on the bedside shelf set off another rustle of discomfort, but Wendell moved down deeper in the bed. He noticed all of a sudden how the mattress had no give, and for what seemed like hours, he tried punching some softness into one spot or another. If only he could stop the loop of his thinking. But his thoughts kept returning to Sensations and Perceptions (mixed media acrylic, graphite on canvas, 38x36) by George Scott