The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (6 page)

“Cyril,” she said in her superior voice, “we don’t seem to have any past records of you in the hospital. Have you been here before?”

Damn—I
hate
this new familiarity that young people have! No twenty-year-old snot has any business calling me by my first name! What kind of a world is this? Even though I might look like roadkill, I deserve
some
respect.

“My name is Mr. Solverson,” I corrected her. “No, I have not been here before.”

She blinked once when I corrected her, but went on. “We need some information,
Mr
.
Solverson
. Do you have insurance?”

“I’m a resident of the care home in Soldiers Grove. They have my insurance records.”

“Do you have any information with you?”

I told her my billfold had been stolen by Balaclava.

“Your clothes are here in the locker. I’ll make a list of your belongings and you can sign it. But do I have your permission to look in your wallet for your medical card, Mr. Solverson?”

“I told you, there’s no wallet. It was taken by the man who abducted me.”

“Do you remember your social security number?”

Now how the
hell
am I supposed to know my social security number while I’m lying on my frozen ass in a hospital bed, half out of my noggin?

“6086245731,” I say off the top of what’s left of my head. I think it’s my phone number, but can’t be sure; it is the only number I can remember for the moment—and it is good enough for this sniffy kid.

“Mr. Solverson, there are ten digits in that number. Social security has nine.”

“How did
that
happen? There’s mysteries
everywhere
around this place,” I said in mock wonder.

“Maybe you’ll remember later. Who is your next of kin?”

“I have none.”

“Who is your nearest relative?”

“I have none.”

“Can you give me the name of a close friend?”

“I have none.”

“Surely there is some distant relative somewhere?”

I think hard, but I can think of no one. I decide to invent a relative so that this prissy missy will just go away.

Who would I like to be my distant relative? Lots of people. But today I think of . . . Thurman Tucker. He was a reserve outfielder for the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians in the 1940s. He had a couple of pretty fair seasons for the Sox. He had a huge mouth like Joe E. Brown, and I saw a picture of him once in the
Sporting News
with half a dozen hardboiled eggs stuffed into his mouth. He wore steel-rimmed specs and I thought he looked like a pretty good guy. “Thurman Tucker,” I said. I spelled it out for her.

“And what relationship is Thurman Tucker to you?”

“He is my cousin three times removed. He might even be deceased by now.”

Pause. “Do you know his phone number?”

“011-43-6841.”

“Cyril,” she said. “That does not sound like a phone number. Is it your social security number?”

“You said you wanted nine numbers. My
name
is Mr. Solverson!”

“
Mr. Solverson
,” the young woman’s voice had gone very, very cold. A gap of about sixty years yawned and opened its abyss between us. “Where does Thurman Tucker live?”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Eva Braun?” I asked her.

“Where does Thurman Tucker live, Cyril?”

“Do you want me to tell you about Eva Braun?”

“No, Mr. Solverson. Where does Mr. Tucker live?”

“France.”

Pause. “There is no one in the United States who is close to you?”

“Balaclava.”

“Who is that?”

“He’s a gunman. He’s the guy who almost aced me. Is that close enough?”

“Cyril!” she said wearily. “You need another nap, you’re not being nice. I’ll come back later,” and she struts off, wriggling her officious butt.

Here I am laid out like frozen broccoli in a hospital, and she’s bouncing around, trying to make me think of numbers I don’t remember.

I suppose I should admit that young people generally piss me off these days. Maybe I should just say that I don’t feel much connection. I can’t recall much about being young—except that it wasn’t pleasant. I remember hustling to avoid the loud brouhahas of my drunken parents, and trying to make myself invisible on school playgrounds that were more like prison yards. I remember being punched around in high school halls.

I did a lot of dreaming about other people’s lives when I was young.

My memory has gone off the rails. I’ve been completely discombobulated by all that has happened to me—the abduction, the miracle of the policemen finding me in the snow, the saving of my life. All the drugs I take seem to shave off my ability to remember things.

I recall sneaking out of my room to go over to Burkhum’s Tap and have a few beers. I remember talking to some people at the bar. Then I went out into the storm, ran into Balaclava and he pulled a gun on me that looked like a howitzer.

Then that bastard left me out in the blizzard. Maybe he was the one who shot off my toes before he sent me off in the snow. It’s all became such a muddle—too much cold reality for me to deal with.

I was ill-tempered, just wanted all the probing, pricking, pilling, and questioning to stop. Suddenly, because of certain circumstances, some folks—after decades and years of not even knowing I existed—have decided that my life is now important enough for them to preserve.

There were chilblains on my hands and ear that were driving me nuts; they had to tie my hands back on the bedsides so I couldn’t scratch or rub. The chilblains hurt like the very devil, but it was the ones that were on my feet that really set me off. I couldn’t reach them, and they itched all the time so that I would start to howl. The nurses came in and scolded me, told me to stop making so much noise—I was disturbing other patients. I tried to get them to scratch my feet. I recited Job’s life for them—all that stuff about sores and boils and suffering—but they didn’t know who Job was.

I woke up one morning and Bonnie, the good nurse, was in my room holding my wrist, taking my pulse. Maria Montez? Gussie Moran? Alexandra Kollontai? I was still trying to think who she looked like so I could give her a life. I was running through some beautiful women in my mind. Then I got it for sure: “The Empress Theodora of Byzantium,” I said out loud. “That’s who you look like. Just like the mosaic of her on the wall of San Vitale at Ravenna.”

“How’s
that
?” Bonnie asked.

“She was the wife of Justinian, emperor of Byzantium, and then she got to be empress when he died. Pretty good for a gal whose old man was a circus bear keeper, who had to become an actress and occasionally take to working the streets just to make a few bucks. But one day Justinian saw her on the street and really got a load of how beautiful she was, and that was
it
. He couldn’t think of anyone else. They had to rewrite the laws in Byzantium which stated that emperors could not marry actresses. Theodora was gorgeous but, much more than that, she was smarter than everyone else. Justinian used to take advice from her, and one time she convinced him to make a stand with his guards and save Byzantium from some bozos who were attacking the city. Everybody else had run away, but Justinian’s guards were able to hold off the attackers. Theodora’s advice had saved the most beautiful city in the world from being sacked. The Empress Theodora—that’s who you look like, Bonnie. That’s not too bad.”

Bonnie listened to me carefully—not like some other people who get nervous or suspicious when I put a life on them—and she liked what she heard. I started calling her Theodora when she came into my room, and it always made her smile.

I told her lots of other lives and she always listened carefully as she checked my IV or took my temperature. Sometimes I’d be asleep when she came into my room to give me a treatment, and she would brush her fingertips on my cheek or the back of my hand. When I opened my eyes—there would be the sparkling face of Theodora. What a way to wake up! It was like a Sinatra song.

I started to act kind of strange. Lovesick is probably more accurate. A warmth in my cold body. A crush. By God, I had a senior crush! I didn’t know what to do, but it was damned exciting, I was thinking fast, and I always think in lives.

Theodora especially liked to hear the lives of women, so one day I told her about Nila Mack: “She was born in a little town in Kansas around the turn of the twentieth century. She lost her parents early and got married to an actor when she was a very young woman. He taught her a lot about the stage. She went to New York with him and eventually got a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System. She impressed people and they decided they wanted to put her in charge of children’s shows, and she became the first woman director at CBS. She put together a show using kid actors, called,
Let’s Pretend.
She broadcast it on Saturday mornings; it became famous and ran for twenty years.

“When I was a kid I used to hide from my parents while they nursed their Saturday morning hangovers, and I’d listen to
Let’s Pretend
on the white Philco in my room. Nila Mack had one story that she produced every year that became my favorite, about a big talking toad who loved a beautiful princess. That toad was so hideous the princess would run away whenever she saw him. But one day he managed to tell her that if she kissed him on the forehead something wonderful would happen. It took her awhile to work up to this—but one day the princess gave the toad a cautious kiss on his horny old forehead and he turned instantly into a handsome, rich prince who began praising her and proposing marriage.”

I could tell that Theodora felt a little wary about what I was getting at with this story, so I held off for a couple of weeks. Then one Saturday morning, I said, “Theodora, it’s time for
Let’s Pretend
. All you have to do is give me a little smacker on my forehead, just to see what happens then.”

She thought about this. Surely it was against the rules, and I’m not sure she really wanted to do it—but, God bless her, Bonnie bent her beautiful face down to mine and planted a light kiss on my forehead. I felt like I was being visited by the Holy Ghost.

“Well,” she said, smiling down on me. “You’re
still
Cyril.”

“Look again,” I said. “I’m happy and rich. I’ve got $50,000, and I’ve been kissed by the Empress Theodora of Byzantium! How many old guys can claim such stuff? I’m now a prince—but alas, too aged to propose marriage to you.”

It almost broke my heart a few weeks later when Bonnie told me that she was moving to Milwaukee to go to graduate school.

But all of this was good preparation for my meeting Louise. But I’ll tell more about this later.

When they finally let me out of that hospital, I’m still wearing bandages, and my skin looks like rancid cheese. I have to use two canes because of the toes I’d lost, and I can only hear out of my left ear. I’d always had a touch of arthritis, but now it came on like the Inquisition.

My hands look like two wild turkey heads; I sometimes have to use elastic bands around my knuckles and fingers—and I’m cold all the time, sometimes wear an old overcoat even when it’s warm outside. When I lurch around in the care home I must look like a flag pole about to collapse. But by God, I’m still moving—can still stick one foot in front of the other with the help of my crutches—and I’ve been kissed by the Empress Theodora. How many old guys can claim such a thing?

On occasions now when everything is hurting all over my body, I’m not sure—if I’d had a choice—that I would have allowed those docs to save my ass. But those guys don’t give you any choice about that if they see any light in your eyes. It’s their work. Somewhere inside me there seems to be a little furnace that those medical people were able to locate and stoke up again to wake me out of that cold void.

My skin was gray all over until they got the fluids moving and then I began to get a little color. I had some clots in blood vessels that they busted up with medicine. A few of the trickier ones they got with some kind of rays from a machine. They had to get my hands and feet and ear and cheeks and chin and nose going again—all those things that got frozen. They were tinkering around with my heartbeat, too. All this kept me in bed for a long time. Sometimes it was touch and go, but I was hanging on to everything I could. I didn’t want to end up like Johnny Eck, the old carnie freak show guy with half a body. I need more than that.

It was a long haul, and I lost some parts along the way: One ear, four toes, and the little and ring fingers on my left hand. Somehow I managed to hang on to my pecker. They wanted to do something about my frozen nose, too—but I said no, no, no—just work with what you’ve got. Can you imagine an old guy in my shape, being that vain? But it wasn’t vanity—I just wanted to hang on to my faithful proboscis that had breathed so many breaths for me over the years. So they did their best to just keep it going. Now it looks like a wad of chopped sirloin stuck on my mug—but it still works.

I’m not sure how the residents in the senior care home feel about my returning—the old fool who was always babbling about other people’s lives. Most of them couldn’t hear what I was saying anyway. I thought I detected some heavy sighing when they rolled my wheelchair into the entry hall.

Now at the care home, there are times when it seems like I can feel that $50,000 still smoldering under me as I take a nap. Once in a while I take the bills out and riffle the stacks like decks of cards. But mostly, I don’t think about that money anymore. And those big-time media folks—they never checked in with me again. They are swarming over other stories.

As for Balaclava, I don’t know what happened to him. But I don’t think they’ve tracked him down yet. He’s out there somewhere with his pipe gun and slit of a mouth. He doesn’t care about anything. I wonder how many guys there are in the world like Balaclava? It makes my gonads turn cold if I think about it.

Balaclava

B
alaclava is driving hard with the winds of the snow-storm as he motors east on US Route 14 toward Madison, watching the myriad flakes twirl down toward his face in the headlights, and clump together on the windshield until wiper blades sweep them aside. The drive is becoming even more dangerous and he has to be certain he doesn’t drive off into pallid oblivion. Too many numbing hours in the cold white. He’s got to find coffee soon and something to eat.