Backing Up Going ForwardThere had been that strange unsettling feeling of hot calm and nervousness. The nervousness hung at the edges of everything but you were glad to be with your brother again because you hadn't seen him, hadn't heard from him for a long time and they might have got him, you never know.
Hot calm because of the sun and no wind, the kind of heat that flows around you and into you, dry heat that makes a noise for itself and you know fires are ahead, that the manzanita will pop and smoke will hang over Northern California again like last summer. But early, like now, it is just that heat that flows around you and into you. Kush lopes around through the brush when he is off his rope, stirring up crackles and snorting big dog breaths but he eventually comes back to the shade by the pickup under the big dusty fir and plops down. I have never seen a Goldie chew sticks like Kush but then he is just out of puppyhood, a year old, almost, a short-hair Lab with prodigious limbs and very little gangle.
He looks like he might have some pit bull, I tell my brother, mindful of the stereotypes of his new profession.
He's purebred Lab, Veky says, not like he is offended but just putting it back to me.
He's got such a square muzzle, I say. I don't remember Oboe had such a square muzzle as that.
Oboe was my own Black Lab with a little Shepard and Chow, a lion's mane and an occasional bark he produced deep in his bowels at three octaves below middle C. He was a dog so good you would cry thinking about him on long trips. We knew he had some Shepard in him because he gradually went blind from exposure to high altitude infra-red rays while we lived in Colorado, something the vet said was the result of the Shepard genes. When it was time I couldn't put him down. Kate had to take him in and hold him while he got the needle. I can cry like a baby now, thinking of it.
He's purebred Lab, Veky says again.
This is a new man, a new brother, sitting in the shade with his Kush and me under the dusty fir and manzanitas in Northern California. Once over three hundred pounds he now is concentration camp thin. When he showed me his operation and around the property he walked in a semi-shuffle, head bent forward, voice calm and measured, like some smockless priest in a dark green tee shirt that hung straight down from his shoulders and didn't touch his body again on its way to his bony hips. He hunched over a bit. I thought he was just being careful where he stepped but his pace never changed. A lot of the property was littered with river stones, the detritus of hydromining operations for gold in the river run in the early days of settlement.
Veky was doing his own hydro mining of sorts. He was running a hydroponic grow operation producing very high grade boutique medical marijuana, hash, swag - no part, piece or chemical went unharnessed. He was hunkered down in the Trinity river bottoms, trying to smash his way back to life at 56 years old, shelled out, hanging on with a Golden Lab named Kush and a skinny partner called "E" who was currently washing another batch with a bag of ice. The buds were safely jarred, weighed and labeled ready for transport to the "dispensary."
Veky was my younger brother, but you wouldn't know it at the moment. We grew up rough in Oakland, sleeping in a shed attached to a warehouse on Dennison and Frederick at about 25th Street where Pops was a watchman. The 880 runs over it now, there is nothing left. Pops was a war hero, jumped out of planes in Burma to bring anybody alive who crashed while flying the Hump in notoriously woggy C-47s back out of the jungle. The jungle of the Naga Head Hunters. Pops was quiet and straight, very erect in his posture, but smooth, athletic in his motion. He did not beat us, didn't have to. We loved and feared him. He married Katlina Verkoska about two years before he re-upped for Korea. I was the front end product of that combination and Veky was the back end. She left as soon as she could get Veky weaned. Pops was not sad and whatever kind of trauma any of it might have been for other kids it was not for us. We three took it because that's what it was and you couldn't make it any different.
Pops and I knew Veky was smart early on but I took the cue and let it wash over me. Veky never got a big head about it and just pressed forward because that was what we did. He pressed forward to a full ride scholarship to UC Berkeley and finished up at Stanford Law. He was a big guy early on, a kind of a John Madden big guy. I didn't get corpulent until I'd sat behind a city desk for 12 years. Veky was a big guy from eighth grade on. Skinny girls liked him, I don't know why, and he was no late virgin but never went pussy crazy. I don't think any of those early girls or Veky's women wouldn't give him a hug if they saw him on the street today. Of course I don't think they would recognize him.
Veky missed 'Nam while I didn't. He told me once it was one of his biggest disappointments but having been to that party myself I felt good about his let down. Pops never expected either of us to sign up but I always hoped he understood I went to honor his own time. You shouldn't get the idea we had some kind of military code holding us together. We did not. We were a single man and two sons. We tried to be straight with people we knew and circumspect with people we didn't. And that was an unspoken code that just rolled out of how we lived.
Veky clerked for Rehnquist for a while and I guess that was a good fit. East coast or west didn't matter much to Veky I don't think. I went my own path and just touched in once in a while. Once in a while meant through two marriages, in each one Veky married women who already had kids by somebody else. He had a boy with his first wife, her third kid. That was early on. She took off and he never knew what happened to her or his boy. Or maybe he did - he was too smart and connected not to parse out her trail if he'd wanted - but he never talked about the boy or the mother, and he adopted her other two kids as his own, each by a different father.
Veky was working for Lord, Day & Lord in New York, shuttling around Eastern Europe doing god knows what, and there were stays in Chile and South Africa, Spain I think too, for a while. I ran in to him twice in airports, this big guy carrying an attache case and a three-suiter Samsonite, dressed nondescriptly - you had to get close and know what to look for to appreciate what it probably cost to dress like that. He'd smile when he recognized me coming toward him, move toward the edges, put down what he was carrying and we'd give each other a big embrazzo and he would listen quietly like he didn't have a plane to catch.
He hadn't heard from his wives or kids for seven years when things went south. It was all vague but the gist was that somewhere there was a lot of money gone and Veky was the fall guy. I believe this because although he was very smart, Veky was, I don't know, an optimist. Well, not really an optimist so much as someone who really, really believed people at their core were good. Even after the knife was firmly in his back, even when it got an extra twist at the end of the thrust he could turn around and spread those huge shoulders to shrug it all off as an unfortunate mistake. Things happen. And things happened to Veky like flash fire.
He got hit by a courier on a bicycle while he was crossing 45th in Midtown. Something on the kid's bike frame gouged out a chunk of skin and muscle on the upper thigh and buttock on Veky's right side. The wound would not heal. His already big leg swelled to almost twice its normal size. The docs put in a drain and Veky had a bag strapped to his calf that he had to empty twice or three times a day. By this time he had been eased out of the law firm after a hearing that didn't put him in jail but disbarred him from practicing law. He was out of circulation on his back for two months and then he still had this misshapen body to haul around and his little bag to empty. The smell couldn't have been good either. A year later he found a specialist at Brigham and Women's in Boston in their Sports Injury Center who figured out what was screwed up -- something to do with lymph systems, veins, arteries -- the doc was a vascular neurologist or something like that. Anyway the guy cut out a bunch of tissue, sewed some vascular stuff together and presto: No swelling, no drain, most of the strength back.
Right after that was when they found Veky's stomach was lying upside down on top of his lungs or in front of his heart or somewhere it shouldn't have been anyway. Veky and his New York doctors thought he had acid reflux, which he did. He had swallowed the barium and had the X-Rays or whatever, and while they thought it was tracking a little skeewampus what they told Veky was that really, no two people's guts are ever the same. This doc from Brigham and Women's, who was not an internist by any means noticed when he was operating on Veky's leg and buttock -- Veky was on his side on the operating table -- that he looked like he might have a third breast. There was a distinct bulge just under his sternum and even overlapping it some. He wouldn't have noticed that if a nurse hadn't dropped some of Veky's bloody leg tissue on the paper sheet draped over his upper body. The doc made her change it and there you have it.
So about six weeks after the leg/butt surgery -- which was healing up great -- another surgeon went in to Veky's gut and basically foreshortened his stomach, stuffed it back into his gut sack about where it belonged and glued/stitched a piece of mesh like they use for hernia operations these days over the gut sack to keep it there. They couldn't do his leg arthroscopically because they were taking out chunks of fleshy stuff but I guess the stomach operation only left three or four puncture marks and there was nothing much to sew up on the outside although they might just as well have sewn his jaws and lips shut. Veky was on a liquid diet for several months. They kept him in an out-patient clinic near the hospital because he had to be constantly monitored to make sure nothing got tangled up inside, poked and prodded and also fed via tube and then a turkey baster-like syringe. He told me all this looking off into the trees toward the river without rushing it or with any particular emphasis or emotion.
He told me it of course could not have happen this fast but he said one day he looked in the mirror and thought he was looking at somebody through a doorway that was maybe a great uncle he hadn't ever met. His face was thin, haggard, with wattles of skin hanging down from his cheeks over his neck. He took off the hospital top he had taken to wearing. Someone had let the air out of his body. Skin hung everywhere. After he saw himself things got worse. He imagined -- at least he supposed it was imagined -- that he could turn over inside his skin, that his penis would pull out of the shell and he would suddenly find himself urinating inside his own flesh, that his feet and hands might pull free to poke out where an elbow or knee had been just a few moments before. He took to gathering up the flesh and holding it like a debutante holds the folds of her unfamiliar ball gown.
...More to come
Backing Up Going Forward
Copyright © 2009 K.R. Passey. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment