JOE ELLIOT’S STORY

On a gray, blustery day in the Northern California town of Albertsville, Joe Elliot parked his Nineteen Eighty-Four green Suburban in a lower parking lot. He was proud of that ride. He carefully squeezed the big vehicle into a compact space, one in which the asphalt was cracked and the white lines were faded. He took awhile getting out of the vehicle, just sitting there, watching light drizzle roll in beads down the massive windshield. He fiddled with the radio, which was set to a libertarian talk show. The guest didn’t know his ass from a hole somewhere. Joe thought about having a final smoke, but feared the odor might linger on his painstakingly pressed green uniform. Today was a dress day, a big one, the biggest in a long while. But for many reasons, he felt down, lonely and depressed.

Duty and honor, yes, it was true. These were the qualities by which he lived his life. Duty and honor.

Yet, sometimes emotions didn’t stay put, the way he’d hoped they would. Sometimes, deep down, there dripped a thick, dull sadness. Joe knew if he wasn’t careful that sadness would grow from a small trickle with a meandering course into a rivulet with more power, and finally surge into a full-blown dam buster. It was a sadness born of alacrity, a sorrow, really, that could not be entirely seen or completely known. Addie had commented on it when they were first married.

“Tigerman,” which was what she called him in those days, “Tigerman, you gotta look at the bright side. You gotta look at the bright side, just like the song say, ‘Always look at the bright side of life,’ ”she would sing to him, while they walked along in the morning under the tall elm and amber trees that lined their block.

Addie was so beautiful, pulling her black hair back, while she snuggled against his barrel chest. She exuded all the good things, the true things in this world: decent and hardworking; she never swore or drank to excess. And she was always there on Sunday, no matter what.

The drizzle became a sudden light rain, and the water cascaded from beads into narrow sheets. One time, Addie came down with a flu so terrible that the doctor said the only thing keeping her from choking to death was that machine in the hospital. But Tigerman knew it was more than that. It was her faith. You can move mountains with it, that was what the preacher said. But Joe didn’t really care to move a mountain. He just wanted Addie to live. So he held her hand behind a room divider in the small hospital double. And tried not to let her see him crying silently when he was so afraid, so afraid that she would pass beyond this life.

She said weakly between gulps of oxygen, “Go tell them I’m OK. Just go on now, and I’ll be here when you get back.”

It was Sunday and they’d all be expecting her, given the suddenness with which this flu had rushed through her small frame.

“Tell them I’d be there if I could.”

Joe looked at her, his face lined by too many years of disappointment, with a stony gaze that didn’t turn up to smile, or down to frown, no matter what the situation at hand. He practiced that look in the mirror as well, when he was alone, perfecting a mask against the world.

Tigerman used to tell himself, “I have no emotions.” He’d said that to Addie once, and she just looked at him and laughed, not in a mocking way, but as a mother amused by her child.

Now, she gave the stony look back at him. Or that was what her eyes said, for the rest of your countenance was obscured by a plastic breathing mask.

“I have cause to believe, Joseph Elliot, that I will live long enough for you to tell them that I miss them and that I’d like them all to visit me as soon as they are able.”

The smallest smile peeked through his lips, more from relief than anything.

“I ain’t leavin’,” he said, making it plain.

Of course, a man can never fully understand the intentions of a woman, not really, for they are deeper than we are. Tigerman knew this. But he also knew she was telling the truth.

“Maybe we’ll just phone them, and it will be all right.”

She set her lips together.

“Water, please.”

He removed the breathing mask and bent the flexible pink straw to her mouth. As Joe edged it closer to her expecting, parted lips, he could hear the oxygen hiss. It clouded the plastic device, held awayfrom her chin. The sound cascaded through his ears and somehow found its way deep inside to where the waiting rivulet was starting to flow. He felt himself numbing out ... and Addie spotted it in his eyes.

She drank in several small, animated sips.

“Don’t you go down there, Tigerman, you stay with me, right here. And we’ll just get through this thing, together.” She spoke in whispers. “Go ahead and telephone them. Tell them we’re OK.”

Joe’s mind wandered back to the task at hand. They said John Brown was a righteous man who got ahead of the law because he heard the Lord speak to him. Maybe that was true. The words turned his hair moonlit white, the power of the Lord’s speech. When he mounted his black, muscled steed, all of Missouri shuddered and moved away from his path. All but the righteous whoknew his true calling and wanted to be a part of history. For he brought freedom with the hot, fiery barrel of a long gun and the Lord’s own words aimed at the Amalekites. For they were unfit to reproduce. Only a few steps to Pelican Bay. Only a few steps to his destiny: to join John Brown in this great fight to eradicate evil.

Tigerman called the congregation, each and every one of them. All he got were answering machines, which was a good thing. The faithful knelt in church, just where they said they would be, for the faithful always kept their covenant with the Lord.

After a time, he fluffed the plastic hospital pillows under Addie’s head and adjusted her breathing mask. Sometimes he could fight against that small and scary place, the way you would flick a foul creature off your shoulder again and again until it went away. This was one of those times. He placed his head on Addie’s bosom as it rose and fell; rose and fell, again. He felt her rhythm and soon he found that his own breathing kept time with hers. It was shallow, sometimes halting, but reflected a strong will to survive. And this intimate, continuing breath pushed her light into his wet and contracted place, pulling him back, back into the present moment.

The day he and Addie walked out of the hospital, he was sure his life would take a new turn. She got up from the wheelchair, just as a quick wind engulfed them and made her blouse billow to twice its size. Even as the chill seized her, shooting down her backbone, she grabbed onto Tigerman, as if he were the only floating log left in the cold, deep ocean.

“You see, I’m well, just like I told you I’d be, Tigerman. When you get down on your knees, you don’t just think about the weather, or somethin’. You think about faith and how some promises are kept, not broken. Don’t you see that?

“We’re alive and the whole world’s out there, just waitin’ for us, Tigerman. Just waitin’ for us to walk in its wonders. To lay down in its fields and, mostly, to love one another.”

He didn’t know quite what to say, so he just held Addie, long after the sharp wind had found others to startle and chill. He just held her and wished that there wasn’t a world, or a field, or anything else. For, in truth, he wanted her all to himself, and he wasn’t so sure about what he thought of when he was on his knees in prayer. Instead of promises, he thought about vengeance; maybe, a bitterness born of struggle. He didn’t mean to pistol whip that last guy, he really didn’t. But there he was with his big paws on him. What was he supposed to do? Let the guy just walk away?

Never let Addie know this ugly part of the world. He knew he had prayed that often enough. Never let her see what John Brown sees: All those who have forsaken the righteous path must be punished. Never let her see the way the world really was, Lord. And thank you for returning her safely to my protection.

On their way home, he remembered putting out the cigarette and closing the three windows that let in rain with thefresh air. There had been no chance to know.

That’s why it was called an accident. This very Suburban had run the stop sign on Highway 80, not going fast, but fast enough to kill. Fast enough that his world had splintered, fallen into the deep, swirling place where his own prayers weren’t ever heard or answered.

He remembered smashing the driver’s head like a pumpkin over and over again into the right front tire. Addie lay crumpled and unmoving in the passenger seat. Her blood covered his face and hands, especially the right one, like a macabre painting you’d see somewhere, far away. He could almost touch the spot from where he stood now. Indeed, he decided to lovingly pat the rim where the small man’s brain leaked out onto the rubber. It left no mark on his precisely scrubbed hand, no road oil or debris on his four open fingers. He remembered he had dragged that tattooed piece of excrement back behind the wheel. Sirens roared in his ears, but he rigidly held to his training and went absolutely numb as he cradled Addie’s lifeless body to himself. He smelled her perfume, L’Air du Temps, and her flowing blood. Joe thought, maybe, somehow, he could bring her back bypouring his breath into her. For a while, he tried very, very hard to bring her back into his life, but as the seconds poured by, his hands and his lips and his lungs knew differently. Joe went still as the black rage poured from his unmoving eyes, and his polished nails dug a vengeance from his own flesh.

“Addie. Oh my Lord, why have thou forsaken me?”

He remembered trying to hold his badge up high, but it kept slipping from his fingers, as the uniforms came running alongside a screaming ambulance. Later, the newspaperman wrote it was the worst accident in Santa Ana in a decade. That’s what the local politicians used to get a flashing, red light at the intersection, instead of a stop sign. The worst in a decade. Two fatalities were noted in the next day’s write up.