Warped Page 4

  #

  Blaze’d taught me how to say Papeete one night on the cruise. Pah-pee-yay-tay, just like that, though I thought it sounded better to say Puh-peet. Such a cute name, and with the pictures from the cruise brochure, I was picturing huts and girls with all that black hair and their boobs showing, maybe some old men riding around on bikes.

  Well, it turned out Papeete didn’t look a whole lot different than Kansas City. Unless you’re looking out toward the water, then it’s a whole different story. But face the other way, and it’s dirty and noisy and there’s buildings right on top of each other just like any city I’ve ever seen, and if I wasn’t on my honeymoon I’d probably be missing our little apartment we were going to move back into as Mr. and Mrs. Blaise L. Gramont when we got home. (For formal, I spell it B-l-a-i-s-e, like he was named when he was born, but Blaze don’t prefer that. He changed the spelling when they moved to America because the other kids teased him.)

  Blaze and I walked to the restaurant he found and he was all quiet and I was worried somebody said something to him. If you hadn’t been around Blaze much it was hard to look at him, I know, but over time you got used to it, he was just Blaze. The edges of his face were normal, since he shot himself in the middle. The dent part started in the middle of his forehead and came down to where his nose was. He still had part of his nose and it was almost like a little button nose. He didn’t like to hear it, but I liked his nose. Then his mouth…well, that was the hardest part for him, I guess, how it wouldn’t shut all the way and lined up sideways and all. The speech therapy had helped a lot, though, and you could understand him just fine.

  I didn’t know him before the day they brought him in the hospital, so I can only tell you what other people said. My Blaze was sweet, he was gentle, and he was glad he didn’t manage to kill himself, especially because he shot out the bad part and he hadn’t had a single one of those fits after.

  #

  For dessert we got this little tart with some kind of fruit I didn’t recognize. It was all right, I guess. Blaze hadn’t hardly said a thing.

  “What’re you looking at, baby?” I finally asked him. He’d been staring off over the water, which was blacker than black, out toward nothing.

  “That way,” he says, real soft. “Tematangi.”

  My heart just about jumped into my throat. “We said we weren’t talking about that,” I reminded him. “You promised.”

  This was what was wrong with coming to Tahiti. This was why I’d said let’s go to Branson, let’s go to Florida, but Hanriette wouldn’t have none of that. She kept saying she wanted Blaze to go back and see where he was born, that it was the most beautiful place on earth and it would be the best way to start a new life.

  I should have told her, then, about the nightmares. I should have put my foot down. But Blaze said no, he was excited to see Tahiti again, excited to show me. He wanted me to see how they could peel a pineapple in thirty seconds with a big knife. It made Blaze happy so I didn’t argue. But I made him promise not to say that word.

  We were quiet on the way back to the hotel, holding hands and walking through the streets smelling of fried fish and spilled beer. We passed mangy dogs with limps and scars, poking their snouts in the gutters—Blaze told me they used to eat dogs here.

  Back at the motel, Blaze shut himself up in the bathroom and stayed there so long I turned out the lights and got under the stiff sheet and slick coverlet. I was not at my ease.

  Tematangi—I had read all about it, long about a month after Blaze got out of the hospital and moved in with me. There were computers at work, and I could use Google good as anyone, even though my mother-in-law acted like I was as dumb as dirt.

  All’s I knew then was that the Gramonts lived in Tahiti when Blaze was born and then they moved back to France when he was seven. A year after that they moved to the U.S. and then they moved around a lot here. I knew Roussel Gramont had been an engineer and a rich one too. He’d been retired for many years by the time I met the Gramonts.

  Sometimes when Blaze was having his nightmares he said that word, Tematangi, but I thought it was French. He spoke French so pretty, I could of listened forever, except the only time he did it was with Hanriette—she switched to French sometimes when she didn’t want me to know what she was saying.

  Blaze finally told me that Tematangi was an island where his dad did some work with a crew of scientists while Hanriette stayed back in their apartment in Papeete.

  I looked online and found out Tematangi’s this tiny little ring of an island 170 miles off Tahiti, so thin it looks like a sliver of lemon peel floating on all that blue water. You never saw anything so pretty. Then the French came in and started dropping nuclear bombs on it.

  Testing, they called it, but I got to ask, once you done it once and it worked, what exactly are you testing for?

  They had all these protests now, folks worried about fallout from back then. It didn’t take long for the cloud to float over here to Papeete. I thought about Mr. Gramont and hundreds of others out there with that shit raining down on them, and Blaze coming into the world breathing the poison into his lungs on his first breath.

  Tematangi, Blaze whispered in his sleep, and I put my cool hands on his dented face and kissed him calm and he never woke up. That was my gift to him.

  He told me once he remembered watching the sky light up. I know that’s not true. He wasn’t but a baby when the testing stopped, and besides he couldn’t have seen anything that far away. But Blaze said he remembered the cloud blooming sulfur-yellow and cotton-white and spreading through the sky and it near split his head in half.

  That memory was his first headache.

  The headaches came first, then the spells, then the blackouts.

  And things happened. Blaze told me, late at night when we held each other and talked in whispers. Bad things started happening when they returned to France. But he never could remember what exactly he did, and his parents wouldn’t tell him. They just kept moving. They had money and connections and Mr. Gramont knew people in the government, people who wanted Tematangi to be forgotten.

  Let me ask you this: how bad do you think it had to be to make the Gramonts leave France? How bad to make them move eleven times all over the U.S. and never let Blaze live on his own or get a job? How bad to make Blaze want to kill himself to shut out the demons?

  On the night before our wedding Hanriette drank so much champagne it was like the bones in her legs melted and I found her in a satin chair in the ladies’ lounge when I went to freshen up. She sipped at her drink and looked me up and down like she could see through my dress and told me “We should have locked him in his room and never let him out.” Then she gave me a smile that looked like it cursed me and she said “Or else he should have aimed that gun a little better.”

  #

  When I woke, it was dark and the streets were almost quiet below our open window. I reached for Blaze but even before my hands found emptiness I knew he wasn’t there.

  That night I didn’t leave the room. I sat with my back against the iron rails and I felt my heart beat against my silky gown. It was my honeymoon gown, a gift from the girls I work with, the color of raspberry sherbet, slick to the touch and cut to there.

  Eventually I fell asleep, and when I woke up the sun was a hot stripe across the bed and there was Blaze, sheets crumpled in his fist, laid out sideways across the mattress.

  There was blood on his hands.

  #

  “Where were you?” I asked for the third time.

  In the hospital, nurses’ assistants get the jobs you do over and over, changing the dressings and taking the numbers, and it was my hands on Blaze the most and I like to think he got to know my touch before the bandages ever came off so he could see me. I knew my work hurt him bad, but he hardly moved at all. Later, when he knew it was me who came, he nodded to show he appreciated me.

  I still put cream on him every morning. It wasn’t necessary anymore but I liked to do it, it was
my way of showing him I wasn’t afraid to touch him, not afraid to see him. I rubbed it into the dents and folds gently, spelling love with my fingers.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I remember…I was down at the water. You know, on that dock down by the place that sold the hats.”

  He’d bought me a hand-painted hat with a brim low enough to keep the sun off my freckled shoulders. He put it on my head and then he put his arms around my waist.

  That was yesterday.

  “Was there anyone around?”

  He thought for a while. “A few people, I think. Going home…and workers, cleaning up. End of shift. I was looking for Tematangi. I used to be able to see it, you know, from there. I looked out and I could see Papa’s boat.”

  I knew that wasn’t true.

  “And then I got the headache,” Blaze said. “I was looking out on the water…and then my head…but that can’t be right, Annie, I got rid of that part.”

  He put his fingers lightly to the dented place and traced the shape.

  “I got rid of it.”

  I had cleaned the blood from his fingers with a hot washcloth and rinsed and folded the cloth and put it in the corner of the bathroom on the floor and put the bath mat on top.

  “You don’t remember after that?” I asked. He just shook his head and leaned into me and I put my arms around him.

  “We need to go back,” I said.

  That’s when he told me. There wasn’t a way back, we weren’t booked on a ship, our tickets weren’t good anymore. He had the envelope with almost thirteen hundred dollars cash left in it, everything from the wedding and what we’d saved. I didn’t have to ask him what he was thinking. My man didn’t want to go back where his parents were any more than I did.

  All I had to do was call Hanriette and explain, and she’d send money. And we would start our married life with a big old balance due on the side of that hateful woman.

  #

  I knew some of the trouble had been animals. Blaze told me. He heard his parents talking sometimes, when he was just a child, hiding in his room while movers swept through the rooms preparing to take them to a new city, a new grand house, the Gramonts the toast of another Midwestern town where they would throw parties and Blaze would try to make friends. He was handsome then—before. And rich, that helped. But by the time any of the friends were starting to stick, things would happen.

  He killed cats, dogs, people’s pets. He’d figured it out, listening to his parents when they didn’t know he was there. I asked him did he remember actually doing it? A picture in his head, a memory of his hands on fur? But there was nothing, nothing.

  Later his parents stopped talking when he was anywhere near. There were medications, doctors visiting him in his room, serious expressions giving nothing away. He was sleepy, he didn’t do well in school. But the day would come when they were moving again.

  As we went about the day, Blaze acted like everything was fine. We went on a bus with other tourists to a place where there were caves that run under the top layer of the earth, down to underground rivers. We saw trees that seemed like they wanted to grow upside down, their branches reaching down to poke back into the dirt. This all seemed unnatural to me, and I felt uneasy thinking how these islands looked on the map like they could slip back under the water at any minute. I couldn’t help feeling like people weren’t meant to live here.

  I watched the dogs skitter around the edges of our little tour group, hoping for scraps, dodging in and out on their skinny legs.

  Let it have been a dog—that was my thought.

  But I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my place.

  When Blaze picked up that gun, he marked himself on the outside. But all my ugly was on the inside. What was done to me, what I invited done later, the ugliness and the ill use—that was all inside me.

  My outside was nothing special. I came from poor and I never had much and I guess it showed. Hanriette wasn’t the only one who believed Blaze married trash ’cause trash was all that would have him. But that’s not how it was. Blaze and me, we loved each other all the more because our broken places called out to each other and we gave each other some peace. Some little bit of peace.

  In the afternoon, Blaze rented us some bicycles, and we took this road that went up and down hills leading out of the city. There was a moment when we were on an empty road and the ocean was crashing up against the rocks hundreds of yards down, and Blaze took my hand and I thought I am a wife and I thought Thank you God. I picked some leaves from a bush I didn’t recognize and I crushed them in my fingers and they smelled like sage and Blaze put his arms around me and I could feel his heart beating under his shirt and I thought we might be happy.

  For dinner we had pizza. I was having a little trouble with all the strange food, everything so different from home, but Blaze never teased me about it. He got me a big slice of cheese pizza and a coke, and we sat outside and I even liked the smell of exhaust when the buses went by. Every restaurant down in the tourist part seemed to have a few tables sitting outside, and people were drunk by late afternoon, and it was like the party was starting up again on a signal from the cruise ships blowing their big horns as they eased on out to sea again.

  Blaze didn’t hardly eat anything. He kept staring out at the water as the sky went gold with the setting sun, and then purple with dark. Waiters went by carrying trays sloshing beers and families with sunburned children ate their dinners. In the next restaurant over, a nice one with curly iron rails around the patio, a jazz trio set up and started sending up soft music to compete with the conversations and the clink of dishes.

  “We need to go home,” I finally said. “If you want…I can call her.”

  Blaze just shook his head, not even blinking. “I need to go out there,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked, but I knew. My heart told me, jerking to attention the way it did, full of dread.

  “Tematangi.”

  “But why, sweetheart,” I asked, knowing nothing would stop Blaze if he wanted to go. This was a man who got into the tub in a rented motel room eighteen months ago, who pulled the shower curtain carefully shut, who put the barrel of a gun into his mouth with steady hands, who did not back down from the taste of gun oil on his tongue.

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “I’ll buy you some ice cream and a magazine, and you can sit here and enjoy the music. I’ll go and find out how to get there. Annie, you don’t have to come with me.”

  “Baby, no. Let’s just go home and—and if you want, we can go look at Peach Court next weekend.” Peach Court was a new apartment complex way far out on the east side of town, about as far from the Gramonts’ place as you could get. Blaze had been wanting to see about renting there, but it was going to take a few more paychecks from his job at the call center before we could swing it. For now, we were both happy enough in my one-bedroom—especially because Hanriette kept calling to remind us that she’d had the guest house cleaned and aired for us.

  “That would be nice,” Blaze said, but I could tell he wasn’t listening.

  #

  I went back to the motel and took a shower and dried my hair straight and shiny. I was in my honeymoon gown when Blaze got home. I had in mind to distract him if I was able. But he held out his hand and I saw he had a folded piece of paper.

  “There’s an airstrip,” he said and his voice was stretched thin. “Same one they used back then, only most of the commercial outfits won’t land there anymore. But I found a guy.”

  “How much?” I asked, even though that wasn’t my real question.

  Blaze shook his head and wouldn’t look at me.

  “You didn’t use the Visa, sweetheart…”

  We said we wouldn’t. We promised each other we wouldn’t. The limit was low, and besides, it was no way to begin our life together.

  But it wasn’t my place to judge.

  Instead, I went to him and I wrapped my arms around him and I held him and after a minute he leaned
against me and we went to the bed. By the time we were done he was shaking. There was sweat on both of our bodies and as it dried the breeze made us chilly, and I pulled the sheet up over us and held on to my husband.

  “My head…” he said quietly, and I held him tighter.

  I swore to myself that I wouldn’t sleep.

  Blaze drifted off, my head on his chest. I wasn’t sleepy at all.

  I listened to the city outside. I could hear the conversations of people passing by now and then, and workers calling to each other. There was the sound of shattered glass and cursing. Dogs barked and growled in the alleys, looking for what the restaurants threw out. I practiced in my mind what I was going to say to Hanriette, how I’d ask her to send us tickets home. So I’d have to whore myself again—it wouldn’t be the first time. And I’d do it, I’d do anything, for Blaze.

  It was close to three when Blaze suddenly sat up in the bed, looked at me with unseeing eyes, and used his feet to shove me off the bed. I fell with a thud and scrambled to get up but he was already out the door and running down the hall, and I could hear his feet ringing on the metal stairs down to the street as I pulled my shiny nightgown down around my thighs and started praying hard.

  #

  When he came back, the sky was going pink out the window, just at the edges. It was still plenty dark. It wasn’t just blood on him this time. There was dirt, or mud, or something else; I didn’t want to know. It looked like he had been dragged through the spoils of some terrible battle, bits of sticks and grass in his hair, the nails of his fingers broken and blackened, and the smell on him was rotten food and something metallic and burnt.

  When he walked in the door and looked at me, I saw that he knew me. I took him by the hand and led him to the bathroom and he stood there not moving while I got the tub filled and then he let me undress him and he sat in that steaming water. I told him to stay and gave him the little bar of soap and a fresh cloth and I bundled up his things and I went out into the early morning. I walked and walked and I put the things into the trash, into dumpsters behind restaurants. I put his ruined shirt in one, his pants in another, even his shoes.