“So you went into drug treatment even though you weren’t an addict.”
“Not too hard to get off drugs when you’re not on ’em. But what I couldn’t get off was that damn war.”
“A lot of bad stuff happen to you?”
“A lot of bad stuff happened to everyone,” he says. “That wasn’t what was killing me. It was what I’d done.”
“What did you do?”
“Let’s just say, things that are hard to forgive, things that sneak up on you later.”
“PTSD?”
“Call it what you want.”
“So then . . .”
“I’d tried everything. Went to church, did about every damn risky thing I could think of that might kill me, meditated; I just got more confused. Every church told me something different—didn’t know whether to let Jesus save me or save myself. Couldn’t figure good from bad, love from hate. Went decades like that. One night around midnight I rode over to the Monroe Street bridge thinking about going out the easy way. Was actually sitting with my legs over the edge when I got it: if I jump and there’s a god, I’m going to have to account for myself.”
“For jumping?”
“Naw, I’d have just said ‘Hell with you, Lord, you made it too hard.’ Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before; I just needed to save as many lives as I took. I didn’t know how many I took, but I knew I’d ruined a bunch of them. My government talked me into going to a place I had no right going, doing things I had no right doing.”
The clock above the counter says I’m late for dinner, but I’m not interrupting this.
“Came down off that bridge,” he says. “Rode to a meeting, decided that was as good a place as any to find some of those particular lives. Turned out, the only person can save a person is that person, but I found I could be a help sometimes; you know, shut my mouth and listen, be a witness. Did that off and on for years. Then one night when you were just a pup, I run into Nancy. She was new . . . think you had just been taken again and she was raw, stress so great she looked to be bleeding out the eyes, nearly twice as big as she is now; obese to the point you could hear her breathing clear across the room. I remember thinking, This woman’s gonna stroke out before this meeting starts. She made it through, but she was one miserable drug-crazed lady. Ugly and desperate as her life looked, it seemed like there was a light in there somewhere, felt familiar somehow. So I took it as a test.”
“A test. Like . . . God testing you?”
“The world tests you, Annie. If there’s a god, he has bigger fish to fry. Anyway, we start talking. Hell, she was the victim of every-damn-thing. Protective services lying to her, stealing her babies when they got no right. Ungrateful kids, asshole boyfriends. Pretty much anything negative invented in the world was tracking Nancy Boots.”
“Did you tell her to grow up?”
“Told her no such thing,” he says. “I listened. You challenge somebody laying out their troubles, all you’re doing is giving them reasons to think harder on what they’re already thinking, and setting it up so they won’t listen when you do have something to say. Adds to their ammo, if you know what I mean. You can’t help anybody unless you’re willing to hear their story.” He smiles and winks at me. “So stop asking questions and listen to mine.”
I smile back. And zip it.
“Couple meetings later we’re on break and I’m standing in the lobby after taking a leak; hear this, this . . . sobbing from inside the ladies’ room. Then these two women come out all horrified and laughing, and as the door’s closing I hear the sobbing again. The two women walk away shaking their heads and elbowing each other and I’m thinking, only other person I saw go in was Nancy. I wait a bit and no one else comes out, so in I go, hear more crying coming from one of the stalls. I ask if everyone’s okay in there and the sobbing stops, but I don’t get an answer. I ask, ‘Is that you, Nancy Boots?’ and it’s quiet a second, then this weak ‘Yeah,’ so what the hell, I open the door and there’s your momma sittin’ with a roll of paper in her hand. I say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she just looks at me. I say ‘What’s wrong?’ and she bursts into tears again, says, ‘My arms are too short.’”
Oh my god, Nancy got so heavy she couldn’t reach around . . . she couldn’t clean herself.
“Those women were laughing at her. I’m furious; I mean, killing mad. So I help your mom out and we get ready to go back to the meeting, but she says, ‘I can’t go back there,’ and I say, ‘If you can’t, I can’t,’ and take her to my car, go back inside, stand in front of those bitches, and say, ‘You ladies can get clean and sober all you want—never touch another drug—but you still won’t have a bit of damn decency.’ Last meeting I ever went to.”
“Wow, Walter. You got together with Nancy wiping her. . . .”
His hand shoots up. “You don’t need that movie in your head, and I don’t need the rerun. Point is, we’re sitting in the car and she’s still crying and thanking me for getting her out of there, and I see a big ol’ woman with a right pretty face, if you can see past her life. Maybe it was timing, but I’d done plenty of things in my life that left an ache on someone, so I thought the two of us might
