You get out by getting smart and turning in your fellow cripples. Most cases, you don't even have to appear in court. Just turn in your expense report for the motel, the rental car, the restaurant meals, and you get your check in the mail. Plus the commission.
Leading up to right now. I've been following Ms. Broome for five days of nothing. When you're shooting a stalk-umentary, you're pretty much married to your subject. To the post office to pick up her mail. To the library for another book. To the grocery store. Even if she sits in the trailer all day, the curtains shut, watching television, then I'd be parked down the gravel road, slouched down low, stretched across the front seat of my rented car so I could lean back on a pillow propped against the inside of the passenger door. So I could keep an eye out. Even if nothing's going to happen.
It's a marriage.
All afternoon, slapping mosquitoes up on the hillside behind her trailer, I was squatted down, hidden back in the bushes. Watching her through the viewfinder on my video camera, I was waiting for my chance to hit the RECORD button. All Sarah had to do was bend over and pick up a white tank of propane. Just five minutes of her unloading heavy bags of cat food from her old hatchback car, and this job would be done. Nothing left to do but check in my rental car and catch the next plane home.
Of course, I'm sitting here in her shed because I tripped and fell. She came and found me, after it got dark, after the mosquitoes were worse than anything—gunshots, knife wounds—she could ever do to me. I had to yell for help, and she put one arm around my waist and half carried me this far. She set me here. To rest a minute, she said.
Nobody's saying I'm too original. I'm a bird-watcher, I tell her. This area is famous for the red-crested hairy plover. This time of year the blue-necked pheasant comes here to mate.
She's got my video camera, fooling with the little playback screen pulled out, and she says, “Oh, please. Show me.” The camera makes a buzz, a click, and the red PLAY light blinks on, bright. She watches the screen, smiling, stoned.
I tell her, No. I reach for the camera, to take it back, but too fast. I tell her, No. Too loud.
And Sarah Broome, she steps away, pulling her elbows and her hands holding the camera out of my reach. Light from the little screen flickering soft as candlelight on her face, she smiles and keeps watching.
She keeps watching, but her face relaxes, her smile drooping, her cheeks sagging into jowls.
It's footage of her lifting sacks of steer manure, slippery white plastic bags packed with cow crap. Each bag printed in black letters: Net Weight Fifty Pounds.
Her eyes still pinned on the little screen, all the muscles of her face squeeze together in the middle. Her eyebrows. Her lips. Here's the five minutes that will end life as she knows it. My short stalk-umentary that's going to put her back into blue-collar slavery.
It could be her back healed. It could be she faked it all, but what's clear is, she's no invalid. With the arms on her, she could wrestle alligators for a living.
Sarah Broome, I just want to tell you I understand. Right this minute, while you read the back of a box of rat poison, I want you to know—that first week of being totally crippled, completely helpless and disabled, it was hands-down the best week of my adult life.
Here's the dream of every farmer. Every railroad brakeman and waitress who ever took a week's vacation to go camping. One lucky day, a freight train takes a corner too fast and derails, or they step in a spilled milkshake, and they end up living down some no-name gravel road. Happy cripples.
It's maybe not the Good Life, but it's the Good-Enough Life. The washer and dryer sitting on a covered deck next to the trailer. Everything painted metal, pimpled and blistered with rust.
If she'd just listen, I could tell Ms. Broome just where to find my carotid artery. Or where on my head to connect when she swings the sledgehammer.
No, Sarah Broome just tells me to wait a spell. She shuts the doors to the shed and leaves me sitting here inside. A padlock snaps.
Right this minute, she's sharpening a knife. She's looking through her clothes, her slacks and blouses, jeans and sweaters, looking for an outfit she'll never again want to wear.
Waiting for her, I'm yelling for her not to feel bad. I'm yelling that what she's doing is all right. It's the only perfect way for all of this to end.
Standing behind the lobby snack bar, Agent Tattletale tells us, “Turns out, she was smarter than me, that Sarah Broome.”
Instead of killing him, she left the video camera recording. She got the story of his past on tape. The murder of Lewis Lee Orleans. And after she'd hidden the tape, she drove him to the hospital.
“That,” the Agent tells us, “is what I'll take for a happy ending . . .”
17
Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up.
Miss America is clutching her belly in both hands, squatting on the yellow seat of a wing chair in the Gothic smoking room, rocking forward and back with a shawl around her shoulders. If her belly looks big, or if she's just overdressed, we can't tell. She rocks, her arms and hands lined with the swollen red welts and scabs from cat scratches. She says, “You ever hear of CMV, cytomegalovirus? It's deadly to pregnant
