Belly Up Read online

  “I’m good, honey love,” Frank gurgled, “I’m all set to go.”

  Frank’s words came out broken like a speaker sunk in a shallow bucket of water. After he spoke there was static instead of silence. He looked over at me from across the hallway and smiled big.

  I watched Frank as he moved around the hospital on his electronic wheelchair and bid the nursing staff good-bye. He whispered digital well wishes into their ears and kept smirking with his tubes. He breathed heavy as he maneuvered. I watched the back of his head. He finally made his way to the handicap exit and scooted down the ramp out into the desert.

  When my nurse returned, I was informed that my blood and I needed to rest, so I checked into a nearby motel. I closed my eyes and then opened them. I folded my body up and out of bed and looked out the window and then at the TV and then decided I had to walk. A walk, I thought, would do me good. I left my room and went into the night. I walked down the road that was the freeway and passed through Balmorhea by foot. Yellow street lamps gave me a shadow. Light also emanated from a single building. A run-down wood two-story with a generous porch and sign reading “Moonlight Gemstones” that seemed to hum in the night. As I approached the building, the sound grew louder. I walked up the stairs, crossed the porch, and pushed open the swinging door of the rock shop into a bath of light and noise. In a panic I covered my ears. Everywhere I looked there were hundreds of little black machines spinning full force. Going around and around with stones inside them and metal cords running from their bodies into the walls. On shelves, on the floor, hanging from the ceiling. All that registered was a blur. The allusion to an object. The sound deadened the space around my body. I could not hear the sound of my feet walking, the hands on my ears, the regular in and out of breaths. The everyday sounds were missing. These machines, these rock tumblers entering my ears, the sounds they made were incinerating my red blood cells one by one, like birds on a fence. Bam bam. I could feel the liquid inside of myself die.

  I tried to configure the meaning of these spinning baskets just as Frank appeared and pulled the plug. Silence descended upon the room like a cloud of black.

  “Hey, there, stranger,” he smiled at me through his nose tubes. “You like rocks?”

  Frank machined his way from behind a desk where he had been hidden and rolled out to greet me.

  “Rocks, fossils, dinosaurs—just giving them a good polish while the town sleeps. Come here, let me show you some of the best ones I have. I bet you don’t have rocks where you come from.”

  I followed Frank to a jeweler’s desk. He took out a worn velvet tray and a series of stones from a drawer. The sudden silence wrapped us in close. He clicked on a desk lamp.

  “See here, see these little veins of red reaching out towards the edges? The black circle here at the center—that is how you know it’s from Balmorhea. These stones from here, right here from my backyard, go all over the world! People like the red bits, that’s why—universal beauty right there, ain’t it?”

  “I am driving from the East and going West,” I said.

  Frank’s smile dropped slightly at the tips of his mouth and he picked up one of the rocks he had laid on the tray. His neck was stiff and couldn’t move much so instead of leaning in to tell me his secrets he stretched his hand out from his body and lifted his arm sagging with skin up towards me.

  I looked down at Frank’s wheelchair. It was a sophisticated machine. On the right arm there were remotes and controls and a small red button under a clear plastic box. Frank flicked the box open, poised his finger above the red button, winked at me, and said, “That’s how I send off my torpedoes.”

  I smiled.

  “You want the world tour?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “I have remote-control everything,” he beamed and scooted around the space. “All the counters are low so I can reach them in my chair.”

  All the surfaces were coated with grime because Frank couldn’t clean.

  “I sleep in the back of the shop,” he said. “Pull that curtain aside.”

  Past the curtain was a fancy mechanical bed.

  “Damn good bed,” Frank said. “Beds like that cost more than a good pick-up truck.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Have you seen the springs?” Frank asked me. “They are just up the road. You could carry me and we could go.”

  It was night and the air was hot and swimming in a spring didn’t sound crazy.

  “They’re world-renowned, these springs. Concrete manmade sides keep the water in a large spring-fed pool. But the bottom is raw rock, just regular Texan granite. It’s deep in parts and during the day or by the light of the moon you can see all the fish and the spring creatures swimming at the bottom. They’ll brush up on your legs, these fish, and swim in between your toes and, if you stand still gaping long enough, the little ones will even swim in your mouth.”

  Frank’s eyes were wet and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was excited or because he had a leaky eye.

  He showed me how to unharness him from his chair. I hoisted him up. I carried Frank to the springs first like a child and then over my back like a sack of rice. Carrying a man like that makes you feel like you are worth something. Walking was the only way to get there and I was glad for it. We were in a jungle of desert, cactus and thirsty-looking trees getting thicker around us as I pushed on. Frank’s oxygen tank weighed heavy on my left hand. My right hand kept Frank balanced on my shoulder. He wheezed into my ear, the sound of his breath as close to life as a recording of waves crashing on a beach. Frank and me, we are our own machine right now, I thought. We are going to make it to this spring and let fish swim in our mouths.

  Holding Frank in my arms, his oxygen tank hooked on my side—heavy and making me slow—I wondered how far I had to climb. The heat crept up through my feet as he urged me on. I could see where we were headed. Pavement turned to gravel and I struggled to keep our balance. Frank was wheezing in my arms, yelling at me through his voice box, making me believe this was the last thing I was going to do and if I didn’t make it, goddammit, we were all going to stop breathing and die.

  When we got to the springs, I put Frank at the base of a tree. I removed my shoes and tested the water with my foot.

  “It’s how I told you it was going to be,” Frank said. He smiled his big gaping smile, his mouth expanding cheek to cheek, his tubes lifting up with joy.

  He looked up at the moon and the bright stars. Something flew overhead. There was Frank. Sitting at the base of a tree, his head stretched back, his trachea facing me like a little puckered mouth. I placed his oxygen tank between his knees. It rested there like a sleeping child.

  “I like the way you look,” I said. “I like the way you look with that tank between your knees.”

  His head came back down, chin stiff again, his teeth covered by his upper lip, “Five minutes and I’ll get rid of this damn thing. I’ll catch my breath and then you can carry me in.”

  I took off everything but my underwear and jumped in the spring. I could feel the nature in the water but I wasn’t sure exactly where. The smell, perhaps. The water reeked of life and mold and rot. The moon put silver scars on the surface of the water. I waited for the fish to nibble my legs but none came.

  “You lied, Frank,” I said. “No fish in this spring—just a fancy granite bottom.”

  Frank stood, which was something I had not yet seen him do. He pulled the tubes out from deep within his nose and placed them on the tank. He teetered there un-oxygenated for a moment, long enough to make me wonder if he was going to topple over. I heard the steady rhythm of his voice box breath radio in and out. Slowly he undressed. I tried not to watch but his old broken body backlit by the desert moon held my eyes. His shirt crinkled off and then his pants. He wore white military-looking underwear.

  “Come here,” Frank croaked. “I might be standing but I sure as hell can’t walk!”

  I swam to the side and pulled myself out of the water. Up close F
rank’s body looked like a misshapen piece of fruit. I stood next to him.

  “You’re short.”

  “I shrunk,” Frank replied in the dark. His pecs sunken into his chest, his belly swollen, his paper skin melting off his bones, “We don’t have all night. Carry me to the side of the pool.”

  I lifted him up, his atrophied legs draping over my elbow, and placed him down on the edge. I swung his feet into the water slowly, his mouth making an O upon entry.

  “I haven’t taken a bath in years,” Frank looked at me and smiled. “Get in so you can lift me in after you.”

  I hopped back in the water and faced Frank. I put my hands on his ribs and braced myself to lift his weight when he croaked, “Stop!”

  Frank brought his hand to his neck and made an unscrewing motion releasing the microphone that he spoke through. He put his voice box to the side of him, a couple feet away from the edge of the spring. Frank spoke again but said something I couldn’t understand. His voice was small. He beckoned me closer. He pulled air with his hand in the direction of my head.

  “Closer,” he mouthed.

  When his lips reached my ear the wind between our bodies beat louder than his breath, that small sliver of life that pulsed through him, somehow keeping his heart beating, his lungs inflating with the rest of the desert.

  “I have to be careful,” he heaved, “of getting water in my neck.”

  With that hard K, I heard him and I pulled away and looked at the gaping, sagging hole that he spoke out of. Through the opening in his neck, I saw the muscles in his body and I stiffened.

  Frank breathed and looked at me and said, “I am ready now. Bring me in.”

  Without his voice box, Frank talked to me in mouth movements and motions. We were lucky the moon was so bright or I wouldn’t have been able to see his words.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Frank asked, “What do you have that is so bad?”

  “Something domestic,” I said.

  “You’re awful young,”

  “Is there an age where your body is allowed to start hating you?”

  “You think my body doesn’t hate me?”

  “But, look at you,” I was angered, “My body has no right.”

  “Did they take a bag of blood out of you here in Balmorhea?”

  “Yes, that’s why I stopped. I knew I had to get my skin around a needle.”

  “Ain’t that the worst,” Frank said.

  I looked up at Frank sitting on the side of the spring, his legs dangling in the water, his head tilted slightly back and his neck hole sagging. I looked at Frank and looked at the stars and imagined all of the stars gathering in the center of the sky and then funneling down into Frank’s neck hole. I looked for holes on myself. Places where stars could gather and enter into me. There were just the usual ones. If the stars were going to funnel anywhere it would be into Frank’s neck.

  “What do you think of this hole?” Frank whispered, “You don’t have one too?” He was trying to make me laugh.

  “Come on, in we go.” I was already in the water. I put my hands under Frank’s armpits and pulled up. His skin slipped out from under my hands and I was afraid it was going to rip. I tried again and retightened my grip further inside of his arms and pulled up, this time, up and forward. His body lifted off the concrete side and fell into the water. I still had a hold of him. The two of us were wavering like a pair of leaves. I watched for a sign that I could let go. He lifted his arms to the sky and my hands slid off him, his skin dripping from my fingertips. I tried to look away, but I had to keep checking that he was still there, breathing OK, doing his stretching thing.

  His movements were giddy. The water took away his weight and let his bones float. While he was doing his movements, I swam over to the other side. It was quite large. There were several alcoves that jutted out from the main spring that looked like natural made hot tubs. We had entered through one of these slight curves. I ducked my head under water in each one. In some, the moon shone bright, and I could see the bottom clearly. Others were dark. The granite shifted under my feet and I realized I might cut myself. There must be some razor-sharp rocks beveled to a slice. In the dark, Frank wouldn’t even see the blood leaking. No one would know what happened till morning when they found Frank wheezing short of oxygen in a spring of my blood, my corpse peacefully floating with the breeze and mixing with the pine needles on the surface.

  I looked back at Frank from across the spring, but I couldn’t see him. I looked harder into the dark, but still no figure appeared. In a panic I got out and ran to the other side where Frank had been. I dripped on the concrete still hot from the heat of the day and looked at the dark that had swallowed him. Over in a corner I saw bubbles, big bulbous bubbles, rising up. I prepared to jump in and pull Frank out, to take my mouth and put it on his neck hole and breath into him inflating him like a balloon. But as I approached I saw Frank smiling at me under the water. He raised and lowered his eyebrows in a playful way. He was breathing bubbles out of his neck hole, spewing them in a pattern, listening to the sounds they made and seeing how many bubbles he could blow before he needed to come back up for air. He finally surfaced, took a deep breath, and ducked back under. Beneath the water he was spotlit by the moon. He tilted his head back, and for a moment I was sure that all of the stars in the sky were going to gather above him and funnel into his neck. He looked at me and tilted his head back again, his neck hole open wide. A single bubble emerged, birthed out of him and bloomed on the surface of the water. Frank birthed three more bubbles out of his neck hole. Then five. And then it was a volcano of bubbles on the surface of the water and Frank popped back up gasping for air, smiling. He looked at me and winked and said in his small voice that may have only been him mouthing the words, “Didn’t even know I could do that.”

  “You lied, Frank,” I said. “I don’t see any fish.”

  “They’re here,” I thought I heard him say. He beckoned me with a hand motion to reenter the water.

  I slid back in and looked around at my feet, at Frank’s feet. Suddenly out of the edge of my eye, I thought I saw a fish. A small black zinger no bigger than my smallest finger. I pointed and Frank nodded. The fish escaped my eyes and then reentered my vision. I stuck my hand under the water and opened my palm towards the sky. There were about three feet between my palm and the surface. I waited. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the fish swimming over my palm. I waited for the feathers of movement. None came. I opened my eyes and looked over at Frank. He had his head half in the water and his mouth open. His eyes were looking straight ahead, not at the water or the sky, but ahead of him at some faraway tree. I didn’t move. And then it was in. Frank shut his mouth, his eyes wide, and pulled himself over to the side of the spring and spit it out. The fish flopped there on the cement looking like a glass toy. It was shiny and black and pretty. I realized it was dying and made a move to put it back in the water but Frank stopped me with his bony hand and mouthed, “Let it die.”

  Its flipping got more violent, and the fish’s mouth gaped, opening and closing for the water, but no water came. I looked far out into the desert, away from the fish, and the place on the pavement where the fish had been flapping went silent. I left Frank where he was and got myself out of the spring. I didn’t need to look at Frank or at the fish. I could have just left him there in that pool. I could have walked back to town in ten minutes and who knows how long Frank would have to wait un-oxygenated in that spring. Maybe it was closed tomorrow. I hoped it was.

  I put on my pants and my tennis shoes and wore my shirt around my head like a turban until my chest dried. It was clear to me that I didn’t know Frank at all. He waited on the side for me to pull him out. He was resting his head on his crossed forearms up on the cement surrounding the spring. His cheek was on his wrist and he looked posed like a beauty queen. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he batted his eyes at me. That would have been something that Frank would have done. I tried to forget the dead fish. I didn’t l
ook at it or acknowledge it was there. The horizon got yellow. I lifted Frank up out of the pool and let him dry off with his feet in the water. He twisted his voice box back on and cleared his electronic vocal cords. I was glad that the hole in his neck was covered again. I’d had enough.

  I helped him to stand. He dripped on the cement.

  “Get me my tank.”

  I pulled it from the place it had been resting in the dirt and handed him his tubes. He put them back up his nose and around his face and breathed in and visibly got larger with the oxygen coming into him. His white army boxers clung to his legs and his balls, and he looked like the least human thing I had ever seen. There he was: wet, slick with scales, shaped like a rotten pear and that machine erupting out of his face. With the morning light, his body showed skin spots with growths and moles and brown patches and purple subterranean veins.

  We exited the same way we came. I carried Frank, the both of us still dripping, through the desert path and back to the Balmorhea strip. The sun rose behind us and we traveled wet and broken in the middle of the street.

  “How do you think we look?” Frank said.

  “Good,” I said. “We look good.”

  As we walked, I saw Frank and me shoved in the mouth of a doctor, reclining under a giant tongue, living in pools of spit together, Frank’s tubes anchoring him to a cavity-ridden molar further back in the doctor’s jaw. I saw us playing cards under the palate and popping canker sores for fun and harvesting dead taste buds for a grill we had set up near the esophagus, me swinging on the tonsils like a tube swing over a river, pumping my legs, pushing my momentum back and forward, back and forward out of the doctor’s mouth and onto the hard cement below.

  WHAT GIRL BUILT

  GIRL ON BOAT, boat covered in ice, ice holds boat in place. Letter is delivered to boat. Girl comes out of boat and skis north to direction from which letter came. World is cold and snow creates dunes that are blown about by wind. Girl’s hands are covered by leather gloves and girl’s face is covered by cloth but she is cold and cannot breathe well, ice closes in. Girl must keep skiing because ice is following. If ice catches girl, she will be limp in ice’s grasp and disappear into snow she is passing. A small domed stone cottage with a thatched roof comes into girl’s view and is illuminated by lantern hanging outside. Stone chimney rises up out of cottage roof and smoke rises up out of stone chimney. Arched wood door opens and girl sees girl’s aunt. Aunt wears apron and rushes to greet almost frozen girl and pulls her inside aunt’s cottage of warmth and food. Aunt leads girl down spiraling stairs underground to large banquet table where all of girl’s family sits and eats. Girl looks around table and discovers mother, father, uncle, sister, grandmother, cousin, cousin, cousin. Girl looks at mother and says,