Chapter 8
Tank
I took the cover off the bike on a Thursday morning with the review set for eleven o'clock.
Six months and change. The dust came off in one sheet and there was the stripe where I'd put my hand on the seat in October and taken it off again, and I stood there in the carport looking at it the way you look at a dog that's been waiting at a door.
Junie didn't know I was doing this. Nobody did. Connie would have talked me out of it in nine words and Judge would have sent four men to ride alongside, which would have been worse than not going.
Here's what I'd worked out, over three weeks, in a garage, at eleven at night, with nobody watching:
The problem was never the riding. Riding is easy — the bike holds itself up, the bike is doing most of the work. The problem is the stop. The problem is a man putting a left foot down on gravel with eight hundred pounds leaning on it and asking a rebuilt femur to be an opinion he trusts.
So: no gravel. Pavement stops only, planned in advance. Right-foot-forward at every stop where the camber allows. And I'd built the leg for eleven weeks with a woman who'd made me get up off a floor two hundred times, and at some point a man has to take his own word for something.
I got a leg over. That was fine.
I sat there for a while.
Then I started it, and the noise came up the way it does, up through the frame and into a rod and four screws that had never heard it, and I want to tell you something — I laughed. Alone, in a carport, at seven in the morning, out loud, like an idiot.
Eleven miles.
I took it slow the first two and then I stopped taking it slow. Cold air, low sun, the ridge doing its business off the left side, and every single thing my body had spent six months telling me was over turned out to be sitting exactly where I'd left it.
Mile ten, the sign came up. Yellow diamond, leaping deer, rusted at the bottom corner.
I didn't slow down. I didn't speed up either. I went past it at the limit, and past the bend, and past forty yards of guardrail that stops sixty yards short, and I'll be honest — my hands were on those bars very hard for about four seconds.
And then it was behind me. And then it was a half mile behind me. And then it was just a place on a road I use.
I pulled into the clinic lot at ten-fifty and put my right foot down on asphalt I had personally scouted eight days earlier, because I am forty-four years old and not a fool.
They'd set up in the waiting room. Four chairs pulled around, the fish tank burbling, one woman from the district in Reno on a laptop screen propped on a phone book, Okafor, Diane, Theo in the good coat, and Junie in her fleece with her back very straight.
She saw me come through that door and I watched her put together the sound she'd heard four minutes earlier in the parking lot with the fact of me standing there, and her face did something she'll deny.
"Mr. Rhodes," said the woman on the laptop, "you're not on this—"
"No, ma'am. I'd like two minutes and then I'll go sit in my truck."
Okafor said, "Let him talk," in a voice I'd never heard him use.
So I stood in a four-bed clinic's waiting room in front of a laptop on a phone book and I said the thing I'd worked out somewhere around mile six.
"Everything in that complaint is true," I said.
Junie's head came up.
"She came to my house. Four days a week, eleven weeks, no second staff, no chaperone, and she rode in my truck at night.
That's all accurate and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it isn't." I put my hands in my coat pockets so nobody had to watch them.
"Here's what's also true. I missed nine appointments.
Nine. Because I wouldn't go in a building.
Six other people from this clinic came out to that house and every one of them left inside twenty minutes, because that's what a caseload allows, and I want that written down too, because it wasn't their fault — that's just what the rules pay for.
"She's the only one who broke the rule. And the rule she broke got me off a cane and back on a motorcycle, which I rode eleven miles this morning to get here.
"Now." I looked at the laptop. "I understand the rule's there for a reason.
So I'll make it easy. I'll sign whatever you want.
I'll transfer my care to Dr. Lindqvist today, in writing, and I'll never be treated by that woman again as long as I live.
I'll sign a statement saying I initiated every out-of-clinic contact, which is true, because I did, by not opening a door.
You can put my name on anything that makes this go away for her. "
"Mr. Rhodes—"
"I'm not done, ma'am, and then I'll be quiet for good.
" My voice did something and I let it. "I've had six months of people arranging things for me.
Six months of being the reason somebody had to work around something.
If I'm the reason she loses a license she earned, then everything she did out at that house is worth less than nothing, and I'd rather have the leg back the way it was in April. "
Nobody said anything. The fish tank burbled.
"That's it," I said. "I'll be in the truck."
I got about four steps.
"He's not transferring care to me," Theo said.
Everybody turned.
He was looking at Okafor, and Okafor was looking back with a folder in his lap and his glasses off, and I watched a man do arithmetic in real time and arrive at a number he did not like.
"I'm withdrawing the complaint," Theo said. "It was — the documentation was accurate but the framing was not, and I'd like it withdrawn." He stood up. "And I'll be resigning the locum effective Friday. Family matter."
"A Wisconsin matter," said Okafor, pleasantly, to nobody.
It took eleven more minutes of paperwork, and I sat in my truck for all of it like I said I would.
Junie came out at eleven-forty and stood at my window a while and didn't say anything at all.
"Say it," I said.
"You were going to let them take you off my chart."
"Yeah."
"You'd have signed a paper saying you'd never see me again."
"Junie, I'd have signed anything with a pen." I looked out the windshield. "It's your whole life. I've had mine, most of it, and I did it wrong for six months of it and it still worked out. You're twenty-seven."
She got in the passenger side, shut the door, sat there.
"You rode past the sign."
"I did."
"Did you look at it?"
"Nope."
"Liar."
"Looked at it plenty," I admitted.
We didn't go anywhere. She followed me home and neither of us said what that was, and it was a Thursday, and it turned into a Friday.
There was no urgency in any of it. That's what I'd like to say about that morning, if a man's allowed to say one thing. The truck bed had been need — cold and fast and a man coming apart on a shoulder of Route 6 and a woman deciding to hold him together. This was the other thing entirely.
The light came up slow through the east window and went across the floor an inch at a time, and there was nowhere to be, and nothing to prove, and no leg to plan around, because I'd already ridden eleven miles that day and the argument was over.
She fell asleep again around eight and woke up around nine, and I hadn't moved.
"You've been awake."
"I've been thinking."
"That's the same thing, on you," she said, into my shoulder, and I decided not to tell her Ramona had gotten there first.
Then she stretched — the whole length of her, arms over her head, the sheet going down to her waist — and I put my hand flat on her stomach and she went still under it, and that was the entire beginning of it. No decision anywhere. Just a hand landing somewhere and neither of us moving it.
I took my time because I finally had some.
That's the thing I understood that morning that I hadn't in the truck bed. Out on that ridge she'd done all of it — she'd made every call, and she'd needed to, and I'd been in no condition to be trusted with a single one. This was mine to do. So I did it slow enough to be almost unkind about it.
I went down her with my mouth. Not fast. The hollow under her jaw first, because I'd been looking at it since October and had never once been allowed to think about it.
Her throat. Her collarbone, where her pulse came up under my lips and got faster and gave her away completely.
Then lower, and she got a hand in my hair and said "Tank" in a warning voice, and I ignored it, and she stopped warning me somewhere around my mouth closing over her.
"You're—" she said.
"Mm."
"You're doing this on purpose."
"I've got all day," I said, into her, and felt what that did to her hips.
She's a small woman and she is not a quiet one, which nobody would guess from watching her run a room.
I learned that in November and I confirmed it that morning at some length.
I went down between her thighs and put her leg over my shoulder and stayed there long past the point where she'd have let me stop — until her heels were digging into my back and she had both hands fisted in the sheet and she was saying my name and then not saying anything with any consonants in it, and the light was coming up the wall an inch at a time behind all of it.
She came the first time with her hand over her own mouth, which I reached up and moved.
"Don't do that."
"There's — Tank, there's neighbors—"
"There's a fence and eleven acres."
She said something extremely unprofessional about the eleven acres. Then I went back down and she didn't say anything else that made sense for a while.
The second time was easier and took longer and she stopped being embarrassed about the noise entirely, and I want it on the record that I have never been prouder of a piece of work in my life.
When I came up she was flushed all the way down her chest and her eyes were wet at the corners, and she pulled me down and kissed me and tasted herself on my mouth and made a sound about it.
"Come here," she said. "Now. Come here."
I got over her — carefully, on the good side, and she saw me do the math and put a hand on my chest and stopped everything.
"Other way," she said.
"Junie—"
"I'm not being delicate. I want to be able to reach you." She got a leg over and rolled us, unhurried, and settled down onto me the way you settle into a chair you own. "There. Now nobody's holding anything up."
And she took me in slow, all the way, with her hands laced through mine on either side of my head.
It was not like the truck. Nothing about it was like the truck. There was no cold and no clock and nothing to outrun; there was a woman moving over me in November light with dust turning in it, and the two of us taking the entire morning about it like we had a lease on the day.
We stayed at it a long time. Slow, then not, then slow again because she'd stop and just look down at me and grin when I made a noise about it.
She let go of one of my hands so I could get it between us and she came again like that, above me, with her forehead against mine and her breath going ragged four inches from my mouth.
Somewhere in the middle of it — and I mean the middle, which I understand is not the recommended time for this — I said, "Stay past twelve weeks."
She went absolutely still. All of her.
"That's not fair," she said, unsteady. "Asking now."
"I know. That's why I did it. You'd out-argue me any other time."
She lifted her head and looked at me, and the light was doing what it does at nine in the morning in November, all along her shoulder, and her heart was going hard enough that I could feel it through her ribs.
"Yes," she said, with her mouth against my shoulder.
And then she started moving again, and neither of us said anything else for quite a while, and when I finally went it was with both arms locked around her and her name in my mouth and a rod and four screws in my leg that I had not thought about once in two hours.
Later, out in the kitchen, she leaned on the counter in my shirt and looked at the twelve feet of linoleum between the doorway and the coffee pot, and she said, "How long's it take now?"
"Haven't timed it in months."
"Time it."
So I did, to humor her, and I want it on the record that it was four seconds, and that I said so out loud, and that she made a sound like a woman at a ballgame, both fists up, in my kitchen, at ten in the morning.