The first torch down doubled its quiet flame, like an accident victim vomiting blood into the roots of the overgrown yard. The flame seeped and grew, and fast-formed a line fed by the spill of the tipped-over can—then the can of turpentine itself was touched by fire ; fire bloomed from the spout like a sight gag, and in a loud whoosh the can swelled. The sides blackened and bent.
“Jee-sus !” Nadia-Italia said, behind me, from the window upstairs.
Grass smoldered under the torches in my hand where they too lay along the ground. The turp rag leapt in its own quick fire.
I picked up the torches, stomped on the flames, and gave myself a hotfoot. The rubber on my shoes curled and darkened. Still stepping in fire, I reached to straighten the can.
“It’s OK,” I called.
Burn shit up. Audiences love it
.
“Chick, like, it’ll explode !” Italia’s voice was a sharp screech, her own ambulance wail. “Herman, wake up !”
Didn’t sound like my audience loved it.
“Calm down, calm down,” I said, and stomped faster. “No need to tell Pop. Show’ll be over in a minute, and panic will get us nowhere.” But was she right? Would the can explode? I was shielded only by the false security of the fake boobs.
I took seventh-grade chemistry. “It won’t explode until it creates a vacuum,” I said. I shoved the unlit ends of the burning torches into loose ground. “It has to burn through the fuel first.” I inched forward, one hand out. My voice cracked as I yelled, though I tried to sound confident. My hands shook, and my heart was a rush of blood washing veins, chemicals. Nerves.
“What the hell?” Herman’s voice at the window joined Italia’s panicked song.
“She set the yard on fire !” Natalia shrilled. “I saw her do it.”
“Under control,” I said.
Nothing was under control. The yard burned in three places.
I grabbed the can in one fast move, like the can was an animal ready to run. I grabbed it, and caught it. But that can was more than an animal. It was Loki, God of Fire. Unleashed. The sides of the metal can sizzled under my hands. I yelped and flung the can far away from me, into the tall grass of the yard, and a streamer of fire followed the can like a comet. A shimmering line of yellow-white flame fell on the grass like a rope, like the tail of a kite. The flame snapped and hissed and fast grew into a wall.
Then my short pink hair was a flash of flame too, as fire jumped to the nylon strands and dabs of superglue. There was no time to think. I beat my hands against my head, against the burning wig. The world smelled like melting Barbie dolls, the burned breath of a Christmas toy dropped against the Yule log. I pulled the pink hair off and flung it, but too late. My nylon sleeve was in flames.
“Crapola ! Crapola !” I ran in a circle and threw myself down. I rolled on the grass where the grass wasn’t on fire, but the Pendulous Breasts resisted my momentum, and everywhere I rolled sparks flew. The Pendulous Breasts duck-quacked and chirped a cacophony of party sounds. I was guilty, and now I was on fire. Who would’ve known hell was so efficient? A few mistakes and hell came to me faster than room service.
Stevie Wonder’s voice melted, then ground to a slurry, low halt.
A fist came at my face in scattered blows. I was blinded. No—not a fist. It was a hard blast, a bitter stream, a fire extinguisher beat against me.
“Coulrophobia !” I sputtered. The fire extinguisher gang !
The blast moved from my face down my arm, then was gone. I blinked until my vision cleared.
The first thing I saw was Herman’s naked muscled butt, his pants in one hand. He sprayed a white blast of fire extinguisher foam, but the extinguisher was small, and here size definitely mattered ; it sent a stream light as piss dancing over the sizzling yard.
“Get the hose !” He yelled. “Spray down the house.”
I tried to breathe.
When I didn’t move, he yelled again. “You’re out, OK? You’re out. So help with this shit.”
Out? Kicked out? I lay on my back. The Pendulous Breasts sat on my chest like twin demons. The sand was twice as heavy soaked by the fire extinguisher. I was beat up. Spent. “Out of the house ?” I asked.
Herman didn’t let on if he heard me. He ran for the hose.
Italia came from the house more slowly. Wrapped in a tiny blue bathrobe, legs naked, she sipped a carton of protein drink and leaned away from the smoke. She said, “God, you’re self-centered. He means
out
, like you’re not on fire, right?” Then she said, “Oh, wait. I see a spark.” With one long, muscled and tattooed arm, in slow motion, she poured her drink on me. The protein drink was a pale, lumpy cascading ripple from the dark sky, a thick splash against my open eye, and I jerked away. Nauseous. She tapped my scorched Big Booty with one foot. “Girl, you’ve let yourself go. The least you could do is get up.”
WHEN THE FIRE DEPARTMENT GOT THERE I WAS STILL ON my back on the ground, wet and cold, trying to breathe and wanting to vomit. The Juicy Caboosey tush put me in some kind of yoga move, with my back arched and head tipped.
My fake boobs were scorched, pocked with melted nylon.
I was sick. The yard was a blackened scar. Herman’s face was a dark mask, soot-stained, eyes red and rimmed in white. He was a Clown Prince of his own, or at least a Barenaked Baron. Once the fire was out, he stopped and put his pants on.
The paramedics knelt to check my vitals. “Just relax, OK?” A fresh-faced boy paramedic put a coat under my head to fix the angle made by the Ass.
“It’s my heart,” I said. I put a hand on the boob suit. “I have a bad heart.”
“We’ll give it a listen,” the fresh-faced paramedic said. “So, what’s your name ?”
I told the paramedics my name as many times as they asked—maybe five or seven. I told them my real name, Nita, not Juicy Caboosey or Sniffles. I held out my arm for the saline drip; that thin needle under the skin fed saltwater, a hospital-standardized taste of the ocean, to revive the premammalian center, bloodstream like an early memory.
“You’ll be OK,” a paramedic said. They lifted me, complete with the sandbag weight of the Ass and the Pendulous Demon Twins on my chest, onto their lowered gurney.
Where was Jerrod ? My cop, my safety net, that apple dumpling of a uniformed streusel. The EMTs buckled me in. My hands were hot under new burns. Herman brought his soot-streaked face toward mine. Behind him, the sign,
Baloneyville Co op
, was blackened.
He let me hold his hand and followed alongside the gurney. I wanted to squeeze Herman’s hand, to transfer heat, to make him my salve.
“Herman. I’m dying.” I coughed. My chest was tight. A paramedic shoved an extra blanket under the arch of my back.
Herman rolled his red-rimmed eyes.
“You’re not dying,” he said. “And you’re not getting out this easy. When you come back, house meeting. No fire tricks.”
Nadia-Italia yelled, “She threw that can of gas ! I saw it hit the shed.”
“I didn’t throw it at the shed.” I coughed again. Perhaps more for Herman’s sake than my own. I hacked like I had instant coal miner’s lung. I said, “It was on fire, I tried to put it out. Besides, you didn’t like that lawn anyway, right?” I coughed again. “At least now we don’t have to mow. That’s the bright side.” His yard was a charcoal pit.
He dropped my hand. I saw what was coming and counted the seconds, like counting between when lightning strikes and the crash of thunder.
By the time I reached three, Herman blew up. He said, “Jesus, Nita. Total disrespect. Same as always. You could’ve burned the house down. That’s dangerous shit.” He took a cigarette out of his pocket, started to put it in his mouth but his fingers were clumsy and tense and he broke the smoke in half, threw it on the ground. “They’ll investigate. My insurance’ll go up, cops’ll be over here.” He said, “Bottom line, when you come back, I want you gone. Period.” His mouth was a damp red gash in his soot-covered face. “Last straw.”
I was on my deathbed—my death gurney—and Herman was giving me the bum’s rush. I said, “Herman—”
He said, “Forget my stash, you could’ve killed us in our sleep.”
The paramedics lifted my new bed. The gurney creaked and rocked as the stars grew closer, and it was like riding a wave. “Let’s talk about it, when I’m better.”
Herman backhanded an invisible foe, shook his head, and folded his arms as though to hold in a rib cage of fury. The paramedics swung my bed into place in the ambulance’s tiny room. Herman and Nadia-Italia, united against me, walked arm in arm across the blackened lawn.
16.
A Turn for the Nurse
IN THE BACK OF THE AMBULANCE IT WAS ONLY THE TOUSLE-HAIRED boy paramedic and me. The ambulance rocked and barreled into town while the blood in my body swirled as a nauseating eddy in my chest. The siren sang opera to our tragedy. Everything smelled like burnt polyester. My bigger-than-big Keds were blackened, melted cheese at the rubber toes, dripped and solidified into a Salvador Dali. The back of the ambulance was a crowded vault of supplies, but might as well have been empty for all I cared because it wasn’t Rex’s ambulance and didn’t have the sexy, sweaty comfort of his body, his presence. My cure.
“I can’t breathe,” I said. The Ass under my hips made my back arch and the fake breasts thrust up. “I feel a knock in my chest. Like a gasp in my heart. Am I dying?” My breath was shallow, the words broken. When I tapped my chest, one Pendulous Breast gave a thin wheeze. Sweat trickled down my temple. Away from the fire, my skin cooled under the sweat like a fever.
“We’re going to give it a listen.” The paramedic reached as though to unbutton my shirt but stopped short, his hands in the air in front of me.
The Kevlar boobs barred the way. Over the hill of the Pendulous Breasts I saw only the top half of the paramedic’s face, his worried eyes and twisted eyebrows. I was at his mercy.
If I could blow up a balloon, tie a few Madonnas, I’d catch my breath and settle my heart. I tried to reach in my pocket. The nylon seat belt cut across my path.
The paramedic touched the curve of the boob suit.
With empty hands I had no props, no balloons, no way to draw attention away from me and toward a trick, a rubber toy, a balloon animal.
I said, “Pass me a latex glove, I’ll make you a reenactment of the Annunciation. The whole thing, I promise.”
He slid his hand tentatively along the curve of a fake boob. He handled me like I was the prop.
“Hey,” I said. I gave a weak smile, called on my clown powers, and tried to summon the fertility goddess meant for that outfit. With my best vaudeville purr, I said, “What are you, a faith healer?” My voice cracked. I fluttered my eyelashes. “That’s a fine medicine—you touch me like you know me. I’m better already.” I took a deep breath, counted to eight, and didn’t feel better at all.
“Just doing my job.” He grabbed one mound in each hand and lifted. The left side quacked, and the paramedic jumped. The right boob, victim of the fire, was only a sad hiss in quiet echo.
He was cute, in a Boy Scout kind of way. “Working on your paramedic’s badge?”
He dropped the boobs against my chest. The demons hit me with their full sandbag weight. “I’ ve got to get to your heart.”
“Sir, you’re halfway there. Touch me again and it’s all yours.” I gave another big clown wink. Really, I wanted to make my exit, to be out of the ambulance, offstage and back in my room. If I could curl up on my bed with Rex’s costumes, a valerian tincture, and a bottle of pills, I’d be fine.
He cocked an eyebrow, took a breath, and pulled a radio off his belt. “I’m serious.”
“Just the way I like my medical men—serious.” Stand-up and one-liners are the clown version of whistling a happy tune. I’d work the crowd even if it was only a crowd of one.
The radio squawked out a rush of static. He held it close and said, “Patient appears to be stable, though there may be…” The last part was muffled as he turned away. “Appears to be in clown clothing…”—his voice dropped even lower—“…delusional…”
Delusional? Did I hear him right? “’Delusional’?” I said.
The paramedic put the radio down and turned back to me. “We’re going to give you a little oxygen.” He rammed two tubes up my nostrils. He pointed at the boobs. “Show me how this thing works. I need to hear your heart.” He unfastened one of the belts that held me to the bed. When he found the snaps at the cleavage, the boobs fell apart willingly and dropped to either side of my chest as two heavy weights.
He put the cold end of a stethoscope to my chest. His breath brushed my neck. I blushed, warm under a mask of greasepaint and soot. The oxygen was cool against my lip. I was scared.
I touched his shirt. W.C. Fields came to the edge of my vision, shook a leg, and said, “Don’t look now, but I think you’re taking a turn for the nurse.”
“Nurse?” I said, and coughed through the soot in my teeth.
“I’m an EMT,” the Boy Scout said. “Not a nurse.” He put a clip on my finger. “This clip measures your oxygen level.” He taped the ends of wires to my skin, hooked me up to a machine. “Now lay back.”
I looked to W.C. Fields for guidance, but he was gone. The Boy Scout spoke into his radio: “Seems to have sustained minor burns.”
Minor? The oxygen slipped from my nostrils with a cool rush of wind over my face. The scout used one hand to put the hoses back in my nose. “Patient may be in some sort of shock,” he murmured into the radio.
I drank in the oxygen. Slowly, I calmed. The pieces of my body came together again: arms, legs, head, heart. Skin, nerves, breath—everything that had been humming and crazed, it quieted. I pressed my weight into the Ass under my hips. By the time we got to the hospital, I was ready to walk in on my own.
DON’T SHOW UP IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM READY TO WALK in on your own. Don’t try to sit up, tug at the nylon straps that hold you to the gurney, and tell everyone you recovered real fast on the way over. Don’t say the fresh air did you good, or the company on the trip made it worth the ride. If you claim to be fine when you’re strapped to a stretcher—that’s hospital code for “crazy.” The fast track through the ER is chest pain. Say “heart trouble,” and you’re bumped to the front of the line. I didn’t have chest pain by the time we got there. Still, the paramedic told an intake nurse, “The patient complains of heart trouble. Difficulty breathing.”
Emphasis on
complains
.
I pressed my elbows into the gurney in an effort to sit up, with the Ass in the way. The straps pulled. The unsnapped boobs hung open like a waterlogged life preserver, heavy as cement, meant to sleep with the fishes.
“I’m OK now. I can breathe again.” One elbow slid on the slick industrial sheets and I fell back against the cot fast. My arm was wretched with burns that danced along the inside of my forearm, like a fry cook after a hard night.
The nurse, maybe seventy years old, rolled her eyes like any one of the prom girls in the hotel bathroom on our Charlie Chaplin gig night. It was her own mime routine. “Got it. We’ll take care of it,” she said. She picked up my arm, looked at the burns, dropped my arm back down, and said, “So, you’ve got a few burns.”
With no novelty to my injuries, I wouldn’t make the medical textbooks. She unsnapped the mobile IV of the saline drip from the short piece of tube where it entered under my skin, but left the gear end of the setup in the back of my hand. “In case we have to hook you up again,” she said, and turned away.
“Should we get her behind a curtain?” a preteen candy striper asked. The candy striper stretched an Ace bandage like some kind of physical therapy for the flat-chested.
The nurse shook her head, waved a hand. “No hurry at all.”
The candy striper nodded, turned and skipped down the hall, her shoes a loud clack and rattle. The nurse brought a wheelchair over, but the wheelchair was routine. She said, “You’ll be fine, won’t you, honey? Just a little trouble you’re in.” She gave me a pat on one knee.
Placating clown treatment, all over again.
She unstrapped the belts. I sat up, and slid around on the Ass to swing my legs off the side of the gurney. I said, “Why do I keep coming back to this joint?”
“Some people like it here. They feel safer.” The flab on the back of her arm shook like a sad fish. “They like to know help is available, to fend off a late-night fear of death. An existential dread of being alone.”
Cheap psychology. “It was a rhetorical question.”
“Rhetorical, confessional, fundamental—ask away,” she said. “Long as you’ve got the coverage, I’m here.”
“Coverage? I’ve never felt so exposed. I lost my wig, and now my boobs are flopping out.” I gave one dangling boob a shake; smoke and ash drifted from it. Sand fell to the floor. I dropped into the wheelchair.
The nurse sighed, “Insurance coverage.”
“Ah.” Shit. I didn’t. There was nothing light about insurance coverage, no joke there.
The paramedic came back with a consent form on a clipboard. The nurse asked him, “She been like this the whole time?”
He nodded. “Some kind of shock.”
I wasn’t in shock. I started to say that, but when I opened my mouth I said, “You think this is shock, you ought to see me when I get the bill.”
Badaboom.
It was the oldest joke in the book! I was regressing. Why did I say it? Nerves. Maybe I
was
in shock—some kind of brain freeze. They left me parked in the wheelchair with the placebo IV, just the works in my hand, the IV equivalent of a fake cigarette filter, a baby’s pacifier.
Rex could breathe on my burns, and they’d turn to comedy.
I got out of the wheelchair. A nurse swung by and took me by the arm. I said, “Just take the IV out. I’m done with this place.”
“All in good time.” She smiled and led me behind a curtain, into a tiny room. “Let’s have a chat. What drugs do you take, if any, and how often did you take them?”
A standard question.
With nothing to hide, I reached low into my long pocket. My hand came back out through a burn hole. I waggled my fingers, little puppets, then tried a second time. My blistered skin was raw and sore, the pants tight over the Fabulous Hindquarters. On the way back up, I had to hold the pocket down with one hand to keep from turning it inside out. I barely got my hand back out again, full as it was on the way up with the amber bottle. I uncurled stiff fingers and handed the nurse the valerian tincture. I said, “I take a few sips of that, and…”
She glanced at the label, sat the bottle aside.
I reached in my pocket again and this time pulled out the small pot of Chinese pills. “I took ten of these. Or fifteen.” I pressed the jar into the nurse’s hand. “Maybe twenty.” I couldn’t remember.
The nurse looked at the jar, put it on a counter next to the valerian.
“I feel great now,” I said, and gave what I hoped was a winning smile, though actually I felt weak, ill and alone, small and inconsequential. Reflected in the chrome of a paper-towel dispenser, my face was a soot mask, my hair a fright wig. Except it wasn’t a wig. It was my hair. Nobody offered to swab off the mask. I said, “You know, all I need is a hairbrush, a damp cloth, a tray of face paint…” I leaned closer to the paper-towel dispenser and ran a finger through the soot mixed with greasepaint caked on my skin.
The nurse bent to peer at the burns.
“A beauty salon, that’d do the trick. Or a dressing room.” I said, “Bad hair day, and all those little lines and wrinkles…Think I’ll be going.” I made a move.
The nurse stepped between me and the curtain. “And how did you do this?” She pointed with the back of her pen at the burns along my hands and the streaks of blisters forming on the inside of my arms.
“Industrial accident, you might say. Injured in the line of duty. Working on a skit, I lit one too many torches. A little spilled turpentine.”
“Turpentine and torches, at four in the morning?” she said. She wrote something down.
“What’s time to a torch?” I said. “Besides, they’re meant to be lit on fire.” I hoped this helped my case.
The doctor came in and the nurse handed the pills to the doctor. “She took these.”
The doctor put on his half-frame glasses and looked at the jar, the picture and the words in Chinese. His face was the red of a lifetime of drink, or a bad trip to Cancún. His neck was heavy with folds and wrinkles, and he wheezed like he’d just run a marathon.
Oh doctor, heal thyself!
“Why would you take these?” he asked. “You don’t even know what’s in here.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in aspirin, really. I don’t know what’s in cough syrup, except alcohol.”
He looked at me, tugged at a stray nose hair, then looked at the bottle again. “You took this before or after you burned your hands?”
I shrugged. “I took them all week. I can’t tell if they’re working.”
“Habitual,” he said, and tapped the nurse’s clipboard. She made a note. He said, “What were you trying to cure, with this so-called medicine?”
“My pulse, my heartbeat. It’s too strong sometimes. My heart and kidneys don’t communicate.” I quoted the acupuncturist and his expertise.
“Ah, communicate?” The doctor said, “Communicate with
whom
? Extraterrestrials perhaps?” He smirked.
I said, “Don’t be crazy. With each other. They’re out of balance.”
He said, “Your heart wasn’t speaking with your kidneys, so you wanted to cure your pulse. Did I get that right?”
I said, “Sometimes, Doc, I can’t stand it. I lie in bed and feel my heart beat. I feel it in my legs, in my arms, in my back. My chest gets tight, and I can’t breathe.” The only reason I told the doctor anything was in case he could help.
He nodded. “Cure your heartbeat…Very Edgar Allan Poe. Do you have other, what you’d call, symptoms?”
I said, “I get splitting headaches sometimes, right at the top of my head, mostly when I’m premenstrual.”
The doctor nodded. “Probably a little cranial neuralgia.”
“Cranial neuralgia?” I said, “What’s that? Sounds serious.”
He said, “Not at all. It’s nerve pain, a sort of pain in the head.”
Great. I said, “So you’re diagnosing my headaches as pain in the head. How scientific is that?”
The doctor looked at the nurse, then at the clipboard chart. “Anal neuralgia,” he said, and tapped the chart again.
“Anal neuralgia?” I said, “Hey, I can do the math. A sort of pain in the ass?”
The doctor smirked again, gave a flirty chuckle. “You’re a sharp cookie. Now tell us, how did the fire come in?”
“The fire,” I said. “That’s another thing entirely. An accident. Juggling.”
The doctor wrote in his notes, and said, “You have first-degree burns.”