Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

A WOMAN ON THE RADIO speaks with a French accent. “Brasserie Caribou. You cannot beat our meat.” Nat and Ruth fly into the back seat. “Howdy, lovebugs,” Mr. Bell says. “How’d it—?”

“Go!” Ruth need only say it once. Mr. Bell locks the doors, engages the engine, depresses the accelerator with everything he’s got. They find their breath in the dark car. She leans forward as he speeds away from the house, and as they fly past, she sees a man running for the car. The man is not Zeke. It’s Ceph, running out of the woods by the house. Ceph calling her name, “Ruth! Stop! Wait!”

“Don’t stop,” Nat says. “Don’t.”

Streetlamps ripple overhead, passing in sickening waves of darkness and light. None of them speak yet because Mr. Bell’s I-told-you-so is loud enough for all to hear.

The vehicle moves away from the house at speeds ranging from thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour for a time period of twenty-three minutes. Once sufficient distance is gained, Nat can finally speak. “I need some water. Please.”

“Of course.”

At Andy’s Discount Food and Dairy, Mr. Bell locks Nat and Ruth inside the car while making his purchases. As soon as Mr. Bell’s gone, Nat starts to plead. “Don’t tell him I fucked up so badly. OK?”

“But the man knows his name.”

“The man knows your name too. Maybe it’s your fault also. Did you think of that?”

She looks out the window.

“Don’t tell him. Not everything. Please.”

“If I have to, you can’t be mad.” She pushes a spot between her eyebrows. “What happened to his nose?”

Nat shakes his head. Ruth imagines the lonely appendage stashed in a cup, a mug, a gift box, blackened, crusted in parts, and all the smells it ever knew. Grass. Bacon. Seawater. Mildew. More likely though, it was eaten away slowly, crumbled and wasted in bits.

“And what the hell was Ceph doing there?”

“Poor Ceph,” Ruth says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mr. Bell passes Nat a bottle of water, juice, and a bag of snacks. He opens beers for each of them, using a quarter pinched as a pry bar. “You look like ghosts. What happened? Did the dead actually speak this time?” He smiles. The alcohol hits Ruth’s blood, swiftly cooling hot metal. Mr. Bell catches Ruth in the rearview. “What is it?”

She shuts her eyes, so Mr. Bell drives. They pass three farms and one home-heating oil depot. Finally she answers him, “The man didn’t have a nose.”

“What?”

“He didn’t have a nose. It had been eaten away. Just a hole in his face.”

“Terrible.”

Nat grabs her thigh, squeezes as if holding her reins.

“More snow in the forecast, Jim. The county’s on alert. We’re looking at accumulations of anywhere from thirteen inches to two feet. More than that up in the mountains.”

“No nose?” Mr. Bell stretches his fingers, regripping the wheel. The streetlamps end. “What happened?”

Ruth turns to Nat. He’s still looking out the window, though there’s little to see besides the metallic flash of the passed mile markers. “They lost some money, and Nat told them it’s in an empty pool.”

“A man lost both his nose and his money? Seems a bad sign. How much?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Well, Nat? Is it in a pool?”

“Not that I know of. No.”

“Maybe?” Mr. Bell asks.

“I don’t think so.”

Nat allows his half-drunk bottle of water to fall into the foot well. They drive a ways in silence.

“He knows you, Mr. Bell. He called you Carl.”

Nat digs his nails into her leg.

Mr. Bell takes a moment to respond. “I’ve never met a man without a nose.”

“Zeke. He knew you.”

“He called me Carl? Did you tell him that was my name?”

“No.”

“He called me Carl? And he lost some money?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve never met a Zeke.” Mr. Bell shakes his head.

“It didn’t go so well,” Ruth says, but begins to worry that she’s brought trouble to Mr. Bell. If Zeke knows his name, it’s because he looked at her marriage record. She’s endangered Mr. Bell. And Nat.

“Why? They thought you were lying?”

Ruth leans into the front. “Do you know a motel we can stay tonight? Outside of Troy?”

“We’re not going home?” Nat asks.

“He knows where we live.”

Mr. Bell finds Ruth’s eyes in the rearview. “I’m sorry.” He has to look back to the road in order to drive. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why? What did you do?” The challenge between Nat and Mr. Bell is plain. Mr. Bell doesn’t answer. They pass the paint factory’s color test field. They pass a rotten dresser someone left on the edge of his property.

“I know a motel,” he says finally, and drives toward Bethlehem, where on August 11, 1859, a meteor fell nearby. They pass Snake Hill. They pass Old Pond. They pass a street whose name remains unknown because a vandal stole the sign and stashed it in his basement years ago.

Ruth chews the dead skin of her thumb. Mr. Bell drives haltingly as if out practicing with a learner’s permit or lost in thought. The road dips. There are a few houses, a mobile home, then nothing for a stretch. A sewage treatment plant lit up like a UFO crash site appears. He keeps driving. A sign says something about the Forestry Department. Nat curls up. Ruth irritates a hangnail. A few snowflakes start to fall. They pass through towns at night. They pass a prison. They pass a number of businesses with vague names: AmSure, Angiodynamics, Noss. The carton of grapefruit juice has warmed up between Ruth’s legs.

An hour later, near Lasher Creek, meteorite found in 1948, Ruth sees a sign for a motor lodge. Underneath the words there’s a depiction of a bosomy woman, dressed in a hula skirt, shaking it underneath a limbo bar, though there’s nothing else Hawaiian about the place. It looks like a cinder block.

Mr. Bell rings the office buzzer twice. A young girl lets him in.

Nat is slumped against the car door, snoring.

Mr. Bell returns to the car with their room key attached to a wooden spoon bearing the number four on its bowl. Ruth squeezes Nat’s wrist. “Come on.” The three of them drag into the room.

“No one’s to blame,” Mr. Bell tells Nat. “Every town has a time limit. Our luck was running out in Troy and I knew it. In fact, I suspect that this is probably my—”

But Ruth doesn’t want to hear them bicker. She locks the bathroom door behind her. She adds no cold to the mix, climbing into the shower, scalding her shoulders and chest. She unwraps a thin bar. The soap will make her skin tight. She lathers up anyway, standing under the water until the burn fades. She scrubs her armpits and crotch with the soap, plucking her curled hairs from the bar and dropping them into the tub. She dries off and gets dressed.

The room is dark. The men have already gone to sleep, two exhausted lumps under synthetic covers. Ruth climbs into Nat’s bed. She rests her hand on his stomach. Her fingers brush the wires there. Nat’s grown a tremendous amount of hair rather suddenly; even his belly button has changed, because she’s in the wrong bed. She’s in bed with her husband. Ruth holds her position a moment longer, a tailor making measurements, so close to what’s inside Mr. Bell: blood, brains.

Ruth finds her shoes and the spoon key. She steps out into the night. There’s a light on in the office. Maybe someone’s making coffee or setting out plastic-wrapped Danish, that fake, sweet cheese. The door opens with a jangle. There are out-of-date magazines as in a doctor’s waiting room or transfer station. Ruth takes a seat, opens a women’s periodical. “Best Low-Fat Potato Chips.” “Our Favorite Bras.” “Tools to Organize Your Living Room.” Essential female information.

Don’t leave him there alone, Ruth tells herself. At the end.

The smell of coffee finally hits her nose, and there’s a shuffling behind a set of saloon doors. Ruth sits up straight. The noises stop. Then a racket. The doors swing open. “What’d you say?”

“Me?” Ruth asks. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t leave who there alone?” The young woman steps up behind the registration desk. “Early riser, huh?” She’s not a typically sullen kid, looks more like someone who relies on curiosity to survive.

Ruth nods.

“What brings you here?”

“Visiting a friend.”

“A friend from here? What’s her name?”

“Umm. Eleanor. Bell. Yeah. El Bell.”

“Cool name. Never heard of her.”

“You know everyone in town?” Ruth closes the magazine.

“Pretty much. It’s a small place.”

“What goes on around here?”

The woman shrugs. “Not much.” She rests an elbow on the desk, chewing one finger to help her think. “Lots of waiting around, I suppose.”

“For what?”

“Grow up, get married, divorced. Maybe a kid. You know, die. School to start. Coffee to brew.”

Ruth takes a seat. “Mind if I wait with you?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“What are you doing up so late?”

“I got a call to open the lock.”

“The door?”

“No. The canal. Erie runs right behind this place. You’re in a lock house, so whoever’s on duty at the motel is also responsible for opening the locks when a boat’s coming through.”

“People still use the canal? In this weather? I thought it was decommissioned.” The Father had told Ruth that.

“Mostly pleasure crafts but, yeah, people still use the canal.”

“Doesn’t it freeze in winter?”

“You’d think so, right? Doesn’t stop some people.”

“How do you open the gates?”

“I’d like to show you because it’s amazing, a feat of engineering, and the people who built it weren’t even engineers. But I’m not allowed to show you. Sorry.”

“Why? What is it? Coast Guard? Homeland Security?”

“Something like that,” she says.

Ruth curls her legs up on the bench. She falls asleep before the coffee’s even had a chance to percolate.

Eventually morning comes on. The girl’s gone. Ruth helps herself to three pastries, two coffees. Nat won’t drink the stuff. She kicks their motel room door. “Mr. Bell. Nat. Wake—”

Mr. Bell opens the door. “I’m up.”

“You want coffee?”

“More than a cake wants a hot oven.”

She thinks that means yes.

“Nat’s just washing up, then I think we can shuffle along.” He heads toward the car. Ruth follows with the coffee and pastry. She has nothing to collect from their room. She left Troy with nothing. They wait for Nat. Mr. Bell turns the engine over. Though they’re separated front seat to back, the quiet unnerves her. She wonders if he was awake last night when she felt him up.

He thumbs his chin. “You ever watch Bacteria Workshop? I saw one episode about thermophile microorganisms that defecate magnets. Honest to goodness. I could not make that up.”

Ruth has nothing to say. She blows her coffee.

“You need sugar?”

“No, thank you.”

Mr. Bell climbs out. “What’s become of our young man?” Closing the door behind him. “Nat!” he calls, ducking into the office for sugar.

Ruth reaches into the front seat. The cushion where Mr. Bell had been sitting is warm. She carries that warmth to her face, leans back again.

Mr. Bell returns shaking two packets of sugar like maracas, like the limbo lady. Ruth is sitting directly behind him now so that she can hide. He faces forward, prepares his drink, takes a sip, issues a yum of approval for the watery, sugary brew. “I want to ask you something.”

She tightens.

He doesn’t turn. He pinches his nose quickly. “Are you familiar with the concept of wabi-sabi?”

Ruth watches the back of his head. “More bacteria?”

“Nah. It’s Japanese. It’s where a thing can’t be beautiful or perfect without an imperfection. Say, Nat’s teeth. The front two are crossed. Just the littlest bit wrong. Yes? They’re the snag that a person gets hung up on. Yes? Caught?”

“You mean my scar?”

“Yes. Perfection scribbled out or the imperfection that makes you, me, anyone perfect and complete because it includes the truth of our mortality. Get it?”

Ruth rests her head on the glass. She imagines Nat’s teeth tearing into raw meat, a bear in a cage. She imagines Nat’s teeth tearing into her scar. “Why?”

“I’m telling you I’m a faulted man who’s done bad things. Many bad things. But”—he turns—“I’m telling you with the hope that you might still be my friend.”

“Well,” she says. “That depends. What is it that you did?”