The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(86)

Spif walks toward the casino to pee and walks back several minutes later. They wouldn’t let him inside.

“What are you going to do?” Ben asks Tommy, eyeing the trailer, but Sunshine leans over to him.

“Shut up,” she says.

“What Sunshine said,” Tommy says. “She’s in charge.”

Tommy leaves all of us and drives the van and trailer out of the parking lot and down a road whose horizon disappears between golden fields of corn.

We get comfortable on the asphalt, leaning against one another. We sit in the sun, wondering aloud how close to the next fair we’re going to get that night, whether we’ll have to sleep in the unplugged bunkhouse in an empty lot on a back road or in a Walmart parking lot, whether we’ll pull in somewhere at an hour when anyone who has someone to call can still call them. We roll small stones between our fingers. We are chatting or silent. Some are on phones. Someone passes out gum. People lie down. Someone yawns and we talk about yawning. Pebble tossing. Shoulder massages. Clouds move across the sky in the shapes of fat horses, and then are gone.

In between emergencies, there’s the regular, boring muck.

*

An hour later, the van and trailer pull back into the parking lot. Tommy rolls down the window and shakes his head at us. Smiles. He holds up one hand with a screwdriver clenched in his fist.

“The trailer won’t fishtail anymore,” he says.

“How can you know?” Sunshine asks, jumping up. Her huge blue eyes squint against his confidence, always testing him.

“The tank,” Tommy says under his breath.

“Oh god,” Sunshine says. “Sewage? I thought you stopped using the toilet after we couldn’t get it open to dump anymore.”

“Well, I stopped shitting in it.”

“Oh my god.”

“It was full. That’s why you were fishtailing. The sewage tank was really heavy on just one side of the trailer.”

“Thomas,” she says, slowly.

“It was the meat-grinder,” Tommy says. We all understand what that means. The busyness of Minnesota didn’t allow for Porta-Potty breaks, and there were too many carnies and kids wandering back behind the midway’s bright lights to allow for peeing against the trailer’s tires, a move I pulled on other darkened fairground nights in smaller lots.

“So you got the latch open with that screwdriver and dumped the tank?”

“I still couldn’t get the latch open,” Tommy says.

“This is disgusting,” Sunshine says. “What are we supposed to do?”

Tommy smiles a long, flat grin. He holds the screwdriver up again. “I stabbed a hole through the side of the trailer into the tank. I dumped all the year-old piss into a sunflower field a few miles down the road.”

Back on the highway, maybe near the yellow sheets of sunflowers, the family has probably left the side of the road. Whatever emergency has happened is likely still happening and will probably continue causing a wake for a long time. The ripples will travel and travel and eventually, hopefully, it will be the strangest thing, when suddenly that child will find herself looking at the clouds, no longer measuring time by proximity to disaster.

*

One and a half years after my mom’s stroke, her brain was suddenly bleeding again. Too much. We didn’t know why, or how, but the drain had stopped pumping and so we had a problem.

I shouldn’t say that her brain was bleeding again, because it is actually always bleeding. It is never not bleeding. It hasn’t stopped since that first stroke. Not really. The liquid space around her brain is constantly gaining volume. When she first came into the hospital, the emergency-room doctors cut away the skull on half of her head, and it cannot fit back on there. It won’t take. They kept trying to reattach it and the body wouldn’t have it.

To reduce the fluid, they surgically implanted a drain that sucks the liquid, blood and fluid, and carries it down the inside of her neck and dumps it somewhere in her stomach, where her body digests it like it processes everything else.

But the drain stopped working, and everyone was moving very quickly.

She was in a rehabilitation hospital that did not have the capacity to deal with this. I was standing in the back corner of the room with my limbs and stomach and butt and throat sucked in as close as I could get them, trying not to be noticed. It was the family members, usually, who wailed, who asked questions, who tried to touch when touching could not occur—they were the ones who were asked to leave. I stayed quiet.

The EMTs were young men, three of them with close-cropped hair, boys still, who left high school five or fewer years before and probably played beer pong on Thursdays. I wanted to play beer pong on Thursdays. I wanted to go to their beach parties. To do something that didn’t mean anything.

They slid her onto the gurney and wheeled her into the hallway. There was oxygen over her nose and her eyes were closed, then open and looking at people on some other plane of existence, and then they closed again.

We waited outside the room while arrangements were made at the hospital. Would she die this time? The question never changed. We called the aunts and uncles with news of the new emergency. Davy wailed in his car.

She was released from the hospital ten months after her stroke. Then she had an infection and had to go back. A month in the hospital. Then out. Three days in. Out. Three weeks in. And out, and back, and out. And in. Et cetera. Would she die?