Patchwork People Chapter II The Good Man Hard to Find
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You tell yourself that you've given up, that you've lost all hope; you
tell yourself often, until you half-believe it yourself; not because it's
true, but because hopelessness is the only thing that makes the wait
bearable--the wait for your dream to come true.
I. All her parallel lives.
Questioned about her past, Marcia Hammond always lied with great
creativity and no conscience. Her present life felt like something she'd
stolen and had the perfect right to steal. Still, like any thief, she was
torn between the compulsion to just keep walking normally or to turn
around and find her worst fear confirmed: that someone was running after
her to take it back.
Front Street was nearly empty at this hour. She passed the shimmering red
geraniums in the flower box outside the Precious Treasures jewelry shop,
the yawning orange dog in the alley between Happy Chopsticks Chinese
Cuisine, and the bicycle repair shop where a baker's dozen of used but
shiny bicycles were standing in the sun.
A flash of sun on the gold-leaf script on the window of the Christian
Science Reading Room momentarily blinded her, but made no further
impression. She failed to notice a billfold someone had dropped the night
before exiting the Drink-em Up Pub. She had a good excuse for her
preoccupation. At precisely 2:18 a.m., while she was still sound asleep
and would be for hours yet, she'd received a text message.
It was another lifetime calling.
It was from Phoebe.
She hadn't seen or spoken to her daughter in three years.
* * *
Marcia fished around her purse for her key to the Blue Cat. She paused to
shift the packages around in her arms. It was still an hour before
opening, but Grace was already inside, cataloguing a new consignment
she'd taken the day before. This one was from a local woman who made
flower arrangements out of old silverware.
Grace sensed the change in light coming from the door. She held up a
finger to say "wait just a sec," finished the entry she was writing, and
came out from behind the counter. She unlocked the door.
"Well good morning darling," she said as Marcia bustled into the shop
with her packages. "So what is it going to be today?"
"Orange-spice muffins and blueberry goat cheese tarts."
"Yum," Grace said. "You can put me down for one of each."
There are places that seem to exist because people were intending to go
somewhere else and didn't quite make it. They tired or got hurt or faced
unexpected obstacles they lacked the resources to surmount. Perhaps they
were turned away from wherever they really wanted to go. Maybe the
destination they imagined didn't exist at all.
Hope Crossing was such a place. People seemed to gather here like flotsam
on a beach. On the map it was best described as located "in-between."
Even the tributary of the river that watered it to life some hundred and
thirty-five years ago seemed to have wandered off in this direction by
chance.
Marcia Hamilton was no exception to this rule. She'd been heading to
Seattle. She'd located a surgeon and a clinic there. And after the
operation, she thought it would be the perfect place to start a new life.
She intended only to stay over a night or two in Hope Crossing but the
repairs to her car were more extensive than originally diagnosed. She
walked into the Blue Cat Emporium on a whim one spring morning. That was
three years ago now. She'd been working at the Blue Cat ever since.
* * *
There was a tap on the glass.
A gaunt man in an amalgamation of military fatigues and church charity
cast-offs stood at the door. He looked like an Old Testament prophet with
his bristling beard, his broom handle staff, and burning eyes.
"Well look," Grace said from behind the counter, "Ranger Jack is blessing
us with a visit this morning. Be a dear and let him in, would you?"
Ranger Jack always came before opening hours. Grace insisted that it was
because he was sensitive to the fact that he would be off-putting to her
other customers if he came during regular business hours. Marcia didn't
think that Ranger Jack was possessed of such fine sensibilities. She
suggested that the man was simply oblivious to the concept of "normal
business hours." That, perhaps being plumb crazy, he wasn't taking
counsel with the concept of time whatsoever.
"Bah," Grace said, waving off such nonsensical talk.
She insisted that in spite of his rough appearance, the man had a
delicacy of manner suitable in any fine southern gentleman. That was
Grace, always thinking the best of everyone. "What's the alternative?"
she was accustomed to asking.
Grace was of the opinion that it made one's own world a better place to
give people the benefit of the doubt. Such an attitude had practical
advantages, she argued. There was a chance that it actually made people
better if you took for granted that it was so.
"Gives them an incentive to live up to your high expectations. People
don't like to disappoint, you know."
Marcia found this a spectacularly optimistic, as well as somewhat
Machiavellian notion.
"It's now Machiavellian at all," Grace said, feigning indignation. "I'm
taking a quantum view. So much depends on the position you take with
people. You must always remember. You're part of the equation."?
* * *
They didn't know much about Ranger Jack. No one did. Like so many others,
he seemed to have ended up in Hope Crossing by chance and circumstance.
Unlike so many others, he offered no back story to explain where he'd
been or what he'd done before.
One popular theory was that he'd been a veteran of one of the Middle
Eastern wars that seemed to be so popular with our ruling classes these
last thirty years or so. There were rumors that he fought with an elite
fighting unit. That he'd seen and done stuff so bad that it sent him over
sanity's edge.
There were other theories, too. That Ranger Jack had been a stock-broker
fallen from grace in one of the various bank scandals. That he'd lost his
wife and children in a house-fire and was driven mad by grief.
Grace was greatly relieved to see Ranger Jack this morning. He hadn't
been around in the last few days. Whenever he disappeared, Grace worried
that something bad might have happened to him. It was only natural to
worry about a man when he lived so precarious an existence.
Marcia shared Grace's concerns. But she also couldn't help imagining the
possibility that one day Ranger Jack might snap. She feared that he
harbored a secret well of violence that might one day flood over the
banks of his precarious sanity. She could almost see the headlines:
Slaughter at the Blue Cat.
Grace poo-pooed her fears. She waved off the man's flailing harangues
against the government, the Martians, or whoever else crossed his
paranoiac radar like she would a child throwing a tantrum. He was more in
need of comfort and calming than a straightjacket in Grace's view. A
cookie, a cup of tea, and a kind word were Grace's prescription for
whatever ailed Ranger Jack. It was better medicine than whatever he'd be
taking if the poor man could have afforded to see a doctor.
* * *
Marcia unlocked the door and Ranger Jack trooped in, dragging behind him
his wire handcart of stuff of worldly possessions.
"Good morning, ladies!" he hailed them in his tone-deaf voice.
He dragged behind him the aroma of too many days and nights without a
shower. He smelled of the place under the bridge where he often slept, of
the garbage through which he scavenged his meals and harvested his
treasures. Marcia did her best not to let her face involuntarily betray
her instinctive aversion to the general unwholesomeness of the man.
Grace came around the counter, holding out her arms. Ranger Jack bent
obediently. She gave him a quick peck on one of his sharp, wind-burned
cheeks.
"How about an orange-spice muffin for breakfast? And a hot cup of Joe?
I'll bet that sounds good."
He nodded his head vigorously and made an expression that was almost a
smile. It was a wonder. With everyone else, he was as skittish as an
abused and feral cat. Under Grace's care, he'd learned to accept the
possibility of human kindness, at least hers.
"Wait'll you see what I've brought you today," he said, around a mouthful
of muffin, crumbs catching in the intricate tangles of his beard.
It was indicative of Grace's gentle touch, this idea that Ranger Jack was
unofficially employed as a treasure hunter for the Blue Cat Emporium, a
procurer of rare and wonderful objects that she was proud to put on
display at the store and not simply a charity case for whom she felt
pity.
She'd even set up a little showcase in the corner: The Ranger Jack
Collection. Old bottles, threadbare gloves, often only one of a pair, a
broken figurine treated like some ancient Egyptian artifact, a stained
Cornhuskers ball-cap were featured artifacts.
Not surprisingly no one ever bought any of it, except that is, for Grace
herself, who'd remove a piece from the collection from time to time and
give Ranger Jack the money someone had supposedly paid for it, minus her
imaginary commission, of course.
Hard to say if Ranger Jack understood. Was he aware that their little
arrangement was a way for him to accept Grace's charity and still save
face? Or was he so off his rocker that he really thought that he was
bringing in things of value?
Grace, with a kind of distinctly Asian equanimity in such matters, would
say it didn't matter one way or another.
Marcia had come to agree.
* * *
Ranger Jack finished his muffin and coffee. He spread out his newly found
treasures and basked in Grace's admiration. He went on his way, a few
extra bucks in his pocket, a pilgrim on a quest into the inaccessible
reaches of his own interior world.
No one would ever solve the mystery of Ranger Jack.
If she could have read the future, Marcia would have seen that she had
nothing to fear from Ranger Jack. He never went berserk. He never harmed
a soul as far as anyone ever knew.
He lived for almost twenty years more. God only knows how he did it. He
died one night, quietly and painlessly as far as anyone could determine.
The coroner said the cause was exposure. He was found camped on one of
the trestle islands under the bridge between Hope Crossing and
Barnesville.
* * *
One particularly slow afternoon at the Blue Cat, apropos of nothing
Marcia could recall, Grace asked her, "Did anyone ever tell you how Hope
Crossing got its name?"
Since no one had, Marcia settled in for what she expected would be the
typical self-congratulatory origin story, part myth, part wishful
thinking. She figured on a story peopled with courageous town fathers and
steadfast, self-sacrificing town mothers, hardy noble stock whose noble
aims and uplifting intentions were especially suited for a town they'd
dubbed Hope Crossing.
And, indeed, it began, more or less, according to expectation.
"It was the Homestead Act in 1862 that made Hope Crossing a real town.
Before that, it wasn't much of anything at all. An ad hoc collection of
temporary encampments up and down along the river. But with the land rush
on the people came by the wagonload, mostly passing through to stake a
claim further west, and a kind of town formed around them to cater to
their needs. One such was a family from Baltimore. Mom and Dad and seven
little ones, aged six months to fifteen years. They were heading west for
a new start like so many others.
"Unlike so many others, they'd gotten a late start and were in a rush to
stake their claim. A freak storm caught them here where they were advised
to stay until the river went receded. But they were anxious to be on
their way. Time was land, you know. The father decided he'd found a place
where they could safely ford the swollen water and despite the warnings
of others who could be presumed to know better, he attempted the
crossing. Hope Crossing, it came to be called.
"As for the wagon, it was swept over in the current, lanced through with
a log, and dragged along the rocky bottom. Everyone, with the exception
of a six-year-old girl, drowned. By various complicated unions, I am a
descendent of that six-year-old survivor."
Marcia had stopped what she was doing halfway through the story. Now she
stood there, the paper towel and glass cleaner in hand.
"Not what you were expecting was it?" Grace said, looking pleased.
"No," Marcia admitted. "They sure had a macabre sense of irony naming the
place Hope Crossing based on that incident, that's for sure."
Grace agreed. "Yes, and I've always admired them for it."
* * *
Marcia occasionally wondered about the quantum physics of her own life.
This was one such occasion. She, too, was subject to the theoretical
speculation of others. Child, parent, ex-husband, girlfriend, man--how
many lives has she lived? How many lives did she continue to live in the
minds of others?
Claire, her ex, would have plotted out one whole life for her. She would
be a villain in that story. She would go on being the villain forever.
How exhausting it was to realize that!
Phoebe, no doubt, had plotted another role for her.
Marcia would learn, soon, what that story was and what her role in it.
When her daughter arrived, she would be bringing with her a world with
another Marcia in it, a Marcia who'd said and done things Marcia herself
would have difficulty correcting or denying.
Worlds were going to collide.
Marcia had told no one in Hope Crossing about Phoebe. She had kept her
daughter a well-guarded secret. She had done so for reasons that even she
didn't completely understand. She knew that it embarrassed her to have a
daughter. It marked her as a failure the way things had worked out. There
were reasons things had worked out the way they had. It was too
complicated to explain.
She felt guilty, too.
Phoebe had phased out Marcia as a parent. That in itself made Marcia
suspect. Certainly it was her fault that, after a long struggle, Marcia
had finally given up being a parent. She had run away, from Phoebe, from
her responsibility. That's what it would look like to everyone. Marcia
shouldn't have given up, that's what people would always think, no matter
what the problems.
People didn't know the truth. And it was too difficult to explain.
The bells above the door jangled.
It was their second visitor of the day.
Madison
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