The Uncalloused Heart

It Begins

Surely keen the blades of your mind abide as you turn
to the furnace again kindled as if with youths' furious light;
there is raiment now to craft, glittering and
joyfully alive!

Clothe yourself with unquenchable radiance
hands easy and heart light with tomorrows' promise;
know always confident feet that trod a path
sure to your soul binding, always!

Greatly does graciousness wend you forward
seeker, with dear hearts beating in adieu

without regret joined as you face the new sun;
the way behind warmed with love and pleasures,

the way ahead forever calling.

Myriad unknowns cast no stain or shadow over
a brow smooth with sensual curiosity anon,
no wraith pursuing for ill-gotten gains;
your quest for tomorrows’ bounty measures naught
to the scales of presumptuous peers

who languor bleary-eyed in alcoves of repose.

Not for you the comforts and ease of times'
demise; for your heart will always answer

to the waking cry of the peregrine instead of the farm's strutting a-doodle-doo!

Feed on wild hearts and harts,

quenching your mouth in undiscovered springs welling
the worthy repast to a new hero-in-training!

( Untitled entry, Rova’s Journal, page 94l)

“You’ve heard me speak of it many times when we gather to discuss our future, when we share the work in the forge, when we work with the horses, when we discuss the ways of the world.  Ours is a life of insight, of knowing for a certainty that there is more to the experience of being human than meets the eye.

“Few know of the events that taught me that truth, and it is a place I have not willingly gone since before many of you were born.  I choose to speak of those times now because my enemies are all dead, and their inheritors are your responsibility.

“Can you see me as the woman I once was, now?  I have bared my very soul in the belief that you must know, so that some of you can connect and set yourselves to the trials I faced. 

“Could you endure and not go mad?

“I pray none of you must ever step through the same gates of chaos and learn the truth.”

***

Chapter One

A day at the gym

We drove to the city, me curious as hell about just what Monica had in mind.  Was she out to kick my ass all across the ring, after wiping me out in some friendly competition with free weights?  Did she have some agenda; did she actually know something?

We started the drive friendly enough, chatting about the weather, the fire season coming early both last year and this; laughing about my near fixation with lingerie, our shopping in Charity - and as I started to listen to her beyond the words themselves I could feel her actually looking forward to going to something of a personal space of her own: Rose wasn’t able to cope with the stresses of commuting to the City to work out with Monica.

I would be entering something more on the lines of Monica’s personal space.  My curiosity got more intense as the near-sixty miles rolled by in the tough old Jeep.  While we talked, I had a chance to look around inside the car: twin fire extinguishers, light bar and siren controls, charger adapter holders for her pac set EMS radio and high-intensity spotlight, what I recognized as a shotgun rack in the ceiling; her medic’s bag; a heavy-looking Swiss Army rucksack and a lumpy duffle-bag behind the seat.

The interior of the Jeep was immaculately maintained.  The fourteen year-old leather upholstery was spotless, waxed and still pliant, soft; in fact, over all, the whole vehicle looked like it had been meticulously, professionally detailed, something I hadn’t taken the time to notice since getting picked up at the airport!

She caught me looking and mid-sentence, talking about a recent hilarious transport of a completely stoned and drunken tourist, she grinned and said, “Rose has this thing about keeping my ride as close to showroom condition as she can get away with!  She says, ‘Somebody has to keep you looking like a professional!’”

We both got a chuckle over that; and I could imagine the slave almost sneaking out to the garage to lavish attention lovingly on the old Jeep when Monica was asleep!

Glancing over at me, knowingly, she got a sober look to her.

“I promised to tell you about how we met - something I just didn’t, and never will feel comfortable talking about to someone; especially over the phone.  Now’s as good a time as any:

“Seventeen years ago this coming June I was driving through the Capitol Hill area late at night, heading out to the freeway after a late dinner after an all day in-service training seminar for a new computer system we were going to be using at the escrow service I worked for back then.  I was facing a long, almost five hour drive back to Leadville.  I was twenty-five.

“At a stoplight a block or two from Colfax I saw a leg sticking out from an alley by a dumpster.  ‘Someone drunk, laying in the mud on a rainy night,’ I thought, ‘hooker, runaway - whatever - it’s not my problem!’  I was - still am, too - pretty jaded about City people.

“The light changed, and as I drove past the alley I got a glimpse of somebody beaten up really bad.  Really bad.  Naked.  No traffic, so I just pulled over, grabbed my Dad’s old Army .45 out of the glove box, stuffed it under my blazer and investigated.

“It was a girl.

“The rain was washing the blood away - but her face was pulped: smashed mouth, what looked like a broken eye ridge under the smashed plum where her left eye should be; badly broken nose and jaw; deep bruises on her neck, all over her arms.  The left side of her head looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it - and I couldn’t see the other side - but I got cold all the way through, the more I looked.

“Her right wrist was twisted and bent at an impossible angle.  She was bleeding from her ass and her pussy - really bad.  The blood was pulsing out of her, washing away into the gutter in the rain.

“And there were more, almost black bruises on her thighs and ankles.

“Gang rape.  She looked like she was she was dying right in front of me.  This hard, cold rage hit me.  All I could think for a minute was wanting to see somebody in the shadows of that alley.  I probably would’ve shot them without a thought.

“What I did then makes no sense to me now, but I did it.  I jumped in my Toronado, grabbed the blanket off the back seat, got that girl wrapped in it and somehow got her lying down in the car.  I grabbed the first aid case out of the trunk, did what little I knew to try and stop the bleeding and I hit the road, heading home!

“I know I broke every traffic law ever on the books, that drive.  I made Leadville General Hospital in under three hours.  Every now and then, the girl would whisper a line or two of what sounded like verse, something like Spenserian prose!  It made the drive almost surreal.  At least I was able to know she was still alive. . .

When I got in sight of the place, I called my family Doctor, also the main Doc for the hospital on my CB, and told him I was coming in - less than a minute out - with a girl I’d found badly beaten.  I didn’t say I’d found her in the City. 

“Not just then, either.  Not ever.

“Dr. Ambruzzio was running into the ER when I carried the girl in.  She was alive, but her breathing was bubbling, and she looked grotesque, being out of the rain for the drive up.  The blanket was soaked in blood.  She was as pale as someone just dead

“Ambruzzio didn’t stop to talk to me.  He screamed for a cart, and to get the OR ready for a critical patient.  The girl vanished in seconds through the double doors, people running like they’d been electrocuted.

“I went back to my car and parked it in the lot, and went to the doors to the ER and had a smoke.  I still wanted somebody to kill; somebody had to pay for what they’d done to that girl.  I remember thinking it would almost be better if she died, because with that mashed head she’d probably be a vegetable if she lived; and if she died, at least it would be out of the City.

“Maybe her soul would be more at peace up here. . .   I still remember thinking that, soaked to the skin, like it was yesterday.

“I went in, and I guess the look on my face was ugly, scary, cold.  Rose McTeague was behind the Reception window - she’d been a substitute English teacher back when I was in High School.  She looked me up and down, nodded, and motioned for me to come over to her.  I figured I had paperwork to fill out.

“She looked around and wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to me, smiled like nothing in the world was wrong and shoo’d me out the door.  I read the note on my way out.  It said, ‘You look like you just murdered somebody.  Get that gun out of your jeans, go home and change clothes.  You’re covered in blood and soaked.  I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.’

“I remember tearing the note up in little pieces and dropping it as I got in and drove home, just a couple miles.  I had a little place, half of an old house converted to a duplex.  The other apartment was vacant.  I walked in the bathroom and looked in mirror on the bathroom door.

“My nice wool blazer was ruined.  My white blouse was covered in big splotches of blood.  My jeans had a knee ripped out, bloody and muddy.  My good boots were a write-off.

“My face.  I had black circles under blood-shot eyes.  I was white as a ghost.  I tried to take a deep breath as I started to strip, starting the shower.  My Dad’s .45 fell out of my jeans when I took them off.  It was a mess.

“I remember showering mechanically, seeing that alley in my mind the whole time.  I threw my clothes away, along with the wet bullets from the .45, replacing them after I gave the pistol a quick field cleaning.  I got a pot of coffee started, looking at the clock on the stove.  Ten till two.

“I got dressed, filled a thermos with coffee and went back to the hospital.

“Mrs. McTeague was on the phone when I walked in.  She just nodded and handed me a clip-chart.  What it said turned me inside-out.  I threw up in the bathroom till I had dry heaves.

“She was listed as a ‘Jane Doe,’ and the more I read, the more I hoped she’d die:  ‘Wood splinters and glass fragments in vagina and uterus; severe rectal lacerations; cranial bleeding, crushed left optic orbit; compound fracture right wrist; five broken ribs left, two broken ribs with pulmonary punctures right lung.  Compound broken mandible, bi-lateral.  Swallowed teeth from broken mouth.  Crushed nose, sinuses.  Severe extended anemia.’

“Somebody wanted her to die alone in unimaginable horror and pain, naked and dropped in that alley.

“I went through two packs of cigarettes and all the coffee I could find.  I just waited.  Sometime around eight in the morning Mrs. McTeague got off the phone and walked over to me, going outside with me.  The rain had stopped.  I think it was beautiful out - but all I kept seeing was that alley; the dark, the rain; that leg on the pavement under the streetlight.

‘I need a cigarette.’

‘You don’t smoke, do you?’

‘I don’t care.  Give me one, and give me a minute, okay?’

“I just looked at her, lit one, handed it to her and waited.  She took a hard drag, held it, and clamped her jaw till the muscles in her face knotted.  Her hands were shaking, but her voice was steady.  She had just had her eighty-second birthday a month earlier.

‘Your girl is going to live.  How, nobody knows.  She needed six units of blood during surgery.’

“She smoked the rest of that cigarette before going on.

‘Ambruzzio will be out to talk to you in a little while.  He sounds like he wants to find out who could do this to another human being - no matter what the justification - and if he does, I think he’s just going to kill them.’

‘Not if I find them first, Rose,’ I said.

“All she could do is look at me.  She said that Ambruzzio wanted ‘Jane’ on a private chart - he was taking her as a personal patient of his.

‘I take it you don’t know anything about her?’

‘I saw her in an alley when I drove by - and all I could think was to get her here.  What about her brain - is she going to just be a veg?’

‘It’ll be a couple months before anybody knows for sure.’

“We walked back in.  She went back to get her coat, heading home.  Her hands were still shaking a little as she got in her car.  I remember hoping she’d make it home safe. . .

“Ambruzzio was coming through the double doors then.  He waved me to follow him and we went to his office.  The door shut, he opened a cabinet and poured two stiff vodkas from the little bar.  I got one.  He just looked at me and said, trying to sound back-to-normal and failing, ‘Doctor’s orders.’

“He talked about the surgery like I was one of the doctors there.  I didn’t understand a lot of it, but he needed to talk it out badly.  He’d refilled both glasses before he was done.  We both chain-smoked.

“He said he was going to get ‘Jane’ to his ranch when she could be moved, thinking that it might be the best place to see if she could recover from the head-injury.  She’d be coming back to the hospital regularly for months, to follow-up on healing from the rest of the violence done her.  He thought home cooking - real food and lots of it; fresh air and peace-and-quiet and exercise when she was up to it was her only hope.

‘She could go insane if she were to be back in the City where all this happened, just ending up a patient in a ward where no one cared.’

“I said very slowly, ‘I never said anything about the City . . .’

“He snorted, stood up and gave me a bear-hug.  He was a big, tall man in his late 60's then.

‘I delivered you, kid.  I know, perfectly, just how you think.  Your folks and I have gone to the same church for over fifty years.  They talk about you quite a lot - especially your Dad.  My guess?  Your ‘Jane’ may surprise all of us and recover pretty well in time.’

‘Can I see her?’

‘Sure - and then I’m going home and all I want to do is get really drunk for the rest of the day.’

“I remember he grabbed me by the shoulder and got me in scrubs and took me to the Recovery Room, chasing the duty nurse out for her break.  I saw ‘Jane.’  She was breathing through a tube, her jaw wired shut.  Her head was shaved and in bandages, arm in a cast; and when Ambruzzio lifted the thin blanket, I saw a tube running out of her chest and another from between her legs.  She was on an IV in her good arm; and she was covered in ugly-looking purple-black bruises almost everywhere there weren’t bandages.

“Ambruzzio walked away, over to the duty nurses’ station.  He was crying, silently.  I remember feeling empty - just empty.  I leaned over to the girl’s ear and whispered, ‘You’re safe.  You’re going to be okay.  You’re going to have to be very strong to be able to get all better.  No one’s going to hurt you any more ever again.  Never again.  I promise.’  I found myself on the floor, Ambruzzio holding me.  I was bawling.  He walked me out, back to his office.

‘I’m writing you a medical leave for a week, Monica,’ he said.  ‘You need to get over this and get back to your life.  If you have any problems, call me anytime.  No arguing - not with me.  Now go home and stay there for at least the next two days.  Work on your car, if you have to do something to keep busy - nothing more than that till you come see me again.’

“I rebuilt the dual carbs in that week.  He made me take a second week off to go hiking, because I still couldn’t sleep worth a damn.  He let me see ‘Jane’ at the end of that second week.  She was still sedated all the time, to give her brain a chance to heal.  Her lungs were damaged, more than just from the puncture from her broken ribs - they were bruised, but like everything else, she was healing, doing okay.  I went back to work.

“I made myself forget about her; hunting, working my ass off every chance I got.  I never told anybody about ‘Jane.’  Nobody at the hospital did, either.  It was like everyone somehow knew that the girl, if she recovered, needed a chance at a new life.  Mrs. McTeague died, from just getting old.  She was buried beside her husband who had died nine years earlier - and I inherited their cabin outside of Bear Paw.  They didn’t have any kids.

“I quit working for the escrow company and got my EMT certification.  I moved into the cabin, fixed the place up, and found a job in the City, working Rescue evenings and weekends.  I guess ‘Jane’ was the reason I got into being a medic. . .”

She looked at me.  We were through the canyon, going past the overlook of the City on the plain below.

“So when did you meet - how long after?”

Monica laughed.  “That is the most unlikely, impossible coincidence of all.”

“Six years later, early November.  I had a business lunch with a client at an upscale restaurant in the City.  He was important, so I’d gotten dressed up a little; nice jacket, good blouse - the works - and he doesn’t show.  I decide to eat anyway, and put it on my expense account.  I’m sitting at a quiet table away from the window against the wall - when in walks this heartbreaking, gorgeous woman about my age. 

“I think I stopped breathing.  I hadn’t been on even a date in years.  All I wanted to do was walk over to her and figure out how to get her to like me!  She was dressed in this beautiful pastel blue outfit, something maybe Stevie Nicks would have fought her for; blonde hair past her shoulders - not a face anybody would think of as particularly beautiful - she was just quietly happy.  She got a window table.  She was alone.

“I was staring.  I didn’t know this woman from Eve!  I went back to eating - not tasting a thing, paid my bill and headed to the door - and when I let myself look, she wasn’t there!

“I didn’t know what to do; I think I was relieved.  I hit the door, walked out, heading for my car.

“She was standing on the other side, smoking, looking out at the day, wearing this thigh-length leather jacket.  She turned, smiled at me, and said, ‘Hi!  I don’t have a damn thing left to do today - and you were staring at me hard enough to get yourself arrested. . . You want to go have a cup of coffee?  My name’s Rose.’

“Emerald-green eyes shot with shards of china blue.  Here teeth were pearly-white, and just uneven enough to make her look real.  She says she looked in my eyes, fell in, and has yet to come out!  I looked in her eyes and I wanted to take her home, then and there.  I wanted to keep her all to myself.  I felt like I was losing my mind - and what hearing her voice for the first time did to me . . .

“She says I just paused a second grinned and said, ‘Sure!  Where’s your car?’ 

“Rose had taken a cab, like always.  She chatted about being a dressmaker, and I think I tried to make small talk about my job while we went to LoDo to a favorite coffee bar of mine.  I had a new interior in the Toronado by then, and it had a recent paint job.  Rose loved my car, thought I had been a little cute and a little weird for staring at her in the restaurant - and she’d decided the best way to make sure I wasn’t some psycho was to have coffee with me!

“I asked her what if I was some psycho; here she was alone in my car, right?

“She reached in her pocket and brought out this derringer, cocking it in one smooth motion, looked at me sweetly and said, ‘If you are, you’re dead.’  That gorgeous woman was packing a double-barrel cannon disguised as a derringer!  She blinked at me as innocent as could be and asked me, ‘So, have you decided?  Are you safe for me to be with?’

“I looked at her holding that pocket cannon at my waist, looked in those eyes, and all I could choke out was, ‘Don’t you think you should decide for yourself?’

“She put the gun away easing the hammer down, smiled and laughed and said, ‘Sounds like a plan to me!’  She stretched back and relaxed, not saying a word the rest of the way.

“We drank coffee and talked till they almost had to throw us out when the place closed.  I’d never talked so much before; or enjoyed talking to a complete stranger so much in my life!  The only thing I kept noticing was that she never mentioned anything about her life more than a year in the past - she was an expert at turning the conversation.

“And she was a heart-breaking flirt!  Innocent, completely guileless and unselfconscious she flirted with the waitress; she flirted with any woman who caught her attention in the pauses and breaks in the conversation!  She’d give me a running commentary under her breath, teasing with looks, resting her chin on one hand while softly sucking the tip of her little finger!

“And the whole time she was completely attentive.  It was like a performance in the softest eroticism imaginable, all for my benefit!

“It was going on three in the morning and I had a busy schedule for the rest of the week.  We got back to my car, and I asked her when could we meet again. . .

“Rose hugged me on tiptoe, and said, ‘You mean you don’t want me?  Aren’t you going to take me home?  It’s only an hour or so from here - that’s what you said, right?’

“We stopped by her apartment - making me wait in the car for the couple minutes before she flew down the stairs with this little tapestry duffle bag slung over one shoulder.  The bag landing on the back seat, she leaned in the door and said seriously; ‘You know, you should never get in the car of anyone you don’t know; right?’

‘Right.  Absolutely.’

‘So what’s your name, anyway - you still haven’t told me, you know?’

“The world stopped - no; the entire universe paused.  In the moonlight, that woman shone; reached all the way into my heart - and I knew I was going to say something that would change everything:

‘Rose; my name is Monica.’

“She slid in, closed the door and I hit the locks.  ‘Take me home with you, Monica,’ she said.

‘I want to go home.’

“I drove the speed limit all the way.  We slept together that night, but all we did was cuddle, falling asleep in each other’s arms.  I called in sick later that morning, faking the flu, asking for at least a week off - and I did the same thing with Rescue.  I unplugged the phone and turned my radio off.

“She cooked for me, waited on me hand-and-foot that week.  I’d never eaten so well in my entire life.  I tried to ask her about her past, wanting to know everything about this angel - and I ran into a brick wall.  It wasn’t that she refused, she’d just turn the conversation and look at me and I wouldn’t press the subject.

“We drove back to the City four days later and cleaned out her apartment.  It only took a couple hours for her to pack.  She had amazingly few possessions beyond a couple trunks of clothes and her sewing machine and some books, a small box of cd’s.  She just left everything else."

© Copyright 2010, Trisha Marie Neimi
All rights reserved.
No part of this may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction.

___________________________________

This is the character development for an archival bible on a decades-long project.  I thought it apt to share.