Текст книги "Haunted"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

16

To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. The lights come on when Sister Vigilante raises the sun, but at sunrise today, it's a smell that pulls us out of bed. The perfect dream of a smell that pulls us out of our dressing rooms, into the hallway. Us, zombie-walking, pulled along by the nose.

Director Denial steps into the hall, falling halfway to the floor before her hands brace against the wall opposite her open door. Wedged against the wall to stay upright, she says, “Cora? Kitty, kitty?”

In the hallway, Reverend Godless struggles with both hands to zipper his matador pants, the pants that fit yesterday. “The ghost,” he says, “must be shrinking our clothes.”

The choker of brass bells cuts into the skin of Mother Nature's neck, so tight that every time she swallows you hear them jingle. “Damn,” she says, “I shouldn't have had that extra helping of Comrade Snarky.”

Out of the next door comes the Missing Link, his head tipped back so far his nostril hair is the tallest part of him. He sniffs and steps past Director Denial and Reverend Godless. Still sniffing the air, his nostrils flared into big black-hairy holes, he takes another step toward the stage and the auditorium beyond.

Director Denial says, “Cora . . .” and slides to the floor.

Out of another door comes Mrs. Clark, saying, “We'll need to wrap up Comrade Snarky today. She needs to go with Mr. Whittier.”

From the floor, Director Denial says, “Cora . . .”

“Fuck that cat,” Miss America says. Wearing a long Mandarin Chinese coat, embroidered with dragons, she leans in the doorway to her dressing room, her spidery hands clutching the doorframe. Her face is pale around the black smear of her mouth as Miss America says, “My head is killing me,” rubbing her face with one open hand.

Miss America shrugs the Mandarin coat off one shoulder and snakes out a thin white arm. She lifts the arm over her head, the hand limp, dark hair sprouting in her armpit. She says, “Feel my lymph nodes. They're huge.”

Up and down her thin, bare arm run long red scratches. Cat scratches, running close together. Trails and miles of cat scratch marks.

Looking up-close at her face, the Missing Link says, “You look terrible.” He says, “Your tongue is black.”

And Miss America drops her arm to hang limp along the doorframe. Her thick, black tongue licking her lips, leaving her lips black, she says, “I was so hungry. Last night, I ate all my lipsticks.”

Stepping over Director Denial, she says, “What is that smell?”

You can smell breakfast toast and eggs fried in grease. A greasy-fat smell. A shared hallucination of our hunger. It's the smell of escargots and lobster tails. The smell of English muffins, dripping.

The Earl of Slander follows the Missing Link follows Mrs. Clark follows Sister Vigilante. We're all following the smell across the stage and up the center aisle toward the lobby.

Miss Sneezy blows her nose. Then she sniffs the air and says, “It's butter.”

The smell of hot butter.

The ghost in every movie theater.

It's the greasy ghost of Comrade Snarky, what we'll have to smell every time we use the microwave. We're breathing her spirit. Her sweet buttery stink will haunt us.

The only other smell is Mother Nature's breath, from eating a bayberry aromatherapy candle.

Halfway up the center aisle, we stop.

Faint and outside, we hear hail falling. Or machine-gun fire. Or a drumroll.

A blizzard of snaps and bangs come on top of each other. This fast, faint rattle comes from the lobby.

Us, standing there in the black plaster center of the Egyptian auditorium, with the dusty, spiderwebbed stars dim above us, we clutch the gold-painted back of the black seats for support. We stand and listen.

And the gunfire, the hailstorm, it stops.

Something exciting needs to happen.

Something amazing needs to happen.

In the blue velvet lobby, the microwave oven dings once, twice, three times.

The ghost of Comrade Snarky.

Still tugging at her necklace, Mother Nature slides down into the rough black mohair of a seat.

Saint Gut-Free looks at Reverend Godless, who looks at the Matchmaker, who looks at the Earl of Slander taking notes, who nods, Yes. And they start up the aisle, the rest of us a step behind them. Agent Tattletale's camera spotlight following them.

Through the auditorium doors, the French velvet lobby is empty. Shadows hide behind every palace chair and sofa. The light from the few bulbs we left, it's not bright enough to show the walls on the far side of the room. The doors to the lobby bathrooms are propped open, and the tile floor inside shines with water from the toilets. Here and there, melted lumps of toilet paper are stranded in the puddle.

On top of the toilet smell, the smell of rotten turkey Tetrazzini, the smell of Comrade Snarky's cooked ass, you can still smell . . . butter.

Through the smoked glass of the microwave door, you can see something white almost filling the oven.

It's the Missing Link who yelps. Our hairy man-animal. He yelps and slams both hands down on the snack bar so hard he swings his legs up to one side and vaults over it. Behind the snack bar, he yanks open the microwave, and grabs what's inside.

He yelps, again, and drops it.

By then, the Baroness Frostbite is vaulted over the marble counter of the snack bar.

The Countess Foresight rushes over to see.

Mother Nature says, “It's popcorn.” Her bells ringing with every word.

Another yelp comes from behind the counter, and the something white bounces high up into the air. Hands follow it, volleyball-slapping it, a white paper ball, keeping it out of the reach of any one person. In the camera spotlight, it becomes a spinning, steaming white moon.

Miss Sneezy is laughing and coughing. Countess Foresight, crying behind her sunglasses. All of us, reaching for it. Stretching to catch the spinning, greasy, hot smell of it.

The Matchmaker shouts, “We can't.” Waving his arms, he shouts, “We can't eat any!”

The paper ball batted between hands, it spins and bounces near the ceiling.

And Countess Foresight shouts, “He's right.” She shouts, “We could be rescued, today!”

One man-animal jump, and the Missing Link has both hands on the bag.

The Link passes to the Countess, who passes to the Matchmaker, who runs for the bathroom.

The rest of us—the Saint and Miss America and the Sister and the Baroness—we race after, screaming and weeping. Behind us all, Agent Tattletale follows after with the camera, saying, “Please don't let's fight. Please don't fight. Please . . .”

The Earl of Slander, already rewinding his tape recorder to hear the drumroll sound of the popcorn still hot in the microwave oven. Then the little “ding” that says it's ready.

Behind the snack bar, only Chef Assassin and Mrs. Clark are left.

To Mother Nature, her friend Lentil is our ghost. To Miss Sneezy, the ghost is her English teacher with cancer. The same way we ruined the food, our ghost might be the combined work of any two or three people. Of us.

From the bathroom, you hear a toilet flush. The toilet flushes, again. A chorus of moans echo from the tile inside the open bathroom door. A fresh sheet of water fans out the doorway, lapping at the edge of the lobby's blue carpet.

The water, spotted here and there with melted paper. Paper and popcorn. Another gift from our ghost.

Still staring into the open microwave oven, Mrs. Clark says, “I still can't believe we killed her . . .”

Still sniffing the buttered air, Agent Tattletale says, “It could've been worse.”

In the wash of water backed up from the toilet, washed up and stranded on the lobby carpet, you can see fur. Tabby-cat fur. A thin black leather collar. Some pencil-thin bones.

By now, Director Denial has followed us from her dressing room. She's just in time to see the little-toothed skull, picked clean by someone and then coughed up by the toilet.

Engraved on the collar, a tag that says “Miss Cora.”

Looking away from the expression on Director Denial's face, watching her reflected small in the mirror behind the snack bar, Mrs. Clark says, “How? How could killing anyone get any worse?”

American Vacations

A Poem About Agent Tattletale

“Americans do drugs,” says Agent Tattletale, “because they don't do leisure very well.”

Instead, they do Percodans, Vicodins, OxyContin.

Agent Tattletale onstage, one hand holds his video camera as a mask

to hide half his face.

The rest of him, off-the-rack in a brown suit. Brown shoes.

A mustard-yellow vest. His straight brown hair combed back.

A yellow bow tie and a white button-down dress shirt.

There, the white of his shirt shimmers,

patterned with movie actors.

Instead of a spotlight, Agent Tattletale is a screen for stock footage:

a shot of some theater audience.

Rows and rows of people, all of them,

their crowds of hands all clapping without a single

sound.

Onstage stands Agent Tattletale, favoring his left leg,

leaning a little more to the right all the time.

Instead of one eye, that spot filled by the red

RECORD

light of the video camera, watching.

Instead of an ear, on that side the built-in

microphone. To hear nothing but himself.

Agent Tattletale, he says, “Americans are the world's best at doing their work.”

And studying and competition.

But we suck when it comes time to relax.

There's no profit. No trophy.

Nothing at the Olympic Games goes to the Most Laid-Back Athlete.

No product endorsements for the World's Laziest

anything.

His camera eye on auto-focus, he says, “We're great at winning and losing.”

And nose grindstoning,

but not accepting. Not shoulder shrugging and tolerance.

“Instead,” he tells himself, “we have marijuana and television. Beer and Valium.”

And health insurance.

To refill, as needed.

Crippled

A Story by Agent Tattletale

Right this minute, Sarah Broome's looking at her best wooden rolling pin. She swings it, testing how heavy it feels. The hard slap of it against her open palm. She's moving around cans and bottles on the shelf above her washing machine, shaking the jug of bleach to hear how much is left.

If she could hear, if she'd just listen, I'd tell her it's okay to kill me. I'd even tell her how.

My rented car is just down the road, maybe one song away if you're listening to the radio. Maybe two hundred steps if you count steps when you're scared. She could hike down and drive it back. A dark-red Buick, covered with dust by now from cars going past on the gravel. She could park it close enough to this toolshed or garden shed or whatever she's got me locked inside.

In case she's outside, near enough to hear, I shout, “Sarah? Sarah Broome?”

I shout, “You've got nothing to feel bad about.”

Me locked here inside, I could coach her. Walk her through it. Tell her how. Next, she'll need to get a screwdriver and loosen the clamps that hold the tinfoil accordion duct to the back of the clothes dryer. Then she can use this same clamp to anchor one end of the duct around the tailpipe of my car. Those ducts, they stretch out, longer than you'd expect. My gas tank is almost full. Maybe she's got a power drill to put some holes in the wooden side of the shed, or in the door. Being a woman, she can drill where it won't show later.

How nice her place looks is important. Seeing how it's everything she has.

“Her life used to be mine,” I say. “I can see the way she thinks things are.”

She can tear off strips of duct tape to hold the hose against the shed. To speed up killing me, she could throw a plastic tarp over the top half of the shed, then wrap it tight to the sides with rope. Turn this into a tight little smokehouse. In five hours, she'll have two hundred pounds of beefstick summer sausage.

Most people, they've never killed a chicken, much less a human being. People, they have no idea how tough this is going to be.

I promise to just breathe deep.

The report from the insurance company, it says her name is Sarah. Sarah Broome, she's forty-nine years old. A senior baker in a commercial bakery for seventeen years, she used to throw a sack of flour up on one shoulder, heavy as a ten-year-old boy, she could balance the flour there while she ripped out the pull-string at the front edge and poured the flour, little by little, into a spinning mixer. According to her account, on her last day at work the floor was still wet from mopping the night before. The lighting wasn't too good, neither. The weight of the flour tipped her over backward, bouncing her head on the rolled-steel edge of a table, resulting in memory loss, migraine headaches, and general weakness that left her unfit for any kind of labor.

The CAT scans showed nothing. The MRIs, nothing. The X-rays, nothing. But Sarah Broome never went back to work.

Sarah Broome, married three times. No kids. She gets a little Social Security. A little company settlement money every month. She gets twenty-five milligrams of OxyContin to treat the chronic pain that follows her spine from her brain and radiates down both arms. Some months, she'll ask for Vicodins or Percodans.

Not three months after her settlement, she moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors.

Right this minute, sitting here inside her shed, my right foot looks put on backward. The knee's got to be broken, the nerves and tendons inside twisted halfway around. Everything below that knee, numb. It's too dark to see, but where I sit smells cow-shitty. The slick feel of plastic must be bags of composted steer manure ready for her new garden plot. Leaning against the walls are a shovel, a hoe, a garden rake.

Poor Sarah Broome, right this minute, she's looking at her power tools. She's sick with the idea of sinking a skill saw into me. Instead of sawdust, the spinning blade spraying a wet rooster-tail of blood and flesh and bone. Well, that's if she has an extension cord long enough. She's reading the labels on paint cans, slug bait, cleaning fluid, looking for the skull and crossed bones. The green frowny face of Mr. Yuck. She's calling the local Poison Control hotline, asking how much barbecue lighter fluid a man would have to drink to die. When the poison expert asks why, then Sarah hangs up, fast.

How I know this is . . . ten years ago I was running kegs of beer between a distributor and too many little bars and taverns. These were places too small to have a loading zone, so you double-parked. Or you parked in the suicide lane, between lanes of fast traffic cutting past you in both directions. I humped kegs. I stacked cases of bottled beer on a handcart and waited for a gap in traffic big enough to run through. Always behind schedule, until, by complete accident, a keg rolled off the rack and creamed me out flat on the pavement.

After that, I got a place almost this nice. A rusted Winnebago motor home that wasn't going anywhere, parked next to a one-hole shithouse, along a wide spot in a gravel road through the woods. I had a four-banger Ford Pinto with a manual transmission to get me into town. A pension for being totally disabled, and all the time in the world.

The rest of my life, all I had to do is keep my car running. I stayed high on so much Vicodin that just taking a walk in the sun felt as good as any massage. As good as a massage with a hand job, even.

Just watching the birds at the birdfeeder. The hummingbirds. Putting out peanuts, stoned and laughing as the squirrels fight the chipmunks, it's a good enough life. The American dream of living without an alarm clock. Without having to punch a time clock or wear a damn hairnet. A dream life, where you don't need to ask some asshole's permission before you can go take a crap.

No, until this afternoon, Sarah Broome had nothing to do but read paperback books from the library. Watch the hummingbirds. Pop those little white pills. A kind of dream vacation that's never supposed to end.

What sucks is, crippled or not, you've got to at least act crippled. You have to limp, or hold your head stiff on your neck to show you can't turn it. Even with painkillers pulsing through you, this is the kind of play-acting that starts you feeling terrible. You fake any symptom long enough, and you'll start to hurt for real. You limp around, and then your knee really does start to ache. You sit around and turn into a big fat hunchback.

The American dream of leisure, it gets boring fast. Still, you're paid to be a cripple. Sitting with your television. Laying in a hammock, watching the damn animals. If you don't work, you don't sleep. Day and night, you're half awake, bored.

Daytime television, you can tell who's watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it's clinics for drying out drunks. Or it's law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it's schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith.

If you're watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You're a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot. After the first couple weeks, being a sloth sucks ass.

You don't have the money to travel, but it doesn't cost anything to turn a shovelful of dirt. Work on your car. Plant a vegetable garden.

One night, after it's dark, a cloud of mosquitoes and deer flies are thick around my porch light. Me in my Winnebago with a mug of hot tea and some Vicodin in my bloodstream, I look up from my book to watch the bugs outside the windows. That's when the sound comes. It's a man's voice, shouting from somewhere in the dark, back up in the woods.

It's somebody shouting for help. Please. Help. He's slipped and hurt his back. Fallen out of a tree, he tells me.

In the middle of the night, here he's dressed in a brown suit with a mustard-yellow vest, wearing brown leather wingtip shoes, and he says he's bird-watching. A pair of binoculars hang from a strap around his neck. That's what they teach in correspondence school. If you're caught by the suspect, say you're a bird-watcher. I offer to carry his briefcase. Then we each put an arm around the other and run a slow, slow, three-legged race back toward the porch light of my motor home.

Almost there, the man sees my old shithouse and asks, can we stop a minute. He really needs to drop a load, he says. I help him inside the door.

Soon as the door's shut and his belt buckle hits the wood floor, I pop open his briefcase. Inside is a lot of paper. And a video camera. The side of the camera pops open, and inside is a tape. When I pick it up, when I snap the camera shut, the tape starts to play by itself, and the little viewing screen lights up.

On the screen, a little man takes a rear wheel and tire off a beat-up old Pinto.

It's me, rotating my tires. Me, knocking lug nuts loose and jockeying the wheels off and on my car.

Nothing else. No bird-watching. After a little buzz of static, the screen shows a tiny version of me, shirtless and lifting a full tank of propane. I carry the tank to the front of the Winnebago, where I change it for an empty.

If Sarah is anything like me, right this minute, she's picking a bread knife out of a kitchen drawer. If she gives me a few Vicodins in a glass of water, maybe she could knock me out. Right now, she's looking close-up, almost cross-eyed, at the serrated edge of the knife, at how sharp it is. It's so easy to section a chicken, cutting a throat couldn't be worse. She's maybe put an old towel over my face, that way she could pretend I was just a loaf of bread. Just slicing bread, or a meatloaf, until she sawed through a vein, then the heart still pushing blood, the big surge after surge after surge of blood. Right this minute, she's putting the knife back in the drawer.

It could be she's got an electric carving knife she got for a wedding present, half her lifetime ago, and she's never used. It's still in the fancy printed box with the little pamphlet about how to carve a turkey . . . bone a ham . . . slice a leg of lamb.

Nothing about how to dismember a detective.

What you have to consider is, maybe I wanted to get caught.

Mean evil me, spying on poor Sarah Broome and her family of cats.

What you have to consider is, maybe she wanted to get caught. We all need a doctor to yank us out of our perfect womb. We piss and moan, but we appreciate God kicking us out of Eden. We love our trials. Adore our enemies.

In case Sarah Broome is close by, I yell, “Please, don't beat yourself up over this . . .”

There's no lock to keep somebody inside a shithouse, so I wrapped a rope around the whole thing, three times, tight, and tied a triple granny knot. Inside, the man was grunting, dropping his mess into the hole he sat on. Slapping the mosquitoes and deer flies that swarmed up from the dark, he was too busy to hear me tie the knot and take his briefcase into my motor home for a little look.

In the detective's briefcase, there's a computer-printout spreadsheet of names next to disabilities next to an address for each one. Here's guys with carpal-tunnel syndrome. Guys with nonspecific soft-tissue damage to their lower backs. Chronic pain in their cervical vertebrae. Listed here is the disability provider, the insurance company. Here's the painkillers prescribed in each case.

And on that spreadsheet, there I am: Eugene Denton.

Inside the briefcase, a rubber band wraps a thick stack of business cards, all of them saying: Lewis Lee Orleans, Private Investigator. And a phone number.

When I dial the phone number, a cell phone inside the briefcase begins to ring.

Outside, Lewis Lee Orleans is hollering for me to help open the shithouse door.

If it would help Sarah Broome feel better about killing me, I'd tell her how the detective, he cried. His sobs muffled behind both hands, he told me he had a wife at home and three kids. Little kids. But he didn't wear a wedding ring, and inside his wallet were no pictures.

People say they can feel getting looked at. Being watched has the same feeling as ants crawling up your pant leg. Not me. That afternoon, I rotated my tires, checked the wear on my brake pads. Changed my oil, going from winter 10-10 weight to summer 10-40 weight. Here on the little video screen, here was me with a full case of motor oil, dragging it out from under the motor home and lugging it under one arm. Totally disabled me, the poor delivery driver who swore in court I couldn't lift my arms high enough to brush my teeth. A crippled invalid who deserved to be put out to pasture for the rest of my natural life. Here, shirtless on camera, the sweat from my armpit soaking a dark-brown shadow on the case of oil, I could pass for a circus strongman.

Living outdoors in good weather, not eating much, sleeping long nights, this tanned little muscle man could be me when I was nineteen years old.

This was the best life I'd ever known, and the man trapped in my shithouse was about to wreck it all.

Most big disability cases, they're always in appeal. The workers'-comp insurance folks, they want years to trail their man. To get just five minutes of good clear video that shows him lift a rototiller into the back of his pickup truck. They play that tape in court, and it's: Case closed. Disability denied. The plaintiff, one minute he's set for life, a good-enough chunk of cash every month, medical benefits covered, plus all the Vicodins and Percocets, all the OxyContin he needs to stay sweet the rest of his days. The defense team plays that tape in court—the rototiller going into his truck bed—and he's got nothing.

He's forty-five or fifty years old, and he's accused of insurance fraud. No chance he's getting anything but minimum wage the rest of his life. No benefits. No free time until he's sixty-something years old and qualifies for relief.

Right this minute, to Sarah Broome even life in prison for murder looks good compared to falling behind in her property taxes, losing her car, and pushing a shopping cart on the street.

When I was in her shoes, all I had on hand was a case of four bug bombs. The Winnebago where I lived had a wasp nest underneath. The directions on each bug bomb said to shake well and then break the tip off a little nozzle on top. The bomb would spray out poison smoke until it was empty.

The label said it would kill anything.

The poor detective. I climbed up a ladder and dropped all four of those bombs down the shitter vent pipe. After that, I clapped a hand over the pipe to stop any leaking out. Me up there, Adolf fucking Hitler, dropping poison gas and listening to my detective cough and beg for air. Just the sound of him gagging up wet puke, then the glop of it hitting the wood floor in chunks, just the sound alone almost made me hurl. The sulfur smell of bug spray and the puke smell. Those bug bombers kept hissing until white whiffs curled out from every little crack and nail hole. Gasoline-smelling smoke puffed from each side of the shithouse as the detective threw himself at the walls, then the door, trying to break out. Beating his arms to bruised pulp inside the shoulder pads of his good brown suit. Wearing himself out.

Sitting here, my leg aching from the waist down, waiting for Sarah Broome to play problem solver, there's so much I want to tell her. How the insecticide only made the detective and me both sick. How it felt, hitting somebody in the side of his head with a lug wrench. How, the first dozen times you hit, it only makes a mess. Even swinging with both hands, you're pounding hair and blood, not really breaking much bone. How the blood gets the lug wrench so slippery you can't hold it, and you've got to go find something clean to finish the job.

If I wasn't disabled before killing that Mr. Lewis Lee Orleans, I was after. Killing somebody is hard work. Hard, messy work. Hard, messy, noisy work, with him bellowing loud, his words making no more sense than a cow on the killing floor.

How I figure is, even if I didn't kill my Mr. Nosy Detective, the long cold night would have. The deer flies and shock from his broken leg would have. Dead is dead, and this way neither of us had to suffer. Not much.

Even if I never got caught, killing the detective spoiled my taste for being crippled. Now I knew people were watching, I'd seen the spreadsheet, another detective would come spying on me someday.

So, if you can't beat them, join them.

On television, the next commercial for a correspondence school, I called them up. They teach you how to stake out a suspect. How to dig through a garbage can for evidence. In six weeks, I had a paper to say I was a private investigator. After that, I had my own spreadsheet of deadbeats to go spy on. To make my own whistle-blowing little “stalk-umentaries,” I call them.

You get out by getting smart and turning in your fellow cripples. Most cases, you don't even have to appear in court. Just turn in your expense report for the motel, the rental car, the restaurant meals, and you get your check in the mail. Plus the commission.

Leading up to right now. I've been following Ms. Broome for five days of nothing. When you're shooting a stalk-umentary, you're pretty much married to your subject. To the post office to pick up her mail. To the library for another book. To the grocery store. Even if she sits in the trailer all day, the curtains shut, watching television, then I'd be parked down the gravel road, slouched down low, stretched across the front seat of my rented car so I could lean back on a pillow propped against the inside of the passenger door. So I could keep an eye out. Even if nothing's going to happen.

It's a marriage.

All afternoon, slapping mosquitoes up on the hillside behind her trailer, I was squatted down, hidden back in the bushes. Watching her through the viewfinder on my video camera, I was waiting for my chance to hit the RECORD button. All Sarah had to do was bend over and pick up a white tank of propane. Just five minutes of her unloading heavy bags of cat food from her old hatchback car, and this job would be done. Nothing left to do but check in my rental car and catch the next plane home.

Of course, I'm sitting here in her shed because I tripped and fell. She came and found me, after it got dark, after the mosquitoes were worse than anything—gunshots, knife wounds—she could ever do to me. I had to yell for help, and she put one arm around my waist and half carried me this far. She set me here. To rest a minute, she said.

Nobody's saying I'm too original. I'm a bird-watcher, I tell her. This area is famous for the red-crested hairy plover. This time of year the blue-necked pheasant comes here to mate.

She's got my video camera, fooling with the little playback screen pulled out, and she says, “Oh, please. Show me.” The camera makes a buzz, a click, and the red PLAY light blinks on, bright. She watches the screen, smiling, stoned.

I tell her, No. I reach for the camera, to take it back, but too fast. I tell her, No. Too loud.

And Sarah Broome, she steps away, pulling her elbows and her hands holding the camera out of my reach. Light from the little screen flickering soft as candlelight on her face, she smiles and keeps watching.

She keeps watching, but her face relaxes, her smile drooping, her cheeks sagging into jowls.

It's footage of her lifting sacks of steer manure, slippery white plastic bags packed with cow crap. Each bag printed in black letters: Net Weight Fifty Pounds.

Her eyes still pinned on the little screen, all the muscles of her face squeeze together in the middle. Her eyebrows. Her lips. Here's the five minutes that will end life as she knows it. My short stalk-umentary that's going to put her back into blue-collar slavery.

It could be her back healed. It could be she faked it all, but what's clear is, she's no invalid. With the arms on her, she could wrestle alligators for a living.

Sarah Broome, I just want to tell you I understand. Right this minute, while you read the back of a box of rat poison, I want you to know—that first week of being totally crippled, completely helpless and disabled, it was hands-down the best week of my adult life.

Here's the dream of every farmer. Every railroad brakeman and waitress who ever took a week's vacation to go camping. One lucky day, a freight train takes a corner too fast and derails, or they step in a spilled milkshake, and they end up living down some no-name gravel road. Happy cripples.