The Medicine Man
Clarence wanted to go bet on some dogs. “You don’t know the first thing about dog racing,” I told him, which was true. “What’s there to know? You pick a hound and you put your money on him.” Clarence was always doing things like that, calling a dog a hound or marriage the plunge. “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be good for us. And I can tell that the ladies want some lady time, right?” Clarence meant my older sister Sherrie (his wife), and my mother, who were clearing up the lunch things from the table. “Go on, Adam,” said Sherrie. I got the keys to our Ford and followed Clarence out the door, not sure exactly what it was that we were supposed to be doing, but having my suspicions - Sherrie knew that I looked down on Clarence (I believe my words to her last winter had been, You are fucking up your life, or something to that effect), and she was trying to ease us into a friendship. What Sherrie didn’t know was that I was taken with him, in my own way, because he was a good storyteller, full of truth about a world that I was too young to believe in. We got in the car and drove out of Portsmouth on I-95. Clarence worked at the Target in Somersworth, loading and unloading boxes. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket. He had a handsome face, black hair, and a long, expressive mouth. From the passenger seat he turned to me and said, “Should I finish my story?” Clarence had been telling me about a man he’d met a few weeks back. He said he hadn’t told anyone about him, not even my sister. I said, “Go ahead. I’m listening.” “Right. So I’m driving to work the other day. And just as I’m passing that hotel that looks like a castle, I see there’s someone hitching, waiting for a lift. I pull over and it’s him, the one I told you about, this fucking medicine man. Of course, I don’t know he’s a medicine man just yet, but so he is. “And this guy’s huge. I mean he’s about seven feet tall and he’s got on his feathers and these leather tassels and the whole nine yards. His face looks like a statue. I can smell him, too. He smells like cooking spices and earth, you know? Real rich. I tell him I’m only going as far as Somersworth, and he says that’s where he’s going, too. So I tell him to get in and we start going. “Anyway, I’m wearing my bronze hoop, the sacred hoop that I always have around my neck. And this medicine man really takes a liking to it, because it is a real sacred hoop that I got from this Indian in Utah.” It was true, Clarence always wore a thick bronze hoop on a long silver chain. I stole a glance at his throat: the necklace wasn’t there. “So then, in perfect English, the guy asks me if he can possess my hoop! That’s his word, possess. “Now I really like this thing, so I tell him no. I tell him it’s a good luck token and it symbolizes the infinite golden hoop of the universe: you know, just the facts. He nods at me and says, ‘Yes.’ We’re at the exit before Somersworth, so he asks to get out. Just when I get the car stopped he starts adjusting his feathers real deliberately. “Then he puts his hand on my chest, over the hoop, and says a blessing in Spanish or whatever it was. And all of a sudden I feel like all the blood in my body is rushing to my heart - I’m just heating up all over. It feels so good it almost hurts, you know? After a few seconds he takes his hand away and smiles at me, this really generous kind of smile. “Something about it makes me fill up with love for him and I take the hoop off my neck and clasp it on his neck. (You may have noticed I’m not wearing the hoop today. Could be in another hemisphere by now, for all I know.) Then the guy thanks me, gets out, and sets up his things to start hitching again – who knows, maybe back to his tribe in South America. I can’t make heads or tails of it.” “That’s an interesting story,” I said. “I think so too,” he said. “I think so too.” He put his hands over his face, then ran them through his hair. “You know, your sister thinks you’re too ritzy for me.” I said it back to myself: ritzy. It got quiet for a few moments. Clarence gave his thigh a squeeze with his hand and looked out the window at the late afternoon, where the trees were dying and the light was dying. Just then, something darted out in front of the headlights and I stamped the brakes on, hard. “Woah, woah! Easy!” Clarence shouted, but it was too late.
I grew up in a blue shingled house in Strawbery Banke, a block from the river and three from the cemetery. I was born in October; I mark time by autumns. Every change in my life has been set against the smell of dying leaves and the lambent geography of late-fall light on the cracked pavement of Portsmouth. “I have something to tell you,” Sherrie said to me last November. “Let’s walk.” I looked at my mom, who was putting her hair up with a butterfly pin. “Go on,” she said, and smiled. The smile told me there was a secret I was about to find out. This was one year ago, eight months before the wedding. Sherrie and I walked toward the cemetery that we had passed every day on our way to school, and at which we had stopped on most afternoons of our childhood. We know the names and dates on every single stone, because we had turned it into a competition when we were little. The cemetery is bounded by a wrought iron fence, with a revolving wrought iron door – the innovation of some industrious colonist to keep the dogs out and the ghosts in. On the far side three homes stand overlooking the plot, and you can smell the river if you face east. When we reached the gate, Sherrie spun through and I climbed over. She smoothed her skirt against the same breeze that was rocking all the fallen leaves to sleep. Something about the swift, unaware motion of her hands against the fabric of the skirt: it was the kind of thing she hadn’t always done, and it filled me with love and curiosity that my sister was a girl and I was a boy. I was seventeen. “Margret Andrews,” she said. “Easy. 1686.” “And?” “Departed this life in the tenth month of her age,” I recited. I sat down with my back against Margret’s stone. Sherrie lay across me with her head on my thigh. “So,” I said. “So,” she said, but differently. Then she sat up to face me. “I have three things to tell you,” she said. “Three big things.” My heart jumped. She told me she was declining her place at UMASS, buying an apartment in Strawbery Banke, getting married in the summer. It seemed like a big deal at the time that Clarence was seven years older than her, but what I was really thinking was that he was eleven years older than me. Even so, it was as if her life was stopping dead in its tracks. I had always imagined escaping from Portsmouth and living in the same city as Sherrie. Now I would be leaving her behind when I started school in the fall. “You’re giving up?” I said. “I’m in love.” “Fuck,” I said mildly. That night it took me a while to fall asleep.
Winter came. I began my last semester of high school, which is to say, my last semester of living with my sister. Clarence came over more frequently. The leaves fell. During a snowstorm in February Clarence and Sherrie and me were sitting around the living room watching TV when Clarence said he had something to show us. “Stay here,” he said, “I’ll get it,” and ran out to his car. “What is it?” I asked Sherrie when we were alone. “Don’t know,” she said. We opened the window curtains all the way, we could see the snowflakes falling like cotton, lashed by the wind that came up off the river. Clarence had made us a fire, we could smell the smoke. Sherrie took an almond from a dish on the table. “Ready?” she said. She threw it up in a perfect arc and I caught it in my mouth. “You know what this reminds me of?” I said. “Yeah, of course I do.” Then a snowball thumped against the window and we looked outside. It was Clarence, with three brand-new sleds. “Come on, brothers and sisters!” he shouted. We spent the rest of the afternoon sailing down the steep banks of the river and across its frozen surface. Once, Clarence and Sherrie went down in the same sled together and wound up at the bottom, one on top of the other. When my sister got up he pulled her down again by the legs. She folded into him, laughing and covering his face with snow and kisses. From the top of the hill, where I was watching, the river looked like a white fur coat. I shouted out that I was coming down and by the time I reached the bottom they were up again, coming towards me, carrying that one sled between them. On the way home I missed my sister, even though I was walking right beside her.
“Let’s get out and see what the hell what was,” Clarence said. We came around the back of the Ford and found the dog we’d hit covered in black bloody fur. His stomach had been ripped open and his tail was bent around the wrong way, because of the angle we’d hit him at. Maybe he’d realized what was happening at the last minute and taken a few hopeful steps toward the side of the road before he felt the warm headlights pinning him, saw the grille and fender coming at him too fast, raised his eyes up, braced himself. He still had some clean fur on his jaw and on the far side of his belly, some of which we would later have to peel off the front of the Ford. “Oh my God,” I said. “Yes sir,” said Clarence, then got down on his knees and began to collect the dog up in his arms. Blood drenched his shirt. I wanted to help but I was a thousand miles away. “You okay?” he said. “Yeah. It’s so strange, though, isn’t it? It’s meaningful – we were driving to some stupid dog race and now we’ve killed this dog. I mean how do you interpret it?” I expected that Clarence, who believed a medicine man could hitch through New Hampshire, would put it all together. Instead, he said, “I interpret it as a dead animal. I think that’s what the dog would say, anyway, if you could ask him.” I came back to myself a little, enough to help my brother-in-law carry the dog to the side of the road, then pull the car over and slide him onto the back seat. I asked Clarence whether he’d bring the dog back to life if he had the power to do it. It was a childish question but I was feeling as much like a child as an eighteen-year-old could feel. Clarence put his hand on the back of my neck, said no, drove us back to Portsmouth. In the car we made an agreement. It was almost eight, there was no one else around when we parked the Ford across from the cemetery. We had no shovels, but we knew somehow that going back to the house to get them would brush the intimacy off the evening, leaving us back where we started. And anyway the dog was small. All the blood had gone out of him and his ribs were crumpled like broken matchsticks. The hole didn’t have to be big – just two feet deep and three feet wide. We started to dig, Clarence’s larger and more powerful hands taking up big chunks of earth, my own hands pulling the ground up a little at a time. We went at an even pace, which made the whole ceremony mean something. An hour went by in silence, our hands turned black. At last, Clarence said, “Okay. Let’s put him in.” From the back seat of the Ford we eased the dog into our arms, and I closed the eyelids with my fingers. Then we laid him in the hole. It was the kind of thing I would have done with my brother if I’d had a brother growing up. I made a promise to myself to have a child, then to have another. “Let’s cover him up,” I said. I reached down and took up some dirt, but when I went to put it in Clarence stopped my hand. “Wait,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out a piece of metal. It was the sacred hoop. “Look.” “Jesus!” I said. “You mean there was no medicine man? You really had me going.” “No medicine man,” he said. “I’ve never even picked up a hitcher in my whole life.” He breathed in deep the smell of the open ground. “Why’d you make up that whole story, then?” I said. “I was only... I was only imagining another way my life could be.” Clarence bent over the grave and placed the hoop on the muzzle of the dog.
Above us the sky was turning from purple to black, the distorting shimmer of a coming rainstorm whipped the air up somewhere not far off. Sometimes two cars would come at once, in opposite directions. Sometimes there was no one for a minute or two. I didn’t look at Clarence and he didn’t look at me; we couldn’t take our eyes off the wet black animal beneath us. I was trying so, so hard to take in what my brother Clarence knew and put it away with the things I knew myself. Then, we threw on the earth.
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