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2000: The Color of the Impression

Laura Pritchett

Published November 10, 2008 at 8:46 a.m.

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Photo by Charles Chamberlin, The Rocky

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I was ice-skating on the pond, the puppy bounding around next to me, leaping at my legs in adoration and joy, and it was this exuberance that caused us to collide. I ran over the pup's paw with the blade of my skate, and her yelp pierced the air as I plunged forward, right into the boat that I leave, upside down, next to the pond. My head hit the chine of the boat, the boat being a little plywood number I made myself. So many things happen in such a moment: I thought, Oh, this hurts, and tipped my head back so the blood in my nose would run backward, and my eyes sought out the puppy, who was limping over to me, leaving bloody footprints on the ice, including one red swipe where she slipped stepping over the push broom I'd used to clear away the snow.

I knew I was fine but that the puppy should get to the vet, for her prints were pure blood now, as if her foot were a brush sopped with red paint. I stood and skated over to the edge of the pond, which was where I'd left my hiking boots, and it took me some time to unlace the skates since my fingers were thick with cold and the laces themselves were hard, but finally I could gather the pup in my arms and carry her to my truck. I was dizzy but told myself, as I do during difficult times, Ah, shut up and wait it out, because the pain would pass and I believed then that fleeting moments shouldn't get much attention, though now I understand that they are in fact what make up my life.

There was an old towel under the pickup's seat, and the last time I'd used it was to rub a newborn calf into life — he'd been plopped down, wet and slick, into the snow, and his mama was doing a half-assed job of licking him warm. But the calf lived. As I started the truck, I put one hand on the pup's side to hold her down into the seat and apologized, as I did with the calf, for the ways life can surprise you with pain.

That was the last moment I remember of my old self, my self that had not yet met Ruben. The next moment I was in a train wreck, which is to say, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could not have avoided it, even if I'd tried, which I did not.

***

Ruben was not the vet. Ruben was the vet's nephew, and judging from his looks you'd guess he was about 25. A child. In comparison. But Ruben looked at me as I told my story, looked at me for longer than one would expect. His eyes were very dark, he was Mexican, with eyes that were like liquid.

The puppy was on the examining table, and Ruben tilted his head to consider the paw, and he said, "Name?"

"Well. I don't know, I just got her. I call her Pup."

Ruben's eyes moved from the pup's foot to my head. "Your forehead. You could use a coupla stitches." But he said it without conviction, because we both knew I wouldn't be driving off the mountain and into town for three small stitches.

"Do you have any of that glue that sticks your skin together?" I asked. "The cut doesn't hurt. No, that's a lie, actually it does. We humans do that all the time! Lie about pain, I mean. Do you know that glue I'm talking about?"

It might be too much to believe that's all it took. Although maybe not: Perhaps it's uncommon to run into a person who's more or less a stranger but you know has interests that align with yours — animals, outdoors, tenderness in a world that is without — and then to have your breath taken away for no other reason than his searching eyes, his smile and some sort of quiet sadness buzzing about him. Perhaps, on top of this, you know you are a bit off-kilter, and that the outside world has a tendency to scowl at you since you cannot quite maneuver through life as they do, and perhaps you know that there are only a handful of people who are going to think that's fine and maybe even preferable. Perhaps all this can happen, and it is not love, at that particular instant, but it is the beginning of it, or at least contains the potential.

Ruben said, "Yes, glue, in a minute," like that was the conclusion he'd already come to. "Your pup has a deep laceration, but the tendon isn't severed. It's a full-skin-thickness cut, though, so Victor will use skin staples, wrap it, antibiotic. Clean cut, though. Nice cut for a cut." He shrugged. "I know who you are. You're the woman who helps out at the Vreeland Ranch. You live up the canyon. You're their ranch hand, right?"

"Yes."

"You have a lot of animals." This he said with a certain amount of admiration.

"Yes, lots of animals."

"You have bees, you sell honey."

"Yes, I do," I said. "People think I'm crazy. But I'm not very crazy! My neighbor, Wendell, calls my place a Damn Petting Zoo. I told him he had so much junk on his property that I could get tetanus just by looking."

Ruben chuckled and said, "The truth is, Victor is at home. Archangels are visiting him today." He looked at me to see if I understood, which I did. Victor is schizophrenic and delusional, and on some days functional and some days not, and during some years he's fared well, and during others he's disappeared completely. Last year, for instance, someone from the mountain found him on Larimer Street, in Denver, sleeping next to a dumpster, and they brought him home and since then we have all been more careful to protect this Victor, this vet who talks to God, who sees patterns and light in ways that we do not. So I knew I had the option of driving 40 miles down the mountain or letting Ruben take over, this vet-tech, this nephew, this quiet, beautiful man.

"Well, can you do it?" I ventured. "Because I don't like town much."

A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150


A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150

We asked 11 authors to pick a decade in Denver's history and turn in 2,500 words of fiction set in the city. Each week we've featured a new story and an interview with the author. Today, look for a special section in print compiling all the stories, plus one additional piece: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, the winner of our story contest.

I put my hand over my mouth. You might think I have problems with silence, but in fact I do not. In fact I spend most of my time in silence and the silence of my body is basically in equilibrium with the silence of the world. It's only when I get with other people that I become nervous, I don't know why, except to say that it's a little hard to clarify some things about yourself to yourself, even when you have long conversations with yourself about yourself in the silence.

When Ruben was done, and the pup was standing on the floor, wagging her tail, holding up her bandaged paw, Ruben washed his hands and stood in front of me. He squinted at my forehead. Cleaned the wound with a cotton ball dipped in something. Dabbed on a bit of glue from his finger to my forehead. I tried (successfully, I might add!) to breathe quietly and not let the tears slip, for suddenly I was feeling very alone, that buzzing heavy terror of a space when you recognize that you are alone and that you are going to die alone. This was bad timing for such a moment to descend, but I managed under the weight of it all.

Ruben said, "You cut your lip," to which I nodded. For a moment I thought that perhaps we both wanted him to kiss it, to apply another kind of healing. But such a thing is not allowed, of course, by the invisible forces that operate this world. These invisible forces have too much power, if you ask me. If only the world could be less influenced by them, then their potency would naturally decrease.

Ruben put on a Band-Aid and his fingers stayed an extra moment as he pushed down the plastic tabs. He said, "Mucho gusto, it's nice to meet you, Lillie."

That was the moment that became slowed down in my mind. Because he knew my name, though I had not said it. And because I am not a person who is ever touched by another human, and so I could not help but like it a great deal.

"El gusto es mio, Ruben," I whispered.

His eyes lit up in surprise at my bit of offered Spanish. Then he nodded and directed me, with a wave of his arm, to the front of the clinic, where I paid my bill. Then I left.

That is the bulk of my story. By the time I got to my truck, with the puppy in my arms, I was wondering what the best course of action is when one is in a train wreck. Run away from the wreckage? Or stay in the danger and heat?

***

I managed to stay away from town for quite some time, and then Victor shot himself. Finally the archangels had been too much. They had been in cahoots with God, setting up various mental obstacle courses to see if Victor was worthy and in the end, Victor felt he wasn't, and he took Ruben's Colt .45 from Ruben's truck and put it in his mouth.

Ruben felt bad about it being his gun, but I called Ruben and told him, along with many other people, Victor would have found a way no matter what. I also told Ruben that I did not feel anything but agreement about this suicide because had I been in Victor's position I no doubt would've walked out in a field, just like he did, and shot myself, too, and indeed, in my most off-kilter moments I've thought about doing just that.

It was getting to be spring, now, and the roads were slushy around the cemetery, and our footprints went down to the earth and left watery brown marks. To get to the funeral, I caught a ride down the canyon with Wendell, and on the way Wendell and I conversed in such a way as to confirm for each other that we did not like each other; he thought I was a scattered and strange woman, and I thought him a dull and stupid man.

"I'm in love with a man," I told him. "It's going to take a lot of effort and erosion to get rid of this feeling." I said this so I could get it out of my system. How many of us are going around telling the truth to the wrong person? Wendell took it as one more piece of evidence of my malformed character, and I took my confession as a needed relief to have voiced my love to someone, somewhere, at some point in time.

The person I hoped to see at the service, of course, was Ruben. I'm honest enough to admit that even at a funeral of someone who had doctored my goats and peacock and cats, I was selfishly thinking of love. Ruben was dressed in black jeans and roper boots and seeing him this way made my heart feel as if it were suffocating; I had to avert my eyes, actually, so as to find some relief. What I did not realize then, but came to understand during the course of the after-funeral gathering, as I kept my hand over my mouth and listened to people talk, was that I was possibly saying goodbye to Ruben as well. Because it is illegal for someone who does not have a degree and license to practice vet medicine, and now that Victor was gone, there was no way that Ruben could keep the clinic open. I did hear it mentioned, however, that Ruben, who, wisely enough, refused to go to school to prove what he already knew (and thus refused to give in to those invisible forces that operate this world), might just doctor animals as a "friend who was helping out" and a person might pay Ruben for his help. As I listened to a dozen conversations, I knew where Ruben was at all moments, which caused me to wonder if love is simply keeping track of a person.

When Ruben came up to me and asked about my puppy, as I knew he would, it was not as I had hoped. There was nothing in his eyes that showed I was alive to him in some unique way. Perhaps he saw my reaction to this because he tried to say something nice. He said, "I never asked you about ice-skating. But I imagined you, skating alone, on the Vreelands' pond on that foggy day, yes?" and when I nodded he continued, "It's rather pretty, the picture I have in my mind. Until the puppy got hurt, that is."

I almost said the following: "This love is invisible but it is very, very heavy."

What I said instead was, "My horse has an odd swelling in its chest and maybe ought to be looked at?"

"It's probably Pigeon disease," he said. "A new thing with horses. They get it from bacteria in the dirt."

"When I push my hand into my horse's chest, where the swelling is, there is the impression of my hand for a moment. Ruben, am I imagining this?"

He looked at me truly, then, and gave his answer: No, you are not imagining this, but no, there is no way for this disease (called love) to be resolved in this particular case. Right then I knew how exhausting it would be, waiting for a peace that was never going to come. And I took notice of my ache, and realized it had a strange, buzzing hum that could nearly burst my eardrums apart.

***

Pretend, if you will, that this is a story, and that it ends like this: There is a woman, some figure in the far distance, a shape that's hard to make out, and she has a task ahead of her, which is to expel a feeling as best she can, or at the very least maneuver it so that the place it occupies inside her is comfortable, or if not comfortable, then bearable. I laughed, for what an odd thing to do to love!

I went home and began to walk alongside the edge of the pond, my puppy darting in front of me, and I noticed that in certain places, the spring snow had formed ridges of intricate crystals that jutted up at an angle. I was surprised to discover, if I squinted my eyes, the degree to which patterns create snow. Then I considered the degree to which colors create snow. Then I considered the degree to which light creates snow. After I came to, I continued walking, and continued to create the collateral damage we all do as we go through life, but then I could no longer crush those snow crystals with my feet in such a clumsy manner, and so I retraced my steps carefully. I walked back to the pond and stared into the melting ice sheaf. While I stared, I kept hearing noises at the water's edge, and I thought an animal was perhaps moving about in the dry grasses. It took me some time to realize the noise came from the ice melting at the edges, slipping into the water below. So I sat in the grass at the edge and watched the crystals slip into the absorbing water, and sometimes I helped it along by gently brushing and dabbing the slush down with a stick that had been left to rest, kindly enough, beside me.