Life Blood --III---Page 10



And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by
diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine
tragedy of Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That
was one of the many things Sarah had done for me over the
years.
All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve
a full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting
I'd known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three
years younger than she was, who came along after my
grandfather widowed my grandmother in a freak tractor rollover
and she remarried a lifelong bachelor neighbor. (I have old
snapshots of them, and I can tell you they all were cheerless,
beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for David to hire Lou
eight months earlier, not too long after I came to Applecore. At
that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI, because of
an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.
For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman
figure, like a traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the
collars, face tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past
fifteen years I'd watched his waist size travel from about thirty-
three inches to thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a
decade since a barber asked him if he needed any off the top.
Natalie Rose, his spirited, wiry wife of thirty-seven years,
succumbed to ovarian cancer seven years ago last September,
and I know for a fact she was the one who bought his shirts,
provided him with general maintenance.
My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff
in a little burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas,
some fifty-five long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up.
When I was about fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and
moved to Dallas, there to enter training for the FBI. He eventually
ended up in New Orleans, and then, after Natalie Rose passed
away and he more or less fell apart, he got transferred to New
York, considered the elephant graveyard of an FBI career.
        Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was
because of my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was
six years younger than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were
very special to each other, had a kind of bonding that I've never
really known with anybody since. We spent a lot of time staying at
each other's house, me the almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I
loved her helplessly, like a little sister. I always wanted to think





she needed me, which can be the most affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.
She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was
the tragedy of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me
say Sarah was a pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair
that defined her as perpetually optimistic—and who wouldn't be,
given the heads she always turned. (I was—am—blond too, though
with eyes more gray than her turquoise blues, but for me blond's
always been, on balance, an affliction: Sexist film producers
assume, dammit, that you're a failed showgirl, or worse. I've
actually dyed it brunette from time to time in hopes of being taken
more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our own special
chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a complete,
whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained slave
of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of
what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a
dream universe of her own making, one of imagination and
fanciful states.
Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop
for a month and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But when I offered to help her find little dolls that
would fit into it, she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest of the winter—I dropped everything—hunting down Christmas tree ornaments that looked like heavenly
creatures. She'd swathe them in tinsel and sit them in balls of
cotton she said were little clouds.
I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration, and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common wavelength.
Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and
eventually she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at
Columbia for premed. By then she was interested in the workings
of the brain, in altered states. I didn't know if it was just more
pursuit of fantasy, but at least she was going about it
professionally.
Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was
actually delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her.
We all managed to get together for family reunions pretty often,
though Lou and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.





Then tragedy struck. She was just finishing her master's, and
had been accepted by Cornell Medical—Lou was bursting with
pride—when he suggested they use her Christmas break to drive
back down to Texas together, there to visit Rose's grave. (I think
he really wanted to show off his budding doctor-to-be to the
family.) Sarah was driving when they crossed the state line into
Louisiana and were side-swiped by a huge Mack eighteen-
wheeler, which was in the process of jackknifing across a frozen
patch of interstate. They were thrown into the path of an
oncoming car, and when the blood and snow were cleared, a six-
year-old girl in the other vehicle was dead.
The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her
own minor facial cuts—which Lou immediately had repaired with
plastic surgery—somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of
her soul. All her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up
somewhere when she started college, came back like a rush of
demons loosed from some Pandora's box deep in her psyche.
She dropped out of school, and before long she was in the throes
of a full-scale mental meltdown. She disappeared, and in the
following two years Lou got exactly one card from her,
postmarked in San Francisco with no return address. He carried it
with him at all times and we both studied it often, puzzling over
the New Age astrological symbol on the front. The brief note
announced she'd acquired "Divine Energy" and was living on a
new plane of consciousness.
Then eight months ago, the State Department notified Lou she was missing in Guatemala. She'd overstayed her visa and nobody knew where she was.
So how did her "new plane of consciousness" land her in
Central America? Was that part of the fantasy world she'd now
returned to? Lou still worked downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, but
he immediately took a leave of absence and, though he spoke not
a syllable of Spanish, plunged down there to look for her.
        He was there a month, following false leads, till he finally
ran into a Reverend Ben Jackson, late of a self-styled Protestant
ministry in Mississippi, who was one of the ardent new
Evangelicals swarming over Central America. The man
mentioned that some chicle harvesters in the northwest Peten
Department of Guatemala had found a young woman in an old
dugout canoe on the Guatemala side of the wide Usumacinta
River, near a tributary called the Rio Tigre, lodged in amongst
overhanging trees. She'd been struck on the head and

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