the base of his neck, no worse than a tick bite.
He took a lot of painkillers. He sat in the hot tub from the time Oprah was over until it was time to go to bed.
“Come out and sit with me, Candy Cane,” he would call from the hot tub at night, his voice lazier than usual from the painkillers.
“What about your wound?” I would shout from the kitchen window. “It’s not supposed to get wet.”
“I’ll risk it,” he said. “Come out and let’s just talk.” But I knew he didn’t want to just talk.
Eventually he went back to work, and then of course all the kids got in on it. They threw whatever they had at him: books, pencils, pocket calculators, their shoes. Two weeks before Christmas, after a shoe hit him in the head, he drove the bus over the curb at the junior high and right into the wall of the school where the band room is.
No one was hurt. It was a brick wall and the bus didn’t bust through it.
It made Channel 9, though. Silvia Vontrauer came into my office to tell me a man in a Channel 9 truck had come out and filmed the place on the wall where the bus had hit, even though there wasn’t so much as a scuff on it. They showed it that night on the six o’clock news, along with Gerald’s school bus driver ID. Client after client stopped by my office to say, “Gerald made the news!”
“No one was hurt,” I had to keep telling everyone.
One night, Gerald wanted me to drive him to a bigger hospital, perhaps the Mayo Clinic. “I don’t feel right. Maybe I need to go on workmen’s comp,” he said.
“Well, I can’t go on workmen’s comp,” I said. “I have to go to work.”
So he squeezed himself into our little Ford Escort and escorted himself to the Mayo Clinic’s La Crosse affiliate. He was gone for three days, and when he came back, he did not speak to me for three more.
Dieter got together a spaghetti supper to honor Gerald’s years of service to the school district. The cardboard sign with the sparkly word ANNIE in the high school cafeteria was replaced with a giant poster with various pictures of Gerald glued to it, all taken from the bottom of the school bus steps. It was a timeline of Gerald getting fatter by the year.
The students were not invited. Only the school administration and teachers and staff were there.
Because no students were invited, the choir did not sing. That was the best part about the whole event.
Doc and Huff were not invited either. They showed up anyway, and so I found myself standing with Huff, Doc, and Gerald as the Vo-Ag teacher bowed to them all and said, “I’m Kenny, the new Vo-Ag teacher. I understand you are very close friends of Tandy Caide’s?”
“Mistaken on all counts,” Huff said, raising a beer he had brought from home.
Dieter gave a speech that thanked Gerald, making mention of his alumni status and his state-winning shot put throw. He said, “It takes the ability to stick to a routine and ignore a lot of noise around you to drive school bus. Gerald brought both to the job, and he did the job as well as anyone could have.”
Gerald ate six plates of spaghetti.
Howie Claus, the Methodist minister, said to him, “What are you going to spend all your time on now, Gerald?”
Gerald said, “Wine, women, and song, and the rest I’ll just piss away.”
Everyone but Howie laughed, including myself and including the Vo-Ag teacher, who laughed so hard he bent over, causing his ponytail to flop down and dangle in the air.
Gerald said loudly so everyone could hear, “I like this guy, Candy Cane.”
“That makes one of us,” I said. Everyone laughed again, including the Vo-Ag teacher, this time even harder.
I could play that game. In fact, it is probably fair to say that I felt a little proud of myself for playing it. I was clever. Witty. I was someone who was not from around here, someone better, someone who could make good-looking strangers laugh. I wanted to make it last forever. I wanted to always feel like that. I wanted to always believe in myself as a person like that.
The feeling wore off by the time we got back home. Gerald immediately removed his clothes and went out to the hot tub. He called out to me. “Come on. You liked it that one time.”
My arms went numb. I felt that fight-or-flight feeling.
I guess I couldn’t stand it anymore. And I guess I felt like I didn’t have to.
I opened the kitchen door and stomped outside and I climbed up the little stepstool next to the hot tub and I looked down on him and I said very loudly, “I will regret that night we made love in this hot tub until the day I die!”
He said nothing, which surprised me, and in some ways was much worse than fighting me. He let his legs float up, and they looked like two hot dogs in a big pot of boiling water, like the last two hot dogs no one wants to eat at a high school football game. Then suddenly he stood up. Water went everywhere. I jumped off the stepstool as he moved toward it. He was coming to catch me.
But he was too fat to do it! He tried moving his foot forward, but he lost his balance and his arms flapped and he almost fell. He had to just sit down on the stepstool and then half slide down it, legs first, like a fat, naked toddler.
Finally he stood there naked on the grass, facing me, steam rising off his giant body.
“They think I should be hospitalized!” he yelled. “For my brain! For my stress! What am I supposed to do?”
I didn’t know that about his brain. That was the first I had heard of it. Others will tell you differently, but I assure you this was the first I had heard of it.
I screamed, “How the hell do I know? I’m a CPA, not a doctor!”
Then he got quiet. Then his voice got cold and flat. He said, “I was worried about what you would do without me.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” he said.
He took a deep breath, in and out. Then he leaned back so that he was resting on the side of the hot tub. He stood there, naked and fat, but confident in it, like fat was just who he was. He put his hands on the area that was supposed to be his hips and looked at the stars.
In the morning, he packed some of his things into the Escort and escorted himself to a special place for mentally sick people run by the state and paid for with people’s taxes, just a half hour east of here, somewhere along the highway toward Dubuque.
I never asked how long he planned to stay there, but he never asked about a lot of things on my end either.
I guess we both got what we asked for. I can be honest with you now, as I think it is important to set the record straight, plus it is of no consequence to me anymore as the deeds are done: It was a lie. I could have taken the day off to drive him to the Mayo Clinic. I just didn’t want to. I didn’t want to sit next to him in the car for an extended period of time,
