From a friendly source, but in a roundabout way to be honest about it, what follows is how this whole story started and then came to me in one telling, and I have held onto it for many years, hoping to hear how it closed down. Nothing as yet has come to alter that wish, and with time and impatience working me to the bone, a bit of tiredness too, and the way time touches us from eld, the way it does from the back row of an old movie theater or from the front seat of an old Ford, I must release it, get out from under, tell it so it can be shared.
Outside the long-term care facility the sun was bright and the light was nearly white on all surfaces of the building, and the glow penetrating the interior was warm and entertaining. Inside, on the edges of the dayroom and in some minor corridors, a few shadows hung around, lazy ones, afraid to let go, hanging out in far corners, struggling with their small eternities.
Michael the orderly, in his daily run at life, knew he siphoned off some of that light, knew it was his due in this world, the light, along with the multi-sensory perceptions he had inherited. The glowing spread of warmth existing outside him, also leaped inside him, carrying all kinds of messages, sensations. Things, he knew, came to him, from a past history he could barely traverse. In darkness he could trace himself without lines. Hell, he might have thought, I'm black to begin with, and there's character formation I can understand.
"Michael," said Todd Grimson from his wheelchair in the facility's dayroom, quantum sparkle in his eyes, energy lifting itself, "What do you do, outside of here, to get so damn muscular and," he flashed his eyes, "so chocolaty?" One thick, gray eyebrow, parted by the faintest of scars, moved with his question, leveled in interpretation. Huge hands lay curved over the wheels; his arms corded from the constant demand of those wheels. He tilted his head in mock uncertainty, half smiled his own glee. The realization flushed through him that an electric quality existed about Michael. Was this favored orderly merely magnetic? Magnetized? For sure, the way dissimilar entities might find engagement, there was brightness atop the darkness of him.
At that exact moment, Marty Vreeland, a broad-shouldered, heavy blond guy in a fast-rolling wheelchair, zipped through the dayroom. Todd yelled out, "Where's the fucking fire, Marty? You ain't that hard, are you?" Marty disappeared around a corner, but could be heard cursing someone most likely in his way. Todd smirked again at that small and remnant noise from another aisle.
Michael, clean as a sharpened ax in his pressed white orderly's uniform, giggled deeply in his throat, fond of Todd Grimson and his no-nonsense and no-self-pity about his way of life, a "wheeler" now instead of a "biker." There was, he knew, a mutual respect between them that had needed no overt statement ever since he had met the man a year or so earlier.
The building cited here, where Todd and Michael spent their days, was plunked on the side of a hill in the next town to my town. White, shining in the sun, casting all kinds of reflections at the beginning and end of the day, it clung on the hillside as if it was an invader of sorts, lately come and eager to stay. Just as its grip said. Below its clinging post, it was separated from the rest of the town by a stream, a small bridge of one-way traffic, and a wide and long field of green in the spring, and mostly golden in late summer and fall, like a farmer's moat. Local geography, or topography, it appeared, had aided in the seeming seclusion of the facility. Out of sight, as one might say, and out of mind, insular, as some neighbors and friends of mine have said. Most of the patients there were bikers, and let's face it… bikers were not the most envied of our citizens. They were more like those strays passing through, as the cowboys used to say.
The half suppressed grin continued on Todd's face, where it resided just about every day, as opposed to most of the accident victims that habitually inclined about the facility or moved about on their wheelchairs. In his upper arms the muscles had muscles, and some latent power existed around him, loitered about him despite his impairment, finding a place of its own.
The white building in the sun was a long-term care site founded upon devotion and deep therapy issues. None of the patients, of course, had ever desired to be there, or ever entertained the possibility of coming there. And some of the others, like Michael, belonged, the way a calling is granted.
Todd was looking straight into the deep brown eyes of the only orderly in the building that he had any real liking for. Michael Truegrove was standing above him, browner than a bear, six feet and five inches of slim but noticeable muscle, his eyes filled often with warmth and understanding. Deep black hair with a luster flowed neatly down his back over the white shirt of his uniform. Each of his movements telegraphed a knowledge of grace, a sense of balance and awareness of body, of good luck in this hard life.
"The chocolate's all the way from the Congo," Michael said, his own grin coming as wide as ever, "from what my daddy told me years ago." Like a warrior he stood, the sun from a large window flowing about his frame, lighting on his shoulders. "I am the Congo Kid come home to take care of one of my favorite guys. You're a special man, Todd. I never once saw you falling all over yourself, commiserating." The pause, like the tempo of a poet, was liquid, fluid, "and I play some ball three nights a week, and move a little iron with my nephew on another night or two when we can arrange schedules."
Todd nodded a slight understanding, his head bobbing less than it did only a little more than a year earlier, after his bike had almost gone all the way under a pick-up truck exiting a dark driveway, no back-up lights at warning. His hair could have been called prematurely gray or lazy blond. "Like they say, Michael, what brung you here?" His grin disappeared. Serious mien grew in its place. "I like stories. About people. I bet you have one, the real one about you I haven't heard. I'd like to hear it, and then I'll tell you one of mine. I might as well tell you, we might just have a couple of lovebirds hereabouts." Todd's eyes flashed a miniature sign of disbelief. "Deal?"
Michael was aware of many of Todd's traits; allegiance, loyalty, love for the underdog and the downtrodden; resurrecting a small bit of hope for his roommates and other patients whenever he could, wearing a smile when he didn't feel like smiling on some of his bad days; and he had a few of those all on his own. I can't imagine that Michael had no idea of the type of secret Todd was holding in place, or what "lovebirds" really meant in such a facility, the word really stretching the image for all that it was worth. Michael had a sense for everything, he believed.
Michael's full grin was sweeping and warm, a collectible. "You swing a hard bargain, Todd. I bet you could sell furnaces in the Congo."
"Hey, that's a twist to the old adage." Todd's eyebrow still played the field of expression. And he must have noted for the hundredth time, the neatness of Michael's white uniform, as clean as wind-blown snow in a wide field. And its cleanliness was starker against the deep color of Michael's skin.
"We're funning, right?"
"We're swapping," Todd replied, "like we agreed, just so. Your story for mine, and mine's a doozie, though it might break your heart."
"That big, huh? That good?"
The clincher came from Todd, as he propelled himself adroitly into a far corner of the room, as he looked over his shoulder. "Come over here, Mike, and tell me. Then, I'll knock your socks off."
