“Hey! Jim! Jim Malick!” said the stick-figure’s full voice.
The man dropped all pretense of concealment, keeping about him only enough guard to glance against traffic to prevent being run down as he crossed the intersection again, running in a beeline until he stood in front of Jim.
“Paul!” said Jim, recognizing his friend.
“Hey, welcome back,” the tall man said. “How was Belize? I got your cards, back there a few months. Sounded like you were having a fine time, though I don’t know about that parrot meat you talked about.”
Jim laughed.
“But I bet you missed this weather,” Paul said.
“Maybe I did, Paul. Maybe I did.”
Paul Ode, a Nigerian, possessed the kind of grin that split his broad face into unequal halves. His high cheeks, wide forehead, and lively eyes made up a face so prone to smiling that Jim could hardly remember any other expression on the man’s face, although surely it had worn others—in fact Jim must have seen others, having sat through so many faculty meetings in his company. Paul Ode taught African and Asian literature and lived in a circle of silence that Jim had only partially penetrated, for all they had been committee buddies.
“I sure missed something else, too,” Jim said. “Something sure changed while I was gone.”
“I bet I know what you’re talking about,” Paul said. “I bet I do. The change. The big change.”
“I just tried to get some chicken soup,” Jim said, feeling the weirdness of what he was saying.
“And you couldn’t.” Paul nodded and then shook his head, his grin having become one of shared puzzlement at the enigma of life in the States. “Let me tell you, things have gotten strange.”
“I guess so.” Jim decided to leave unmentioned Paul’s odd manner of walking only moments before. He fathomed its necessity, anyway: to avoid tickets. Paul had been an inveterate walker, too, eschewing wheels whenever possible.
“Just on my way to see Vicki,” Jim said, “to find out what was going on.”
“Ah.” Paul’s smile widened again while an eyebrow jutted high. “Then let’s go this way.”
“Co-op’s moved?”
“No, but you’ll see. Co-op’s having troubles—”
“It was thriving, last I saw!”
“Yeah, Jim, but there was that big change. So now the co-op has troubles, because half what it was trying to do, the guvvy has spooned under, passing the scrip laws in that busy politicking way it has, trading this for other snafu stuff in the health-care wars.”
“You lost me,” Jim said. “Been speaking Spanish too long. What did you say?”
“The scrip laws. Anytime a health claim is made for a ‘product,’ then scrip’s needed. The Food and Medicine Administration finally pushed it through, after getting up the steam through the eighties and chomping the bit for the last five, six years. Crazy, huh? And the American Medical Society went right along for the ride.”
“Crazy isn’t the word for it. I mean, chicken soup?” Jim looked uncertainly ahead of them. The town still felt strange to him. “So where’re we going?”
Paul grinned. “Where we’re going—think of it as guerrilla HQ.”
“Whatever you say,” Jim said. “What is it really?”
“A restaurant.”
“Restaurant? A guerilla restaurant?”
“Right. Follow me.”
With instructions so simply given, simple execution should have followed, Jim thought. Instead, he found himself picking up speed abruptly then hunching behind a juniper while Paul periscoped his head to scout the prospect. The tall man darted forward, losing footing a moment in the snow around the corner, and then taking a new position between a building and the wide trunk of a thickly knotted tree, an old maple that stood naked but dignified in the heavy weather. Snow fell again, lightly dusting the air.
Two stick figures, furtive but obvious against the white: they must look that way, he thought.
He wondered if the Spartans, with their rheumatism and their damp lowlands, would have taken it kindly if a false Asclepius had stood between them and the waterside willows from which they made their anti-rheumatic decoction. Asclepius, asking for payment for his scrip—insisting on granting permission for people to heal themselves? Hard to conceive! Would the Spartan soldiers have moved evasively to the river, as Paul Ode did through the streets of Painesville, or would they simply have taken out swords and hacked their way past the misguided healer?
And what would indigenous Americans have thought, had the tribal healer stood between the Rhus radicans and the Impatiens capensis, the poison ivy and its specific remedy, the touch-me-not? How could a healer stand between a problem and its cure?
For that matter, Jim thought, what would he have thought had someone insisted on his getting “scrip” after welts and discoloration had spread over both his arms? He would have suffered longer, then—much longer!
Instead, a true Asclepius had appeared, in the form of a small, poutcheeked girl who looked disgusted at Jim’s stupidity. She took him back to where he had brushed the poison-wood. There, in the same thicket as the Metropium browneii, grew Bursura simaruba—the funnily named Gumbo-Limbo, a tree whose inner-bark sap provided effective salve against poisonwood, much as touch-me-not did against poison-ivy.
How could he forget little Pia Calderon, frustrated at this tall Jaime “El Bobo” Malick who knew everything except what was useful?
“It grows here?” he said to Pia. “Why don’t people grow some where it’s handy?”
“Because it grows here.” She said it as if saying that the obvious should be obvious.
“But wouldn’t it be handier—”
“But the poisonwood’s here,” she said.
“Yes, but—”
“They both grow here,” she said, giving her final word.
“Oh, together? They grow in the same place? Do they always?”
She shrugged and headed back down the path.
It made a crazy kind of sense in a way: plants humanly useful grew next to each other. He felt as though he had opened a page from the mechanist Deists with their vision of an interlocked humanity and Universe, or from that States philosopher of the strange, Poe, and his logical economy of nature. Some things argue for design in nature, whether or not design exists.
Rubbing in the Gumbo-Limbo salve, there along the path in the Belizean forest, the argument for design had felt forceful indeed.
Jim shivered behind Paul Ode, and followed him as he sprinted to a snow-covered park, ducking behind a high memorial bench of concrete inset with nobly postured Revolutionary War figures. Jim glanced at them and thought, It’s Boston Tea Party time, folks.
“Come on,” Paul said, motioning and then starting in a run across the park, his boots kicking up plumes of snow.
As they skirted a copse of pines, Jim’s head brushed a low-hanging branch and received its benediction: a load of snow puffed out over his head, a few icy fingers reaching beneath his collar and making him shout in surprise. Paul shot him a curious glance, then powered ahead across the white expanse.
“It’s cold,” Jim said.
“ ’S what winter’s for,” Paul shot back.
“Tell me about this big change you talk about, Paul,” Jim called ahead. “How’d it happen?”
“Madness.”
“Well, sure, it’s madness.”
“I mean literally, Jim,” said Paul, slowing down. Snow puffed around his boots. “Madness in government. It happens every twenty or thirty years, seems like, when morality takes over from ethics, when words matter more than what’s real, when politicians launch their egos on a thick cloud silver-lined with good intentions.”