Free Power Slide by Susan Dunlap

couldn’t answer. His address? I’d only called him, never
written. Date of birth? Close to fifty years ago? Next of kin? I’d never given it a thought. Insurance? Probably, if he’d been paying union dues.
    In way too short a time, a doctor motioned me in through the double doors.
    I didn’t need to wait for words; I could read his face. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “Yes.”
    The air went thick. My words sounded like they came from someone else. “How can that be? It was just his nose. There wasn’t even any blood on his shirt, was there?”
    He hadn’t seen the shirt, I could tell that, too. He was saying it didn’t matter. But it did matter, how could he not get that? “His shirt was fine, just dirty. There was no damage to his chest, was there?”
    Doors whished open; metal rattled. People muttered, moaned, screamed. A woman was yelling into her phone, “Just get your lazy ass over here.” The walls—beige or that shade of pale blue or green or yellow that’s the same as beige—evaporated. Nothing made sense. “It’s just a broken nose! How can he be dead of a broken nose!”
    More words. They made no sense. Then I heard, “Do you want to see his body?”
    His body! I longed to see him , not his body, his empty body. I nodded and was led down the hall and into a curtained-off slot, the kind of place Guthrie would hate. Like a work cubicle in an office—a death cubicle with curtains.
    He lay there, his face cleaned now, his nose caved in to the right, his head propped up on a pillow in mockery of his last hours. I had to fight not to think about sitting with him in the cab of his truck talking about my burns, or in the trailer, leaning against that shoulder that now stuck out from the sheet, bare, already dry-looking, but with every muscle still
visible. I wanted to reach forward, to rest my hand on his skin, but I just didn’t dare. Barely audibly, I said, “How?”
    The doctor lifted Guthrie’s shoulder and turned him on his side.
    The back crown of his head was caved in as if it had been hit with a pipe. Blood matted his hair and the bleeding had spread down his neck onto his back. It looked like his head had exploded inside.

10
    WHEN MIKE DISAPPEARED I went into a funk that only eased back to normal years later. Now, I could tell that Gracie and John and, particularly, Mom were worried about how I’d deal with Guthrie’s death.
    But one of the things I’ve learned is that you can grieve wholly when you sit zazen. No interruptions, no one cheering or offering ineffectual comfort, nothing between you and every memory or hope, every pang that leaves your chest hollow and cold. Leo offered to sit with me, and we sat period after period. In normal zazen we let go of thoughts and come back to the breath. But this time I let the thoughts linger, memories of the set outside San Diego where we’d met doing car gags, the time I’d run into him at an opening and barely recognized him in a tux, the nights and luscious afternoons together in the truck, the plans he and I’d just started making. The feel of his body against mine.
    After a few periods of zazen, thoughts start to arrive more slowly and they’re easier to see. The back and forth between the thoughts and the cold hollow in the chest becomes clear, each beholden to the other. In its starkness the pain is easier to face as what it is—fear—and feelings in my chest that I wanted to call grief or regret but that were in fact just feelings there. I might have loved Guthrie, but I hadn’t known him. What I loved was the acceptance we had each allowed that preserved our own secrets.

    If he’d kept his secret, would he still be alive?
    I went to bed exhausted, slept till ten, and then got the streetcar out to Mom’s house and picked up Duffy for a walk on the beach, one of the places Guthrie and I had never been. I think of Duffy as my dog even if my mother thinks otherwise. He, I’m sure, figures he has many servants. A Scottie, he’s