The CAT scans showed nothing. The MRIs, nothing. The X-rays, nothing. But Sarah Broome never went back to work.

Sarah Broome, married three times. No kids. She gets a little Social Security. A little company settlement money every month. She gets twenty-five milligrams of OxyContin to treat the chronic pain that follows her spine from her brain and radiates down both arms. Some months, she'll ask for Vicodins or Percodans.

Not three months after her settlement, she moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors.

Right this minute, sitting here inside her shed, my right foot looks put on backward. The knee's got to be broken, the nerves and tendons inside twisted halfway around. Everything below that knee, numb. It's too dark to see, but where I sit smells cow-shitty. The slick feel of plastic must be bags of composted steer manure ready for her new garden plot. Leaning against the walls are a shovel, a hoe, a garden rake.

Poor Sarah Broome, right this minute, she's looking at her power tools. She's sick with the idea of sinking a skill saw into me. Instead of sawdust, the spinning blade spraying a wet rooster-tail of blood and flesh and bone. Well, that's if she has an extension cord long enough. She's reading the labels on paint cans, slug bait, cleaning fluid, looking for the skull and crossed bones. The green frowny face of Mr. Yuck. She's calling the local Poison Control hotline, asking how much barbecue lighter fluid a man would have to drink to die. When the poison expert asks why, then Sarah hangs up, fast.

How I know this is . . . ten years ago I was running kegs of beer between a distributor and too many little bars and taverns. These were places too small to have a loading zone, so you double-parked. Or you parked in the suicide lane, between lanes of fast traffic cutting past you in both directions. I humped kegs. I stacked cases of bottled beer on a handcart and waited for a gap in traffic big enough to run through. Always behind schedule, until, by complete accident, a keg rolled off the rack and creamed me out flat on the pavement.

After that, I got a place almost this nice. A rusted Winnebago motor home that wasn't going anywhere, parked next to a one-hole shithouse, along a wide spot in a gravel road through the woods. I had a four-banger Ford Pinto with a manual transmission to get me into town. A pension for being totally disabled, and all the time in the world.

The rest of my life, all I had to do is keep my car running. I stayed high on so much Vicodin that just taking a walk in the sun felt as good as any massage. As good as a massage with a hand job, even.

Just watching the birds at the birdfeeder. The hummingbirds. Putting out peanuts, stoned and laughing as the squirrels fight the chipmunks, it's a good enough life. The American dream of living without an alarm clock. Without having to punch a time clock or wear a damn hairnet. A dream life, where you don't need to ask some asshole's permission before you can go take a crap.

No, until this afternoon, Sarah Broome had nothing to do but read paperback books from the library. Watch the hummingbirds. Pop those little white pills. A kind of dream vacation that's never supposed to end.

What sucks is, crippled or not, you've got to at least act crippled. You have to limp, or hold your head stiff on your neck to show you can't turn it. Even with painkillers pulsing through you, this is the kind of play-acting that starts you feeling terrible. You fake any symptom long enough, and you'll start to hurt for real. You limp around, and then your knee really does start to ache. You sit around and turn into a big fat hunchback.

The American dream of leisure, it gets boring fast. Still, you're paid to be a cripple. Sitting with your television. Laying in a hammock, watching the damn animals. If you don't work, you don't sleep. Day and night, you're half awake, bored.

Daytime television, you can tell who's watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it's clinics for drying out drunks. Or it's law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it's schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith.

If you're watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You're a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot. After the first couple weeks, being a sloth sucks ass.

You don't have the money to travel, but it doesn't cost anything to turn a shovelful of dirt. Work on your car. Plant a vegetable garden.

One night, after it's dark, a cloud of mosquitoes and deer flies are thick around my porch light. Me in my Winnebago with a mug of hot tea and some Vicodin in my bloodstream, I look up from my book to watch the bugs outside the windows. That's when the sound comes. It's a man's voice, shouting from somewhere in the dark, back up in the woods.

It's somebody shouting for help. Please. Help. He's slipped and hurt his back. Fallen out of a tree, he tells me.

In the middle of the night, here he's dressed in a brown suit with a mustard-yellow vest, wearing brown leather wingtip shoes, and he says he's bird-watching. A pair of binoculars hang from a strap around his neck. That's what they teach in correspondence school. If you're caught by the suspect, say you're a bird-watcher. I offer to carry his briefcase. Then we each put an arm around the other and run a slow, slow, three-legged race back toward the porch light of my motor home.

Almost there, the man sees my old shithouse and asks, can we stop a minute. He really needs to drop a load, he says. I help him inside the door.

Soon as the door's shut and his belt buckle hits the wood floor, I pop open his briefcase. Inside is a lot of paper. And a video camera. The side of the camera pops open, and inside is a tape. When I pick it up, when I snap the camera shut, the tape starts to play by itself, and the little viewing screen lights up.

On the screen, a little man takes a rear wheel and tire off a beat-up old Pinto.

It's me, rotating my tires. Me, knocking lug nuts loose and jockeying the wheels off and on my car.

Nothing else. No bird-watching. After a little buzz of static, the screen shows a tiny version of me, shirtless and lifting a full tank of propane. I carry the tank to the front of the Winnebago, where I change it for an empty.

If Sarah is anything like me, right this minute, she's picking a bread knife out of a kitchen drawer. If she gives me a few Vicodins in a glass of water, maybe she could knock me out. Right now, she's looking close-up, almost cross-eyed, at the serrated edge of the knife, at how sharp it is. It's so easy to section a chicken, cutting a throat couldn't be worse. She's maybe put an old towel over my face, that way she could pretend I was just a loaf of bread. Just slicing bread, or a meatloaf, until she sawed through a vein, then the heart still pushing blood, the big surge after surge after surge of blood. Right this minute, she's putting the knife back in the drawer.

It could be she's got an electric carving knife she got for a wedding present, half her lifetime ago, and she's never used. It's still in the fancy printed box with the little pamphlet about how to carve a turkey . . . bone a ham . . . slice a leg of lamb.

Nothing about how to dismember a detective.

What you have to consider is, maybe I wanted to get caught.

Mean evil me, spying on poor Sarah Broome and her family of cats.

What you have to consider is, maybe she wanted to get caught. We all need a doctor to yank us out of our perfect womb. We piss and moan, but we appreciate God kicking us out of Eden. We love our trials. Adore our enemies.

In case Sarah Broome is close by, I yell, “Please, don't beat yourself up over this . . .”

There's no lock to keep somebody inside a shithouse, so I wrapped a rope around the whole thing, three times, tight, and tied a triple granny knot. Inside, the man was grunting, dropping his mess into the hole he sat on. Slapping the mosquitoes and deer flies that swarmed up from the dark, he was too busy to hear me tie the knot and take his briefcase into my motor home for a little look.