by Wally Lamb
I told her I’d gotten dropped off. “Had an accident last night,” I said. “Totaled my truck.” Her eyes said nothing. My well-being barely registered a blip on her radar.
She walked to the far end of the porch and stood there for a minute, her back to me. Was she crying? “As it turns out, this isn’t a very good day for you to be here,” she said. “Henry’s having a bad time right now. He’s not in very good shape.”
I stopped. Stared at her.
“He’s depressed,” she said.
Henry’s not in good shape? Henry’s depressed? Her saying that got me so mad, so fast, that the frozen screw I’d been working on creaked and started turning. Hadn’t she and Henry been running a three-week harassment campaign to get me over there? If I had a buck for every message those two had left on my machine . . .
“I’m not going to be here that much longer anyway,” I said. “I just have to pull the rest of these shutters, like I told you on the phone. Should be out of here in an hour.”
“It might be better if you just left now,” she said. “Can . . . can you just go?”
I reminded her that I’d wrecked my truck—that I couldn’t leave until my ride got there. God, I hated these people.
“All right,” she said. She turned and went back inside the house.
I was pissed. Hand or no hand, sore neck or not, I dragged and yanked and raised my extension ladder until it rested against the second story. One-handed, I gripped the side of the ladder and started to climb. One thing about working angry: it made the adrenaline pump. Even with all the trips up and down the ladder, I got those second-story shutters off faster than I had the ones on ground level. Gimp or not, rusted screws or no rusted screws, I was cooking. Working up a sweat. Not thinking, for once, about my truck or my brother or who had knocked up my girlfriend.
By the end of an hour, it had caught up to me, though. I’d removed and stacked all the shutters on both floors. Fuck that pair up on the third story, I thought. I made my good hand a visor and squinted up at that attic window, the little tar-roofed widow’s walk. Made more sense to just ring the goddamned bell and walk up through the house, anyway. Climb out onto that little porch from the attic window. But, hey, I wouldn’t want to disturb poor Henry while he was depressed, now, would I? Not when poor Henry was having himself such a bad day. He should trade places with me if he wanted to know what a bad day was really like. Trade places with my brother. That would cure his depression. As far as I was concerned, old Henry was living the good life.
I walked to the sidewalk and looked all the way down Gillette. Looked the other way. No sign of Ray. Buying that friggin’ neck collar was probably what was holding him up. Either that or they were way the hell behind at the doctor’s office. I had to get home—go over those notes for the hearing. Whatever the holdup was, I was probably going to kiss that nap goodbye.
I sat down on the Roods’ front wall. Looked back at those top floor shutters. I can give you a hand mornings. That’d be great: Putting up with Ray every day on the job on top of everything else. Listening to him tell me how he would have done something—how my way was all wrong. . . . Just a little numbness in my feet. That was all I needed: him up there on the ladder some day and he can’t feel his feet on the rungs. What was that numbness from, anyway? The diabetes? I hadn’t even asked him.
My hand was starting to throb like a bastard. Still no Ray. I reached into my shirt pocket, fished out the last of the pain pills. If I took it now, I’d be clear-headed by four o’clock. How was I supposed to go home and sleep if I was in this much pain? Sheffer would love that, though: me arriving for the big hearing stoned. If anyone’s going to convince the Security Board to release him, paisano, it’s going to be you. . . .
I looked back up at those third-floor shutters. Fuck it, I thought. I was just sitting around waiting, anyway. If I got that last pair of shutters down, then that’d be all of them. Maybe I’d bring ’em down to Willard’s and have them dip-stripped instead of scraping them all myself. Bite the bullet. I was already losing money on this job anyway. Screw it.
I flip-flopped my thirty-foot extension ladder over to the widow’s walk. It’d be easier than the second-floor windows, actually: just climb over that little railing and onto the porch up there. This isn’t really a very good day for you to be here. She had one hell of a nerve. . . . I climbed up, up—over the railing.
From up there, I could see all the way to the end of Gillette and out to Oak Street. See a little sliver of the river, even. Still no sign of Ray. I had to get home, go over those notes for the hearing a few more times. Grab a shower; I must be getting pretty rank by now. Doctor had said not to get the bandage wet—to wear a plastic bag or something. God forbid Joy should be home to give me a hand. . . . Hurry up, Ray.
The left shutter came off easily: the window frame was so rotted out, I could pull the hinge screws out by hand after the first few turns. It might be a bitch to get that shutter back in there tight, but getting it off was no problem. I lifted it, adjusting it as best I could for the climb back over the railing, the descent.
Something moved against my hand—a leathery flutter against my wrist. “Jesus!” I muttered, letting the shutter go. It banged against the railing, bounced, fell over the side.
I was watching it break apart on the ground below when a black blur flew back up at me. For half a second I thought, stupidly, that it was part of the shutter—shrapnel or something. Then I realized what it was. Saw it up close and personal: a godamned bat.
“Get out of here!” I yelled, shooing it away. Man, I hate bats; I’m scared of them. You ever want proof that there’s evil in the world, go look at a bat up close.
It circled back to where it had been sleeping, hovered, looking for the protection of the missing shutter. Then it landed on the top of the sill, three feet away from my face.
I stared at it and it stared back—cocked its little walnut-sized head and studied me. When it opened its jaws and hissed, I was close enough to see the pinkish-gray inside of its mouth, its little saber teeth. My heart chugged. I broke out in a sweat. . . . This little fucker could have just wasted you, I told myself. It could be you busted up on the ground down there, instead of that shutter.
It kept shifting its head, staring. Watching me. I reached into my tool belt and found some glazing points—started pelting them at it. It hissed again, flapped its wings, and flew to a nearby tree. “And stay there!” I said. Leaned against the house for a second to let the wooziness pass.
That’s when I saw him. Rood. He was standing there at the attic window, staring. Was he looking at me? Past me? It was scary, the way he kept looking. And there I was, too, my reflection in the glass superimposed over him. “What?” I said. “What do you want?” Thought: Get away from me, man. Stop staring.
He put the gun in his mouth. I stumbled back.
Fell.
The rush toward the ground was soundless. I could see them both—in slow motion and in a gleaming streak—my daughter and my mother. Angela spun in a kind of pirouette. She was wearing a pure white dress.
30
“Carry the corpse,” the monkey says.
“Which corpse?”
“He’s hanging from the cedar tree.”
And then I see him, the rope around his neck, his naked body swaying back and forth, back and forth. I approach him slowly, reluctantly, and he raises his arms as if for an embrace. His severed hand has grown back.
“But he’s alive,” I say.
“Kill him,” the monkey says. “Carry the corpse.”
My heart pounds. I’m afraid not to obey. When I step onto a rock, he and I are at eye level. I look away from his pleading gaze. Lift the bag over his head and pull. He bucks, flails, twitches. Then he’s still.
I cut him down from the tree. Carry him over my shoulder, stumbling toward the sound of spilling water. And when I see the water, my burden lightens and I realize it’s no longer my brother’s corpse I’m carrying. It’s the monke
y’s corpse.
“Forgive me,” it whispers, its lips moving against my ear. I stop, surprised that the dead can talk.
“Forgive you for what?”
The monkey sighs.
Miguel, the night nurse, pointed to the bag hanging from a pole next to my bed. “It’s not you, man,” he said. “It’s the morphine. Lots of patients freak out on this stuff.”
I held up my hands to look at them—the stitched one and the other. I had smothered my own brother—had felt life leaving him. “It seemed so real,” I said.
Miguel cupped his hand under the popsicle I’d been nibbling and held it in front of me. I took another bite. “That’s the kicker with hallucinations, right?” he said. “Is it real or is it Memorex? You ever do acid?”
I shook my head, awkwardly because of the neck brace.
“I dropped it a coupla times—back in my hombre days, before Wife Number Two got ahold of me and parked my butt in an LPN program. One time when I was tripping, I thought I was running with a pack of wild dogs. Thought I was turning dog, man. I could have sworn it was real. . . . Hey, you want any more of this? It’s getting a little drippy.”
I said no. Reached up and grabbed the chain bar suspended above my bed. Shifted my position an inch or two. “What’s this for, anyway?” I said, tapping the soft cast on my shoulder.
“Tore your trapezius muscle—caught a corner of the porch roof on the way down, I guess. I was talking to one of the EMTs that brought you in? This guy that goes to my church? He was telling me about it. Said they were working on you for a good five minutes before they realized they had the wrong guy. . . . Hey, how’s that catheter feel?”
“Better,” I said.
“You sure?” As he lifted the blanket and sheet to have a look, I raised my head. Looked down at my swollen, stapled leg, my purple eggplant of a foot. “Jesus, what a mess,” I said. Looked away and shuddered.
“Coulda been worse, man,” Miguel said. “Coulda been worse.”
According to Miguel, when the EMTs had arrived at 207 Gillette Street in response to Ruth Rood’s hysterical 911 call, they’d found me unconscious in the front yard, adrift on a pile of broken shutters. The medics made two incorrect assumptions: that I was Henry Rood and that the tumble I’d taken was the suicide attempt Mrs. Rood had been screaming about over the phone. My left leg was splayed beneath me; my foot was cocked at a right angle to where it should have been. My fibula had separated from its ball-and-socket joint, splintered, and was poking out of my leg. They had me sedated and were readying me for transport before someone finally deciphered Ruth Rood’s ranting about the attic, her husband, the gun he’d fired into his head.
I remembered the fall but not the landing. Flashes of the aftermath flickered back at me: a barking dog among the sidewalk gawkers, someone screaming bloody murder when they tried to take off my work boot. (Had the screamer been me?) I told Miguel I didn’t remember the pain. “That’s cause your brain acts like a circuit breaker,” he said. “When it gets too intense, a switch flips you unconscious.” He flipped his hand back and forth to demonstrate. “Computer this, computer that,” he said. “If you want high tech, give me the human body any day.”
Henry Rood had been pronounced dead on arrival at Shanley Memorial, Miguel said, although he’d probably died a second or two after he pulled the trigger. According to what Miguel’s friend had told him, the back half of Rood’s head was all over the wall and the floor. I arrived at Shanley shortly after Rood, I was told, in a second ambulance with a second trio of EMTs. Dr. William Spencer, chief of orthopedic surgery, was called away from a father-and-son golf tournament halfway across the state and arrived at Shanley somewhere around 6:00 P.M. It was he who made the decision that my shattered foot and ankle and the broken and dislocated bones of my lower leg required reconstructive surgery right away. That night. The operation began shortly after seven and lasted until sometime after midnight, by which time fourteen bones and bone fragments had been rejoined with screws and plastics and two curved steel plates. My leg had so much metal in it, Miguel said, it could probably conduct electricity.
I asked him how Mrs. Rood was doing—if he’d heard anything.
Miguel shrugged. “The funeral’s Monday. I seen it in the paper. Hey, you better excuse me for a minute. I gotta check on your buddy over there.” He tiptoed to the other side of the room and disappeared behind the drawn curtain.
When I closed my eyes, I saw Rood at the attic window, staring. He’d gone out angry, that was for sure. I’d read that someplace: when they leave that much of a mess behind, they’re getting even with the cleanup crew. Ruth, probably: he must have been evening some score with his poor, pickled wife. But why had he dragged me into it? Gone up there and given me the evil eye just before he did it? I started to shake, a little at first and then uncontrollably.
“Miguel? . . . Hey, Miguel?”
His head popped out from behind the curtain. “What’s the matter? You cold?” He told me he needed to check on a few things but that he could come back in a few minutes with another blanket. He left the room.
I closed my eyes and tried to unsee Rood. Wandered back, instead, to my morphine nightmare. The monkey, the cedar tree. . . . I’d strangled my own brother, for Christ’s sake: morphine or no morphine, what kind of a sick son of a bitch would dream up something like that? A wave of nausea passed through me. I grabbed for the plastic tray on my bedstand and missed, retching bile and melted popsicle all over the front of me.
When Miguel came back, he cleaned up the mess and changed my johnny. “How you doing now?” he said. “You feel better now?”
I managed a weak smile. “Can you . . . Are you real busy?”
“What do you need, man?”
“I was . . . I was wondering if you could sit with me. Stay with me for a while. I’m just . . . I . . .”
“Yeah, all right,” he said. “It’s a pretty slow night. I guess I can swing that.” He sat beside my bed.
“What . . . what day is it, anyway?” I asked. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
“It’s Saturday,” he said. He craned his neck around to see the clock in the corridor. “1:35 A.M.”
“Saturday? How can it be Saturday?”
“Because yesterday was Friday, man. You been in and out of it for a couple days now. More out than in, to tell you the truth. That first night you came in here, you were one of the most out-of-it dudes I ever seen at this place. Kept trying to get off the bed, yank out your IV. That would have been something, huh? You getting out of bed and trying to walk on that foot? Between the surgery and the Percoset and then the morphine drip, you were—”
It began to sink in: I had never made it to Thomas’s hearing. I’d blown it for my brother. “What . . . what’s the date?”
“The date? Today? November the third.”
I saw Thomas, the bag over his head. I grabbed hold of the bed railings and tried to raise myself up. “I’ve got to use the phone,” I said. “Please. I’ve got to find out what happened to him.”
He looked at me as if I were hallucinating again. “What happened to who?”
“My brother. Did you hear anything? About what happened to him?”
Miguel shrugged. “I heard about your truck. I didn’t hear nothing about your brother. Why? What’s the matter with him?”
I told him it was too complicated to go into—that I just needed to make a call.
“Who you going to call at one-thirty in the morning, man? Look, you’re a little disorientated, that’s all. It happens when you been laying in bed for two, three days. You call somebody this time a night, they’re gonna come down here and bust your other foot. You ain’t thinking, man. You got to wait till morning.”
Before, I might have balked. Might have jumped all over him. But I had nothing left to fight with. I felt helpless, overwhelmed. I burst into tears.
“Hey, hombre,” Miguel said. “Come on. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s the morphine.” He re
ached over and took my hand. I could call whoever I wanted in the morning, he promised. If he was still on, he’d dial the number for me himself. He held my hand until the shaking subsided.
Miguel said he had worked a double shift the night before. Had met my family. He asked if my brother was the tall guy who’d been here with my father and my wife.
He’d visited me? Thomas? Had they released him, then?
“Did he . . . We’re twins,” I said. “Did he look like me?”
Miguel shrugged. “This guy was tall, a little on the stocky side. He had dark hair like you, but I wouldn’t say he looked like you. He kept talking about how he was going to be in some movie.”
I closed my eyes. “That’s my friend,” I said. “Leo.”
Had he just said my wife had been there? I had no recollection of visitors.
“I seen that guy someplace. I just can’t remember where. Is he really going to be in a movie, or was he just b-s-ing me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My . . . You said my wife was here?”
He nodded, his face breaking into a grin. “Hey, if you don’t mind my saying so, that’s one fine-looking woman you got there. And you and her got a kid on the way, right? Beginning of May? She was telling me all about it.”
Joy. It was Joy who’d been here. Not Dessa.
“Hey, just think: by the time your kid gets out of the oven, you’ll be back on your feet, running around good as new. Changing diapers and everything.”
I closed my eyes again. Suppressed another shudder.
“Me and my wife just had a kid last month,” he said. “Our third. Plus I got a daughter from my first marriage. Blanca. Four kids in all. Blanca’s nineteen already. I can’t even believe it sometimes.” He took out his wallet and showed me their pictures.
A kid in the oven . . .
“Hey, come on, buddy,” Miguel said. “You gotta think positive. Look. That’s my wife right there.” His thumb tapped a stocky, long-haired brunette at the center of a family portrait. Even through the blear of my tears, I was taken by the directness of her gaze back at the camera. At me. I mumbled something about her being a nice-looking woman, too. “Yeah, and she don’t take no crap from nobody, either. Me, especially. She’s three-quarters French Canadian and one-quarter Wequonnoc. You don’t mess with that mix. Know what I’m saying?”