Jim himself hadn’t had much luck with women, unless you counted bad luck. He’d thought things were improving tonight. Before heading home after a wasted visit with his dad, he stopped at Plainwell Lanes, where he met a girl and bought her three wine coolers. She had a round, pretty face, a clear complexion that made him think she’d just rinsed and patted her face dry with a clean towel.
She said she lived outside of town and her friend had gone off with a guy, and so Jim offered her a ride. Twenty miles later, twenty miles farther away from Kalamazoo, it turned out she was living with her mom and dad in order to go back to school, and she kissed Jim goodnight lightly on the lips, as though he were some fucking prom date. It was a kiss-off, for sure.
The stink of gasoline helped Jim stay awake all the way to the first Kalamazoo exit. He was running on autopilot when he turned off the highway and when he continued through the intersection where they’d installed a new stoplight a few months ago. When the light turned red, he did not ease to a stop. He was almost home, and he did not want to sit and rot waiting beside the stinking paper mill for the light to turn green—hell, some black guys could jump out from under the bridge and rob you while you were waiting on that damn light. As Jim cruised through the intersection, red and blue lights flashed, as though the son-of-a-bitching cop had been sitting there all night just waiting for him.
Jim pulled to the side of the road and fastened his seatbelt in hopes the cop wouldn’t notice he hadn’t been wearing it, and he waited. Cops didn’t hurry—they sat back there running your plates for five or ten minutes, searching for a bench warrant or some shit. Cops got paid for being out there, and they didn’t care if you had other places to get to. If the cop searched his car, he’d find his dad’s shotgun in the trunk, but there was no law against that. Jim pulled out a cigarette and a packet of matches from Plainwell Lanes. A few years ago, wasting a Friday night at a bar with a girl was fun, but tonight the whole thing made him feel old. The guys at work used to go to bars with him, but now they sat home with their wives and girlfriends.
He held the book of matches up to the window to read them by the streetlight: a silhouette of three bowling pins on the front, and the girl’s phone number inside beneath her name, Stephie. He hadn’t realized she’d given him her phone number. She must’ve stuck it in his pocket when she kissed him. That was something, anyway; the girl wanted Jim to call her. When he struck the first match, most of the burning tip flew off, and what was left went out.
“Cheap-ass matches,” he said. He struck another and lit the cigarette. When his leg first began to burn, it felt merely like a confirmation that he had successfully lit his cigarette. It took a few seconds for him to feel the heat on his leg. With the cop’s lights blaring through his back window, he couldn’t make out exactly what was burning him. When the heat increased, he flinched and the cigarette between his lips fell into his lap and down between his legs. He pulled at his crotch to retrieve it, and only then registered the blue glow on his right leg. He slapped his thigh under the steering wheel in a failed attempt to snuff out the flame.
Finally, he unlatched the door handle, intending to jump out, but the cop, a short-haired white man who seemed eight foot tall, was standing there with a gun on him. He said, “Remain in the car.”
“Holy fuck,” Jim said.
“Don’t move. Don’t do anything stupid.” The cop seemed nervous. This was how people got shot, Jim knew, by making cops nervous, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Sir! My leg is on fire.”
“Open the door slowly.” The cop stepped back.
“You don’t understand,” Jim said. As he opened the door all the way, the flame on his leg turned from translucent blue to live orange. The vinyl on the steering wheel began to smolder and stink.
The cop stepped back. “Get out and roll. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Yes sir.” Jim wore his seatbelt so rarely that in his panic he tugged against the belt and grunted without even trying to unhook it.
“Get out of the car, man,” the cop said. “Hurry up. You’re burning. I can smell your damn flesh burning.”
Jim grabbed at the wrong side of his seat a few times before remembering where the latch was and unfastening it. He held up his hands and let himself fall onto the pavement, hoping to meet ice or snow to help put out the flame, but the road was clean and dry. He rolled onto his stomach and onto his back and pressed and patted his hands over the hole burned in his jeans, but still felt like he was on fire.
“You wouldn’t have been destroying evidence, would you?” said the cop, his gun still pointed at Jim.
“My leg, my hands,” Jim groaned. Already burned once from the coffee, his right hand now screamed as though the skin would slide off. “I’m burning up.”
“I’ll call a medic.” The cop backed slowly to his car, his gun still trained on Jim. The creases stood out on the cop’s pants, front and back. Probably some woman ironed them for him, probably some woman really loved this mean cop bastard.
In the ambulance, EMTs cut away one leg of what was Jim’s newest pair of Levis. Twenty-eight fucking dollars down the drain. Not that he could ever have worn them with the right thigh burned off, but on the way to the hospital, he focused on that loss instead of on his leg.
“We’re giving you something for the pain now,” said the emergency room doctor, who spoke with an accent. Maybe he was an Indian from India or one of those island countries. Jim searched for a name for what the man was, but he couldn’t come up with one. Dagos were Italians, weren’t they? Camel jockeys were guys from the Middle East. The guys at work would have had something to call this guy to put him in his place.
Within about twenty minutes of somebody shoving an IV line into the back of Jim’s wrist, his leg was feeling better, his hand soothed. Within the hour he was feeling relaxed, more relaxed than he had felt in a while. The next person attending him was a dark-eyed woman with a wide face; as she worked over him, he gazed into her eyes, and he felt almost good, thinking that a girl had kissed him and given him her phone number. When he next awoke, someone was bandaging his leg, and he heard a voice, which at first seemed soft, until it registered to Jim that it was a man’s voice.
“Good, you’re awake,” the man said. “I’m George. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit,” Jim said.
“I believe you.”
“I need a cigarette.”
“We can get you a patch.”
“I don’t want a damned patch. A patch is not the same as a cigarette.”
“You’ve been burned badly, Mr. Lobretto.”
“You’re not going to take skin off my ass, are you?”
“You may need skin grafts,” he said. “First you’ll need hydrotherapy.”
“What’s ‘hydrotherapy’?” Collecting each thought was a struggle against the medication.
“Hydrotherapy involves the application of medicated water, baths or showers. You’ll come to the burn center for daily treatments.”
“You want me to take a bath up here every day?”
“Mr. Lobretto, a burn like this can get infected, can even result in your losing the leg if you don’t take care of it.”
“How much is all this going to cost?”
“You can talk to the case worker about that.”
“I didn’t ask for charity,” he said. “I’ve got insurance. And you aren’t taking the skin off my ass.”
“We don’t have to decide on treatment right this minute.”
“I want to go home.” The comfort he felt at the notion of home had no relation to his apartment. Maybe he could stay at his dad’s house for a few days. Except that his dad probably wanted to be alone with his new wife. Probably they made love all the time, wrassling around together, all balled up roly-poly.
“You should watch me change your bandages so that you’ll be able to do it yourself when you do go home.”
“Why do I got to have a fucking male nurse?
Where’s the woman who was here?”
“I’m a physician assistant, a burn specialist.” The hospital lights blazed, and the man looked clean, as clean as a priest, naked in his cleanness. Jim’s face hadn’t been scrubbed like the PA’s since he was a boy and somebody else had washed him (an aunt maybe, his mother’s sister?) before going to church. A guy like this couldn’t possibly understand a man like Jim who poured molten metal, a guy who operated slow-moving mechanical arms that dipped red-hot iron into etching vats. This guy was probably a fag, a friend of the lesbians upstairs from his apartment.
“I want to get out of here,” Jim said.
“We’d like you to stay in the hospital for twenty-four hours.”
“You can’t make me stay.” Jim didn’t know why he wanted to leave, maybe because this guy wanted him to stay. Maybe because he wanted a cigarette.
“That’s right, we can’t. But you’ll have to sign a paper saying you’re leaving against our advisement. You’re at risk of infection if you don’t come back, and you’re going to be in pain. The morphine is blocking you from feeling the full extent of it right now.”
“Can’t you give me medication to take at home?”
“I can give you the first pill, and then you’ll have to fill a prescription. It won’t feel like this though. With the Vicodin you’re going to know you’re in pain.” The PA dressed the wound while Jim watched, but the morphine was making it difficult to feel the connection between the leg and himself. When he gazed directly at the wound, it seemed as if he were looking into a big wet torn-up eye.
The PA wrote on his chart and asked, “By any chance, do you want to see a priest?”
“Why the hell would I want to see a priest?”
“Your chart says you’re Catholic,” the man said. “It says you were born here in this hospital.”
“I don’t need a priest.”
“I’ll put some salve in a little tub for you to take home,” the man said. “But like I showed you, you should never touch the open wound, just salve the skin around it to keep it from tightening up. I’ll need to see this burn in forty-eight hours. I’ll give you a paper that describes what you need to do and contains information about hydrotherapy.”
Jim Lobretto thought the medical system was designed to make you feel dumb and helpless.
And if he hadn’t had insurance, this burn fag nurse and all the rest of them wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep him here.
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” Jim muttered, forgetting and then remembering he’d already established that he was leaving.
“No, we can’t.”
Jim signed papers and accepted the appointment card for treatment at nine a.m. Monday, and noticed the PA gave him a prescription for only two days’ worth of Vicodin. Jim listened as best he could to the directions about changing the bandage once a day. If the guys from work were here, he would have made some kind of joke about the situation. He had earned a reputation with them for being tough by resetting his own broken finger on the work floor a few years ago; Jim had been so freaked out at seeing the way his finger was bent that he yanked the thing straight without thinking. His boss had driven him to the hospital, and he’d never let on how scared he was. With those guys you had to have something that was especially tough about you, and Jim had never been in jail or the marines like the rest of them.
He limped to the lobby of the hospital and was startled by a fountain of the Blessed Mother, gazing toward heaven, her arms outstretched. He reached out and dipped his burned hands in that fountain to cool them, but pulled them out when he saw the receptionist watching him.
The sun had already risen. As he limped, stiff-legged, a half mile to where his car still sat on the shoulder of the road, discomfort gradually gave way to something much worse. He found under his windshield wiper a twenty-dollar parking ticket and threw it into the back seat. Despite the cold, Jim Lobretto was sweating. He got into his car by stretching his right leg into the passenger seat area, and he drove by operating both pedals with his left foot. Arranging his leg that way hurt enough that he took the single pill the doctor had given him. Traffic was light early on a Saturday morning, and nobody noticed when he ran a stop sign by accident. His car stank of burned vinyl and plastic from the scorched steering wheel. Smoke had darkened the windshield above the driver’s side. Although the PA had said his hand didn’t need wrapping, it stung as he clutched the wheel.
Once home, he positioned himself carefully on the couch in his first-floor apartment, and the combination of the pill and what was left of the morphine gave him a few hours during which the pain was bearable, but gradually his knee and thigh began to burn as though still on fire. He limped into the kitchen, reached up over the sink and found an unopened pint of Jack Daniels. He drank the whole thing and passed out.
He awoke on his back, throat parched, with the bright sunlight drying him. Heat rose through the bandage on his leg, rose from inside his body, and he wondered if maybe the doctors hadn’t been able to put out the flame, which was still melting the flesh, radiating heat out from the bone.
The light meant it must be afternoon. He managed to limp to the sink by hopping on one foot, holding the burned leg stiff. He drank a pint jar of tap water, paused to catch his breath, and drank another pint, more water than he’d drunk in a long time. Outside the kitchen window were four different kinds of bird feeders hanging in the trees above the complicated birdbath fountain the lesbians had put out there, with the little stream running down into a pool and the word peace written on the side. A few times when he was drunk he’d considered going out there and pissing into it, but now that trickle of water suggested a promise of comfort— hydrotherapy. The whiskey had been a mistake, he now knew. He wouldn’t drink any more whiskey—he’d drink beer instead. Beer would keep him hydrated, like hydrotherapy. He took a cigarette out of the pack on the counter, but there were no matches within his reach, and he couldn’t imagine turning on the gas burner and leaning close to the flame.
He went into the living room, where he sat on the couch near the heating duct and slowly unwound the bandage from mid-thigh to knee and pulled up the gauze. What he saw made him sick.
He replaced that same gauze and wrapped it back up without putting the salve around the edge.
Then he wondered if he’d wound the bandage too tightly, because his leg ached and burned worse than before.
Jim kept planning to go out to the pharmacy and get the Vicodin and to use the pay phone to call his dad, but his body was sluggish. Then it got to be night, and he realized the pharmacy would be closed, which meant he’d have to suffer until Sunday noon. The closest thing he could find in his cupboard to painkillers were some over-the-counter sleeping pills, so he took four and lay in a dull, nightmarish stupor in his bed. Although the pain didn’t let up, time eventually did pass in the cool darkness, and he kept thinking back to the wound he’d glimpsed only for a second. The puffy edges and the wet, raw center had made him think of women’s eyes when they cried.
As he lay there, he heard whispers filtering down from upstairs, and he thought a woman’s voice said, “Jimmy Jim-Bo,” as his mother used to call him when he was tiny. His father said those memories were his imagination, that he couldn’t have remembered his ma, who left when he was three and died two years later, but he was sure he knew her voice. He got out of bed and limped back to the couch, nearer the heating duct so he could hear the women upstairs. When Jim had first moved in, he had invited the women to share some barbecued sausages with him, and the bigger one had told him they didn’t eat meat. Once, though, he had given the smaller gal a beer, and she had accepted it and stood with him drinking it in the backyard, beside the birdbath fountain.
Jim stared up at the ceiling panels. He wished there were cool breezes in his apartment, birds flying around and creating currents with their wings. He wished he were surrounded by soft material that barely touched him, bandages made out of silk or flower petals. That girl had kisse
d his lips so lightly outside her house, and she had tasted sweet, like fruit or flowers. He could call her number and explain what had happened, and she would say that the pain must be unbearable, and he’d say it wasn’t that bad. He found his hacked-off jeans on the floor and searched the pockets for those matches, but the pockets were empty—the stuff must be in that plastic bag they’d handed him at the hospital. He was pretty sure he’d carried the bag to his car. Or maybe the matches had burned up or fallen onto the road with him. Outside, the sun was rising, making the gauzy clouds appear pink like rare-cooked meat.
When someone knocked at the door, his clock said 10:30 a.m. It was a miracle, he thought, the women upstairs had come to help him. Standing up made his leg erupt with heat, and his eyes watered. He stood still for a moment to let the pain subside, but it didn’t subside. Maybe the women would bring him food or get his medication for him. He limped to the door and opened it to find two black women in long skirts and winter coats, with their shoulder-length hair neatly formed into white-lady hairdos. They were turning away, but when he opened the door, they turned back to him, and he felt a great disappointment that they were strangers and that they were black.
“We’d like to talk to you about the word of the Lord,” said the first woman gently and glanced at the other woman for reassurance. They both stared at his leg. Then Jim remembered that he was clad only in boxer shorts. He saw that yellow fluid had seeped through his bandages.
“It’s not piss,” he said. “I’ve been burned. Badly burned.” A few tears fell from his eyes, in relief at telling someone.
“We’ll come back another time,” said the second woman, who was younger.
American Salvage Page 7