What Dies in Summer

by Tom Wright

  I knew things were going to get worse now but there was no good way to go from here, so I got my chin down and my elbows in and moved forward. Jack was just watching me with a little smile, waving me in.

  Then something suddenly changed in me. Everything went red and started happening in slow motion, the universe shrinking down to a bloody target with Jack’s grinning face right in the center of the bull’s-eye. I felt weightless and unreal. Without thinking about it or even knowing I was going to do it, I gave him my best imitation of his own head-and-shoulder fake and threw my right hand as hard as I could. I wanted the punch to land, wanted to destroy that face more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

  And I did nail him. His head snapped backward and the jolt shot up along my arm to my shoulder and neck as he staggered a couple of steps to the side but didn’t quite go down.

  It was absolutely the best punch I could possibly hope to throw, much less land, but there was Jack, still on his feet. He got his balance back and shook his head again. A trickle of blood started down from one nostril toward his mouth. As I looked at him, things began to change back to their normal colors and I tried to catch my breath. Jack gave me a tight smile and said, “Pretty good shot.” But he was white around the lips and a muscle roped up in his jaw.

  He started dancing on his toes again, this time watching me more carefully. He did a little shuffle and sidestep and from the other end of the universe I heard Mom saying, “What the hell’d you do to him this time, Jack?”

  I opened my eyes and tried to get up but couldn’t. Mom’s voice echoed around in my head, not seeming to have anything to do with me. She was kneeling beside me, bending down to inspect my face. I could smell her cigarette and her flowery perfume as she put her hand on the grass by my head to balance herself. Above her the light coming through the leaves moved and sparkled in her golden-brown hair.

  She looked back at Jack, who was lighting a cigar. His gloves were nowhere in sight. “For chrissake, his eye is swollen almost shut!” she said.

  “Just sparring a little,” he said. “He walked into one is all. He’s fine.” He looked at me. “Arncha, Jim?”

  Nothing seemed to have any connection with anything else.

  “Whagga,” I said.

  Mom helped me sit up. My gloves were gone.

  “Oh, baby,” said Mom. “You’re just a mess. Here, let me clean up your face a little.” Shaking back her hair, she took a tissue from her purse and wiped blood and sweat away from my mouth and the side of my nose. It felt like my arms and legs belonged to somebody who wasn’t here at the moment.

  “Guess I coldcocked him pretty good at that,” Jack said, taking a drag from his small cigar. “Need to learn to hold back a little more.”

  “Hey, Mom,” I finally managed to get out, my tongue slow and thick. “We’re boxin’.”

  “Yeah, I know, hon.” She gave Jack another look. “Jack’s quite the athlete. Are you okay now?”

  “Sure,” I said, swallowing the blood in my mouth.

  Jack said, “Where you been, sugar?”

  “Don’t start, Jack,” Mom said. She pulled me up.

  “Just saying,” Jack said. “Reasonable question to ask, man wants to know where his lady’s been.” He tilted his head to pop his neck. “You telling me there’s something wrong with that?”

  I managed to stand up. “Go onna Gram’s now,” I said to the ground.

  “Oh, honey, you must’ve wondered where your mama was when you needed her, didn’t you?” Mom said, kissing me on the cheek.

  “No ma’am,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything else. She stood by Jack as I stumbled back toward the driveway to go around front and get my bicycle.

  “I’m just asking you what’s wrong with the question,” I heard Jack say before the corner of the house came between us.

  On my way back to Gram’s I threw the fish to the dog and pedaled away as he snuffled at them in the gutter.

  10 | Finger-pointing

  AS I WALKED in the front door I saw L.A. standing on the little blue granny rug in front of the record player, listening to Sam Cooke with her eyes closed and her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, moving slightly with the music: “Wonderful World.”

  Her not turning around meant that as always she knew it was me who’d come in. Gram was in the kitchen at the sink and the house smelled of roasting chicken, rare for us in the summertime and one of my all-time favorites. But I had no appetite and wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Gram and L.A. what had happened to my face. On top of that, my head felt funny.

  Coming back from Mom’s I’d stopped to throw up, and I started toward the bathroom now to brush my teeth and splash some water on my face. But before I got there the floor tilted up at me and I was watching small fish that jumped in every direction and became silvery coins rolling away in the dark. There were millions of them. I was desperate to keep them from getting away but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my hands on even one.

  Then I realized that somewhere some kid was calling for his mother in a wailing voice that rose and fell in a weird, tragic rhythm. All around me the red light was back, except this time it was flaring on and off and back on again. Everything shifted and bounced and roared. I was going somewhere in a hurry. L.A.’s girl-breath was in my face and I heard her yelling at me down a long echoing tunnel, “Be all right, Biscuit!” She was nose to nose with me, gripping me by the ears. “You hear me?” she screamed. “You gotta be all right!”

  There was more noise and movement and different colored lights and pretty soon somebody else’s breath, a man’s this time, and a moving white light in my eyes.

  “Okay,” said a masculine voice. “I’d call that equal and reactive. Tracking looks pretty normal, conjunctivae nice and pink, no apparent fractures.” A long-fingered hand clipped the light back into the pocket of a short-sleeved green doctor shirt. “Can you hear me okay, tiger?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I’m Dr. Colvin. What’s your name?”

  “Biscuit.”

  “Biscuit, huh?” He looked at Gram, who nodded.

  “His father called him that,” she said.

  “What’s your last name, Biscuit?” asked the doctor.

  “Bonham.”

  “Who was it you wanted to kill?”

  “What?”

  “You were talking about killing somebody. Sounded pretty serious about it too.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But of course I did, and a wave of angry memories broke over me, followed by a chilling remorse that paralyzed my tongue and drenched me with shame.

  He raised his hand, saying, “Okay, how many fingers do you see, Biscuit?”

  I focused my eyes. “Two,” I said.

  “Stick out your tongue for me,” the doctor said. I did. “Feel this?” he asked, running his fingernail down one side of my face and then the other.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He took off my shoes and socks and scratched the bottoms of my feet with his pen, seeming to be very interested in how my toes reacted.

  “Can you sit up for me, please?”

  “Yes sir.” As he was helping me up I noticed he smelled like Lifebuoy soap.

  He looked at my eyes again and said, “I need to see if you can keep your balance now, Biscuit.” Behind him I could see L.A. and Gram and a nurse with black hair and a little pointed white hat.

  I stood up. The floor looked kind of far off.

  “Any dizziness? Sick to our stomach?”

  “No sir.”

  “How about your noggin—that hurt?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Where?”

  “All over.”

  He had me turn and tilt my head and close my eyes and touch my nose and tell him what day it was. “Can you smell anything?” he said.

  “Yes sir. It smells like alcohol in here.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You smell clean.”

 
; He smiled at me and said to the nurse, “Cranials are intact and we don’t seem to have any decerebration or anything going on with the brain stem. Level of consciousness is continuing to come up. I don’t think we’re dealing with any kind of acute bleed here but let’s go ahead and get a skull series anyway, just to be on the safe side.” He looked back at me. “How’d this happen to you, Biscuit?”

  “Uncle Jack did it!” blurted L.A. There was a hot look in her eyes as everyone turned to her. She put her hands in her pockets and looked away.

  “We were boxing,” I said.

  “That’d be you and Uncle Jack?” said the doctor with a glance back at L.A. She nodded. I nodded too but immediately stopped myself and put a hand on my head to settle the pain.

  “So the two of you, you and Uncle Jack, were boxing and you happened to get knocked out. That right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Any idea how long you were out?”

  “No sir. My gloves were off when I came to. Mom was home.”

  Dr. Colvin didn’t seem to like the sound of that at all. He peeled back my eyelid for another look, saying, “And Jack, did he do anything to help you, call for help or anything?”

  “No sir, I don’t think so.”

  The doctor nodded, but he wasn’t happy.

  “You look like maybe a welterweight to me—that about right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” he said. He clapped me on the shoulder and turned to the nurse. “Let’s get this slugger admitted, make sure we don’t have any slow leaks.”

  The nurse nodded.

  “Did you say there was already a chart?” said the doctor, and she nodded again, handing him a thick folder.

  “Wow,” said Dr. Colvin, looking at me over his little glasses. “Not your first visit with us, I see.” He took the file and sat on a small wheeled stool to read it.

  “Spiral fracture, left humerus, three ribs, different dates,” he said to himself as he flipped through the folder, his neck gradually reddening from the collar up. “Mandible, possible bruised spleen. Jesus Christ, who’s been seeing him?” He checked. “Ferraro,” he said, looking up and closing the folder. “New York asshole.” He breathed for a while as he looked at the nurse. “This goes back over three years,” he said to her, his teeth showing. She nodded as if she were somehow responsible. “Get him an ice pack,” he said.

  “Yes, Doctor.” The nurse squeaked away along the polished floor of the hall in her rubber-soled shoes.

  Dr. Colvin gave L.A.’s shoulder a pat as he passed her, then walked off toward the nursing station. A couple of nurses glanced up at him and moved out of his way. We heard the front doors open and saw Mom and Jack coming in. Jack was now dressed in cowboy boots, starched jeans and a yellow polo shirt. Mom was wearing her weekend-shortest black skirt and high heels, her hair pinned back on one side like an actress. Dr. Colvin saw them heading toward the examining room I was in and stopped as they approached. They stopped too.

  “Might you be the parents?” he said.

  Mom said, “Yes. How is he?”

  Dr. Colvin looked Jack up and down, then turned back to Mom as he answered. “He’s had a concussion. Right now it doesn’t look too serious, but he’s going to have to stay with us at least until tomorrow. We’ll need to see how he does over the next twelve hours.” He moved off again toward the nursing station as they talked, still shooting looks at Jack, and they trailed along with him. I lost track of what they were saying. The nurse came back with the ice pack.

  L.A. poked me in the chest with her finger. “Why the hell’d you have to go over there?” she said. “You’re just a dumb”—jab—“fuckin’ ”—jab—“numb-nuts, y’know that?”

  “Lee Ann,” said Gram.

  This kind of stuff was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted sympathy. I looked at Gram, saying, “Think they’ll let me have some aspirin, Gram?” I balanced the ice pack on my head with one hand.

  “Shit-for-brains,” said L.A. Gram fired a look at her, which I knew would shut her up for maybe five seconds.

  “I don’t know, James,” said Gram, moving over to help me keep the ice pack on my eye and cheek. “They might not, because it’s your head that got hurt.”

  “Nothing but a flesh wound,” said L.A. “A fat wound.”

  I could tell she was starting to cool off. Through the glass I saw Dr. Colvin talking into the phone and watching Mom and Jack, who had now moved into the waiting area, Jack slouching down into one of the green plastic chairs, cracking his gum. Then the doctor turned away from them with the phone still at his ear and said something else, punching three holes down through the air one after another with his finger as he talked.

  Mom got a cola from the machine against the waiting room wall and walked over to us. “Hey, honey,” she said. “Hi, Mom. How ya doin’, Lee Ann?”

  “Hi, Auntie Leah,” said L.A., taking a step back.

  Mom glanced back at Jack, then took my hand, saying, “How are you, baby?” She ran her hand through what she could reach of my hair. “I’ve just been so worried about you.” She took a sip from her drink.

  “I’m pretty good,” I said, noticing that although Mom did look sort of worried, most of her attention was directed back at the nursing station and waiting area.

  As the nurse was getting me into a wheelchair to go upstairs, a big cop in a brown uniform and a sad-looking woman in a dark dress suit came in through the main doors. The woman had several manila folders in her arms. Dr. Colvin motioned them over. As he talked he tipped his head toward Jack, who was now paging boredly through an old National Geographic. I couldn’t catch what Dr. Colvin was saying from this angle but it looked like he was angry at the woman, who kept nodding along with his words.

  Then the cop thumped his palm on the counter, nodded to Dr. Colvin and stuck a kitchen match in his teeth as he walked over toward Jack, who had stood up when he saw the cop eyeing him.

  “Say, podnah,” said the cop, his voice carrying clearly. “You Jack Ardoin?”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, hitching up his belt.

  “Cajun, right?”

  “What about it?”

  “Y’know, I’m thinkin’ I might already be acquainted with you,” the cop said as the match traveled slowly over to the middle of his mouth and then back. “Wrecker service and repo lot offa Harrison, id’n it? You and that joker with the glass eye, what’s his name?” Now that they were standing face-to-face you could see the cop had at least fifty pounds and five inches on Jack, and he wasn’t giving him any room. Jack had to crook his neck to meet the cop’s eyes.

  “Bailess,” said Jack.

  “Yeah that’s it, Lester Bailess. I do remember y’all. Old Lester’s uglier’n a Arkansas hairball, ain’t he? Scratches his ass all the time—wouldn’t doubt but what he’s got pinworms. Went up for something a few years back too, if I remember right. Lessee, what was it, forgery? No, wait, it was messing with little girls, wudden it?”

  Jack swallowed. There didn’t seem to be any need for an answer.

  “Oh, well,” said the cop, waving the subject off. “Tell you what let’s do, Jack. Let’s you and me come to the altar here for a minute.”

  The sorrowful woman took Gram and L.A. away to talk. I couldn’t remember seeing her before, but it looked like they all knew each other already. As the nurse started to roll me away I could still see the cop talking to Jack, his voice now too low and soft for me to make out what he was saying. He’d laid his big hand on Jack’s shoulder and seemed to be massaging and pinching the muscles at the base of Jack’s neck as he looked down at the tip of Jack’s nose and talked around the match in his mouth. He shook his head and made a couple of weed-cutting strokes in front of Jack’s face with his finger, then put the end of the finger against Jack’s breastbone. Jack had stopped chewing his gum and turned white around the lips but didn’t say anything, just nodded.

  As I watched them an understanding came to me. At that moment I knew that Jack w
asn’t seeing the cop at all anymore. He was blinking in a strange way, his hands opening and closing at his sides, and I knew he was looking up instead at his own drunken, raging father, wishing he could become invisible and doing his best not to piss his pants.

  Trying, with no success and no hope, not to be weak.

  11 | Dreamland

  LATER, lying on the bed in my room, unable to find a comfortable position, listening to the hospital noises, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, but I must have drifted off because when I opened my eyes Dee was there, talking quietly with L.A. in the doorway of the room. Then he was standing beside the bed with his hand on mine. Then Hubert Ferkin was there, saying something to L.A. about “that fuckin’ Jack.”

  The next time I woke up it was dark outside the window. I looked around the room. L.A. was curled up asleep in the armchair in the corner. There was an open Life magazine and an empty paper cup on the floor beside the chair. She was lying with her cheek on her hands, and I caught the light sound of her breathing among the other noises of the hospital. I was thirsty, but not quite enough to get up for a drink.

  And then I was crossing into and out of dreams, the long, involved, semi-real kind you sometimes get with painkillers, where it’s not always clear whether you’re thinking about something that happened or dreaming about it:

  It is early afternoon at Gram’s, me on the couch in front of the TV with nothing else to do, watching Daffy Duck harass Speedy Gonzales.

  But really mostly thinking about Diana.

  L.A. is sitting cross-legged in her blue jeans and an old T-shirt of mine at the other end of the couch with a bottle of cream soda in her hand and her nose in one of Gram’s magazines. Earlier I saw her sneak a drink of the Madeira Gram uses for cooking, so the cream soda could be for camouflage. The cover of the magazine, which is the kind that has recipes and pictures of beautiful kitchens and quizzes about how to tell if you’re a good wife, shows a lemon cake with one slice out of it, like all magazine cakes. It looks like it would taste great, but I can’t focus on that because I can’t stop thinking about Diana. The reason she is a problem for me right now is that I have a more or less major date with her coming up. Actually it’s a road trip, and even though her parents will be there too, I still have my hopes.