by Thom Jones
A dialysis fistula is a special tract placed under the skin of the forearm connecting an artery and vein to provide access to a dialysis machine. Without the surgically created fistula, a patient’s blood vessels would quickly break down altogether.
A few people on the midnight-to-four-A.M. shift still have jobs. They will sleep, read, or maybe engage in a little lighthearted banter while the techs hook us up. Occasionally someone will have a mini-nervous breakdown. Some of the dementia patients are screamers. There is an adjunct room in the back, but you can hear them anyhow. You wonder why they never get hoarse.
Mickey and I used to drive to the hospital emergency room on Friday and Saturday nights as well as nights of the full moon, since there are so many drunken automobile and motorcycle accidents, and drive-by shootings, random shootings, knifings, etc.
This is how Mickey got his new pancreas and kidney, from a twenty-five-year-old man, blood type O, cause of death unknown. Mickey wanted me to get them but the man’s organs were too big, or I’m just a little shrimp. I didn’t know it at the time but a donated organ has to fit or it won’t work right. Mickey takes prednisone so his immune system doesn’t destroy the new kidney and pancreas. He’s got a swollen face, but apart from the pills, he’s cured. He tells me over and over that he wishes I got the cure, not him. He said he would die to save me. He said he will protect me from any harm that might befall me and that I’m the only person he can trust.
When I turn seventeen we are driving to South Carolina and getting married. Dixie helped me pick out lingerie to wear on my wedding night. When we were at the laundromat she told me that my underwear was too “utilitarian.” Personally I think her thongs, bustiers, and other sexy garments are uncomfortable-looking. She badgered me into buying a black ruffled petticoat. It’s not the kind of thing any girl in Ulaanbaatar would ever put on.
I can fell an edible crow with a blowgun or drop a hefty vulture with a boomerang. I can practically start a fire under water. Ha-ha. Additionally I can handle .50-caliber machine guns, crush a villain’s trachea, or knife him through the heart even though I don’t like seeing people get hurt.
Hen Pierson sits in the geri chair across from my own. He was a diabetic at twelve and has been on dialysis nineteen years interspersed with two short-lived transplants. His albumin-creatinine ratio (ACR) at 3.4 is better than my own.
Hen is sixty-four. His brother was thrown in prison for murder, and while he sat many a long year in his death-row cell, the weight of his crimes weighed heavily upon him. Hen asked his brother for a kidney but his brother wrote back, “Why should I give you a kidney? Nobody ever gave me anything worth having.”
A week later Convict Pierson, age fifty-seven, was stabbed to death in the prison infirmary. Madame Rosa said she knew this was going to happen. “It was plain as day.”
She said she was glad it happened. I think her lumbago puts her in a bad mood sometimes. She is not a mean person. I have seen her read the Bible from time to time.
Hen came to treatment looking pretty down after the incident at the prison. He wanted the kidney, sure, but he loved his brother and he was always loaning him money or paying off lawyers, money he could have spent on himself.
He was wearing a suit that looked three sizes too big on him. He removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his left arm, exposing his arterial fistula.
The dialysis technicians were coming down the line, hooking everyone up, but when they got to Hen’s chair, I heard a terrible scuffling of shoes against the tile as Hen stumbled out of his chair and started to fall. The clinic nurse hurried down the aisle and helped him gain his balance. “Are you okay, Mr. Pierson?”
Hen’s face was white with fear. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m just going to go home.”
The long room fell dead with silence. When Hen realized he was the center of attention, he tried to put a good face on things and said, “I want to thank everyone for being a pal for so many years. I sincerely wish you all the best.”
Hen approached my geri chair, where I lay with my lower lip trembling. I was crying big tears, snot coming out of my nose, choking. I just couldn’t control my feelings. I was so ashamed. I didn’t want him to feel still worse. It felt like someone stuck a spoon in my heart and twisted it. Hen always looked after me. He knew me since I was little. We were solid. He gave me a hug and said, “Don’t you worry about a thing, sugar britches. Everything is going to be all right.”
I said the same stupid thing to him I always said after dialysis. “See you later, alligator.”
The ultrafilters on my machine took three liters of water out of me after that. I can’t urinate; the machine does it for me. Losing all that water at one go is a shock to your body. I had cramps, my knees hurt, and I itched everywhere, but I put on my winter coat and staggered to the bus stop. Dixie and Vera T. Bailey, who is slightly retarded but nice, offered me a ride home. I should have taken it. I should have gone back to the clinic. People actually get angry with you if you don’t ask for a stupid ride. They all seemed like mechanical people to me. Machines and robots like the damn Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, who was so fake he wrecked everything in that movie. What a bozo.
The next day Mickey and I bought a four-gallon BiOrb aquarium at the Goodwill. It looks just like a crystal ball. It came with a filter, bubblers, air stone, and magnetic algae cleaner. It was just too cool for words. I was so happy, I couldn’t wait to get home and fill it.
Mickey said, “Looks like Seven Cent got him a fifty-five-dollar crib.”
I hugged Mickey and kissed him until some Goodwill shoppers told us to “go get a room.”
“We don’t need a room, what we need is a mortgage,” Mickey said.
Ha-ha.
The BiOrb was the talk of treatment; at the clinic, twelve midnight to four A.M., I went on and on about it. Finally Dixie said, “Most of the stuff you get for Christmas is crap you don’t want, just stuff you have to get rid of, a used piano or something. An anvil.”
Ha-ha.
A young man named Jerome now sits in Hen’s geri chair. He’s tall, thin, and good-looking, from New York City. He’s got a crush on Dixie and won’t leave her alone. Dixie told him to zip his lip, but it only heightened his ardor. Pretty soon Dixie has a big crush on Jerome, and listening to their crazy infatuation talk was almost scary. They begin to sound like mental patients in their heated excitement. By that I mean they can be talking about normal everyday stuff and something insane will pop out like a jack-in-the-box. Pow!
Dixie started in with a story she read in the National Examiner about an ostrich that swam from Nelson Mandela’s prison island to Cape Town, South Africa.
“Why would an ostrich go to the trouble?” I said.
Dixie said, “I don’t know. To pull rickshaws or have chariot races. They got the legs for it.”
Jerome said, “An ostrich is no more than a giant chicken, too heavy to swim or fly. All they can do is the fifty-yard dash.”
Normal non-in-love people don’t talk at length about things no one else cares about, fighting over nothing. Mickey is the love of my life, but I have never broken into this sort of gibberish pining over him.
“Jerome, you are just an ignorant fool,” Dixie said. “All you do is lay over there acting gangster. You should go back to New York City and live in the ’hood again.”
“I was starting to like you, but now I have changed my mind,” Jerome said.
Dixie lay back in her chair. She said, “I’m right and you know it.”
I used a commonsense voice with levelheaded humor and said, “Let me get this straight, jobless ostrich braves howling winds, tenebrous currents in search of work, ha-ha—”
Jerome wheeled on me in a fury. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up? You aren’t funny. You think you are but you aren’t. I am not gonna lay here for four hours three times a week, twelve hours total not including the fucking goddamn Mickey Mouse of coming and going, only to get ha-ha’ed to death by you.”
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Super Huge Hudson, a dialysis technician and martial artist, came thumping down the aisle on his size-fourteen feet. He pinched a muscle on Jerome’s neck, paralyzing him. “I don’t want to hear another word out of you, Jerome, ever again, so long as you live. Do you follow? I am back there at my desk trying to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I don’t want to hear another word come out of your filthy mouth.”
Jerome didn’t so much as say “Ouch,” but later I could hear him sniffling. What was he thinking about? This fresh humiliation? The rigors of dialysis?
I felt bad for him, I who cried bitter tears across the aisle from him over Hen Pierson, who was never coming back. Hen walked out with a clear mind. He knew without dialysis he had a week, maybe ten days.
One night when Super Huge Hudson was out sick, I was lying in my geri chair, half flaked, and I could hear Jerome crying again. I said, “Jerome, I know that normally you are a nice person—”
“No I’m not!” he shouted back. He leaped forward at me with such blinding speed I thought he would rip the tubes to the fistula loose. Instead he half toppled his machine, screaming, “If I could get away with it, I would kill you right now, today!”
Dixie looked over and said, “Put a lid on it, dorkhead. You aren’t supposed to talk. Jesus H.”
I spoke to Jerome in low confidential tones. “Down deep inside you are a nice person, Jerome. Down deep you are wonderful and I love you.”
None of what I said was true, but why hit someone when they are down? I was freezing cold. It felt like a Jack Frost crew of half-inch Eskimos had infiltrated my machine with sacks of dry ice over their shoulders. My blood sugar was so low that I fainted amid a room of fellow sufferers. Dixie said, “That’s the third time this month.”
The skies cleared and it got colder. I went back to the Goodwill store, where I saw a coat that wasn’t too bad. More importantly it was lined with sheepskin. Like some hand-me-down from Cinderella. I like a coat with loose sleeves. I wear long sleeves even in the summer to hide my fistula. For knock-around activities I wrap an Ace bandage around it.
Damn! Look at the lovely bride wearing a black ruffle petticoat with a large conspicuous fistula bulging out of her arm. Isn’t she lovely? Ha-ha.
I was at the bus stop and along comes Hannes Smit, another type 1 diabetic, and he’s back to drinking again. He’s on the list for his third kidney. He won’t get one; he’s sixty-two years old. He was some kind of part-time janitor.
“You live in a dangerous neighborhood,” he said. “Let me walk you home.”
“Naw, the bus is good.”
Hannes said the whole world would end before dawn, and being gay, could he fuck me since he never had sex with a woman before? Tell me what chick hasn’t heard that come-on a thousand times?
We were on a long desolate street inhabited by empty shops and failed restaurants. Down the road I watched the approach of the yellow Union Street bus, bumping and squealing along on a leaf-spring suspension and razor-thin drum brakes, its headlights imperceptible.
I hopped on and moved to a seat with an open window. Outside Hannes was having an argument with the parking meter I had been hanging on to moments before. At least I knew that it was a parking meter.
I wanted the bus to get going but the driver sat behind the wheel trying to light a wet stub of a cigar, and outside Hannes had now turned his vitriol on a fire hydrant. Hannes wasn’t right in his mind from a stroke he had. Once he split his pants and I saw he was wearing aluminum foil underwear.
Mickey and me live kind of far out, and when I got off the bus the sidewalks were extra slick. I unlocked the iron gate surrounding the house and struggled up the incline to the front door. I could hear the low rumble of the diesel generator.
There were three access portals to the shelter, all sealed with blast-proof doors. There was one in the basement, another in Mickey’s shed, and the third out in the field covered with thorny blackberry bushes. Mickey called it “hiding in plain sight.”
He was down in the basement shoring up a section of a narrow tunnel. He crawled out and wiped the grime off his face and hands with a clean rag. He was sweating in spite of the cold.
I asked him why he had the generator going.
“Air movement,” he said. “I just put in a backup filter. Now we got two.”
A strong current of air came out from the tunnel, which was constructed with a lot of ninety-degree turns designed to block the forward path of nuclear radiation.
“As long as the generator is going,” I said, “I’ll go do twenty minutes of my show. I don’t feel like it, but I’ll do it anyway.”
“Have you sketched out a script?”
I shook my head no. “I know what I’m going to do.” He shrugged his shoulders. I knew he wanted to get back to his project. I went to the radio shack, where I had a hidden six-pack of lime Diet Coke. I had been sneaking one too many only to pay the piper on the ultrafilters. Back at the bus stop I swore up and down I would never do such a thing again. But I was so thirsty I guzzled an entire can and opened another.
I put on the radio headset and adjusted the microphone.
“Good evening, all and sundry. Welcome to another fabulous hour of Bomb Shelter Radio. This is Doomgirl and you are dialed in at 147.859 MHz. Hang on to your hats; this is going to be a truly fantastic show.”
The words coming out of my mouth were hollow, but I pressed on. “I’m sort of rattling things off the top of my head, but there is this young man, Jerome. I wish to dedicate tonight’s show to Jerome. I hope you are okay, buddy. I just want to tell you that you are not alone in thinking your stalwart plans will only vaporize and disappear in the weak rays of light. I have Mickey and Seven Cent and all you out there listening, but can someone tell me why life is so hard?
“I want to ask about loneliness and tears, about frustration, lots of frustration, about my head exploding, about how I ache for love, unconditional love that will last and last, about how hopeless I feel no matter how much I know, of how I will die soon, about how I have so few friends, about all the bad things I’ve done, about how afraid I am of dying in pain, about how I am such a disappointment to those who love me, about how slow I am, about blood coming out of me, about the places I go and don’t come back from, and really, Jerome, for all this the only thing I have to offer is the first tune of the evening, the Waltz in C-sharp Minor, op. 64, by Frédéric Chopin, the man who wrote poems with the piano, who wrote for Saturn’s icy rings and Ulaanbaatar, for Madame Rosa and beautiful Hen and Dixie in her thongs, here we go. I love you all out there in Radioland. Stay warm. Merry Christmas.”
Acknowledgments
On Thom’s behalf, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Richard Fisher, Don Fotheringham, Troy Young, Will Conroy, Braxton Pope, Lee Froehlich, Candida Donadio, and Patrick Keller for their inspiration and many, many years of loyal friendship. For their selfless devotion and canine companionship, eternal thanks to Boxer, Shelby, Manny, and Sugar. May you all look after one another in heaven. For their infinite patience and many, many prescriptions, thank you to Doctors Samuel Coor and William Bradford. Additional thanks to the Olympia Public Library for the ever-revolving supply of books (apologies for the snack stains), and thanks to the Olympia Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services for the countless hypoglycemic revivals. Finally, an enormous thank-you to Ben George of Little, Brown and Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency for this magnificent collection and remembrance of our favorite literary genius, husband, and father.
—Sally and Jenny Jones
These stories originally appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “Pot Shack” in Buzz; “Night Train” in Double Take; “Daddy’s Girl,” “I Need a Man to Love Me” (published as “Nights in White Satin”), and “I Want to Live!” in Harper’s; “The Black Lights,” “Cold Snap,” “Mouses,” “The Pugilist at Rest,” “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” “Superman, My Son,” “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” and
“A White Horse” in The New Yorker; “All Along the Watchtower,” “Bomb Shelter Noel,” “Diary of My Health,” “A Merry Little Christmas,” and “Pickpocket” in Playboy; “Mosquitoes” in Story; “Volcanoes from Hell” in Tin House; “Tarantula” in Zoetrope.
“The Pugilist at Rest,” “The Black Lights,” “I Want to Live!,” “Silhouettes,” “Mosquitoes,” and “A White Horse” were previously published in The Pugilist at Rest (Little, Brown and Company, 1993). “Cold Snap,” “Superman, My Son,” “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” “Pickpocket,” “Pot Shack,” and “I Need a Man to Love Me” were previously published in Cold Snap (Little, Brown and Company, 1995). “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” “The Roadrunner,” “A Run Through the Jungle,” “40, Still at Home,” “Tarantula,” “Mouses,” and “Daddy’s Girl” were previously published in Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (Little, Brown and Company, 1999).
“The Pugilist at Rest,” “I Want to Live!,” “Cold Snap,” and “Way Down Deep in the Jungle” were selected for The Best American Short Stories in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1995, respectively. “I Want to Live!” was also selected for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. “The Pugilist at Rest” and “Tarantula” each won the O. Henry Prize and were included in that anthology in 1993 and 1998, respectively.
About the Author
Thom Jones, who died in 2016, was a National Book Award finalist, O. Henry Award winner, and the author of three story collections: The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap, and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. He received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973 and thereafter worked an array of jobs, from copywriter to janitor, until he was published for the first time, in The New Yorker, in his midforties. His stories went on to be published in other magazines such as Harper’s, Esquire, Playboy, and Story and were reprinted numerous times in The Best American Short Stories. John Updike chose his story “I Want to Live!” for The Best American Short Stories of the Century.