Coronado

by Dennis Lehane

  “I’m okay.” Daniel can hear a defensiveness in the words he didn’t intend.

  “Who is it?”

  “Who is what?”

  The man’s eyes gesture over Daniel’s shoulder. “You’re here to see?”

  “My father,” Daniel says, not sure why.

  “He is sick, yes?”

  Daniel nods.

  “Of?”

  Daniel wishes the guy would take a step back. “I really don’t want to discuss it.”

  The man places a soft hand on his wrist. “It’s good to talk. Yes? I think it is. My mother. She is here.” The man’s head tilts in the direction of the ICU.

  “What is it?”

  “Pneumonia.” The man shrugs, as if indifferent to the particulars.

  Daniel says, “Open-heart surgery. My father. Things went wrong.”

  The man nods, and his eyes are tender. He holds out his hand. “My name is Michael.”

  Daniel shakes the hand. “Daniel.”

  “My mother?” Michael says. “She is old. Ninety-six. But she is my mother, you see? Ninety-six, a hundred and six, what difference? She is my mother. She is sick.” His hands shake slightly. “Your father?”

  Daniel takes a moment to compose himself. He’s beginning to believe his story, to feel his father is in there, hooked up to tubes, hoses, beeping boxes.

  “He’s seventy-eight,” Daniel says. “He’s a strong man.”

  Michael nods and claps his shoulder. “Now you must be the strong son. Strong for him. It is this way with things sometimes.” He leans against the wall. “Ah, the waiting.” He sighs and drums his fingers on his thighs.

  AT TWO IN the morning, he looks out another window and he can see them on the roof by his car. Two of them. One takes the night air. He leans against the grille of the Sequoia and smokes a cigarette.

  Daniel goes back to the ICU waiting room. It’s the waiting room for all the units on the floor. Someone must have figured that when it came to the loved ones, no S or C or N was necessary. At this point, it’s all ICU.

  He is alone except for a Brazilian woman who snores under the TV, pieces of the Sunday paper scattered at her feet.

  He has been here for four hours. Doctors and nurses come and go but pay attention only to the families of their own patients. Strange faces, it is assumed, are the problems of other nurses, other doctors.

  Daniel pulls a chair close to the one he’s sitting in. He does so carefully, quietly, so as not to wake the Brazilian woman whose name he has forgotten. She is here for her husband; he was in a car accident. Glass wedged in his throat, pieces of plastic from the underside of the dashboard infiltrated his stomach. His surgery has been going on for five hours. They have no children. He works two jobs, sends the money home to a brother. He and the brother hope to open a gas station in two years outside São Paulo. Then, she told Daniel, they will have children.

  Daniel places his feet up on the chair. He places his coat over his chest. He feels the need for sleep as he hasn’t since he was a child. He feels that today he has developed a kinship with grief and trauma and nurses’ asses. He feels it in his bones: love—for the pudgy woman who’d come from a party, for Michael, for the Brazilian woman, her nose pepper-spangled with dark freckles. He feels flushed with it and exhausted by it. But it’s a good exhaustion, earned, he feels.

  HE STAYS IN the hospital complex for a month.

  At some point, they tow his car. But they don’t leave. He sees Troy ten days in, wandering the main street, eyes glancing up at the windows. He rotates to a different hospital every day, returning to the first every seventh. He wanders into ICUs, SICUs, CICUs, even NICUs, which have nothing to do with brain trauma and everything to do with babies, some of them the size of peanuts as they lie under egg-shaped glass, huff into masks, writhe their fists and feet into the air.

  It is assumed he is a father, a husband, a brother, and while he has been all those things in his life, he has never felt those roles so proudly or direly as he does here.

  He watches the war in waiting rooms with the loved ones of the injured, the impaired, the damaged and broken and internally soupy, the brain-dead, the cancer-stricken, sickle-cell-stricken, terminally anemic, HIV positive, jaundiced, tumor-ridden. He hears stories of rare diseases with odd names. He hears of sudden flicks-of-the-switch in the cerebral cortex, the aorta, the left and right ventricles, the kidneys and pancreas. (And of these, he learns that more than anything, you should pray for a healthy pancreas. Once it goes wrong down there, modern medicine pretty much skips the rest of the show.)

  Take care of your colon too. Exercise, for God’s sakes. Stay away from the fried food, the cigarettes and liquor, asbestos.

  But there’s more—don’t cross streets where the noon sun is sure to hit the windshields bearing down on you. Don’t swim drunk. Don’t swim at night. Don’t swim. Don’t work on the electrical yourself. Don’t anally pleasure yourself with a Coke bottle (a rumor, true, going around one of the surgical wards, but a good one; everyone gets a laugh). Don’t ski anywhere near trees. Don’t live alone. Don’t climb a stepladder while pregnant. Don’t laugh while eating. And whatever you do, don’t retire. Half the people in here are less than a year removed from retirement, and Daniel hears the same tragic-comic stories night after night. He’d taken up fishing, he tended to his garden, he’d been planning a trip, she loved lemonade, she went on long walks, she was knitting an afghan the size of your house, he bought into a time-share, they took up golf.

  Daniel watches the war and feels cocooned here. Hospitals strip a lot from you—your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.

  Would you like this magazine? I’m done with it.

  Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat, take it.

  I’m going to get a soda. Would you like one?

  Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?

  Even the employees in the gift shops and the cafeterias and the food court and at the coffee carts are, to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don’t know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you’ve been told you won’t see June.

  There is a basic human concern in hospitals, a unity. And he begins to suspect he is addicted to it.

  HE IS NOT there when Isabella takes Manuelo home after three weeks, but he hears the prognosis is good. But he is there when Michael gets the news that his mother has passed on, and he sits with him on the heating grate of a windowsill overlooking the city. Michael speaks softly of the flower beds she placed in boxes outside her apartment windows, speaks of her need to bake in times of grief, her inclination to purse her lips and go silent in times of joy. He tells Daniel she learned only the most rudimentary English, enough to get her green card, and then never spoke it again except to order meat from the deli.

  “She would say, she would say, ‘Russia is my home. I did not choose the men who ruined it, who made me leave it. So I do not choose to face that I am not there.’” He claps Daniel’s knee. “Ah, she was a rough old woman. Farm stock, you see? Thick ankles, thick head.”

  Daniel goes down in the elevator with him and they walk outside. It’s late, the streets silent and smooth with rain. Michael gives him his card. He is an instructor in martial arts.

  “Karate?”

  He shakes his head. “Soviet military techniques. No pretty philosophy, just attack.”

  “You were in the military?”

  Michael smiles and lights a cigarette. “I was KGB, my young friend.”

  Before Daniel can think how to respond, Michael says, “It’s so nice to be able to say, yes? I was KGB. Just like that. I say it. It is said.” He raises his hands to the air. “And no one stops me. This country…”

  Daniel says, “I’m not sure you’d get the same result if you said you were CIA.”

  Michael keeps his smile and nods. He blows smoke int
o the air and follows it with his chin. “You have no father here.”

  Daniel says, “I do.”

  Michael chuckles and shakes his head at his cigarette.

  Daniel says, “I don’t. Okay.”

  “You are hiding. Yes?”

  Daniel nods.

  Michael says, “You will run out of space.”

  Daniel looks around at the sprawl of buildings. “Eventually.”

  “But by then—yes?—they could have stopped looking.”

  A thought infiltrates Daniel before he can stop it: What would I do then?

  He says, “They stop looking sometimes, do they?”

  Michael nods. “It depends on the level of the offense. But, yes, oftentimes, they just go away.”

  “To where?”

  “Other things. Other files. You wake up one day and there is no one watching anymore.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Daniel says, but his throat fills with throbs at the prospect.

  “And you are free again, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Michael touches his arm, squeezes it to the bone. “I promised my mother I would take her home.”

  “To Russia.”

  He nods, still holding Daniel’s arm.

  “But this,” Michael says, “this is home, I think.”

  Daniel nods, though he’s not sure he understands, and Michael lets go of his arm.

  Michael strips the coal off his cigarette with a slide of his finger and thumb, tosses the remains into a trash can. He sniffs the air.

  He looks at Daniel. He says, “You have been my friend.”

  “You’ve been mine.”

  Michael shrugs.

  “You have.”

  Another shrug, smaller.

  Michael says, “Eventually…”

  “Yes.”

  “One way or the other.”

  “Yes.”

  Michael smiles that soft smile of his. He takes both of Daniel’s shoulders in his hands. He squeezes them and his jaw is clenched below his smile and he looks into Daniel’s eyes and nods.

  “Good night, my friend.”

  “Good night.”

  Daniel stands on the sidewalk. He can smell the rain in the night, though it has long since stopped falling, and he feels the hospital complex breathing around him.

  If they really did stop looking…

  If they really have lost interest altogether…

  Michael reaches the corner and looks back, gives him a final wave, and Daniel waves back. An ambulance bleats. Lights come on in windows. Out on the main avenue, cars turn right, turn left, beep their horns. Two nurses pass him, one of them laughing as she tries to tell a story. They’re on their way somewhere, the local bar for nurses and doctors, he supposes. Or maybe not. Maybe to a restaurant. Maybe home. A movie.

  Somewhere.

  GONE DOWN TO CORPUS

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I go up the walk to Lyle Biddet’s house and ring the doorbell. I’m hoping Lyle answers and not his mother or father, because I really don’t want to think of him as someone’s son. I want Lyle to answer the door so I can convince him, real friendly-like, that we’re having an off-the-cuff celebration to commemorate our four years playing football together for East Lake High. I’ll tell Lyle there are no hard feelings for him dropping that pass on the one and coughing up the ball on the thirty. No hard feelings at all. And Lyle’ll follow me back down the walk where Terry Twombley waits behind the wheel of his Cougar with the Lewis brothers sitting in back, and we’ll take Lyle on a little ride and find someplace real quiet and kick the shit out of him.

  Ain’t much of a plan, I know. Best I could come up with after months of stewing on it, though, which again, ain’t saying much. Only time I was ever much of a planner was on the football field, and that’s over now, over and done, which is pretty much the reason we need to beat up on Lyle, the dumb fuck with the bad hands and all.

  Lyle lives in this new suburb called Crescent Shores where there ain’t no body of water, ain’t no shore, ain’t much of anything but all these shiny white houses that all look alike on these shiny white streets that all look alike, which is how come we got lost about six times trying to find his house until one of the Lewis brothers remembered there was a plastic squirrel glued to the roof of the Biddets’ mailbox.

  I ring the doorbell a second time. It’s raining, the drops soft and sweaty, and there don’t seem to be anyone around on the whole street. It’s like they all left their white houses at the same time and drove off to the same golf tournament. So I turn the knob to the Biddets’ front door and—I ain’t shitting—it opens. Just like that. I look back over my shoulder at Terry. He sees the open door and his big grin lights up the whole car.

  It’s been three weeks since graduation. Fourth of July weekend, 1970. I’m eighteen years old.

  MY DADDY FOUGHT in Korea. Only thing he ever says about it is that it was cold. Colder’n an icebox. He lost a finger to the cold. Lost half a thumb. In the summer, when everyone is hiding from the sun in dark rooms and under trees and tin porch awnings, my old man’s lying out in the backyard with a cooler of beer beside him, eyes closed, chin tilted up. One time, my mother looks out the window at him and gives me a small, broken smile. “Damn,” she says, “but he looked fine in a uniform.”

  TERRY AND THE Lewis brothers park the Cougar a block over and then come back to the house, streak up the walk and inside, and I shut the door behind them. It’s cool in the house, the air blowing from these vents cut high up in the walls, and for a minute we all walk around looking at the vents, marveling. Morton Lewis says, “I gotta get me a setup like this.”

  His brother Vaughn goes, “Shit. We take just one of those vents, it’ll be good enough for our whole place.”

  He actually climbs up on the couch, looks like he’s fixing to rip one out of the wall, take it home with him. I can picture him a few hours later with the thing sitting in front of him on the kitchen table, trying to find a place for the batteries.

  You put the brains of both Lewis brothers together and you still come up with something dumber than a barrel of roofing tar, but those boys are also tear-ass fast and my-daddy’s-a-mean-drunk crazy off the snap count, kinda boys can turn a starting left tackle into the town gimp, come back to the huddle not even breathing hard.

  Terry says, “Nice house,” and walks around the living room looking at everything. “Got a bar too.”

  There’s a small swimming pool out back. It’s the shape of a jellyfish and, like I said, none too big, but we have a few drinks from the bar and then we all go out and piss in it.

  That’s what gets us going, I think. We go back into that too-white house and the Lewis brothers have at the vents, and I push over a vase in the dining room, and Terry breaks all the knobs off the TV and pours his beer all over the couch and we go on smashing and tearing things for a while, drunk from the liquor, but drunk with something else too, a kind of hysteria, I think, a need to keep from crying.

  IF WE’D WON that last game of the season, we would have gone on to the divisional playoffs against Lubbock Vo-Tech. Only way college scouts see you if you grow up in a tiny shithole like ours is if you make it to the divisionals. And that’s where we were heading, no question, until Lyle Biddet’s hands turned to Styrofoam. He coughed up the ball twice—once on the fucking one—and North Park converted both of Biddet’s gifts into touchdowns, left us standing numb and cold under a black Texas sky, fans heading home, the lights shutting off.

  My guidance counselor asks me a week later what I plan to make out of my life, what I’m fixing to do with it, what I plan to apply myself to, and all I’m thinking is: I want to apply my hands to Lyle Biddet’s throat, keep squeezing till they cramp up.

  Lyle, you see, never needed the divisional game. He was going to college no matter what. SMU, I hear. Nice school.

  WE’VE OBLITERATED MOST of the first floor by the time the girl walks in. The hi-fi is in the swimming pool along with two shredded leath
er armchairs. The fridge is doors-open and tits-down on the kitchen floor. Potted plants are unpotted, the toilet’s spilling into the hall, and don’t even ask what the Lewis brothers added to the chocolate rug pattern.

  So we’re standing there, kind of spent all of a sudden, amazed as we look around a bit and see how much shit we managed to fuck up in forty minutes and with no one ever giving the order. That was the weirdest thing—how it just happened. It just sprung up, like it had a mind of its own, and that mind went apeshit and angry all over the Biddets’ house.

  And then the side door off the kitchen opens and she walks in. Her dirty blond hair is combed straight down but with two matching strands braided and hanging over her small ears. She’s got white boots going up to her knees, and above that she’s wearing one of those plaid schoolgirl skirts they wear in the private, Jesus schools, except hers has got red finger-paint splattered on it and someone’s drawn a peace symbol over the left thigh. Her T-shirt is tight and I can just make out a pair of hard little nipples pressing up against the tie-dye.

  I’ve seen her a couple times before, when she was younger—Lyle’s little sister, a year behind us. She’d gone to East Lake her first year, but then we heard rumors of trouble, a boyfriend in his twenties, a suicide attempt, some said, and the next year she didn’t come back, got shipped to someplace outside of Dallas, supposedly, locked up with the nuns.

  She stops by the overturned fridge, looking down at it for a second like she isn’t sure it belongs there, and then she looks up and sees us. She doesn’t scream. For a second, I see something catch in her face. A word enters her eyes, and I know exactly what the word is: rape.

  I see her throat move as she swallows, and then she says, “You all done fucking up my momma’s house? Or you just getting started?”

  She’s looking at me when she says it, and I can hear Terry and the Lewis brothers breathing real shallow-like behind me.