by Lee Durkee
In the opening game of the double bill that evening, Matt hit for the cycle, going four for four in an abbreviated seven-inning rout. During his last at-bat, Matt had turned a double into a belly flop triple. The scorekeeper neglected to mark a throwing error so that Matt got credit for the cycle.
Noel killed time between the games by using his pawnshop zoom, a Zahyr that had seen better days, to search for Amber in the visiting bleachers. When he could not find her, he used the zoom to spy on his own family. Finally he just started zeroing in on random girls.
By the last inning of the second game, Matt needed only a single to hit for the cycle again. This time the crowd was hushed as it stood for his last at-bat. The first pitch was in the dirt. The second was way outside. That got the crowd to booing. The third pitch was outside and in the dirt, but Matt leaned out and fanned at it. He stepped out of the box and yelled something at the pitcher. The crowd was yelling too. Matt dug in. The fourth pitch was a loop change-up that the catcher caught standing up. A much deeper chorus of boos swarmed the field. The pitcher stepped off the rubber to polish the baseball. The last pitch, ball four, was wild and inside. Matt ended up on his butt in the dirt but did not stay there for long. He sprang to his feet, whirled the bat at the pitcher, then charged the mound.
In the photograph, the pitcher has his right arm cocked behind his ear, as if about to deliver a blow, but his face has already been churned sideways, toward the camera, by Matt’s haymaker left. The pitcher’s head is outlined with a spray of sweat, like a halo. His eyes are clenched shut, his teeth bared, and his face is pear-shaped from the punch.
Both benches cleared. Noel abandoned the camera on the dugout roof and jumped onto the field and clotheslined the opposing catcher just as he was about to blindside Matt. Then Noel straddled the catcher and started punching him. Every once in a while, though, Noel would stop and glance up, searching for Amber’s face above the Petal dugout.
•••
On the same day his photograph made the front page of the sports section, Noel got his hair cut short, as a sign of yet further repentance. Less than an hour later, he went to the mailbox and found this letter awaiting him:
Dear Noel,
Thanks for all the letters and pictures. I’m afraid I got bad news though. I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to keep this restaurant afloat. To top it off now Kim’s 6 months pregnant. Truth is I can’t offer you a place to stay right now. Probably if you’d ever been around pregnant women you wouldn’t be asking. And what with the cost of living down here you’d have one hellava time meeting rent on what I could pay you. Why not give college a shot first? As far as I know you’d be the first Weatherspoon to go. I’ll tell you something else, something I’m not supposed to tell you. Your mom called. I guess she thinks I have some kind of sway over you, and basically she wants me to tell you to go to college. Seems she knows all about your plans to head south. You have been infiltrated. Anyway we talked it over and decided this. If you go to college and make good grades then I’ll line you up a job here next summer. I’ll put you behind the bar and teach you to sling drinks. There’s lots of sweet young things down here running around in next to nothing.
You asked me about why your dad joined the army and thats a long story I’ll try and sum up. Goose ran with the wrong crowd, always did. He liked to gamble and wasn’t much good at it. He joined the army the day after he pitched that no hitter and ever since then there’s been much speculating. Rumor has it he was supposed to throw that game, to lose it on purpose, and that he’d been payed alot of money to do this. But then he got caught up in pitching the no hitter and instead he won the game. Meaning he had to get out of town quick. He kinda pitched his way into Vietnam, so to speak. I’m not positive this story is true but it’s the only explanation I’ve ever heard that makes any sense as to why he joined up. Never knew Goose to be much patriotic before that. I guess this doesn’t cast your dad in a great light either, but he was always a good older brother to me and I miss him. I miss him alot and wish I’d been a better uncle to you and Matt.
You take care of Matt and take care of yourself too. Y’all are brothers and need to look out for each other. Try to stay outa your stepdad’s way. And please give your mom my regards.
Tommy
After Noel had finished reading the letter, he balled up the paper inside his fist and put that fist through his bedroom wall and then dropped the letter inside there. Later he had to hang a poster over the hole in the wall.
Friday arrived, and Roger drove Noel to the new medical plaza. They walked together up the brick steps to the brick fountain, Roger with the collar of his lime-green sports shirt flicked up. At the top step Noel halted and said he had changed his mind. He planted himself on a scaffolding along the edge of the fountain bright with new pennies while Roger locked his fingers behind his head and gazed out over the fountain as if it were an ocean. Here I am, Lord, he seemed to be saying, a man doing his level best.
Finally he asked, “Noel, what’s the worst thing that can possibly happen in there?” When Noel mumbled, “I dunno,” Roger nodded as if that were an intelligent response, then he asked what was the best thing that could happen.
“I dunno, I said.”
“So what do we got to lose, huh?”
What Noel had to lose became abundantly clear at the check-in window when the worst thing that could possibly happened promptly did. He recognized the girl behind the sneeze glass from school. He could not recall her name, but she was the same girl Tim had overheard saying that Spider Weatherspoon shot up heroin under his tongue. Did she already know the reason for his appointment? Was that written down somewhere? Horrified, Noel scratched his signature then shoved the clipboard back toward her while offering up a sphincter smile. Her name would not come to him. He knew she had once been very fat and was not fat anymore, though her breasts remained huge, her face plump. Behind her in the office, four older women typed and filed. Did they know too? Did everyone know?
Reading his name off the clipboard, she said, “Noel,” with an approving smile, then she added, “I never heard your real name before.” Next she asked, “Got your ears lowered, huh?” The anatomy of the question left him dumbstruck until she laughed and touched her own bangs and said she liked it short. “You don’t even know my name, do you?”
“My memory’s a little shot.” He made his hand into a pistol, aimed it at his temple, then shrugged. She told him her name then, Mona Campsong, and asked how Noel had done on the ACTs. He replied, “I don’t even wanna know.” Jerking his thumb over his shoulder, toward where Roger was seated, he said he’d best be getting home now. And since that made zero sense, he quickly added, “He ain’t my real dad,” then he whirled away and staggered off full blush.
“Hey, what’s my name?” Mona called out, loud enough that everyone in the waiting room looked up. He had to stop. He had to stop, turn around, and face the aquarium of secretaries.
“See, I can’t even remember,” he said, shooting himself again. “And you just told me, huh?”
Twenty minutes later his name was called by a large black nurse with dangling Jesus-on-the-cross earrings. She led him into an examination room and took his blood pressure, his temperature, read his pulse, then she shifted her ballast in the chair and asked the nature of the visit.
“The nature . . .” Noel repeated. “It’s kinda personal.”
Without raising her head—she seemed to be addressing the clipboard—the nurse said, “Well, hon, how we supposed to help if you don’t tell us what’s wrong?”
Noel remained silent.
“Is it something to do with your hands?”
He looked first at his right hand, at the purple and yellow knuckles and the scabs. Then he looked at his left hand, which wasn’t bruised as badly. He shook his head and told her, “It involves . . . sex.”
“Ah-huh,
” she said and asked if by any chance he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease. “STD,” she added.
He quickly agreed that he had. “Kinda.”
That made her lift both her pencil and her eyebrows. “It has been my experience, as a nurse, that either you do or you don’t.”
“I do.”
“Any discharge?”
“Discharge? . . . Yeah, sometimes.”
“What color?”
“Yellow?”
“You asking me yellow or telling me yellow?”
“Sorta yellowish.”
She repeated sorta yellowish, stretching out the two words to last as long as it took her to write them down.
“Burning when you pee?” To this, she tacked on, half resentfully, “Urinate.”
He said yeah, a little.
“Stains on your drawers? Your underwear?”
He cocked his head as if trying to recall, then he said no.
“Not even in the morning?”
“Oh yeah, then, sometimes.”
“Sometimes. Blood in your urine?”
“Blood?” He pursed his lips before consenting, “Yeah, blood.”
“What about on the rim of the john—the commode—more blood?”
“More blood.”
“And the last time you had intercourse? . . . was . . . ?”
It had been a while, he explained apologetically.
“What’s that mean? A week, a month?”
“A few weeks.”
After recording a few more such lies, the nurse arranged a series of scissorslike instruments on the steel counter, then she handed him a blue bib and told him it tied in the back. “Doctor Martin’ll be in shortly.”
Alone, Noel picked up the nearest instrument and fit his fingers into its handle. He made the motion that with scissors would have spread the blades. The thin metal probe divided itself into two thinner probes with a disconcerting half-inch margin between them. He set the instrument down but did not take his eyes off of it as he undressed and tied on the bib.
Doc Martin entered the room still laughing at some hallway joke. While skimming the clipboard, he drummed his fingers against it. Then, very abruptly, he shut the door and paused to consider the chart hung there, a cross-section of the human liver and kidney, then, just as abruptly, he turned toward Noel and smiled grandly. They had known each other for as long as Noel could remember, though recently Doc Martin had grown a white goatee that framed his mouth in a perfect square.
“Well, Noel, old friend, let’s have a looksee.” He patted the bed behind Noel, who reluctantly stretched himself out. Doc Martin fitted a white latex bib over Noel’s lap then milked Noel’s penis and testicles up through a small hole in the bib. He took a giant tube of ointment and squeezed the cold lubricant onto Noel then massaged it in. Suddenly Noel was very aware of a draft inside the room. The doctor rearranged the instruments on the metal table before saying, “Physicians have different theories when it comes to this moment, Noel. Some think it only fair to warn you. Others think that just makes it worse. Me, I come down on the side of fair warning. At least that way if you scream bloody murder you won’t feel guilty for it. Noel, this is going to hurt like all get-out. Scream away, young man.”
Instead of screaming, Noel began to talk for all he was worth. Not that what he blurted out was the exact truth; instead he made his impotence sound a recent phenomenon, a curiosity that had followed upon an otherwise active sex life. When he had finished and opened his eyes, Dr. Martin was wiping him off with a towel and chuckling, “Well now, that’s a horse’a different feather.” He removed his rubber gloves and asked Noel had many times this . . . condition, let’s call it . . . had happened.
Noel held up three fingers, shrugged, and said, “I dunno, a couple maybe.”
“Son, I’m no Sigmund Freud standing here before you, but it’s my guess you wouldn’t be here if it had only happened twice.”
Noel nodded, whispered, “Yeah, more’n twice, I guess. A lot more.”
The doctor nodded sympathetically then began tapping his right temple with his index finger.
“The mind,” he said, “is a funny thing, Noel.”
“Yessir.”
“And an amazing thing.”
Noel continued nodding and then tried to make a joke by suggesting that maybe he was allergic to sex.
“Heaven forbid,” the good doctor said and crossed himself.
•••
Doc Martin was one of those men fond of informing the public that if he had it all to do over again he would not change a thing, as if his own current character and outlook were so satisfying to him that any number of trials would be happily reendured. “No sir,” he liked to say. “Looking back, I’d do it all over again.”
The first thing Doc Martin did was to explain to Noel how very rare impotence was, especially in boys his age—“almost unheard of.” Next, after making a series of henlike clucks, he launched into a reminiscence where he admitted it did crop up in wartime, what with all those soldiers driving over potholes in those blasted jeeps—“hell on the prostate.” He picked up Noel’s chart, scanned it, then scribbled something down and announced they were going to play a little game, the two of them were. A simple game, really. Or maybe not so simple. He was going to leave the room. To check on another patient. And while he was gone, he wanted Noel to do something. Or rather not to do something. “While I’m gone,” he instructed, “I want you not to think about pink elephants.”
He stared at Noel too intently and asked if he understood the rules of the game. Noel, who had been straining to read his chart and simultaneously imagining all of the places that chart might end up, kept bobbing his head even after Doc Martin had left the room. For the first full minute alone, Noel stared at a colorful poster of the male reproductive system. Then he slid off the table and pressed his face against the second-story glass and pictured himself splattered across the parking lot. He drafted a suicide note or two and imagined the fuzzy consistency of his obituary photograph. Which photo would his mother select? He was still considering this choice when some giant humming mechanism a floor above him shut down. He had not been aware of the loud hum until it stopped. He listened for laughter in the hallway, but there wasn’t any. There seemed not a sound left in the world. A capsizing silence filled him.
He felt an odd washboard quiver. The floor shifted, or seemed to, and Noel lurched into the wall. Earthquake! That was his last coherent thought, but in truth what happened was more like a flash flood, one that picked him up and swept him away and then set him down again, gently, and left him staring down into an open manhole, an imperfect circle framed by an octagon of two-by-fours. The manhole appeared to be covered with dead leaves. Slowly he raised his head. The wall he was facing swam a moment, then solidified into raw plywood. He was cold and knew he was naked, but his body felt so strange to him that he was afraid to look down at it. He touched his stomach and then his fingers began tracing the edges of a jagged scar just under his bellybutton. Finally he raised the hand to his neck and felt the noose there. He looked down again and saw that his feet were not touching the floor.
Mona Campsong was about to pour water through a coffeemaker when she saw Spider Weatherspoon come out of the examination room wearing the blue bib. Her mouth opened, but instead of speaking she held the pot higher up, pointing it at him, and she watched in this manner as he pivoted away from her and walked toward the staff phone mounted at the end of the hall next to a sign in Mona’s own handwriting that said, No Calls Longer Than 3 Minutes!!! This Means U!!! She could see the acne on his butt. His steps were smallish, heel to toe, and his hips swayed. The walk seemed noticeably wrong to Mona, who carried the coffeepot a few steps forward before stopping again. It was the voice she heard speaking into the phone that had halted her. During the next
few weeks she would learn to imitate the voice. When she told the story—and she would tell it often—she made it very clear that it was not Noel’s voice she heard at all, no, not a boy’s voice imitating a girl’s, it was a girl’s voice coming out of Spider Weatherspoon’s body, a girl’s voice that Mona could not quite place, not at first anyway. This voice said into the phone, “Mom, it’s me, I’m in the tree house, there’s a rope ’round my neck. Help me. HURRY!”
Then, as Mona would later explain it, many times over, “He just hung up and walked past me, except this time, right as he passed me, he said, still using that same girl’s voice, he said, Hey, Mona. Just like that. That’s when I recognized the voice. I almost dropped the coffeepot. He went back into the room and closed the door, and I just stood there, like some kind of statue. I was still standing like that when Dr. Martin went into the room. I think he said some kind of joke to me, but I didn’t even hear it. I get goose bumps now just thinking about it. Look.” After extending her arms, which had recently been treated with electrolysis, Mona would add, “That was the same afternoon that Amber Smith tried to hang herself in her dead brother’s tree house and that her mom found her just in time to get her down alive. I used to know Amber. At 4-H camp. We lifeguarded together.” Here Mona would time a mental drumroll before concluding, “Now, if they ever let her out of the crazy house—and they probably won’t—but if they do, then she’s going straight to jail, that’s what I heard. For murdering her baby brother. She confessed to it, that’s what everybody says. That’s why she tried to kill herself.”
•••
Doc Martin paused to reflect on the chart of the human liver before turning around and straddling the metal stool, which rolled forward two feet under his momentum. “So,” he began, but then he paused to deliver a rakish grin. “Noel, what have we been thinking about?”
The sound of his own name startled him awake. He had been dreaming. In this dream he had been given an Aleph 2000 made of pure gold. While looking through it for the first time, he had seen a montage of beautiful women, like a quick shuffle of photographs, dozens and dozens of beautiful women. And in this dream he had known with a wonderful certainty that he would sleep with all of these women. Staring into the Aleph 2000, Noel had understood, however fleetingly, that not even pain was permanent, that life was long and contained possibilities unimaginable. That’s when he heard the sound of his name being spoken.