I hit the water flat on my left side, like hitting cement at that angle, and it knocks the wind out of me. I stay under. Let the river current take me, and I keep my eyes closed. Wait for the strike of pain to ease up, for the tightness in my body to loosen like it usually does when I hurt myself, but it doesn’t, or not much anyway. My body stays tight, even when I come to the surface.
I’m downstream. Natalie’s yelling something off the bridge. I go under again and come back up. My left arm is stung. Won’t work. I use my right arm to paddle.
Natalie yells, “Are you okay?”
I look up and see all of the 40s boys and Natalie hanging over the west-side bridge rail, watching me float downstream. I try to yell back, to say that I’m fine, but I’m still gasping for breath. I make a thumbs-up sign with my good arm. Hold it for a second, then try to swim. But I can’t swim correctly. I cripple-swim to the side using my right arm only, kicking my feet and gasping for air. My chest feels like it’s supporting a large rock, like I’m lying flat and the rock’s crushing me.
I make it to some rocks at the side of the river. Moss covered. I drag myself up. Breathe. Try to calm my breathing. Open and close my numb left hand. My arm feels the way it did last winter when I ran through a screen in a basketball game and hit the other team’s center at a full sprint. He was 260 pounds, and I jammed my shoulder so hard I got a stinger.
I hold my left side and stumble up the bank of the river, over the mossy rocks and through the blackberries that hang above the water, scratching my legs and arms. I roll my neck and shoulder to loosen them up, to get the nerves going again. When I get to the dirt underside of the bridge, I put my hands on my knees and breathe, try to relax and get strong again before I have to face Natalie and the 40s boys.
But Natalie runs down the dirt path and meets me under the bridge. “Oh shit, Travis, are you okay?”
I straighten up when I see her. Say, “Yeah, I’m good. I’m fine.”
“That looked horrible. Are you hurt?”
“No,” I say, “it wasn’t that bad. I just over-rotated a little.”
Natalie starts to hug me, then pulls back and looks me over.
“Really,” I say, “I’m fine. Let’s just walk back up.”
She leads me and I hold her hand with my good arm. We weave through the blackberry bushes, up the trail. Past broken glass and an old sweatshirt. One syringe and needle, and a glass cap. Human shit on a newspaper. When we get on top of the bridge, the 40s boys gather around me. “You all right, man? That was crazy.”
I nod. “I’m fine.”
“You need a drink?” One of them holds out his 40. “If you chug the rest of that, it’ll take the sting away.”
“No, I think I’m good.”
The one who did the perfect backflip earlier says, “That was crazy, bro. Crazy to do a flip if you don’t have the height dialed.”
I nod.
He says, “I dialed 35 feet at a quarry years ago. So it’s not hard for me to get it right.”
I smile, but then I cough and a little bit of blood splurts out onto my chin.
“Oh damn.”
Everyone steps back.
“What the…? You’re coughing blood, man.”
“Oh my God,” Natalie says. “This is really bad.”
“I’m okay,” I say. I wipe the blood off my chin with the back of my hand.
One of the 40s boys says, “There’s a clinic not too far from here. University health center on 13th. There are doctors there.”
“Travis”—Natalie grabs her shorts and tank top—“we’re going there now.” She picks up my shoes and lays them out, right and left at my feet. I step into them, bend over slowly, and pull the tongues to get them on. Bending over feels like pushing a steak knife between my ribs.
Natalie says, “It’s gonna hurt to bike, but you have to bike fast anyway. We need to get you checked out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
One of the 40s boys turns my bike around for me. “Good luck, man.”
“Thanks.” I get on. Hold the handlebars with my good arm.
“Come on,” Natalie says. She starts to pedal.
My left side hurts so bad I feel like laughing.
Natalie yells back, “Come on, Travis.”
I follow her. We pedal down off the bridge, west along the river, under the train tracks, up onto Franklin Boulevard, and down 13th. We stop in front of the clinic. Natalie clips my lock around both of our bikes. “Come on,” she says. She takes my good hand. Pulls me into the clinic. At the nurse’s desk in front, Natalie says, “He’s got to be seen at once.”
THE CLINIC
The nurse leads us into a room and a female doctor follows us in. The doctor points to the exam table. “Have a seat.”
I sit. The nurse puts a wrap around my bicep and starts pumping. Takes my blood pressure. The doctor listens to my chest. The front, then the back. “Subcutaneous hematoma,” she says. The nurse writes notes on her clipboard.
“No catching sounds.” The doctor listens some more. “The lungs sound good.” She holds my face. Looks in one eye, then the other. Presses my cheeks with her thumbs. “No sign of shock.” The nurse continues to take notes. The doctor says, “Follow my finger with your eyes. Keep your head still.”
“Okay.” I follow her finger back and forth.
“Good. Now tell me what happened.”
I explain the flip, and how I landed.
Natalie says, “He coughed up blood.”
“How much blood?” the doctor asks.
“Not much. He sort of spit a little blood up onto his chin as he was talking to us afterward.”
“Okay. We’ll do X-rays now, then bring you back in here again.”
The nurse walks me down to the X-ray room and they take pictures with me standing in four different directions. Then I go back to the exam room.
Natalie’s waiting in there. She says, “Was that okay?”
“Yeah, they didn’t mess with me or anything.”
“Good.”
We wait, then the doctor comes back in. “Okay,” the doctor says. “Now I have a better sense of what’s going on. I want you to lie back.” She feels along my ribs, then pushes on my abdomen in different places. “Any pain there?”
“No.”
“How about here?”
“No.”
“Good,” she says. She turns to the nurse. “The liver and spleen are intact. Organs are fine.” She pats my leg. “Now sit back up, please.”
I have to roll to my side to sit up. I groan. It feels like someone’s stabbed me with scissors from behind, trying to wedge my ribs apart.
The doctor runs her fingers up my back. I wince. She says, “There?”
“Yeah.”
“And there too?”
I pull away from her.
“And there?”
I wince again. “Yeah.”
“And probably the most right…here.” She pushes on a rib with her fingers and I feel something like a heated spike going in.
I open my mouth and drool with pain.
Natalie says, “Is that necessary?” She has her arms crossed.
“Yes.” The doctor turns around. “I had to know if I had the right location. Sometimes the bruising isn’t a perfect indicator.”
I breathe and try to relax.
The doctor turns back to me. “Do you have pain anywhere else?”
I say, “My arm went dead, but it’s a little better now.”
She rotates my arm. Nods and says, “When a person hits a surface violently, he’s going to burst a few small blood vessels at the very least. Thus, the blood you spit up. But your lungs sound fine and your left arm is fine as well.” She looks down at the clipboard the nurse is holding. “In layman’s terms, you deadened the nerves when you hit so hard on your left side. You have significant bruising on your back. Cracked ribs. At least three. Maybe four. There are fracture lines on three on the X-ray, and a spot on the fourth, the one that hurts
the least. See the color coming in there?” She has me look in the mirror to see the bruising.
There’s a dark color all down the left side. Four of the ribs are marked by dark lines going across.
The doctor says, “You need a lot of rest. But in four to six weeks, you’ll be good to go.”
“Four to six weeks?”
“Yes,” she says. “Don’t do anything significant for three or four weeks at least. Do you understand me?”
Natalie says, “He’s a basketball player. A good one.”
The doctor smiles. “Well, don’t play any basketball this month, okay?”
I don’t say anything.
“This is important,” the doctor says. “It’s summer right now, and basketball’s a winter sport, right?”
I say, “If you want to be good in the winter, you have to work hard in the summer.”
“I like that attitude,” the doctor says, “and I’m sure that’s true, but three or four weeks off won’t kill you.”
Natalie looks at me. “It might.”
—
Before we leave, the nurse comes back with two Vicodin and a prescription for 40 more.
We walk out of the clinic to the bike rack. Natalie says, “What’s your grandpa’s phone number?”
I shake my head. “We’re biking home.”
“But the nurse said…”
“Trust me. I’m fine. We’re biking.”
ALL THE WAY HOME
The bike home is brutal. Normally I can do it in under 20 minutes, but it takes me a full 45. Natalie keeps slowing down and riding next to me even when that means she’s riding in the street instead of the bike lane. Cars honk as they drive around her. She flips them off.
When we get to the skate park, I say, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“No,” she says, “I’m biking you all the way home.”
The Vicodin is kicking in and I’m starting to feel hazy. “I’m okay. Really.”
“All the way home,” she says. “And that’s final.”
We bike up Crescent Avenue to Green Acres. I slow one more time at the entrance to the trailer park. “I’m good now. Really.”
“Just tell me,” Natalie says. “Which way from here?”
I call the park a trailer park, but there aren’t that many trailers. Most of the houses are single-wides or double-wides, manufactured homes, a little better than trailers, but still not well built, not nice houses. As we ride past the first few, I’m hoping Natalie doesn’t notice the plastic porch railings and Astroturf lawns, the pressboard siding and carpeted porches, the prefab slide-and-lock picket fences, yard gnomes, windmills, and pink flamingos stuck into the fake grass. I think of Natalie’s white-carpeted stairs, her hardwood floors, her clean front porch.
She says, “Which one is your house?”
“A little farther.”
When we get to my grandparents’, I see how ugly the mini Tuff Shed is, with its peeled red paint and a big dent on the driveway side. On the porch, there are fake flowers in metal stands on the railing. I say, “My grandparents have a thing for fake flowers.”
Natalie laughs. “They’re cute.”
We park our bikes on the side of the house and go to the front door. Walk inside. Grandpa’s watching baseball. He looks up and clears his throat. Stands quickly. “Well, uh, hello, young lady.”
“Hi.” Natalie smiles at him.
“My name’s Roy.” He holds out his hand.
“Natalie.”
“Please sit down.” He points to the recliner.
“Okay. Thanks.”
I look around the room and notice how cluttered it is. Junk mail sliding off the desktop in the corner. Magazines, dirty plates, and milk-crusted drinking glasses on the coffee table. Laundry in a pile at one end of the couch. I walk over and start to pick it up, forgetting about my ribs. I groan and stop.
“Hey,” Natalie says, “let me do that.”
Grandpa looks confused. “No, no, he can…”
“Seriously, I’ve got it.” Natalie takes the laundry from me. Turns to my grandpa. “Where do I put this?”
Grandpa goes to get a basket. Brings one back and she dumps the laundry in. Grandpa takes it to my room and comes right back. He points at me. “What’s wrong with you? She’s a guest.”
Natalie says, “He cracked four ribs. Fractured them.”
Grandpa adjusts his glasses. “How?”
“He hit the water wrong when we jumped in the river.”
“Must have been a big jump.” Grandpa shakes his head. He points to the chair and the couch, and Natalie sits down again. I have to sit slowly, leaning on my good arm first and lowering my body into a sitting position. I can feel each place where my body parts connect, and none of them feel well put-together.
“That doesn’t look good,” Grandpa says. “You better rest. Watch this game.”
“I’m okay.”
“No,” Natalie says, “you listen to your grandpa. You need to do nothing for a while. Your grandpa can go get that prescription and I’ll make you some food. Does that sound good?” She turns to my grandpa.
He stands up again. “Yes, ma’am. That sounds like a plan.”
I pull the prescription out of my pocket and hand it to him.
Grandpa says, “I’ll go get this and come right back.” He looks at Natalie. “You sure you’re okay here?”
“Just fine.” She smiles.
“Grandma’s asleep. If she needs anything…” Grandpa looks at both of us now.
Natalie says, “I’ll get her anything she needs.”
“Thank you,” Grandpa says. He puts on his YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK hat and grabs his car keys. “I’ll pick up some Tang too, and we’re almost out of bread and sandwich fixings. Maybe I’ll get some more eggs and milk.”
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
He wears his hat high on his head, like a trucker. He adjusts the bill, smiles at Natalie, then leaves.
“He seems nice,” Natalie says.
“He is nice. He just…”
“Smokes a lot of weed?” she says.
“Right. At night. In the day, he’s fine.” I lean forward to grab the TV controller.
Natalie says, “If you need anything, just ask me, all right?”
—
I watch a TNT reality special on the NBA Summer League while Natalie makes me a ham sandwich and the last of the Tang. When she comes in with the food, she says, “How’s your pain?”
“Those pills work.” I feel like clouds are floating through, more and more clouds, my mind puffy and my eyes heavy. “Yeah, I’m not hurting too much.”
“Good,” she says.
I’m watching the show and I’m eating, and Natalie’s sitting next to me, and I fall asleep. I don’t even know when. I don’t know if I finish my food or if we say anything else. When I wake up, there’s a baseball game on and it’s dark outside. Grandpa’s on the couch next to me.
I blink. Try to wake up all the way. “Where’s Natalie?”
Grandpa says, “She left after a couple of hours. You were sleeping the whole time.”
“Oh.”
“Real pretty girl,” he says.
My pills are on the coffee table. I say, “I should probably head to bed.”
“Okay,” Grandpa says. “Sleep in tomorrow and heal up, all right? No basketball.”
“Right.” I pick up the prescription. “Thanks for getting these.”
Grandpa waves me off but doesn’t look up from the TV. There’s a Giants game on, and the Giants are up to bat.
It hurts to open the sliding glass door. My back feels like it’s been tightened with sharp metal screws. My left shoulder won’t rotate all the way. I use my good arm to close the door. Then I walk down to my tent.
I have to piss but I’m too sore to go over to Mr. Tyler’s, so I piss in the blackberries near the water’s edge. Go back to my tent. Take a big drink from my water bottle and crawl in. Then I think of something. I put on my headlam
p and prop myself up, open the prescription bottle, dump the 40 pills onto my pillow, and sort them into groups of five. The last group only has two pills, not five. I make sure I didn’t lose count. Count out by fives again. But there are only 37 pills in there. 37 out of 40. Three missing.
I look through my tent flap at the house. I can see the back of my grandpa’s head as he watches the Giants game.
ZEUS
Behind the motel. I was maybe 60 pounds, just a little kid, holding a garbage bag, walking toward the Dumpster. Zeus was slumped against the front. He was wearing a yellow Oregon Ducks shirt. Purple tutu. Bare feet. A sombrero on his head tilted low.
There was an empty Mickey’s bottle between us like a single bowling pin on a lane of black asphalt. The bottle was shining bright green in the sunlight. I dropped the garbage bag and picked up the bottle. I didn’t know if Zeus had already seen me. Sometimes he was awake and sometimes he wasn’t.
I stepped forward and swung, but he wasn’t sleeping and he caught my arm. Worse, he was laughing, and he tilted his head back and I saw his missing top row of teeth. I hated how his bottom teeth jutted into the space when he opened his mouth, how those teeth reminded me of the dead nutria I found down on the riverbank the night my mom forgot me after a score.
GOING D-1
Creature comes to the tent at 8:00. He says, “Bright shiny morning, baby. Sun like an egg yolk, and you didn’t even get me for practice? It’s already eight o’clock.”
I groan as I roll over. Reach to unzip the tent with my good arm, and even that hurts. “I’m hurt, man.”
“You’re what?”
I get the zipper open. Look at Creature. “I’m hurt.” I roll to my knees and crawl out of the tent. I have to stay on all fours for a second before I sit to my right, lean on my good arm. I don’t have a shirt on, just my basketball shorts.
Creature sees my back and the huge bruise there. “What the hell did you do to yourself? That thing’s huge.”
“I know.” I struggle to stand up. It feels like someone’s wedging apart my ribs with a set of screwdrivers. “I tried to do a backflip off Knickerbocker yesterday. Landed wrong and cracked four ribs.”
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