Three-Fifths

by John Vercher

“Aaron, Jesus,” Bobby said, the words a whisper, strangled by the desert in his throat.

  Cort looked up at Aaron, then over to Bobby who shook his head at him. His tough façade folded in on itself. “Yeah, all right, man,” Cort said. “My bad…I mean, it’s cool.”

  “Good.” Aaron said. “Turn this shit off and point me to the head.” Cort gestured. Bobby watched as Aaron’s heavy boots thumped down a short hallway and disappeared into a room off to the right.

  “Whatever, man,” Cort mumbled to himself when Aaron was out of earshot.

  The gun-like sound effects of an MTV News brief exploded from the television behind Bobby and startled him. Tabitha Soren recounted the day’s proceedings in the O.J. trial. Detective Furhman had been questioned about using racial slurs on the job as the attorneys for the defense attempted to build a case for a conspiracy. The skinhead shook his head and sneered. He punched Bobby in the thigh.

  “You believe this shit?” he asked. “No way he didn’t do it. Look at his eyes. They got no whites in them, just blackness. Like a…like…” He stared at the screen, heavy-lidded. Bobby leaned forward to see if he’d nodded off, then offered an end to his sentence.

  “A shark?” Bobby asked.

  Cort’s eyes widened and he snapped his fingers at Bobby. “Oh, shit, yeah, that’s good. I was thinking chimp, but a shark. Shit, yeah. Anyway, I hope they still do hangings in Cali. Am I right?”

  Bobby’s feet felt like they didn’t belong to him, then his hands, his arms, his legs. He couldn’t feel his face. For a minute, it seemed as if he wasn’t really there. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he’d skidded out in the snow and crashed and none of this was happening. In fact, right now, he could be in a hospital bed while his comatose brain constructed the entire thing. No attempted murder. No accessory to attempted murder. Just brain dead. The heavy bass thumped from the television again. Cort bobbed his head and mouthed the lyrics to Biggie Small’s “Warning”, then looked over his shoulder down the hall where Aaron had gone and turned the volume down low again. Feeling came back to Bobby’s limbs in a rush and he walked down the hall after Aaron as bong water bubbled behind him.

  Aaron rinsed lather from his hands. The drain was slow and the water turned into a red and white soup before getting sucked down. Aaron inspected his fingernails. Bobby hadn’t noticed before how long they were. He remembered seeing some show where inmates grew them long and filed them to points and he caught a chill.

  “You all right?” Aaron asked.

  “Where are we? Who is that guy?”

  Aaron hissed through his teeth. “That punk. No dignity. It’s for his uncle I don’t beat his fucking ass. I owe him that. That’s why I’m staying with him for a bit.”

  “What do you owe his uncle?” Bobby asked. Though he wanted to know, he dreaded the answer.

  “Nothing. Everything,” Aaron answered. “All depends on who asks. He brought me into the brotherhood. Kept me safe.”

  “The brotherhood?” Bobby said, his voice raised. “Do you hear yourself? I don’t believe this. Who am I even talking to? I have to get the fuck out of here.”

  “And go where, Bobby?”

  Aaron splashed water on his face and looked for a towel but none hung on the bar. When he grabbed the hem of his shirt to pull it to his face, he noticed the smeared blood that he’d wiped from Bobby’s inhaler. He took off his shirt, and dried his face with a clean spot. His chest and back were covered in acne and Bobby guessed someone inside found a way to get him steroids. He turned around to piss. “88” was tattooed on both shoulder blades. In between the zits on his back were round scars, the raised flesh the circumference of the business end of a cigarette. Someone had used him for an ashtray.

  When he turned around, Bobby’s eyes went to the large swastika on his sternum, the arms of the broken cross bending across his chest. Bobby backed up as Aaron walked towards him until he bumped against the wall in the tight hallway. Aaron leaned against the doorframe. His face softened.

  “Look, I’m sorry I flipped out downstairs. I know you’re scared, but you’re safe here,” he said. “You’re always safe when I’m around. I owe you at least that much. We’ll get some rest and figure things out in the morning. I promise you, everything will be fine. Now go grab the pizza before that little shit eats it all.” Bobby opened his mouth to protest but Aaron patted him on the cheek, squeezed past him and walked to another door at the end of the hallway.

  For an instant, Bobby was furious, far more angry than scared. When Aaron touched his cheek, Bobby wanted to reach out and grab him by his neck and scream in his face. He wanted to squeeze until he found the huge Adam’s apple that used to bob up and down in the scrawny neck of the kid Bobby always had to talk down from his perpetual state of weed-fueled paranoia. It had never been the other way around. Sure Aaron was drunk, but below all that freaky calm had to be that same kid in a panic.

  But he wasn’t there. His eyes looked as cold as their ice-blue hue. He’d been out less than twenty-four hours and he damn near killed someone. Now he wanted pizza. Prison had created Prison Aaron and Prison Aaron did what he thought he had to do, supposedly to protect them both. Either he enjoyed it, didn’t care that he’d go back if they were caught, or some twisted version of the two. The thought made Bobby go right back to being scared shitless.

  Bobby walked back down the hall. Was there a phone in this dump? He should call Isabel. He spied one on the wall in the kitchen off the living room and stepped towards it, then stopped.

  Aaron was right. Where would he go? What would he say? What could Isabel do?

  He imagined the kid’s mother again and pizza was the last thing he wanted. He went back to tell Aaron to get the fucking pizza himself, but Aaron had sprawled out on a single bed in the room at the end of the hall, out cold. Maybe he actually was scared, and putting on a front had exhausted him. Or maybe he was drunker than Bobby first thought and he just passed out. Bobby stood at the foot of the bed and stared, then let his eyes relax, like he did with the three- dimensional pictures he’d seen in the mall that are supposed to turn into dolphins. He wasn’t sure why he looked at Aaron that way just then, nor did he know what he expected to see. He never saw the images they told him he was supposed to see in the pictures, either. They just gave him a headache.

  THREE YEARS AGO, Bobby had waited for more than thirty minutes to see Aaron. It had been his first week in prison. The line for visitors was long, and stunk of a mix of different perfumes and body sprays that smelled like the shit Isabel wore when she went out for the night. When Bobby saw no other guys there, he had worried that they might think he and Aaron were a couple, and he felt guilty about what that meant people thought about him, not what it might mean for Aaron. Guilty or not, selfish or not, the feeling compelled him to leave, but just as he had turned, an officer filed them all through the metal detectors and led them to the visitor’s booths.

  A moderately attractive woman sat next to Bobby. His knees bounced on the bottom of the counter. She stared, and he knew, just knew that she wondered, too, what a guy was doing visiting another guy at a men’s prison. Bobby wrapped the phone cord around his thumb until the tip went red. The thick safety glass had handprints. Fingerprints. Grey lipstick smudges. He wondered if the woman next to him would kiss the glass, or try to touch hands through it, maybe whip out a tit and smush it against the Plexiglas while her man pressed his palm to it. Bobby noticed his own palms were wet. He didn’t know why he was so nervous. Aaron had only been in a week. He’d be fine. Then the steel door squealed open and a guard led Aaron in by his bony elbow, swimming in his orange jumpsuit, head bowed, limping.

  One eye was purple and swollen shut. A chain of small bruises ran around his neck and a zipper of stitches went down the side of his head where they had pulled out some of his hair. He shuffled to the window and went to sit but couldn’t. His ass hovered until his legs shook. He pressed his bloated lips together and beads of sweat bloomed on his forehead with the effort. He gave
up and leaned one knee on the stool as they both reached for the phones.

  “Hey, man,” Bobby said.

  A tear ran out of Aaron’s good eye.

  “Don’t ever come back here,” he said.

  The words came out soft and wet. His front teeth were gone. He hung up and shuffled back to the guard. Bobby called out after him and before he realized what he was doing, he pressed his palm against the glass. He noticed the woman next to him, staring. Bobby looked past her to see her man, who looked over his shoulder at Aaron. He snatched his hand away with the realization he might have just earned him another round of what he’d gotten before. The door slammed shut. Bobby stared at it until his eyes relaxed and his focus fell on his own greasy handprint, indiscriminate from the other remnants of futile attempts to connect, save its newness. He wiped the print away with his sleeve and left.

  Bobby tried to go back once, but he wasn’t on the list after that day. Or any of the days that followed.

  Letters went unanswered. Days turned into months. Three years. A chunk of time that seemed like forever and not that long at the same time. Enough for the edges of what someone looked like to blur, even if only a little. Enough time that Bobby thought he remembered exactly what Aaron’s voice sounded like but, after a while, didn’t quite trust the memory. Just enough that when he saw Aaron in the parking lot for the first time after all those years, he had walked right past him.

  AARON SNORED. BOBBY snuck across the room and pulled back the blinds on the window, looking out into the street as Aaron had, presumably looking for the same thing. But no cop cars patrolled the streets. No cars at all. The snow had piled up quickly and Bobby couldn’t make out the street from the sidewalk. He walked to the front of the bed and curled up on the floor.

  When Bobby was seven or eight, the teacher had told them a week or so ahead of time that the book fair was coming to school. His mother would only give him enough money to buy school lunch, but when the book fair came around, Bobby would eat as little as he could stand that week and would look for spare change all over the apartment. He would get so excited when the truck pulled up and unloaded their rolling folding metal shelves.

  He always went straight for the Choose Your Own Adventure books. He only ever had enough money for one, maybe two, books but those were like having four or five books in one, if he made the right choices. They were fantasy books full of rainbow dragons and dark knights.

  Do you go into a dark cave with only a torch or do you go around it and climb the mountain path with all assortments of evil monsters? Bobby picked the cave. They never said anything about monsters being in there so he thought he was safe.

  The cave ended up killing him. It sucked, but then he got to start all over again.

  The adrenaline finally ran out and exhaustion set in. Bobby’s eyelids felt weighted. As he fell asleep, he envisioned a page to which he’d turned where he had to make a decision.

  Choose your own adventure. If you want your skinhead best friend to confront a gang member, turn the page to see what happens next. If you want to drive on to the next destination and not watch him kill someone, turn to page ninety-three.

  Robert caught the sideways glance the ER nurse shot him. He took one last drag before he flicked his cigarette toward the street. It landed in the snow with a hiss. He certainly wasn’t the only doctor there who smoked, but he was one of the very few who did. He knew it wasn’t a good look, but he’d only just picked up the habit again. He checked his watch. The nurse was part of the shift change. He could leave now if he wanted to, but he was in no hurry to return home. Solitude made everything seem larger. Bare footsteps echoing off the hardwood floor of their dining room that, though it only sat eight, loomed like the feasting hall of some great castle. The endless California King with no edges, always waking in the middle no matter how many times he rolled. The kitchen table stretching on to infinity, nothing interrupting its polished oak surface, save the divorce papers that arrived just days ago.

  Papers she had already signed.

  The snow that sat atop his tight gray-flecked curls melted and ran in rivulets, cooling his scalp in dots. He cracked the knuckle of his ring finger. Slid the wedding band on and off, the light brown of his skin almost white underneath. An old habit, never used to the jewelry—any jewelry— but especially on his hands.

  He was heading inside to get his keys when he heard the keening of a siren in the distance. He waited. The Doppler effect faded as the ambulance neared. It slid slightly before coming to a full stop under the archway. The siren shut off, but a muffled wail from inside the vehicle replaced it. The back doors swung open and a paramedic jumped down and helped his partner guide the gurney. A lanky young brother lay strapped down, tan hoodie soaked with blood. The sheet was crumpled at his feet from the writhing of his legs, and covered in urine and feces. His oxygen mask fogged with every moan.

  Robert followed the paramedics inside and they briefed him on the way to the trauma unit. The bones of the left side of the kid’s face had been crushed, and the right side was lined

  with fractures, likely from a secondary impact. Few teeth remained intact, and the bite from the impact had lacerated his tongue almost to the middle. Some of the shards from his orbital bone damaged the eye. He’d likely lose sight in it, if not the eye altogether. What neurological testing they had been able to complete when he wasn’t seizing suggested he had a bleed in his brain.

  The pieces of red mortar Robert plucked from his skin suggested someone had struck him with a brick. Had they thrown it? Dropped it on him? The force of the impact seemed impossible for one person to inflict on another.

  The team of residents moved quickly to stabilize him. After paging the neurosurgeon on- call, the team had the kid transferred to the ICU. Robert removed his mask and gown, crumbled them and tossed them towards the trash. It fell short of the mark. One of the EMTs stood with his back to the nurses’ station, elbows propped on the counter running game on a young aide. He saw the missed shot and tilted his chin at Robert.

  “What’s that they say about day jobs?” he asked.

  Robert gave a half-hearted smile and joined them at the station to review the boy’s chart. “Homewood,” he said to himself. They shared a hometown, though Robert hadn’t been

  back in years. Not since before Mama got sick. Then Pops died. Then Mama followed him home. A wash of overwhelming loneliness surged, then, with a sharp breath out, ebbed. He pushed the chart away.

  “Probably some kind of retaliation,” the EMT said.

  Robert looked up. “I’m sorry?”

  The EMT turned and leaned his arms on the counter, standing over Robert. The bulge of his jacket partially obscured his identification badge, but Robert made out the first name “Scott”.

  “The kid,” he said. “Probably got jacked as a retaliation. His gangbanger buddy was there when we showed up.”

  “That boy wasn’t wearing colors,” Robert said. “But his friend was, so that says it all, I guess.”

  Scott shifted on his elbows. “You said it yourself, the kid’s from Homewood. Do the math.”

  “I’m from Homewood,” Robert said. “So what you’re saying is black plus Homewood equals gang member. Is my math right?”

  Scott stood up from the counter and ran his fingers through his hair, his pale cheeks flushed. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  “Right,” Robert said. He stood and went to walk away, then stopped. “Let me ask you something. How long did it take you to get there?”

  “Excuse me?” Scott said.

  “When the call came in, and you heard a young black man had been assaulted, did you hurry? Or did you finish getting the number of some aide at another hospital?”

  “Are you calling me a racist?”

  “And when you picked that young man up, did you do everything within your power on that ride here to save him, or did you think, well, it’s just another banger off the street?”

  Robert saw in
his periphery the aide Scott had been talking to trading uncomfortable glances with the nurse next to Robert. Scott leaned his hands on the counter, his face tight, save a slight curl at his lip.

  “You can go fuck yourself, Doc. You don’t know a thing about me.”

  “Yeah,” Robert said. “Yeah, I think I do.”

  Scott pushed away, hands up in mock surrender, and headed for the sliding doors to the parking lot. He grabbed his partner along the way and they left without a look back. Robert dropped back into his chair. He felt eyes on him and looked to his left to see Lorraine, the charge nurse, with wide eyes. Then a smirk creased her brown cheeks.

  “Okay, Dr. Winston,” she said. “I see you.”

  Robert winced. “Too much?”

  “Please. Not enough.”

  Robert returned as genuine a smile as he could fabricate. He held no regret for what he’d said, but regretted the necessity. He reached for the chart again and read his name.

  “Marcus Anderson,” he said.

  Had the boy been someone his mama might have known? Had his grandfather watched the Steelers on Sunday’s with Robert’s father?

  “Lorraine, page me with updates on him, will you?”

  She nodded and walked off to join others on the staff gathered around the station and listened to the weather report on the radio. The Nor’easter approached. Those with long commutes prepped empty treatment rooms for an overnight stay. They joked and laughed. They didn’t exclude Robert, but they didn’t include him, either. Not that he blamed them. He enjoyed these rotations with the teaching hospital. He often, but not always, arrived to a certain level of celebrated respect. One thing remained constant, however no matter where he went, especially with the trauma teams—he hadn’t earned the camaraderie they’d formed in the trenches, and so, he often found himself alone, tonight more so than most.

  He finished his notes, grabbed his coat from the hook behind the nurses’ station and headed back outside. A gust sent icy air slicing through his scrubs and the long johns beneath. Leaning against his spot against the outside wall, he fished another cigarette from the bent soft pack in his front coat pocket. Savoring the cold fresh air, he took a deep inhale, closed his eyes, and saw the dining room table again.