Their last year with the big boys won’t be easy either. This year’s 6A division presents a uniquely demanding gauntlet. With Shooter Ackley out of Seaside, Ian Callert over in Canby, Danny Rubbe down in Cape Blanco—all NCAA Division I–bound athletes—not to mention Jesuit’s factory of disciplined contenders, 6A is shaping up to be something to tell your kids about. Berg’s got the windows down for cold air. He has to keep Jimmy awake. He knows that much. These call-in people with their outrage, they’ll do it for him. 4A? This is a joke! Whole town empty. The cold air isn’t enough. He doesn’t care what these people have to say. Only values the noise they make. At least we know we’ll kick butt.
“What the hell were you doing, Jimmy?” he shouts over the wind and radio.
Jimmy’s head lolls on the end of his neck. “Where we going?” he asks. Blood bubbles up on his lips.
“The hospital. We’re going to the doctor. You’ve been hurt.”
“I know.” There’s a gurgle in the kid’s throat and Berg wonders if he should stop the truck, make sure Jimmy isn’t choking on his own blood. Instead he presses down on the gas harder. Truck roars. The hospital is nearby.
“Don’t tell, OK?” Jimmy says after a little while. The sound of his voice is barely audible over people pissing on over the pseudo issue of sports divisions. Kid sounds like his father, Todd Kirkus, from back when they were best friends and he was about to do something Berg wasn’t sure about. Bergy? Be cool. Don’t tell.
Tears come to Berg’s eyes. “I won’t tell. I won’t.”
• • •
Two nurses come at them moments after they enter the ER waiting room.
“What happened?” the first nurse asks. Berg doesn’t recognize her.
“Chris?” the second nurse shouts. “We need a bed out here, get us a bed.” This one Berg knows. He can’t remember her first name, but she’s a Parson. She was a couple grades below him in high school, her mother was the English teacher. He used to drink with her brother. Bud Lights and bonfires.
“Where’s Todd?” the Parson nurse asks. “James, where’s his father?”
But the bed is there and Berg is pushed aside in the activity as the first two nurses and a tall, bald man who must be Chris, lower Jimmy onto a wheeled gurney. Sarah. The second nurse’s name is Sarah. Sarah Parson. Berg feels an unnatural amount of relief to remember her name. With this, it somehow seems to him, everything will be OK.
Then a pale girl Berg has never seen before steps through the nurses and up to Jimmy just as he’s about to be wheeled away. Young, still in high school probably. She bites her lip and reaches her hand out toward his head.
Sarah grabs her hand before she can touch the kid, holds it. “No, honey,” she says, “not now.”
“Is he going to be OK?” the girl asks in a shattered voice.
Jimmy just stares. Berg isn’t sure he’s heard her.
“He’ll be OK,” Sarah says and places the girl’s hand back at her side.
“Carla?” It’s the Reverend Ferguson. New to town, homeschools his kids. This girl must be one of his, Berg thinks. “Carla, come here now.”
Chris, the bald male nurse, is pushing Jimmy’s bed toward the door that leads into the ER. Berg walks with them. The door opens before they get there and some doctor out of Portland, because Columbia City can’t seem to raise their own doctors—just janitors and Pepsi deliverymen—ushers the nurses back, already talking jargon Berg has no hope of following. Sarah stops, looks at Berg, and Berg stops. He can’t go back there.
“Remember,” Jimmy calls out.
Mr. Berg releases a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “What?”
“You won’t tell?”
The doors are closing. Berg nods his head, not sure if Jimmy can see.
“We’ll take good care of him,” Sarah says, a calmness he could cry for in her voice.
Berg keeps nodding.
He turns back to the waiting room in time to see the pale girl wavering out of the sliding doors, the Reverend Ferguson holding her elbow. She’s visibly weak. “That’s Jimmy Kirkus,” Berg hears her tell her father. “The basketball player.”
Berg doesn’t know what’s wrong with the girl to be here so late at night, to be so pale and sick, but something surely is. He feels like he’s seeing a different side to the town he’s always known and it frightens him. This is a world populated by pallid, shaky girls and boys bent on smashing themselves out. He wishes it were any other night, and he was home, watching the Late Show, smirking along with Letterman. He sits in one of the gray chairs, picks up the courtesy phone, checks for a dial tone, places it back down.
Berg remembers running into Jimmy and his father, Todd, years before. They were in the Safeway parking lot around Christmas, buying a tree from the Boy Scout sale. Jimmy couldn’t have been more than two. Such a sweet kid, he ran around picking up tree trimmings. Couldn’t believe those were free. Sweetest kid. Lately though, kid’s been different—no surprise there with what he’d been through. Whole world’s weight on him.
So maybe, in a way, Jimmy was jumped back in the gym; only by himself and not some other kid. The sweet Jimmy snuffed out by the new one. Mr. Berg shakes his head. He doesn’t like thinking about things in this way. Brings him close to a black hole in his mind. All the possibilities and none of them right. Trapdoors. Slippery slopes. He had hated college for that reason and chose work as a janitor for the way it shrunk the world down.
First he calls Van Eyck beverages, gets Todd’s cell number from a sleep-voiced kid who perks up at the word “emergency.” Hangs up on him quickly, lest he forget the number floating in his head, and dials Todd. Of course he does. He’s the father of a kid too, isn’t he? Jimmy Kirkus wasn’t thinking straight when he told Berg not to tell. There are records and insurance claims to be factored in. Jimmy is a minor, who the hell did the kid think would check him out? The phone is ringing and Berg’s shame is building. Not rushing right in, or coming sooner to have prevented it happening in the first place, these are things he adds to his own case against himself.
Todd answers on the fourth or fifth ring, the oceanic roar of driving in the background. Berg pictures him in his Van Eyck Beverages delivery truck, working the night shift as always.
“Hello?”
“Todd, it’s James. James Berg?”
There’s the background roar and a sharp, rhythmic clicking too. Blinker?
“It’s about Jimmy. I found him in the gym. I thought he’d been jumped. But that wasn’t it.” The phone is fumbled, and in the ensuing scuffling, three bangs in a row, it sounds to Berg as though it’s been dropped from a great height, though it was probably just from ear to lap. “Todd?”
“I’m here,” he says so quickly Berg can’t be sure the phone was ever dropped in the first place.
“Jimmy was on the floor and . . .” Berg doesn’t feel guilty for telling, just guilty he hadn’t called sooner, from the gym, from the car ride over, from twenty-two years before.
When he’s done there is only breathing on the other end. No words, but what could James expect? This was about Todd’s kid, not their friendship. Still, he can’t stand it, he presses on.
“I wish I would’ve known he was still in there, in the gym—Coach Kelly should have told me. I would’ve never. Well, you know that. Listen. He’s at the hospital now. I guess you’ll have to come pick him up.” There’s a shifting sound, the pop of the truck door opening, Todd getting out. James pictures him pacing on the side of the highway. He hears a siren from far off, though he can’t tell if it’s on his end or Todd’s. He looks up and notices the nurse, Sarah, staring at him from the check-in desk, listening. He wants to say more, but can’t, not with her there.
Then a click. Hung up on. Not even a scrap of gratitude, forgiveness, or acknowledgment. James throws the phone across the lobby. Cord yanks it short so it bashes onto the
floor, receiver cracked. He looks up. Sarah’s all owl eyes from where she sits.
The dial tone, dull but somehow urgent, bleeds out.
“I’ll pay,” James says. “The phone. I can pay for that.”
• • •
Look at our kid Jimmy, asleep in a hospital bed. He’s dreaming beautiful things. Car window studded with water. Taillights smeared red across the windshield. Paul Simon singing on and on from the CD player about diamonds on the soles of her shoes. Mom and Pops looking back at him through the rearview mirror, and then at each other—like they still care. Dex playing his Game Boy and asking Jimmy to “Please, please, just get me past the fireball plant in level eleven.” Watching the darkness outside the car from warm safety. A day he always wants to dream about, but never does. He’s hovering, just on the dusty side of sleep, a great happy sadness welling within.
It’s been a fitful hour of doctors coming in and administering tests with penlights and clicking sounds. And once, in the middle of it, a nurse with Mickey Mouse scrubs and a doctor with hairy spider hands laid him down and inserted him headfirst into a giant, whirring machine. The doctor had been kind, patted him on the foot and told him it was just a CT scan. Jimmy hadn’t known what that meant, or what they were looking for with the machine, but he said, “OK, yeah,” and listened to the whirring and beeps for clues. He figured with a machine that big, with mechanics so obviously expensive, it could see straight into your brain. Poke around and tell if you had hurt yourself permanently, but also, maybe, see exactly who you really were and what you wanted and who you wished to become. Jimmy isn’t sure of what they found. This scares him. Like it’s a test he might fail.
• • •
Gravity. That’s the only thing that pulls Todd out of the parking lot—big Van Eyck truck taking up two spots—and through the sliding automatic doors and into the hospital. Emotional gravity. He was on the cliff, just an hour earlier, when James Berg called. Son. Hospital. He’d dropped the phone. Not that. He couldn’t handle that. But then it wasn’t that. And there was an easier grade down after all. Not the smash into flat-out oblivion he’d first seen. Jimmy was alive.
Otherwise he’d be too tired, too spooked by the empty future that had snapped into focus when he had assumed the worst to even make it this far. He would have walked away, truck left on the side of the road where he’d pulled off when James Berg called, blinking hazard lights. They would have found the truck—known immediately that it was his from the dead cow skull he’d glued on the dash—but never him.
Into the hospital and the first one up is James Berg. Out of a waiting room chair and at his side. Matching steps.
“Todd, he’s going to be fine,” James says. “Nothing permanent, I’m told. He’ll be OK.”
“Where is he?”
“Right through there. That’s Sarah Parson, you remember her?” A nurse he vaguely recognizes, smiling, pressing a big, blue button that opens the doors into parts of the hospital you don’t normally see unless you’re bringing life into the world or sending it away.
“I just found him laid out, you know, on the floor. I think he did it to himself. I took him here just as fast as I could. I’m sorry, Todd.”
Todd knows what’s happening. He glimpsed down into the gap where their friendship once was. Best friends. Until Berg had ratted him out for drinking. It seems silly now, but somehow, twenty-two years old, it’s still fresh-black dug. Guy’s trying to fix it all wrong though, like he always has. A gnat. Trying to fill it in with words. Be nicer, kinder, more understanding. Get lower, why don’t you? What he needs to do—and Todd recognizes this even if he couldn’t put the right words to it to say so—is just man up and tell him he’s an asshole. Nobody made him do any of what he did that led to his initial, selfish spiral. He’d drunk, he’d fucked, him, Todd Kirkus. Just stand up and tell him like it is. Then maybe they could get on with it. Move some dirt.
“James, just go,” he says, as kind as he can manage.
“Yeah, OK, but if you need anything.”
More wrong. Todd waves him off. Picking up steam. He’s closer in orbit now, crashing through the atmosphere, following Sarah Parson. James falls off as Jimmy—his son—a planet, rolls in. Emotional gravity.
• • •
For the last half hour he’s been left alone. It’s quieter than before. The lights in the ER dimmer, there’s a curtain pulled around his bed, and it’s a delicious gray. He could stay in this color forever. He loves how everything is shades of the same.
Then his pops comes in, yanks wide the curtain, lets in the background light, casters screaming. He grabs Jimmy’s shoulder, shakes him out of his half sleep. The whole bed moving. Jimmy’s brain is a loose marble rattling in his tin-can head. Last night with the brick wall comes back to him. Pain. All is pain.
“You’re dead, kid,” his pops says. “Now get the hell up.”
Jimmy whimpers as his father’s low-down voice brings on a different kind of hurt; now it’s like his brain has too much water packed around it. No room to think. “It’s too early?” he says. His pillow is wet. Somewhere, something is leaking.
His pops whispers like air let out of a bike tire, “Getthehellup.”
“But, Pops,” he’s almost crying. “It’s too early.”
“Too early? I gotta pick my kid up from Columbia Memorial, four in the morning, and it’s too fucking early?” Todd sweeps Jimmy’s thin hospital blanket off in one go.
Jimmy’s robe is twisted, riding high, and he scrambles to cover his half-hard dick, listing solemnly to the side. He burrows his head into the pillows, clutching his junk with two hands.
Todd slaps a hand over his eyes. “Jesus, Jimmy.”
The suddenness of cold air on his naked body makes Jimmy’s head hurt. But everything makes his head hurt. He curls into a ball at the top of the thin bed and he’s sweating, can feel his heart beating in his tongue and his temples. He needs a glass of water, he needs a week alone. Jimmy gropes for the blanket that has been cast off him in the dim hospital half light, one hand over his stuff, head still beneath a pillow. The fog in his brain feels as though it’s draining from his nose. Strange. He sits up, sniffing, too confused to care what his pops sees.
“We got to go,” his pops says.
“It’s too early,” Jimmy tries again.
“Too early for living too, since you already dead.” His pops finds a wall-mounted exam light, flips the switch, and everything cracks into being. Gone, the grayness.
Jimmy winces in pain. Fireworks. A quick fear runs cold up his spine that he actually is dead and this is hell. He grinds his teeth. So hard they might come out. Groans again.
For the first time his pops is seeing his head. Those great tree-trunk legs buckle, Jimmy watches him reach for support, grab hold of the back of a chair. He breathes out bumpy. “And take care that bloody nose.” His pops yanks the curtain back, casters screaming again. Jimmy puts a hand to his nose, it comes away red.
• • •
Sarah Parson meets Todd Kirkus as he’s leaving Jimmy’s curtained-off bed, headed toward the waiting room. She stands before him and all manner of physics are violated when he slows and then stops instead of just running her flat. He rears up, eyes flashing.
“Mr. Kirkus, it’s the hospital’s recommendation that Jimmy stay put for a bit longer,” she says, voice calm. She clicks her pen to meter her words. A trick she learned in nursing school. “He should be seen by someone, make sure he doesn’t do it again.”
Todd laughs, gruff, unfunny. “Oh, he’s not doing that again.”
“Still it’s our recommendation.”
Todd cuts her off—and this she hates. “Shouldn’t a doctor be telling me this?”
“Dr. Maron has been called away, but has asked that I speak with you.”
He leans in closer, breath thick with cheap mint. “Let me ask you somet
hing. How many people you already called about this? Prime gossip, all this.”
Sarah has seen this line of thought coming. She knows Todd doesn’t recognize her from high school—what use could he have for a short, pudgy girl who liked to spend her time in the library, rewriting her favorite scenes from books, word for word, just to see what greatness felt like—but she knows him, or at least his type. Everything leads back to his or his son’s persecution. So center of the bull’s-eye is he that he doesn’t realize nobody’s shooting arrows. “Mr. Kirkus, it would be a breach of my personal moral code, not to mention the hospital’s, not to mention the law’s, to do any such thing.”
“Can you keep him, legal?”
Officers Jones and Markham had already been through, cleared Jimmy on any criminal counts, and Dr. Maron signed off on his physical condition, so no, she couldn’t, not legally. Still. She wished she could pull the brakes on the infamous Freight Train. No doubt he was going to try and ply his son with more “tough love,” the exact same shit that got him into this mess in the first place. There were times Sarah Parson thought of moving to Portland, or Seattle, or even somewhere on the east coast for a chance at love, happiness, and adventure (Columbia City being a terrible conduit for all three), but the prospect of leaving the idiots of this place to themselves made her linger.
Rules for Becoming a Legend Page 4