Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Light returned to Cameron’s face. “Similar how?”

  Janice sketched the story for him, the seeds of which she’d found in a citation in an obscure Korean War–era Army Medical Services report—a portion of the story, anyway.

  Floyd John Denton, of Bagdad, Arizona, was eighteen years old when he enlisted as a private in the Army Air Forces in 1942, and displayed such remarkable flying prowess that in less than a year he was promoted to master sergeant. In the first five months of 1943, he was credited with shooting down nine enemy planes over North Africa. On May 23 of that year, Denton’s P-38 Lightning fighter was strafed in a dogfight over Algeria and caught fire, forcing him to bail. Enemy tracer fire shredded Denton’s parachute during his descent, causing him to spin like a maple seed as he went hurtling toward the desert. Landing in a shallow wadi might’ve saved his life, but it didn’t save his spine. When Bedouin tribesmen happened upon Denton, a day later, they found him paralyzed below the waist, and turned him over to Italian troops. He languished in a hospital near Bari, Italy, until September 1944, when the Italian authorities repatriated him, and he returned home to Arizona.

  On the morning of May 12, 1950, almost six years to the day of his injury, Floyd John Denton woke up with sensation in his legs—a light prickly pain, “as though chiggers,” as the author of the Army Medical Services report stylishly put it, “were snacking on his lower extremities.” Denton recovered motor function much more slowly than Cameron did—over the course of two weeks, Denton’s granddaughter told Janice; the AMS report failed to specify—but the differences more or less stop there: Like Cameron, the once-paralyzed airman found himself fully restored.

  Cameron’s face was registering a pendulum of reactions to Janice’s account. Part of him felt thrilled, he’d later say, to hear that he wasn’t alone, could no longer deem himself an aberration of nature or of supernature; yet another part of him was dismayed by something he still finds hard to articulate. A loss of singularity, perhaps. The feeling, maybe, of scaling a mountain reputed to be unclimbed, only to find a candy wrapper at the summit. A question came trembling off his lips: “Did he—did he stay that way?”

  “For the rest of his life, yes,” Janice answered.

  This was Cameron’s only question about Floyd John Denton, and for that Janice felt relieved. F.J., as he was called, “was a hard, rough man,” says Cherie Nugent, the granddaughter with whom Janice spoke. Nugent, a massage/reiki therapist in Phoenix, is the eldest daughter of F.J. Denton’s son, and a candid family historian. “They say he was bad to drink before he started walking again,” she says, “and then worse to drink after.” Alcohol-fueled fisticuffs appear to have been his prevailing post-recovery pastime—with bar patrons, mostly, but also with his co-workers at the Bagdad copper mine and, sadly, with his wife and child. Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office records show Denton was arrested for battery and assorted other charges eight times between 1952 and 1957. (Later records were lost in a fire.) Even in a hard-drinking, knock-em-stiff mining town like Bagdad, Denton cut a ferocious and dangerous figure; he was fired from the mine in 1959, allegedly for assaulting a foreman, and worked sporadically as a handyman in nearby Prescott thereafter. When he died, in 1965—killed in a one-car automobile accident after midnight on the Yavapai Indian reservation, the cause of which struck most people as self-evident—the Prescott Evening Courier’s obituary made no mention of Denton’s wartime heroics, except to note that he was a World War Two veteran, nor did it make any mention of his extraordinary postwar recovery.

  There’s no evidence of any medical investigation having been done on Denton’s recovery. He was clearly examined by military doctors for his case to have been cited in the 1951 AMS report; but the citation was anecdotal, appearing in the report’s introduction as a way of illustrating the epidemiological mysteries of spinal cord injuries.

  “I don’t get the feeling people thought of it as a miracle, no,” says Nugent. “At least no one in the family ever talked about it that way. It was more like, nothing and nobody could ever whup F.J. Not even a drop from a burning plane with his parachute torn to ribbons—not even that could break him. Like he was too damn tough to stay paralyzed.”

  Denton’s recovery, then, seems to have been viewed less as an act of God than as an act of will—when it was viewed at all. The local newspapers took no notice. Nothing in the archives of Bagdad’s two churches suggests Denton’s recovery attracted clergy interest. “He wasn’t raised in the church and I doubt he ever entered one,” says Nugent. “There wasn’t a lot of love for him in the family, and probably wasn’t much love for him anywhere around Prescott, if I had to guess.” To say that Floyd John Denton—despite his aerial valor and despite his spectacular recuperation—rolled through Bagdad and later Prescott like a tumbleweed, leaving no apparent trace, seems valid; but it seems equally valid to liken his passage to that of a rattlesnake, a presence best avoided. “My father was just twelve when his dad died and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he’s never stopped being terrified of the man.” (Carl Denton, Nugent’s father, hangs up the telephone when asked about his father; he did speak to Janice, but only to say he didn’t wish to discuss the matter and to recommend she speak with Cherie.)

  “So what’s it mean, then, that this has happened before?” Cameron asked her.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. And I’m still very unsure how this,” meaning Cameron, “is related to that,” meaning Denton. “Unfortunately there’s no data to quantify any parallels. There’s just a story.”

  Cameron was shaking his head. “And here you said you didn’t have no news.”

  “Is that news?”

  “I mean, can miracles happen twice?”

  “Well.” She brought a forkful of salad to her mouth to give herself time to consider a response. Privately, her answer was yes: The existence of a precedent—if the case of Floyd John Denton could be called that—suggested that a very rare and unknown mechanism could be at work. But Cameron was asking about miracles, not mechanisms; the distinction was more than semantic. “That’s a question for your priest, not me.”

  Seeing his brow knotting, she wondered if divulging F.J. Denton’s story had been a mistake. Intimations aside, Denton’s neurons and Cameron’s might’ve shared nothing more than narrative resemblance. “Is it all still bothering you?” she asked. “I mean, not bothering…you know. The whole spiritual thing.”

  “Not as much, I guess,” he said. “I mean, Father Ace, he’s certifying it. The hard part now is understanding why it happened to me—why God chose me. And what-all I’m supposed to do with it.”

  “Is that how you want to think about it—as a miracle?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked uncomfortable, as though congested with something inexpressible. “I mean, it’s either God or it isn’t, right? The result’s the same.”

  “That’s probably a healthy way of looking at it,” she said, though a part of her grimaced as she said it. Nap, her husband, had voiced something similar while venting his frustrations about the off-duty energy Janice was devoting to Cameron’s case. His irritation, she thought, wasn’t entirely unfair; she was experiencing her own side effects. Her exercise regimen was getting squeezed, for starters—she hadn’t clocked a ten-mile-plus run in weeks, and, with her concentration often fritzing, her running times were inching up. During yoga classes she didn’t find her head clearing, as it once had, but instead felt it clouding ever deeper. When Nap mentioned events in the news she often found herself staring back vacantly: The only reading she was doing was medical literature. She hadn’t been like this—single-minded, frazzled, abstracted—since med school, and maybe not even then. Her friend Cheryl had even asked her, in a roundabout way about which they still laugh, if Janice might be having an affair. “A healthy way of looking at it, I guess,” she added to Cameron, and perhaps to herself, “though I can’t imagine it’s
an easy way of looking at it.”

  “Helluva lot easier than what I used to have to think about,” said Cameron. He was dipping a fried oyster in Tabasco-laced ketchup, and his tone was light. “Shit, I was popping my Skittles just so I could think what to eat for breakfast. I don’t miss that.”

  “Miss—” Janice felt a twinge of alarm. “Don’t miss what?”

  “My Skittles. The meds.”

  “You’ve stopped taking them? Which ones?”

  “All ’em. Except the pain meds sometimes, when my legs get to aching.”

  “The Zoloft?”

  He nodded.

  “The Prazosin?”

  “Yeah, that too. I still got some of those Klonopin tabs left but, naw, I’ve not taken nothing since…it’s been a couple weeks I think.”

  Cameron had been taking a daily 150-milligram dose of Zoloft, an antidepressant, since 2011, when he’d foundered into a deep depression following his release from Brooke Army Medical Center. Janice had later prescribed him a high-dose regimen of Prazosin, which blunts the impact of excess adrenaline, to ease Cameron’s nightmares and sleep disturbances. She’d also prescribed him Klonopin, a benzodiazepine, for anxiety. It’s a common and clinically effective cocktail for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. A year or so before, Tanya had confided to Janice that the drugs had probably saved her brother’s life.

  “Cameron, those medications weren’t for your legs. They were for your brain.”

  “But the problem with my brain was my legs.”

  “No, no, no.” She was registering a gush of adrenaline and anxiety herself now. “Your PTSD—that’s independent of your physical trauma. Just because your physical trauma resolved doesn’t mean the psychological trauma did. What happened to you is still up there.”

  “But it doesn’t feel that way. What it feels like is that none of it happened.”

  “But it did.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “No, listen to me please. Major life events can often lead to depressive episodes—even happy events. Sometimes especially happy events. And let’s be honest—life events don’t come more major than yours. You’re grappling with some substantial issues right now, from the spiritual stuff on down. I mean, if fame feels weird now, imagine how it’s going to be when the show premieres. And when it ends. What about then?”

  He stared back at her.

  “Look, there may come a time for us to adjust your medications to align with your different situation in life and how you’re feeling about it, absolutely—but right now isn’t it. It’s more important than ever for you to be stable up there. I really can’t stress that enough, Cameron. When did you stop? Do you remember?”

  His face was expressionless, and that in itself Janice read as defiance. “Two, three weeks ago,” he said. “When my Zoloft ran out. I just figured…”

  He concluded this sentence with a shrug.

  “Have you noticed any changes?” She’d pulled her iPhone from her purse and was now typing notes into it.

  “Changes? Not really. Don’t get that dizziness anymore. Or that zoned-out feeling. Uh, takes me a lot longer to catch a buzz? That’s a weird one.”

  “Nothing negative? The nightmares haven’t returned?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No mood swings, no anxiety, intrusive thoughts…”

  “Nothing, doc.” The smile on Cameron’s face, steady and beatific, evoked that of a preacher, intimating that what seemed fraught and complex might in fact be quite simple. “Maybe that’s part of the miracle.”

  With a deep and unruly sigh Janice placed down her phone. “I really wish you’d talked to me before making that decision.”

  “I’m talking to you now.”

  As Janice opened her mouth to respond she sensed a strange tightening of the atmosphere, a warning that came floating through the air, and when she glanced right then left she saw that the diners around them were staring and maybe also, she worried, eavesdropping. Perhaps she and Cameron had been exuding more tension than she’d realized, or perhaps she’d failed to notice, until then, just how closely their lunch was being monitored, how entrancing was Cameron’s porchlight of fame. Gulfport and Biloxi aren’t small towns, by Mississippi standards, but they act like it; if word were to reach Dr. Turnbull she could conceivably (if gymnastically) defend a social lunch with a patient, but certainly not an off-campus, off-the-books consult about Cameron’s drug regimen. Cameron’s gaze followed hers, and possibly latching onto her discomfort he announced, “I’m gonna grab a smoke.”

  “I’ll walk out with you,” she said.

  Out on the sidewalk Cameron tapped his pants pockets and cursed; he’d left his cigarettes in the car. Janice watched as he fished a keyless car remote from one of those pockets. When he thumbed its button the headlights on a very new and very shiny car flashed twice, accompanied by the blooping of its horn, and Janice trailed Cameron to the car where he plucked a fresh pack of cigarettes from the passenger seat. A disabled placard, she noticed, was hanging from the rearview mirror.

  “This is yours?” she said.

  “I reckon,” he said, lighting a cigarette with a shrug. The car was a 2014 Ford Fusion sedan, its deep blue exterior evoking the Gulf beneath a full moon. “Two cars show up one day and they hand me the key to one and tell me it’s mine. I didn’t ask for how long. They said Ford donated them or something. The producers, they didn’t want Tanya’s old Kia in the driveway so we gave it to Quỳnh to use.”

  “Quỳnh?”

  “He’s the Vietnamese fella owns the Biz-E-Bee.”

  “Oh right,” she said. “I actually stopped by there a week or so ago. It’s like a shrine to you.”

  “Yeah, he’s given us a lifetime discount. Ten percent off everything except cigarettes.”

  At this Cameron grinned, widely and toothily and almost, to Janice’s eye, victoriously, the way a poker player revealing a royal flush might grin, and it was then, in the bleached light of the midday sun, that she finally identified that overriding discrepancy in his appearance that’d been throwing her off: his teeth. They were spectacularly white and uniform, like plastic piano keys. He was sporting an anchorman’s mouth.

  “Your teeth. Are those…?”

  “Veneers, ha.” Cameron sucked at them, blushing. “Network paid for ’em.”

  “Well I’ll be damned.” She wagged her head in an effort to shake off her visible incredulity. “It’s just—it’s a whole new you, isn’t it? Top to bottom.”

  “Kinda is, huh?”

  Looking at him now, with the sun-dappled peacock shades of the Gulf at his back, his glinting new teeth eligible for a Colgate commercial audition, his blond hair—now longer than he used to keep it, and styled with L.A. precision—shimmering lightly in the breeze, she flashed back to the first time she’d seen him, in her office: crumpled, scarred, unwashed, pale, minimally responsive, mildly intoxicated, ever-nudged by his sister, one of those combat casualties for whom survival, in their heads, seems more curse than blessing. He’d come to her, that morning, in a state of rot. It was beyond difficult for her to reconcile these two Camerons—no, it was flat-out impossible.

  “Are you—are you happy, Cameron?” she found herself asking. The odd way he looked at her suggested he hadn’t quite heard her, so she repeated it: “Are you happy?”

  Cameron remembers answering yes to this question. Janice, however, recalls him replying with a question of his own: “How could I not be?”

  She’s adamant about the accuracy of this memory, she says, because she remembers asking Cameron’s question of herself as she drove along the coast toward New Orleans that afternoon: How could I not be happy, she remembers thinking, about this transformation in my patient? What was it that was unsettling her about him? She ran through their conversation in her head (later, in New Orleans, she
’d transcribe it from memory), sifting through everything he’d said for clues to…to what, exactly? To something atmospheric, ineffable, emotional—the goose-pimply stuff she hated.

  She turned on the car radio. She turned off the car radio.

  Was it her own pride, she wondered darkly: some noxious facet of her ego resenting Cameron’s metamorphosis because it’d not only happened without her but possibly in spite of her? But what warped species of physician begrudges a patient’s recovery?

  Or was it merely a symptom of the terminal weariness she was feeling—maybe Nap was right when he’d said they should take a vacation or start having babies—from trying and trying and trying and trying to find an explanation for Cameron’s recovery, in hundreds of books and internet journals, in long-shot consultations with other clinicians, in a forgotten 1951 Army Medical Services report that simultaneously provided her with everything and nothing she needed, in her groggy thoughts as she awoke every morning and in her groggier thoughts as she fell asleep every night? How could science have nothing to say? How could she—she who’d examined those legs when they were spindly and insensate, who’d studied and re-studied the data, she who’d felt the motion of those reanimated legs beneath her palms and found herself gasping that same incoherent word as everyone else, Jesus?

  As Mississippi became Louisiana, the piney woods escorting I-10 giving way to cypress swamps, their still and glassy waters rust-stained with reflections of the autumn leaves, Janice’s mind drifted back to Doc Woodson in Greenwood and to what her father had deemed the pinnacle of medicine: treat the injury, treat the cause. But what if there was no cause? What if that boy from her father’s story, the one with the broken jaw—what if he’d just been sitting outside the Pemberton General Store or in front of Fountain’s Big Busy Store downtown, not doing anything, not even chewing gum, when from out of nowhere he felt his jawbone snap? Doc Woodson wouldn’t have said Jesus, no. Doc Woodson would’ve said bullshit. Doc Woodson, she realized, would’ve called that boy a liar.