A More Perfect Union

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  “Well, he’s not,” she said decisively.

  “Have you thought about asking him about this? It is his life, after all.”

  “Of course I’ve tried talking to him. He’s too damned stubborn to listen.”

  “He is related to you, after all,” Tom said, but the comment went entirely over her head.

  “I don’t care how you go about doing it, but we cannot have him prancing around in front of the whole community acting like some damned fruit. It’s embarrassing to me and everyone in his family.”

  “He’s not acting,” Tom said.

  “Of course he is,” she said.

  “This is something you and he need to talk about,” Tom repeated.

  “You aren’t listening to me,” she said, a strong hint of exasperation quickly creeping into her voice. “He won’t listen to reason, so I’m forced to come to you. I don’t know what you’ve done to him. He was always a good boy who never gave us this kind of trouble. It was only when you came onto the scene that everything started to go all to hell with him. So stop it.”

  Tom stared at her for a moment, trying to decide how much of his anger should be allowed out.

  “Since I disagree with your entire premise, I can’t help you.”

  “I don’t care what you think—”

  “Sorry, but I do.”

  “I don’t care. Fix this mess.”

  “I cannot and will not simply because I don’t see what you refer to as a ‘mess.’ What I see is a man I love and a man who loves me.”

  “Men aren’t supposed to do things like that,” she said angrily.

  “Men and women have been doing this for thousands of years. You’ve just been oblivious to it. Your son has been gay all of his life—you just didn’t see it.”

  “No son of mine is one of those people. I raised my kids right.”

  “Being gay has nothing to do with the way one is raised. Someone is gay because of something in his or her DNA and not from what someone did or did not do. He no more chose to be gay than you chose to be straight.”

  “No one wants to see such distasteful, sinful stuff shoved in their faces.”

  “Likewise,” Tom agreed, which only confused her more.

  “Enough,” she yelled. “I’ve told you what you are going to do, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you again.”

  “And what would that be, Mother?”

  Neither his mother nor Tom had heard Jeordi arrive home, so his question caught both of them by surprise.

  “Since you will not listen to reason, I had no choice but to come talk to”—she waved her hand vaguely at Tom—“this one to tell him to fix the mess he’s created.”

  “Why in the world would you ever do something like that, Mother? There is nothing wrong, other than you not getting the message that I don’t need or want you meddling in my life.”

  “I’m your mother. It’s my job to keep you on the straight and narrow and to help get you back on course when you get into trouble.”

  “Good to know. If I ever get into trouble, I’ll be ready.”

  “Will you stop being so goddamned stubborn?” she yelled at him. “Everybody sees you behaving like this, and they’re all going to think I didn’t do a good enough job raising you right.”

  “I think you’d better go now, Mother.”

  “I’m not leaving until you see reason.”

  “No, you’re leaving now,” Jeordi said, taking her by the arm and walking her to the door.

  “You’re throwing your own mother out?” she demanded of him.

  “If you had any manners and didn’t come into my home to abuse and misuse the man I love, then you would be welcome to stay. But clearly you are not capable of that, so I guess I am throwing you out. Good-bye,” he said as he closed the door with her on the other side.

  Chapter Three

  AFTER A quiet weekend, Monday morning dawned cold and wet and dreary, a constant drizzle falling from the leaden sky. Monday mornings were always the toughest days to get up and get going, and that morning, being nasty, was only more so. But they had no choice. Work awaited both of them, so they reluctantly got out of bed and started moving through their morning routines.

  Tom’s job was closer, but he started work earlier than Jeordi, so Tom left first. Since finances were so tight for them, they did not own a car. To get to work, Tom walked, but Jeordi’s job was a couple of miles away, so he rode his bike. A bike ride on a wet morning was far less appealing than it was on other days of the week.

  The drizzle had turned into a steadier rain by about the halfway point of Jeordi’s bike ride to work. He was just passing an especially congested part of his ride when a car, going too fast, apparently did not see him and turned right, hitting him from the side, knocking him to the road, and sending him body surfing across the hard blacktop of the pavement.

  When his body first connected with the pavement, his head bounced on the hard blacktop with enough force to leave him feeling quite disoriented. It was this disorientation that probably prevented him from feeling the pain that would normally have accompanied the horrible slide he took on the road.

  If he had not been getting a face full of rain, he likely wouldn’t have tried to move as soon as he did. The only problem was that he wasn’t very successful in making his body do what he wanted it to do.

  “Don’t move,” someone said. Jeordi didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Here, I’ll use my umbrella to keep the water off your face,” he heard a woman say from close by. He was having a hard time sorting out who was talking and what they were saying. Since the cold water was no longer hitting his face, though, Jeordi had less urgency about getting up. He lay back down and lost consciousness. At least that was his best guess, because the next thing he knew, someone was moving him from the ground up onto something softer than blacktop. He roused enough to see what was happening, but unfortunately the first thing he happened to spot was the mangled form of his bike. He groaned at the sight. It wasn’t new, but it was how he got around. He didn’t know what he was going to do without that bike, and he certainly couldn’t afford one.

  “Hey there, buddy,” an unknown man said to him in the back of an ambulance. “How you feeling?”

  “Don’t know,” Jeordi answered truthfully.

  “Hell of a way to start the week,” the unknown man said as he skillfully inserted an IV into Jeordi’s arm.

  “What’s that?” Jeordi asked.

  “Fluids. You’ve been bleeding. Standard course in an accident like you had.”

  “What happened to me?” Jeordi asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see it. Looked like a car hit you and sent you flying.”

  “Right,” he said. “I remember—I think.”

  Jeordi was a bit confused about the order in which things happened, but at some point the ambulance reached a hospital and he was wheeled into the emergency room, where someone checked him out almost immediately, ordering a series of tests and scans, the names of which meant nothing to Jeordi.

  One test completed, Jeordi lay on his bed in the ER waiting for the next test when he heard the familiar voice of his mother.

  “Oh my God, baby, are you all right?”

  “Mom?” he said, not expecting her.

  “I’m here, baby. Oh, my heavens, look at you. You’re so scraped up. What happened to you?”

  “I think a car hit me,” he said. “Is Tom here?”

  “I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  “Call him, please, and make sure he knows what happened.”

  An orderly appeared to push his bed off for his next test. An hour later when they returned him to the ER, other members of his family were there, but there was no sign of Tom.

  “Where’s Tom?” was his first question.

  “I don’t know,” his mother said before quickly going on about something else entirely.

  When someone came to draw blood, everyone stepped out while the technician did his wor
k. A nurse was in the room at the same time, so Jeordi asked, “Has anyone called my partner?”

  “What’s her name, sweetie?” the nurse asked.

  “His name is Tom,” Jeordi said.

  “You got a number?” she asked.

  “It’s in my phone. Where’s my phone?”

  “Sorry, baby, but you didn’t have one when you were brought in. Maybe it fell out when the car hit you?”

  “Crap,” Jeordi said, his frustration piling up. First his bike and now his phone. Digging into his memory, he gave her the number for Tom’s workplace.

  “I’ll go call for you.”

  Jeordi lay back, slightly comforted by the thought of Tom getting there to share in the hellish way in which his Monday had started. Jeordi hurt, and if he were honest, he was also scared. But it was only Tom with whom he would share the existence of that fear. He was certainly not about to show his fear to his parents or anyone else in his family.

  “Mr. Boone, I need to start cleaning up some of the injuries you sustained,” another nurse told him upon entering his space. “I’ll do my best to be gentle, but there may be some pain with some of the deeper parts, especially where I’ve got to try to remove foreign bodies.”

  “Foreign bodies?” Jeordi asked.

  “Most likely gravel and dirt, things you picked up when you slid along the road and the shoulder of the road.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Jeordi said.

  His mother chose that moment to pop her head back into the room. “You okay, baby?” she said.

  “Doing great,” he said dismissively. “Is Tom here yet?”

  He wasn’t looking at her, but Jeordi could hear the hitch in her voice. “I haven’t seen him. I’ll be out here if you need me, baby.”

  With her gone, Jeordi sighed and mentally shook his head in frustration.

  The debridement, to use the technical term—a term he learned when the nurse’s assistant tried to distract him from the nurse digging into an especially deep and sensitive spot—was not pleasant.

  “This is going to require some stitches,” she said before stepping out to summon a doctor.

  As Jeordi waited, he had nothing to do other than feel a throbbing in a huge section of his chest, not to mention his face, and he wasn’t even ready to think about his leg. He couldn’t move much since he was covered with sterile cloths, and the nurse had warned him about not disturbing them.

  Trapped as he was, Jeordi noticed the distinctive smell of the hospital. If asked, he couldn’t have identified what the chemicals were that created the scent, but there was no question it was there and it was very real.

  The wall to the right of his location looked a bit battered. Clearly it had seen a lot of people brush up against it. Gurneys had been bumped into it, along with an untold number of the rolling trays of instruments that dotted the room at the moment. He’d also seen some big but portable devices being wheeled around into other spaces, and he guessed that some of those had added to the damage. If that wall could talk and tell the story of each ding, dent, chip, and scuff, what a story that would be.

  The light in the room was dramatically different than that in most of the rest of the world. Since he was flat on his back, his face was getting the brightness full blast. And the nurse who had been working on his injuries had an even more intense beam, this one with a huge magnifying glass attached to it with yet another light source. If there was something that those two didn’t reveal, it must be tiny.

  His gaze drifted upward, not to the lights but to the square panels that made up the remainder of the ceiling. Clearly those were not new but had been there for some time. A number of them were chipped or had pieces missing, most likely from being pushed up or removed multiple times over the years. There were any number of smudges, probably from hands dirtied by whatever was on the upper side of those panels. Some of the stains were clearly handprints, but others were not so easily identifiable.

  This combination of dinged, dirty, and damaged surroundings made Jeordi wonder if perhaps the sterile cloths the nurse had used were enough, given the environment in which she was working. He made a mental note to mention that. But he also made a note to ask her for something for his headache, which was getting worse.

  A moment later he heard the nurse return and begin to pull on a fresh pair of surgical gloves. She was accompanied by a man, presumably a doctor, who did the same thing. He looked a bit harried, like he needed to be somewhere else more urgently at the moment, anywhere but in that room.

  “Okay, let’s see what we’re dealing with here,” he announced as he spread the deepest scrape on Jeordi’s chest.

  “Ow!” Jeordi cried out.

  “Did that hurt?” he asked.

  “What the fuck do you think?”

  “Not unexpected. It looks like you’ve damaged yourself quite a bit. How did this happen?” he asked as he continued to poke around.

  “A car hit my bike and sent me flying.”

  “Motorcycle?” the doctor asked.

  “No. Bicycle bike.” Jeordi’s opinion of the man was dropping precipitously, especially when he felt another sharp pain in another spot. “Ow!” he yelled, a little louder this time.

  “You shouldn’t be feeling that,” the doctor announced, as if that would clear up the problem.

  “Well, I did feel that.”

  “The anesthetic should have numbed the area.”

  “I haven’t given the patient anything yet, Doctor.”

  “What?” he demanded of the nurse.

  “You know I’m not allowed to do that.”

  The doctor sounded pissed, which made Jeordi even less happy with the man poking around on his body.

  “All right. This is going to take longer than I realized. I need to go finish up with another patient first,” he said as he left the room.

  “Nurse,” Jeordi said. “Is there anyone else other than him? I don’t like him. He seems mad at the world. I don’t think I want him working on me in that state.”

  “I’ll see. He’s really a good doctor, but he is stretched a little thin right now. You lie here for a few minutes and we’ll be back.”

  As suddenly as it had started, Jeordi was once again alone with nothing to do and no one to talk with. The usually placid, mostly quiet emergency room was apparently getting busy, at least based on the noise Jeordi was hearing from somewhere away from his location. Voices were raised, joined moments later by the sound of running feet and more commotion. He couldn’t make out the words nor tell who was speaking. Whatever was happening, it took a few minutes to resolve and involved one loud metallic crash before it was finished.

  Ten minutes later when a nurse poked her head in to check on him, Jeordi asked, “Has my boyfriend, Tom, got here yet? Someone called him quite a while ago. I need to see him as soon as he gets here.”

  Jeordi glanced her way when she didn’t immediately respond and saw an expression of… something unidentifiable on her face. “What?” he demanded.

  “Um, there was… well, there was just a dispute of some kind between the front desk personnel and someone who was trying to get in to see a patient. Those people who have been checking on you got involved somehow, but I didn’t hear what they said or what really happened.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Jeordi said, knowing instantly what had happened.

  Pushing himself upward, Jeordi felt a moment of dizziness and disorientation that only got worse as he swung his legs around to sit up on the table.

  “What are you doing? You can’t move!” the nurse yelled at him. “I had you all sterile. Now we’ll have to do that all again.”

  Jeordi stood, even though he still had the IV in his arm and wasn’t wearing anything other than his white cotton briefs.

  “Get this out of me,” Jeordi ordered, pointing to the IV.

  “No, I can’t. You need fluids.”

  “I’m leaving to go see if my parents have done what I think they’ve done. I need this thing out while I do that.”<
br />
  “I can’t let you leave. You haven’t had your stitches yet, and we haven’t finished debridement. We have a lot of work to do on you yet.”

  “I’m coming back, but I’ve got to go check this out first.”

  “This is a really, really bad idea,” she said.

  “You can do it, or I will do it,” Jeordi said. “It will probably be safer if you do it.”

  She gave a huge sigh and pulled something free from the needle the ambulance crew had placed in his arm.

  “I’ve disconnected the line, but the port is still there.”

  “Good. Thank you,” Jeordi said.

  Unsteadily, Jeordi made it to the door of the room, halting only when he heard the nurse tell him, “You’re not dressed.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Jeordi said.

  Every step he took hurt, sending reverberations of pain through his entire body, from his twisted ankle straight up to his aching head. His dizziness made him stop a couple of times, waiting for the world to right itself. But each time, he did not let his physical condition hold him back.

  “Baby,” he heard his mother shout when he reached the waiting room.

  “What just happened?” he said loudly, which unfortunately made his head hurt just that much more.

  His brother, Jerry—where had he come from—stood and tried to support Jeordi.

  “Shit, man. You’re a mess,” Jerry said. “I hope they’re not done with you yet.”

  “What happened out here?” Jeordi repeated. “Where’s Tom?”

  His previously animated family was suddenly silent.

  “I said, where’s Tom?” Jeordi asked again.

  “He’s not here,” his mother said, but Jeordi could read her well enough to know why he wasn’t there.

  “Where?” he asked, turning.

  “Where you going, bro?” his brother asked.

  “To find my boyfriend,” Jeordi answered, starting to step away from his family.

  “Jeordi, behave yourself,” his mother said sharply.

  “Get out of my way, Mother,” Jeordi said without turning back or stopping. With one hand on the wall to support himself, Jeordi limped to the doors, which automatically opened as he stepped near them. Proceeding outdoors was tougher because there was no wall for him to hold on to. Consequently, he had to move from one pillar to another. But at least he had a destination now. His destination was crystal clear. He was headed directly to the man who sat crumpled on the curb outside the hospital ER. Jeordi could hear the man weeping and knew now why Tom hadn’t appeared.