by Drew Perry
“Maybe I should go help him,” Jack says.
“We covered this already,” says Butner. “Fucknut can cut every damn inch of it himself, as far as I’m concerned. It’s enough, him just fucking showing up here in the first place.” He looks around. “Hey, where’s the little man?”
Jack looks at the lineup of buckets, and Hen’s not there. He’s not at the hose spigot, and he’s not in the greenhouse. He’s not anywhere. Jack’s up and out of his chair, imagining, what, the sound of air brakes locking up out on the highway, Hen disappearing under the bumper of one of the medical supply trucks that drive up and down. Or drinking diesel out of the pump over at the Shell. And Beth will have been so right about him, about everything. She’ll make him explain it again and again to her: No, we were just sitting there. Yes, I was watching him. I don’t know how. She’ll make him explain it to everyone at the goddamn funeral. And he’d just started speaking Spanish. But Jack comes around the mulch bins and of course there he is, Hendrick, right there, because where the hell else would he be, except fine, unscathed, squatting at the foot of the cedar pile—he’s lining up long pieces of cedar, each at a ninety degree angle to the last, a staircase, a calculator, a Spanish-to-Hendrick dictionary. He’s choosing each piece carefully, examining it, touching it to his lips, then laying it in place. And he’s whispering. At first Jack can’t pick it up over the noise from Canavan’s chainsaw, but when he leans in, he recognizes it—it’s the lead to one of The Weather Channel storm retrospectives. A show about the history of weather. They’ve seen it twice this week. Hendrick chooses another piece, looks up, and says, The remnants of Tropical Storm Allison march toward the city, dumping as much as thirty inches of rain in two days.
Jack’s heartbeat starts coming back down. He’s listening to the trucks on the highway headed east and west without having to run over his son to do it, so it takes him a few beats to register that there’s something else now, another something, a new thing wrong—that Butner’s yelling for him, that the chainsaw motor has stopped. He looks up, and across the yard Butner’s standing over Canavan, who’s on the ground in a pile of branches. Butner’s waving, yelling something Jack can’t hear. He picks Hendrick up and starts over there. Hen keeps right on through his litany. How much of this has he got memorized? Let’s go to Jim Cantore in the Weather Center for a look back, Hen says, over Jack’s shoulder. Jim? Probably all of it. He probably has the whole thing. As they get closer, Jack can see how much blood there is, and he starts to hurry.
Canavan has put the chainsaw all the way through his leg, Jack thinks at first. His jeans are soaked in blood and he’s sitting there in the leaves, both feet out in front of him. There is blood down in the dirt next to where he’s dropped the saw. Everything smells like sawdust and saw oil and sweat. He looks sick. His leg’s still attached. So not all the way through. His face is pale, and he’s not screaming, not grabbing at his leg, not doing much of anything. He’s staring at his truck, at the painting of himself there on the side. “Call an ambulance,” Butner says. Gently, almost. And that’s what Jack does. That’s certainly what’s called for here. He puts Hen down and pulls the phone out of his pocket. It’s the first time in his life he’s ever called 911. Hen’s staring at Canavan’s leg, whispering At three-thirty a.m., the storm drains in the downtown neighborhood of Campus Reach fail. And at Mercy Hospital, nurse Gloria Arroyo prepares her patients for a possible move to higher ground. He’s even got the intonations down. It takes five rings for anyone to pick up, and when they do, the line’s bad. Jack can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman on the other end. He can’t tell for sure if he’s even connected. He just starts saying his name and address. “Jack Lang,” he says. “Patriot Mulch & Tree, 7144 Highway 70, Whitsett.” He says that three times. Canavan looks like shit.
The phone goes perfectly clear, and the voice on the other end says, “Sir, what is the nature of your emergency?”
The nature of his emergency. Jack bites on the inside of his mouth. He says, “Somebody cut himself with a chainsaw. Terry Canavan. Somebody we work with.”
“Does anyone there know first aid?” asks the voice.
“I do, a little bit,” says Jack. “From Boy Scouts.” He feels absurd. He remembers learning how to carry somebody out of the woods, how to boil water to purify it. He remembers that if one kind of bear charges you, you’re supposed to throw yourself on the ground, and if it’s the other kind, you’re supposed to run. He doesn’t remember which is which. He remembers a kid at Scout Camp actually getting his eye poked out because he was running with a stick. Jack Lancaster. The kid who poked his eye out. The mothers must have loved that story.
“If you can put a clean cloth over the wound and elevate it, that would be great. Can you do that for me, sir?”
Jack says to Butner, “Can you put a clean cloth on it and elevate it?”
“Where the hell is a clean cloth?”
“Hang on,” Jack says to the 911 operator, and puts the phone on the ground. Hen picks it up and says, “Patriot Mulch & Tree.” Jack pulls Hen’s shirt off over his head. He gives it to Butner, who presses it against Canavan’s shin. Canavan wakes right up after that, comes out of his trance screaming and kicking at Butner with his good leg. Hen says into the phone, “At Bob Dunn Ford, We’re Dealin’.” Jack gets a log off the back of the truck, rolls it over to Canavan, and he and Butner elevate his leg. There is a lot of blood. A lot. Hen’s shirt soaks through. Hendrick says, “We’re the Little Cheaper Dealer.” A cartoon chick, the Little Cheaper, pops up on the screen during that ad, and Jack half-expects it to appear here, now, in the yard. Butner wipes his hands on his own jeans, on Canavan’s jeans. Canavan goes quiet again, lays back on the pile of branches, groans some. Jack wonders if he’s going to pass out. He takes the phone from Hendrick and says, “What if he passes out?”
“Try to keep him awake for me, sir, OK?”
“But what if he passes out?”
“Sir, just try to keep him awake, and somebody will be there in a few minutes. We’ve called fire and ambulance for you.”
“Nothing’s on fire,” Jack says.
“Sir, fire is generally our first responder.”
Butner’s got Canavan sitting back up, is behind him now and holding him, his arms around his chest. Hen’s squatting next to Canavan, shirtless, rocking, whispering. Things seem blurry. Jack stands there and holds his phone. Beth will find some way to make this his fault. The line goes bad again, and he takes a few steps in each direction to try to get it clear. The voice on the other end says, “Sir, they’re about five minutes out now, OK? Sir?” Then the line goes dead. Butner shifts behind Canavan some, trying to make him more comfortable, and blood spurts up and out of the gash in his shin. It hits the back of the trailer, the license plate, drips down. Butner gets up and takes his own shirt off, tears it into a long strip, ties it tightly around the cut. As he’s doing it, Jack sees bone, sees where the saw has cut well down into the bone, sees the stark white of it, and that does it for him: He turns around and vomits. Hendrick says, “Side effects may include nausea and diarrhea.”
He wipes his mouth off and stands up, tries to do something, to find something to do. He’s dizzy. Do something fatherly, he thinks. Act like you own the place. He pulls Hen back away from Canavan and Butner a little bit, runs over to the office, where they’ve got a first aid kit. He brings that and a bottle of water back, tries to hand the water to Canavan, who waves it off.
“You gotta drink,” Butner tells him, and opens the bottle, pours some water in Canavan’s mouth. He spits it back out again, but then motions for more. Butner pours, Canavan swallows. Jack tries not to look at Canavan’s leg, at the little pile of shirts soaked in blood. He opens up the first aid kit. There’s only ace bandages and gauze. Nothing that would really do anything more than what they’ve already done. He hands the gauze to Butner. “They said they’d be here in a minute,” he says.
Canavan says, “You called somebody?”
“I called 911,” Jack says, showing him the phone.
“Oh,” Canavan says. “OK.”
Butner puts the gauze on Canavan’s leg, and Jack takes one of the red tie-downs from Canavan’s trailer, hooks one end through Hendrick’s belt loop, starts tying him off. He doesn’t want to lose track of him again. “Listen,” Jack says, finishing the knot. “I’m sorry about your yard.”
“Don’t apologize for that,” Butner says.
“Why not?”
“His leg’s cut. He’s not dying. Get your shit together.”
“Thanks,” Canavan says.
“How’d you do it?” Jack asks him. “What happened?” It only now occurs to him that Butner might have done it, might have walked over here and taken the saw and sheared his leg right open. It is vaguely possible that Butner would be capable of something like that, Jack thinks. He was always real quiet, a good employee.
“I’m not sure,” Canavan says. “I was cutting all this to length, and I guess the saw jumped on me. Should have been wearing guards. Stupid.”
“It could have happened to anybody,” Jack says.
“I was hurrying,” says Canavan. “That’s all. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be OK,” Jack says.
“How much of this am I going to have to listen to?” Butner says. “You two should be clusterbombing each other’s houses. Instead you’re asking each other to dance. Fucking pussies.”
Jack wonders whether Beth’s at school or at Canavan’s house right now. Maybe she’s taking a bath. Or she’s at the grocery, buying a sweet little dinner for two. “I pulled some tomato plants for you,” he tells Canavan, because otherwise he’ll have to ask where Beth is. “From the greenhouse. I’ll drop them by.”
Canavan nods. He’s sweating pretty hard. “OK,” he says. “Thanks.”
Hendrick leans against the radius of the tie-down, playing with the circle it gives him. He’s making airplane noises, arms out, when the fire truck pulls into the lot, bouncing through the pot-holes. There’s no siren, but the lights are going. The driver hits the horn on his way in, and that about does it for Hendrick. This is enormously exciting. He starts turning in circles, gets himself tangled, and Jack spins him back in the other direction, wonders what the Spanish word for exciting is. Some of the firemen are off the truck before it stops. They take the whole scene over right away. Two of them know Butner. They talk with him while two more firemen look at the shirt tied around Canavan’s leg, hold fingers up in his face and ask him to tell them how many there are. He gets it right, mainly. Everything seems much more professional now. The firemen get him laid down on what looks like the kind of board that beach patrol lifeguards carry, and one of them pulls some bandages out of a big black first aid kit and ties a tourniquet around Canavan’s leg just under the knee. That same summer at Scout Camp, a kid tied a tourniquet around his penis and couldn’t get it undone, had to go to the infirmary to have the nurse do it. Hendrick spins himself into the tie-down again. One of the firefighters who’s talking to Butner says, “Is that kid on a leash?”
“No,” Butner says. “He’s autistic.”
“He’s what?”
“Like Ronnie Dorchester. Remember him? Tenth grade?”
“I think so,” the fireman says. He’s wearing his helmet backwards. He says, “Is he this guy’s?” He nods at Canavan.
“No. He’s his. The guy who owns the place.”
“Kid like presents?”
“Sometimes,” Butner says. “Depends.”
The fireman takes his helmet off and walks over to Hendrick, holds it out to him. Jack runs his tongue across his teeth: What’s possible here is that Hen takes it, and everything goes well. He could also launch into orbit, throw himself on the ground, scream for seven hours. The other firemen are still working on Canavan. Hen blinks a few times, takes the helmet, and stands still. He holds the helmet out in front of him. Then he puts it very gently on the ground. The fireman turns to Jack. “I’ll tell the chief it fell off the truck,” he says.
“Thanks,” says Jack.
“Blood can be a tough thing for a kid to see,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know that.” Jack wonders who doesn’t know that, then registers the fact that he’s actually tied Hen in place there in front of all of it. Fair enough.
An ambulance comes in from the other direction, siren off, lights off. It stops just past Canavan’s truck, then backs up, reverse warning beeping. Hendrick stares. Two EMTs, a man and a woman, get out and talk to the firemen, load Canavan and his lifeguard board onto a stretcher. A third EMT stands by the ambulance, watches. Supervises. They inflate something around his leg, a sleeve to stop the bleeding, maybe, or just to protect him, and they wheel him over the gravel toward the open back doors of the ambulance. One of them gets on the radio, and the other, the woman, comes over to Jack and Butner and the firefighters.
“We’ll take him to Moses Cone, in Greensboro,” she says. “Better trauma unit, almost as close.”
“OK,” Jack says. Hendrick picks the helmet up, puts it on, then takes it right back off again. It’s much bigger than his head.
The EMT says, “You guys know him, I assume.”
“Yes,” Jack says.
“Is there maybe someone you could call, tell somebody where he is?”
Butner’s getting ready to say something, but Jack says, “I can do it.”
“OK,” she says. “Terrific.”
“Do you know how bad it is?” Jack asks.
“It doesn’t look awful,” she says. “I mean, it’s bad, but I’ve seen uglier. Looks worse than it is, probably. More blood than anything. It’s kind of a messy cut.”
“Messy?”
“Chainsaws are bad. Knives are better. The edges are smoother, easier to patch up. Chainsaws are a pain in the ass.”
“OK,” Jack says.
“Moses Cone,” she tells him again, like she thinks he won’t remember.
“He’s got it,” Butner says. “He’s got it.”
“We should go,” she says.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “OK.”
They get ready to load Canavan into the ambulance, and Hen starts freaking out, starts doing his noises. Something’s touched him off. Everybody stops what they’re doing and watches while it gets worse, while he starts shrieking in short, staccato bursts. He’s out at the very end of the tie-down, pulling hard on it, leaning. Jack goes over to him, tries to calm him down, tries to hold him, tries state names. Arkansas. Kansas. It doesn’t work. He’s really ramping himself up now, kicking and screaming, spinning back into the strap, and Jack unties him, trying to make it so he can’t get too tangled, at least, and that turns out to be all he was wanting: Once he’s free of the tie-down, Hendrick runs over and stands next to the stretcher, silent. He stands eye level with Canavan, who’s not talking, not moving. There is blood on the stretcher. Hendrick leans in and kisses him on the arm. He actually kisses Canavan on the arm. Some children with autism have difficulty showing affection of any kind. Hendrick kisses Canavan, and he says, “These member stations.” He says, “NPR is brought to you by this and other NPR stations, and by contributions from listeners like you.” He says, “By the Ford Foundation, and by the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.” He says, “Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the World,” and then he steps back, having said what he needed to say, and the EMTs get Canavan loaded into the ambulance. Jack puts his hands on Hen’s shoulders. One of the EMTs gets in the back with Canavan, and the other closes the doors, hits them twice, gets in up front and they pull away, lights flashing now, but still no siren. Butner walks over to the Shell to talk to Cherry, who’s come out to see what all this is. The firemen start loading back up, and Hendrick’s talking again, saying something else Jack can’t figure out, a garbled mess of half-words and sounds, or maybe just sounds. Secret code. The ambulance is around the big curve and out of sight by the time Jack gets it figured out, gets hold of what he’s saying, which is ecnalubma, ecnalub
ma. He’s read the backwards printing on the front of the ambulance. A brand new word, yet another language. Ecnalubma. Hendrick sits down in the dust and puts the fire helmet on again. In it, he looks like he’s the wrong size for the world.
“I don’t know,” he tells Beth again, standing on the yard. He’s called her at Canavan’s. “I wasn’t looking. I was chasing Hendrick around, and when I looked up, he was down.”
“What do you mean, ‘he was down’?”
“I mean,” he says, “I found Hendrick over by the cedar, lining it up, and when I looked up again Canavan was down, and Butner was shouting.”
“You found Hendrick? Was he lost?”
“He wasn’t lost. He just got away while I was sitting with Butner. He was ten feet away.”
“So you don’t know what happened.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody does. He just cut himself. The EMT said it didn’t look that bad. She said she’d seen worse.”
“Of course she’s seen worse. She’s an EMT.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I only puked because of the blood.”
“You threw up?”
“Only a little.”
“Did he cut anything off? Like toes or anything? I mean, should you be going to get a bag of ice or something from the gas station and looking for toes?”
“He didn’t cut anything off,” Jack says. “I think he just let the saw slip off a branch, and it nicked him.”
“You don’t ride in an ambulance for a nick, Jack.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Have you looked for toes?”