The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  He stopped to look for her. “Trina,” he whispered, and scanned the woods with his light. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m here.”

  There was no answer. So, Jacob bent to the ground, took off his backpack, and angled his light to the log.

  Inside of it sat a blue duffel bag as fat and ­ancient-­looking as a snake. Jacob unzipped his backpack and gave the woods another worried glance before pulling out his own bag, an exact replica of the one inside the log. What did it mean? Two identical bags, two totally different possibilities.

  Jacob reached in and grabbed the bag inside the log that had, from the first touch, a terrible weight. He unzipped it and saw what he knew he would see: the barrel of a shotgun. And with this sight Jacob felt that every train in the station had now pulled up inside of him. He stuffed his duffel bag inside the other, his eyes beginning to blur, and was careful not to touch the gun. As he went to slide it back in the log, he felt his phone go off in his hand.

  He looked to the screen to see a message from Trina. The last one, he remembered, said Someone needs to be held responsible.

  This one read, ­simply . . . Who better than you?

  Jacob closed his eyes to try and think. Who better than him to be held responsible for what? he wondered. Toby’s death, or Toby’s life? He did not want to feel responsible for either but yet could not ignore the idea that maybe all men should be held responsible for their inaction. That perhaps he should be held responsible for his. The way he’d watched girls go in and out of Toby’s life knowing that he did not care for them yet said nothing, the way he listened to Trina talk about payback and guns but was too hung up on a kiss to see it, the way he’d heard guys talk in awful ways about girls that he never condemned in any manner stronger than silence. But if only he could think instead of feel, he thought, that would be helpful. If he could solve this simple equation, connect all these dots, think his way out of this particular moment right now before he took on the rest of his life, he might come upon a solution. But Jacob could not. Instead, what he felt was that he had been acting like the only boy in the world, as if he was a stranger everywhere he went, and that no one would ever understand him. And through this machinery of feeling instead of thinking, Jacob was overcome with the urge to call his father. He wanted to tell him everything, to confess all that he had thought and done, even if the connections between these things made little sense. He wanted to take the blame for it all.

  In the distance, though, he heard something coming.

  It was a soft crunching of leaves and shifting of sticks, an almost impossibly slow sound, more light and careful than any human could be. Jacob looked behind him but saw nothing. He then stood up and turned his light to the path before him and in it, where it had not been before, stood a giant bird.

  It was an egret, tall and feathered white, taking its gentle evening stroll across the path before him with no knowledge of anything at all. Its head rocked back and forth atop its long neck and the bird eyed Jacob in a way that seemed, to him, without judgment. The careful footsteps and gentle grace of its body were so out of place that Jacob felt run over by all of life’s potential. The fact that this animal could lift and take flight whenever it chose to, that it could be, in many ways, whatever it chose to be. The physics of it nearly paralyzed him.

  Jacob watched it cross the path until his vision blurred almost completely. He was crying, he knew, and yet was determined not to blink. He wanted to witness this small thing, this leisurely stroll across a path of terrible possibility, before the rest of his life began. As he did this, the sharp outline of the bird’s body went from defined to hazy and white, the cone of his flashlight growing to glow around the crane until it was no longer a bird at all but only a bright notion.

  And then a series of lights around him, he realized, from white to red, as the bird was evolving from one form into another. He heard the graceful hitch of its wings, felt the air displaced by its decision to fly, and watched the red crane squat and take off ­toward whatever future awaited it.

  In its wake, other incoming sounds.

  The sounds of men in the lights that Jacob heard now.

  The white, the red, the blue lights.

  34

  That’s What Happens, When Two Worlds Collide

  Douglas entered the room to see Cherilyn sitting upright on a hospital bed, wearing a thin gown with blue flowers on it. Dr. Granger stood before her with his fingers pressed gently beneath her neck as if checking her glands.

  Cherilyn looked over at Douglas without moving her head.

  “Oh, Douglas,” she said, and reached out her hand as if expecting an embrace.

  Douglas stood at the far end of the room and did not say a thing. All he could do was look at his wife’s hands. He had no idea what was all over them: dark brown lines and circles of what he first thought to be an infection. Cherilyn must have noticed his look of disgust as she put her hand to her lap and wrapped it in her thin gown.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  Douglas could hardly bear to look at her in that moment. It physically hurt him to do so, and so he very intentionally looked at Dr. Granger.

  He was a handsome man in his sixties, still fit, with ­salt-­and-­pepper hair and a pair of fashionable tortoiseshell glasses. He was not the type of doctor you saw around town but one that appeared so intelligent that he could exist in only two places: at a hospital or at brunch.

  “What’s going on?” Douglas asked him.

  Dr. Granger asked Cherilyn to stand up and raise her arms.

  “What’s going on,” he said, “is that I have a patient who’s been keeping secrets from me.”

  “Is that a fact?” Douglas said.

  “Douglas,” Cherilyn said.

  “Hold your arms out,” Dr. Granger said. “Try to keep them up. Don’t let me push them down.”

  Dr. Granger placed his hands on top of Cherilyn’s and began pushing down on her arms. He did one until he had forced her arm down to her side and then did the other.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, and took his stethoscope from around his neck. “I want you to tell me when you feel pressure on your arms, okay?”

  Cherilyn closed her eyes and said, “Okay.”

  Dr. Granger took his stethoscope and ran it lightly down her right arm from her shoulder to her elbow.

  “I feel that,” she said. “It’s cold.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Granger said, and blew on it with an open mouth, rubbed it a few times with his sleeve. He then moved it down to her right leg.

  “Oh,” she said. “My leg. I feel that.”

  “Good,” Dr. Granger said, and moved it over to her left leg. Cherilyn stood with her eyes closed. He then moved it up to her arm, tracing from her elbow down to her forearm, and put the stethoscope back around his neck.

  Cherilyn opened her eyes. “Are you going to do the other side?” she asked.

  She looked at Dr. Granger and then over at Douglas and the expression Douglas saw in her face was one he’d never seen before. The look was one of open and unabashed fear and rendered her so vulnerable that Douglas had the sensation it was his own life being threatened. He felt his chest tighten around this image, as if saving it in his new dark battery for any time he might run low on worry.

  “I didn’t feel anything,” Cherilyn said, as if talking only to Douglas. Her eyes began to well. “What is happening to me?”

  Douglas had to fight the urge to approach her. He wanted to, but also thought that what he needed to do at that moment was to think instead of feel.

  “How did you get here?” Douglas asked her.

  “I’d also like to know how long this has been going on,” Dr. Granger said.

  “No,” Douglas said. “I mean, who drove you here?”

  Cherilyn lowered her chin to her chest and began weeping in a way that told Douglas
all that he thought he needed to know.

  Douglas suddenly saw his own past as one he might never recover and so, rather than going to console Cherilyn, walked out of the door to see Deuce still sitting across the hall.

  Without saying a word, Douglas attacked him to the best of his ability.

  He grabbed Deuce by the shirt and pulled him to the floor. He knelt on top of him and went to punch another human being for the first time in his life. Deuce moved his head to the side and Douglas cracked his knuckles on the floor, but this did not stop him. He went to hit him again. “What did you do to her?” he yelled.

  “Come on, now!” Deuce said, and blocked Douglas’s weak punches with his arms. He then grabbed Douglas by the coat and rolled over on top of him, kneeling on his chest and trying to grab his arms as Douglas flailed against him, his thin hair out of order and all over his face.

  “Don’t make me put you down, now,” Deuce said. “This wouldn’t ever be a fair fight.”

  “What the hell did you to do to her?” Douglas said again, and finally Deuce had both of Douglas’s wrists in his hands. He pushed them to the ground.

  “I love her,” Deuce said. “Hell, you know that. I had to give it a try. Aren’t we all supposed to try?”

  “You enormous asshole!” Douglas said.

  “Come on,” Deuce said. “She doesn’t love me. I know that now. I tried all I could. I mean, nobody knows how hard I tried. So, congratulations, Hubbard. You happy? Luckiest man in the goddamn world. Just like I always told you.”

  At this point, Dr. Granger had walked out of the room and taken off his glasses. He tried to pull Deuce off, but Deuce just slapped him away.

  “I’m done now,” Deuce said. “Okay? I saw it. I’m done now. All she was doing was asking for you and I was right there. I’m done.”

  “You need to leave, Deuce,” Dr. Granger said. “I’m calling ­security.”

  “I’m going,” Deuce said, and as soon as he started to get up, Douglas went after him again. He pulled at his shirt and ripped the breast pocket and two blue tickets fell down on Douglas’s face.

  Deuce stood up and held his shirt where it had been torn. Douglas grabbed the tickets and crumpled them up in his palm. He stood up and caught his breath.

  “Hand me those back, now,” Deuce said, and Douglas had no idea what he was talking about. All he could think of was the pain shooting from his knuckles up through his wrist to his elbow. He looked down at his hand and opened his palm.

  “I’m serious,” Deuce said. “We’re done, you and me. Hand me those back.”

  Douglas looked at the two readouts in his hand. The first one he saw clearly. It said Jonathan Bruce Newman. Hair color: Brown. Eye color: Blue. Potential Life Station: MAYOR.

  The other, Douglas flipped over in his hand.

  It read Jonathan Bruce Newman.

  Potential Life Station: ROYALTY.

  “What is this?” Douglas said.

  “Fuck it,” Deuce said. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just business now. Fuck it all.”

  Douglas stared at the tickets. “What are you saying, Bruce?” he asked, but Deuce had already started down the hall.

  “I’m saying ain’t nobody tried harder than me!” he yelled, and slammed into one of the carts in the hall. “Nobody!”

  Douglas turned the tickets over in his hand, exactly like the one he himself had received, and did not have time to process the information before him.

  As soon as Deuce turned the corner and was out of sight, a nurse came hustling up the hallway.

  “Dr. Granger,” she said. “They need you in the ER. We’ve got a gunshot coming in.”

  “Really?” Dr. Granger said. He looked over at Douglas and lifted his eyebrows like this was delightful news. He put his fashionable glasses back on and cracked his knuckles. “I guess it’s time to work my magic,” he said, and nodded at the receipts in Douglas’s hand. “After all,” he told him. “Mine said Magician.”

  35

  How Lucky Can One Man Get?

  Hank was lucky to still have his toe.

  This was the consensus, at least, of all the smiling nurses and doctors who’d come through the ER to help bandage his foot. A man can live, of course, without a pinkie toe, but it was not the preferred way of going about things. And so wasn’t this big strong cowboy, they said, this rugged Marlboro Man on their hospital bed, this Lone Ranger, lucky to still have his toe?

  Jacob did not see the humor.

  His jeans were still wet from the panic he’d had in the woods where he stood shaking and unable to speak, unable to drop his phone, even, as the police commanded him to. He could still smell the rank odor of adrenaline on his shirt and in his armpits from where he’d sweat like a mute before those lights. He was no hero in that moment and he knew this. What he also knew was that Trina hadn’t ever planned to walk in that building with a gun or do anything to those boys. There were no shells in the bag, the police had said, no ammunition at all, yet they had been tipped off by an anonymous call to check the Crane Lane for a shooter. She’d then tweeted out the video of him at his locker, as well. And so what Trina had hoped was for Jacob to be there at the same time the cops were, to be holding the gun and perhaps die right there in those woods, to take the blame, he realized, for a crime his brother never got the chance to. That her readout for him was not one of hope but perhaps some strange form of confession she would not be around to deliver herself. And, Jacob knew, Trina had almost gotten the exact thing she wanted. The only calculation she had not made, it seemed, was for Jacob’s father.

  Jacob remembered little other than the sound of his dad’s voice among the lights, coming from behind him, though, as if he had followed him up the trail. So much yelling, Jacob remembered, and in such a rough way that he had never heard adults yelling before. Drop things. Turn around. Hands up. So many conflicting commands that Jacob could not have obeyed if he tried. And, finally, the one line he remembered, because the nurses kept repeating it now.

  “Ain’t nobody draws a gun on my boy!”

  The shot that followed this sent Jacob to the ground, sure he was to be jettisoned from this life and into another. It also sent the four policeman to the ground, each of them down to a knee with their guns drawn.

  The only person who didn’t fall was his father, whose hand was still on his holster.

  “That,” his dad said, “was an accident.”

  “It was those good boots that saved the toe,” one of the nurses said. “You know, Nikes aren’t really built for that type of thing.”

  Jacob now sat beside his father in the ER with the full knowledge that there were a million possible ways in which he could have died that night. If his father had not shown up, if he had been wearing different clothes, perhaps, said a different thing, looked a different person, if just one officer had sneezed. The horrible possibilities terrified him. Yet the way the nurses acted toward him was as if it was high time Jacob realized everyone on this planet is just one stranger’s decision away from eternity. They barely paid him any attention at all and doted, instead, on his father. Jacob rubbed the growing bruises on his wrists from where he had been immediately cuffed and dragged to a squad car that sat idling on the gravel entrance to the trail. Where, through the car window, hopping like he was crossing a bed of coals, he saw his father coming, too.

  The officer set them both in the back of the squad car, where his father politely bled all the way to the hospital, and Jacob did not let him get a word out. He instead leaned his head against the cage in front of him and confessed to his dad everything he could think to confess. He let it all come out. From the beginning, with Trina. What she’d said the dickheads had done to Toby that night and the anger he’d had not just about Toby and the kids at school but about his mom and how he felt that there was nobody at all in the world and even the way she had kissed him and
talked about terrible things without him ever trying to stop her and how he had ultimately, like an idiot, let it all get out of hand.

  His dad did nothing other than rub Jacob’s shoulder as he blubbered. He kneaded it back and forth as if he were expressing some deep sore, squeezing all of the guilt out of him. It was a motion so strange and unrehearsed as Jacob spoke like a child, cried like a child, that Jacob didn’t know what to make of it. But something in his father’s rough touch he enjoyed. The way it felt like his father was perhaps not trying to get something out but rather trying to join him there, in Jacob’s body, to be one with him when the trains rolled out. He wanted to feel it again.

  The attending officer drove without hurry and said only, “It’s funny you should mention Trina Todd,” he said. “There’s an APB out on her right now for Grand Auto. Not sure what good it’ll do with all of us over at the school but, I mean, it’s like a full moon tonight.”

  So, Jacob thought, more men were going after Trina.

  God help them.

  Jacob looked up at his dad, who was now lying in the hospital with his left boot still on and his right foot wrapped like a package. He had his hat resting on his chest and looked unmistakably pleased with himself. He took small sips of apple juice through a straw from a carton and seemed to know everyone in the place. Oddly, the amount of people who came by to wish his father well gave Jacob a sense of pride. His father was admired, Jacob knew, and why shouldn’t he be?

  Jacob should tell him that he admired him, too, at some point, and he would tell him, he decided, but knew he had plenty of time. Whether they shipped him off to some detention center for troubled youth or threw him in jail or just let him sit in that hospital room forever, Jacob knew that what his father told him earlier was true. It was just the two of them now, out in the field, out in the rain, and they would have plenty of time to talk.