“That’s a term only a soldier would use.”
He pulled a chair close to my bed then sat down, a pocket of air held in the side of his mouth. “So maybe I was there.”
“In what capacity?”
He chuckled at my question before he answered. “Let’s just say I wasn’t dressed in camouflage and humping a pack. But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Right now you’re wondering about Murton Wheeler.”
“I’ve been wondering about Murton Wheeler for a long time.”
“So like I said, I can probably help you with that.”
I thought for a moment before I spoke. “He’s with the G?” I said.
“Something like that,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll let him explain it. Believe me when I tell you though, Detective, he’s paid a tremendous price for his country. I personally owe him a debt I’ll never be able to repay, but that’s another story. From what I gather, that puts you and me in the same boat.”
“Where is he?” I said.
“Out in the hall, waiting to come in,” he said.
Murton walked into the room and stood about halfway between the door and my bed. I pushed the button on the control panel attached to the rail and elevated the bed into a sitting position. We stared at each other for a minute, neither one of us sure of what to say. It might have been the pain medicine, or it might have been the nervous tension, but I felt the corner of my mouth turn upwards, then before I knew it we were both smiling.
“You’re a fed?”
“Well, I was,” he said. “But not anymore. I put in my papers this morning.”
“Why?”
He laughed without humor. “Which why are you asking me about? The why did I disappear? Or the why didn’t I tell you what was really happening in my life? Or the why I had to let everyone, including you, your parents, and even my girlfriend think I was a criminal and a complete fuck up?”
“I’m sorry about Amy,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.” He stayed quiet for a long time. “We buried her yesterday. Her mom slapped me in the face at the service. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? She thought her death was my fault. You know what? She was right, but for all the wrong reasons. After the service I told her who I was, who I really was and she didn’t believe me. So I pulled out my badge and handed it to her and you know what she did? She fainted. Just like that. I thought I killed her. I’ve been under too long Jonesy. I had to get out. I let my job get in the way of my girlfriend’s well being and it cost her and my unborn child their lives.”
Jesus, Murt, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. God damn. I’ve been an asshole. I’m fucking sorry, man.”
We sat there, both of us quiet for a long time. We had spent the first half of our lives together as best friends, brothers, and the last half under a flag of deception that drove us apart.
“Well, at least Pate got his, huh?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You’re kidding, right? You mean no one told you?”
“Told me what, Murt? No one’s told me anything.”
“Aw, that’s beautiful, man. After everything that’s happened, I get to tell you.” I watched the light in his eyes go dark and it reminded me of the look he carried with him in the desert over twenty years ago. “Guess you haven’t been watching the news. Pate’s dead, Jonesy. Yesterday morning at the taping of his show. Except it wasn’t just a taping. Because of everything that’s happened, he convinced the network to run a live special. The place was packed. He stood up there on the pulpit and confessed all of it. He had tears running down his cheeks and everything. It was like every other preacher you’ve ever seen on TV when they bare their soul and confess their sins, except ol’ Sermon Sam out did them all.”
“What do you mean?”
“After he confessed to burning his church in Houston, and taking responsibility for the deaths of Franklin Dugan, and Amy, and trafficking in child pornography, he stuck a gun in his mouth and blew the back of his head all over the choir. All on live TV.”
“You said with everything that’s been happening. What else did I miss?”
“Plenty. A city cop who now has the unfortunate nickname of Cauliflower shot your sniper to death and saved the Governor as well.”
“What?”
“Say, I don’t mean to change the subject, but I’ve got to tell you something else,” he said. “When I was cutting you down, I could hear your mom’s voice. In my head, I mean. It’s like she was telling me exactly what to do. Can you believe that, man?”
I was still processing what Murton had told me when a physical therapist came in the room and explained that it was necessary to get up and move around. Murton said good-bye, explaining that he had six or seven reams of paperwork to complete and would look in on me when I got home. Then, before he left, he walked over to the bed and kissed me on my forehead. “Never stopped lovin’ you, brother,” he said. My lips trembled, but I couldn’t get any words out. I grabbed his arm as he went to turn away and held him in place. After a few seconds I saw his eyes crinkle. “You’re welcome,” he said, then ruffled the top of my head like we were kids again and walked out the door.
The physical therapist watched our exchange in silence. She was a short sassy brunette who looked like she had never quite lost her baby fat. I had the thought she looked like she should be working in an ice cream parlor or maybe a pet supply store.
“You can’t see it, but there’s a rubber knob on the bottom of your cast, right under the heel of your foot. Like the stopper on the end of these crutches,” she said, holding up one of the crutches for me to see. “When you’re moving around, I want you to keep as much weight off of your leg as possible. But, if you have to put any weight on it, keep it on the knob. That’s what it’s for. That, and to make sure you don’t slip and fall. She tried a smile on so I tried one right back at her, and when my scar lit up, she momentarily jerked the crutch across the front of her body, like a shield. “Uh, anyway,” she said, “here, let me help you. Swing your legs off the side of the bed, but don’t try and stand, yet.”
“Just give me a minute, will you?” I said. Then I gathered myself together and sat upright on the side of the bed and with the therapist’s help I managed to stand mostly on my good leg, my broken one held at an odd angle at the knee to prevent it from touching the floor.
“Good, good. That’s good,” she said. “Now straighten your knee and let the knob on the bottom of your cast rest on the floor, but don’t put any weight on it. I just want you to get a feel for where it is down there.” I did what she asked, and when I did, the pain flared in my shin and the room spun. The therapist grabbed my arm and eased me back down on the bed. “I said not to put any weight on it.”
I nodded, my breath whistling through my teeth. “I didn’t.”
“Well, maybe you did a little. Do you want me to see about getting you a wheel chair?”
“No, I do not want a fucking wheel chair,” I said.
“All right, then, Come on, let’s try again.”
I looked over at the side of the bed where the IV stand had been and wondered if maybe they might hook me back up if I asked. Just for a little while.
“Come on, give it another try. It only gets better from here.”
“I can believe that,” I said. I gripped the handle of the crutches, the therapist standing next to me like a gymnastics spotter. I leaned forward, put my weight on my good leg and pulled myself up.
“All right. Now, let’s try moving around the room a little. You look like a pretty strong guy. Just remember, the key to using crutches is in the forearms, not your armpits, okay? Keep your leg bent, and use both crutches at the same time. Step with your good leg, then follow with your arms, okay?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and found that I hated her already. But after a few minutes of her help and some painful practice, I had to admit, she had me moving around fairly well.
; She handed me some kind of waiver stating that she had demonstrated the proper use of the crutches and asked me to sign at the bottom. Her parting words were, “Remember, if you stumble and think you’re going to fall, and you probably will, just let your body go limp. Don’t try and save yourself. Just relax and go ahead and let yourself go. You’re more likely to reinjure if you try to save yourself than if you just go ahead and let it happen.”
For some reason, her statement made me think about my relationships with my dad, Murton, and Sandy.
A few hours later, one of the nurses came in and told me my ticket out would be to show the doctor I could get around on my own, and that was all the motivation I, Virgil F. Jones required. I picked up my crutches and made my way toward the door. I leaned against the jamb for a few minutes and waited until the hall was mostly clear before I ventured out. I found it was not too bad, the moving around, but the physical therapist was right; the key was to keep the weight off my leg. I went up and down the hall a few times, stopping to rest only once at the opposite end of the corridor from my room. The hardest part really was holding my leg in the air, bent at the knee, and it did not take long before I could feel the burn in my thigh. There was a couch at the end of the hallway next to the elevators, so I decided to sit and watch the business end of the hospital for a while.
As soon as I sat down I knew it was a mistake. The couch was lower than I thought-going down was not too bad-but once I was seated I knew I would not be able to get back up without help. The nurses station was at the other end of the hall, so to get back up I would have to either yell for help, or wait until someone happened by who was able-bodied enough and took pity on me.
Smooth, Jonesy, I thought. I closed my eyes for a while and when I opened them back up my father was sitting next to me and the look on his face told me we were thinking the same thing. “This place will kill you, you know that?” he said. When I didn’t respond, my father looked over at me and said, “You remember your Uncle Bob?”
“No, not really. I might remember the name, but that’s about it.”
Mason nodded. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. You were pretty young when he died. He was your mother’s uncle, your great uncle. He was a mortician. Had his own funeral home up in Kokomo. After he passed, his family sold out to a conglomerate, but I was talking to him one time, this was years ago, before you were even born I think, and you know what he told me? He told me that in the funeral home industry, they call it death care. I always thought that was the damnedest thing, Death care.
“I’d sit up here with your mother, just one floor above this one while they pumped that poison into her veins trying to kill the cancer inside her, and in the end all they did was make the last few months of her life more miserable than they already were. Every time we’d come in here I’d think about that conversation with Uncle Bob. They might call this health care, Virg, but it’s really all the same thing sometimes.” Then, like the concept of a segue was foreign to him, he finished with, “So, when they letting you out?”
I looked at him, not quite sure what he was trying to say, if anything. “Tomorrow, I think. Want to help me back to my room?”
“You bet,” Mason said. “You bet I do.”
We took our time going down the hall, and he told me Delroy and Robert were going back to Jamaica for a week, so he was going to close the bar to sand down and refinish the bar top. When I said I would stop by to help if I could, he laughed, and told me not to worry about it.
When we finally made it back to the room, we stood next to the bed for a moment, and I looked at my father and said, “I can’t explain it Pops, but it was her. She was standing right behind him and her hands were over the top of his. She helped him untie me and get me down. She was smiling at me, Dad. What do you think of that?”
“You were bleeding out from the inside, Son. The doctors said you had about two and a half minutes left by the time they got you here. The mind can play tricks on you when you’re in that kind of shape.”
“I’ve been in that bad of shape before, you know.”
“I know, Son, I know. You saw what you saw. Was it real to you?”
“Yeah, it was.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. We stayed there for a moment, then he did something he had not done in almost forty years, an act that brought tears to his eyes.
He helped his son to bed.
A short while later the nurse came in to take my blood pressure and when she offered me more pain medication, the nature of the conversation that followed must have made her think I might be suffering from brain damage.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked her.
She had her hand on my wrist, my pulse beat steady under the tips of her fingers. She held up a finger in a ‘wait a minutes’ gesture and then said, “Sorry, I was counting. What was that you just asked me?”
“Never mind,” I said. But then I asked her something else. “I keep hearing this muffled little happy birthday tune. Is anyone else hearing it, or is it just me?”
The nurse laughed. “That’s from the maternity ward. It’s one floor below us. Every time a baby is born the new father gets to push a button behind the nurse’s station and it plays the first few notes of happy birthday over the loudspeaker on that floor. You can hear it on this floor because they’re right below us.” She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm just above the elbow and pumped the bulb. I watched the needle on the indicator bounce back and forth and I waited until she was done before I spoke again.
“I was wondering. Is there any way that I could move one floor up?”
“What?” the nurse asked. Why would you want to do that? That’s the cancer ward.”
“I know,” I said. She stared at me, a look of confusion on her face, then walked out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The next morning when I woke, the sun sliced through the partially open blinds and fell across the cast on my leg and gave it a striped look like that of a zebra. I wiggled my toes a little and when I did, the dull throb in my leg led me from the clutches of sleep like a demented tour guide with a cruel agenda. My mouth tasted like at some point in the night I’d sworn off hospital food and eaten my pillow instead. And I had to pee.
I thought about pressing the call button and having the nurse help me up and into the bathroom, then decided against it. I wanted to do it myself. By the time I got my crutches under myself, got up, took care of business and made it back to the bed twenty minutes had passed, but I had done it. I brought a damp wash cloth back from the bathroom and sat down and wiped the sweat from my forehead. A few minutes later, while I was watching the morning news a nurse’s assistant who I had not yet seen came into the room pushing a small cart ahead of her ample body. I estimated her weight at somewhere around three hundred pounds. Maybe more. Her bright pink lipstick and bright pink fingernails were a perfect match to the pink uniform stretched tight across her body. When she walked the fabric looked like it was being strained to the breaking point and I thought if one of the buttons on the front of her blouse let go I might need a bullet proof vest for protection. Her dark kinky hair was pulled back in tight cornrows that pulled the skin on her forehead so taught it made her look like the top half of her head was younger than the bottom.
The wheels on the cart made a wobbling noise that reminded me of the sound my air conditioner made last summer just before the compressor failed. It was not until she was almost next to the bed that I realized the noise wasn’t coming from the cart, but from the nurse’s breathing. She was wheezing from the effort, whether from pushing the cart or moving her own weight around. Maybe both.
I knew what was coming and even though I was starting to notice my own stink, I did what any sane person in my situation would do. I closed my eyes and feigned sleep, hoping she would go away.
“Good morning. My name is Miss Sally. What’s yours?”
I did not answer and instead I pulled the blanket up over
myself and turned away. Miss Sally was not impressed.
“Oh, child, you’re gonna have to do better than that,” she said. “Come on, now, I’m here to hep ya. We’re gonna get you cleaned up. Won’t take but a minute or two. Lord, I swear I could smell you before I could see you. That’s not an insult, you understand, I just tells it like I smells it. What’d you say your name was, again.”
I opened my eyes a little bit, squinted at her. “I didn’t.”
“I see. Well, you know, I can see right here on your chart your name is Virgil. I was just trying to be polite.” She pulled the sheets off of me and set them on the chair next to the bed. “Now, untie your nighty there and let’s get started. You don’t have to be proud or ashamed, either. I done seen ‘em all, the big ones and the puny ones. I expect yours will be somewhere betwixt em.”
“Look,” I said, “I think I can clean myself up, okay? The doctor said I’d probably be going home today anyway, so thanks just the same.”
The nurse laughed, one hand resting on the cart, the other on her chest. “Oh lord, if I only had a nickel. You know how many times I heard that one? It’s always this and that, or some such thing. Come on now, I got me a schedule just like everyone else around here and you’re my last one. Don’t want to make Miss Sally late for quitin’ time, now do you?”
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” I said. I began to untie my hospital gown, thinking if there were a God, he’d do something about this. Then, as if I had a direct line to the heavens, the door opened and another nurse stuck her head in.
“Miss Sally? Mr. Jenkins down in six-oh-two missed the bed pan again. We need your help to lift him up so we can get the sheets.”
“Be right there,” she said over her shoulder. Then to me, she said, “That poor Mr. Jenkins. Well, you’re off the hook this time, handsome. Moving Mr. Jenkins around can take some time, and I’ll be off by then. Hope you do get out today, but iffen you don’t, someone from the next shift will be in to clean you up.”
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