by Pete Dexter
Up at the X-ray board, the brain doctor turned away from the pictures of Spooner’s brain and gazed down upon the real thing. “You were a very lucky young man,” he said, words that took Spooner back even further than high school, all the way back to Georgia. And even then he’d known this remark was ridiculous. The lucky people were home in their beds or fucking in their sinks; luckier people than Spooner were outdoors in the snowstorm cutting their grass.
The bone doctor came back through the swinging doors, rolling like a bear—when had he left?—and asked the brain doctor a question that Spooner could not follow. The brain doctor showed the bone doctor the pictures of Spooner’s skull, and they both bent in closer to look, one and then the other, making little circles over this gray area or that gray area as they talked. Spooner lay waiting for a pronouncement of some kind but at the same time sensed that the doctors were unsure, leaning too much on each other. He had an acquaintance with the medical world by now, and these were not first-string doctors.
“Well, the next couple of days will tell the story,” the brain doctor said finally, and everybody seemed satisfied with that. Spooner only closed his eyes and began the long process of waiting it out. He didn’t know much, but he knew the story would not be told in any couple of days.
FORTY-SIX
It developed that the bone doctor worked for the city, a medical practice devoted almost entirely to keeping city employees off disability. He set broken bones for firemen and police and garbage collectors, and did all the surgeries associated with all kinds of fractures, dislocations, torn cartilage and ligaments. He drew a yearly retainer for this work and received an additional flat fee for each consultation and surgery, regardless of outcome, and also picked up a few dollars now and then at Hahnemann Hospital operating on the indigent. Or the comatose, or people who’d had their eggs scrambled so badly they didn’t care who was cutting them open.
Spooner fell into the egg-scrambled category, or at least had enough else on his mind not to care much who was cutting him open. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have asked for his own bone doctor, who was on staff over at the University of Pennsylvania and had not gotten his job by way of having a cousin on the city council, or, for that matter, gotten into medical school the same way.
The reason Spooner happened to have a bone doctor of his own was that he’d broken the same leg twice in the last four years and also broken the ankle of the other leg, and a collarbone. The ankle and the second leg fracture had required surgeries, and there were screws and bolts and wire now holding him together inside, and he could feel the bolts beneath his skin when he was putting on his socks. Luckily these screws and bolts were not magnetic, or he supposed he would be waking up every morning of his life with his legs stuck together.
Which is only mentioned here to reemphasize that Spooner knew his way around the orthopedic community, and knew that as a rule, the old-school bone doctors like this one had been the bottom of the barrel back in medical school. More recently, of course, with the dawn of artificial knees and hips and surgeons making dancers out of gimps—and rich men out of orthopods—they weren’t the bottom of the barrel anymore, and once you knew what to look for, it didn’t take a brain surgeon to tell which was which.
Arriving as he had, however, in the middle of the night without an appointment, Spooner had fallen victim to the orthopod’s code—finders keepers—and never had a chance.
As mentioned, there were things besides bone doctors on Spooner’s mind, first among them Mrs. Spooner, at home in bed, presumably wide awake now and possibly at the end of her wits. It was hard to say what reserves she had left, but this incident, which she would very likely view as preventable, would not be well received. He wondered if it had been the smart thing, asking the nurse to make the phone call. On the other hand, who else to ask? Stanley?
The ER doctor puzzled one last piece of Spooner’s lip into place and commenced sewing, and the room began to empty out. There were suture threads hanging off Spooner’s lips and lying against his gums and in his mustache, and the feeling in his mouth reminded him of a backlash in a fishing reel.
They wheeled Spooner up to a room in the intensive care unit, where he spent the next few days in the company of an elderly black man named Sylvester Graves who had been run over by his wife in a parking accident. Mr. Graves was suspended from a scaffold near the ceiling, and moaning in his sleep.
“Well,” Spooner said to the nurse who tucked him in, “they say the next couple of days will tell the story.”
Mr. Graves moaned in his sleep.
The nurse patted Spooner on the hand. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He can’t feel a thing.”
The down-state returns were not in yet, but unofficially Sylvester Graves had even more broken bones than Spooner. His wife was named Betty, and a month or so previous they had purchased a new car, a dark green Pontiac Bonneville. Mr. Graves had been out in the street every day since, washing and waxing, some days just sitting in his chair watching it shine, keeping the neighborhood children with their skates and twirling batons away, not allowing Mrs. Graves herself inside it without taking off her shoes. And in the way these things sometimes happen, the first time Mrs. Graves was allowed behind the wheel, she scratched the bumper, not incidentally pinning Mr. Graves against the brick wall of a parking lot. They had been visiting Mrs. Graves’s family out in West Philadelphia, and he was taking no chances on the Bonneville’s bumper even touching the wall, and was out of the car guiding her, like a signalman on an aircraft carrier. He’d just given her his first signal, in fact, motioning the car back toward himself, when she drove it into the wall, the impact modified only slightly by Mr. Graves himself, who was still there in between, motioning come to me with his hands.
Then, unbelievably, she’d panicked and done it again, the first time crushing both his femurs, the second time breaking his pelvis and dislocating his hips.
Mrs. Graves hadn’t wanted any part of it from the start—it made her nervous even getting into the passenger seat, afraid she’d do something wrong, and even when she’d heard the first scream she wasn’t sure of what had happened, except she was pretty sure from the noise he made afterwards that she’d scratched the car.
Suspended as he was from the scaffolding, the old man was unable to move much and perhaps due to this unnatural positioning, was visited by strange dreams night and day, whenever he slept. Falling dog dreams, it looked like, as he twitched violently and made yipping noises and grabbed at the bed rails as he came awake to break his fall. Awakened in this way, he was often out of his head with pain, pleading with the nurses somewhere in the maze of hallways outside for his shot.
It was always half an hour before someone answered, or an hour, and then one of them would come in, taking her time, and would remind Mr. Graves as she administered the injection that she had other patients to take care of and that he should learn to wait his turn. Then the nurse would leave and a few minutes later Mr. Graves would sag into the straps holding him up, and then for a while he was content enough to hang from the ceiling and talk about women drivers and common sense, and a couple of hours would pass—pleasantly, considering the man was hanging from the ceiling—and then he would sense the drug beginning to leave his system and he would start watching the clock.
Spooner was much in sympathy with Mr. Graves, and grateful that his own injuries didn’t require being hung from the ceiling. On the other hand, he—Spooner—was not allowed to have morphine or anything else for the pain, and every move he made was instinctively countered by an opposite and corresponding part of his body, which set off the same pain again, but headed in the other direction. He had a broken femur of his own, and a broken rib and torn connective tissue in his rib cage and nerve damage in both hands. His cheek was also broken, and his eardrum, and one of his eyebrows apparently had been sanded off against the sidewalk. His back was fractured, although nobody had noticed it yet. The thing that bothered Spooner most those first da
ys, though, was not a specific injury, or being unable to move, but a feeling of riding a cold, violent wash down into the vortex of an eddy. He was being flushed. The floor of the world dropped away and everything moved clockwise and down, and he panicked again and again and grabbed for the sides, but there was nothing to hold on to because it was all going down with him.
Without moving his head, he asked Mr. Graves if he also had feelings of being flushed.
Mr. Graves said, “None I noticed; they just got me spunned up here like a spiderweb is all I know.” He thought a little while and said, “That woman come after me out of nowhere. They wasn’t no common sense in it, she just do.”
They brought breakfast at dawn and gave Mr. Graves another shot of morphine and fed him quivering eggs. Spooner stared at his own pile of eggs and felt it staring back.
A technician arrived and took blood from them both, and a little later a nurse came in and changed the dressing that covered Spooner’s skull, and cleaned dried blood out of his hair and his remaining eyebrow and his mustache. The strokes she used were short and punishing, as if she were angry. He asked the nurse if head injuries commonly made accident patients feel as if they were being flushed down a toilet. He had begun to suspect a connection between the tunnel that near-death-experience experiencers often reported and the eddy at the bottom of the whirlpool, beginning to see the pure, bitter genius behind everything if the act of dying turned out to be flushing the toilet.
The first call came in about seven-thirty from the Associated Press. Spooner hung up.
He wasn’t angry—how many times had he made the same kind of call when he’d worked for the city desk? Or knocked on somebody’s door? Granted, he’d usually gone to a movie instead, but there had been times back when he was a reporter when he’d done what a city editor told him to do. And now, a few years later, and the tables turned, Spooner the newspaperman was refusing to talk to the press. It struck him somehow as a pure distillation of the human condition.
But then, what didn’t?
The next call was the woman from the bookstore, asking if there was anything she could do.
Spooner knew the woman by now though and knew she was not calling to offer help. “Not a thing,” he said.
“I’d come over in person, but I was thinking it might be better if I didn’t have any public connection to this. You know, with the store and all…”
Spooner didn’t answer.
“I mean, it might be best for everyone if I weren’t there at all last night, if you follow my meaning.”
“Of course,” he said.
And now she thought of it, it might be best for everyone if Stanley’s attorney wasn’t there either.
“You know what I’m thinking?” Spooner said. “It might be best for everyone if none of us were there.” And in the quiet that followed, the floor spun and dropped out of the world.
It was a day for visitors. Just before lunch Stanley came in with his arm in a cast, and was hugely amused at the gauze cap covering the top of Spooner’s head. His left arm was broken below the elbow, and even though the ulna was the smaller of the two bones connecting his hand to his elbow, it was the slower and more difficult bone to heal. It was strange talking about bones with Stanley Faint, strange to think of his having bones with the same names as everybody else’s.
Stanley had dropped Spooner off last night and then, possibly in some bit of instinctive misdirection, gone to a different emergency room to have his own arm set. Spooner often wondered at the variant things they saw, looking at the same world, and wondered how it might have looked to Stanley last night when the bar filled up with bats and tire irons and sociopaths. What was it he’d said? I hope that’s the softball team? Or had Spooner said that himself? Had he—Stanley—even been afraid?
“This is Mr. Graves,” Spooner said, indicating Sylvester, suspended as always from the ceiling.
“What’s happening?” Stanley said.
“Oh, everything lovely here,” Mr. Graves said.
“In a way he was in a car accident,” Spooner said.
“You that fighter, aren’t you?” Mr. Graves said. “What you gone done to your arm?”
Stanley shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said.
“You two boys concoct this all up?” Mr. Graves said.
“That’s the sorry truth,” Stanley said.
A little later Stanley signed an autograph for Mr. Graves and posed with him for a picture when his wife came in with her Instamatic camera. Mr. Graves told Stanley the story of how he had been crushed, and while Stanley’s braying was rattling the china everywhere in the hospital, Spooner considered the cast covering his left forearm. In Spooner’s view Stanley’s one great asset in the ring was that quality which in the boxing world was called the intangibles. The problem was that at Stanley’s present level of competition his opponents had all the tangibles—i.e., speed, reflexes, power, most of all power—in the world and these had to be worn out and used up before Stanley could narrow the matter to a contest of hearts. Which is to say he got hit too much—you didn’t have to know anything about boxing to see that—but until now at least nobody had ever walked through his left hand to do it. What would happen now if he couldn’t jab?
Spooner gagged and leaned over the lunch tray sitting beside his bed. Nothing came up, but the gauze cap fell off his head, and Stanley borrowed Mrs. Graves’s camera to get the picture.
Stanley was still there when Mrs. Spooner arrived. Mrs. Graves had left—it was time to change some of Mr. Graves’s dressings, and she could not stand to watch or hear him moan when they moved him around. For all his good qualities, Mr. Graves did not suffer quietly.
Stanley got up from his chair, making elaborate room for Spooner’s wife to attend his bedside. She did not speak to Stanley, did not so much as acknowledge that he was there. Instead, she delivered the news that Calmer was due in later that afternoon, and then sat down quietly and stared across the way at Spooner’s roommate, suspended from the ceiling.
“He gagged a little bit ago,” Stanley said, “but don’t worry, I got pictures.” He laughed again, filling the room and the hall outside with the great sound, but the room had changed moods. Mr. Graves had gotten his shot of morphine and was beginning to drift, and Spooner’s pulse and his various miseries had slowed to one and the same thing. And Mrs. Spooner sat in a knot, faintly vibrating—nothing audible, like a snake, just a faint, steady vibration—and, like some post office clerk who notices the package is ticking, finally Stanley felt it too and moved carefully away, trying not to even stir the air, and vacated the premises. He’d looked vaguely hurt that Mrs. Spooner hadn’t said hello, but then he was not used to being unloved.
It was a strange thing to watch. The man had recently boxed Early Shavers—his given name—who was the most powerful and feared heavyweight of his era, absorbing a quantity of blows that would have knocked out all the other heavyweights who ever lived, and in the end had exhausted him, worn him out, then knocked him out, and Mrs. Spooner had just run him out of the room.
Spooner touched her hand. She did not pull away but continued to vibrate, and did not touch him back. A candy striper came through the door carrying two bouquets of flowers. All day long, candy stripers would be delivering flowers to Spooner’s room. When she had gone, Spooner touched his wife again.
“He stayed there with me when he could have run off,” he said, meaning Stanley. “It’s why I’m here.”
“That is exactly why you’re here,” she said, which should not be taken to mean that she agreed with what he’d just said. Still, she knew as well as Spooner that he hadn’t been led anywhere by Stanley Faint; that wasn’t how it worked between them. More to the point, Spooner had been getting himself into one scrape or another ever since he could walk. Even more to the point than that, Mrs. Spooner was not only aware of the spontaneous aspect of Spooner’s personality but back in the day had been tacitly drawn to it. But that, of course, was back in the d
ay, before they had a baby to think about, and a house and a lawn and a septic tank.
She closed her eyes and the vibrating turned into shaking, and then a pretty good imitation of herself beginning to come, but he did not see how it would do anybody any good to bring it up.
Instead, trying to maneuver the conversation away from Stanley, he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Mrs. Spooner opened her eyes now and slowly beheld what lay on the bed in front of her, beheld Spooner until he realized the terrible mistake he’d made, bringing his physical appearance into it.
“Have you seen yourself?” she said.
Which, now that she mentioned it, he hadn’t, and the next time a candy striper came in with flowers, he asked for a mirror and began to appreciate the extent of the damage. He tried imagining that he and his wife were in each other’s places, that she’d walked into a bar in the Pocket and been beaten with crowbars and bats. That thought—Mrs. Spooner bruised and broken and sewn together—led to nausea, then to half a dozen cold-wash flushings, which came one after another, with the new flushing beginning even before the last flushing stopped. Like airport toilets.
He put the mirror down and picked up his lunch plate—meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, cling peaches, each set into its own little quadrant with raised boundaries to keep it apart from the rest—and spewed a small helping of green beans more or less back into the quadrant they had come from. Mrs. Spooner looked away, offering him what privacy she could while it came up, and then got a washcloth and a plastic bowl from the bathroom and carefully cleaned off his mouth, a touch so light he barely felt it. He saw that she liked him better now that there was something she could do to help.
And while Mrs. Spooner was tidying him up, a nurse appeared and took his vital signs and his temperature, and then noticed his lunch tray, sitting just as it had been delivered. Except the beans didn’t look as good as they used to.
