by Ron Hall
The surgeries had seemed to stir the tumors in Deborah’s abdomen into a venomous fury. But she hated taking pain medications. For one thing, she feared addiction. Also, she had dozens of visitors and loathed the idea of receiving them drugged up and slurring. And so, sleep became an elusive dream as we battled the enemy of pain.
Four weeks after her first surgery, we drove to Baylor University Medical Center to see Dr. Robert Goldstein, a world-renowned liver specialist. After an MRI, we met with the doctor in his office. It was a space curiously absent of diplomas and other credentials, filled instead with pictures of the gray-haired, ponytailed doctor and his pretty wife posing on Harley-Davidsons.
Facing us across his desk, Dr. Goldstein wasted no words. “I’m sorry. The MRI results aren’t good.”
Deborah and I sat next to each other, in a pair of side chairs. “What do you mean?” she asked.
He laid it on the line. “Most people in your condition live no more than a year.”
In the millisecond it took for his last few words to register in her brain, Deborah fainted. She actually fell out of her chair onto the floor. Dr. Goldstein dashed into the hall waving his arms like an accident bystander trying to flag down help. I dropped to my knees and lifted her limp body so that her head lay in my lap. A nurse came in, the doctor close behind, and covered Deborah’s face and arms with cool, damp cloths.
Moments later, she came to, pale and shaking, and I helped her get back into her chair. Then I put one arm around her shoulders and with my other, held her hand. I gazed at Dr. Goldstein for a moment, knowing he was a walking repository of the latest information on colon cancer. There had to be options.
“What’s your recommendation?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
Then he looked at Deborah. “The cancer is too extensive. If you were my wife, I would send you home and tell you to enjoy your family as best you can, and hope a cure can be found within the next few months.”
Deborah looked deeply into Dr. Goldstein’s eyes. “Do you believe in God?”
“I believe in medicine,” he said.
Accordingly, he ticked off treatment options then shot them down like skeet: Chemotherapy—wouldn’t work. Liver resectioning—too many tumors on both lobes. Ablation, or burning the cancer off the liver—tumors too large.
His words hit like hammer blows, crushing our hope. I could feel my heart pounding, breaking. Our hands clasped tight, Deborah and I stood.
“Thank you for your opinion, Dr. Goldstein,” I said through lips that felt like wax. We walked out of his office and out to the car where we sat, mute and paralyzed. Finally, Deborah spoke into the roaring silence.
“Let’s praise God,” she said.
For what? I thought without saying it.
“Let’s forget what he said about only living one year, and let’s just trust God,” she told me. “Dr. Goldstein is just a doctor. We serve the living God, who knows our number of days. I intend to fulfill each one of mine.”
Despite the hope-crushing meeting with Dr. Goldstein, Deborah and I weren’t going down without a fight. Shortly after moving in with the Davenports, she commenced a grueling course of chemotherapies at a grim-looking oncology clinic in Fort Worth. The chemo lab was gray and dimly lit, with twenty blue recliners laid out on linoleum tile in two ranks of ten, usually full with cancer warriors, pale and gaunt.
Deborah lay there, soldierlike, for three or four hours at a stretch, as poison dripped into her veins. She said the chemicals felt like heavy metal flowing into her body; she could taste iron and copper. No screens or dividers created private spaces for suffering. So, as I sat with her, talking softly, stroking her hair, people around us vomited into trays provided for the purpose. Sometimes Mary Ellen or other friends would come and sit with her, read to her.
We usually didn’t make it far from the clinic before Deborah was overcome with a wave of nausea or diarrhea. I’d pull the car over and help her through it. Apart from her pain, the indignity of being unable to control her body was tough going for a woman who had never looked tousled, even when she got out of bed in the morning.
The medicine took her down quickly, slashing her weight to one hundred pounds. Still, she was determined to eradicate the enemy and insisted on trying different kinds of chemo treatments, sometimes in the same week, hoping to incinerate the cancer with the medical equivalent of napalm. At home, whenever she could lift her head off the pillow, she slipped on her Reeboks and we would walk together. The kids and I couldn’t get her to stop, even when she ran out of strong.
35
It was Deborah who first brought up the idea of getting Denver a driver’s license, in the fall of 1998. She felt bad that her cancer—and how it consumed our time—was hampering Denver from being more a part of our lives. If he had a license, she reasoned, he could more freely join in the things we were doing, without being dependent on our hunting him down in the hood.
When we broached the subject with Denver, he responded in typical fashion: “Let me think about it,” he said.
A few weeks later, we talked it around over coffee at the mission. “I like the idea of bein able to drive, Mr. Ron,” he said. “But I got to tell you, I ain’t exactly clean.”
“Clean?”
“I got a record.”
It seemed Denver had done a little scouting down at the Department of Public Safety. When the clerk typed his name into the computer, up popped a list of problems: a disorderly charge in Louisiana, a few unpaid tickets related to his car-motel business, and—this was the deal-breaker—a citation for marijuana possession bestowed on him in Baton Rouge during some years he spent riding the rails. With the pot charge on his record, there could be no driver’s license.
Denver wanted to clear his name, so we agreed he had to travel to Baton Rouge and subject himself to the laws of Napoleon. It is an odd fact of American history that some laws in the Bayou State haven’t been rewritten since the little Corsican still owned the place.
It was December 1998, and we picked a sorry night for a road trip. A freezing rain had shut down highways all over Texas. But Denver wanted his past behind him, so I drove him down to the Greyhound station. He figured there might be a few drunks on the bus, but fewer than at the mission, which was always packed to the rafters during lousy weather.
Denver wagered that a couple of hundred dollars in the hand of the right Louisiana lawman might fix his legal problem. “That’s just the way it is down there,” he said. So I gave him $200 to pay the fine.
After a long, slippery trip on the Greyhound—“That dawg slid like a hog on ice!” Denver told me later—he rolled into Baton Rouge. The day was about like the night before, with the kind of icy wind that makes your toes ache and your nose run. Denver pushed through the doors at the police station, stamped the cold out of his feet, and tried to explain that he wanted to turn himself in for a ten-year-old marijuana charge.
The police just laughed at him.
He hunted down a payphone and called to tell me he wasn’t having any luck. “They think I’m crazy, Mr. Ron,” he said with a chuckle. “They think I’m just tryin’ to get arrested so I can have a warm place to sleep. I can’t find nobody to take my money under the table—or on the top!”
If I couldn’t help Denver get fined or arrested, I figured I’d have to use the good-ole-boy system. I called a fellow I knew, a young mover and shaker in Louisiana who’d grown up playing Hot Wheels with the governor’s son. Deborah had taught him in the first grade. I figured he would know someone who’d either arrest Denver or set him free. He did, and just like that, Denver’s record was clean. As Denver told me before he headed down to Baton Rouge in the first place: Things are different down there.
And so, the way was clear for Denver to get his driver’s license. That meant passing a written test—no big deal for someone who can read. But, unable to study the Department of Public Safety manual on his own, Denver opted instead for tutoring. A couple of fellows at
the mission worked with him for weeks until he knew all the questions and most of the answers. When he declared himself ready, I took him down to the DPS.
After an oral exam, Denver emerged from the DPS office laughing, raising his hand for a big high five. Next came the driving test. He had driven a tractor and even a couple of cars, but had never parallel-parked. I drove my new car, a silver-green Infinity Q45, out to the big parking lot next to the Lakeworth High School football stadium and let him slide into the driver’s seat. Then, for a couple of hours, Denver practiced parallel parking between the phone booth and the concession stand before the Lakeworth marching band took over the parking lot and ran us off.
Finally, in September 1999, ten months after his trip to Louisiana to try to get arrested, Denver got his license. (The lady who gave Denver his road test said she really liked his Q45 and wondered aloud how much his monthly payments were.) He thanked me again and again, until I finally had to tell him to quit. He took nothing for granted and declared the license one of a great many blessings God had lately sent his way, Deborah and I among them.
In practical terms, Denver’s getting his license was a validation: Without one, so many things are out of reach—not only driving, but other things that make a person feel like a person, like just being able to prove who you are. Soon after he got his license, Denver used it to prove more than that.
Regan had finally found a job she was sure she’d love, as a cook for Young Life, a Christian youth camp. It was half the pay and twice the hours she worked at the gallery, but it was ministry work and it was in Colorado, set against the majestic Rockies, where a lot of twenty-five-year-olds feel called to suffer for the Lord.
Deborah felt strongly that Regan shouldn’t hover around home, waiting to see how the cancer would progress. We encouraged her to take the job. So she packed her bags and headed west to the Crooked Creek Ranch in Winter Park, Colorado. But at twenty-five, Regan had more than luggage, having had apartments in both New York and Dallas.
Jokingly, I said to Denver one day, “Now that you’ve got a driver’s license, would you like to drive Regan’s things to Colorado?”
When I mentioned the route wound through the capital city of Denver, his smile stretched wider than an eight-lane interstate. “I always wanted to see the city I was named after,” he said.
Now I’d opened my trap and couldn’t take it back. So over the next three days, we hammered out a plan. I pulled out a road atlas and traced the route to Winter Park with colored marking pens. But Denver couldn’t read the words in the atlas, so on plain paper, I drew a rough map with pictures of highway signs, and showed him what the one going to Colorado looked like. Denver was thoroughly convinced he could follow a map—and he convinced me as well.
So on a brilliant October day, we loaded my nearly new F-350 crew-cab pickup with everything Regan owned—TVs, stereos, clothes, furniture. We set a meeting time for him and Regan, 6:00 p.m. the following day at the Safeway grocery store in Winter Park. And after a final one-hour cram session, I sent him on his way, armed with $700 cash, a simple little hand-drawn map with checkpoints, phone numbers to call if he got in trouble, and a $30,000 truck with a free and clear title.
As he eased down the driveway, I ran alongside the truck, repeating, “Two-eighty-seven! Two-eighty-seven!” If he made the turn onto Highway 287, he’d be on his way to Colorado. If he missed it, he’d wind up in the hinterlands of Oklahoma where, I had tried to convince him, humans spoke an entirely different language.
I tried to convince myself I knew what I was doing, but the plain facts were that Denver was heading out on a two-thousand-mile round-trip, navigating interstates, back roads, and mountain passes—the highest in Colorado—using a driver’s license that had arrived in the mail only the week before. What was he thinking? Better yet, what was I thinking?
As he pulled away with the money, my truck, and everything Regan owned, Denver wiped his forehead with the towel that he usually carried, grinning a little semi-grin that I couldn’t quite decode.
The angel on my right shoulder whispered that it meant, “Thank you, Mr. Ron, for trustin me.”
The devil on my left cackled, “No, it means ‘Adiós, sucker!’”
36
I ain’t no thief and I ain’t no liar, but Mr. Ron didn’t know that. It just didn’t make no sense to me why he gon’ trust me to take all his daughter’s stuff way off yonder to Colorado. Now I ain’t the most intelligent man, but I can figure things out purty good, so I wadn’t worried ’bout gettin there. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why a rich white man would give me his four-by-four, $700 cash, and all his daughter’s possessions, and expect a broke, homeless man that can’t read or write to go nearly a thousand miles to somewhere he ain’t never been, deliver the goods—and bring back the truck!
It just didn’t make no sense. I knowed he was a smart man that maybe thinks he knows what he’s doin. But bein smart don’t mean he’ll ever see his truck again—that takes faith.
I expect I never had no more than $20 or $30 of my own at one time, ’cept for once when Mr. Ron slipped me a hundred. Then he gives me $700 cash and a $30,000 truck fulla TVs, furniture, and stereos. I just couldn’t let the man down.
He drawed me a map, thinkin I could read it, and explained the best he could what signs to look for and how to get there. After we finished loadin the truck, he pointed me in the gen’l direction of Colorado. Then, when I was pullin out, he kept runnin by the truck, hollerin, “Two-eighty-seven! Two-eighty-seven!”
Now, I’m gon’ be honest with you: With all his talkin and pointin and hollerin, I was real nervous and couldn’t remember everthing he told me. But I did remember him sayin if I miss 287, I’m gon’ wind up in Oklahoma. And the way I’m gon’ know it is I’d cross a big bridge over a big river and the sign’d say “OKLAHOMA,” and the river’d say “RED.”
And that’s exactly what happened. I knowed I had a problem so I stopped at a gas station and told a fella I was lookin for Highway 287 to Colorado. He told me a different way to get there, and I was a little worried about that ’cause he didn’t look too smart. I took outta there again and was drivin purty slow ’cause I was afraid all Mr. Ron’s daughter’s stuff gon’ blow out the back. I figured he’d rather me be gettin there late with the goods than on time with a empty truck.
Part of the $700 he give me was for a motel room, but I slept in the truck ’cause ain’t nobody ever trusted me before with that much stuff, and wadn’t no way in the world I was gon’ take a chance on somebody stealin it.
Things was goin purty good. The folks in the gas stations kept me goin in the right direction. Now, when I got into Colorado, I started seein mountains away off, and I was thinkin how purty they was. But I figured Mr. Ron’s daughter’s camp musta been around on the other side of them mountains, ’cause for sure ain’t nobody gon’ drive up over em in a truck. The more I kept on drivin, the bigger them mountains got. I could see snow on top of em, but I couldn’t see where they ended so I started worryin about how I was gon’ get around em. Next thing I knew I was smack up next to em with the road headin straight up!
I stopped at another gas station and asked a lady how I was s’posed to get to Winter Park. She looked at me and pointed up the mountain. And when I asked her where the Crooked Creek Ranch was, she pointed to the top.
“The road is narrow,” she said. “Once you head up there, there’s no turning around.”
That caused me and myself to have a little talk. I’m a strong fella, I thought. Ain’t no reason to be scared. So I got back in the truck and headed up the mountain. Real slow.
The drive was mighty purty, the sky spreadin out from the mountain blue as a lake, and the trees all red and orange and yella like they was on fire. ’Bout halfway up the mountain, I decided to do me a little sightseein, so I pulled over to take a look over the edge and see how far could I see.
That was a mistake.
I couldn’t see no bottom. The edge of
that road dropped off into the biggest nothin I ever saw in my life. I got back in the truck right quick and squeezed that steerin wheel so tight I thought it was gon’ break off in my hands, and I started pourin sweat even though it was freezin outside. I didn’t go no more than about five miles an hour the rest of the way and by the time I got to Winter Park, I had about a hundred cars stacked up behind me like a freight train.
37
When Denver failed to make the meeting with Regan, my faith slipped off the mountain. First I thought of calling the highway patrol to report an accident. But I changed my mind as I imagined the dispatcher breaking into a belly laugh when I told what I’d done. Besides, Denver was supposed to have crossed three states, and I had no idea where to tell the authorities to look for him.
It ate at me that Denver had all my numbers but that I had not heard from him in two days. I remembered how wide his eyes got when I handed over the $700—it must have seemed to him a small fortune. I flashed back to a lecture I’d gotten from Don Shisler about the fate of a buck in the hands of a bum. Maybe the temptation had been too great.
Maybe he’d taken the money, the truck, and Regan’s stuff and set up housekeeping in Mexico. Or Canada. He’d always said he wanted to see Canada.
I hated to tell Deborah that Denver was missing, but I knew she could hear, each time Regan and I touched base on the telephone, that our voices had climbed the octaves from concern to worry to panic. So I went into the bedroom and told her.
Her response was vintage Deborah: “Well, why don’t you stop worrying and let’s start praying for Denver’s safety?”
I knelt beside the bed, and we held hands and prayed. We’d been like that for only a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Regan: “He’s here!”
38
Late the next day, the doorbell rang and there stood Denver, wearing the biggest grin I’d ever seen in my life. In the driveway sat the truck, washed and waxed.
