by John Fulton
My mother put her hand on my good shoulder. “We’re almost there,” she said.
I felt another hand—icy cold—on my neck and looked up at my father. “We’re going to teach you how to fight. I promise. You won’t have to go through this again.”
“I fought,” I said. “I tried.”
“Sure you did,” he said. “You’re going to have to tell the truth now, Steven. You understand?” He was no longer angry. He was intense, directed, and anxious, as if he himself were about to enter the ring and fight.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Good boy.”
When we reached the head of the line, my father told the nurse that he wanted to speak to the police. “My son has been assaulted,” he said. Almost immediately, a policeman came. The tag on his chest pocket read FRANKS, and he was a large, blond man with a beard who, I realized, closely resembled Nurse Douglas. “I want to press charges against the kid who did this to my son.”
“We’ll have to ask your son some questions,” Franks said.
“Whatever it takes to get a little justice done,” my father said. I could tell that Franks did not like my father, did not care for his sense of entitlement, his loud demand for justice.
Franks looked at me. “He seems a little tired. Maybe we should wait until they’ve treated him. Maybe we should give him a little time.”
“I think we’re ready to do this now,” my father said.
I don’t remember the questions that Officer Franks asked me, though I could tell by the way my father stood—his arms crossed, his face calm, unmoved, determined—that my answers pleased him, that he believed his plan was working. As I talked, I looked at Franks’s belt, the heavy black gun in its holster, the black club dangling down the length of his thigh. I heard my mother talking to someone. “Could we get something for the pain? He’s in terrible pain.” After the questioning was done, a nurse offered me two bright pink capsules. “These should help,” she said. “They might make you float a little.” I was standing on a scale in a back room. The brightness of the light hurt my eyes. The nurse gave me a little Dixie cup of water with the pills. “He’s number fifteen on the list,” she said to my mother.
Out in the lobby I began to feel weightless and good, and leaned up against the side of the Coca-Cola machine next to me—glowing red and humming from within—and fell asleep. When I woke, Jenny was talking to an Asian girl who was holding a washcloth to her hand. Her mother held a baby, lost in a bundle of pink and white blankets, and yelled in a language I didn’t understand at her little boy, who was kicking an aluminum can across the muddy floor. “Say the word Coca-Cola in Vietnamese,” Jenny was saying to the injured girl.
“I don’t know it in Vietnamese,” the girl said.
“They’re number seventeen,” Jenny said to me. “We’re two numbers before them.” I was groggy from those pills and wasn’t sure what my sister meant. “Say ‘Coke is it!’ in your language,” Jenny politely demanded. The girl said something then, though the only word I understood was Coke. The woman with the baby leaned over and shouted something to her daughter in Vietnamese that made the girl turn away from us and read a book she’d had in her lap.
Jenny looked over at me. “I’m bored,” she said. Next to Jenny, my mother had fallen asleep in her chair. I had no idea where my father could be. “This is taking forever.” I looked down at my arm, studying the odd way my palm and elbow pointed away from my body. “Does it really, really hurt?” Jenny asked.
“It’s not so bad with these pills,” I said. I was able to sit up straighter, and my breathing was easier, though any sudden movement sent a stab of pain along my right side. “How did you know his name?” I asked. “How did you know he’s Danny Olsen?”
“From last year’s yearbook,” she said. “I memorized some names in it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Just because,” she said. “I know every kid in last year’s tenth grade. One hundred and twenty-three kids.”
“You don’t know them,” I said.
“I know their names,” she said.
“Those kids are going to hate us now, you know. They’re always going to hate us.”
“Maybe not.” She looked over at my mother and said, “She’s going to leave, isn’t she?”
“What?” I said. “Who’s going to leave?”
“I’m not stupid. I heard you two talking in the car. I always hear that stuff.”
“You’re not supposed to know that,” I said.
“Is she going to leave?” Jenny asked, this time in her little-girl voice, the one she used when she wanted something or when she was frightened. “Do you think she would do that?”
“Shush. She’ll hear us.”
“No, she won’t,” Jenny said. “She’s sleeping.”
I looked over at my mother, who was leaning her head against the wall behind her. Her eyes moved beneath her closed lids, and her mouth was cocked open in a way that made her seem vulnerable and very distant, and it made me feel that I should look away from her, which I did. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
“Yes, you do,” Jenny said.
She was scared now, honestly scared, and just wanted me to say something that would make her feel safe. “No,” I said, “I don’t think she will. She always says she’s going to, but she never does.” That’s not what I felt. But it’s what I knew I had to say, even if I was in no mood to pretend, even if I was tired of being alone with what I thought I knew.
“Good,” Jenny said. She looked away from me and began paging through another magazine, reading about what women do to make themselves pretty and attractive to men. She sighed. “I’m bored. Bored, bored, bored.” I was glad that, for now, she was done feeling scared, and I could barely keep my eyes open. “Sleepy boy,” she said, smiling at me and touching my hair.
“Could you get my glasses out of my pocket for me?” I asked. I had just noticed that everything in the distance—the walls, the people, the reception desk—was blurry, that I had to squint to see things. Jenny handed my glasses to me, and I put them on only to find that the left lens had broken so that I saw the walls, chairs, magazines, and muddy floors of that room very clearly broken into two pieces. “Jesus,” I whispered, because I’d wanted to feel that I had at least saved one small thing from that stupid day.
“Go to sleep now,” Jenny said. And I closed my eyes on the broken picture in front of me and slept.
* * *
When I woke again, my entire right side was on fire. “We’re up,” my mother said. “It’s our turn.”
“The pills stopped working,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “He says the pills stopped working.” She was talking to the attendant. Jenny was walking behind me. Behind her, my father stood at the Coke machine talking to a man in a suit and tie.
“Is Dad coming with us?” I asked.
“I’ll be there in a minute, Steven,” he said. “One minute.”
The attendant left us in a little room, where I sat up on a sort of bed and looked at a chart of human anatomy on the wall, dozens of multicolored organs stuck to a man’s skeletal frame. The sight of it made me think about how disgusting and unimaginably complicated people are inside. “Stop playing with that,” my mother snapped at Jenny, who was fiddling with something on her side of the room. My mother was looking at her watch when a young woman came in followed by a short, muscular man who pushed a metal cart. “I’m Dr. Gardener,” the woman said, already looking at my shoulder. “This is Martin. He’s going to help us put your arm back into joint.” She was short and had a wide nose and small, pointy breasts inside her white lab coat. I wanted her to be more attractive. She cut my T-shirt off with large scissors that felt icy against my skin. “You’re spasming,” the doctor said. “That’s normal. What would you say, Martin?” Dr. Gardener asked.
“That’s a dislocation, all right,” Martin said. I looked down at it and saw the muscle quivering
beneath the tight skin. Martin smiled at me. “It won’t be as bad as you think. Best thing about it is it’s quick. As fast as you can snap your fingers.” He snapped his fingers. I looked back down at my shoulder and noticed the unnatural round bone poking up beside my clavicle. “That’s a doozy. You get ten points for that,” he said, trying to be funny. “You might have some tissue damage, too.”
Martin left the room to fetch an IV drip that, as Dr. Gardener explained to me, was going to make me drowsy. “We wouldn’t want you to be wide awake for this,” she said.
But when Martin returned, he didn’t have an IV. The IV would have to come from another hospital across town. We could wait, but there was no telling how long it would take, given the weather. “I’m sorry to say,” Martin said.
“I want to go to sleep,” I said.
“I think you’re going to be better off getting this over with, Steven,” Dr. Gardener said. She was removing the plastic guard from the needle of a large syringe. “This will relax those muscles and make this a little more comfortable for you,” she said.
“I’m not going to look,” I heard my sister say.
“Where’s my father?” I asked.
“I’ll go get him,” my mother said, starting for the door.
“No,” I said. “Don’t leave.”
“You might feel a small prick.” When Dr. Gardener thrust the needle into my shoulder and began counting slowly to ten, I looked away and saw Jenny staring at the thing that was happening to me. She was biting her thumb.
“Stop looking at me,” I said.
“Hold tight,” Dr. Gardener said. She had finished with the needle and was now placing my good arm around her neck and embracing me, holding me so close that I smelled the warm, salty stink of her skin. My right arm had gone almost completely numb. “I’m not going to tell you that this won’t be a little uncomfortable, but it will only last a moment or two. That’s a promise.”
“I wish I could sleep,” I said. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t keep them closed. I wanted to see what they were doing to me.
“This will help us get some leverage,” Martin said. He began wrapping a white sheet around my arm. “This will only take a second.” He was still adjusting the sheet, tightening it like a sort of sock around my arm.
“I’m not ready,” I said.
“Think good thoughts,” Martin said. “Think of something you like. Concentrate real hard on it. All right?”
“Please wait,” I said because nothing good had occurred to me, because I needed more time to think of something. But Martin had already stepped back; a moment later, I knew only that Dr. Gardener was still holding me and that I was screaming at the top of my lungs.
* * *
I didn’t want the wheelchair, but the doctor insisted that I sit in it at least for the initial trip down the hall. There were other patients in wheelchairs—an old lady in a pink robe, a little kid in striped pajamas who sucked on his fingers and looked scared. Jenny pushed me through this strange traffic of sick people while my mother walked behind us and quietly talked with the doctor.
“Do you know where we’re going next?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t really care,” I said.
“Danny Olsen and his father are here,” she said. “I saw them. Danny Olsen’s been crying. You can tell. We’re going to meet them in the cafeteria now. He’s supposed to apologize to you.” After they had put my arm back into joint, Jenny must have slipped out of the room and done some snooping around. “Dad’s threatening to sue them or something. I heard him talking on the phone before.”
“What?” I said.
“He was asking for money to pay for the hospital bills … to pay for your suffering and inconvenience.”
“You shouldn’t know that,” I said. I was really seeing that night how much my little sister knew and tried to know, how much she made it her business to know. “You shouldn’t know any of that.” I couldn’t help feeling that I shouldn’t, either, that neither of us should.
My father walked up behind us. “Let me take him for a minute, Jen-Jen,” he said. I could tell he was in a good mood. His voice sounded upbeat, happy, large. Jenny let go of my chair and ran down the hallway.
“Don’t run!” my father shouted after her, but she kept on running. “How’s your arm, Steven?”
“I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I know you’re trying to get money from them.”
My father slowed his pace. “Yes, I am,” he said. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a bad thing.”
“I thought you would be happy. That kid hurt you. We’re getting him back. We’re going to win this thing.”
“We’re not winning,” I said.
“Yes, we are. They hurt us, and we’re hurting them back.”
“They hurt me. I don’t want to hurt anybody back.”
“You don’t?” my father asked. “You really don’t?” I didn’t say anything. “I need to ask you something, Steven.”
“What?”
“We’re meeting this boy and his father now. They’ve agreed to give us what we’re asking. Things might have been a whole lot more difficult for us. But Mr. Olsen is ashamed of what happened, and he wants his son to see the pain and the suffering he’s caused us. He wants his son to learn from this. And I want them to see that we’re going to be gracious, that we’re going to be good sports. I’d like you to give me your word that you’ll be gracious.”
“No,” I said. “Hell, no.”
My father stopped, locked the wheels of the chair, and kneeled down in front of me. “How much do you think that’s going to cost?” He gestured at my arm. “You’ll need to see a physical therapist for a month or two. You realize that something like that is outrageously expensive. How much do you think?”
I didn’t want to look at him, but his face was too close to mine to avoid. “A lot, I guess.”
“A whole lot,” he said.
“Times are good, aren’t they? Soon we won’t need to worry about money. That’s what you always say.”
“I’m talking about now, Steven.”
“It’s my stupid arm. Mine.”
“Of course it is,” he said, laughing a little. “But someone has to pay for it.” We both looked down at my arm. It was in a sling and my fingers were swollen and red. It was numb and tingling and felt far away. “That’s why we’re going after these people. All I need from you right now is a little good behavior. Can you give me that?”
I looked up at him, his eyes bloodshot but alert, awake. I felt sick to my stomach then, though not because of what my father was doing. I felt sick because I wanted to know something and had to ask him about it. “How much are they going to give us? How much money?”
“Enough,” he said. “More than enough.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be a good sport.”
Jenny was sprinting down the hallway toward us, stupid and happy and flailing her arms. “I get him back now!” she shouted. “I get to push him again.”
* * *
The cafeteria was large and mostly empty and uncomfortably quiet. The warm, suffocating smell of mashed potatoes seemed to be everywhere, even though no one stood in the food line. Danny Olsen and his father sat at a large round table in the middle of the room. I couldn’t see them too well because I wasn’t wearing my broken glasses. (I didn’t want that kid to know he had defeated me in this small way, too.) As we drew nearer, I saw that the father and son seemed to be looking at some difficult, invisible object at the center of the table. We came to a stop, they stood up, and I could see that Danny Olsen was frightened of the cripple in front of him, frightened of what he had done to me. His hair was still wet from a shower or bath he had recently taken, and his chubby face seemed too white and harshly scrubbed; and even though he was sort of fat, he looked small and shaken. Jenny locked the wheels of my chair in place and Mr. Olsen nodded at me. He wore a suit and his hair was nicely combed, and in his middle-age
d, chubby face I easily saw the resemblance between father and son. “Go ahead, Daniel,” he urged. My father stood off to the side of me, his arms folded. He wore a pleasant and somehow serious smile on his face. Despite his silly flannel pajama top, he was a capable-looking man with deep-set eyes and a nose that had been handsomely broken, set off slightly to one side. He looked strong and good-natured and, to use his word, gracious, more gracious than I knew him to be. I tried to stand up from my chair, but having only one good arm, slipped. When I tried again, I felt the surprising strength of Jenny’s hand holding me down. “Don’t,” she said. “You’re not ready to stand yet.”
Danny Olsen looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice.
“I want to hear it,” Mr. Olsen said.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a louder voice.
“And,” his father prompted.
Danny Olsen bit into his lower lip, looked down at the floor and then up at me again. “I was in the wrong. I apologize for what I did to you. I apologize for what I said to you.”
“Go ahead, Daniel,” Mr. Olsen said. Danny Olsen put his trembling right hand out, which was confusing because I could only offer him my uninjured left. We grasped awkwardly at the other’s mismatched hand and then quickly let go.
“We’re not Catholic or anything,” I said.
My father cleared his voice behind me. “Steven,” he said.
“Okay,” I said to Danny. “Thanks for the apology.” Danny Olsen moved his arms from his pockets, crossed them, let one dangle. He felt awkward and ashamed, looking down at me in my wheelchair, and I knew that we had won, that that moment was my family’s moment of victory, and I tried to feel whatever emotions—elation, superiority, graciousness—winners are supposed to feel. But I didn’t feel those things. Instead, I felt satisfied to see that the kid who had hurt me was scared. I felt safe knowing that they were not only going to give us the money we needed, but also more than we needed, more than enough. I was pretty sure that this was not the feeling of winners. I was pretty sure that this was not “graciousness.” It was too greedy and mean for that.
