Little Manny stuck a hand under each of Nat’s armpits and tried to help him to his feet.
“I’m fine. I told you.” He knocked the hands away. “I’ll get up on my own.”
He rose partway to his feet in the wildly spinning ring, then had to brace himself on the mat again to keep from falling.
He made it on the second try.
He ducked carefully through the ropes and followed Little Manny toward the door.
The crowd booed him. A guy threw a cup of freezing cold liquid on him, and he felt bits of ice slide down his back and chest. Another guy aimed a beer bottle at him and he dodged it, causing the room to spin even more violently. Again he worried he might vomit.
He ducked after Little Manny out into the cold, quiet night of the equipment yard. The noise from inside sounded blessedly muffled and far away. Unreal.
“Why did they boo me?” Nat asked, his voice not sounding like his own to him.
“Why not?”
“It’s not like they had money on me to win.”
“I think they wanted a better show. More than two minutes.”
“That was more than two minutes. They should’ve rung the bell. They owe me a hundred bucks.”
“Good luck collecting. You sure you’re OK?” Little Manny pried open one of Nat’s eyelids and peered in at close range.
Nat reflexively shook him off again. Pushed him away. “Stop it. What are you doing?”
“Doesn’t matter. I can’t see in this light, anyway. Ready to go home, kid?”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely. I definitely want to go home.” He began to walk toward the street.
“Hey. Cinderella. Forgetting something?”
Nat turned back to face his trainer, still not clear on what he was forgetting. Little Manny glanced down to a spot below Nat’s face, so Nat looked down, too. He was wearing only his boxing trunks. He hadn’t even taken his gloves off.
“I’ll go get your clothes,” Little Manny said, and ducked back inside.
Nat lowered himself gingerly on to a stack of three or four wooden pallets. He looked down at his gloves and felt suddenly desperate to have them off. So he tore at the tape with his teeth, which he knew from the start was pointless, then gave up and wedged his wrists between his bare thighs.
He looked up at the sky, and saw stars. It seemed so out of place. How could the stars be shining over a place like this one?
The heat of exertion began to wear off, leaving him shivering in the cold. To his great humiliation, Nat found himself blinking back hot tears. To be seen that way by Little Manny felt unimaginable. It even embarrassed Nat to cry in front of himself.
He fought desperately to beat them back again, but was only partially successful.
He looked up to see Little Manny standing over him. Was it pity Nat saw in his eyes? Or was he just reading his worst fear into the scene before his eyes?
“Come on, kid. Let’s get you home.” He turned and walked toward the street.
“Little Manny,” Nat called. And Little Manny turned around. “Thanks for coming here with me.”
Little Manny passed the words off with a wave of his hand. “You coming? Or do you like it here?”
“I’m coming,” Nat said.
8 March 1980
Seconds
“What time is it?” Nat asked again.
“Four thirty.”
Nat could feel the slight rocking of the train as he sat with his eyes squeezed shut. He wished for the hundredth time that they had taken the bus instead. Smoother ride. He opened his eyes and looked out the window. Watched the occasional lights of some little farming village flash by. But it hurt too much, so he closed them again. Even though it didn’t seem to help.
Every second seemed an hour long, and he ached to be home. Even knowing that home wouldn’t make the pain stop. And yet he felt that if he could simply lie curled up on his side on his own bed in the dark, everything would somehow be all right, in a way that it wasn’t now.
Especially if Carol would curl up against him.
“You got any more of those aspirin?” he asked Little Manny.
“You already took six.”
“Just another two or three.”
“They’re gonna make you throw up.”
“So, go get me something to put in my stomach.”
“Café car’s not even open at this hour.”
“Coffee with a whole bunch of cream. You could go up to business class and get it.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“My neck is so stiff.”
“Not surprising. Is that what’s bothering you? Or is it your head?”
“My head. But my neck is so stiff.”
“Get used to the headaches.”
“I am used to them. This one is special.”
“Get used to the special ones, too.”
• • •
The lights came up inside the train car and Nat, who had no idea he’d fallen asleep, lurched awake with a cry of pain. He shielded his eyes with one arm.
He’d been dreaming of flashes of colored light in front of his closed eyes. If they could be considered dreams.
“Why’d they turn the lights on?”
“We’re at a station I guess. Might be Albany. Anyway, we stopped. Told you not to fall asleep,” Little Manny said. “Not good to fall asleep when you’ve got a concussion. Here.”
He picked up his hat from his lap and placed it over Nat’s face. An old-fashioned hat like men used to wear on the street in the fifties. It hurt where it touched his temple, but the light hurt more, so Nat left it in place.
“How do you know I have a concussion?”
“What? I can’t hear you under the hat.”
Nat lifted it a few inches. “How do you know I have a concussion?”
“Because I saw the freight train that hit you. That’s how.”
“Oh.”
He gently set the hat back in place, and stared into its light-ringed darkness, surviving the pain of each second individually. What was the point, though, really, of surviving an hour-long second if another waited right behind it, also needing to be survived? But it made him feel panicky to think about that, so he returned to the one-second-at-a-time plan.
The train began to move again. Nat breathed carefully until the light leaking in through the edges of the hat went dark again. Then he gave the hat back to Little Manny.
“That was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to me,” he said quietly.
“There’ll be more.”
“Thanks loads.”
“What’d you expect? To win without breaking a sweat every time?”
“No, but I thought I’d do better than that. Can you tell if my ribs are broken by feel?”
“I dunno. Raise your arm.”
“It hurts to raise my arm. That’s how I got in this trouble to begin with.”
“No, you got in this trouble when you said yes to that fight. Against my advice. Raise it anyway.”
Nat slowly, gently coaxed his right arm to about shoulder height. He felt Little Manny’s hands run over his side.
“Ow! Gently, please.”
“That’s as gentle as I can be and still feel. I dunno. They’re not out of place as far as I can tell. So prob’ly just cracked. But first thing Monday morning, go to the doctor, get an X-ray. And tell him you took a mean one to the head. Let him give you one of them neuro exams.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
“No. Not whatever. Promise.”
Long pause. Nat figured he probably wouldn’t bother to go. “OK.”
They rode the rest of the way home in silence.
• • •
Nat sat on a bench at the station, shivering miserably in the morning cold, his head in his hands to block out the light.
Several paces behind him, he could hear Little Manny talking on the pay phone.
“Yeah, he don’t feel so good. Got a mean headache. Otherwise I’d just tell him to walk ho
me. But he feels so lousy, that’s why I’m asking. Hate to make him walk all that way.”
A pause. Then, “Yeah. OK. Good. Thanks, Nathan.”
Little Manny came back and sat next to him on the bench. Patted him on the back. Which hurt. Not because his back hurt. Just because it moved everything slightly.
“He’s coming to pick you up.”
“Promise me you won’t tell him,” Nat said. “Promise me you won’t tell anybody. Ever.”
“Don’t worry,” Little Manny said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t come off too good in the story, either.”
• • •
Carol came into their bedroom about seven P.M.
“What are you doing in bed? It’s like seven o’clock.” She flipped on the light.
Nat yelped out loud. “Turn it off, OK? Ow. Jeez.”
“Wow. Sorry. You OK?”
“I have a headache.”
She flipped off the light again and crossed over to the bed, where Nat lay curled in a fetal position.
“Want me to get you some aspirin?”
“I already had eight. They didn’t help much.”
“Poor Nat. Is there anything I can get you?”
“How ‘bout a morphine drip?” He reached a hand up to her. “Come lie down with me.”
She kicked off her shoes and settled next to him on the bed. In front of him. He uncurled slightly to make room for her. Then he threw an arm over her and tucked in close.
“That’s better,” he said.
“Than what?”
“Than anything.”
“How was your sparring match? Were you as good as in Golden Gloves?”
“Not quite that good, no.”
They lay together in silence for several minutes.
So, this was the brass ring, the great finish line that he had promised himself all the way home. Lying on his own bed, with her.
He still hurt like hell. But if you have to hurt, he figured, there are worse places to do it.
“I’ve been dreaming about this,” he said.
“What?”
“This.”
“Just this?”
“Yeah. Just this.”
“But we do this every night.”
“No. We didn’t do it last night. And I could have used it, too. I just wanted to get home and hold you. That’s all. Is that so weird?”
“Yes and no. I mean, no. It’s not weird. Not exactly. It’s just that … you don’t usually talk like this.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Almost like … like you need me. I’m not saying you don’t. Just that you don’t usually talk like you do. That must be some headache.”
9 March 1980
Worse
Nat eased himself down at the breakfast table, using all of his scant energy to squash what could easily have blossomed into a full-on state of panic. He couldn’t believe he’d wakened up to find the headache had gotten worse. He wouldn’t have believed, if anyone had tried to tell him, that there was such a thing as worse.
He tried to smile at Nathan, but was pretty sure it came out as a grimace.
“Do you still have a headache?” Nathan asked. “You look terrible.”
Nat nodded ever so slightly. His neck felt locked into place. As if with steel braces. He had to move his whole upper body to give the appearance of a nod.
“Is Carol coming to breakfast?”
Nat shook his head as best he could.
“Already gone to see her grandparents?”
Nat nodded.
“I hope she had some breakfast.”
Damn. This did not seem to be a yes or no question.
“I think she had cereal,” he said. But something went wrong. Something happened to the words. They slurred and blended at the edges. As if he were drunk.
Nathan looked up briefly. Curiously.
They both held still for a split second. Then the moment seemed to pass on its own. He had just wakened up and he had a headache. The perception was dismissed.
It must have been nothing.
Nat put his head in his hands, shielding his eyes from the light.
He heard a small noise in front of him, and opened his eyes to see that Nathan had set a plate of poached eggs on toast in front of him. The smell made him a little bit nauseous. The last thing he wanted was food, but he had to get something in his stomach. So he could take another fistful of aspirin.
He reached to the middle of the table for the salt.
His fingertips touched down a good ten inches to the right of it.
He stared at the hand for a moment, detached. As if it must belong to someone else entirely.
He tried again. This time it landed three or four inches left.
When he tried to pick up the hand for a third try, he failed. It just didn’t pick up. As though it had never received a signal. As though the lines were down.
He looked up to see Nathan watching him, a shocked look on his face.
“Nat,” Nathan said. “Are you drunk?”
“No!” he said, or tried to say, but it came out sounding spastic. Like the retarded boy in his fourth-grade class. The one everybody made fun of. Like a person who had been born deaf learning to talk for the first time.
“Nat,” Nathan said again. Clearly alarmed. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he tried to say. But this time it didn’t sound nearly so good. This time it sounded like the howl of some wounded animal.
His stomach suddenly revolted in response to the pain, and Nat knew he was about to throw up. He lurched up from the table and turned toward the sink, but the first step opened a whole new category of trouble. His legs felt rubbery and weak, as if his muscles had turned to rubber bands, and they refused to follow the simplest instructions.
He felt himself pitch forward. He braced for the pain of landing.
But he never felt himself land.
11 March 1980
White
Nat opened his eyes.
He saw white walls in front of him, and on either side. White sheets beneath his direct field of vision. A television set hung suspended high on the wall. It was the only thing he saw that was not white.
The headache was gone.
He let his eyes drift closed again, experiencing and blessing that relief.
When he opened them again, a pretty young black woman stood over him. Wearing a white uniform.
“Well, look who’s awake,” she said. She spoke with an accent. It was lilting and songlike. Probably from one of those islands where you go on vacation to snorkel and drink rum. “That’s a lovely thing now, to see those eyes open. Are you in much pain, darlin’?”
Nat shook his head slightly.
“OK, well, if you feel a lot of pain, you can ring me with this button. Can you reach this button on your own, do ya think? Try it now, so we see.”
She held up a power cord with a red push-button device on the end. Then she set it down on the bed again, beside his right hand.
Nat gathered up all of his powers of concentration and reached for the button. But his arm felt weak, and his aim was off. The hand wavered on its way into the air and never quite touched down anywhere different.
“Don’t worry, darlin’, I’ll be checkin’ in on ya. If you need your morphine adjusted, you just give me a nod or a blink. ‘Kay?”
Nat nodded hazily.
She disappeared from his field of vision, leaving mostly white.
Nat’s eyes closed again, and he drifted back to wherever he had been before.
12 March 1980
No
Nat opened his eyes. Let them close. Willed them open again.
He saw Nathan fill up nearly his entire field of vision. Leaning over his bed.
“There you are. Good to see you back with us. Carol will kick herself. She just went down to the cafeteria, and it’s all my fault. I twisted her arm, because she hadn’t ea
ten in more than two days. She had to eat something. How do you feel?”
He felt great, actually. Maybe it was just the morphine. But he wasn’t convinced that even morphine could have cured a headache like that one. Not completely, anyway. So he figured it was really, blissfully gone.
“Better,” he said. But it came out sounding like the same mess. The vowels twisted into spastic, howly nonsense, and the consonants seemed not to have been found at all. “Huh?” Nat asked reflexively. Alarmed at his own voice. But even that was barely intelligible. It was only the inflection, the way he raised his voice at the end of the word to suggest a question, that allowed it to make any sense at all. “What?” He tried again. He felt, even through the haze of drugs, the beginnings of a rising panic.
“It’s OK,” Nathan said. “Relax. It’s normal. The doctor says it’s normal. You’ll have trouble with speech for a while. We’ll probably need to get you a speech therapist. And a physical therapist. There’ll be some muscle weakness. And—”
“What? No!”
He wanted to ask how much muscle weakness, and for how long. But he wasn’t even sure his last two syllables had come through. He couldn’t have muscle weakness. He was a boxer. Boxers can’t have muscle weakness.
He had to ask the important question. He had to make those words come out right.
He gathered his inner resources together, much the way he would if someone had asked him to lift up a car.
“When can I box?”
It was pathetic. Maybe the “when” came through well enough to guess at. The l sounded like a, and the other words never made it out of the gate in one piece.
“When …” Nathan said. “When what?”
Frustrated, Nat raised his right hand and tried to imitate writing. But the loops came out looking shaky, and bigger than he had intended.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me.”
A flash of silver caught Nat’s eye. In Nathan’s shirt pocket. It was the clip end of a good silver pen. He pointed to it.
Nathan looked down. “Oh. You want to write something.”
When I Found You Page 24
