He took a sip of black coffee and was quiet for a minute. When he spoke again he didn’t look at Mick anymore. “I don’t remember much about what happened that night. I know I was high, and then there was this bright light and the earth was shaking.”
Mick hadn’t forgotten that everybody called him Preacher. He figured this was the part where the preacher would make the standard Jesus speech. Probably hallucinated some angels and walked the aisle at a tent meeting or a homeless mission.
“I remember an air horn, too,” the Man said. “Close. Really close. Something hit me, and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital.”
“You got hit by a truck?”
“Train,” he said. “I found out later it was a guy they called the Stick. Friend of mine saw him drag me up to the track and lay my hands up there. My friend tried to get to me but he didn’t make it—he was somewhat impaired himself. He saw the Stick over by the wall jumping up and down, laughing.”
Mick pointed loosely at the hooks. “You mean somebody did this to you on purpose?”
“Oh, yeah, it happens all the time. It’s just that homeless people aren’t news—unless of course you get it on film. People love to watch.”
He let out a low whistle. This was not what he had expected, but what could he say?
“That wasn’t the worst of it,” the Man continued. “Not by a long shot. The real hell was after that, in the hospital. When all you’ve got is bandaged stumps where your hands used to be, you can’t do anything. I mean, think about it. You can’t feed yourself, can’t brush your own teeth. You can’t even go to the bathroom by yourself.”
“Can’t pick nose,” the giant said, miming the act.
“There’s a lot of things you can’t do. You sure can’t shoot up, so on top of the sheer horror of losing my hands, I was going through withdrawal and was in intense pain at the same time.”
“But you were in a hospital. They gave you something for pain, right?”
“Yes, but what they gave me was nowhere near the level of narcotics I was accustomed to. They gave me all they could legally give me and it didn’t make a dent. We’re talking excruciating pain, here, and it went on for a long time. Soon as the grafts healed over the stumps I ended up strapped to a bed at Atlanta Regional.”
Mick had heard of it. There was a detox unit there.
“Strapped down. You try to kill yourself or something?”
He nodded. “Couple times. I tried to go out a window on the sixth floor. I couldn’t open it with my teeth, so I just backed up, got a running start, and tried to dive through the glass. But apparently I wasn’t the first to try it. That window was bulletproof or something. When I came to I was lying in the floor bleeding, with a couple orderlies leaning over me, laughing. After that they kept me restrained. I remember some long nights. A lot of screaming.”
“But obviously you got over it. So what happened?”
“Oh, eventually I got well enough to be fitted with these prosthetics, and when they ran out of bed space they declared me healed and put me back on the street. I remember standing there in front of the place thinking, Which way? It was crunch time. I mean, I knew. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt if I went back “home” I’d find a way to score some smack inside of an hour, and I knew people who would push the plunger for me if I couldn’t handle it.
“But right then I was clean, and stone-cold sober. Right then, in that lucid interval, I knew for a fact that I would never have a better chance to turn around and walk the other way. If I went back where I came from, I knew what would happen. It was just plain ugly suicide, and I wouldn’t be able to resist it. Just thinking about that led me to the third option, which was to go down to the tracks and let the train have the rest of me. Get it over quick.”
He wrinkled his nose, glared into his nearly empty coffee cup, flung the dregs on the ground and stuck the cup back in his jacket pocket.
“It was one of those stormy, gray summer afternoons,” he said, locking his hooks together and settling his elbows onto his knees again.
“Been there,” Mick said. “Pop-up thunderstorms rolling around, threatening to bust wide open any minute. Nervous times, up in the steel.”
“I can’t tell you ... I don’t think anybody can imagine the mental anguish I felt right then, standing at the intersection waiting for the light, literally at the crossroads of life and death, and knowing it for what it was. It’s like the clock stopped for a moment—all the noise and thunder and voices went away, and the universe itself whispered to me and said, ‘Well? What are you going to do?’ But I was worn out. I just wanted somebody else to take it off of me, to make a decision for me right then—either way—so I could turn my brain off and maybe not hurt so bad.”
This was starting to sound familiar.
“I just couldn’t hold it anymore, couldn’t contain it. I looked up at those rolling black clouds. I didn’t actually say any words, but it’s as if all the pain and angst and confusion and guilt, along with everything I ever wondered about life and death and right and wrong, it all just sort of coiled itself together and sprang out of me right then and there. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how it felt.”
Mick chuckled, but nervously, because he hadn’t forgotten that morning at dawn, the day of the accident, when he was up in the steel alone.
“So, did you hear any voices?” he asked. He must have. Mick’s throat was a little dry.
“Wait,” the giant said, grinning. “Is good.”
“No, I didn’t hear a thing. I stood there for a minute or two, and then the light changed. I started to step off the curb, heading down to where I knew the train would come through, but before my front foot landed in the street a bolt of lightning hit the YIELD sign on the other side of the intersection.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m dead serious. Lightning. BAM!! Just like that. It hadn’t even started raining yet. You know how you jump when something like that happens—I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was just a reflex, but I came down heading in the other direction without even thinking about it, half blind, with a jagged blue line burned into my vision. And you know what else? I never looked back.”
“So where did you go?”
He smiled a little, and his eyes looked at nothing. “It’s a long, roundabout story, but the short version is I ended up at a monastery for three years.”
“No way. You stayed straight?”
“As an arrow.”
“Okay. I see,” Mick snorted, and he did. He saw where this was going. “You got religion.”
“Religion,” the Man With No Hands said quietly, staring at his feet. “Religion is what regular people get in order to stay out of hell. People who have already been to hell don’t want religion, they just want to know God.”
Mick raised an eyebrow. The things the Man said made a kind of sense, but they left another question. A big one. “You’re telling me you came back here to live under a bridge, on purpose, just so you could preach to crackheads and junkies?”
A shrug. “These are my people.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
He smiled, watching the fire. “Yeah. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.”
“Sorry,” Mick said. “I just . . .”
“It’s okay.” The old man glanced across the street, chuckling, and said, “I’ll take an honest skeptic over a hypocrite any day, and in the context of the wider world you’re a fairly soft-spoken skeptic.”
“It just seems risky to me. I mean, for a recovering junkie to come here and try to rehabilitate other junkies. Seems more likely they’d drag you back in.”
The Man thought about this for a second. “I worried about that at first, I guess, but the desire was gone. I didn’t just kick a habit, my whole nature changed. I was clean, as if none of it had ever happened. The funny thing is, when I came back here after three years I still recognized some faces. There’s a pretty big turnover—a lot of them dead or in jail, some of them just moved
on—but there were still a few people who knew me from before. People I used to run with. I was braced for an argument, but they didn’t even try.”
He looked Mick square in the eye and said, “At first I thought maybe these hooks had bought me a little space, but it wasn’t that at all. These people, they watched me. They waited, and watched to see if I was real, and for a while they didn’t say anything at all. Once they made up their minds they fitted me back into their world, but here’s the thing—when they saw I was clean, and staying clean, none of them ever asked me why. Not one. All they ever asked me was how.”
Mick couldn’t help admiring any man who refused to let people tell him how to run his life, and if what the Man With No Hands said was true then he was a man of strength and independence. But Mick’s admiration only went so far. He admired the Man With No Hands, but that didn’t change how he felt about the rest of them. Mick had always seen homeless people in general as failures, not victims, and nothing he’d witnessed here had changed his mind. They were real to him now—he’d gotten close enough to smell them and hear them talk and see the fear in their posture and the hunger in their eyes—but as far as Mick was concerned they had earned their troubles, same as he did. They had brought their troubles on themselves, one way or another.
Just the same, he went home and hugged his kids. Hard.
13
* * *
Snapshots.
IT DIDN’T take long for Mick to fall in love with the Nikon Aubrey gave him. He had to get used to all the manual options—play with the F-stops and figure out exposure times—but he could shoot with it all right. He carried it with him on Tuesday mornings when he took Dylan to his therapist, and on the way home he’d drive down back roads looking for old barns. Sometimes, if he found one he liked, he’d stop and shoot a roll of film, but when he got the pictures developed they were always just okay. When he laid them alongside professional landscape pictures he found in magazines they seemed flat and lifeless. Aubrey was right—there was something he didn’t understand about lighting. He just couldn’t see it. He showed a batch of them to Layne one afternoon while she was down in the floor reading Yertle the Turtle to Dylan. She flipped through them and handed them back.
“There are no people in them,” she said. “What’s the point?”
“I just thought you might be able to help me figure out what’s wrong with them.”
She lifted her chin from her palms to look up at him. “I told you, there aren’t any people. That’s what’s wrong.”
“I’m not taking snapshots, Layne. I’m trying to shoot photographs.”
She tilted her head and looked at him kind of sideways. It was a little embarrassing, to tell the truth—a construction worker trying to explain to his wife that he was trying to be some kind of artist. It felt like a dirty secret.
“I see. Well, honey, I sure can’t help you. I don’t know anything about serious photography. You need to go see Aubrey.”
He just stood there slapping his pictures against his leg. Seeing the look on his face, Layne handed Yertle to Dylan, stood up, put her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear.
“It’s okay, Mick. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be creative, and it’s perfectly all right to accept help from another human being.”
“Aubrey doesn’t really want me hanging around there,” he mumbled.
She pulled back to face him, their noses an inch apart. “Yes. He does. He’s our neighbor, and he’s trying to be your friend. You just don’t like him.”
“He’s kind of a nerd.”
“You haven’t given him a chance.”
“He’s just so . . . well-dressed and educated and polite.”
“So am I.”
He gave her a little squeeze. “That’s different. You’re built better.”
“He can’t help being rich, dear. You need to overcome a few of your prejudices. Some of them. Maybe.”
* * *
No matter how much he adored his wife, no matter how persuasive she could be, Mick couldn’t make himself go asking Aubrey for favors. He’d already gone too far just taking the camera from him. The balance sheet in his head told him things were just fine the way they were, and he didn’t want to owe Aubrey any more than he already did. What he needed to know about photography he figured he could learn from magazines and how-to books.
He managed to get away from Layne without making any promises about Aubrey, and he already had plans for after supper. It was skate night. Normally Layne liked to do the nighttime extra-curricular stuff with the kids herself—the PTO meetings and dances and such—but she hated skate night, so Mick always went in her place.
Skate night was held at the indoor rink over in Stock-bridge—a great big slick concrete oval with lots of spotlights and a glitter ball overhead, too-loud teenybopper rock music blaring from state-of-the-art speakers and a snack bar specializing in the three main food groups—hamburgers, pizza and Coke. Toad could skate like a pro. She just needed a ride to the rink; after she got there she didn’t need help with anything. So that night Mick took Dylan along to see if he could handle a pair of skates. He figured it might force the kid to focus on where his feet met the ground.
When Mick first strapped the skates on Dylan he couldn’t even stand up by himself. Mick tried to hold his hands loosely as they lurched around the rink, giving him enough slack to learn—and to fall. Every few seconds Dylan would do a split or a half-gainer and Mick’s fists would flinch, catching him just in time to soften the fall. There was a kind of sense in what they were doing, and Mick marked it down in the little parenting guide he was building in the back of his mind.
Give him room to fall, but soften the landing.
He never knew what would happen with Dylan. Some things came easy. Other things that appeared to use the same muscles were completely impossible. Dylan couldn’t jump a rope to save his life, so Mick figured there wasn’t much chance of his being able to skate. He helped him around the rink most of the night, and then, finally, toward the end, something clicked and Dylan suddenly took off on his own. He staggered, he floundered, he waved his arms and fell down every ten feet, but he never quit. Once he got the merest glimpse of success, of possibility, his natural tenacity took over and he kept getting up until he didn’t fall down anymore. By the time the rink closed he could actually skate a little bit. It wasn’t pretty, but he stayed up.
While Mick was helping Dylan he noticed a bunch of kids skating in a cluster. When they rounded the far end and turned to face him Mick saw they were ganged up behind a wheelchair, pushing it. The kid in the wheelchair was skinny, and his knees and ankles looked kind of twisted. The whole group was having a wild time, zipping around the rink, hair flying, laughing hysterically. There were kids of all sizes, shapes and colors, all shoulder to shoulder pushing this wheelchair. The kid in the chair was laughing harder than anybody. The faces behind the wheelchair kept changing—some dropped off, others joined in, sometimes there would be six behind him and sometimes only one or two, but the kid in the wheelchair never stopped grinning.
Mick had his hands full with Dylan, so it was a long time before he noticed that the kids behind the chair seemed to be coasting, and that the wheelchair and its tires looked oddly heavy, and that the kid in the chair gripped a small joystick in his hand.
Motorized.
He was bitterly disappointed. The shine on that little cluster of kids dimmed considerably and his whole opinion of them changed. They weren’t pushing, they were hitchhiking. They weren’t looking to show the handicapped kid a good time, they just wanted a free ride.
But he kept watching. There was a spotlight pointed down on an angle at his end of the floor, and every time the wheelchair boy passed by he would charge out of the darkness and flash through that spotlight right in front of Mick. More than once he wished he’d brought his camera, just to try and catch that grin all lit up. The boy in the wheelchair was having the time of his life. It finally dawned on Mick t
hat the boy wouldn’t have had half as much fun if he hadn’t been the one doing the pulling. For once in his life he was the one with an advantage, something special that gave him an edge and made him everybody’s friend. The kids who hung on and let him tow them around the rink actually gave him more than if they had pushed him.
Mick couldn’t get that boy’s face out of his mind, even after the last turn around the rink, after he pulled the skates off his kids, handed them in, laced Dylan’s shoes and headed for his truck carrying Dylan and dragging Toad. The gleam in the wheelchair boy’s eyes spoke to Mick. Driving home, one thought spilled into another and he started thinking about Aubrey again.
It had seemed strange to Mick, especially for a guy who didn’t normally just give things away, that Aubrey would give him a perfectly good Nikon camera. Even his old one. And then he had offered to teach him about photography and even develop prints for him. It was too much. Like the kid in school who didn’t have any friends, Aubrey seemed to be trying too hard. But after watching the boy in the wheelchair Mick began to wonder if maybe—just maybe—Aubrey needed somebody to ask him for help.
* * *
“When did you shoot these?” Aubrey asked when Mick took his pictures to him the next day. He was dressed for golf again. Loud plaid.
“Last week.”
“No, I mean what time of day?”
“Oh. ’Bout noon, I guess. We were on the way back from the therapist.”
“Yes, of course. That would explain it. Look, see the way the colors are all washed out? That’s because the sun is directly overhead and the light’s coming straight down. You have to take advantage of slanting light to create contrast.”
Summer of Light Page 12
