Critical Injuries

by Joan Barfoot

  None of what he’s saying rings a bell; but then of course, as he points out, she was unconscious. She guesses she can spare him some sympathy, for being the one to almost stumble over her head, to be frozen by blood, to go through the process of becoming unfrozen.

  When will that happen to her?

  “It felt like forever before anybody turned up, although I understand now it was under four minutes. An eternity at the time. The kid, the clerk, was crying, kind of wailing away at the counter. I wanted to lie down on the floor with you and hold you, but all I could safely touch was your face. I think I was talking to you, but for sure I remember stroking your forehead, and smoothing your hair. I didn’t know if you could feel anything, or if you were right out.”

  He looks, briefly, uncomfortable; as if he has blundered. Which of all those words did he not mean to say?

  “The ambulance screamed up first. I didn’t want them tearing in on top of you, so I stepped outside to show them in. The cops arrived a couple of seconds later. The two of them jumped out of the cruiser with their guns drawn, which was a bad moment. I don’t think they get a lot of really heavy experience around here. They looked kind of wild-eyed, anyway, so before they took a notion I was the bad guy, I waved them down, told them you’d been shot, the gunman was gone, the clerk was a witness, and I was sort of a witness, and I guess I was being so calm, because I thought I needed to be, that one of them said, ‘You’re pretty cool for a guy whose wife’s just been shot,’ like I might have done it myself.”

  “Oh, who cares?” Isla would like to cry out. “Who the fuck cares? Get to me!” But she can only whisper a protest, which Lyle evidently doesn’t hear, or can’t interpret.

  “By the time the cops got inside, the ambulance guys had you strapped onto a board and were lifting it onto a gurney. The cops looked mad, like they should have just left you there. But maybe I’m wrong about that, I was kind of hyper-sensitive right then. Like everything was real bright and real clear. Not loud, but clear.

  “I said I was riding along with you, and the one who’d got shirty in the first place said something like, ‘You’re a witness, we need to talk to you,’ but the other cop said, ‘We can catch up to him later, we got the clerk to interview anyway, a lot of other shit to do.’ Like it was a chore. He was looking at the floor, where you’d been. The blood.” Lyle shivers.

  How long ago did all this happen? Recently enough that Lyle might be in shock? Do witnesses and loved ones go into shock, or is it mainly just victims themselves?

  Isla isn’t in shock. She doesn’t seem to be in anything except a rage.

  “I said, ‘There’s no big mystery, you probably know the kid that did it, the clerk does. He ran out the back, but I can’t see he’d be hard to find. About five-eight, freckles, thin. And scared, okay?’ I wanted them to know he was scared, which maybe meant he was sorry. I didn’t know if being scared would make him more or less dangerous, but the shotgun was on the counter so he probably wasn’t armed any more, and I didn’t want them getting excited and blowing him away when they found him.”

  This seems excessively merciful. What about vengeance? How about loyalty? Isla would shoot the son of a bitch herself, if it would undo what happened. If it would just get her up on her feet, she would shoot him. If for no other reason than simple, straightforward balance: this for that.

  She hopes that boy’s conscience, if he has one, eternally vibrates from the persistent, wide-eyed haunting of those few bright seconds in Goldie’s when he, something in him, an instinct or a desire or a terror, made a decision. Because these things are decisions, no matter how swiftly or incoherently taken. Decisions are responsibilities, she believes that, not whims; at least not solely whims.

  Do people like that think people like her go around armoured and bulletproofed? Do they dream no one will be hurt? If they don’t deliberately set out to cause harm, do they suppose harm is unlikely? Impossible? Do they imagine their intentions are true? Oh, she is angry. Unspeakably furious. All the real disasters and true betrayals of forty-nine years — not so many, perhaps, but each one monstrous to her — and now Goldie’s.

  “I felt,” and Lyle sounds puzzled, “that it would be bad luck for you if things went wrong with the cops and the kid. Like it was all a mess, but if we could keep it from getting any messier, it might still be repairable, somehow.”

  And will it be? Repairable? For God’s sake, Lyle!

  “I don’t know much about what’s happened since. I haven’t heard if they’ve caught him. We took off in the ambulance, stopped at the hospital just long enough for them to say we’d better keep going, so now we’re at Northern where they say the best specialists are. So you’re in really good hands.” He smiles at her in a hopeful sort of way; or he is making an effort to look endearing.

  One question answered, though: the inessential where. So she’s in the huge teaching hospital in, obviously, the north part of the city, not that far, as a matter of fact, from her office. She regularly drives past Northern, and sometimes reads in the newspapers about its research projects and various miracles, but has never had occasion to enter it. Now and then it conducts fundraising projects of one sort and another. She should, perhaps, have contributed.

  “When?”

  “When what?” But how much clearer can she be, for God’s sake? “You mean, what time is it, or when did it all happen? It’s morning now. You were out for quite a while, and then they gave you something to keep your system shut down while they did more tests, poked around.” She would shudder, if she could shudder, at the notion of people testing and poking around while she was helpless. Not that, apparently, anyone couldn’t do anything they wanted to her as she is, awake and conscious.

  Morning. She has meetings, although at the moment has no idea with whom or why, and who cares? All that was probably vital yesterday, but it means shit today. Lyle’s supposed to be in court first thing. He must be exhausted. A small, forty-watt bulb of compassion flickers on briefly: she would, after all, like to reach for his hand, to thank him for being here.

  For all she knows, they are holding hands.

  “The cops will want to talk to you whenever you’re up to it. They need to nail everything down.”

  What the fuck does she care about cops and what they might need? “Doctors,” she whispers irritably. Surely to God a lawyer knows what is important to a narration, a case, and what is not. In her business of advertising, she wouldn’t make that mistake. In her business, there’s a little space or a little air to make the point and that’s it, time’s up.

  He looks hesitant, his eyes shifting. This is not the look of a man offering any form of good news. “I’ve already told you pretty much everything the doctors had to say: we wait, then there’ll likely be some kind of surgery, and plenty of hope everything will go right. It’s just really a matter of getting strong and being patient, that’s all.”

  Well no, that’s hardly all. “Exactly,” she says. “Details,” she manages.

  It’s interesting to see somebody actually coming to a decision. She watches his face open up and grow clear, a small, relaxing movement of mouth, and then a drawing down of the nostrils, a widening of the eyes, lifting of eyebrows. Little lines in his forehead iron out, larger ones alongside his mouth deepen. He looks at her with something resembling the way he often looks at her in difficult or tenuous moments. This is an expression likely to contain more respect than, at those particular moments, affection.

  Which is reassuring. She’s the human Isla again in his eyes, not the patient, or wife, or responsibility, or burden, or problem.

  Not quite a cripple.

  Where did that forbidden word come from?

  “Okay,” he says. “What they know so far is that the bullet nicked into your spine. Fairly high up. And that you’re lucky, really, in a way, because just a tiny difference in the angle and it could
have gone through soft tissue and drilled right into one of the vital organs. Or angled higher the other way, it could have gone into your brain.” As if her brain is not one of the vital organs. “It’s a very good thing you were turning just as you did when he shot.”

  Then presumably a very bad thing that she didn’t turn just a tiny bit farther, twist just that little bit harder, or faster. Then the bullet would have smacked harmlessly into the door frame, or the freezer, or the floor.

  “Anyway, when it nicked your spine, it obviously did some vertebrae damage, but they don’t know about that exactly yet because the bullet itself fractured, or whatever you’d call it, so part of it, just a fragment I guess, is still lodged in there. But it may ease out on its own as you get more stable, we’ll see.”

  It doesn’t seem to Isla that she could get much more stable than she already is. Immobile must be just about as stable as stability gets, short of death. She frowns, or thinks she frowns, intends to frown, at him.

  Still, once again he said “we.” Here he sits, with his face full of grief, his heart surely likewise.

  Still again, he can say “we” all he wants, but he’s not the one, is he, with part of a bullet in his spine, vertebrae damaged with paralyzing results.

  “Paralyzed?” she inquires.

  He does not meet her eyes. “For the time being. But like I said, try to be patient. Get yourself strong. Then we can find out a whole lot more than we know now. Have some answers.”

  Be very careful with questions, she remembers again. Because the answers may not be the desired ones, or even bearable. That true thing she learned with James, and which she learned well, right into her bones, and which may now constitute something like a motto, or a creed.

  “It’s a good sign,” Lyle goes on, “that you can speak. It means something to do with lungs being more or less okay. And that your face muscles work a bit, that’s good, too. I mean, you can do things like blink. You could even,” and how sweet and hopeful he looks, “probably smile, if you wanted to.”

  She can also narrow her eyes, she believes. He’s lucky she can’t raise herself off this bed. “What the hell do you think I should smile about?” is what she would like to say. “Why?” is all she can manage. Enough to make him look embarrassed.

  But he is here. He is trying. She should be grateful for that.

  No. Gratitude is pitiful, she cannot reduce herself to that. Neither can he, in the long run.

  There can’t be a long run. This doesn’t happen to her, to people like her.

  But it does. All the time people get plucked, randomly as far as anyone can see, out of the relatively untroubled crowd and plopped into true disaster. Why not her?

  Because. Because is there not some sort of quota on catastrophe? And has she not already had hers, Lyle, too? Because she was just getting started on joy again, has only had a few tempered years of it, really, with him. So who’s keeping score here, some sadist who doesn’t count or assess very well? She would shake her head in disbelief, except of course that’s one of the many, many things she can’t do.

  Well then, what can she do? She can rage. She can remember. Some rare and special shocks stay resolutely in the present — something else she learned from James. The electric knowledge about him still has enough voltage to surprise her over and over again. People speak of earth-shattering moments and may mean anything huge or atrocious. Massacre, they may mean, or murder, hurricane, birth, revelation. Revelation in some almost-biblical, certainly apocalyptic sense. Judgement day. Like a bullet.

  Now the moment just inside the door of Goldie’s Dairy Bar. Apocalypse for sure.

  Softer, more elusive events get recalled for no particularly obvious reason: a conversation, a movement, a colour, a shape; others because an internal directive says, Do not forget. Remember exactly how this moment is.

  She has to believe this is temporary. She has to bend herself in that direction.

  So when she’s back up on her feet, she will have to remember this: that even merely treading through an ordinary, predictable, regular day is a blessing. She will have to keep in mind — be mindful of, as Alix has taken to saying — what she had that she earned and deserves and desires, and has for this moment lost.

  She will set herself to remembering to remember all this. It’s a small project, but in this circumstance it’s almost a miracle to have any kind of project at all. This is one she can get her teeth into; if she could feel her teeth, if she could sink them into anything. For the time being she can bare them, smiling, at Lyle, like the wolf in Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s bed but looking, she really does hope, somewhat kinder.

  A Simple Plan

  They keep asking what happened. “Tell us what you did, son,” says the bigger, older one. He’s the same one who, out in the field, as Roddy stared up at impassive dogs and into the stars, happy as hell, suddenly appeared at the edge of his field of vision, arms outstretched and rigid, in his hands a gun aimed right at Roddy.

  “Don’t move, son,” he said. “Just stay perfectly still. You understand what I’m saying? Tell me you’re not going to move a muscle. Right now. Tell me.”

  “Okay,” Roddy said.

  “Hold,” said another voice, and the two dogs shifted away, out of view. They didn’t go far. He could still hear them breathing.

  The other guy, younger, knelt carefully beside Roddy, eyed him warily. He passed his hands carefully, remotely, all over Roddy’s body. He nodded at the bigger guy, who said, “Okay now, stand up, real slow.”

  It was like he was old. It was almost painful, rolling slightly and getting his hands and feet in position to push himself up. It didn’t help that while he was still sitting, the younger guy took his hands and pulled them behind him and fastened his wrists together. There was no click. The binding felt like plastic, not metal. Roddy guessed things were different than they were on TV. The cop took one arm and lifted it upwards. Roddy almost bounced when he hit his feet finally.

  The other cop, the one who called him son, stepped back. He was still aiming his gun: a black hole. Roddy wanted to say nobody needed a gun, but he thought maybe he shouldn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell what they might do. He wasn’t scared, exactly, because this couldn’t be happening, it wasn’t real enough for fear. Just, it was so strange, out here in the field in the night, the young cop holding a flashlight on him like this was a stage, a spotlight, a play.

  “Let’s move.”

  Returning through the fields to the road, two flashlights now directing their steps, wasn’t easy. Especially with his arms behind him, it was hard to keep his balance, not stumble. In this small way the fields, their slight humps and hollows, their hidden pitfalls and stoninesses, became strange to him; unfriendly.

  The two cops grunted now and then, one on each side of him and slightly behind. He could hear the hard breathing of the bigger, older one, and the dogs padding along. Nobody spoke. Nobody spoke when they got to the car, either. The younger cop put his hand on top of Roddy’s head as he eased him into the back seat, braceleted and alone.

  The roads looked like new country, like nothing he’d ever travelled before. The outskirts of town, the rows of houses, the street lights, everything might as well have been in some other country, in Europe maybe, where he’d never been. Passing the corner of the street that led to the street where he lived right up till a few hours ago, he thought, “Grandma’s there, a block away, right this second, and my dad,” but it felt like where they really were was in a parallel universe.

  Anyway, where they really were was at the police station: his fat, distressed, red-eyed grandmother, his pale burly father. They rose off their chairs the same way the same second, like they were tied together, like they were puppets. Except then his dad stood still, while his grandmother took a step towards Roddy. But the cops said, “No,” and guided Roddy right by, each of t
hem holding one of his arms. He didn’t even try to look back. What was the point? They were here, but they must think he was nobody they knew.

  Now he’s in a room with the two cops and some other guy his dad called in to be his lawyer. The guy told him, “You don’t have to say anything, I suggest you don’t say a word.” Roddy just shook his head.

  When the cop says, “Tell us what you did, son, tell us what happened,” Roddy isn’t silent because he’s refusing to speak. He’s silent because he has no idea what to say. It was so clear before, when it was only a plan.

  The woman. Her face. Mike’s voice, finally. Too late, the way everything was too late, like time got out of synch and for a few seconds things were happening backwards, or inside out.

  Now he’s back in time, but it’s a whole different time.

  “Where’d you get the shotgun?”

  That’d be easy. It’s his dad’s. His dad takes a week every year and goes hunting with a bunch of guys from his work. He never shoots anything, though. He probably tries, but he never hits anything.

  Not like Roddy. Suddenly he’s very cold again, and shivers.

  “You got something to put around him?” his lawyer says. “A blanket? I don’t think he’s well.”

  “No shit,” says the younger cop. “And no, we don’t.”

  The lawyer shrugs. “If he’s sick, if he gets sick, it’s on your watch, you know. On your shoulders. In fact I’m not sure we shouldn’t be calling a doctor. He could be shocky. That could be dangerous.”

  “Get him a blanket, Tom,” says the older cop.

  Roddy’s attention swings from one man to another. It’s like watching a play. Mr. Siviletti, Roddy’s English teacher, just about the only teacher Roddy likes, says every word in a play is supposed to do something. Move things ahead somehow. It doesn’t seem to Roddy as if this talking among the cops, the lawyer, is getting anyone anywhere. On the other hand, he has nothing, himself, to add. It’s not like those moments out in the field, though. It’s not like he’s happy and wants everything to stop right now so he can keep on being happy. The lights are too bright, the chair too hard, the faces, even his lawyer’s, too harsh.