by T. Greenwood
The man didn’t move, not even with a second nudge, so Ben started to roll him over, pulling his shoulder until his body yielded. He was big, maybe six foot two, a couple hundred pounds. And then the man was on his back and Ben stood up, stumbling backward.
“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “Shit.”
Both eyes were sealed shut, crusty with blood and circled in blue-black. His nose was crooked, bent at an impossible angle, with dried blood in two lines running from each nostril to his lip. His bottom lip was blue and swollen, split in the center. And slowly, a fresh stream of blood began to pour from his ear, the crimson blooming like some horrific flower blossoming in the snow.
He should have run back into the house then, gotten Sara. She was a nurse, for Christ’s sake. But he was suddenly paralyzed, quite literally frozen in place as he realized: He knew this guy.
Of course, he couldn’t remember his name…. Jesus, why couldn’t he ever remember a goddamned name? But he knew him. He was the kid who came into the bar almost every single night to shoot pool. Ben knew he couldn’t be old enough to drink, but he never carded him, because all he ever ordered were Cokes. And because Jack’s served food, minors were allowed in as long as they didn’t sit at the bar. The kid always sat alone in a booth, eating cheese fries, waiting for someone to show up at the tables. He was a good pool player. Didn’t talk shit like some of the idiots that came into the bar. A gracious winner and loser. Jesus fucking Christ.
Ben dropped back down to the ground, feeling the cold wet seeping through the knees of his jeans. He pressed his hand hard against the kid’s chest, waiting. When he felt nothing but the resistance of bone, he leaned over and pressed his ear against his chest, listening. He didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t the silence that was suddenly as loud as drums. And the harder he pressed his ear against him, the louder the blood in his own ears got.
When it snows like this, the sun never rises. The air simply turns lighter and lighter until things come into focus. Until there is clarity.
Ben stood up again and shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, looking for his cell phone. Shit, where the hell did he put his phone last night? He was afraid to leave the kid there in the snow, as if something worse than what had already happened could happen to him now if Ben left him alone.
He thought of Sara, sleeping angrily in the bedroom, and knew that he had to wake her. She would know what to do. He needed to call 9-1-1. And so as the sky filled with hazy white light, he backed away from the kid whose head was surrounded now by a bloody halo, back through the blizzard, back to the house.
Even before the ambulance arrived, he knew what the newspapers would say about this. Young Native American man found dead in Cheshire neighborhood. Alcohol-related death suspected. He knew because this was how too many Indians die here. They come from the reservation to Flagstaff, looking for jobs, for a way to change their lives. And when they get here and find nothing but disappointment, they find places like Jack’s or the Mad I or Granny’s Closet. Ben had worked at Jack’s long enough to know that this was one of many, many sad truths. He’d seen men drink until they couldn’t see, and then watched as they stumbled out into the snow. And at least once a winter, one of them would wind up on the train tracks, where he would fall asleep and not wake up. Ben wasn’t sure how many people had died since he got here, but it seemed as if there was always some story—buried deep in the paper, mentioned in passing on the news, whispered about at the bars. This, like the snow, was a fact of life here.
Still, you don’t expect to walk out of your front door on a Sunday morning looking to retrieve your newspaper from a snowbank and find someone dead on the sidewalk.
After he woke Sara and called 9-1-1, watching as Sara made her way through the snow to the man, he started to think that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. Maybe Ben had been mistaken. He’d had a roommate in college who’d drunk almost an entire bottle of vodka by himself one night. They’d found him passed out in the bathroom at a party and called 9-1-1. The EMTs had revived him, and at the hospital they pumped his stomach and sent him back to the dorms with a crisp plastic bracelet to remind him how close he’d come. But this kid didn’t drink. At least not at Jack’s. He knew this. And besides, you don’t bleed from your ears when you’re drunk, and your face certainly doesn’t look like you ran into a brick wall headfirst from drinking either. Somebody did this to him, and when Ben had listened for his heart, all he’d heard was his own.
After the ambulance pulled away, he and Sara stood on the sidewalk, watching the twirling red lights disappear down the road.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
Sara nodded without looking at him.
“Do you think he’ll make it?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look good. He had no pulse. No blood pressure. He was bleeding out.”
Ben stared at the place where the kid’s head had been, at the violent bloom slowly turning pink as the snow kept falling.
Their neighbors were watching from the windows, their faces pressed to the glass. A few had come out onto their porches, clutching their robes around their waists. Sheila, from next door, had ushered her two sons back inside when she realized what was happening. Mr. Lionel stood on his porch, nodding grimly. Now the ambulance was gone, and Ben could hear the plow coming. In a few minutes it would barrel down this street too, pushing away any evidence that a man had just begun to die there.
The police were quick. They sent only one car, and they took Ben and Sara’s statements without even coming inside the house. Ben was surprised by how soon he and Sara were alone again. By the time the paper boy finally threw the newspaper into the yard, it felt almost as though they had just woken from the same terrible dream.
They sat at the small oak table that used to belong to Sara’s grandmother, sipping coffee, staring at the pages of the paper. Sara said, “I wonder if he has family here.”
Ben looked up, grateful for her breaking the silence, for her willingness to set aside whatever it was that had transpired between them the night before. “I don’t know,” he said. “He had ID on him, so they should be able to find out pretty quickly.”
“What was his name?” she asked. Her eyes were soft with tears.
He thought about the kid sitting at the booth at Jack’s. Always alone. Ben had a problem with names. He blamed his job. Both of his jobs. So many people in and out of his life. At the bar, he had a talent for remembering the names of every single patron for exactly the amount of time they spent bellied up, drinking, tipping. But the moment they were gone, the second they’d slapped down a five or a ten and walked out the door, any recollection of what they called themselves was gone. It was like this at school too. He had anywhere between forty and eighty students a semester. He knew the first and last names of each and every one of them until the final exam. Then he’d run into one of them on campus (Hey, Professor Bailey!) and there was nothing but that white-hot shame of forgetting. Though maybe Ben hadn’t ever known the kid’s name. It was possible that he hadn’t forgotten at all, but rather that the guy had always been anonymous.
He should tell Sara that he recognized him, he thought. That he was a regular at work. But for some reason, he didn’t. Sometimes it was easier to keep things from her. To lie. And so he said, “I think they said it was Begay? His last name. I don’t remember his first name.”
“He was just a kid. Who could have done that to him?”
This was the Sara he loved. Old Sara, he thought of her. She emerged sometimes from New Sara’s body and face, like a slippery ghost. This was the true Sara, the sweet Sara, the Sara who wasn’t sarcastic and always rolling her eyes as if she were always, always disappointed. Sara without her guard up. Vulnerable Sara. Her hair was messy, in a pale puff of a ponytail. Her makeup from her witch costume last night was smudged under her wide green eyes. She was wearing the robe he’d bought her five years ago for Christmas. He’d filled the pockets with green-and red-
foil-covered Hershey’s Kisses. It was pilly now, frayed at the cuffs.
“God, Ben. What the hell?”
He reached across the table for her hand. Her hands were small, like a child’s, with short fingers and tiny palms. He studied the ring on her finger, the one that had been resting there, waiting there, for almost two years. He could barely remember most of the time now what it was that had gripped him, what emotion it was that had assailed him two summers ago. He remembered buying the ring; he’d found it at an antique shop on Route 66. He remembered her happy yes. But ever since that initial moment of elation, sitting in the alley courtyard at Pasto, dizzy with too much wine, he remembered feeling almost nothing but regret.
He’d somehow managed to convince Sara that they should wait to set a wedding date. His reasons, at first, were good ones: They needed to save money if they were going to have the kind of wedding she wanted. Then his mother passed away, and he just needed time. Later, he suggested that he really wanted them to own their own house first, wanted them to be more stable. When her father put the down payment on the place in Cheshire, he couldn’t help but feel he was being bribed. Angry now, he became even more reluctant. Let’s wait until summer. Fall. No, winter. A winter wedding. Wouldn’t that be beautiful? And finally, they stopped talking about it altogether. By now, the ring had become a constant reminder of his biggest broken promise.
He hadn’t realized that he was playing with the ring, until she yanked her hand away and grabbed her coffee mug. “What time do you have to go in to work?” she asked.
“I might check at the hospital first, to see what happened,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Maybe he didn’t die,” he said.
She shook her head. “I really don’t think he made it. Couldn’t you just call? That way you won’t miss your shift tonight.”
“So that’s what this is about?” Ben said. “The fifty bucks I’ll make at work tonight?”
New Sara raised her chin, hard and sharp, and stood up, disappearing into the kitchen. “Do what you need to do, Ben.”
But he wasn’t dead. At least not right away.
If he’d died right away, if not for the body’s stubborn insistence upon living, then it might have ended here: the snow plow carrying away the crimson snow, Ben and Sara sipping coffee at the kitchen table. They would have gone on with their lives, and this man-boy, body frozen, breath stolen by winter, would just be a sad memory shared between them. They might talk about it sometimes, about the tragedy of this life cut short. Another casualty of winter. Just another sad disaster.
But when Ben closed his eyes, he could almost see time slipping backward, events unraveling … a woven Navajo blanket made by the boy’s ancestors, the pattern slowly coming undone, each thread revealed, the intricate design disassembled. He saw him riding a rusty tricycle in the dirt, a hungry rez dog nipping at his ankles as he pedaled furiously away, his face flushed with heat and joyful. Ben imagined him at his grandmother’s feet as she braided his hair. His soft moccasins. His small feet. He could hear the sound of her voice as she sang the boy to sleep. He watched his eyes close and then watched as he packed a duffel bag, as he hitched a ride to Flagstaff. Ben wanted to tell him not to come. To stay home. He wanted him to see the finished picture, this picture of himself, lifeless in the snow.
Sara might be able to let this go, to will herself to forget, but Ben couldn’t let it end like this, with the uncertainty of whether or not the boy had survived. He couldn’t just pretend it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t let everything just disappear into the new snow.
Sunday night was a shit shift. Hippo could handle the kitchen and the bar by himself until Ben got there later. He grabbed his coat and said good-bye to Sara through the bathroom door. Melanie was on her way up from Kachina with a bottle of wine and a movie. He knew that by the time he got home, Sara would be asleep; she had to work tomorrow. There were children with strep throat, kids with chicken pox, babies waiting to be immunized. And so he walked out the door and drove to the hospital.
Ben hated hospitals. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been inside a hospital, and each recollection was still sharp and nauseating. The first time was when he fell out of a tree, snapping his elbow like a twig. The second time was when he was five and his sister, Dusty, was born, one month early, her head as small as a tiny peach. He’d been terrified of the wires and tubes and the blue veins running and pulsing under the transparent skin of her chest. The third time was when Dusty died. He was eleven years old then, and he remembered the hallways smelled like chlorine, cold chicken soup, and bleach. He could still recall something bitter in his throat and the swell of something awful in his chest. And so years later, when he was away at grad school and his mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he’d only gone back east to see her in the hospital a couple of times. Each time he’d felt his pulse racing, felt his knees and spine melting into liquid bone. He’d been almost relieved when she was sent home, when she stopped the chemo treatments and opted to acquiesce rather than fight anymore. Hospitals made him sick, made his skin prickle. He didn’t know if it was ironic or masochistic or simply sad that he’d wound up engaged to a nurse.
Until now, he’d managed to avoid the hospital in Flagstaff as well. Even the time Hippo had nearly sliced off his thumb at work, he’d just dropped him off at the emergency room entrance. But now, here he was again.
He went to the visitors’ information desk and told the receptionist the story about the kid, asked if he had been admitted. He told her he only wanted to find out if the guy had survived, that he thought his last name was Begay.
She clicked and tapped at the computer without looking at Ben and said, “ICU. But you’ll need special permission to go in to see him. Down that hallway, then take a right.”
He hadn’t planned to actually go see him, but he found himself muttering, “Thank you,” and following her directions anyway. He tried to concentrate on his own breaths rather than the smell, the silence, the loamy green walls. By the time he got to the ICU waiting room, he wondered what he was doing there. He knew the kid was alive. Wasn’t that enough? He could go to work now. He could leave. But what then? Did he just go on as though nothing had happened? When you find someone beaten nearly to death in your front yard, what is expected of you? Are you tied to them, inextricably bound in some intimate way forever?
There was one old man in the waiting room. He was reading the Daily Sun but had fallen asleep. His chin rested on his chest, and he was snoring. Ben approached the nurses’ station and spoke softly so as not to wake the man, repeating the story he’d told the lady at the information desk.
“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Begay is in grave condition, and only immediate family is being allowed in at this point.”
“Does he have family in town?” Ben asked.
“His sister,” she said. “She just went to get a cup of coffee.”
Ben felt his chest heave with relief. The kid wasn’t alone. Perhaps this was all Ben really needed. To know that if the guy were to die tonight, he wouldn’t be here, in this hospital, by himself.
“You can wait for her if you’d like. I’m sure she’d appreciate your being here.”
“Okay,” he said.
He sat down next to the old man and picked up a magazine to busy his hands. It was quiet here, just the ticking of the clock and the distant beeping and humming and buzzing of the machines.
He looked up when he sensed someone coming into the room.
The girl was blowing into the top of a Styrofoam cup. She was tall, thin, and her thick black hair ran down her back to her waist. She was wearing overalls splattered with paint and red high-top sneakers. She spoke to the nurse, who gestured toward Ben, and the girl turned to look at him. She scowled and then came over.
Ben stood up. He felt shaky, unsteady on his feet.
“Hi. I’m Ben Bailey. I’m the one who …” he stumbled. “I found him. This morning.”
&n
bsp; She looked at him, skeptical, and sat down in one of the chairs and took a sip of her coffee. She gestured for him to sit as well.
“How is he?” he asked.
She shook her head. “He won’t live through the night.”
It felt like someone had punched Ben in the chest. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “We could keep him here, hooked up to these machines, and he would keep breathing. But his brain is dead. It’s too late.”
Ben took a deep breath.
“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. Her voice was crackly, like timber just catching fire.
He shook his head. “No, I just … he was just out there. In the snow.”
She rubbed her temples. Her long fingers were stacked with thick silver rings. Her nails were clipped short, clean.
“Somebody knows something,” she said, looking up at him. Questioning him. “Somebody must have seen something.”
“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head, “know anything.”
His eyes were stinging, and his throat was thick. He hadn’t felt this sensation in so long, he barely recognized it anymore. A relic of childhood. This sorrow so big it fills your entire chest—he hadn’t felt that way since he was eleven years old. Not since Dusty died. It was déjà vu of the worst kind, like re-dreaming a terrible dream. Somebody knows something. Somebody must have seen something.
This was not what he had expected. He just came here to make sure the kid had lived. That was all. He would check in and then make his way back to work. That had been his plan.
“Hey, are you okay?” she asked, her furrowed brow softening.
He nodded and looked at her. Her face was striking, with high cheekbones, amber skin, and eyes a confusion of brown and gold. She wore a thin leather choker around her long neck, a rough nugget of turquoise dipping into the deep hollow below her throat. There was a streak of white paint across her collarbone.
