by Lewis Shiner
Cole was uneasy about the doctor’s name—“Skinner” was unfortunate for a surgeon. Skinner himself looked to be in his 70s. Long, thinning white hair and glasses so thick he could have burned ants with them. He used a tiny electric saw to cut the plaster cast off Cole’s arm. A small cloud of white dust and gauzy threads floated above the dime-sized blade. When the cast finally dropped onto the table in two neat halves, Cole was shocked by how thin his forearm had become in only two weeks. Peeling patches of damp white skin gave off a corrupt, sweetish odor like spoiled hamburger.
Skinner wrinkled his nose. “Anhh, always it stinks a bit under there. A couple of weeks with no way to wash, no air circulating, it happens. Let me cut the rest of these bandages off.” Cole looked away. “Now we clean.” As Skinner wiped the skin with alcohol, Cole felt dangerously fragile, as if the weight of his hand could snap the radius bone like a toothpick.
“Better,” Skinner said. “Now we get those stitches out.”
“It’s pretty tender,” Cole said. “Could you give me a little something first?” He could feel the kiss of the needle, the wave of warmth washing over him. A light sweat broke on his forehead.
Skinner’s glasses magnified his stare to grotesque extremes. Cole knew what he must look like—bloodshot eyes in deep, dark sockets, one leg nervously bouncing on the ball of the foot. At last Skinner said, “We can put on it some Lidocaine.” He brushed a clear liquid onto the stitches. The pressure of the brush hurt. For the last week, every inch of his skin had hurt.
“You’re not touching the button, right?” Cole said.
“Not for two more weeks. I want you to look at that chart over there on the wall. Can you see it?”
“The one that shows the arm bones?”
“Correct. Please read the labels on the chart, out loud.”
“Greater tubercule,” Cole said. It felt like Skinner was shoving big, glass-headed hatpins into his finger.
“Tubercle,” Skinner corrected him. “Keep going.”
“Lesser tubercle.” Sweat ran down his face, and down the ribs under his arms. “Inter-tu-ber-cular sul-cus.”
“We’re done. Your stitches are out, and you now will always remember the geography of the upper humerus, I think.”
Cole looked at his naked hand for the first time since the accident. Aside from the horrifying button and wire, this was what he would be living with for the rest of his life. It was ugly, deformed, and he couldn’t imagine a desirable woman ever loving a man with a hand like that. No wonder Corrina had run away.
“Very carefully, I want you now to bend each of your fingers for me. We start with the index.” Skinner held the other fingers lightly to restrain them. The fingers were swollen enough to make them stiff. Cole couldn’t touch the end of his index finger to his palm, and the effort made his middle finger feel like he was shoving it into a cup of broken glass.
“And now the ring finger. Good. And the little finger. And now, very gently, the middle finger.”
Cole took a breath and tried. The tip of the finger burned as the remaining joint in the middle bent, as instructed, a good half-inch.
The tension and the pain had left Cole exhausted. He sat passively while Skinner fitted him with a removable cast to wear at night or when he was in danger of banging the hand into something. “Otherwise you will leave it off and gently exercise the fingers during the day. Gently, you understand?” He wiggled his fingers to demonstrate.
In the car, Cole ignored his mother’s attempts to talk about how well it had gone. Once they got home he went immediately to his room and locked the door. He lay on his bed and tried to conjure the feeling of a double dose of Demerol, from the nurse pinching up his flesh and the first prick to the fullest penetration of the drug into his toes and the follicles of his hair. The memories skittered out of reach. He had worn all the edges off them, like he had the memory of making love with Corrina.
Skinner had been disappointed in him, and Cole was disappointed in himself. The fictional spies that were his heroes were tortured routinely, and they egged their tormentors on with wisecracks. Cole had broken like a raw egg.
He peeled off the Ace bandage and the new cast and sat with the wounded hand in his lap. The whole balance of his hand was wrong, like a tennis racket with no strings.
Tennis. He’d been so obsessed with the guitar that he hadn’t thought about tennis. Even when the finger healed, he would never have enough strength in his grip. The years of work, the way he’d defined his image with white jeans and a cable-knit sweater like Robert Culp in I-Spy, all gone.
Which left him nothing but the guitar. Eventually he took it out of its case and sat with it on the edge of the bed. He fitted the pick carefully into his right hand and hit an E chord. The pick slipped out of his fingers and through the strings and bounced on the carpeted floor.
He bent over to retrieve it and fatigue spun his brain so badly that he had to put the guitar aside and get carefully down on his hands and knees to find it.
He settled the curve of the guitar on his right thigh again and used both hands to get the pick in the right position. He squeezed it hard with his thumb and forefinger until the answering pain in his middle finger made him gasp. He relaxed the pressure to where he thought he could stand it and gently stroked the E chord again. Twice more, and then the pick turned sideways in his grip, blurring and muting the sound. In frustration he hit the strings again, and this time the stiff, swollen stub of his injured finger scraped against them.
“Shit!” he yelled. The pain was like an electric shock. He felt it in the backs of his knees, and flashbulbs popped in his vision. He wanted to hurl the guitar through the window. Instead he let it fall onto the floor and curled up on his bed on his left side, facing the wall, and pulled up his knees to shelter his throbbing hand against his chest.
A tentative knock at the door. “Jeff?” his mother said. “Are you all right?”
“Go away,” he said.
He’d never talked to her like that before. He heard her try the knob and discover that it was locked. That had been an absolute rule, from the time he was big enough to reach a doorknob, that he was never, ever to lock his door. In the long pause that followed, Cole knew she was trying to decide what to do about it. The answer, it seemed, was nothing.
He closed his eyes and let his mind go where it wanted. His beautiful guitar, which he would never play again. His tennis racket, which he would never use again. Corrina, who he would never see again. His father, who had sent him to Tyler to be crippled. Alex, who would move on to a new best friend, a friend with two good hands, who could play guitar. His school, which bored him, Dallas, which he hated. The world, with its snipers in towers and Vietnam War. The wider the circles got, the more terminal and desperate everything seemed. Make it stop, he thought. Make it all stop.
He’d never thought seriously about killing himself before. A world without him in it—he had no vantage point to picture it from. Better to focus on his fucked-up, useless hand, and how he wouldn’t have to live with that any longer.
He got up and waited for the dizziness to pass, one of the new habits he’d had to learn. He unlocked the door and opened it, and his mother, from the kitchen, said, “Jeff?”
“I’m all right,” he said, and went into the bathroom. He took a leak and carefully washed his hands and got out his Schick injector razor. He slid in a new blade, wrapped the old one in a Kleenex, and held it loosely in his right hand as he opened the bathroom door. His mother stood at the end of the hallway, watching anxiously. Before she could say anything, he ducked into his bedroom and locked the door again.
He lay on the bed and took the blade in his left hand. When it came to it, he would do it in the bathtub, of course. Supposedly it hurt less as well as making less of mess. The question was whether he could bring himself to cut himself.
He turned his right hand over. A fat, blue-green vein ran from the base of his thumb diagonally across his wrist tendons and then all the way
down his forearm. It was, he knew, the arteries he needed to cut, and they were deeper.
He touched the corner of the blade to the skin of his wrist. Above it was the coarse stump of his middle finger. A Frankenstein’s monster of a hand. What difference would another cut or two make?
He pressed gently on the blade. It made a small indentation and then, finally, the skin gave way. He took the blade away and watched two tiny droplets of blood ooze their way out. He felt no more than a sting.
Okay, then, he thought. He put the blade on his nightstand and pressed the Kleenex against the cut and held it. All set.
His mother had kept the car that morning to drive Cole to his appointment. She would have to go downtown to get his father around four. That would leave Cole alone for at least an hour. Plenty of time.
His mother knocked on the door again. “What can I fix you for lunch?”
“Nothing,” Cole said.
“How about a tuna fish sandwich?”
“I’m not hungry.” He tried to soften the peevishness in his voice. “I’ll fix something later.”
Her footsteps receded down the hall.
Four hours to kill, he thought, and laughed at his pathetic little joke. He put on his shoes—loafers, since he could no longer tie laces—and put his guitar in its case and put the case in his closet. He put the razor blade under his alarm clock.
He stopped at the kitchen to say, “I’m going for a walk.” His mother nodded, tried to find something to say, and gave up. Cole let himself out the front door. He hadn’t put the removable cast back on. He wondered if his hand would frighten small children. When he tried to let it hang normally, it swelled up and began to throb, so he held it against his chest, like Boris Karloff as the Mummy.
High noon in suburbia. Cole was on a sidewalk that nobody used except the mailman. Nobody walked in Dallas. The streets were empty because everyone worked too far away to come home for lunch. There were four basic patterns of one-story ranch houses, not counting the mirror images and the ones turned 90 degrees. Mixed and matched with different colors of brick and trim and shingles, all built by the same developer, all between five and ten years old, all with parched lawns and the occasional low tree, all as alike as boxes of detergent on the Safeway shelf. His parents’ house had cost $12,000, more or less what his father made in a year. Affordable, secure, clean, fundamentally the same as the neighbors’. Like the brown Buick sedan that had cost three months’ pay. Both of his parents had lived through the Depression and this was their dream. A good house and a good job that no one was going to take away. Steak in the freezer and money in the bank. A kid they could brag about to their friends, private school, headed for college.
His mother would be devastated. And befuddled. Sorry, Mom, he thought. You should have had a spare kid, in case one broke.
As for his father, his disapproval would know no bounds. Cole pictured him finding the body, saying, “He always was a quitter.”
Cole began to walk faster, as if he could outrun the thought. It dominated everything else he was feeling—exhaustion and pain, self-pity and self-loathing, love and lust for Corrina, depression and despair.
He’d nearly circled the block. Head down, not looking at anything but the sidewalk in front of him, he walked to his parents’ house. He was sweating, and the air conditioning hit him like a snow bank. His mother looked up from her armchair and offered him a tentative smile, which he ignored. He washed his face and hands and used a strip of adhesive tape to bind the stump between the index and ring fingers. It hurt every bit as much as before, but this time he didn’t care. “I hear you knockin’,” he said out loud, “but you can’t come in.”
He locked his bedroom door and strapped on the guitar. The guy at the pawn shop had given him an assortment of picks, though Cole had quickly settled on a medium weight teardrop. Now he took out a thick, oversized triangle and wedged it into the first joint of his index finger.
Instead of starting with a chord, he picked the G string as his left middle finger slid up to the fourth fret. He carefully picked the third fret of the B string. G string again, slowly, then the fifth fret of the B string.
He breathed in and breathed out and let up on the vice grip that held the pick. He played the same four notes a little faster, a little more smoothly. Again. Then he finished the lick with the hammer-on and the slide down to the second fret. Again.
It didn’t matter that his stump howled with pain. The fucking thing could fall off if it wanted to. Time for the E chord. Slowly. Then D, then A. This could be the last time, baby, the last time…
He played for forty minutes, slow fragments of 20 different songs, until his legs shook and the mixture of tears and sweat burned his eyes and soaked his T-shirt. When he was done, he wrapped his swollen hand in an ice pack and slept for three hours, waking only when his mother knocked and said she was leaving to pick up his father.
*
Alex took his calendar off the wall and made some calculations. It was Sunday, August 21, and he hadn’t seen Cole for two weeks, not since the drive from Tyler. They’d talked on the phone, where Cole had been distant and non-committal. You could tell he hadn’t been sleeping, that his hand was hurting, that he was depressed about Corrina on top of everything else. He wouldn’t leave the house, didn’t want Alex to come over, and wouldn’t talk about the band.
Alex’s sympathy had hit its limit. The first day of school was two weeks away. If the band was not rehearsing by then, with some hope of playing gigs in the near future, then Cole would have to go.
Now all Alex had to do was tell him.
He put it off for an hour, then another, and then Cole called on his own and said he was ready to practice. “That’s great, man,” Alex said. “I’ll call the other guys. You want to come over this afternoon, run through a few things?”
“Not today. I’ll see you at rehearsal. Let me know when it’s going to be.”
“Cole?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay, man? Are you able to play and everything?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Cole said, and hung up.
Alex stared at the phone. Man, he thought, enough is enough of this shit.
Mike and Gary were both able to make it the next day at noon. He called Cole back, and Cole sounded surprised that it was happening so quickly. “You said you were ready,” Alex said, his patience gone. “Are you or aren’t you?”
“Let’s do it,” Cole said.
*
Alex had no idea what to expect when he went to pick up Cole the next morning. The day was hot and clear, headed for 101. Cole waited in the driveway in a white T-shirt, wheat jeans, and cowboy boots. His right hand was wrapped in an Ace bandage, with some kind of metal support glittering through, and he held it against his chest like it was in an invisible sling.
Cole stowed his guitar and amp in the back seat and got in next to Alex without saying anything. Alex backed out and drove to Webb’s Chapel Road. The longer the silence went on, the weirder it got, and the harder Alex struggled to find something natural to say. Finally he asked, “Have you been sleeping?”
“I’m up to four, maybe five hours a night.”
Alex nodded. He didn’t have another gambit, so they drove the rest of the way without talking.
The garage door was open as Alex pulled into the driveway. Gary already had his Indian rug down and his drum set mostly together. Mike was bolting the leg stand assembly to his Vox Continental. Mike looked up as they got out of the car and nodded to Cole. “Hey, Cole, how was Ty—” He saw the bandages on Cole’s hand. He looked at Alex and said, “What the hell?”
Now Gary had seen it too. “You must be Gary,” Cole said, raising his injured hand in a half-assed salute. “Pardon me if I don’t shake hands.”
Gary looked at Alex. Alex said, “Um, Cole had a little accident on the oil rig.”
“What the fuck,” Cole said. “You didn’t tell them?”
“I didn’t want anybod
y to freak out.”
“Well,” Mike said, “I am sure as shit freaking out now.”
Gary straightened up and dropped his hex wrench on his snare with a clatter. You could hear the high buzz of cicadas in the distance as they shifted up a full step.
Alex closed the garage door and turned back to face them. “He can play,” he said, as the sweat broke and ran down his forehead. “It’s not a problem.”
They stood looking at each other while Cole put his guitar down and made a second trip for his amp. Finally Gary said, “Can I see?”
“Sure,” Cole said. He unwound the Ace bandage and Mike followed Gary over for a look.
Gary whistled through his teeth. “What happened?”
“Piece of chain fell from the monkeyboard up at the top of the derrick. I was a dumbass and didn’t get out of the way.”
Mike looked a little green as he walked to his organ. Gary nodded and watched with interest as Cole took a roll of adhesive tape out of his jeans pocket and bound three fingers together. Ignoring Gary, Cole looked at Alex and said, “Can I have a beer?”
It was not a precedent Alex wanted to set. As he hesitated, Cole shot him an impatient look and Alex gave in. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Cole took a Bohemia out of the fridge and struggled for a while with the opener. Alex let him. When he got it open, Cole took a long swig and turned to the others. “Anybody else?”
Alex was relieved to see them shake their heads. “A bit early for me,” Mike said pointedly.
Cole strapped on his guitar and plugged in the amp and hooked up his cord. He was taking deep breaths and his hands shook. He took another long pull on the beer bottle. It was like watching somebody on a ledge, sixteen stories up.
Gary finished setting up. Instead of his usual tapping and thumping, he sat in eerie silence and waited. Mike had his guitar on and was standing behind the organ. They both stared at Cole.
Alex put on his bass and asked Mike for an E. They all tuned up.
