At first, it only itched. Dad thought it might be a mosquito bite turned blood-blister. Maybe he could just coax out a few drops of blood, and thing would turn back into regular skin. He squeezed it between his thumbnails, but nothing came out.
When it was bigger the next day, he tried to prick it with the corner of his folding razor. The blade barely brushed the dot when Dad sucked air over his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, gripping the sides of his foot with both hands as if curling up that way would make the pain stop.
The next day the dot was twice as big, and it was no longer a dot. It was a little brown crater with a black pit, and the ring of skin around the crater was puffy and angry-looking. The day after that the foot was so swollen it bulged out of Dad’s shoe like rising bread, and a day after that the shoe didn’t fit at all.
For the first time in four months, Dad stayed in his bed beneath the mosquito net instead of rising for Morning Prayer. We tried to cool him by fanning him with fronds, the way the villagers did. We pumped the water filter for him and offered him mangos and porridge. He drank some water and ate a little of the mango, but the porridge came right back up.
When he could no longer bear the heat in the chapel, he crawled outside to lie on the ground in the shade of the giant palmettos. His hair hung in greasy strings and his forehead was shiny with oil and sweat. The whites of his eyes had begun to look yellowish. He was embarrassed that he’d had to crawl.
Two days later, Dad didn’t even think about crawling. All day long he lay moaning under the palmettos with a mosquito net draped over him, not caring about the ants that marched across his belly or the centipedes making paths through his hair. He kept one hand pressed into his face, either palm-down covering his eyes or palm-out with the back of it pressing into his mouth. I think he did that so no more pain sounds would come out.
Dad hadn’t taken off his sock. He couldn’t; the rapid swelling had cinched the seam of elastic tightly around his calf. Flesh bulged above and below the seam, making Dad’s lower leg look like a tied sausage.
We could have cut the sock off. Despite our ill preparedness in other areas, we’d managed to bring a pocketknife apiece. Roarke’s even had a tiny pair of scissors that folded out so you could pinch them open and closed with your thumb and forefinger. But Dad wouldn’t let us touch his sock. I think he was afraid to see what was happening under there. He didn’t want Rory and me to see, either, but we knew it was worse than we could imagine because by then the smell was so bad.
Dad’s infected leg gave off a smell like fetid cheese and rotten hamburger meat. You could smell it ten feet away. We’d all done a fine job of training our noses to ignore our own smelly underarms and the bouquet of the latrine-hole, but no sane person could ever shut out the smell of Dad’s infected leg. My brother and I stole sips of air through our mouths and pretended we didn’t notice as we sat with Dad, distracting him with staged arguments about which of his sermons we remembered best. He distracted us with forced chuckles that doubled him fetal with pain.
Dad’s moans became high and shrill at the end. Consumed, none of us ate or slept. Rory and I didn’t know what was expected of us, and Dad was too sick to say. God was nowhere to be found.
After Dad slipped into delirium, he could no longer refuse Roarke’s pleas to let him run fetch Father Claussen. Rory left the chapel early in the morning, disappearing into the spots of brush that had grown over the path since we’d walked it last. He didn’t come back until nearly dawn.
“Father Claussen will be here when the sun comes up. He’ll bring some men with a cart and a mule to bring Dad out. “
I lifted the mosquito net so Rory could climb into bed next to me.
“What about a doctor?” I whispered.
“There isn’t one.” Rory groaned softly as he settled into the bed. He sounded very tired. “Not a real one. Dad’ll have to be flown out the way we came in. Father Claussen’s already radioed San Tomas for a pilot.” Rory was silent for a while. “I told Father Claussen about…about the smell. He asked me how long, and I told him almost a week.” After another pause Rory added quietly, “He asked me if we have kin in Boston. You know…just in case…in case Dad…” Rory broke off in a heave. I could tell he wanted to cry. At last he said, “In case the Lord takes Dad before we make it out of here.” He said that in an even, weighted voice I’d never heard from Roarke before. Dad was right about one thing. The jungle had made a man of my brother.
A Presbyterian doctor in San Tomas cut off Dad’s pants with scissors that were bent flat halfway down so they could slide right between Dad’s pants and his leg. Then the doctor used his bent scissors to cut Dad’s sock into squares. When he began to peel away the squares, Dad tore at his sheets and screamed to God for the strength to stand it until a nurse rushed in with more morphine.
Father Claussen stood by his head and Rory and I held Dad’s hands as each square was peeled away. His leg didn’t look like a leg anymore. The knee was a black bulge with hard, raised bruises. In the gaps between bruises were mounds of flesh so swollen that the skin over them was stretched white and split into hard bloodless cracks. Below the knee the bruises became a forest of brown craters, each with a black pit, like the first one we’d seen on the top of Dad’s foot. The one he thought might be a mosquito bite.
Square by square, the infection only grew more grotesque. Ripe pustules on the calf broke audibly to drip green fluid that filled the room with its cheesy, sickening smell. Around the ankles thick white and yellow stuff pooled between chunks of diseased tissue. The foot was nothing more than a spongy grayish mass, like a wet biscuit dissolving in mop water.
A lot of the squares wouldn’t peel off. They were melded to the leg with crumbles of yellow crust, and trying to peel them just caused more flesh to tear away, exposing Dad’s long white leg bone. The doctor called the squares of stuck sock ‘grafted’, and said that it probably happened at the very beginning, before Dad’s body stopped trying to scab over and heal itself. The doctor gave up trying to remove the remaining squares of sock. Even he looked aghast.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” He kept saying. His accent sounded like the man with the hotdog cart back home. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Father Claussen took us into a waiting room and swallowed an aspirin and told us that the ‘grafted’ squares of sock didn’t matter anyway.
“I’m not a doctor, “ he said, “But if I’ve ever seen a clear-cut case for amputation it was lying in front of me ten minutes ago.” Father Claussen sank into a chair and looked at my brother and me, thin and filthy, blotchy with heat rash and covered with the scabs of bug bites scratched bloody in the night. I could tell by the way he softened that he pitied us. “San Tomas has some of the best doctors in this part of the world,” he said. “If your father’s life is meant to be saved, these men will save it.” The priest closed his eyes and I knew he was seeing it again, Dad’s rotting leg. I saw it too. It was burned into the dark behind our eyelids. He tightened his hold on the crucifix around his neck. Then he opened his eyes and looked at us sincerely. His voice was as soft as a whisper.
“Your father should not be alive. God is truly walking with this man.”
* * *
God may have been walking with Dad that day, but Dad himself would never walk again. The doctors found rot running all the way up to his hip, so that’s where they amputated. The place where Dad’s leg once met his pelvis was now just a concave socket the size of a baby’s head, with prickly stitches like long black caterpillars holding the skin in place. There was a tube in Dad’s arm for morphine and fluids, one in his chest to pump antibiotics in, and another beneath the covers to pump other things out.
A long time passed before Dad was conscious enough to speak. Father Claussen made arrangements for us to stay at a convent in San Tomas, where the nuns treated us like children. They did not know the things we had seen.
When Dad started to come around, the doctor called Father Claus
sen and he drove us from the convent to the hospital in his big green Buick. I stood beside Dad’s bed so excited I began to cry. Dad opened his eyes, then closed them for so long I was afraid he’d drifted off again. But at last he broke the seal of scum cementing his lips together and the first thing he said was:
“Where is it?”
Father Claussen looked at us and we both shrugged our shoulders.
“Dad,” Rory said gently with tears on his cheeks, “We’re here. Simon and I and Father Claussen. You’re going to be all right.” Rory’s throat caught and he glanced at the lopsided mound of blankets covering Dad’s lower body. “I mean, you’re going to make it. You’re not going to die.”
Dad didn’t say anything for a minute. I squeezed his hand. His head turned on his pillow and he looked at me incredulously.
“Didn’t you hear me ask you a question, son? I said—where the fuck is my goddamned leg?”
Back in the waiting room, the doctor with the accent and the bent scissors spoke to Father Claussen in a rapid, rolling language. Father Claussen looked at the floor with his hands clasped behind his back, nodding. When the doctor was finished, the Father turned to us and said,
“The doctors think that your father’s fever has damaged part of his brain.”
I stammered, stunned and confused. But Roarke was angry. His fists were tight balls at his sides.
“The problem with our Dad was his leg, Father. Or didn’t you see it? Because I did. And my little brother sure did. A fever can’t change a person that way. When I had the mumps I was as hot as a skillet for three days, couldn’t bear a stitch of clothing or a spoonful of broth, and I didn’t wake up a swearing blasphemer.”
Father Claussen nodded, still looking at the floor, this time with his hands clasped in front of him. He started to say something, then stopped, as if he’d changed his mind about what to say. He started again, carefully.
“Son, every part of a man is controlled by a specific part of his brain. When one part of the brain is damaged, he might forget how to walk. Another part and he forgets how to swallow, or how to speak, or how to read or write or do arithmetic.
“These doctors say that sometimes—not very often, but sometimes—a very special part of the brain gets hurt, and the person forgets what kind of person he is. They think that in your dad’s case, the fever just…burned that part of him away.” Father Claussen put his hand on Rory’s shoulder. “May God be with you boys. The Church will do everything it can to help you and your father through this trial. You must have faith.”
Roarke clenched his fists more tightly and shrugged out from under Father Claussen’s hand.
“God had his chance, Father. And the Church brought us to this Gomorrah to begin with. I don’t think we’d like any help from either of you. In fact, I think my brother and I ought to be alone right now.” He took me by the arm and began to turn away.
Father Claussen’s voice called out,
“This is a time for joining together in prayer, not for casting blame.”
Roarke did not turn back.
“There is one more thing,” called the priest. Something in his voice made Rory stop.
“Your father says he won’t leave here without his leg.”
* * *
The man in the hospital bed had Dad’s face, but nothing else about him was the same. When the nurses came to change his bandages he waited until they were leaning over him before he tweaked their nipples through their smocks and asked if all the women from their country were sluts-on-wheels-with-titties-of-steel. He held his fork with the wrong hand and laughed at things that weren’t funny. He wanted to know where the fuck were his goddamn cigarettes, wide-filter Pall Malls, as if he’d smoked them every day of his life.
Even his breath smelled different. I know because right before we landed in Massachusetts, he grabbed my collar and pulled me close.
“Those olive-eatin sawbones said they’d never seen the fuckin bug I got,” he told me, his voice low. He was so close I could feel hot breath in my nostrils. “Said maybe it was the first time anyone got it, anywhere in the whole world. And I said isn’t that something? Hey, why don’t pack the whole thing up and ship it back to the good old U.S of A? Maybe have the fellas from the Mayo take a look at it? For research, you know? Just so I can make sure I do my part.” He smiled a smile that made his face dark. “Then I look at the sawbones with my eyes real big…big wide crocodile eyes…and I say, I wanna do my part to see this tragedy don’t befall another living soul. Not if I can do anything about it.” He laughed sweetish breath into my face and I recoiled. He yanked me fiercely back to him. “It belongs to me, after all. It’s my goddamned leg. You can’t just toss someone’s leg in the garbage like a used rubber. So they said yeah, maybe I had a point. Those brains at the Mayo are thinking up new medicine all the time. Pills to stop your headache, cure the clap. Even pills to make your dick hard! Those guys may have something doin’. So the sawbones trussed it up in a big glass tube fulla some of that formaldehyde stuff. Locked it in with these big steel caps. I saw ‘em loading it into the cargo hold. Looks like the biggest pickled pig’s foot you ever saw.” He laughed again. There was a rattle and a lurch as the landing gear deployed. We were back in Boston, but it didn’t feel like home. Nothing was the same. “I’ll be fucked if those needledicks at the Mayo will ever get their hands on it. It’s mine.” Dad pulled me so close his nose touched the skin of my forehead, and his voice fell to a whisper that made my skin break into gooseflesh. “Do you hear me, son? It’s mine.”
Father Claussen had arranged a one-bedroom apartment for us on a sloppy street beside an Italian restaurant. It was close to Saint Elizabeth’s, the hospital where Dad could go if he needed to see a doctor.
“And I mean the other sort of doctor too,” Father Claussen reminded us. “A psychiatrist. If he gets any worse, or if you boys are ever afraid he’ll hurt you, just pick up the phone and call Saint Elizabeth’s right away. I’ve written the number to the psychiatric crisis line right here next to the phone.” He also said the church would pay all of Dad’s medical bills, so not to worry about that. And there was a Murphy bed in the living room, he told us, so there would be room for all of us as long as my brother and I shared a bed. He spoke a last hurried blessing, and then he left.
The apartment smelled like garlic bread and had nubby carpeting with gold and burgundy curlicues, like carpet from a movie theater lobby. There was something called a ‘kitchenette’, which was a half-sized icebox, a sink and a hotplate on an island of dingy linoleum that curled up where it met the carpet.
Father Claussen said he chose this apartment because it had belonged to a man with polio. The door that led in from the alley had a wide ramp and a rail for Dad’s wheelchair, and above the bathtub and toilet were special bars where he could grab on if he needed to. The countertops in the kitchen and bathroom were only half as high as normal so he could reach everything.
Dad sat in his wheelchair in the kitchenette smoking Pall Malls and yelling slurs at the two black porters who had toted our luggage from the airport. We didn’t have much, mostly just secondhand clothes and dishes from the nuns in San Tomás. The pair of big men struggled up the wheelchair ramp with something heavy wrapped in black duvetyn. They set it down in the corner and were wiping their brows when Dad yelled,
“You stupid spooks! Are you gonna put that right in front of the radiator?” He dropped his cigarette in the sink and wheeled angrily across the room. “Be careful with that goddamnit. Do you even know what this is?” He yanked off the duvetyn. Rory and I froze, staring, not believing. “It’s my goddamned leg, that’s what it is!”
There it was, Dad’s rotten leg, bobbing inside a glass tube as high as my shoulders. Steel caps closed the tube at the top and bottom, bolted tight with pieces that looked like chrome lug nuts. A paper with a big orange symbol that said BIOHAZARD stuck to the glass with strips of wrinkly white tape, and a few paragraphs of medical words filled the space beneath the s
ymbol. Beyond that, the gray mess of craters and boils floated like a fleshy jellyfish in the pale, yellow preservative.
“Cost me half my nutsack and a gold pocketwatch. Good thing you darkies are hot for bribes and shiny things or it’d be halfway to Alabama by now, on its way to be poked apart by some egghead with a microscope up his ass.” One of the black men took a step toward Dad, like he might hit him, but the other man touched his elbow and shook his head, and after that they both left and closed the door behind them.
The lights in our new apartment were dimmed by puddles of dead moths settled in their yellowed fixtures. The fluorescent over the kitchenette flickered constantly, like it was sucking its electricity through a bent straw. There was not enough light or space or air. We all stood together in our new home, not speaking. Me, my brother, my Dad and his preserved amputated leg.
* * *
Rory turned seventeen that spring and fibbed himself a year older so he could join the Navy. I cried and begged him not to leave, but he went anyway. He hugged me and told me he’d be back before I knew it, but he couldn’t look me in the eye and we both knew he was abandoning me. He was leaving me alone with Dad.
Dad smoked cigarettes all day and watched game shows on TV. “The Price is Right” was his favorite, he said, because when Bob Barker picked a pretty woman to guess the prices you could see her tits bouncing as she ran down to the stage.
“Hell, doesn’t even have to be a pretty one,” he said, lighting a fresh cigarette off the old one.
We mostly ate take-out from White Castle and Carl’s Jr., but sometimes at the end of the month before Dad’s disability check arrived I’d use the hotplate to warm up food for us. Mostly frozen things: corndogs, pizzas, Marie Calendar’s chicken potpies in flimsy tins made of foil. We’d eat off paper plates sitting at a card table we’d found folded up under Dad’s bed. Once I’d tried to make beef stroganoff, but when the time came to eat it I couldn’t. I couldn’t get past the thick gravy and the slippery noodles sliding over bits of meat. After the stroganoff I had a hard time eating altogether. The feeling of chewed food churning around in my mouth made me sick to my stomach.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4 Page 18
