“THERE HE IS. You awake, hon?” A nurse, big shoulders in green scrubs, a mask but kind- looking eyes under blue eye shadow. She turned to the door. “He’s awake.”
“Ray, how you doing?” Another nurse, this one small with blond hair framing the mask.
“I don’t know.” His eyes were leaking water. Fat tears that made him ashamed.
“You’re in the hospital. Do you remember?”
“I don’t.”
“That’s okay. We need to pull this tube out.”
He blinked and tried to raise his arm. It was tethered to the bed with a soft strap. “I can’t get my arm.”
“Sorry about that, hon, you were pulling at the IV.” The big nurse unwrapped his hand and it lifted, stiff and weightless as if reduced to denuded bone, and he brought it up to touch his face and felt stubble, then wiped at the gum in the corners of his eyes.
He wanted a drink, and they gave him ice chips. He felt like he was wrapped in someone else’s flesh, a great swollen mass obscuring him, and he felt a distance between himself and his own wounded body. His arms were wrapped in gauze, and tubes ran under his blankets. He could smell himself, a rank smell of sweat and blood. In his leg he felt a sharp and constant stabbing as if there were still a knife blade in his thigh.
“I really hurt.”
The nurse patted his hand and told him they had orders for him to get pain meds.
“I, uh, I have to go.”
“You’ve got a colostomy, Ray. Do you know what I mean?”
“Christ.”
“It’s only for a while.”
A third nurse, this one with red hair, came in, flicking a needle.
“No. I don’t want that.”
“It’s okay, Ray. It’s for the pain.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Is he, are you confused about what’s going on?”
“No. It’s okay, really.”
“Well, if you don’t feel you need it.”
He turned his head to look at nothing. “I’m, uh. I have a problem with medication.”
“Oh.”
He heard them stop, all three, and felt them looking at him and each other.
“I can’t. I shouldn’t have anything like that.” He could feel something, a wall going up. Something hardening in the air be tween them.
“Okay, Ray.”
“Can you make a note or something? I just don’t want them to ask me.”
“I understand.”
“ ’Cause I’ll say yes. Right now I can say no, so please don’t let them ask me again.”
“We’ll get someone in to talk to you about it.”
HE FELL ASLEEP again and awoke, this time the pain sharp and clear and insistent, fingers poking his ribs, his belly, his arms and his leg clamped in a vise. He woke breathing hard, his head full of webs and haze. Bart and Theresa were there, sitting on two chairs pulled close together. Theresa was looking through her purse, and his father was dozing, his breath a raspy whisper. Ray watched them and tried to control his breathing. He held on to the bed rails with a shaking hand.
Theresa looked up, jumping from her chair when she caught his eyes. “Ray”
His father started awake and stood up, rubbing his face. They looked down at him, and he stared back, shaking and wracked.
“So,” he said, his lips cracking, “who’s watching the dog?”
Theresa put a hand to her eyes and choked, and Bart put his hand on her shoulder and patted her, the gesture clumsy and stiff.
“Look at you. Your heart stopped.”
She couldn’t say any more, and Bart helped her into her seat. He came back to look down at Ray, and they stared at each other a long time. Ray put his shuddering, dry hand on his father’s arm. Bart looked down at his son’s hand and then raised his head, and Ray saw him smile. It had been so long since he had seen his father smile it was almost disconcerting, as if he had become someone else for a moment, but in another moment Ray was smiling, too. He shook his head and he raised his eyebrows at his old man, at what they knew about each other. Ray grabbed the skinny rope of muscle over Bart’s forearm, touching him where a heart was etched that had once been bright red but was slowly going green and black. It said caroline.
His father shook his head and said, “So that’s done, then?”
Ray nodded.
“You’re kicking now?”
“I figure they got me strapped down anyway.”
Bart nodded back, and his mouth opened and closed a few times like he wanted to say something else, but he just patted Ray’s hand.
“I know,” said Ray.
Bart held a hand out and took it back, then reached out again and touched Ray’s head, patting him with a big hand of rough skin and loose bones. “We’ll come back, and I’ll keep her from cooking for you for a couple days.”
“Yeah, that’s good.”
Theresa blew her nose, a long honk that echoed off the hard walls. “What’s wrong with my cooking?”
“Nothing, girl,” said Bart. “It’s just the boy can’t eat for a while.”
“I’m not an idiot, Bart. I know that.”
The shaking got worse, and Ray stuck his hands back under the sheet, sweat standing out on his forehead. Theresa stood up and held his cheek, and then they went out, Bart stooped and round- shouldered. Ray lay back and stared at the ceiling and bit his lips to keep from yelling out. After a few minutes of breathing through his mouth a nurse came in.
“How’s it going?”
He just looked at her, his eyes wild, and she nodded and lifted his gown to check his dressing. For the first time he saw the crisscrossed lines of sutures and dark blood that reminded him of barbed wire, as if an army had fought a battle ranging across the white expanse of his abdomen and left fortifications abandoned in the field. There was a red tube that he realized was blood draining from one of the wounds and a flaccid plastic bag taped over a hole in his gut.
The nurse went to the sink and wet a washcloth and put it across his forehead. He nodded thanks at her, not trusting himself to say anything. He put his hand in his mouth and bit the fleshy part and growled, praying to pass out. The nurse told him things looked good. She said there was still a risk of infection but everything really did look good. He nodded without speaking, and she shook her head and left. It was more than he could stand, and he wanted to scream.
HE WOKE UP again and it was night. He had a sense of days going by, but nothing changed except the light, so he wasn’t sure. He sat in the dark for a while getting used to himself, listening to the murmur of voices from the nurses’ station, and then a dark shape filled the doorway and Manny came in and stood over him.
“Hey, man.”
“Hey.”
“How you making it?’
“Not good. Not good.”
“Yeah, they giving you anything?”
“They wanted to. I told them no.”
Manny shook his head violently. “What the fuck, Ray? You’re missing your big chance here, man.”
“I’m trying to kick.”
“You’re what? Are you kidding?”
“No, I figure I can get straightened out.”
“Ah, bullshit.” Manny stepped close, his voice a tense whisper.
“What? I’ve been high for two weeks. I want to get clean.”
“You’re not an addict, Ray.”
“The fuck.”
Manny got closer, pulled a chair up, and folded himself into it, his shoulders hunched. In the dark Ray could see pinpoints of light in the lenses of his sunglasses. “I’m an addict. I been in and out of rehab like six times. I’m a fucking dope addict. My mom was a dope addict. You…” He looked over his shoulder at the bright hallway and figures going by. “You’re just, I don’t know. Fucking with yourself.”
Ray let out a long sigh and let his eyes close.
“You think you need to pay for something. Man, you paid. You went to jail for nothing, and your whole life was fucked.”
“A lot of people are dead.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked up.” He leaned in close, his voice dropping. “But you didn’t kill anyone wasn’t trying to kill you.”
“My head is full of it. All this shit I done. I can’t close my eyes.”
Manny watched him and then turned his head to look out into the bright hallway for a while. “Listen to me.” He turned back to look at Ray. “Listen to me. You ain’t like me. Or Harlan. Or Cyrus or any of ’em. You can get clear of this and get a life. That guy you killed’”
Ray shook his head no, but Manny kept going.
“That guy you killed, he cut an old woman’s throat and did worse for Danny. That doesn’t mean you give up being a human being. Shit, if a cop had been there he’d have done the same.”
“I threw it away.”
“No, see, the fact you even think this way? That means something. Man, I never had two minutes worrying about any of the things I did. I say fuck ’em all and I mean it. You got all messed up with your dad going up and then the accident and that girl dying and then you came out of jail all fucked up. This money we got? I’m just gonna burn through it. In a couple of months it’ll just be gone and I’ll be broke again with nothing to show for it.”
“What about Sherry?”
“I love Sherry, but she’s as fucked as I am. She talks about kicking, having a kid, about buying a house, but at the end of the day she’d rather get high and watch TV and eat takeout food. We don’t need that money. It’s just going to kill us faster.”
“What do I do?”
“Take the fucking money and go somewhere and do something. What do you do I have no fucking idea. I never been nothing but a convict or a thief. What ever you coulda been you better start being it now. Fuck, man, your heart stopped. Twice, Theresa said. And here you are, breathing and talking and shit. That means something.”
Ray shook his head. “It can’t be that simple.”
“It don’t have to be complicated. You’re thinking of the debt you owe? Then, I don’t know, own it. Do something good for somebody. That money had blood on it long before we walked into that house. You want to help somebody, that’s not wrong, but you got to help yourself. You got to want to. I remember enough of that crap from rehab to know you got to at least think you got a right to be alive, to get through the day. You did things wrong, do what you can to make things right.”
Ray sat and listened, his head cocked. It was the most Manny had said in years that wasn’t about wanting dope or girls or money, or getting dope or girls or money.
Manny grabbed Ray’s upper arm and squeezed it tight. “Somebody’s got to make it. We can’t all die off. Somebody’s got to get their shit together and get right.” He let go of Ray’s arm and grabbed his hand. “I got to go, I’m turning back into a pumpkin.” He squeezed Ray’s hand and got up, looming in the dark.
“Wait,” Ray whispered. “What happened to our friend? From up north?”
Manny looked over his shoulder to check for anyone nearby in the hall, then turned back showing his teeth. “Bart finished the barbecue.”
Ray flashed on the hole in the backyard, the pile of crumbling bricks.
“That thing’s got the deepest foundation of any barbecue in the county. He’s motivated, your old man works fast.”
MORNING, AND A feeling of being hollowed out, a husk around air and bones. There were two men in the room, behind the nurses as they worked checking the IVs and drains and patting his hand. Ray watched the men, one tall, long limbs folded into a chair, black hair and a knowing smile like an assistant principal who figures you were the one who took a dump in the faculty lounge and he’s just angling to prove it. He had a thick sheaf of papers and files in his lap.
The other one was short, gray- haired, moving around the back of the room with a dark energy, touching the pitiful bouquet from downstairs that Theresa had left, a card left thumb-tacked to a board for somebody’s grandma who had been in the room before Ray. The nurses left, and he sat and looked at them.
The younger one spoke. “Raymond!”
Cops.
“How are you, buddy? We thought we lost you there.”
“Ah, you know. Making it, Officer.”
“I’m Detective Nelson. This is Burt Grace, special investigator from the district attorney’s office.”
Ray nodded, and the gray- haired older man just looked at him.
“You know we’re police officers.”
Ray shrugged. Cheap sport coats and fraying collars, did anyone else dress like that?
“We wanted to talk to you about what happened.”
“I don’t really remember.”
The older one shook his head, snorted. “Right.”
“Well,” said Nelson, acting the reasonable public servant. “What do you remember?”
“I was coming back to my apartment in Willow Grove, this guy jumped out of the bushes and stabbed me.”
“You were home?”
“I guess. It’s all pretty hazy.”
“Did you know the man with the knife?”
“No, I didn’t really see him.”
“Lemme guess.” The older cop again, Burt Grace. “It was a big black guy you never saw before.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Grace turned to Nelson. “This is a waste of time.” He pointed at Ray without looking at him. “This piece of shit is in the dope business, and he got stuck by some other piece of shit in the dope business.”
Ray breathed through his nose, his body starting to hum with pain. “So is there something we have to talk about, or is this something you do for everybody gets stabbed in the county?”
Nelson leafed through the papers in front of him. “You’ve had quite a time, Raymond.”
“You got my life story there, do you?”
“Three juvenile arrests, sent to Lima. Two arrests as an adult, both involving stolen cars. Sent up twice.” He flipped pages. “You got a lot of interesting friends, Raymond. Emanuel Marchetti…”
Grace made a noise with his lips. “Manny Marchetti? That scumbag? Isn’t he the one his mother was a junkie retard got cut up in Bristol?”
Ray cocked his head. “Yeah, and you all did shit about that. It’s been ten years. Any leads on that, Kojak?”
“Shut your mouth.”
“Burt?” Nelson held up his hands.
“What?” Grace made a gesture of throwing something away. But he went to stand by the window.
“He’s got anger management problems?”
“Detective Grace is a good cop.”
“I never heard a cop say another cop was anything else.”
Nelson was still paging through the files. “Harlan Maximuck. Jesus. Is he still alive?”
“Last I heard.”
“Is that story they tell true? About the guy’s head in his trunk?”
“I sure wasn’t going to ask.”
“Vietnamese organized crime figures. You get around.”
He went in the folder, held something up to his eyes. A picture. Turned it to face Ray and there she was. Marletta Hicks, in her cap and gown. He wasn’t prepared and turned his head.
“Pretty girl.”
“Why are you here?” His eyes down, boring holes in the floor.
“Stole a car, smashed it up with the daughter of a state trooper in the passenger seat. Man, here’s another one.” He held up a picture of Ray, much younger with his eyes blackened, his arms in casts. “Off to adult prison that time, the first time. With your arms broken from the accident. That must have been fun. Of course, worse for the Hicks family.”
Grace walked over and stood closer to Ray, and he thought the old man was going to take a swing at him. “You piece of shit. I knew I knew that name. You’re the one killed Stan Hicks’s kid. Jesus.”
“That’s what it says.”
Nelson lifted his head. “You say different.”
“Why would I?”
Grace said, “Oh, what the fuck. If this asshole is going to start lying again I’m going downstairs.” He looked at Ray. “They should have punched your ticket ten years ago, shitbird.” His footsteps moving away were like gunshots in the hall.
Nelson had a smile fixed on his face, waving pages from the file as if inviting him to continue. “You got something to say about all’this’I’m all ears. I never knew a convict who didn’t like to spin a yarn.”
“Okay, just be on your way.” Ray’s stomach cramped, and he gritted his teeth.
Nelson nodded and got up, pulling his card from his pocket. When he laid it on the bed table, Ray looked up, out of breath. “You got the file?”
Nelson held up the pile of papers. “Pretty much everything.”
“Okay.” Ray looked off, then back, breathing like he’d run a mile, spikes driven into him everywhere. “Okay, then.” He grimaced and sucked in air. “You know it all.”
“You got something to say about that?”
“Why would I?”
“Now’s your chance.” The cramp eased and Ray panted, open mouthed.
“No, my chance passed a long time ago. Just ask Stanard Hicks.”
“Marletta’s father? I know Stan Hicks.”
“Yeah?”
“Why would I care about any of this?”
Ray shrugged. “No reason. I mean, you got the file, so you got the story.”
“Raymond, you are a piece of work. Look at you.” He went into the file, came out with the picture again, and laid it on the table. Marletta smiling in her cap and gown, her brown skin glowing. “What ever else is true, Raymond, you’re alive, still. You know, in my religion, they tell me everything happens with some kind of purpose. You’re alive, and this beautiful girl is dead. I don’t know, Ray. I can’t see the purpose in that.” He turned, but Ray grabbed his arm, hard.
Nelson looked at the white hand on his arm and then into Ray’s eyes. “What do you want from me?”
“Not that. Forget all that.”
“What?”
“There’s a kid, down in Falls Township.” Nelson nodded, got out a pen.
ALONE AGAIN, PAIN threading through his limbs and abdomen like hot wires, Ray just stared off into space and drifted. He was back in a car on a hot day in June when he was a kid with his arm around a girl in a bathing suit, he was lying in a black road starred like the night sky with broken glass, he was in prison with his back against a green tile wall and his broken arms held out like clubs, he was in the front yard of his father’s house, watching the moon stab through the clouds and waiting to sleep.
THEY REPAIRED HIS gut, closed the hole from the colostomy, and discharged him quick, Theresa shouting after the clerk who came to tell him about his limited options. With no insurance, no job, no place to go, he found himself at the curb with a metal cane across the arms of his wheelchair, noticing trees across the parking lot starting to show bits of red. Theresa pulled up, and Bart waved from the passenger seat. They got out, and the orderly who had wheeled him to curb helped him into the backseat, where he sighed and fell in on himself like a derelict house. Bart pulled the seat belt across him, and he nodded thanks and let his head loll back. Bart stood back and pursed his lips, looked about to say something, but just nodded his head and closed the door gently.
At home Ray limped to the couch, still not comfortable on the cane, and Bart helped him down. The dog came and sat by his feet and watched him, and he leaned awkwardly down to pat the ancient head. His boots felt huge and stiff on his feet, and he swam in his clothes, gathering the empty expanse of his shirt in his hands. He watched Theresa empty his kit bag out, lining up his pill bottles on the TV while Bart got a pillow from the bedroom and brought it out and put it behind him.
“How’s that, old man?”
“Good.” Ray forced a smile, wished he was alone. “Thanks.” Couldn’t bring himself to call his father by any name and didn’t know where to put his hands.
He wished for a book, a cigarette, a drink. Theresa put on the TV and brought him the remote, a scepter for the new king of the living room. He was afraid they’d sit down, but their work done, they drifted to the kitchen while Ray flipped through the channels with the volume off. He heard the rattle of pans and smelled coffee and something sweet baking. Warm and yeasty smells after the antiseptic tang of the hospital.
He clicked through shows about decorating houses and planning weddings, watched men stumble around pitched decks in a storm, cops standing over a humped sheet, one naked hand open in the street. A broad red plain under a yellow sun, and jackals tearing at a carcass, the dead thing jerking with a simulation of life.
Thirty years and a month. It sounded like a sentence, something he’d been handed by a tough judge in a bad court. Well, he’d served it and what? Was he out and free? Was he marking time and dreaming of tunnels under the wall? He became aware of Theresa standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him. She was smiling.
“What do I do now, Ma?”
She stood and looked ahead, out the picture window at the lawn and the street and the trees and two jets from the base moving together through the darkening sky, a kind of arcing steel pantomime of love. Her eyes were lined and she looked tired, and he felt a pang of guilt. Theresa had buried a husband when she was young, been a knockaround girl who met Bart when she was a dancer and he was stealing heavy equipment and stood by him through arrest and years of jail and tried to raise Ray, an angry kid who became a thief and hadn’t told the plain truth to anyone about anything since he was eighteen.
She said, “How about some coffee?”
He laughed but said, “Sure, Ma.”
She stopped at the doorway to the kitchen. “I know you’re feeling bad, hon. I know. But it’s good to have you home with us.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Ray.”