I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.
A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said-and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.
They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.
Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.
Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.
Thanks, Mom.
During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”
“They be done with, all right,” another said.
Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”
I said I was.
“That’s good.”
A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”
Chapter Eight
A few days later, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”
I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.
Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.
“Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”
“You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”
“You could have saved yourself the trouble-”
“-and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”
“Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”
“Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”
“All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”
“On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”
Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”
I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”
“We always are, you and me.”
“Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”
He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”
“Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”
Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.
“I’m tired, Lew. Used up.”
“Been a rough few days. Then there’s that retirement thing, wear down the best of men.”
“You see a wheelchair coming in?”
“Yeah, there’s one right outside your room.”
“You wanta get it? I don’t think I can walk and carry all this shit. Hell, I’m not sure I can walk at all.”
“We’re going somewhere?”
“Just down the hall.”
Seeing me fetch the chair, a nurse came flying out of the central station and through the room’s open doorway with a shrill litany of can’t-allow-its and absolutely-nots. Rose Price-Jamison, her name tag read. I stood quietly by and let her and Don talk it through, their discourse a stew of pigheadedness, tacit invective and (for me) the all-too-familiar condescension of medical personnel. Authorities were called to bear, a charge nurse, a baffled and battle-fatigued surgical resident, a hospital administrator; finally Dr. Lieber, who after listening to the resident’s summary said more or less, Man thinks he can do it, let him. Miss Price-Jamison helped us gather up tubes, monitor lines and IVs and hang them strategically about the chair.
“And you wonder why phrases like ‘thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch’ follow you around.”
“Image is everything.”
“Yeah. Well right now you look like something from a cheapie version of Mad Max. Big finale’s gonna be you and the bad guy chasing one another in wheelchairs across the wasteland.” I rolled us out into the circle. It suddenly occurred to me how much the layout of the ICU resembled a roulette wheel. “Where we going?”
“Prison ward. Up one floor, go to the end of the corridor, Santos says.”
We shared the elevator with another reverse-rickshaw pair, pusher and pushee alike twentyish black men. Urine in the bag attached to the latter’s wheelchair was the dull red of rust. His head kept falling onto his chest, then he’d catch himself and come around again. His unfocused eyes were that startling gold color you see often around New Orleans.
I pushed Don off the elevator and down the hall. He thumbed the buzzer by locked double doors beyond which only a wall could be seen. Within moments a voice issued from the tiny speaker: “Can I help you?”