I sucked the smoke in and blew it out, and as I did, it felt like my mouth was a furnace door that I was opening. The smoke was hotter than the air, and it made my face fiery and my eyes water. I felt light-headed, and the smell of the roast beef was sickening. There was a thrumming in my eardrums. I feared I might puke on the sidewalk.
“You okay, Dean?” I heard Troy say. “You good?” His voice was far away. I wasn’t sure if he was asking whether my life in general was good.
“It’s hot out here,” I said. It was all I could do to maintain my balance.
“This ain’t hot,” said the man I didn’t know. “If you think this is hot, wait till August.”
I was happy to engage in weather talk. “It’s probably going to be a hundred degrees in August,” I offered.
“A hundred degrees?” The man I didn’t know was incredulous. “A hundred degrees?” He was outraged. He looked at me hard. “If it’s ninety degrees in May, how’s it going to be a hundred degrees in August? I’m telling you, my man, it’s going to be hundred and twenty-five degrees in August.”
Against my better judgment, I took another drag off the cigarette, and it had a surprisingly calming effect. The smoke came out white and round and hovered around my head in the still, heavy air.
“Hey, Dean,” Quincy said suddenly, “you looking for a job?”
Troy said, “Dean don’t need no job.”
“They’re hiring,” Quincy said. He nodded to the textiles building down the street.
“Who’s hiring?” I said.
“Mainframes, man,” Quincy said.
“Chemicals and whatnot,” Troy said.
“I don’t ask no questions about what they make,” said the man I didn’t know.
“You watch,” Quincy said. “Once the war starts, they’ll be opening factories all up and down this street. There’s going to be an industrial revolution right here in the ghetto.” This broke them up. They slapped one another’s hands, stinging slaps. I smiled but I didn’t slap.
“Where you working at now, Dean?” Troy said. I told him.
“Damn.”
“Damn.”
“That’s a good job.”
“How’d you get that?”
“That’s the kind of gig I want.”
“Damn.”
“That’s what I’m going to get me,” said the man I didn’t know. He said this more to himself. Then he said to the rest of us, “I’m going to get one of those essential jobs, so that when the draft comes, they pass me up.”
“There’s not going to be any draft,” I said. It was my turn to state something as fact.
The man looked at me in astonishment. He cocked his head. Then he guffawed and wiped his handkerchief over his entire face in one swift motion. “How’d you figure that one out, my man?”
“It’s going to be a quick war,” I said. “Marines are going to take the peninsula first thing.” I drew in the air as if I was standing in front of a map. “Here’s the bay…here’s the peninsula…you’ll see.”
The guys got quiet as they pondered this.
“Anyway,” I said cheerfully, “even if it’s a long war, there’ll still be plenty of people willing to join up.”
“Plenty of people?” The man I didn’t know snorted. “This here’s the guy”—he turned to Troy and Quincy—“who thinks it’s only going to be a hundred degrees in August.”
—
At the hospital, the air-conditioning was going full blast and the sweat froze on my skin. It was almost twelve o’clock and I was exhausted and parched. I was also hungry. I went back to blaming Roberto for everything. People with all sorts of ailments came and went in the waiting room, and I thought about how this must be what it’s like when soldiers get back from battle. I wasn’t sure if Roberto had checked in under a false name. He was nervous about not being a citizen and was always going out of his way to cover his tracks. He had no driver’s license, no bank account, no telephone, and his new apartment still had the name of the previous tenant, Cynthia Abernathy, on the mailbox even though she hadn’t lived there for two years. Every so often he’d get a package for her, and he’d tell the delivery guy some elaborate and unnecessary story about how Cynthia was his wife but she was out of town because her mother was dying and he didn’t know when she’d be back but he’d let her know that a package had come for her when he talked to her next but he wasn’t sure when that would be because her mother was dying. It was always the same story. He was positive that the INS was tracking him and the delivery guy was an agent. In the meantime, he’d accumulated several mail-order kitchen gadgets, including an electric eggbeater.
“Don’t you think they’re going to start wondering why your mother-in-law never dies?” I’d ask him.
He never liked this. “You’re going to be penitent one day,” he’d say, dropping in one of those words he’d learned specifically for the SAT. “You’re going to be penitent when they come for me. They’re going to lock me up somewhere, like they did those apple pickers, and you’re never going to hear from me again.”
“I’m looking for Roberto Díaz,” I told the hospital receptionist.
She checked the computer. No, she said, there was no Roberto Díaz listed.
“Then I’m looking for Rob Days,” I said.
No, sorry.
“How about Bob Hays?” I was trying to recall all the various permutations he had used over the years.
No.
“I’m looking for Tyler McCoy,” I said, because this was the name of the main character in his favorite gangster film.
The receptionist punched in Tyler McCoy, and I could tell by the way she slowly struck the keys that she was getting suspicious or impatient. “You sure do have a lot of friends,” she said.
“I sure do,” I said. And Tyler McCoy was in Room 831.
He was asleep when I got there, lying on his back with his mouth wide open like a drowning man trying to suck oxygen. He had bandages running ear to ear, and his nose, always prominent, seemed gigantic under the bandages, as if he had an anvil for a nose. His eyes were swollen, his hair was matted, and a Reader’s Digest rested on his stomach, rising and falling with his haggard breath. Across the room a window faced out onto the roof of an adjacent wing of the hospital. The roof was white, and if you didn’t know it was ninety degrees outside, you could mistake the whiteness for snow.
I pulled up a chair next to his bed and took a seat. He didn’t stir. I thought about turning on the television and then, when he woke, apologizing for having disturbed him. From my vantage point, he looked to be all torso, as if he were lying in bed after having had his legs amputated. This was a result of having spent ten years lifting weights constantly and incorrectly. I’d experienced him straining, screaming, staggering, a terrifying sight to behold as he attempted to hoist more than was humanly possible, and the second the summit was attained, not one second more, he would discard the barbell midair so that it would drop and crash and bounce in explosive vanity. His chest was colossal and so were his shoulders and his arms, and he had a thick blue vein in his neck that was permanently engorged as it piped gallons of blood to his muscles twenty-four hours a day. But his legs were thin, the legs of a teenage girl or an insect, and they looked nonexistent beneath the pale blue hospital sheet. “Why don’t you try doing some cardio every once in a while?” I’d counsel. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice that his proportions bordered on the freakish. His physique had provided him with those coveted manual-labor jobs — mover, deliverer, unloader — and that was how he had survived all these years without any aid or assistance except what he got from me. Businesses needed men like him and were happy to pay him under the table. He’d carried bricks, drywall, bales of hay. “I’ve got a special job for Robbie,” my mother once said. He’d come over for dinner and wound up spending half an hour lugging a tree trunk from our backyard to the curb. She’d given him ten dollars. I’d yelled at her later for what I saw as an example of her condescension, but my father intervened, coming into the living room in his bare feet and no glasses and uttering one of his platitudes, “Every man has to make his own way in this world.”