I watched his fingers working over the exposed flesh. I said, “You’re right.”
The big upshot of the deal was I never want to shoot a gun again. People can call me wimp or city whuss or whatever, but as I watched all the cutting and sawing and sewing, I knew that I caused this and I didn’t want to cause anything like it from now on.
Brogan went two inches or so up from the wound and slit the skin all the way around. He cut through the fatty layer, then the muscles and laid them back in flaps. It looked like cutting a chicken thigh off the breast. When he cut through the joint, the knife made a scraping sound.
“You going to pass out on me?” he said without looking up.
I glanced down at Hank and Soapley. Their faces were blank, although Soapley was sweating some. “No, sir.”
Otis’s front paws did a digging motion, so Brogan stopped to give him another injection. Then he clamped off three blood vessels and tied them with black thread. After he made the final cut, he handed me the leg.
“Souvenir.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Hank said.
Brogan started sewing the muscle flaps shut. “Yes, I do.”
“It was as much my fault as the boy’s.”
“You two can share it.”
Dr. Brogan wanted to keep Otis overnight. Hank and I waited outside while Soapley did a short good-bye thing, then we sat in the truck and rode back to the dump. I had the leg on my lap. It was mostly black with a large white spot near the top and a smaller one down lower. The toenails were black.
At Hank’s truck, I wanted to tell Mr. Soapley I was sorry, but I started crying and he only stared out at the mounds of garbage. He wouldn’t look at me or say anything. Hank went over and got my rifle and unloaded it. He made me hold it on the ride into town. I went in the house with the rifle in my right hand and Otis’s leg in my left.
11
The day after Christmas I took to my bed with no intention of getting up again. I didn’t think, I will never get up again, I just didn’t think at all. I knew this was it. I would lie there until I rotted from the inside and mold grew across my face and armpits.
You think you’re doing fine, zooming along through the day-to-day, more or less above the deal. I’m making out okay in school, learning all this new sexual territory with a pretty girl, going where you’re supposed to want to go, Lydia’s in a practically human phase, Hank’s a nice enough guy, then I go and blow the leg off a dog and whomp, nothing means squat anymore.
I wanted to go backward, to before fucking and before I shot anything, back to North Carolina where I was young. Nothing mattered then either but I didn’t know it. Christmas Day in Greensboro I would have been playing basketball in Jesse Otake’s driveway. He always made me play point guard because he was an inch taller. I would have ridden my three-speed over to Bobby McHenry’s garage to watch his older brother with the cigarette pack twisted into the T-shirt sleeve break down the clutch on his ’59 Chevy.
I sure wouldn’t have spent Christmas at the dump with an Indian. I never saw a dump in Greensboro. You put the trash on the curb Friday morning and it disappeared. Nobody cared where it went. Dogs didn’t ride on top of truck cabs. Indians stayed out of sight.
I wanted to see the ground. How could we live in a place with no ground? And no railroad tracks, and no curb markets or McDonald’s or car washes or hotel elevators. Hell, no hotels. I woke up every morning and looked at the ceiling and saw two dead animals with giant bug-eyes and horns. That couldn’t be a healthy first sight every day for a person.
My thing got stiff and I lay on my side with one eye open and stared at Otis’s leg on my desk next to my typewriter.
The nurse checked on the IVs and crept soundlessly from the room. The boy’s grandfather waited anxiously in the hall.
“Well?”
“He says he’s fed up. He will no longer accept pain.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“That’s what he thinks.”
“I should have taken him more seriously. I shouldn’t have banished him away from his friends and coaches.”
“He says he’ll never move again until somebody loves him.”
“Poor boy.”
Early afternoon the need to pee overcame the need to be in a coma, so I padded barefoot across the house and came back by way of the kitchen where Lydia sat in her white nightgown, working a crossword puzzle.
She had a blue spot on the edge of her mouth where she’d been sucking on an ink pen. She held the pen in her hand like a cigarette with her long, thin fingers pointed at the ceiling.
“Ten-letter word for lampoon.”
I opened the refrigerator and looked in at a stick of butter, a jar of dill pickles, a bottle of French salad dressing, and five Dr Peppers. “Satirize.”
She counted out letters on boxes. “Too short.”
“Lydia, would you explain to me about women.”
She glanced up at me, then back at the puzzle. “Cold enough in here without the fridge open.”
I took the pickles over to the table and sat across from her. I could see the puzzle upside down. Lots of answers had been written in and scribbled out so it was hard to figure what was what.
Lydia filled in a couple of letters. “I thought I already told you about girls.”
“I don’t mean dicks and tunnels and babies. I want to know why they do what they do.”
“Come on, Sam. Nobody knows why anybody does anything. Give me one of those.”
“Maurey and I perform sex and I feel something odd for her but she keeps telling me we’re just friends and nothing mushy is going on.”
Lydia took one of my pickles. “So?”
“Isn’t sex the definition of mushy?”
“Four-letter word for dessert. Cake? Tart? Pies?” She tried a letter then blacked it out. “You’re lucky she’s your friend. In all probability, you’ll have a lot more lovers than friends in your life. And you’re too young for any deep emotional entanglement.” She bit the tip off the pickle. “This way you get the fun of love without the heartbreak.”
“But what if I like her and get my heart broke anyway?”
She looked back up at me for a second. “Then you’re a sucker.”
“Maurey’s looking forward to going on dates.”
“Aren’t you?”
“She thinks she can go to the movies with some guy and flirt and neck, then come back here and get in bed with me and tell me about it.”
“Wish I had a deal like that.”
“I think it’s bizarre, even for us.”
“Caricature.”
“What?”
“Ten-letter word for lampoon—caricature.” She stuck her pen tip in her mouth.
“Is Hank a lover or a friend?”
“Don’t be impertinent.” She switched pen for pickle.
“Impertinent? Lydia, we passed that six years ago when I started fetching your Gilbey’s. You can’t be a buddy when it’s convenient and a mother when it’s not.”
“You’ve been reading too many books.”
I sat there scarfing pickles and watching her concentrate on something other than me. Even upside down, I knew several of the answers, but I wasn’t about to help her.
“Hank is a suitor,” Lydia said.
“That’s awfully Southern of him.”
“He’s kind of a Southern boy. You know he feels terrible about yesterday.”
“When are we going back to the South, Mom?”
Lydia crunched on her pickle and ignored me.