Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Skeet once made medical history, though his name is in none of the textbooks. Why that is, I don’t know. All I know is that the measures the doctors took to save Skeet’s life, now so commonplace, were unheard of at the time.

He first got sick not long after he moved in with us. He began having difficulty with walking, and talking, and moving his arms, sluggish like a windup toy in the final throes of its gyrations. Mom was a nurse, attentive to those things, and saw it before any of us, including Skeet himself, I think, suspected a problem. She got Skeet the right appointments and checkups, and after many weeks of tests the doctors determined that Skeet’s muscles were dying. They were dying generally, and all over. No name for his malady existed, but the doctors said it typically began in a patient’s extremities. Limbs and appendages would begin to get more sluggish and numb. The arms and legs first, then the fingers and toes and the tongue. Skeet wouldn’t be able to walk or eat or keep his eyes open. And then the numbness would spread inward — to the stomach muscles and the abdominal muscles and the bladder muscles and, in the end, the heart muscle would go. Skeet was nine.

Although the doctors had seen this before, and knew what to expect, they still had no way to successfully treat it. One of them had some ideas, though, and wanted to try them on Skeet. And because the treatment was experimental, and the risks somewhat uncertain, and because we had no money to speak of, the entire procedure — tests, injections, physical therapy, and hospital stays — would be free.

Mom took a couple weeks to think about it, and to try and find Skeet’s mother.

Before he came to live with us, Skeet was no one special. He wasn’t even Skeet. His name was Ted, and he was just the sickly looking kid who lived across the street from us, in a shotgun house like our own. Ted and his mother had moved from somewhere, Cincinnati I believe, and because Ted’s mom and our mom were the only single mothers on our block, and close in age, they became friends. Skeet’s mother would haul him over to play with us when she wanted to sit on the porch and talk aimless talk to Mom. She would find a sitter for all three of us when she wanted to take Mom out drinking with her, which Mom liked to do now and again.

I wasn’t home when Skeet’s mom brought him over to spend a few days with us — forever as it turned out. Janie was home, and she remembered that Skeet’s mom seemed rushed. Apparently Skeet’s father had turned up in Ohio somewhere, and she was off to find him and bring him back. Could we look after Ted for a while? Of course.

That night, with Skeet asleep upstairs and Janie on her way up to join him in the bedroom we would all come to share, I lingered in the kitchen a while with Mom, and prophetically asked her what would happen if Skeet’s mom didn’t come back. She laughed. “She’ll be back for Ted, sweetie,” she said, unable to imagine a mother abandoning a child. “That woman’s had a hard way,” she said, never once stopping to think of herself in those very terms. In the months that followed, Janie and I were worried and Mom was privately terrified, waiting for Skeet’s mother to show up, then waiting for some city agency to discover her missing, or to question our possession of this child who did not belong to us. But nobody came, mother or father or officer of the law, and in time we all stopped worrying. It seems amazing now that a child could simply be left forever with a strange family, but I suppose you could get away with itinerant moves like that back then. You can get away with anything, really, when people stop paying attention.

Skeet never seemed to note his mother’s absence. He never once mentioned her, and in time none of us mentioned her. After Skeet’s illness we never spoke of her again.

If it was an awkward household before Skeet got sick our unease grew as Skeet’s strength began to waste away drastically. When Mom wasn’t at work she was at home, holed up in her bedroom when she wasn’t making us meals, while Janie and I took Skeet around the neighborhood in the wagon, and sat him up on the porch with us. In the afternoons the three of us would watch TV, and when Mom would come out to fix dinner, Skeet, who could not move his head very well, followed her everywhere with his eyes as she moved about the room, and Mom, sensing it, would risk one glance at Skeet and start crying. She didn’t know what to do for him. Neither did we. And after a month of not being able to find Skeet’s mother, and with the doctor’s reports evolving from “concerned” to “grave,” Mom signed the releases. Skeet’s treatment began immediately.

The experiment they tried, untested then, as I said, but so common now, was to administer huge doses of synthetic hormones to his system. They did this in the hospital three times a week, for four hours each time — with a few hours afterward for rest and rehabilitation. On those days Skeet went to work with Mom in the mornings, and Janie and I went directly to the hospital after school and waited with Skeet while he rested, in the aftermath of the treatment. It was not unlike the way in which my mother would take chemotherapy just a few years ago before we had lost her, and it was not unlike chemotherapy in the havoc it wrecked on Skeet’s little body. He was exhausted, then exhilarated, then wracked with muscular cramps that made him scream. They had him on a rigorous program of physical therapy on his “off” days. When, after three months of treatment, his muscular control not only returned but started to flourish, Skeet continued with the workouts on his own and only went into the hospital for tests and an overnight checkup once a month.

“He’s Charles Atlas gone crazy,” Janie said one night at the dinner table, a year later. Mom and Janie and I were alone. Skeet had already left for the YMCA to work out. He worked out every night, always leaving the three of us at the table. Skeet had no patience for table talk, and he left us that way almost every evening. Not rudely, not unhappily, but in a distracted and determined way that seemed completely uncalculated.

“I think I’ll call him Charles,” Janie said, “instead of Skeet.”

“Oh, I hate that name,” Mom said. “Skeet is a name for hoodlums. Or hillbillies. I don’t know why you can’t just call him by his real name.”

Janie and I looked at each other, and Janie rolled her eyes.

“Ted,” we both said aloud, and started laughing. Mom smiled reluctantly and soon was laughing along with us. We were ashamed of our smiles, but we all smiled nonetheless. Skeet had been such a constant preoccupation for all of us that we could afford to take refuge in the shoddy respite of a little smile.

Skeet’s name came from the sputtering sounds he made early on in his illness, when the muscle spasms were just beginning to act up and were proceeding toward his tongue. His speech devolved into a drooling hiss as he struggled to control the delicate sounds — the S’s and T’s on the end of his tongue — and his tongue went flying off the handle. He sounded, said the neighborhood kids, like a mosquito. Skeet still went to school then, and the kids we had known all our lives, with whom we grew up and were familiar, became unfamiliar in the way they took to teasing Skeet, cruelly. They asked him questions. They were always asking him questions, any question they could think of, and many of them. They loved to hear him speak, and when he finally wouldn’t answer, humiliated, they asked him more and more questions, again and again, until he lost all restraint and sputtered out, screamed out, and the words fell apart and they called him Skeeter.

But by the end of the year, when he was almost well again, he adopted the name all our classmates had called him and would only answer to Skeet. His speech restored, he relished the slow, methodical, precise pronunciation of his name. “My name is Skeet,” he would say, and the way he said it seemed sinister.