David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

… All but little Leonard Stecyk, who after only the briefest neural pause moved forward, quickly and decisively, came out around the group’s flank, punching at the band saw’s double-marked Power button with the heel of his bandaged hand as he swept around the back of the machine, looking neither right nor left in his apron and pressed white shirt, elbowing aside a large boy in a paisley headband who stood with his Keds’ soles in human blood — a boy who only days before had menaced Stecyk with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs behind the lathe’s peg-board tool display — and seemed instantly to be at the side of Mr. Ingle, implementing the first rule of on-site treatment for hemorrhagic trauma, which was simultaneously to elevate the wound and to identify the severity of the trauma using the five-point Ames Scale from Cherry Ames RN’s 1962 First Aid for Industrial Injury, which Stecyk had checked out of the public library as part of his standard preparation for the Autumn ’69 class schedule. Stecyk simply lifted the hand as high as he could, to about eye level, while Mr. Ingle knelt hunched and slumped beneath it. It cannot be overstressed how fast this all was happening. The thumb and surrounding base tissues were not completely detached but hung by a flap of dermis such that Mr. Ingle’s thumb itself pointed straight down in a parody of imperial judgment as Stecyk, ignoring both the blood and the high-pitched diminutives for ‘Mother’ that began to be audible as the band saw cycled down, removed with one hand first his slacks’ belt and then the metric-conversion ruler he carried in a special narrow pocket of the carpenter’s apron Mr. Ingle had ridiculed and — after running mentally through the protocols and determining à la Cherry Ames RN that digital pressure around the wrist did not alone control the bleeding — fashioned a deft two-knot tourniquet (w/just a hint of Edwardian flourish to the top’s four-loop bow, which was even more amazing given that Stecyk constructed the special knot with slippery scarlet hands that also supported a man’s half-fainting weight) that stanched the flow with only one and a half turns of the ruler, such was the memorized precision with which Stecyk had placed the tourniquet just at the crucial branch between the forearm’s ulnar and radial arteries. In the belling stillness after the saw’s blade stopped you could now hear the sounds of the pneumatic jack from the Intro Auto Mechanics classroom next door. It was also now, with the spray’s cessation, that Mr. Ingle lost consciousness, so that the last sight some of the taller boys at the flanks had was Stecyk cupping Mr. Ingle’s skull at the back like a child’s and gently lowering him — it, the big man’s head — to the floor with one hand while the other held the tourniquet in place at the upraised wrist, there being something both dancerly and maternal and yet not one bit girlish about the sight that reverberated within the souls of a few in strange ways for days and even weeks after they were shouldered aside and told to break it up and give the man some air by the Auto Mechanics and Appliance Repair teachers, who also were brisk and adultly unfrozen but did not try to move Len aside or ask the Home Ec aide to shoo him outside with all the others and their red footprints but rather stood like subalterns at either side of the man’s upraised arm with pendent thumb, awaiting instructions from the boy on whether they should wait for the ambulance or maybe try and put Mr. Ingle in one of their cheap but faultlessly tuned cars and rush him right to Calvin, speaking to Stecyk as more of a peer and being spoken to in return without deference or hesitation.

Voc Ed students tend not to be very sensitive or emotionally agile, and it would be too much to say that ‘everything changed’ after that day in Industrial Arts. It was not that Leonard Stecyk became popular, or that the hard boys started inviting him to come out with them on school nights to perpetrate vandalism or abuse gateway drugs. A few of them, though, were surprised — not ashamed so much as shaken — by their paralysis in the face of trauma and the noxious little faggot’s actions. It was strange. These were tough boys: They fought freely, took beatings from stepdads and older brothers. For the brightest among them, their idea of what toughness was, of the relations between coolness and actual value, had now been somewhat fucked with. Their accounts of the incident were confused and varied from boy to boy. More than one alluded to Lost in Space, which was a popular show at the time. The main change in the quality of the future DDP’s life was that most of the Stecyk Specials and sudden hallway punches in the upper arm’s radial nerve and other daily bits of cruelty ceased, mostly because a strange unease came over the hard boys when they saw or even thought of Stecyk, and real cruelty — as every adolescent knows — requires a close attention to the object of that cruelty. Stecyk’s actions that day did not make him more but less special; the hard boys ceased to see him or single him out. It was strange, and stranger still was how fast Stecyk himself forgot the whole thing, even after Mr. Ingle returned to C. E. Potter after Thanksgiving for his new duties as a Driver Ed instructor with his maimed right hand encased in some kind of protective black polyurethane glove or sheath, resulting in the student sobriquet ‘Dr. No’ throughout the early 1970s. Everyone seemed to have incentive to forget the whole thing. A Voc Ed hard boy who would serve in the Plaine des Joncs region of Indochina twenty months later was the only one with a clear conscious memory of Stecyk and Ingle’s thumb that one day, and this when a fat-body draftee who’d almost flunked Basic and been the object of a savage blanket party had taken a squad that had lost its corporal and regrouped them and brought them around between two separate NVA platoons to reform with Able Company; he had just stood up and told them to strip ordnance off the dead and form a defilade against the opposite side of the creekbed, and everyone had obeyed — unthinkingly, for reasons they could not later explain or admit — and the hard boy had thought of Stecyk in his little apron and paisley bow tie (the latter a distortion of memory) and of the fact, again, that what they’d then thought was the wide round world was a little boy’s preening dream.

Cusk had been ushered into the psychiatrist’s office and was counting the boxes of Kleenex in a little room lined with big books and diplomas. The sixth was on the little desk in the corner the psychiatrist used for filling out prescriptions. The office was minus the little sink some physicians had — he’d spent whole days girding himself for the sink. When his name had been called, Cusk had shaken the psychiatrist’s hand and taken a padded chair the psychiatrist’s other hand had indicated. The psychiatrist hitched her trousers up slightly at the knee and had sat down opposite Cusk across a glass coffee table on which were two boxes of Kleenex. Her hand had been large, warm, and soft. Her chair was the same model as Cusk’s chair — one, maybe two levels of comfort below an easy chair — but seemed, unless it was his imagination, to be slightly taller than his chair.

… ‘of spiders, of dogs, of mail,’ Cusk was listing — the psychiatrist listened intently, nodding, but did not take notes, which relieved Cusk—‘Fear of spiral notebooks, the kind with the spiral or wire down the spine; fear of fountain pens — though not felt-tip or ballpoint pens, unless the ballpoint is one of those expensive ones with an aspect of permanence — Cross, Montblanc, the kind that look gold — but not plastic or disposable ballpoints.’ Having exhausted Kleenex boxes to count, Cusk was mentally repeating ‘large, soft, and warm, large, soft and warm,’ over and over, a ruminative chant just below the level of thought.