T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The night had suddenly grown dark again. In the garish glow of the embers, Phil’s face looked like some Polish Christ’s, gaunt and long-nosed, suffused with suffering. Gesh’s hair stood straight out from his head, his face was blackened, the yellow strips of the aloha shirt trailed from him as if he were peeling. I was trying to catch my breath, experience relief, savor the first few moments of life without frenzy, when Gesh turned to me, the lines of his face underscored with soot and locked in the grid of rage he wore into battle. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he growled. “Can’t you see Phil’s got to be taken to the hospital?”

I glanced at Phil. His right arm had crusted over and the welts on his chest and shoulders were raw; a slashing wet wound cut back into his hairline. He was a mess. “Can you …?” I began, turning to Gesh. I meant to ask if he was sure he could handle things in the event the fire started up again, but I was jittery still and unable to find the words. As I faltered, the brush began to flare in a pocket out by the propane tank.

“I can drive myself,” Phil said, so softly I could barely hear him. He looked like the survivor of a DC-10 crash, his clothes reduced to rags, body scorched, hair gone.

“Bullshit,” Gesh said. “You take him, Felix.”

I felt sapped, felt as if I’d just come off a two-week shift in the coal mine — felt as if I’d been trapped in a coal mine, for that matter, buried under tons of hot rock, breathing noxious fumes and drinking beakers of acid. My shoulders and arms ached, I was bleeding in half a dozen places, my hands stung as if I’d dipped them in a deep fryer and then rubbed them with alcohol. I felt like shit, but I also felt transcendent, exhilarated, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. I’d stayed with it, fought the odds like a square-jawed hero, and won. “Sure,” I said.

Gesh had already begun to move off toward the presumptuous little blaze licking at the propane tank, but he paused to look me in the eye. “Go,” he said, and it sounded like a benediction.

Trees cowered along the road, signposts and mileage markers backed off like startled animals, the pavement itself seemed to plunge away from the clutch of the headlights as if dropping into oblivion. It was four a.m. by the dashboard clock, and I was coming into Willits at eighty, Jerpbak and his jackbooted legions be damned: I was the one on urgent business this time. Full of grace, the lark ascending, survivor, victor, hardass, I took the curves like a teenager with identity problems and sucked the straightaways into the future with a blast of exhaust. A road sign — it sprang up like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show and then vanished instantaneously — announced the city limits. SPEED LIMIT 35. I slowed to sixty. Through the town center, past the nightglow of the Willits Diner, the neon lure of motels and quick-stop restaurants, stoplights falling away like leaves in a windstorm, noli me tangere.

Phil slouched in the death seat, eyes lidded. His neck had sunk into his chest and his head pitched and rolled with the road’s abrasions, his face impossibly heavy, a thing of stone. He hadn’t uttered a word since we’d left the farm. Was he asleep? In shock? Withdrawn in the web of his pain like a crippled animal, like a dog licking its mangled paw in the dark void beneath the house? I glanced over at him. He’d propped himself against the window, raw back arching away from contact with the seat, his near shoulder stippled with blisters, pitted, cratered, rough as toadskin. “You okay?” I whispered, watching the road. He began to cough into his fist. I stepped on the gas. “Another minute, Phil,” I murmured, lurching round the only other vehicle on the road — a creeping heedless bread truck — with a desperate jerk of the wheel. Phil didn’t even lift his head.

The hospital was like a medieval leprosarium, poorly lighted, neglected, falling into ruin. Cheap additions fanned out from the main building like the wings of a crippled bird, the sloping drive was afflicted with potholes, slabs of pale green stucco peeled from the walls like sloughed skin. I thundered past the lions couchant and Ionic columns of the main entrance (long since boarded up) and did a sloppy power slide into the AMBULANCE ONLY/NO PARKING/TOW AWAY zone in front of the emergency entrance. Phil clawed his way out of the car as if emerging from a tomb and tottered toward the doorway on stiff legs, his fists clenched at his sides. I swung open the door for him and we found ourselves in a scuffed hallway cluttered with plastic plants, cheap furniture and collapsible wheelchairs.

“Yes?” The night nurse sat stiffly at a pine desk outside the emergency room, alert as a three-headed dog. She was blond, forty, a victim of dry skin and a lifetime of suppressing emotion. Beyond her I saw a dull wash of light, a clutter of chairs, the janitor, feet up, white socks, masticating a bologna sandwich and devouring a Louis L’Amour Western.

“We’ve had an accident,” I said.

“Name?”

“Mine or his?”

Bent over a printed form, her pen poised to record information, the nurse’s cap cleaving her head like a scythe, she expelled a long withering depthless sigh of exasperation. “The name of the individual to be admitted,” she said without looking up.

Phil croaked out his name.

“Sex? Age? Height? Weight? Medical insurance? Allergies?” The questions came like body blows in a prizefight, cumulative, unending, wearying. Phil stood there in the sepia light, burned raw, the collar of his incinerated T-shirt still clinging to his neck, charred underwear poking through the holes in his pants. We were both in blackface.

“Look,” I said, cutting her off in mid-phrase — was she really asking about his bank account? — “the man is in pain, can’t you see that?”

“Savings?”

Phil looked as if he were about to go down for the count. “Crocker,” he gasped.

“Major credit card? Next of kin? Religion?”

“Listen,” I said. She ignored me.

“Sign here.” As she pushed the form toward Phil, she focused her colorless eyes on him for the first time, and I saw with a jolt that there was nothing there. Neither curiosity nor concern, sympathy or interest. She might have been home in bed, dancing in a casino, married to the Aga Khan. But she was here. In Willits. At four-ten in the morning. She’d witnessed resuscitation and expiration, stroke, hemorrhage and loss of hope, seen the human form twisted and degraded, hacked, torn, bathed in blood, pus, mucus, urine, she’d seen blue babies and blanched corpses. We were nothing. Scabs, vermin, dirt. The contact lenses clung to her eyes like blinders.

Phil signed.

As Phil stooped painfully to drag pen across paper, the doctor appeared as if on cue. He came flashing through the emergency-room door in a pristine scrub shirt, young, perfect, his head a mass of imbricate hair, mustache impeccable, teeth aligned, skin clear. “Well,” he crooned, jocular as an anchorman delivering the news of three hundred thousand fatalities in a Hunan earthquake, “so we’ve had a little mishap?” He was winking, nodding, grinning, as if we were sixth graders caught in some minor peccancy — playing with matches or peeping into the girls’ locker room. “Sensitive, is it? Yes, yes,” he purred, taking Phil by the elbow and steering him toward the back room in a flurry of one-liners and sympathetic tongue-clucks. As they passed through the doorway I heard the doctor’s voice rise in screaming falsetto as he broke into a mock Negro dialect: “And then she says, ’Lordy, lordy, this dude done got burned!’ “ There was a single wild bray of laughter, and then the door swung to with a click.