T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I took a seat in the waiting room. The janitor had finished his sandwich and was tenderly examining the ball of his right foot, from which he’d removed the sock. A bucket of filthy water stood beside him. the mop handle protruding from it like a reed in a swamp. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I was feeling weary, numb, the stirrings of a nameless dread pounding in my organs like jungle drums, a subtle chemical abstersion flushing my veins of the adrenaline that had kept me going over the past two hours. Freud, coming down off his cocaine, knew the feeling. So did Sherlock Holmes and the speed freaks on Haight Street. I’d felt exultant, energized, potent, rushing with stamina and inspiration, and now all I felt was empty. It was over, the crisis past. I’d consumed enough vodka before the fire erupted to be drunk now, but I didn’t feel drunk at all. I felt tired. Frightened. Depressed. I opened my eyes once and saw that the janitor hadn’t moved — he was fixed in the cloudy frame of my vision, feet forever white, rubbing, rubbing.

When I woke, the janitor was sloshing dirty water across the floor and the beaming physician was standing over me. “Your friend,” he said, “Phil?”

I nodded, rubbing my eyes. “Yeah?”

“He’s been burned pretty severely — right shoulder, right forearm, chest, back, hands — and he’s lost a lot of fluid.” He was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning like a talk-show host.

“Is he going to be all right?”

Oh, he was beaming now, this doctor. There was no cancer in his body, he’d never bled, bruised or burned, his heart was like a piston. This was the question he’d been waiting for, this the reason he’d poked at preserved cadavers in a chilly basement in Guadalajara and interned at Cleveland General — for this moment and the infinitude of others like it. He was in no danger. He jogged ten miles a day, forswore tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, cholesterol, food additives and TV. But Phil? “We’ll have to keep him overnight. At least.”

The doctor wasn’t moving. He was winking again now, nodding and tossing his eyebrows like a stray Marx brother. “What about you?” he said, looking down at my hands.

“Me?” It hadn’t occurred to me that I might need treatment, too. I lifted my hands and examined them as if I’d never seen them before.

“You’ve got a second-degree burn there.” He smiled. “Blistering, extravasated fluid, risk of infection.” He looked pleased with himself.

Ten minutes later I was bent over the nurse’s desk, a pain killer dissolving in the pit of my stomach, my hands imprisoned in gauze. The sixty questions had passed the nurse’s lips, the responses had been duly recorded and the form shoved at me for confirmation. I was fumbling with the pen, struggling awkwardly with my gauze mittens and attempting a clonic, looping two-handed signature, when the outside door flew back with the sort of histrionic boom that announces Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust. Windows rattled up and down the corridor, a dull metallic echo resounded from deep in the hospital’s bowels. I looked up. Bullet head, frozen spine, boots like truncheons: Officer Jerpbak stepped through the doorway.

He was not alone. Cradled in his right arm, dead weight, was a Halloween ghoul, a bloodslick puppet, an extra from a sleazy flick about knife-wielding maniacs. Heels dragged, blood flowed. Signal 30, I thought, disintegrating sports cars, overturned logging trucks, head wounds, multiple contusions. I backed off as Jerpbak, one arm thrown out for balance, staggered down the hallway under his burden. I’d never seen so much blood. It maculated the floor, darkened the front of Jerpbak’s uniform, blotted the features of the limp, spike-haired kid locked under his arm. Jerpbak’s face was drained, the hard line of his mouth unsteady: he looked up at me and saw nothing.

The nurse’s pen was poised, her head bent to yet another form. “Name?” she said, barely glancing up. Jerpbak stood before the desk, dazed, bewildered, his mouth working in agitation — there was a wild, urgent look in his eye, the look of the harried shopper bursting into the kitchen with four splitting sacks of groceries and no place to set them down. He’d lurched to a confused halt, bracing his legs to support the kid’s weight, right arm girdling the kid’s chest, left cradling his head: bloody Mary, bloody Jesus. The kid was unconscious. His leather jacket shone wet with blood, blood like oil, black and slickly glistening; his face looked as if it had been slathered with finger paint, as if a twenty-five-cent bamboo back scratcher had been dipped in a pot of gouty red enamel and raked over his eyelids, nose, cheekbones, mouth. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I saw the lids roll back like defective shades, I saw the dull lifeless sheen of his eyes.

“Goddammit!” Jerpbak leaned forward to slam the desk with the flat of his hand. “Are you alive or what?” He was addressing the nurse. Roaring at her. Barking out the question, his voice a primal yelp that cut through the nurse’s apathy like the physical threat it was: she’d seen it all, yes, and now she was seeing this. She sprang from her chair as if she’d been stung, took the room in five amazing strides and plunged through the emergency-room door like a diver. At the Game time, Jerpbak lost his grip on the inert kid and staggered forward with him, inadvertently slamming the kid’s body across the desk like a slab of boneless meat — if he hadn’t caught himself at the last second he would have fallen atop him. I heard the sound of an electric motor starting up somewhere down the corridor, the lights dimmed, then came back up. Jerpbak leaned over the prostrate kid like a beast over his bloody prey, breathing hard. Then he pushed himself up from the table as if he were doing a calisthenic, caught my eyes — his were punctured with shock — and reeled into the waiting room shouting incoherently.

I saw the white flash of the janitor’s hair as he looked up from his mop, and then the young doctor pushed through the swinging doors and into the waiting room, his face rushing with hilarity as he rehearsed his stock of cops-and-robbers jokes. He looked first at Jerpbak, the grin turning quizzical, and then beyond him to where the kid’s limp form was flung across the desk.

His face went cold. Forget the charm-school manners, the easy quips, pain with a smile: this was no joke. He was on the kid in an instant, a man with a thousand hands — checking for heartbeat, clearing nose and mouth, stanching the flow of blood — all the while shouting instructions over his shoulder. I watched as nurses, orderlies, aides — a hidden white-clad army — slammed through the door with a jangling gurney, descending on the kid like a snowstorm.

Jerpbak, his uniform dark with the kid’s blood, stood at the doctor’s back, tugging abstractedly at his own stiff shirtcuffs. “He fell,” Jerpbak said, as if it mattered, “fell and hit his head.” The doctor gave him a quick sharp glance and then he was gone, the gurney squealing across the wet floor, voices parrying, the flurrying hands concentrated now on the kid’s face and head.

The whole episode, beginning to end, had taken no more than sixty seconds. Jerpbak stood with his back to me, watching as the gurney was swallowed up in the embrace of the swinging doors. The night nurse had vanished; the janitor shook his head slowly and went back to swabbing the floor, erasing the gurney’s tracks with a sleepy dreamlike motion. The form I’d signed lay on the desk still, a single smear of blood cutting it in two. I lowered my head, put one foot in front of the other and walked down the hallway and out into the night.

Amber light, red. Jerpbak’s patrol car stood at the curb, engine running, rack lights flashing. At first glance the car seemed empty, and I was shuffling toward the Toyota, thinking only to get out of there before Jerpbak turned his mind to other matters, when I was arrested by the pale glimmer of a face floating in the obscurity of the back-seat window. I saw the glint of an earring, the turned-up collar of a sad leather jacket like the one the kid had been wearing, a pair of pinned mournful eyes. I came closer. Behind the stark wire mesh of that back-seat prison I knew only too well, a second kid sat, the desolation of his face punctuated by the sickle-shaped bruise under his right eye. I stared at him. His tongue flicked out to lick a split lip, the radio crackled, the engine stuttered and then caught again. He was a tough guy, this kid, sixteen years old. He looked as if he’d been crying.