Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

“No, you don’t. You all think I’m a clown.”

“You don’t have to die to prove your emotions are real.”

He balanced a foot on the bucket. “The world is an awful place, Mr. Callahan. I’ll never fit in here.”

Clark stuck his foot in the water and his finger in the light socket.

I rammed him as hard as I could with my shoulder. The momentum broke Clark free from the charge but not before I caught a stiff zap. I landed on my left side on the concrete porch and slid into a column. When I looked back, Clark lay on his face in the spreading water from the dumped bucket.

Clark was dead weight as I rolled him over on his back. His face had gone slack and gray. Both eyes were nearly closed, but not quite—twin egg-white slits showed in the folds. I felt his neck for a pulse but couldn’t find one, so I doubled up my fist and belted him in the chest. The body didn’t jerk or anything, was like hitting a sack of potatoes. I put my ear to his heart and held my own breath, listening. Nothing.

From the street someone called, “Is he all right?”

I grabbed hair and pulled Clark’s head back like they teach you in the artificial respiration films in high school. In the films, the victim’s mouth falls open and the savior goes to work, but in my case, Clark’s jaw locked. First I tried prying it open with my thumb, then I slapped him hard. No good.

I jumped off the porch and ran to the garage for a screwdriver. All the way across the yard, I rehearsed what my life would be like if I let him die. My life, Billy’s life, Clark’s mother, who must have been at the Prescott party too—losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to anyone, and being the cause of someone losing a child may be second.

Back at Clark’s body I jammed the screwdriver between his molars and twisted. I may have broken his teeth, I don’t know, but somehow I got him open. Some of the people from the street had come into the yard, but no one offered to help. I didn’t expect them to. Clark was my responsibility.

The door opened and Shannon appeared in the light, still wearing her grass skirt and leis.

I said, “Call an ambulance.”

She disappeared without a word. I pulled Clark’s head way back until he almost faced the wall, then, holding his tongue down with the screwdriver, I took a deep breath and put my mouth against his.

My lips on another man’s. You can be repulsed at the thought of something all your life and then not even think about it when the time comes to act. A minute ago touching a man on the face was the least likely thing I would ever do.

A shadow crossed the rectangle of light and Eugene knelt beside me. He was dressed in a gorilla costume with no head.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Clark’s chest rose when I blew into him, but when I stopped, so did he. “Clark Gaines. Billy’s boy.”

“Why isn’t he breathing?”

“Electrocuted himself.”

I don’t know if the information meant anything to Eugene or not. He probably didn’t remember the name Billy Gaines, and if he did, I doubt if he connected his attempt at finding me something to do with this body on the porch.

Eugene used his teeth to pull off his gorilla paws. “Move up closer to the head,” he said. He put his palms on Clark’s chest and pumped. I went into a three exhalations, then listen pattern. Clark’s lungs would work one or two breaths, then stop again. He wasn’t dead, but he couldn’t stay alive on his own.

Shannon reappeared with jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers. “You’ll need them in the ambulance,” she said.

“Call Billy Gaines and tell him to meet us at the hospital. Moses Cone is closest, so I guess that’s where they’ll take him.”

“Okay.”

“Billy was at Skip Prescott’s a half hour ago. He might still be there.”

Shannon started to ask a question, but didn’t. She moved to go inside, then turned back to me again. “He’ll want to know what happened; what do I tell him?”

I had no answer.

The ambulance attendants stuck paddles onto Clark’s chest and jolted him with a battery and got him going, then at the hospital he stopped again in the emergency room. I watched him start and stop until a nurse spotted me in the corner and chased me into the waiting room.

Billy, Skip, Cameron, and a woman I didn’t know sat on pastel chairs like you see in institutional cafeterias. The waiting room walls were legal pad yellow and the tube lighting buzzed. Hart to Hart played on an elevated TV with a bad picture and no sound. Robert Wagner wore a tuxedo while Stephanie Powers pounded out her next best-seller.

Skip glared at me in blatant hatred, but Billy came over and shook my hand and thanked me for bringing Clark in. He introduced me to his wife, Daphne.

“I don’t understand why Clark was at your house,” she said.

Billy and I stared at the tile floor. He was still in shock at having a son who’d attempted suicide. He hadn’t gotten around to blame yet.

Skip had. And Cameron. My fathers had hated me from the start and now they hated me with good reason, which made them more confident in their hatred. Cameron still wore the three-piece suit he’d been in when he came to threaten me earlier in the day. Skip had on the tennis shorts uniform. It was hard to see anything the two had in common besides Skip’s sister and my mother.

Hart to Hart ended and the news came on and went off while we sat in silence. Every now and then an orderly or a nurse came through and everyone looked up expectantly. The nurses were professional at ignoring people in the waiting room. Billy cleaned his glasses. Twice he asked Daphne if she wanted a Coca-Cola and both times she said “No.” Skip smoked a cigarette.

I thought about how I would feel if Shannon killed herself. That’s what fiction writers do—see someone in trouble and try to feel what they feel. If Shannon committed suicide, I couldn’t conceive of ever recovering. People do live through it, but I don’t know how. Maybe they have no choice.

I watched the side of Billy’s face as he blinked, his attention on Daphne. His face wasn’t sneaky or complicated; it accepted, like an animal. Innocent. I got in a fight once to stop a kid from killing kittens, but what I’d done to Billy was so much worse than killing kittens. All that pride I took in knowing right from wrong and refusing to do wrong had turned out nothing but hooey. Accidental cruelty is just as evil as doing it on purpose.

The emergency room doctor was Egyptian, I think. He looked Egyptian and wore a name tag that said Dr. Faroub. He walked with that straight-up way you never see in Americans.

He came toward me, fingering the stethoscope in his jacket pocket. “Your son, he will live.”

My stomach unclenched. “Not my son. His.”

Dr. Faroub turned to Billy. “The boy suffered a grand mal seizure, which brought on heart failure. He should lose weight and receive counseling. Counseling is a help for the children.”

Billy shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for saving him.”

“Suicide is illegal, you know.”

“How can you tell he did it on purpose?” Daphne asked, which might have been a meaningless question if anyone but Clark had stepped in a wired bucket of water and stuck their finger in a light socket.

Dr. Faroub looked from Daphne to Billy. “The boy had a note in his pocket saying he wanted his body going to the Duke Medical School…so his father couldn’t touch him.”

Daphne raised her hand to her cheek. Of all my extended family members, she was the one who’d been left in the dark. “Clark idolizes his father,” she said.