Joyce Oates - Sourland

Nobody’s thinking clearly any longer except me, David thought grimly.

The night before, he’d been working on geometry problems in his bedroom after he’d been supposed to turn off his lights at 11 P.M. weekdays. Then he’d gone to bed and was wakened, it seemed, almost immediately, by his mother’s panicked cry outside his door, and from that moment onward the world’s surfaces had become tilted and slip sliding. Always he would be hearing Help! Help us! in a woman’s terrified voice he’d hardly identified as belonging to his mother. Something has happened to my husband!

(And that, too, was strange to his ears: My husband. )

So Mr. Rainey who’d been Dadda, the children’s father, was taken away by ambulance in the night. Now the Raineys had to know themselves unprotected by God or by the general good fortune they’d taken for granted. As Kit-Kit told David, swiping at her nose with a look of somber disbelief, “I guess anything can happen to us now. Anything. ”

The father hadn’t died, though he’d been near unconscious and on an oxygen machine, three hours in the emergency room and eleven hours in intensive care and then transferred to room 833, a private room where at last anxious relatives could visit him, cautioned not to crowd around his bed and not to tire him. The diagnosis was not a heart attack exactly but severe atrial fibrillation, with a possibility of blood clots in the heart and elsewhere.

It isn’t him, I don’t know him. Who is it? Amid the tense whispery talk it was the Raineys’ youngest son who held back, shyly staring at his father in the cranked-up hospital bed. Overnight the father had become strangely sunken chested and feeble lying there in a hospital gown through which his graying chest hair faintly glowered, only fifty-one years old (but, thought David, fifty-one is old) yet stricken as if with a sledgehammer. Into his bruised right forearm two IV tubes were running, attached to clear-liquid sacs on poles beside the bed; around his upper left arm a blood-pressure cuff was tightly wrapped, and this cuff was timed to take readings every few minutes with a peculiar whirring sound. (The patient’s vital signs, as they were called — heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure — were indicated on a monitor in his room and in a nurses’ station: if one of the readings dipped or soared too much, an emergency alarm would be sounded and help would come running.) When it was David’s turn to speak with his father, he didn’t know what to say as the pale, squinting man in the bed smiled at him, fumbling for his hand, icy cold the man’s fingers, poor Dadda — as if this stranger was Dadda or could ever have been. “Davy, don’t worry — I’m a little under the weather — all these drugs they’re pumping into me — ” his father was saying, insisting, as if there weren’t a reason for the powerful drugs or for his being in this strange place, and David smiled anxiously and nodded, having to lean close to hear his father’s voice. For overnight the change was upon Mr. Rainey, you could see it, and you could smell it — “don’t worry, I’ll be home soon, I promise. Things will be as before. I love you” — this, David couldn’t be certain he’d heard, his face crinkling suddenly like a baby’s, and this was the signal for his mother to embrace him, or to try, as if he weren’t thirteen years old — but the Goat was quick to sidestep her, mumbling words that might have been See you later! or Leave me alone.

They let him go. Knowing he wouldn’t go far. To a men’s lavatory on the floor. To hide, to cry.

It was like he’d been tricked. And he didn’t know who to blame.

The Goat, or Little Goat, was so called because as a very small child he’d scampered up stairs before he could walk, on hands and knees like a frisky kid. Meems and Dadda laughed at him in delight and clapped. Look at that baby billy goat climbing the mountain! The Goat was proud of his talent, wouldn’t have known that such talent was only just showing off for the family. And long after he’d ceased scampering up stairs in the big old red-brick house on Upchurch Street, he’d be known within the family as the Goat, as his sister was Kit-Kit, and his brothers were Pike and Billy-o. And none of this sad, silly stuff mattered in the slightest in the real world.

That night kneeling bare-kneed on the hardwood floor in a corner of his bedroom. Let something of mine be taken! He was breathless and fearful as if God in whom he didn’t believe might be in the very room with him. Let my father be returned to us.

It would be a simple trade, barter. It would be a secret transaction. None of the others would know. Not even Father.

For it was a fact: all was changed now. Even if his father’s heartbeat could be returned to normal. Even if there were no clots sifting through his blood to strike him dead like bullets. Even if the house on Upchurch Street that looked now as if winds had blown through the rooms, where the phone was forever ringing, returned to normal. His father had promised things would be as before but David no longer believed his father. For nothing could be as before . He was angry that they’d think him so young, and credulous, to believe such a lie.

It was like a theorem in his geometry text. It was irrefutable. There is no before without after .

In the dark he went to his desk, switched on a lamp, and took up his geometry compass. He stabbed the sharp point into the palm of his left hand and pressed, grunting with the surprise of the pain. The skin was punctured and blood oozed grudgingly out. His upper lip was beaded with sweat. Push it all the way through, like a spike.

The compass slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor gleaming faintly with blood.

Coward.

“The Cheetah” — so David called the boy, in secret.

This was the person, David believed, who’d been crying in the men’s lavatory the first day of the Raineys’ vigil at the medical center.

He was a slender, handsome, foreign-looking boy of about fourteen whose father, too, was a heart patient in the cardiac unit. In room 837, two doors from 833. David began noticing him on the second day. After that, he couldn’t not notice him. The boy was “foreign” though dressed like an American teenager in jeans, T-shirt, expensive running shoes. He spoke English with no evident accent (that David could overhear) though his relatives, crowded into room 837, spoke a language David couldn’t recognize, or heavily accented English the medical staff had trouble understanding. Maybe they were Middle Eastern? Turks, Lebanese, Arabs? Or were they Pakistanis? Or — Portuguese? Their language was rapid, harsh, and sometimes sibilant, teasingly familiar to David (from TV?) yet mysterious. In David’s suburban school there were few ethnic or minority students and most of these were Asian-Americans. The Cheetah was black haired, olive skinned, with distinctive features that reminded David of a cat’s, and he was catlike in his movements, restless, inclined to impatience. Sometimes he appeared stricken with grief; at other times he looked sulky, even bored. He and David often saw each other in the eighth-floor corridor, in the visitors’ lounge, just stepping out of an elevator, with relatives, or alone, eyes turned downward. The Cheetah was taller than David by several inches, about five foot five. He only vaguely acknowledged David, with a glance, though David was certain he recognized him. The Cheetah was the most striking boy of his age that David had ever seen up close.