“See you at school!” he called. “Don't tell my idea!”
Harv's sister stood behind the counter, our cardboard box merrily steaming. The guy in the wheelchair still waited for his order, hands folded in his lap, reminding me uncomfortably of my mom.
“I rushed it through,” she announced coolly, “so you could be on your way.”
As we walked back to the car, each kid propping up a side of the box, I saw that Harv was already gone. Just the pay phone dangling by its cord.
Those tiny bald flecks had been left by the staples they'd used to put his head back together. And how badly could Harv use some of that James Jones money? And who could bring that to resolution but me? I hadn't done nearly enough for my students, that was clear as Sprite, and though there was a telephone at home I couldn't walk back through my orderly front door until I'd talked to someone from Dockside.
“Deb,” I said, “please just drive them up the hill. I'll walk up in a minute.”
“Do, do you want us to wait for you?”
“Dad?” Josie called from the back seat. “What's going on?”
“Climb in for pizza!” Ray yelled.
“Easy, easy, guys. I'll catch up.”
Deb rolled down the driver-side window. “Is this really what they need right now? Whatever this is can't wait ten minutes?”
“Stephen Hawking,” I told her, not knowing what the hell I was saying, “maybe didn't have ten minutes.”
As the car drifted up the street I trotted across to the pay phone. The bus must've come because the people waiting had disappeared, or maybe Amber had pulled up in a convertible and invited Harv and the old people to a nitrite-dripping sex party.
Dr. Reid's fax came out of my pants pocket. His sender's number across the top read 805-504-9090, which seemed weird since that wasn't a Nebraska area code.
Contact person at site:
Rob Aiken, 402-466-9807 (cell.)
I slid my Visa card through the slot and dialed. A breeze pushed an empty Lucky Strikes pack up the sidewalk toward me while I listened to one ring follow another.
“Yeah? Hello?”
Sounded like our tour guide had maybe had a few beer.
“Hi, yes, this Peter Giller, we met on Friday? The field trip from Hoover?”
Nine-second pause. Glasses clinking in the background?
“This isn't such a good time for me. What do you want exactly?”
“Well, after our visit and the, uh, the spill, the students and I have experienced some side effects.”
Not loss of appetite, numbing of extremities, weight loss, hair loss or colorectal disastersâthose were Lydia's side effects. I'd moved on to something new.
“Okay, yeah,” Rob said blandly.
“I was wondering whether you might be able to give some insight into what we're, um, experiencingâwhether we can expect it to get more intense or if it'll calm down before too long.”
“You talking about the bacon, wanting bacon?” A long, ragged sigh. And wheels on gravel? “No, from what I've heard that doesn't quit. What about the temper, smashing things up, has that started?”
Ten feet away, an elderly woman crept up to the bus stop, her purse's strap clutched in her hands like it was a weight she could hardly bear.
“Nothing like that has happened,” I lied, just to see how he'd predict the other stupid things I'd already done.
“All right.” He yawned. “Maybe you ought to bring your people out to see my people.”
“What, at the factory? Hey, did you talk to this James Jones?”
“Jones.
No sé
. And, no, not at DocksideâOld Man Penzler's seen the last of me. You know Lancaster County?”
“Way out east, sure, around Lincoln? I'm from Pawnee.”
“Yeah, we've got sort of a new facility out there. I'm going that way now. Get out to where Route 77 meets the interstate, then call me again, all right?”
“And would this be for a meaningful conversation between the two of us, or should I haul these kids two hundred miles too?”
“Ah!” His chuckle sounded like a shot glass rattling inside another. “Another night or two, you won't need me to answer that.”
“Hey, why be a jackass? All we want is some kind of answer ifâ”
“I don't have an answer but we've got a solution, how's that sound? All right, looks like I'm getting pulled over,” said Rob. “Look forward to seeing you.”
I looked down at the receiver as though it might say something of its own volition.
Get thee to Velouria, why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners?
The bus-stop woman shifted a patent-leather shoe on the concrete.
“Excuse me.” I hung up the phone. “Do any buses head up toward Hawthorne?”
“This next.” She wore a single dot of pink lipstick. “We can go together!”
Deb must've believed
that if you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all, because the instant I bounded onto the porch she hurried out for that evening's power walk. The kids and I played Hungry Hungry Hippos and when Ray put a marble up his nose I didn't even lose my cool. Good, right? Then I was sitting at the table mowing through cold pizza with that weekend's
Hoover Hunter-Gatherer
up in front of meâonly thing suspicious out of Velouria was an attempted truck-jackingâwhen Ray apparently thought it'd be hilarious to knock the newspaper out of my hands with a hammer because the same thing had happened to the tipsy admiral in
The Little Wretch
. I saw his white-socked feet shuffle up, then the hammer tore through the sports page like a fork of lightning, bisecting the Orioles' catcher until the steel claw embedded itself in the base of the ring finger of my left hand.
It happened as fast as that. I stared down at that hammer's silver head, streaked with rust and now a single unit with my body, and did I scream? No. I thought,
Ah, yes. This makes sense, it's all been building up to this exact thing
.
“Oh,” I told Ray. “Let's be careful here.”
I yanked the claw out of the pale finger then dropped a burgundy placemat over my hand while Ray shrank against the wall. His hands were little white balls and it looked like his neck was trying to eat his chin.
“A hammer is for what?” I asked.
“It's for⦔
“It's for driving a
nail
, Bugface, you do not use it on
people
. Josie?” I called, voice straining only slightly. “Take Ray down and turn on
SpongeBob
, okay?”
He forced a tight smile, pale even under that blond hair.
“Sorry, Dad,” he said. “I didn't mean toâ”
And once they'd thumped down the stairs I finally lifted the placematâI would deal with it on my own before Deb came home. Something yellow showed inside the cut and I figured that might be bone. But it still didn't hurt.
In the bathroom I wiped it with a Kleenex and put Neosporin in the cut.
“Pyjamas!” I called down the stairs.
Deb read them their stories while I sat in the kitchen with an ice pack on the hand, then she went to bed herself. I could still make a fist. While I was brushing my teeth I tugged at the poor finger to see if the bone would click out of place or go a little wobbly.
Instead the finger snapped off in my hand.
No spray of good red blood, just a few drops of purple. The thing just looked wrong, sitting there in the palm of my right hand, and my left hand with a gap where my ring finger had been looked even more wrong, but it still didn't even sting, and I thought of those lizards that lose their tails for self-preservationâthat can't
hurt
the lizard, can it? The shock would kill them. The shock ought to have killed Amber on Monday morning, too, and if it
had
killed her I would've been standing there on my porch with my useless arms at my sides. Wasn't I capable of more than that? I needed the bacon, sure, but I couldn't allow bacon to cloud my brain anymore.
I glanced at myself in the mirrorâmy eyes looked enormousâthen dropped the finger into the breast pocket of my pyjamas and spat my toothpaste into the sink.
I took my tool kit out of the broom closet, found the staple gun, and with four half-inch staples, two on each side, I reattached the fingerâthose webs of skin between the digits gave me some raw material. Eric had been right to recommend staples. I lived in the science-fiction future where dogs sat on the toilet.
“How'd that happen?” asked Josie.
She stood in her nightgown in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of apple juice.
“Ray got a little rough,” I said, stowing the tool kit.
“But no emergency room, right?”
I shook my head.
“Can we get, um, pizza again tomorrow?”
“Grandma probably still wants hamburgers.” I let my left hand lay flat on my pyjama leg. “You know you'll need to brush your teeth again after you drink that.”
She grinned like we were in an ad, showing a mouthful of teeth perfect as Chiclets.
Her
kids would have perfect teeth too. Things would come up roses for my kids even if they'd already lost a parent and a parental finger.
Thursday, October 27.
With a constant
knot of bacon in my gut I'd gone on teaching for three more days, battling successfully to keep my cool when students handed in half-digested worksheets or Ray forgot to flush, tugging my ear so relentlessly that the lobe scabbed over. I'd only seen my Chemistry 11 kids out in the parking lot, driving doughnuts in their parents' cars until Cam waved them off-site.
But on the Thursday morning, I'd finished our bacon supply at four
am
, and someone had eaten that jar of congealed grease too, so as the sun climbed up the horizon I drove to 7-Eleven in my burgundy UC Denver sweatpants, on a mission!
When the doctors had started keeping Lydia overnight, she'd sent me home each evening with nineteen-point to-do lists describing bedtime snacks, breakfasts, recess snacks, lunches, pyjamas, school clothes, dishes, garbage pickups, emptying the litter box when we'd still had the cat, relatives and friends I needed to keep in the loop, homework journals I needed to initial and shows I needed to confirm the TiVo had recorded even though it'd be too late to do anything if it hadn'tâI'd loved those lists of things I was perpetually qualified to accomplish, because otherwise in those days I'd been useless as a dead battery, capable only of nodding hopefully at the parade of doctors, squeezing Lydia's fingers, swollen from chemo, and reassuringly ruffling the kids' hair so often it had gone thin at the back. My heart had enjoyed a half-beat thrill whenever she'd slipped a scrawled-on gift-shop receipt into my hand.
A tractor towing a load of hay rolled slowly across the intersection.
With enough bacon, I could teach through most of the day before I drove out to Velouria to hopefully receive a single pragmatic answer to our manifold problems. I'd tried phoning the Dockside number that information had given me but hadn't even heard an answering machineâit was the kind of business that didn't need much contact with the public.
“Truck from Fontaine should've been here yesterday morning,” muttered the green-smocked 7-Eleven clerk, gnawing a fingernail. “But we got no word from 'em whatsoever.”
“Wait. You're saying you're
sold out
of bacon?”
No grocery stores opened before nine so I drove home, stinging earlobe pressed between my fingertips, and ate the eggs and toast Deb put in front of me. I thanked her, kissed Josie and Ray on their clean little temples and walked out to the car while something yawned wide inside me.
Halfway to Hoover High, my lane of traffic was brought to a stop by a flagman in a hard hat. They were laying a new sidewalk along the far side of the road and their machines cluttered the pavement. In the rearview mirror I watched the driver behind me dig patiently in her nose. I wasn't running late, and after thirty seconds or a minute, tops, I knew they'd stop the oncoming traffic to give our lane its turn. But I got out of my car, in tie and pressed white shirt, and ran between the oncoming cars to get over to that new sidewalk.
“Sir?” the flagman yelled. “Hey!”
The sidewalk crew wore hard hats and fluorescent vests. The foreman stood with his back to me, hands on his hips, while the other five or six guys all kneeled, smoothing out the cement with their big flat trowels. With the heel of my shiny-black dress shoe I kicked the foreman in the small of his back. His head snapped back and his hard hat tumbled off as he squelched hands-first into the wet cement.
The guys on their knees squinted up at me. One of the cars behind me honked its hornâ
Watch out, workers! Crazy guy!â
right as the
foreman sprang to his feet like he extricated himself from wet cement a hundred times a day, a sinewy-armed little guy with a half-cemented moustache. I threw a punch but he ducked underneath then shoved me hard in the chest, as if to say
I don't even want to fight you, asshole, I just want you the hell off my site.
I stumbled backward, caught my feet in a coil of something and fell onto my back.
I tried to sit back up but couldn't somehowâfelt like my right shoulder was stapled in place. I couldn't figure out why, my eyes roamed around for some explanation. All the sidewalk guys were on their feet by then, hot for my blood, but they only walked as far as their foreman and stopped dead.
“Aw, fuck,” one of them said.
I finally looked at the shoulder itself. A six-inch hunk of rebar had been set into that particular piece of ground, and I'd fallen on it so that a good three inches of steel, streaked with that purple blood, protruded from my shirt front. I heard a lady in a car start hollering.
“Don't try to move,” the foreman said. “Call an ambulance, Jim.”
“I'm all right,” I said.
The problem was that I'd fallen straight onto the rod, and of course when you try to sit up from lying down your shoulders aren't still parallel to the ground, it's more like 45 degrees, and the rebar wasn't going to pop out like that. So I wriggled my heels against my bum and I got my left shoulder under me, then pushed so my right shoulder went straight up. The muscle made a sucking noise as the rebar moved through it, but then I was finally unpinned and dropped onto my side in the dirt.
“Aw, fuck!” the workers said, and knelt beside me.
After a couple of deep breaths I didn't feel too bad.
Don't let a school bus drive by
, I thought,
or Cam will call goddamn Kirsten McAvoy
. I rolled over and climbed to my feet. I wasn't even woozy, though my stomach grumbled. I smoothed down my tie.
“I can't apologize enough,” I told the men, then sucked back another long breath. “If I've put you out any expense, just let me know. My name's Peter Giller, I work up at the high school.”
They kept looking up and down between me and my long-lost rebar. The flagman was staring with his sign down at his knees so traffic wasn't moving in either direction. I jogged across to my car. I'd left the engine running so I pulled straight out into the oncoming lane, mouthed a
Sorry!
to the twitching foreman and sped off toward school. Never even fastened my seatbelt!
I parked behind the metal shop so I could go in through the cafeteria entrance. Mrs. Abel was by the oven, dolloping out a sheet's worth of cookie dough, and I asked whether she might have a little bacon that I could come back and eat after homeroomâI didn't have to tell her I preferred it burnt because that was the only way she cooked it. I grinned at her, full of hope, but she just stared back at me. A poster beside the cash register read
we will be writing letters to urge congress to sponsor d. r. congo's women & children as refugees, in the cafeteria after school thursday, the more the merrier this will save lives, questions? Grace â locker #174.
“You can't teach like that,” Mrs. Abel informed me.
I looked down and saw that my white dress shirtâmy only new one since Lydia had first been diagnosedâsported two gray handprints across the chest, a livid purple streak down one side like I'd been painted with a roller, and a small hole in the shoulder.
“Sure I can.” I wiped my hair off my forehead. “What do these kids know?”
So instead of cooking my bacon she had a hushed phone conversation until Mr. Vincent sauntered down the ramp from the office then walked me out toward my car.
“This is stupid,” I said, centring my tie. “I can teach!”
“Let's just talk a minute.”
“Let's talk about the seasonâWeek 15 against the Jets, what's that going to be?”
“No, just sit down here,” Cam growled.
I sat in the passenger seat, the door hanging open while he stood beside the car and kicked pebbles across the pavement.
“I've had phone calls from all of the parents,” he said, riffling a hand through his crewcut. “Halliday, Melloy, all of them telling me, âEver since that trip to Velouria my kid's been walking around like a zombie, knocking down the cat, cutting their feet with razor blades, blah, blah.' All I can say is, âWell,
medically
they were given a clean bill of health, Mrs. Tits. Is there anything going on at home that might be a factor here?' And you'd think they'd say âScrew you,' but, no, they get off the phone toot sweet.”
“Don't herd us in with them,” I said. “Zombies haven't got mental function. They drag themselves around looking for brains to eat. Shit, I can still
think
.” I tilted the seat back and put my feet on the dash. Clumps of concrete all over my shoes. “I just haven't been in a good mood.”
“So tell me why Amberâ”
“Poor old Amber's arm fell off, sure, might be you could get the district health guys in here to tell you why that happened, but she's still thinking, all right? ”
“But just for argument's sake,” said Cam, “how does a zombie
know
he's not thinking? If he goes from eating macaroni and cheese one day to
braaains
the next, sure, he might notice a change in himself in
that
instance, but if the transformation takes six months, a year, well, people do
change
, right? He's just picked up some new hobbies, that's all. Altered his diet. It might take, say, a high school principal to tell the guy there's a difference. This large-scale medical stuff is out of our sphere, nobody expects schools to address arms that go missing, but lapses in judgement do concern me. See my concern?”
“Give me back my car keys,” I said.
Cam squatted beside the open door.
“Don't take this the wrong way, Giller, but do you have a whole lot of friends?”
“Thanks for noticing,” I said.
“A-ha. Show off these higher mental functions and tell me why you're crusted in blood and cement.”
“They're the lot of the common man, Mr. Vincent. One day you'll be in them up to your waist. Hey, did you hear from this James Jones in the last couple of days?”
He shook his head with furrowed brow, trying to look engaged.
“He works for Penzler Industries,” I said, “that's the parent company of that outfit in Velouria, and he was around here askingâ”
“I know them.” Cam got up, twisted to the left and cracked his back. “Saul from the board office called yesterday afternoon, said the lawyers for Penzler wanted contact information for everybody caught in the accident so they could start getting the wheels rolling on compensation. I pictured you and Ray and Josie at Disneyland and I said, âHell, yes, Saul, don't drag your feetâtell 'em what they need to know!' ”
I knew Cam was finally saying something important but I couldn't take my eyes off the turquoise hatchback that was parking over by the fence. Kirsten McAvoy. Fake pearls and all.
“Did you call Kirsten McAvoy to cover my classes?” I asked.
“Listen, it isn't your effed-up
shirt
that's the problem.” Cam wiped his nose with a lily-white handkerchief. “It's the state of mind that would allow you to wear that shirt into my school that's the problem.”
“Please just give me my car keys.”
“Hold on. Kathleen's been calling around to get you a ride.”
I set my feet down on the parking lot and got out of the car. I felt tall!
“You
listen
.” I jabbed Cam's sternum with two fingers. “You run and get me a plate of bacon in the next thirty seconds orâ”
Meep-meep!
Deb pulled up beside us in her red Corolla. Kirsten McAvoy clacked past on her turquoise pumps and thick ankles, scrapbooking binders clutched to her chest. She grinned at us, waving her car keys.
Deb lowered her window.
“Let's get you cleaned up,” she said. “I turned on the tub, so we can't dawdle.”
“Thanks for coming down so quick,” said Cam. “Don't let him near your brain.”
“Oh, you know me better than that,” said Deb.
At the first
red light, Deb put her elbows on the steering wheel and looked sideways at me. She hadn't put on her makeup yet so her eyelashes were invisible.
“You know, I won't be upset if you find a girlfriend,” she said. “I don't know what she'll think of me being underfoot, but the woman has to be out there somewhere.”
“Are you crazy? Give it ten years.”
“She's out there somewhere.”
She worked the clutch pedal, ready to go.
“When you played football, Lyd always called you âCaptain America.' ”
“Until my shoulder got torched,” I said. “Could barely write finals.”
“I just remembered it because I thought you could go on one of those dating websites and call yourself that. âCaptain America.' ” The light changed and she turned left up our hill. “Are you still allowed to burn leaves? Somebody's got a real bonfire.”
A column of smoke billowed from the hill above us.
Every time I'd seen a burning house, even on the news, I'd imagined the resident spotting the smoke from blocks away, driving closer and closer, the pit of his stomach knotting tighter, until he sees that, yes, it's his own damn house.
And when we pulled up to squint at flames licking the underside of my roof and smoke pouring out of the upstairs windows, my gut instinct was to blame Deb for leaving the bathtub runningâbecause that can lead to significant property damage, right? Then I thought that the simple act of talking to Rob Aiken on the phone had made this happen. He'd made it sound like things were going to get worse. I already had my door open.
“You dropped the kids at school, right?”
“Of course they're not
in there
!” Her seatbelt shot back over her shoulder. “For God's sake!”
Then sirens behind usâthe fire department storming up the street like an invading army. I was already up the steps and at the front door, wondering how not having my keys somehow prevented me from getting through a locked door, while Deb pulled her car ahead a couple of houses to give the trucks room.