Spooner (42 page)

All these thoughts came later, of course, after he’d been brought back to the here and now and the ice-covered sidewalk of
Devil’s Pocket. A different kind of noise had revived him, something from hell itself. It said—distinctly said—“If he’s dead,
so is every one of you. Every one of you motherfuckers is dead.”

You may notice the use of the word
is
. In times of stress, Stanley Faint often reverted to correct grammar, which indicated to Spooner that he—Stanley—wasn’t dead,
which further indicated that neither was Spooner. In fact, it turned out that Stanley was barely scathed, relatively speaking,
suffering only what looked like an inconsequential break of the ulna of his left arm. The tire iron hadn’t knocked him out,
or even down; he’d slipped.

To Spooner’s huge relief, he looked up into the night sky, and found it full of Stanley’s remarkable face. That boneless nose.
“Another night in the life of a big-city columnist,” Stanley said, and picked Spooner up off the street with his good right
arm. Spooner achieved verticality, but noticed that one of his legs had ceased to function. Absolutely would not move.

“We’ve got to go,” Stanley said.

Spooner tried to walk with him back in the direction of the car they’d driven over in, but the leg stayed where it was. “My
leg won’t move,” Spooner said. He tried again, but the leg might as well have been cut off and lying in the street for all
the attention it was paying to Spooner.

Stanley looked down the expanse of row houses where the locals had run—somewhere out there they were regrouping. “We don’t
have time for your leg not to move, Sunshine,” he said.

Spooner stared down at the leg again, trying to see what was wrong with it, and pretty soon the blood that was running from
his scalp found its way through his eyebrows and into his eyes, and his vision blurred. “You think it’s serious?” he said.

“It could be if we don’t get out of here,” Stanley said.

“I know how odd this sounds to you, but it just won’t move.”

Without another word, Stanley put his head under Spooner’s arm and walked him/carried him back to the company car, then deposited
him in the front seat and got in the other side and started the engine.

“So where are we going?” Spooner said a little later.

Stanley checked the rearview mirror. “The hospital, unless there’s some place you’ve got to be.”

“You think it’s that bad?”

And Stanley looked at him again and began to bray, and it was good to hear that noise again, although here in the confines
of the company car, it set off a ringing, like standing in the street when the fire engine blows by.

S
tanley pulled Spooner out of the car and carried him through the doors to the emergency room at Hahnemann Hospital, where
he was taken right to the front of the line—some of the other victims of the night complaining that they were there first—and
before long an emergency room doctor came in and began sewing Spooner’s scalp and lips back together, and then an orthopedic
surgeon came in to look at his leg, and a brain surgeon came in to look at his brain.

Pictures were taken of everything and two shots of Spooner’s brain were fastened onto a lighted viewing board where the brain
surgeon studied them, back and forth, apparently disapproving of everything he saw. Spooner tried to engage the doctor, asking
if one of the pictures might show why he’d been living in the third person lately, but it was two-thirty in the morning now,
and Spooner’s mouth was swollen snug against his gums, affecting his speech, and the doctor was in no mood for Spooner even
if he could have understood what he was saying.

The emergency room doctor was finishing up sewing pieces of his lip back into place.

Would this embarrass the family? How much school would he miss?

There were hints now that Spooner was in the wrong time zone. He thought it over and was pretty sure that he’d graduated from
high school.

“How old am I, anyway?” he said, and at the sound of his voice the emergency room doctor spooked and his hands jumped, and
a piece of Spooner’s lip dropped onto his teeth.

“Quietly, please,” the doctor said, “I am working on these lips.” He was a high-strung fellow, a native of some country where
the people were small and brown.

Up at the X-ray board, the brain doctor turned away from the pictures of Spooner’s brain and gazed down upon the real thing.
“You were a very lucky young man,” he said, words that took Spooner back even further than high school, all the way back to
Georgia. And even then he’d known this remark was ridiculous. The lucky people were home in their beds or fucking in their
sinks; luckier people than Spooner were outdoors in the snowstorm cutting their grass.

The bone doctor came back through the swinging doors, rolling like a bear—when had he left?—and asked the brain doctor a question
that Spooner could not follow. The brain doctor showed the bone doctor the pictures of Spooner’s skull, and they both bent
in closer to look, one and then the other, making little circles over this gray area or that gray area as they talked. Spooner
lay waiting for a pronouncement of some kind but at the same time sensed that the doctors were unsure, leaning too much on
each other. He had an acquaintance with the medical world by now, and these were not first-string doctors.

“Well, the next couple of days will tell the story,” the brain doctor said finally, and everybody seemed satisfied with that.
Spooner only closed his eyes and began the long process of waiting it out. He didn’t know much, but he knew the story would
not be told in any couple of days.

I
t developed that the bone doctor worked for the city, a medical practice devoted almost entirely to keeping city employees
off disability. He set broken bones for firemen and police and garbage collectors, and did all the surgeries associated with
all kinds of fractures, dislocations, torn cartilage and ligaments. He drew a yearly retainer for this work and received an
additional flat fee for each consultation and surgery, regardless of outcome, and also picked up a few dollars now and then
at Hahnemann Hospital operating on the indigent. Or the comatose, or people who’d had their eggs scrambled so badly they didn’t
care who was cutting them open.

Spooner fell into the egg-scrambled category, or at least had enough else on his mind not to care much who was cutting him
open. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have asked for his own bone doctor, who was on staff over at the University of
Pennsylvania and had not gotten his job by way of having a cousin on the city council, or, for that matter, gotten into medical
school the same way.

The reason Spooner happened to have a bone doctor of his own was that he’d broken the same leg twice in the last four years
and also broken the ankle of the other leg, and a collarbone. The ankle and the second leg fracture had required surgeries,
and there were screws and bolts and wire now holding him together inside, and he could feel the bolts beneath his skin when
he was putting on his socks. Luckily these screws and bolts were not magnetic, or he supposed he would be waking up every
morning of his life with his legs stuck together.

Which is only mentioned here to reemphasize that Spooner knew his way around the orthopedic community, and knew that as a
rule, the old-school bone doctors like this one had been the bottom of the barrel back in medical school. More recently, of
course, with the dawn of artificial knees and hips and surgeons making dancers out of gimps—and rich men out of orthopods—they
weren’t the bottom of the barrel anymore, and once you knew what to look for, it didn’t take a brain surgeon to tell which
was which.

Arriving as he had, however, in the middle of the night without an appointment, Spooner had fallen victim to the orthopod’s
code—finders keepers—and never had a chance.

As mentioned, there were things besides bone doctors on Spooner’s mind, first among them Mrs. Spooner, at home in bed, presumably
wide awake now and possibly at the end of her wits. It was hard to say what reserves she had left, but this incident, which
she would very likely view as preventable, would not be well received. He wondered if it had been the smart thing, asking
the nurse to make the phone call. On the other hand, who else to ask? Stanley?

The ER doctor puzzled one last piece of Spooner’s lip into place and commenced sewing, and the room began to empty out. There
were suture threads hanging off Spooner’s lips and lying against his gums and in his mustache, and the feeling in his mouth
reminded him of a backlash in a fishing reel.

They wheeled Spooner up to a room in the intensive care unit, where he spent the next few days in the company of an elderly
black man named Sylvester Graves who had been run over by his wife in a parking accident. Mr. Graves was suspended from a
scaffold near the ceiling, and moaning in his sleep.

“Well,” Spooner said to the nurse who tucked him in, “they say the next couple of days will tell the story.”

Mr. Graves moaned in his sleep.

The nurse patted Spooner on the hand. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He can’t feel a thing.”

The down-state returns were not in yet, but unofficially Sylvester Graves had even more broken bones than Spooner. His wife
was named Betty, and a month or so previous they had purchased a new car, a dark green Pontiac Bonneville. Mr. Graves had
been out in the street every day since, washing and waxing, some days just sitting in his chair watching it shine, keeping
the neighborhood children with their skates and twirling batons away, not allowing Mrs. Graves herself inside it without taking
off her shoes. And in the way these things sometimes happen, the first time Mrs. Graves was allowed behind the wheel, she
scratched the bumper, not incidentally pinning Mr. Graves against the brick wall of a parking lot. They had been visiting
Mrs. Graves’s family out in West Philadelphia, and he was taking no chances on the Bonneville’s bumper even touching the wall,
and was out of the car guiding her, like a signalman on an aircraft carrier. He’d just given her his first signal, in fact,
motioning the car back toward himself, when she drove it into the wall, the impact modified only slightly by Mr. Graves himself,
who was still there in between, motioning
come to me
with his hands.

Then, unbelievably, she’d panicked and done it again, the first time crushing both his femurs, the second time breaking his
pelvis and dislocating his hips.

Mrs. Graves hadn’t wanted any part of it from the start—it made her nervous even getting into the passenger seat, afraid she’d
do something wrong, and even when she’d heard the first scream she wasn’t sure of what had happened, except she was pretty
sure from the noise he made afterwards that she’d scratched the car.

Suspended as he was from the scaffolding, the old man was unable to move much and perhaps due to this unnatural positioning,
was visited by strange dreams night and day, whenever he slept. Falling dog dreams, it looked like, as he twitched violently
and made yipping noises and grabbed at the bed rails as he came awake to break his fall. Awakened in this way, he was often
out of his head with pain, pleading with the nurses somewhere in the maze of hallways outside for his shot.