The Turnaround (9 page)

“Seventy-nine’s less crowded,” said Kendall. The Metrobus ran every ten minutes up and down Georgia during rush hour and made far fewer stops than the 70. “Quicker, too.”

“If I see one, I’ll get it,” said Monroe.

“Wizards win?” said Marcus. He was short for his age, wiry, with an athlete’s heart, and ears too big for his skull.

Monroe nodded. “Gilbert looked into his head and torched the Mavs for thirty-nine. Caron and Antawn did some damage, too. Now, if we could only get us a center with hands . . .”

“Tell Mr. Raymond good-bye,” Kendall said to Marcus.

“Bye, Mr. Raymond.”

“All right, Marcus. You have a good day at school.”

Kendall came over to Monroe and kissed him on the mouth. He let it linger just a moment and then pulled back, so as not to cheapen her in the boy’s eyes.

“You look nice,” said Monroe, looking her over.

She wore a pantsuit she had purchased at the Hecht Company, now gone, up in Wheaton. With the coupons and the sale price, Kendall had bought it for next to nothing. She didn’t need to buy expensive clothes to look good. She was a handsome woman, with puppy brown eyes and a full mouth. Curvy, and not too small anywhere, which he liked.

“Thank you,” she said, blushing a little. “Call me, hear? Maybe we can meet for lunch.”

“Right,” said Monroe.

When he was done with his coffee and the paper, he left Kendall’s house, locking the door behind him. He went down to Georgia Avenue and took it north on foot. He passed the D&B market, Murray’s steak and produce, a Spanish-owned auto repair. Many of the folks he was passing were dressed cleanly, on their way to catch buses or taxicabs to their jobs. The neighborhood was changing. He expected that it wouldn’t be long before most of these businesses would be replaced, too. Cafés, bars that weren’t about pussy or violence, a theater that would show plays, something akin to a Starbucks. It was coming.

Still, there were the usual men outside the liquor store, waiting for it to open, to remind you of what had been. Monroe said hello to the group, and one of them called out to him by name. He saw a midget wearing chains over a Len Bias Celtics jersey and boy’s-size Nike boots, going for that street-retro thing. Little man was frequently out on the same corner of the Avenue. Monroe had greeted him once but gotten only a scowl in return. Dude was just the angry type, Monroe surmised. Then he thought,
I would be angry, too
.

Monroe went on. He passed a couple of bus stops before he lighted on one. He lived in his mother’s house in Heathrow Heights, and he did own a car, but when he slept in town, he sometimes liked to enjoy the experience of the city. Walking and riding the bus, having contact with folks, that was how he liked to go.

IF HE got off to work early enough, Raymond Monroe would start his day at First Formation, a kind of roundup after reveille on the Walter Reed grounds. The hall where the soldiers gathered resembled an American Legion auditorium. Here, badly wounded patients mingled with those who were being treated for less-serious injuries. Amputees wore the evidence of their wounds most obviously and permanently, as did burn victims in the late stages of recovery, and men and women with rows of stitches and patches of bald spots now bearing stitches. Others did not outwardly appear to have been wounded at all but were suffering from mental disorders. Many of those who made it to First Formation were in the final stages of their hospital stay and headed for the Temporary or Permanent Disability Retirement List, which the soldiers called the TDRL and the PDRL.

Monroe had missed reveille but got into the hall in time to get up with a couple of the guys he had treated. He approached Private Jake Gross, who stood by a folding table near one of the hall’s many doors, leafing through a NASCAR magazine. The table was covered with similar fare, muscle-and-drag-car periodicals, flyers offering free nosebleed seats to Wizards games and Nationals contests, crab feasts, and trips to Six Flags and other nearby amusement parks, all reflecting the geographical backgrounds, interests, and ages of most of the soldiers.

Gross, twenty, was scheduled to leave the hospital shortly, having made the PDRL, and was headed home to Indianapolis. His build and bearing were military made, but his face was still as freckled and free of stubble as a sixteen-year-old boy’s. His right leg was artificial. His plastic knee was robin’s-egg blue, and his shin was a metal pole that ended in a New Balance sneaker. He had come far since Monroe had met him. He was a fit and energetic young man to begin with, but athleticism was only a small part of getting him mobile. He had the necessary will and heart. He was walking as well on the new leg as anyone Monroe had treated.

“What’s goin on, short-time?” said Monroe. “You ready to go home?”

“More than ready,” said Gross.

“You gonna be staying with your parents?”

“My girlfriend. Her father got me a job at the big printer they got outside Indy. They’re a bookmaker, like.”

“Say you’re gonna be a bookie?”

Gross blushed. “Not like that. They print books up and put ’em together. They printed
The Da Vinci Code
there.”

“Never heard of it,” said Monroe.

“Yeah, right. Anyway, it’s not like a factory job. Everything’s computerized. Big as a rack of football fields, too. You should see it.”

“If I’m ever out that way, I’ll let you give me the tour.”

“Count on it,” said Gross, putting his hand out. “Thanks a million for everything, Doc.”

“I’m no doctor.”

“Heck, you fooled
me
.”

“You just made my day, Private.”

“I’ll stop by before I ship out.”

“Do that,” said Monroe.

Outside the hall, Monroe saw Sergeant Major O’Toole, a soft-spoken Vietnam veteran who had come out of retirement to work with soldiers through the army’s Wounded Warrior Program. He was talking to a young man seated in a wheelchair near a couple of his friends, who were standing on the sidewalk. One of them was on new legs. Monroe had treated the wheelchair-bound young man, Private William “Dagwood” Collins, so nicknamed for his tall, thin build. Collins, the victim of a roadside bomb, had lost the use of both legs. He had initially refused a double amputation, which would prepare him for the next step, the fitting of artificial legs. But Monroe had heard that the young man was having second thoughts. Monroe caught O’Toole’s eye but did not stop to talk to him or Collins. He walked across the campus to the main hospital and took the elevator up to his floor.

Raymond Monroe worked primarily in the occupational therapy and physical therapy rooms of the hospital. A therapy dog, Lady, roamed both rooms, playing with toys, sniffing at outstretched hands both flesh and plastic, and allowing herself to be petted. The facilities included free weights and weight machines, treadmills, mats and medicine balls, and a well-used pool. Raymond Monroe did much of his work on the occupational therapy room’s many padded tables, stretching his patients and increasing their range of motion and flexibility through repetition. The hips and shoulders were crucial areas. Prosthetics, burns, and scars aside, the problems he dealt with here were not much different from those he had encountered when he had worked as a PT at sports medicine clinics. He was bringing people back to some degree of active normalcy, postinjury.

Monroe’s first patient that morning was Sergeant Joseph Anderson of the First Cavalry Division, who had lost his right hand near Mosul. Anderson had a wry sense of humor and a positive attitude. He liked classic rock, redheaded women, and ’66 Mustangs, and he had an admirable abundance of confidence, despite the fact that his face had been badly scarred.

“Ali Baba tossed a grenade into our Humvee,” said Anderson the first time he met Monroe. “I picked it up and tried to throw it back to him, as a courtesy. But I guess I was a little late.”

“Word is you might have saved a couple of your men.”

“I sure would like to have my hand back, though. And my dashing good looks. Didn’t work out like it does in the comic books, sir.”

“No need to call me sir. I’m a civilian.”

“I was raised to call my elders sir. ’Less they’re ladies, and then I call ’em ma’am.”

“Where was that?”

“Fort Worth, Texas. As in, don’t mess with it.”

“You a Cowboys fan?”

“There
ain’t
no other team.”

“I won’t hold it against you.”

“You must be for the Deadskins.”

“Don’t play.”

Anderson had a prosthetic hand. On it, he had recently tattooed something, looked to Monroe to be a word spelled
Zoso.
On the flesh of his forearm were three symbols inked in blue. The one on his hand was known as a continuation tattoo. Many of the soldiers had gotten them applied to their prosthetics to replicate the portions of tattoos that had been lost to injury or amputation.

“You like my new tat?” said Anderson.

“If you like it, then I do, too,” said Monroe, who was kneading his fingers into Anderson’s forearm, doing it roughly because the young man could take it. “What’s it mean, anyway?”

“It’s a symbol. It looks like a word, but it isn’t. They call it a glyph. Don’t ask me why. Four members of Led Zeppelin each chose a symbol, and they put them on their album. Four band members, four symbols.
Led Zeppelin Four,
get it? The greatest hard-rock record ever made.”

“All right,” said Monroe.

“I envy you for being around when they were playin,” said Anderson. “You ever see ’em live?”

“Musta missed it.”

“Tell me you were a Zep fan, Pop.”

“Can’t say I was.” Monroe issued a barely detectable smile. “Matter of fact, I didn’t even know it was a group. I used to think it was
one
dude. My older brother set me straight, like he always did.”

“Mine liked to school me, too.”

“That’s how big brothers do,” said Monroe.

Later, after Anderson had left, after he had treated a couple of other patients, Monroe broke for lunch. His intention was to meet Kendall in her office.

Beyond the swimming pool, in a hall that led to a bank of elevators, he saw a general and some lower-ranking, freshly scrubbed officers; several doctors were giving the visiting uniforms a tour of the facility. The group parted as a young man and an older woman came down the hall.

The young man was a private out of Minnesota who had recently gotten his new legs. He wore a harness and a leash. His mother followed him as he wobbled on plastic knees and shin poles fitted into sneakers, his hips gyrating wildly as he took tentative steps. His face was pink with effort and concentration. His forehead was damp with sweat, and he bit down on his lower lip. The young man’s mother held the leash, steadying him, just as she had done twenty years earlier in their home in Thief River Falls, when he was eleven months old and taking his first steps.

The general, the officers, and the doctors began to grin painfully and clap their hands in unison for the enlisted man as he moved through the crowd. Monroe could not bring himself to join in. He had love for the soldiers and marines he treated and nothing but respect for the countless doctors, therapists, career military, and volunteers who were making their best efforts to help them. But he wasn’t about to join these officers with their frozen smiles.

Monroe walked quietly to the elevators as the private and his mother passed.

Seven

A
LEX PAPPAS had recently bought satellite radio service for the coffee shop, as he had become increasingly discouraged by the content of modern terrestrial radio. The choices on satellite were plentiful and could satisfy the help, who were mixed in culture and thus had varying musical preferences, and the clientele, who generally resided on the upward and downward slopes of middle age.

Darlene, as the senior member of the crew, had promptly commandeered the new radio. Of the original help from his father’s era, only she remained. Inez had died of liver failure in her forties, and Miss Paulette had passed away shortly thereafter, a victim of diabetes and her weight. In the ’80s, Junior Wilson had been taken by the glass pipe and for all purposes had disappeared. His father, Darryl Wilson Sr., still the engineer in the building above, no longer spoke of his son.

Darlene was now forty pounds heavier than she had been at sixteen. When he looked at her, Alex still saw her lovely eyes and smile, and also those forty pounds. He gently urged her to lose weight and give up smoking, but she brushed off his suggestions with a gentle laugh.

She had given birth to four children, one fathered by Junior Wilson, and currently was the grandmother of nine. An unemployed, single daughter and two grandchildren lived in her row house in the Trinidad section of Northeast. One son was an inspector for the health department, another was incarcerated on drug convictions in Pennsylvania. The second daughter had a government job, a successful marriage, and a house in PG County. Darlene had supported various family members over the years and had managed to do it all through her job at the shop. Alex provided her a basic pension plan and health insurance coverage. She had been completely behind him from the day he had taken over, helped him get through that time of his father’s illness and death, and continued to be essential in the running of the coffee shop.

Darlene exercised her radio privilege by playing the oldies R&B station Soul Street, hosted by the legendary Washington DJ Bobby Bennett, remembered by many as the Mighty Burner. When Darlene was feeling generous, she conceded the radio choices to the Hispanic employees who made up the balance of the crew: Rafael Cabrera, an energetic young man from the Dominican Republic, who managed to perform both delivery and dishwashing duties; Blanca Lopez, colds and sandwiches; and Juana Valdez, the counter waitress.

Alex only asked that during the rush the radio be set on something without vocals. Vocals annoyed him when it was busy and only added to the confusion in the store. Alex’s older son, John, had suggested to his father that he play the “chillout” sound at rush time, which he called “up-to-date and intricate.” To Alex it was just rhythmic instrumental music, mildly hypnotic and inoffensive, and intricate, he suspected, only if one was high. But John was right. It was perfect background music for the lunch rush.