Rules for Becoming a Legend (5 page)

•   •   •

Gravity. That's the only thing that pulls Todd out of the parking lot—big Van Eyck truck taking up two spots—and through the sliding automatic doors and into the hospital. Emotional gravity. He was on the cliff, just an hour earlier, when James Berg called. Son. Hospital. He'd dropped the phone. Not that. He couldn't handle
that
. But then it wasn't that. And there was an easier grade down after all. Not the smash into flat-out oblivion he'd first seen. Jimmy was alive.

Otherwise he'd be too tired, too spooked by the empty future that had snapped into focus when he had assumed the worst to even make it this far. He would have walked away, truck left on the side of the road where he'd pulled off when James Berg called, blinking hazard lights. They would have found the truck—known immediately that it was his from the dead cow skull he'd glued on the dash—but never him.

Into the hospital and the first one up is James Berg. Out of a waiting room chair and at his side. Matching steps.

“Todd, he's going to be fine,” James says. “Nothing permanent, I'm told. He'll be OK.”

“Where is he?”

“Right through there. That's Sarah Parson, you remember her?” A nurse he vaguely recognizes, smiling, pressing a big, blue button that opens the doors into parts of the hospital you don't normally see unless you're bringing life into the world or sending it away.

“I just found him laid out, you know, on the floor. I think he did it to himself. I took him here just as fast as I could. I'm sorry, Todd.”

Todd knows what's happening. He glimpsed down into the gap
where their friendship once was. Best friends. Until Berg had ratted him out for drinking. It seems silly now, but somehow, twenty-two years old, it's still fresh-black dug. Guy's trying to fix it all wrong though, like he always has. A gnat. Trying to fill it in with words. Be nicer, kinder, more understanding. Get lower, why don't you? What he needs to do—and Todd recognizes this even if he couldn't put the right words to it to say so—is just man up and tell him he's an asshole. Nobody made him do any of what he did that led to his initial, selfish spiral. He'd drunk, he'd fucked, him, Todd Kirkus. Just stand up and tell him like it is. Then maybe they could get on with it. Move some dirt.

“James, just go,” he says, as kind as he can manage.

“Yeah, OK, but if you need anything.”

More wrong. Todd waves him off. Picking up steam. He's closer in orbit now, crashing through the atmosphere, following Sarah Parson. James falls off as Jimmy—his son—a planet, rolls in. Emotional gravity.

•   •   •

For the last half hour he's been left alone. It's quieter than before. The lights in the ER dimmer, there's a curtain pulled around his bed, and it's a delicious gray. He could stay in this color forever. He loves how everything is shades of the same.

Then his pops comes in, yanks wide the curtain, lets in the background light, casters screaming. He grabs Jimmy's shoulder, shakes him out of his half sleep. The whole bed moving. Jimmy's brain is a loose marble rattling in his tin-can head. Last night with the brick wall comes back to him. Pain. All is pain.

“You're dead, kid,” his pops says. “Now get the hell up.”

Jimmy whimpers as his father's low-down voice brings on a different kind of hurt; now it's like his brain has too much water packed around it. No room to think. “It's too early?” he says. His pillow is wet. Somewhere, something is leaking.

His pops whispers like air let out of a bike tire, “Getthehellup.”

“But, Pops,” he's almost crying. “It's too early.”

“Too early? I gotta pick my kid up from Columbia Memorial, four in the morning, and it's too fucking early?” Todd sweeps Jimmy's thin hospital blanket off in one go.

Jimmy's robe is twisted, riding high, and he scrambles to cover his half-hard dick, listing solemnly to the side. He burrows his head into the pillows, clutching his junk with two hands.

Todd slaps a hand over his eyes. “Jesus, Jimmy.”

The suddenness of cold air on his naked body makes Jimmy's head hurt. But everything makes his head hurt. He curls into a ball at the top of the thin bed and he's sweating, can feel his heart beating in his tongue and his temples. He needs a glass of water, he needs a week alone. Jimmy gropes for the blanket that has been cast off him in the dim hospital half light, one hand over his stuff, head still beneath a pillow. The fog in his brain feels as though it's draining from his nose. Strange. He sits up, sniffing, too confused to care what his pops sees.

“We got to go,” his pops says.

“It's too early,” Jimmy tries again.

“Too early for living too, since you already dead.” His pops finds a wall-mounted exam light, flips the switch, and everything cracks into being. Gone, the grayness.

Jimmy winces in pain. Fireworks. A quick fear runs cold up his spine that he actually
is
dead and this
is
hell. He grinds his teeth. So hard they might come out. Groans again.

For the first time his pops is seeing his head. Those great tree-trunk legs buckle, Jimmy watches him reach for support, grab hold of the back of a chair. He breathes out bumpy. “And take care that bloody nose.” His pops yanks the curtain back, casters screaming again. Jimmy puts a hand to his nose, it comes away red.

•   •   •

Sarah Parson meets Todd Kirkus as he's leaving Jimmy's curtained-off bed, headed toward the waiting room. She stands before him and all manner of physics are violated when he slows and then stops instead of just running her flat. He rears up, eyes flashing.

“Mr. Kirkus, it's the hospital's recommendation that Jimmy stay put for a bit longer,” she says, voice calm. She clicks her pen to meter her words. A trick she learned in nursing school. “He should be seen by someone, make sure he doesn't do it again.”

Todd laughs, gruff, unfunny. “Oh, he's not doing that again.”

“Still it's our recommendation.”

Todd cuts her off—and this she hates. “Shouldn't a doctor be telling me this?”

“Dr. Maron has been called away, but has asked that I speak with you.”

He leans in closer, breath thick with cheap mint. “Let me ask you something. How many people you already called about this? Prime gossip, all this.”

Sarah has seen this line of thought coming. She knows Todd doesn't recognize her from high school—what use could he have for a short, pudgy girl who liked to spend her time in the library, rewriting her favorite scenes from books, word for word, just to see what greatness felt like—but she knows him, or at least his type. Everything leads back to his or his son's persecution. So center of the bull's-eye is he that he doesn't realize nobody's shooting arrows. “Mr. Kirkus, it would be a breach of my personal moral code, not to mention the hospital's, not to mention the law's, to do any such thing.”

“Can you keep him, legal?”

Officers Jones and Markham had already been through, cleared Jimmy on any criminal counts, and Dr. Maron signed off on his
physical condition, so no, she couldn't, not legally. Still. She wished she could pull the brakes on the infamous Freight Train. No doubt he was going to try and ply his son with more “tough love,” the exact same shit that got him into this mess in the first place. There were times Sarah Parson thought of moving to Portland, or Seattle, or even somewhere on the east coast for a chance at love, happiness, and adventure (Columbia City being a terrible conduit for all three), but the prospect of leaving the idiots of this place to themselves made her linger.

She stepped aside and Todd barreled past.

•   •   •

There's a small eddy of calm in being behind the curtains again. It's enough for Jimmy's thoughts to get all the way through his swollen head. It's the day after and his pops knows. Blood pats down in Jimmy's lap. Sticky. He pinches his nose high on the bridge, and guess what? It gives him a headache.

Jimmy gets up. Shaky, he holds on to the bed. The pain meds have been useless and what little effect they did have is waning as they are spreading their wings, flapping, ready to leave him but not yet sure of flight. Every movement sets his body afire in hurt and he knows it will be even worse once the last of the pills have flown the coop. He puts on his shorts from last night. Feels the small territories of stiffness where his blood had dried. Sweatpants over them. No T-shirt anywhere in the bundle and there snaps back to him a memory of ripping it off in the gym. He whimpers and pulls his sweatshirt on over his bare torso. Then his winter coat. Last his socks and sneakers. This is a challenge. Down on one knee, wobbly-weak with the burden of balance, tying the laces. A pair of white sneakers go by, visible beneath the hem of the curtains, pushing something with wheels. If people's feet were portals into other lives, Jimmy would choose these. Simple, white, perfect for their world of hospital corridors and break rooms.

He stands up. Slow, steady. He pulls on his hood, careful of the radius of ache around the soon-to-be-famous wound. Puts that mess of black hair in check. Pulls the drawstrings tight, knots it in two bunny ears. He doesn't have that beautiful, straight-as-an-arrow Japanese hair like his mother and Dex did. It's got more of his pops in it. Curly shape at least.

He wonders how his pops found out, but then brushes the thought from his mind. It's a useless mystery to entertain. By now everyone in Columbia City must know; it's too little to hide a secret this big.

That's small town.

He leaves the curtained area and there's a nurse standing with her clipboard—someone he doesn't know. She looks up at him, smiles. “Jimmy, I'm Sarah.”

He blinks at her, not sure how to respond.

“I think my mother had you in English class, Mrs. Parson? I was here when Mr. Berg brought you in. Quite the shock.”

Our kid feels sick, sweaty, and ready to sit down. This nurse in scrubs printed with hundreds of fish all pointed the same direction is in the way. Big eyes ready to take everything in. She steps closer, reaches out and takes his hand. He lets her, though he keeps it limp. Hers is small, dry, but with an expert dexterity in her squeeze.

“Listen, it's never as bad as it seems, do you hear me? I can tell you that for a fact, it's never as bad as it seems.”

Who the fuck is this woman? He's hurt, clothes stiff with his own dried blood, and she's giving him this? What if it's just exactly as bad as it seems? What if it's even worse than he's letting on? He takes his hand away and Sarah the nurse smiles. He's going to brush past her but she puts a hand on his chest so he stops and slaps down her clipboard. It clatters on the ground, outsized in its noise. She reaches down, all calm and easygoing like it was her fault. She straightens the papers and smiles at Jimmy again.

She tucks a card into the pouch pocket of his sweatshirt. “I'm a good listener.”

He goes down a stubby hallway and exits into the waiting room. His pops is there, hunched over the counter, signing some paper. The nurse behind the desk has pushed her chair back a few feet, watches him over this gap. A tall Mr. Clean–looking dude stands back against a wall, arms folded.

Jimmy sits in one of the chairs. This room smells of coffee. Coffee in the morning used to be a thing him and his brother, Dex, joked about. They'd come shuffling into the kitchen, noses leading the way, bumping into things. You know, after that Folgers commercial. People waking up because of the smell of coffee brewing. Like shitty coffee could bring a family together. It used to crack them up till they were laid out on the floor, his mom being like, “Can't I ever get some peace and quiet?” and his pops just trying hard as hell not to smile in front of her.

The stink of coffee.

His pops is done with the papers. Comes to stand over Jimmy. He's got a flimsy cup of the hospital coffee and is machining through mint after mint that he pulls from a bag in his pocket. He cracks a mint in his teeth, and then takes a noisy sip. Must be an interesting taste. He always has a big bag of those green candies wherever he goes these days. Cracking them habit enough to keep his mind free of the drinking. There's a cabinet above the fridge stuffed with family packs. At about fifty a pack, Jimmy has it figured his pops goes through over two hundred candies a day. That amount of sugar could have killed an elephant. But hell. Couldn't touch his pops. Freight Train himself. If his mom were around she would have been bugging him about switching to sugar free. She could be like that sometimes. Working in a hospital and all.

“Let's go,” his pops says loudly and Jimmy's head fizzes.

“Can't a kid get some coffee?” He wants to delay whatever his pops has planned for as long as possible. His heart pounds.

“You want coffee?”

“I always get coffee.”

“Dead don't get coffee, and you already dead.”

He didn't want coffee anyway, but this is too much too soon. Only been a few hours since the wall. He didn't die, did he? Can't this all just slow down? “Shit, Pops.”

“Shut up. You run yourself into a fucking wall you don't get to speak neither.” His pops is trembling, and Jimmy wonders,
Am I gonna get smacked? Right here in front of some nurses? Dial up child services. Old man's losing it.

Instead the big man stomps over the waiting room tile and out the big automatic doors. That limp is there. Same as always. Bum knee. The
boom, creak, slide. Boom, creak, slide
. Jimmy follows him out the automatic doors and the wind is immediate. It's cold as hell and he feels stipple designs up and down the back of his neck. Jimmy turns back to the hospital waiting room for shelter from the wind and zips his winter coat to the top, pulls its hood over his sweatshirt's hood. The doors have closed again and he catches his reflection in the glass panes. Hood on and blood streaking down from his nose, bruise like a third, busted eye. Blooming, almost tropical in color and vibrancy, whitish bandages covering the epicenter. A beat-to-hell movie monster. Doesn't recognize himself.