Helltown (11 page)

Austin was pacing back and forth, chain smoking Marlboros, when Mandy said something. He turned to face her. She was bent close to Jeff, as if examining him.

He tossed away his cigarette and hurried over. “What is it?”

“He moved,” she said.

“He moved?” Austin repeated, filled with sudden hope. “His legs?”

“No, his cheek. It twitched. At least I thought it did. Jeff?”

He didn’t reply.

“Jeff?”

Nothing.

Austin said, “You must have imagined it.”

“I don’t think I did.”

Austin patted Jeff’s cheek. “Hey, buddy? You hear me? You wanna open your eyes for us?”

“Stop that!” Mandy said. “You’re going to wake him up.”

Austin frowned. “So?”

“What if he starts screaming again?”

“So he screams. He’ll stop eventually, and we can find out…”

“Find out what?”

“If he can move his fucking legs!” He patted Jeff’s cheek again, harder. “Jeff? Wake up, buddy. Jeff!”

“Stop it!” Mandy cried.

Austin ignored her and continued hitting Jeff’s cheek. “Wake up, Jeff. Wake up—”

Mandy grabbed his wrist. “Stop it!”

He shoved her backward. She fell on her butt. Tears welled in her eyes. “Fine!” she blurted. “Wake him up! Listen to him scream!”

Austin hadn’t meant to push her so hard. “Mandy, I’m sorry.”

“Jesus, Austin,” Cherry said. She’d been sitting off by herself but joined them now. “Apologize to her.”

“I just did!” he said as Mandy covered her face with her hands. He looked at Cherry helplessly. “Can you talk to her or something?”

Cherry crouched next to Mandy and offered words of comfort.

“I’m not hurt!” Mandy said. “I just want to leave this place!”

Austin returned his attention to Jeff. He ran his hands through his Mohawk in frustration. God, he couldn’t take this. He really couldn’t. He had to know. He slapped Jeff’s cheek, hard.

“Don’t touch him!” Mandy screamed.

“Just scrape the bottom of his stupid foot!” Cherry said.

Austin frowned. “Huh?”

“If he has feeling below the waist, his toes will curl down. It’s instinctual, like when the doctor checks you reflexes by hitting your knee with a hammer.”

“Bloody right!” Austin exclaimed. “Why didn’t you mention that before?” He tugged off one of Jeff’s reddish-brown dress shoes, then a diamond-patterned sock. He dug his key ring from his pocket, chose the largest of the three attached keys, and scraped the tip along Jeff’s sole.

His toes didn’t curl. They didn’t even flinch.

Austin scraped Jeff’s sole a second time.

Nothing.

“Try again,” Mandy said, staring at him with pleading eyes.

“He can’t feel it,” he said numbly.

“Do it harder.”

“It won’t make a difference.”

“Do it harder!”

“I did it twice!” he shouted. “He can’t feel a fucking thing!”

Austin stumbled away from Jeff’s inert body, his collar damp with sweat despite the cold, the air suddenly greasy, unpleasant to breathe. Through a part in the fog he spotted the road and wished he’d taken the case of beer from Noah’s Jeep before he and Steve had left for the hospital, because if he’d ever needed to get shitfaced, it was right then.

Jeff, he thought. A paraplegic.

Austin blamed himself and the others for this sad fact. Steve had said they had to move Jeff or he would have been barbequed alive. Fine. Austin agreed with that. However, it was
how
they moved him, half dragging him like he was a heavy side of beef—
that
he couldn’t get out of his mind. They should have kept their cool, made a litter, carried him properly.

Austin lit a cigarette and inhaled greedily.

Jeff. A paraplegic.

The words were like oil and water, chalk and cheese. They had no business being grouped together. Maybe if Jeff had been some poor slob the idea of him wheeling around in a chair for the rest of his life wouldn’t have been so hard to accept. But Jeff was the poster boy for success and vitality. Austin had met him on the first day of grade nine at Monsignor Farrell High School. Austin had been sitting in the back row of third-period math when Jeff had strolled through the door seconds before the bell rang. He had been tall even then and could easily have been mistaken as a senior. His blond hair had been brushed back from his forehead, his maroon school golf shirt perfectly fitted, his gray slacks pressed and creased, a preppy sweater draped over one shoulder. He swept his eyes across the room, then started down the aisle to the empty desk next to Austin, poking students with his pencil along the way, eliciting nervous chuckles from the victims. Ten minutes into the lesson he made a
pssst
noise and passed Austin a note. Austin opened it and read the three words: “Suck my dick!” He was so surprised he laughed out loud. Mr. Smith, the bespeckled teacher with a bushy brown mustache and yellow sweat stains under his arms, paused in his explanation of the course outline and asked him what was so funny.

“Nothing, sir,” Austin replied.

“Stand up, Mr.…” He checked the roll call. “Mr. Stanley.”

Austin stood up.

“Now tell the class what is so amusing.”

“Nothing, sir.”

Mr. Smith crossed the classroom and collected the note from Austin’s desk. He read it, his face impassive. “Who gave this to you?” he said.

“No one, sir.”

“You wrote yourself a note?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you laughed at your own note?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’d like to see you back here during the lunch break. Do you understand, Mr. Stanley?”

“Yes, sir.”

After class, in the hallway bustling with students, Jeff found Austin and hooked his arm around his shoulder. “Thanks for not ratting me out to Armpits,” he said.

“No problem.”

“What’s your name?”

“Austin.”

“I’m Jeff. I’ll see ya round.”

After that day Austin and Jeff started hanging out more and more. Their personalities complimented each other in so much as they were both smart-mouths and troublemakers. Yet this was as far as their similarities went, because while Austin despised sports and could barely keep his grades above water, Jeff made the varsity golf and baseball teams, graduated with a 4.0 GPA, and was one of three students named valedictorian. And while Austin dropped out of community college and ended up buying a crummy bar with his grandmother’s inheritance and battling alcohol addiction, Jeff went the Ivy School route and was now trading securities at a top tier investment management firm, living the dream.

Was
living the dream, Austin amended.

A paraplegic.

Fuck.

Cherry had moved away from the burning BMW and sat beneath a large tree with a thick trunk, wanting to be alone. The fragile calm that had existed since Steve and Noah left with Jenny had deteriorated quickly. Mandy was a total mess, while Austin seemed ready to explode. She didn’t blame either of them. Mandy had dated Jeff for four years; Austin had known him since high school. This was the reason she hadn’t mentioned the plantar reflex stimulation earlier. She knew there was a chance Jeff could be paralyzed from the waist down, and she didn’t want to verify this was the case, for it would only demoralize the others further. But Austin had totally wigged out. He had been slapping Jeff, inadvertently moving Jeff’s neck, which could compound his spinal cord injury. So she told him to scrape Jeff’s foot, and the diagnosis turned out to be as bad as she’d feared.

Cherry herself remained clinically detached to Jeff’s predicament. She wasn’t close to him like Austin and Mandy were. In fact, she didn’t particularly like him. Not only had he been making fun of her height from the moment they’d met, he was an asshole in general. Moreover, as a registered nurse, she had become used to seeing sickness, disease, and injury.

Just last week there had been a mentally disabled man in the ER with an infected stasis ulcer in the back of his calf. The necrotic tissue around the black eschar had been gnawed away by maggots that were still in residence in large numbers. During debridement surgery the man decided he had to urinate and could only do this standing up, so he got off the operating table, bleeding and dropping maggots everywhere, and peed in the middle of the floor.

And then there was old Ray Zanetti who had cancer to the mandible. Cherry had been his primary caregiver, and pretty much every time she checked in on him he would be looking in the mirror and peeling away pieces of his flaking skin. By the time of his death his face had all but fallen off.

Situations like these were grotesque and sad certainly, but they didn’t faze her anymore. They were simply part of her job, what she experienced on a daily basis. All in a day’s work, so they say.

Nevertheless, Cherry had never questioned her career choice; it had provided her a new life, literally. She had been born in Davao, in the Philippines. Her family had been dirt poor. Her father didn’t work, while her mother was a housecleaner, mostly for Western ex-patriots. She earned two hundred pesos, or approximately four dollars, a day. This went to support her husband, Cherry, and Cherry’s two siblings. They lived in a cinderblock house with a corrugated iron roof and no running water. They battled lice and rats on a constant basis, and they wasted nothing. Her mother often told her how disappointed she was with her Western employers, whose refrigerators were always full of expired food and spoiled vegetables.

Most of Cherry’s friends dropped out of high school to work at McDonald’s or one of the big malls. These positions didn’t pay any more than her mother made cleaning houses and apartment units, but you got to hang out with your friends and spend the day in an air conditioned environment out of the stifling tropical heat. Cherry, however, had greater ambitions. She wanted to get a university degree and work in a call center. She would have to work night shifts to compensate for the different time zones in the UK or US or Canada, but the money was decent and, in the eyes of other pinoys, it was a highly respected profession.

However, when Cherry heard about a friend of a friend who had become unimaginably wealthy as a registered nurse in the US, she promptly changed her degree to nursing. Her mother, starry-eyed at the prospect of having a daughter who could lift her family out of poverty, offered to sell the
carabao
—water buffalo—to help pay for Cherry’s schooling, but Cherry refused. She began working at a massage parlor servicing Western expats because the hours were flexible and could accommodate her classes. The company exploited her shamefully, paying her twenty-five cents each massage she gave, regardless of whether it was one hour long or two. Even so, they turned a blind eye to “extra” service. Cherry was raised Roman Catholic, went to church every Sunday, and was conservative by nature, but money was money. For her, a hand job was a service, nothing more, and depending on how cheap (not poor—Westerners were never poor) or generous her client was, she could make anywhere from ten to fifty dollars for a few minutes of work. She could have made even more by offering sex, for which she was often propositioned, but she would not cross that line. She was not a prostitute.

Once she completed her BS in Nursing four years later, she passed the US licensure exam, applied successfully for a green card, and was offered an entry position with New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. She’d been there for three years now, had a mortgage, a car, and enough money in the bank to send hefty sums to her family in Davao on a regular basis, making them the envy of all their friends.

Cherry pulled her eyes from the ground and glanced at the others, relieved to see they had settled down somewhat. Austin was pacing again, but he no longer seemed like a ticking time bomb. Mandy had stopped crying and was staring inward.

Cherry checked her Coca-Cola Swatch and saw that only ten minutes had passed since Steve and Noah had left with Jenny. How long would it take them to find a hospital, explain what was going on, and bring back help? Half an hour? Longer?

A nippy breeze ruffled the nearby reeds and saplings and stirred the mist into searching, serpentine tendrils. Cherry folded her knees to her chest for warmth, wrapped her arms around them—and spotted three flashlight beams bobbing between the trees some fifty yards away.