Men in the Making (10 page)

It happened just like that, that fast, no slow motion like you see at the movies when something dies. The dog, by the time we got up to it, was bleeding and lying still and breathing, but not from its mouth. I stood back while Grandpa knelt beside him. I stood and listened to the whisper-slick sound of a dying dog sucking air through a hole in its lung.

"Mercy," Grandpa said, clamping his hand over the wound. "He's in shock. Jesus, boy. Give me that vest."

I took a step back, jammed my hands into the vest pockets. "I can't," I said, "I'm sorry," because in a way I was, and because there wasn't anything else I could think of to say.

Grandpa leaned close to the dog, pressing down, blood rising up between his fingers. "We don't talk that way here," he said, looking up. His eyes were electric, flashing with sunlit tears. Pulling a hand from the dog, he punched the hard ground with his fist. "I already told you that, boy. Now give me that goddamn vest."

"I'm sorry," I said again, because my feet had gone numb in my boots and the dog wouldn't stop dying and I suddenly didn't care how Texans talked. Besides, he wasn't talking about Texans. I knew he wasn't. He was talking about my daddy. He was talking about my daddy and he was talking about me, and I wasn't sorry just for killing his dog. I was sorry because I couldn't do what he asked, what he thought a man should do, couldn't bring myself to take off that vest. I didn't want him to wrap it around that dog. I didn't want the dog bleeding on it. I wanted to wear it home and see that bright look of recognition in my mother's eyes. I wanted to take it to school and show my friends and tell them who once had worn it.

The dog was shivering, staring blank-eyed at the wide morning sky and Grandpa was crying in earnest now, pounding the earth with a bloody fist and cursing God and saying, "Easy Allie, easy old boy, I got you baby, I got you now," and I was just standing there, holding my own, wishing like hell I was back in Oklahoma where I knew now I belonged. I worked my boot around in the soil and I wished myself gone, wished the dog alive, and then I took a step forward and stopped wishing things that couldn't come true, things I couldn't force into being any more than I could bring my father back to life in my dreams. I took another step and put my gun on the ground and knelt down beside my Grandpa while he smoothed Alamo's fur, and I stayed there with him awhile, helping him help his dog die.

T
HE BABY HAD
died inside her, and Tammy hadn't been out of bed in five days, not since the doctor induced labor that Saturday. Raymond had taken Monday and Tuesday off, spent the afternoons making soup from Tammy's recipes, flipping through old magazines and doing laundry, matching socks. He ironed his blue hospital scrubs, knowing they looked fine pulled straight from the dryer. He paced the small rooms of their apartment, going from small task to small task, unable to sit still and unwilling to hold any one thing too long in his hands. Taking the remote control from the coffee table, he'd set it next to him on the couch without turning on the TV. He'd even set out to disassemble the baby's changing table that Tammy had gotten through mail order. He'd twisted a wing nut from the aluminum support at the base, and that was it. He'd stopped there. He remembered working as a teenager in the nursery at St. Jude, his parents' church in Houston. The other babysitters had called him Diaper Boy because he hadn't minded the changing, because he'd liked the smell of powder and the crinkling sound of disposable diapers, the milky, cooing thank-yous of freshly changed babies.

On Sunday he called Marcelo's, the restaurant near Lake Austin where Tammy had been sous-chef for five years, ever since graduating from culinary school the year they were married. Raymond spoke in a low, deliberate voice, one he'd been forcing from the back of his throat for days. "She'll be back," he told the manager. "Hopefully soon."

Twice a day he gave Tammy the pills Dr. Rusk had prescribed to help her sleep. He filled two glasses with filtered water and pretended, as he might have done with a child, to take a pill himself, and they drank the water in unison, staring at each other with unblinking eyes over the rims of the glasses. From a chair by the bed, without touching her, he'd watch her sleep, often for hours at a time, her long hair thrown above her head, lost between the mattress and the wall.

On Thursday morning, his second day back at work, Raymond cursed the elevator when it stopped on the fourth floor. The doors slid open and a man with chapped lips and a double-breasted suit stepped in from the maternity ward. Raymond kept his eyes lowered, fixed on the laces of his white Reeboks. "It's going up," he said.

"Fair enough," the man said. He swung his arms lightly at his sides, rocking on the balls of his feet, and Raymond bit down on the inside of his cheek. They act like that, he thought. Like they can't wait for a day or two to pass so they can wrap them in blankets and drive them to some nice little house, maybe up by Lake Travis. Lay them face-down on their stomachs in the new crib and stand for hours in the remodeled nursery watching them sleep, smiling stupidly and inhaling the smells of baby powder and new pink paint.

"Don't mind at all," the man said. "I'll take the roundtrip." He smiled and Raymond noticed one tooth, up top. Crooked. The others were straight and dull, but white. He knew it was senseless, but Raymond took a certain pleasure in locating the man's hidden imperfection. "Just fine by me," the man said.

Raymond got off on the seventh floor. The man said, "Take care." He was leaning on the back wall of the elevator, and Raymond nodded without looking back. When the doors slid shut, the man was whistling.

After signing in and rolling his cart from the storage closet, Raymond walked his rounds. There were only three patients on the wing, and the thought of Melody, the little girl in the room closest to the nurses' station, turned Raymond toward the far end of the hall. The girl was five, covered from the waist down with third-degree burns from a water heater explosion. With burns, Raymond had learned, oral medication, even narcotics, didn't make much of a dent in the pain, and topical ointments prevented the wounds from breathing, so it was Raymond's job to hold the girl still while she screamed, to force her waist deep into the debridement whirlpool while the water and Dr. Dutch worked the dead skin free from the wounds. Yesterday, after her treatment, the whirlpool had bubbled with sickeningly pink water.

As Raymond rolled his cart down the hall, nurses waved to him shyly from their center station, forcing tight-lipped smiles. They had sent a sympathy card with a Bible verse on the cover:
And this is the promise he hath promised us, even eternal life.
There were signatures inside, some that Raymond didn't even recognize. He'd worried about them, wondering how these names had escaped him. Early on, he'd made a point of meeting the other hospital employees, from the radiology staff to the cafeteria cooks; even the doctors waved, gave him the thumbs-up sign when they passed him in the halls. They liked the way he joked with the patients, the way he never pretended to be more than a nurse's aid, and then suddenly, a month before, after three years on the evening shift, he'd been moved up to days on the burn unit. Normally the unit was staffed only by RNs and LVNs, and Raymond was proud of the move. Three-fifty more an hour, and while he thought—at least most of the time—that he'd earned the promotion, Raymond wondered now if it was just another symptom of downsizing. As he wheeled the cart into Mrs. Lane's room, he was thinking it was all the same.

Mrs. Lane's bottom lip was burned mostly away, and Raymond tried not to imagine it melting, dripping down onto her chin. He was surprised she could still talk, but she spoke without squinting or slurring her words—without even the slightest sign of pain. The day before, while Dr. Dutch and Nurse Taylor peeled the loose burned skin from the old woman's chin with tweezers and scissors, scouring the raw flesh clean with a pad that looked like the one Tammy used on her baking dishes, Raymond had held the woman around the waist, keeping her bent above the whirlpool, whispering in her ear, as she screamed for them to stop, that it was almost over.

Hers had been the first debridement therapy of the day, and it was too much for him: the sight of bloody new skin and thick yellow pus and the smell of old singed flesh, and afterward he'd walked inconspicuously to the restroom and vomited.

Now Mrs. Lane sat tilted up in her bed as if nothing had happened.

"Hey, good lookin'," Raymond said, moving to the bed. At the top of her neck, folds of loose skin bunched beneath a large square bandage that curved from under her lips down over her chin. Raymond touched her arm, pulled the blankets tight around her narrow hips. The TV was going in the corner near the ceiling.
Wheel of Fortune.

"Might need some help with this one," Mrs. Lane said, nodding at the game show's wall of unturned blocks. "I'm thinking
Babes in Toyland.
"

"Don't know, Mrs. Lane," Raymond said. "Says they're looking for historical people."

"Well, I'm not
blind.
You don't think the babes count?"

Mrs. Lane raised a hand to her bandaged chin, tracing the smooth adhesive edges with her bony fingers and frowning. On the bedstand, beside a crumpled apple juice box, a picture of a young woman and three boys in matching suits faced the bed.

"Handsome family there," Raymond said.

"Oh, yes," she said. "That's my favorite, from back when Charlie was still alive. He hated me dressing the boys like that, but he let me all the same. He took it—the picture, I mean."

"Quite a group," Raymond said. He crossed the room and parted the drapes. Outside, the sun threw the shadow of the building onto the parking lot below. Two nurses stood talking in the shade beside an old pickup, and a line of cars sat waiting at the light on Lamar. "Look at that. Springtime in Austin, Mrs. Lane, and you got the best seat in the house."

Raymond turned and the woman was scratching her neck at the edge of the bandage. The day before, Nurse Taylor had told Raymond how it happened, how the old woman, in what the nurse called a "state of confusion," had tried to eat a spoonful of hot bacon grease. "Believe that?" Nurse Taylor had said. "And she seems so on top of things. Best keep a special eye on her."

"Go easy on that bandage, Mrs. Lane," Raymond said. "Gotta give that burn a chance to heal up. Look out there. You got a perfect view of the capitol building from right there in bed."

"Can't say as I care much about the capitol," she said. She ran her hands up and back on her lap, shaping the blankets around the tops of her legs. "My boys are all gone now," she said. "Two in Dallas and the other in Tulsa. Kids of their own, except for Charlie Junior."

In the parking lot, the two nurses climbed into separate cars.

"He's coming to visit," Mrs. Lane said. "Charlie Junior is. Driving all the way down here tomorrow after work." She touched the picture frame, running a finger across the top. "We're all done with those treatments," she said, rubbing her thighs with cupped hands. "Aren't we, Raymond?"

All at once his feet grew hot, burning in his shoes. He crossed the room and pressed the bed switch to sit her up straight. When he'd signed in, Dr. Dutch's schedule for the day was posted at the nurses' station; Mrs. Lane's name was near the top. "I'm not sure," he said.

The bed's electric motor whined and Raymond remembered the muscles clenching in her stomach, the tight flexing against his arm as he held her forward over the water and went tense himself, gritting his teeth against the echo of her hoarse cries between the concrete walls. Raymond took a quick breath and looked into the hall as if—what? Afraid to be caught stealing air? Leaving the room, he remembered the whirlpool, the sound of water swirling beneath them while he held the old woman in place.

 

The Friday before, Raymond had sat at the foot of the bed rubbing Tammy's feet after she sat up abruptly and turned on the lamp. She was seven months pregnant, her feet were swollen, red as if blistered, and she'd been jolted awake by the feeling that something within her had changed.

"Something stopped," she said, her eyes blinking in the sudden light of their bedroom. She said it over and over—"It feels like something just stopped"—and Raymond worked the arches of her feet with his thumbs. It was late, nearly three, and he'd only been home a few hours after working a double shift.

"Don't get yourself excited," he said. "We're supposed to keep your blood pressure down. Have you been taking those vitamins?"

"When I can get them down. You've seen them, Ray. Horse pills. They make me gag."

"Well, then, maybe you're just deficient is all."

"You don't understand," Tammy said. "This is different. Something's not right."

The rest of the night Raymond spent trying to coax her to sleep. He warmed milk and rubbed her poor, swollen toes and turned the light back off. But even in the dark he could sense that she was awake, her blue eyes streaked with the jagged red lines of panic, and after a while he gave up. He got under the sheets and pulled her head onto his chest. He pulled her nightshirt up over her waist and traced by memory his finger between the little moles on her back. He kissed her forehead and rocked her gently on his chest. "Any better?" he asked.

She was shaking, her legs moving uncomfortably against his, pulling his hairs as she kicked and tossed. "No, Raymond," and she dug her fingernails into his chest while he held her, rocking slowly.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. He kept his voice low, struggling to be patient. Because they'd been short staffed at the hospital, with the exception of a brief break between shifts, he'd been on his feet for sixteen hours straight. When he'd gotten home, he'd fallen to dreaming easily, his body limp with exhaustion, his limbs filled with the dense, liquid weight of sleep, but now pressure was building in his chest and his lower back arched with spasms. A muscle twitched in his neck. "Well, you wanna go rushing off to the emergency room because you had a bad dream or something?"