Mohawk (6 page)

Tonight both ambulances are on duty. Saturday nights are always busy in the emergency room of the old Nathan Littler Hospital, especially around two in the morning when the bars are closing and people are forced to consider the prospect of returning home with so many of the night’s dreams unfulfilled. What follows are the usual brawls and the battered wives and husbands and girlfriends who limp up Hospital Hill—some afoot, some in wobbly old cars—to be sewn up and sent home. Some are bleeding, the majority terribly drunk, and all but the most tragic cases must wait in line for attention from the sparse, overworked staff. Among the throng awaiting attention is a couple in their late twenties. Both are huge, but the woman is slightly larger. Still, it is the man who grabs one’s immediate attention. Shoeless, he is wearing a bright orange beach towel about his middle in lieu of trousers. The towel sticks out in front comically, and the large woman stares down at the protuberance maliciously.
“
Look
at you, you dumb fuck,” she says. Her voice, though not loud, is brittle and carries marvelously even in the crowded room.

“Look at yerself, if you can stand it.”

“You don’t even have enough sense to feel like the dumb fuck you are,” the woman says. “Everybody’s looking at you, you dumb fuck.”

This happens to be true, but the man wearing the beach towel is undaunted. He uses a simple four-letter word to describe his companion and it is a part of her own anatomy. Despite the name-calling, neither is truly angry. Their language alone is inflationary. They’ve been calling each other such names for so long that it’s now beyond the power of mere words to stimulate passion. At this moment they are closer to humor than anger.

“You’d see what a dumb fuck you was if you wasn’t so proud of yerself. You just never had no hard-on get so big and last so long.”

“I just wisht I had a woman worth it.”

She ignores this. “I don’t see why yer so proud, anyways. It ain’t every man has a weeny the size of a wedding ring.”

“Least I got a weddin’ ring, which is more than you’ll ever have.”

This is clearly the best shot in the volley, and the woman reacts as if he has punched her good. “How’d you like me to slap that worthless little weeny, dumb fuck.”

The man turns away from her. “You’re just mad ’cause I won the bet.”

“I shoulda knowed, that little thing.…”

Someone in the room wails loudly, and the man and woman are no longer the center of attention. People crane their necks to see who howled, but no one looks
particularly guilty. When one of the emergency room doors slams open, an ambulance siren is heard—at approximately the same pitch as its human counterpart— and everyone concludes it must’ve been the ambulance siren all along.

The ambulance driver winds the vehicle around the back of the hospital, over the trail of broken glass toward the yellow crease of light at the end of the long drive. In the rear is a fifteen-year-old who probably will not live to see the morning—after a wreck that took the rescue workers half an hour to get her out, she’s in very bad shape. Inside they will do what they can, then take her by helicopter to Albany Medical, but the driver knows the girl is too badly broken to live no matter what they do. He’s a young man himself and he doesn’t like to think of her young life ending, but there is nothing he can do about it. For all he knows, she’s already dead. Sometimes they tell him when a patient dies; other times they let him drive like hell with the corpse. As he nears the leaking yellow lights, he hits the brake hard to avoid hitting something in the road, which disappears immediately. There is a chorus of “Heys!” from the rear. When the driver docks beneath the red
EMERGENCY
sign, the back doors fly open and the young girl is hurried inside, which means that this time, anyway, he has been transporting a living person.

Rather than get out, the driver sits by himself in the ambulance, staring out the window at nothing in particular, listening to the thick static on the CB and the low twang of a country singer on the conventional radio. After a few minutes he remembers and grabs a flashlight. Fifteen minutes later, one of the ambulance attendants finds him far down the drive at the base of
the hospital’s gutted south wing, shining the flashlight into the cavelike windows.

“What was it—some kinda animal?”

“I guess.”

“Next time, hit it.”

“How’s the girl?”

“Just died. Come on. There’s busted glass all over the place.”

They walk back toward the red
EMERGENCY
sign, but every now and then the driver looks back over his shoulder at the dark windows along the third and fourth floors. He’s not certain that what darted in front of him was an animal, but it must’ve been.

Randall Younger stared out the second-floor classroom window at the dark, weatherbeaten statue of Nathan Littler, the town father, on the sloping lawn in front of Nathan Littler Junior High. Already several members of the gang of boys who called themselves the Cobras were beginning to congregate at Nathan’s feet, even though last period had over fifteen minutes to go. For Randall, last period was math, and he was bored. The material his teacher was trying to cover should’ve been clear to anybody who’d read the book, but most of Randall’s classmates didn’t read books of any description and would never have allowed themselves to be pressured into reading a math text. The private school that Randall had attended in the city had been much more demanding, and in the two years since he and his mother had moved back to Mohawk, Randall had occupied his time waiting for his classmates to catch up. It was exhausting work. The Mohawk kids had pretty high opinions of themselves, but most of them lacked natural ability and desire, at least when it came to schoolwork. As a result, Randall was fast coming to the conclusion that the only way he’d ever be accepted was if he regressed. To that end he had recently adopted a few simple measures. By purposely flubbing questions
on exams, he was able to avoid the chorus of groans that had for more than a year greeted his announced test scores. Perfection rankled just about everyone, including the teachers, whereas mediocrity made people feel comfortable. The Jewish kids could get away with excellence because it was just the way they were brought up, but Randall was not Jewish. His father was just a mechanic at the Pontiac dealership, so better things were expected of him. Therefore, instead of scoring a perfect hundred on a recent science test, Randall had allowed himself a mere eighty-eight, and the prettiest girl in the class had smiled at him approvingly. Indeed, if she hadn’t been going with the best wrestler in school, Randall might’ve asked her out to a movie some Saturday afternoon. He wasn’t exactly afraid of the wrestler, just aware that he had a way to go before his own credentials were rock solid.

When the bell rang, Randall tossed his things in his locker and drifted along with the crowd toward the double doors, ducking into the gym at the last moment so he could slip out the door that opened on the alley behind the Mohawk Grill. Randall didn’t believe in tempting fate. The day before, he was waylaid by Cobras who insisted he join. For a dollar a week, they’d make sure nobody bothered him. That wouldn’t have been such a bad deal except that the Cobras themselves were the only ones who ever bothered him. Only the biggest and most athletic boys escaped paying dues. Randall himself had avoided the issue for over a year because no one knew exactly who he was and because he had a way of blending in. But now Boyer Burnhoffer, the Cobra leader, who had already spent two years in reform school, had him figured, and Randall knew he’d have to join pretty soon if he expected to
escape a thrashing. The Cobras bragged that they had once killed a boy who refused to join. Randall didn’t believe it, but it was vaguely unsettling to know that it was murder they aspired to. They had stopped Randall at the foot of Nathan Littler’s statue, and Boyer Burnhoffer—his shirt unbuttoned to the waist in the late October chill, his breath reeking of onions—had wondered out loud, his nose only an inch or two from Randall’s, what the boy could have against becoming an honorary Cobra. Randall had known they wouldn’t dare to beat him up there on Main Street in front of the school, so he stalled and made an excuse about his grandfather waiting in the hospital. That wasn’t true, of course. Mather Grouse had been released earlier in the week, but the ploy for sympathy worked and Randall got away after promising he’d join by the end of the week.

The situation was far from critical. All he had to do was make sure he always had a dollar in his pocket and exercise normal vigilance to avoid parting with it until he had to. It wasn’t forking over the dollar that bothered him, but giving people money not to beat him up seemed a bad precedent. By leaving through the gym, he was able to flank the Cobras, who were quite attached to Nathan Littler, in whose august presence they swore and smoked and said mildly obscene things to passing girls. It would probably take them a month or two to figure out how it was they missed him every day, which left only the men’s room to steer clear of. And when they finally discovered his flanking maneuver, he could still join the chess club, which met after school in the library.

When Randall emerged into the alley behind the Mohawk Grill, he came face to face with Wild Bill,
who appeared headed in the wrong direction. The alley ran along the junior high until it dead-ended at a tall chainlink fence at the base of Hospital Hill. The man had apparently been absorbed in his own thoughts, because when the gym door opened, he started visibly. His longish black hair covered his ears completely, though patches of leprous white scalp showed through where hair inexplicably refused to grow. Randall had seen Wild Bill on the street many times but had never before come face to face with him. But if he was rattled, Wild Bill was more so. He stared at Randall as if he recognized in him someone who had once played a dirty trick on him. Then Wild Bill’s expression changed and, as usual, he looked just goofy. “Oughta,” he said cheerfully.

“How are you?” said Randall, trying not to appear nervous. His grandfather had told him that the best way to deal with dogs was to show no fear. According to Mather Grouse, dogs could smell fear in people, and Wild Bill, who had a distinctly canine appearance, might have the same ability, it seemed to Randall. There were many legends concerning Wild Bill, stories that Randall had never credited when he saw the other man slouching harmlessly along Main Street, but that, now alone with him in the alley, Randall remembered. According to some eighth graders, Wild Bill was an ax-murderer escaped from Utica. Others said he had once been a perfectly normal teenager until he encountered Myrtle Littler’s ghost one night in Myrtle Park, at which point he’d gone crazy. One girl claimed to have watched Wild Bill urinate on the street and, whenever she had listeners, she described the event horrifically. Randall would’ve almost preferred that his path be blocked by eight or ten angry Cobras than one benevolently beaming
Wild Bill, who seemed unable to do anything but nod and grin. When the awkward face-off became unbearable, Randall croaked “I have to go now,” whereupon Wild Bill, as if he had been waiting for precisely this intelligence, danced nimbly out of the boy’s way like some some shaggy doorman who’d nodded off waiting for instructions.

Before Randall could complete his escape, Wild Bill had stuck one hand into his own dusty black trousers and drawn out a small package, which he then thrust into Randall’s hand. Much to Randall’s relief, the back door to the Mohawk Grill opened and Harry Saunders, its cook and proprietor, appeared with a bagful of trash for the dumpster. When he saw Randall and Wild Bill, he stopped and surveyed them critically. “You get on home, Bill,” he advised.

That must have seemed like good advice to Wild Bill, who resumed his course up the blind alley the wrong way. Once he was out of earshot, Harry turned to Randall angrily, “Just what’s wrong with you boys, would you tell me that? None of you got nothing better to do than torment that poor man. Cheating him out of what little money he’s got, getting him to trade dimes for nickels, then giving him a bloody nose when you’re tired of his company. And all because you can’t figure how else to amuse yourself—”

“I never—” Randall began, but Harry wasn’t in a mood to listen.

“What ever become of decency? That’s what I’d like to know.” He still held the sackful of garbage but seemed to have forgotten it. “What ever become of decency?”

“I don’t know,” Randall admitted.

Harry then remembered the bag and tossed it into
the dumpster, wiping his hands on his grimy apron. “Garbage!”

On Main Street Randall turned right to head home, then stopped to see if Wild Bill would retrace his steps when he discovered there was no outlet to the alley. When he did not, Randall went all the way back to the gym door, from which point he could see the entire alley in both directions. Wild Bill had vanished. On the other side of the chainlink fence was the sheer hillface, heavily wooded all the way up the slope to the old hospital. The only place Wild Bill might conceivably have gone was in through the rear door of one of the other shops that fronted on Main, something Randall was certain he had not done. Then he remembered the small package still in his pocket, and when he took it out, Randall did not immediately know what it was. “Ribbed and lubricated for maximum pleasure,” the little package promised. He quickly shoved it back in his pocket, just as he heard someone call his name. Randall half expected to see Boyer Burnhoffer, but when he turned, he recognized his father coming out of the Mohawk Grill. His shirt said
Steve
above the pocket.

“What’s up?” Dallas said, falling in step beside his son.

“Nothing.”

“Something must be up.”

Randall insisted there wasn’t anything up that he knew of, the end of the line for that conversation. He saw his father very seldom, and when chance threw them together, it was always a struggle to discover something to talk about. Most subjects just naturally fizzled after two or three exchanges.

When they passed the sloping lawn of the junior high, Randall heard his name again. The Cobras were still congregated at Nathan Littler’s feet, and they all waved. “See you tomorrow,” Boyer Burnhoffer called.