The Cry of the Sloth (17 page)

So there I was sprawled in the middle of the busy intersection, traffic was backing up in all directions. Amazingly, no one leaped to my aid, nor did they saunter to it. What they thought of course I could not know; perhaps they thought of both leaping and sauntering, but in the end could not be bothered. I could see heads poking out of car windows all down the line, craning for a better view, and not just children’s heads either, but still nobody got out. I managed to haul myself up into a sitting position and was engaged in close communication with my knees, when a car horn sounded from far down the line, a single halfhearted toot made by the pressure of an uncertain and craven palm. I looked up. I may have glowered. I am sure I grimaced (I was beginning to register the pain in my hands and knees). I realized that I had lost a shoe, the villain with the flap. I tried unsuccessfully to put it on. I would have had to loosen the lace, which I always double knot. I scarcely had the use of my fingers, paralyzed as they were by tingles. Meanwhile, there was no further sounding of horns. I would have preferred a chorus of them. The drizzle of patient silence was completely unnerving. Swiveling my head to all points of the compass, I saw no manly hand outstretched to help, no angelic smile of succoring female beamed its sunshine upon me. My gaze met only the grinning chrome of the automobiles’ grills and bumpers and the blank stares of their huge glass eyes. I crawled—yes, crawled!—on all fours, on my bloodied knees and hands, out of the roadway. I collapsed in a heap on the grass verge. I leaned my back against a signal pole and watched the traffic resume its wonted pace. I thought of how the indifference at the heart of the machine migrates into the souls of those who command them. Then I took off my other shoe and walked home in my socks.

I assumed at first that my finger was only sprained. But after lying awake all night listening to its complaints, I discovered in the morning an interesting new object protruding from my palm: a soft whitish cylinder about twice the thickness of my erstwhile digit. Where I had once had a knuckle, it sported a dimple. I thought, “I ought to have this looked at.” Other days I would have carried it to Dorfmann. I would have relished handing him my poor damaged digit like baby Jesus cradled in a bloody palm. There was a time when this would have moved him. But our relationship has hit a sharp snag since you left—he was always soft on you—and I am not going to trust an asshole with the life of my trigger finger. Looking in the phone book I discovered a Lawrence Swindell, MD with an office on Oak Court, which is the little street that runs along the back of the Maytag plant. I swallowed six aspirin and drove over. Oak Court is a dead-end street with small ranch houses along one side and a chain-link fence along the other. A wooden sign—Dr. Lawrence Swindell, MD—hung beneath a mailbox in front of one of the houses.

I opened the screen door, and a chime sounded from somewhere in the back. The waiting room looked like somebody’s living room, complete with sofa and glass-topped coffee table. I sat down in a chair by the door. There were not any magazines, and I was the only customer, so I thought I would take a fresh look at my knees. Unfortunately, I had changed pants and the ones I was wearing did not have openings in the right places. I had to roll the legs up almost to my thighs in order to get a really good peek, and because of my hurt finger I had to do the rolling with one hand, which took some time. I palpated the crusty bits on my kneecaps a while, and then I studied my finger some more. It looked a lot like an enormous grub worm. I took out my pen and gave it two little eyes. I was considering the kind of mouth it wanted—a downturned one certainly, it being a wounded creature, but I wasn’t sure if it should have teeth—when I was interrupted by the entrance of a woman in a nurse suit. I thought of poor Mama and Mrs. Robinson. Seeing me there with my pants rolled up she assumed that I had come about my knees and was already bending over for a closer look when I said, “No, my knees are O.K. It’s my trigger finger.” I held it up so she could look at it. I rotated it so she could see all sides. “It has eyes,” I said.

“I see that,” she replied.

I said, “Do you know Elaine Robinson?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Should I?”

I thought she should. I said, “Elaine Robinson is a nurse in Milwaukee.”

She said, “Why would I know somebody in
Milwaukee
? I’ve never even been to
Chicago
.”

I wanted to tell her why, but the reason evaded me. “Chicago,” I said, “is bigger than Milwaukee.” She looked puzzled. So I went on, “It started with my shoe.” I lifted my left foot and shook it. The loose sole flapped open and shut. I made it do that a few times. “It’s trying to say something,” I explained.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. I heard a toilet flushing, and a moment later the doctor walked into the waiting room. He was smiling broadly and ratcheting a bountiful paunch down with successive jerks of a narrow belt. A final cinch, and the belt disappeared into a fold of his belly. He was fat, but except for the paunch there was not a lot of roundness to him. He was blockish and large and his huge square head was bald right down to the ears, which were small and lay flat against his skull. I thought of my own ears and wanted to cuff them (I mean my ears, but also his). “What we got here?” he boomed. I exhibited my offended digit, which he bent over and studied, furrows of fat forming across his brow, while the nurse looked on, her hands on her hips.

“Can you bend it?” he asked. I tried to make the finger curl; it protested, but I compelled it over. While the doctor interrogated my finger, my own gaze was fixed on the top of his glabrous pate hovering just inches from my face. Round and smooth as a bowling ball, about that size, it was so shiny it made me blink. I glanced up and saw the nurse had noticed my fascination. A faint smile touched the corners of her mouth. Then she winked. I noticed for the first time how neatly she fit her uniform.

The doctor straightened. “Might be broken,” he said. “But if it is, then the bone’s still in place. Otherwise, you couldn’t move it like you did. Anyway, I can’t put a cast on till the swelling has gone down.”

I followed him into the examination room. With my pants still rolled above the knees, I looked as if I were about to wade in something. He had me sit on a polished metal table. My feet dangled several inches off the floor. I felt like a child in a high chair. I kicked my legs back and forth in an attempt to pump the feeling up a little.

“Stop that,” he said. Which was of course the perfect thing to say.

I sat quietly while he packaged my finger in a splint constructed of two tongue depressors wrapped with several turns of adhesive tape. Then without a word he grasped the rolled legs of my trousers and turned them back down, first one and then the other, and snapped the cuffs straight with sharp tailor-like jerks. He must have worked in a clothes store before becoming a doctor. Leaning on the table next to me he wrote out a prescription for pain medicine.

The whole time the doctor was applying the splint the nurse had just stood there watching, hands on her hips, and now she said, “That’ll be twenty dollars.”

I had the wad of bills from yesterday in my pants pocket, where I had transferred it that morning. My intention was to reach down and peel off a twenty without dragging the rest to the surface. This was not as simple as I thought. Because of the splint I was forced to use my left hand, the clumsy one, though the money was in my right pocket. By twisting my shoulders and torso I contrived to work my hand down into the pocket, where I attempted to unfold the wad. I had what I thought was the corner of a single bill pinched between my thumb and index, while my other three fingers fought off a dozen other bills clinging to it. But the more I struggled, the more tangled they became. From the corner of my eye I could see the nurse craning her neck in what was either astonishment or an effort to peer into my pocket. I succeeded finally in peeling off the twenty and began cautiously withdrawing my hand. This hand, however, having approached the pocket from the wrong side, had entered at an oblique angle, and was now stuck there. I could, of course, let go the bill, relax my fingers, and slip my hand out without difficulty. That, however, would defeat the purpose, leave me without the twenty, and oblige me to start the whole process over. One solution would have been for the doctor or, better, the nurse, being smaller, to put her hand in. But I was reluctant to have them do that. Meanwhile, my awkward posture (twisted at the middle, my left hand sunk deep in my right pocket), combined with the physical exertion of trying to wrench the hand back out, caused me to lose my balance. Staggering sideways, I lurched across the room and collided with the side of a glass-fronted cabinet. Fortunately the glass did not break, though judging by the noise a number of things fell over inside. Finally, by dint of an upward jerk that practically lifted my feet from the floor, I snatched my hand free from what I had come to think of as the jaws of my pocket. My hand rocketed forth, the sought-after twenty dangling from it, and immediately in its wake the entire wad of remaining bills erupted from the pocket in a kind of volcanic explosion.

I recall a moment of paralysis. No one moved, and there was no sound other than the leaf-like flutter of money falling to the floor. I shouted “That’s
my
money!” And the next moment we were all three knocking heads as we crawled around the floor on our hands and knees. I mashed the doctor’s hand under my knee. He hit me in the temple with his bowling ball. The nurse was swinging her hips like battering rams. It was clear that he, with his hanging paunch, and I, with my damaged finger, had no chance against her. We exchanged looks that said as much, and scrambled to our feet. The doctor handed me the tuft of bills he had gathered. We walked over and stood against the wall to be out of her way, and watched while she finished the job. Wagging her hips, she crawled around the floor like a dog on a scent. Spy a bill and she would pounce, slap it with the flat of her hand like a child slapping jacks, hand it across to the steadily growing wad crumpled in her fist, and lunge for another. The doctor shot me a glance that I interpreted as smirking. I winked, and he looked away. I thought of how I would feel if that were you on the floor, and I was embarrassed for him.

Having captured all the bills in sight, she spent a minute or two sniffing in corners and behind the desk. Then she stood up, brushed the dust from her knees, and handed me the crumpled wad of bills. It was warm and damp from her fist, and I hastened to stuff it into my left pocket, making sure it went all the way to the bottom. I remembered my father on the front lawn of our house stuffing a dead mole into his pocket, an event I had forgotten until that instant. I think I must have paused a few moments, hand in pocket, lost in reverie. When I looked up again, I noticed she was still holding one twenty-dollar bill. I know some people—and I suspect you are among them—would say that this was just the twenty dollars I owed her, and I suppose that was the way she saw it. But that’s not the way I saw it. I accidentally had spilled some money on the floor, and this woman had helped pick it up, as was only polite. But now she had decided—unilaterally decided, without a word of consultation with its rightful owner—to keep a portion of it for herself, ignoring the blatant fact that I had not paid her anything yet.

So I held out my hand and said, “Could I have my money please.”

She replied, “You owe us twenty. This is the twenty” She waved the bill in my face.

I said, “But I didn’t give you
that
twenty,” and I dug in my pocket, and, after a little work, I contrived this time to draw forth a single bill. “For all you know, I was going to give you
this
twenty,” and I waved that one in
her
face.

“What fucking difference does it make?” she snapped.

The doctor murmured, “Lucille.” I realized, from the way he said it, that this was his wife.

I said, “It makes all the difference in the world. The fact of the matter is, I had not yet paid you one penny. It is likely that I had every intention of paying you the full amount, but you didn’t know that. You couldn’t know that unless you had eyes inside my head. Furthermore, had I chosen not to pay you, you would not have had the right just to snatch it. You would have had to take me to court.”

Neither of them had an answer to this. They looked at me, wide-eyed, and then at each other, obviously bewildered by my glibness. I continued in a more conciliatory tone, “Just give it to me, and I’ll give it back to you.” She hesitated a moment. She looked at the doctor, who shrugged. She was starting to hand it over, when I said coyly, “Maybe.”

She jerked her hand back, hiding it behind her like a naughty child with illicit candy. It was an incredibly guilt-admitting gesture. She must have seen it that way too, for she brought her hand back to her side. She looked sullen; she stared at her shoes and would not meet my eyes. I felt a tremendous surge of energy. I held out my hand and spoke in a firm tone.

“Lucille, give me the money. Give it to me now.”

Slowly she lifted her hand, still not looking at me. I took the money and said. “Thank you.” I let a moment pass, allowing as it were the proof of ownership to settle. Then I said, “Here’s the money I owe you,” and I handed the other bill to her.

I turned and walked out. I could feel their eyes on me, the darts of their hatred banging the back of my head like steel balls. The waiting room was crowded with people.

On the way home I was elated. Despite the continuing pain in my finger I couldn’t resist tapping out little tunes on the car horn.

The finger is not broken, I think. The swelling is almost down, though there seems to be a slight bow below the knuckle that was not there before. I am feeling very lightheaded, but I can’t sleep. I lie on the sofa downstairs. There is a calmness to the blue light there. Or I sit in the red chair among the boxes. I get the feeling that I am waiting in a station surrounded by my luggage. I am very excited. I ask myself, Where the hell is the train?