Chapter 5

THE FREE CLINIC was on 8th, just across the railroad tracks. Twice G2 realized he’d turned the wrong direction and was heading away from it. He sat to rest, sleeping a while each time. When he reached the tracks, he stumbled and fell. He just lay there, thinking that if he didn’t get up he’d get run over, but too exhausted to drag himself further. While he was lying there, Ben Johnson came across the tracks. G2 had ridden the rails with Ben a time once before. Ben was good company and told stories to fill the air. He seemed to accept that G2 didn’t talk much and would be happiest left alone.

“Hey, G2. Ya gotta get up off the tracks, buddy,” he said. He offered G2 a hand but G2 wasn’t strong enough to raise his up. “You’re pretty out of it today, man. Which direction you headed?” G2 raised a waved his hand vaguely toward the clinic. Ben looked that direction. “Yeah, that’s a good one. Let me give you a hand.” He bent down and helped G2 to his feet and supported him as they stumbled across the next set of tracks. It seemed like a long way across the yard to the clinic and there were two freight trains stopped between them and the other side. Ben led G2 down the length of one of the trains. He stopped beside a cattle car, inspected it a bit and then moved on to a box car with an open door. “This looks good,” Ben said. “Better out of the wind than the cattle car. I’ll bring you a bunch a straw and you’ll be all set.” He boosted G2’s light frame up into the boxcar, shoved his feet in, and ran back to the cattle car. Before he got back, the train began to move. G2 lay huddled in a corner of the box car. He wasn’t going to the clinic after all. Well, the train was a better place to die than a hospital.

G2 woke up in a hospital room with five other men in beds. A tube was attached to his arm and a clear plastic bag at the other end dripped slowly into it. Some of the men snored. One tossed and rolled on his side. The man in the bed next to G2 lay flat on his back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes staring at the ceiling. So intent did that stare seem to be that G2 looked up to see what the other man saw on the ceiling. Acoustical tiles, yellow with age. G2 looked back at the man. His gaze never wavered. He never blinked. G2 had seen it before.

Uncle Al was a bus driver in a city about an hour from where Gerald lived. He had a grown son, a son about two years older than Gerald, and a daughter about the same age as Gerald’s sister Marian. Gerald loved to visit Uncle Al and Aunt Millie, even though technically they weren’t related to him at all. He got to ride the bus to the garage with Uncle Al. Uncle Al once gave Gerald the job of “shooting” the birds. When the starlings kept squawking in the trees outside their house, Uncle Al taught Gerald how to press a board beneath his foot and slam it on the sidewalk so it sounded like a gunshot. The starlings would all scatter and it would be quiet for about half an hour. Then they’d come back noisy as ever and Gerald would “shoot” them again. Uncle Al said he wished it was legal to use his shotgun in the city limits. He’d end the starling problem once and for all. Denny, the younger of Uncle Al’s sons, had a paper route before Gerald did. He took Gerald out with him one day and it was all Gerald could do to keep up with the older boy as he sped on his route. He was following behind Denny across a street when he ran straight into the curb on the other side. Gerald flew over the handlebars and landed in the lawn. Denny said it was a good thing he didn’t hit the sidewalk. The bike couldn’t be ridden after that. The front wheel was caved in from the impact with the curb. Gerald was very apologetic, but Denny didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve got another wheel in the garage,” he said. Then he showed Gerald the trick of pulling up on the handlebars just before you reach a curb to lift the front wheel over. “Should have showed you that earlier,” he said. It was later that year, though, that Uncle Al got sick. Gerald’s family went to visit almost every weekend and took food to Aunt Millie and the kids. It seemed like everyone had something on their mind and the younger kids were left at home while the adults went to the hospital to see Uncle Al. The girls sat and played with Barbie dolls in the living room and Gerald read a book for a while. When he got bored, he wandered around the house looking at Aunt Millie’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. His family always brought unique salt and peppers for Aunt Millie from wherever they traveled and apparently so did everyone else they knew. She had hundreds of pairs in glass cabinets. Gerald saw the carved cedar set his family had bought when they went to the Ozarks in the Packard. The whole store where they bought those was full of cedar carvings, including the salt and pepper that were balanced on either end of a saw sticking through the trunk of a tree, all about three inches across. Gerald had a cup and ball from that store, but his father wouldn’t buy him a sling shot. The store’s smell was like a closet only a hundred times more. Everything was fresh cut cedar wood. Gerald’s favorite salt and pepper shakers in Aunt Millie’s collection were the owls. Two brown owls held salt and pepper, but beside them were three smaller owls that were simply their family. Eventually the day came when everyone visited Uncle Al in the hospital. It was time to say goodbye, Gerald’s mom told him. Is he going to die now? Gerald wanted to know. Very soon. But he wants to see everyone first. Gerald didn’t know that when it was time to die you could wait until you saw everyone first. That was good to know. When it was time for him to die, he was going to think of someone who would take days or maybe years to get to him so that he could stay alive until he saw them to say goodbye. There was bad traffic that day and their car overheated. Gerald’s dad had to call AAA to get help. That took a couple of hours while Gerald and his sister finally went to sleep in the back seat of the car and his mother sat with her head bowed in the front. They drove faster than his dad usually drove when they could finally get started again and arrived at the hospital just in time to see Aunt Millie come out of Uncle Al’s room. Gerald’s mother swept her into her arms and his father wrapped his arms around both women. Gerald peeked through the open door. Denny and his brother and sister all stood silently on the other side of the bed Uncle Al lay in with their heads bowed and tears running down their cheeks. Gerald had never seen Denny cry. Uncle Al lay on his back with his lips slightly parted, staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe. Apparently Uncle Al couldn’t wait.

G2 woke up thinking. The man in the bed next to him was snoring loudly. Different man. The dead one had been replaced almost as quickly as they could change the sheets. He wondered if this was where he would die and who he should ask to see before he went. Appendix, the doctor had said. They brought a form to him and asked him name, address, and a lot of information G2 didn’t know. He took the form from the doctor and wrote his name in block letters: Gerald Good, G2. He didn’t have an address, didn’t know if any of his relatives were living, didn’t know his medical history. He dragged a disused memory from the depths of his subconscious and wrote down a social security number. He thought he remembered it right. And how old was he? 50? 52? He wrote down his birthdate, but wasn’t sure if it was September or October. Well, it was close enough. Then he remembered one other thing. There wasn’t a spot on the form for it, so he wrote it in the address blank. “M16-999.” You never forgot your first license plate. It was still on the old Chevrolet Impala his father kept in the garage, even after he bought the new Gremlin that he died in. Some things were very clear. Others didn’t seem to make any sense at all.

Gerald woke up that Saturday morning thinking he had to get out and make his deliveries before 6:00 a.m. He was going on seven months without a complaint or a missed collection. He was well on his way to becoming carrier of the year and winning one of the trips to Disneyland next summer. Only six trips would be awarded to the top six carriers of the year. Junior High was much more fun since Gerald got the paper route. He had a transistor radio—not the old crystal radio—that he bought with his earnings from the route. It had five bands, AM, FM, two Short Wave bands, and a Weather Band. Late at night, Gerald could tune in Quito, Ecuador on the Short Wave, and had found performances from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

He got up and dressed in his long underwear, jeans, and a pair of coveralls and then pulled on the hooded parka he loved. The weather had turned bitter cold that week and with the fresh snow, there was no way he would be able to ride his fat-tired bike this morning. Once the snow had been plowed, shoveled, and packed down he could go just about anywhere on that old bike. Of course in the summer he would ride the new 5-speed Schwinn that he got for Christmas. But for hauling his heavy load of papers, there was really nothing like the big Monark with fenders, carrier rack, generator light, and shock absorbers. Both bikes would stay in the garage this morning. He pulled the twin bags over his shoulders and left through the garage, patting the big car on the hood as he stepped out into the cold. “Agent M-one-six-niner-niner-niner on assignment,” he said to himself. The first bite of wind reminded him to wrap the scarf around his face. The bags were heavy, but he knew they would get lighter as he went. He fell twice before he delivered the first paper. It was going to be a long morning.

Half an hour later, tears had frozen to Gerald’s cheeks. His fingers were numb, even inside the two pairs of heavy gloves he wore. His ears beneath the stocking cap and parka were burning. He wasn’t even a quarter of the way through his route, slogging through the big drifts between houses. He couldn’t feel his toes. Gerald turned the corner and saw his father’s big Chevrolet idling in front of his next delivery. He was so thankful to see the big car that fresh tears ran down to join the ones frozen on his cheeks. He opened the passenger door and his father beckoned him. “Get in and get warm,” he said. “With both of us delivering we’ll get them delivered in time.” Gerald shoved the bags between them on the front seat, pulled his gloves off to lay his hands directly on the heat vents. As soon as his teeth quit chattering he said softly, “Thanks, Dad.” His father didn’t have to get up on Saturday morning, so Gerald knew this was special. “You showed your commitment this morning, son,” his father said. “I’ll always be there when you are committed.”

Of course, G2’s father wasn’t there now. He hadn’t been there since a year after that morning when he crashed the new Gremlin on an icy road.

But that morning the Impala was Gerald’s salvation. His father would roll to a stop in the middle of the street and the two would grab a handful of papers and jump out of each side of the car. His father took one side of the street and Gerald took the other. The newspaper publisher always gave him a lot of extra papers, so they delivered to every house, whether it was a subscriber or not. They raced each other up the block and back to the car to drive to the next block. In half an hour, Gerald was jumping out of the car to deliver the last paper on his route. That was when he slammed the door shut on his finger. His gloves were so thick and his hands so cold that for a moment Gerald thought he had only caught his glove. Then the stinging pain broke through the numbness and arced into his mind like a bolt of lightning. His scream was still echoing down the street when his father wrenched the door open, took the last paper from Gerald’s hand, snapped a rubber band around it, and flung it sidearm at the last house. It clanged against the aluminum storm door. Even through the pain and tears, Gerald remembered thinking “Bullseye—way to go Dad.” His dad got Gerald into the car, and they were home in ten minutes. The pain was terrible. It felt like his whole arm was going to explode. Once the garage door was down and they got into the house, Gerald’s father was stripping the coat and gloves off his son to look at the damage. The ring finger was already beginning to turn an angry purple. “You’re going to lose that one,” his father said. Gerald cried out as a new flood of tears, this time in panic, hit him. “Not ze finger,” his father laughed. “Yus ze nail.” The whole family had laughed when they sat around listening to a Danny Kaye album of fairy tales. “Clever Gretel” came to mind. In order to conceal her gluttony she told the guest that the master was going to cut off both his ears. The guest fled from the house and Gretel told the master that he had stolen both chickens. The master, with knife still gripped in his hand, ran down the street after his guest screaming “Not bos, yus one!” Gerald choked back the tears to laugh at his father’s imitation. He broke ice cubes out of a tray, wrapped them in a dish towel, and smashed them with a kitchen mallet. He wrapped the ice towel around Gerald’s finger and Gerald winced, but was determined not to cry again. “I know it’s cold and it hurts, son, but if we don’t ice it will swell up so big you won’t be able to put your hand through your shirtsleeve.” That was terrifying, so Gerald bucked up and kept the ice in place. “You keep that on,” said his father, “and by the time I get pancakes and hot chocolate made, the worst will be over.” Gerald thought that was a little bit of an exaggeration. He ate aspirin with his pancakes at his mother’s insistence. Later in the day, the blood had pooled beneath the nail turning it black and it hurt worse, even though Gerald had kept his hand above his head all day. His father looked at the nail before bed and decided to operate.