“Yourself?” said the woman.
“Yes,” said Hosea. He coughed. “Yes, myself.”
“Very good then,” said the woman. “And the address of your office being?”
“Office being?” said Hosea.
“Yes,” said the woman.
“Oh,” said Hosea, “okay.” And he gave her the address.
“Our counter should be there at ten o’clock, Mayor Funk, is that convenient for you? Mayor Funk? Hello, Mayor Funk? Mayor Funk!”
“Oh yes,” said Hosea. “Sure thing. Thank-you.”
Hosea hung up the phone and two seconds later heard the scream of Algren’s one and only ambulance as it ripped through the torpor of the day. Before Hosea could make it to the window, the ambulance had passed and the street was, once again, as dead as a ghost town.
Hosea ran out of his office and towards the hospital. The siren had stopped and Hosea could hear birds singing and an airplane flying directly behind him, maybe it was a crop duster, why was it following him? And a stampede of horses. Or was it his heart? One kid stopped playing in his yard and looked up at the strange sight of Hosea Funk sprinting down the sidewalk like an escaped parolee, and a couple of women visiting outside stared at him and shook their heads. “That Hosea Funk,” one said, but Hosea, by that time, was nearing the hospital, and then he was there, running up the stairs, then through the front door, towards the emergency room, and shouting, “No! No! No!”
Tom lay on the stretcher surrounded by machines and cords. Dr. François was pounding on his chest and checking levels on one of the machines. Nurse Barnes was injecting Tom with something and another nurse was standing next to the doctor, watching a machine and opening up a small package. A third nurse was on the phone to another hospital and Hosea heard her say, “… massive cardiac …” and then some numbers. Then the doctor speaking to the nurse beside him, softly, and … Tom, just lying there. The doctor turned around and saw Hosea standing in the doorway and said, “For God’s sake …” and turned back to Tom. After a few seconds, the doctor said to Hosea, “Find Dory,” and then he and the nurses surrounded Tom, and Tom disappeared inside them.
Twenty minutes later, Dory and Knute stood in the waiting room, waiting for the news. The doctor was sure Tom was going to die, there was no way he could survive that much trauma to the heart, and, in fact, Tom had been dead for a minute or so, but came back to life.
“If he’d been taken to Winnipeg right off the bat would he survive?” asked Dory.
“He wouldn’t have made it to Winnipeg,” the doctor answered. He told them that Tom had called the hospital himself before he had the heart attack, saying he was feeling very strange, and when they got to him he had been dead, for that minute.
So, there they were. Tom was on a lot of morphine and lay there with his eyes closed, but Dory and Knute squeezed his hands and kissed him and said good-bye. They were in shock, complete shock. Hosea came in for about a minute, that’s all the doctor would allow him, and he touched Tom’s arm and looked at Tom. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then he was asked to leave the room.
But then things got weird. Tom wasn’t dying. Knute and Dory could tell Dr. François was getting sort of nervous because he probably figured he should have transferred him to Winnipeg after all. Not that the doctor wanted Tom to die, he just seemed a little confused. So Tom remained alive and eventually Knute even left to get some coffee for herself and Dory. The doctor came in and by then a few doctors had come from other towns, and one from Winnipeg, and they huddled around Tom, speaking in hushed tones, telling Knute and Dory that they had to admit they were puzzled. That the heart had sustained so much damage, they didn’t know how it was capable of functioning. Knute and Dory were still so overwhelmed that they just nodded and stared at Tom and, well, just waited.
Hosea tried to make himself comfortable in the waiting room. The doctor gave him updates on Tom’s condition, but mostly Tom was just still alive. “Still alive?” Hosea would ask, and the doctor would nod and go back into Tom’s room. At one point Dory came out and asked Hosea if he would sit with Tom while she went to the cafeteria to get some more coffee. Knute had left to get Max and Summer Feelin’ and bring them to the hospital. Hosea sat down next to Tom. Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Tom whispered, “What time is the count?” Hosea, startled, grabbed at the front of his shirt and cleared his throat. He looked at Tom, and said, “What? What did you say, Tom?”
Tom, exhausted by the effort he had made to speak, began again. “What … time …” He took a deep breath, and then was quiet for a long time.
Hosea held his hand and squeezed. “… Is the count?” he whispered in Tom’s ear. Tom nodded once.
“At ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Hosea. “They called me today from Ottawa … but how did you know … how do you know about the count?” Tom didn’t say anything. He’d heard it all the other night, every word, thought Hosea. He knows the Prime Minister is my father. He knows what’s going on.
“Tom,” he whispered, “you don’t—”
Just then the doctor came into the room with Dory and said to Hosea, “Okay, Hose, let’s not tire him out,” and Hosea nodded and went back to the waiting room.
Tom stayed alive all night, although he had developed a fever. Dory sat in a chair beside his bed, and held his hand and put small flakes of ice between his lips from time to time. Knutie slept on another bed in Tom’s room, Max took S.F. home and tried to console her, doctors and nurses walked in and out quietly, adjusting levels, writing down information, and Hosea curled up as best he could on a sweaty vinyl couch in the lobby of the hospital, where he spent the night alone and dreaming.
He was dead. Right after he died, he said, “I don’t want to be put into a box and buried in the dirt,” so they pumped him full of helium and tied a steel cable to his ankle and cranked him up into the sky so he could float around the world and check things out, without getting lost, and losing Algren. He checked out a Mexican circus and New York City and lost tribes and a few hundred wars and a housing project in New Orleans. And then he felt a gentle touch, a hand on his shoulder. He had a short-wave radio with him, propped up on his stomach, and he lay on his back and floated for a while over mountains somewhere in the world and listened to police calls on his radio, and then Knutie’s voice on the other end saying, “We need you here in Algren, we’re bringing you back,” and the cable jerked on his ankle and the short-wave radio fell off his stomach and they started cranking him back down to earth. Iris Cherniski was squirting a little WD-40 into the crank machine and saying, “That’s it, that’s it, easy does it,” and Max was there with a microphone and holding S.F. in his arms, saying, “Perfect two-point landing, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying with CorpseAir, we hope you enjoyed your flight.” And there were Peej and Euphemia playing concentration on the curb, smiling shyly at each other and ignoring Hosea entirely, and then there was John Baert, standing beside Euphemia, asking if he could play, and Hosea tried to undo the steel cable from his ankle and go over there, “Those’re my folks,” he said to Max. “I gotta get this thing off. Today’s the day. Help me get this thing off.”
“But, Hosea,” said his Aunt Minty, who had just showed up, “you’re still pumped full of helium, if we take it off you’ll float away.”
“Then empty me!” yelled Hosea. “C’mon, help me, Minty!”
“Oh, Hosie,” said Euphemia, finally looking up, “relax, sweetheart, you’re dead.” She smiled sweetly at Peej and John Baert and said, “He’s so dead …”
“Tough shit!” yelled Hosea. “So are you, get this damn thing off me!”