Lenny shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “No you’re not.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m not.”
Lenny hit him once. The punch caught Ear-Dick between his nose and lip with a sickening crack, and he went down where he stood. He didn’t teeter or sway or stumble, he dropped, his legs giving way beneath him.
“What the fuck?” I said, taking a step back, putting some distance between myself and Lenny.
Lenny was standing over him breathing heavily as though he’d just sprinted around the court. “I knew it was him.”
“It wasn’t him.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course it was.” He said this like I was the crazy one. He still had his fists raised in a boxer’s stance, as though at any moment Ear-Dick might jump up and fight back. Ear-Dick’s chest rose and fell with the gentle rhythm of sleep. Other than that he was motionless, knocked out cold. His head was turned to one side and a puddle of blood was forming beside his face.
Lenny lowered his hands. After a moment he said, “We should go.”
“We have to call an ambulance,” I said. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“He’s coming with us,” Lenny said. He reached into his pocket and took out his keys.
“To a hospital?”
“After,” Lenny said.
“After what?”
“After he admits what he did.” Lenny said this like it was all very reasonable, like he half-expected me to be having the same train of thought.
“Are you retarded?”
Lenny’s face tightened. His left hand was still balled into a fist. “Don’t say that.”
“It wasn’t him,” I said again. Cars whizzed by on 26th Street, and I worried that at any moment one of them would make a left turn and that whoever was inside would see us standing there, Ear-Dick sprawled on the pavement between us.
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Lenny said. “You’re supposed to believe me.” He glared at me with his good eye. “Please.”
Behind him the basketball net swayed in the breeze. It had been a long time since I’d seen Lenny on a court. In junior high he’d been our team captain and MVP, fighting for rebounds under the boards, draining jumpers while his parents cheered from the stands. But at the first tryout in high school the coach took one look at Lenny’s blind eye and put him on the practice squad. Lenny quit a week later. I thought about his house and how it was gone forever, nothing left but ashes and rubble and smoke-stained sneakers. I thought about how at the plumbing shop, his brother hired kids right out of high school to work on the jobsite and make union wages while Lenny still drove the supply van and took orders from guys who’d worked there half as long. I suddenly felt unsteady on my feet. I placed my hands on my thighs and leaned forward as Lenny’s whole sad history unraveled itself before me.
“We’ll just drive around till he wakes up. I’ll ask him one more time, and then it’s straight to the hospital. I swear.” Lenny raised his hand as though taking an oath.
“Give me your keys,” I said.
I pulled the truck over, and we undid the vinyl cover until it was halfway unfastened. We loaded Ear-Dick into the bed. The stream of blood had stopped flowing from his nose, as though whatever hidden source had fed it was now dry. We put him in on his side, wedging him between the wheel-well and a portable generator. We began to refasten the bed cover.
“What about air?” I asked. “How’s he gonna breathe?”
“Relax,” Lenny said. He shut the tailgate, unfastened a couple of the snaps that held the vinyl cover down, and pulled the loose corner back. “He’ll be fine.”
We went east on 26th Street until we reached Glenwood Park Avenue, which ran through my old neighborhood, a part of town I usually avoided. When Lenny turned right, headed away from the lake and out of town, we passed my old house, a red brick two-story, occupied now by some other family. The last time I was inside was two days before my father died. It was early in the morning. I had been driving around aimlessly all night, the cooler of beer beside me nearly empty, when I found myself in my parent’s neighborhood. I had not intended to end up there. Hospice had been called in and their white van filled our driveway.
I found my mother and the hospice nurse keeping vigil beside my father’s hospital bed. The only light came from a bedside lamp. The tubes that were attached to my father the last time I’d seen him were disconnected now.
“Where are his tubes?” I asked. Neither of them answered. They just left the room. I sat down in a chair next to the bed and watched as my father opened his eyes. When he saw me, he smiled, but I could tell that he was somewhere else, somewhere not in the room. Below his pale veiny skin, the cancer that had begun in his throat had travelled down the length of his chest and filled his stomach. It was eating everything that remained alive within him. He had been given a great deal of morphine, and his eyes looked huge and glassy.
“You’re late,” he said calmly. “Try to be on time from now on.” His cheeks were sunken. Someone had tried to shave him, but areas of stubble remained here and there. I had never seen him with any facial hair and it surprised me how much it changed his appearance.
“Dad,” I said. He was staring at a patch of nothing on the ceiling. I could tell he was about to say something.
“Did you know,” he began, “that during the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold was shot in the leg while fighting for the Colonists?” He opened his eyes even wider and turned to me. “Did you know that?”
I shook my head, but he seemed not to notice.
“He was crippled for the rest of his life, but people only remember him as a traitor.”
“Dad,” I repeated. There was something I needed to say, something I had not yet found the words for.
“That’s the way history works,” he said. “That’s the way the world works.” He turned back toward the ceiling and took a deep breath. My own breath caught in my chest. Across the room, the first light of the day streamed pale yellow through the drawn beige curtains. “After the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the Japanese military killed 250,000 Chinese civilians. They did that because the Chinese were helping downed American Airmen.” He began to move his hand about before him. “It’s extraordinary,” he said. “The Chinese didn’t even know us, but they helped. Does anybody know how extraordinary that is?” His eyes searched the ceiling, following the direction of his finger, pointed in front of him. I knew then where he was, standing at the front of his classroom, leading his students, offering them the inexplicable acts of men and scanning the desks for answers, for a raised hand, for anything. His eyes passed over my face as they might have passed over any student’s. “People do extraordinary things every day,” he said.
“Dad,” I said. He stopped pointing and for a moment I thought that he’d heard, that he was back in the room. He let his hand fall onto his blanket, and his glazed eyes fixed on me and what I wanted to tell him was that I was sorry, for everything, that I was a fuck-up and I knew it but I could change, that it wasn’t too late for me to change. I wanted to beg him to forgive me. I wanted to thank him for always believing, for not giving up on me when anyone else would have. That’s what I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t. Instead, I lowered my head and heard myself say, “Please stop expecting anything from me.” When I raised my head his face held a serious expression, his eyebrows sloped toward each other.
“You remind me of my son,” he said. He seemed to be studying me, searching my features, and then suddenly his expression twisted until I thought he might cry out. “Ohhh,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he said it from pain or sadness or if there was any difference at all.