Afterwards I idle on the sidewalk. Smoker’s row: patients, orderlies, nurses filing a concrete abutment. In wheelchairs and hospital blues, dragging vital sign monitors and oxygen tanks. A snatch of a song comes to me: The saddest thing that I ever saw / Was smokers outside the hospital doors.
A guy stands in light shed by the ambulance bay. Shuffling along the halogen-lit brickwork. His fly is unzipped and his shirt’s buttoned all wrong. His hair — long, the last time I’d seen him — was razed to the scalp. I walk over.
“Hey, how are you?”
Colin Hill offers me the most open, beatific smile.
“How do you do?”
He speaks as if a baffler down his belly prevents him from raising his voice. Slack features. Shaving cream crusted in his ear-holes. His smile goes on and on and on.
“We lived on Sarah Court,” I tell him. “As kids.”
He rubs a palm over his scalp as you do a foot that’s gone to sleep. The muscles mooring his jaw tense. The frustrated noise he makes is, I’m guessing, laughter.
“I remember.” He extends both hands in front of him, palms facing me, touching his thumbs then spreading his arms to their furthest ambit. The sort of panoramic gesture a shady condominium developer makes to encompass vacant swampland where he plans a timeshare resort. “I remember… everything.”
My euphoria sours. Colin faces the wall again. He hunts until he finds what he’d lost: a ladybug crawling in the grouting. He slips a pinkie finger into the gap. The bug perches on his nail. We’re approached by an old man in a housecoat and winter boots.
“You got matches?” he asks us.
“Would you like a cigarette?” Colin says.
“Did I say cigarette? I said matches.”
Colin’s expression is wounded. The old man intuits things.
“I got a briar, son.” He pulls a pipe from his housecoat. “Bastids at the home won’t let me buy matches.”
“But they let you roam around at night?”
“Roam?” he answers me. “What am I, a cow?”
He takes Colin’s Zippo. We stand in fragrant cherry smoke, which must bother the ladybug as it lifts off from Colin’s fingertip. “Oh, pooh,” says Colin.
Our fathers have met in the hospital foyer. Wesley shakes my hand with a tired smile, then zips up Colin’s fly. It’s decided we’ll go for a drink.
“I can drink a damn beer,” declares the old man, as though one of us had challenged his ability to do so. Wesley asks his name.
“I’m Lonnigan,” he says, and when he smiles his face is vaguely familiar — but in this city everyone’s face seems vaguely so.
“Mr. Lonnigan—”
“Who said mister?”
“Okay, Lonnigan, come on.”
Wes takes his son’s hand to guide him down the sidewalk. Lonnigan lifts the odd car door to see if it’s unlocked. At the Queenston Motel the Hot Nuts machine remains empty. Charred peanut specks stuck to hot greasy glass. Colin cadges a handful of loonies off his father and makes for the Manx TT Superbike video game. We take the window booth. When beers arrive, Lonnigan tells the bartender to put his on our tab and joins Colin at the video game.
“Your son…” Dad asks Wes.
“Barrel couldn’t cope, Frank. They who built it said it’d been tested to so-and-so many psi but that water’s a beast. Seals burst. Colin died a bit down in the dark. But I think he’d probably do it again. Just how he’s made. When I baled him in he reached for my hand. Instinct? I don’t know. He did reach. They did one of those — stuck him in a tube and went at his head with magnets…”
“MRI.”
“Right. Black specks. All over his brain. None of the major neural centres.”
I ask can it be fixed.
“No more than you can fix the rotten spots on an apple,” Dad says.
“Jesus, Dad.”
“I don’t know it’s the worst thing,” Wes says. “Hope this doesn’t come off bad, but I understand him again. For so long he was alien to me.” He stares into his glass. “In some ways he’s back to the kid I taught to shave before he had hairs on his face. Standing next to me in the bathroom, shoulders barely clearing the sink ledge. I lathered him up and he shaved with one of his mom’s old pink leg razors. Thing is — and Frank, you’d know it — even as your kid gets older there’s something of that child about their faces.”
“A hell of a burden, Wes, your age.”
“Yeah, Frank. Fine motor skills coming along. He’ll find a job after therapy. But yeah.”
A black man in orderly whites presses his face to the window. Shakes his head as he steps inside. Lonnigan spots him coming and chugs his beer before the orderly can take his glass away.
“You old cabbagehead. Who let you out?”
“Must’ve been you, Clive,” Lonnigan cackles.
“You crazy goat. I’m’na handcuff you to a bedpost.”
“You try and I’ll sic the CNPEA on you faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse — ho ho. I know people.”
“Am I safe in believin’ you ain’t wrapped an automobile round a tree tonight?”
“Goddam fine driver, me. I don’t wrap trees.”
“Wrap your ancient dodo ass round a tree, is what I ought to do.”
“CNPEA.” Lonnigan clucks at the orderly. “Remember that.”
“He says you brought him in,” says the orderly, who I instantly recognize as Clive Suggs, the father who KO’d me years ago. “Why do such a thing? Old dude in his housecoat.”
“He was insistent,” says Dad.
“Well, he is that.”
Clive sits for a beer. On duty, he admits, but what’s one going to hurt?
“You want to know what?” he says, easing into his miseries with the air of a man slipping into a well-worn pair of slippers. “That old potato-head steals cars. Joyrides. A teenager do what he do, that boy’s a hooligan. An old man do the same and he’s full of beans. Discrediting the myth aged folk can’t do nothing. Some kind a hero. He even stole a honeywagon.”
“A what?”
“A kind of a septic truck,” Clive tells me. “Suck the wastes out of pay toilets.”
“He is peppy.”
“Demented pain in my ass, what he is.”
After another round, this pleasant fuzz edges everything: sort of like beholding the world from inside a cored peach. Colin and Lonnigan switch their attentions to the Claw Game.
“Go for the big white bear,” Lonnigan instructs him. “Don’t fiddle-fart around with them junky trinkets.”
“Mister L,” says Clive. “You played out your leash. Time to go.”
On the way out Lonnigan checks up in front of Dad.
“I wasn’t there for what happened to your dog,” he says. “After I found out, I left for good. Can’t say I could’ve done much. That woman had her ways. But you knew all about it, didn’t you, doctor?”
Clive grasps Lonnigan’s elbow. Dad drinks his beer with a distant smile. Soon thereafter Wes also says his goodbyes.
“I wish you boys well.”
“Same to you, Wes,” Frank and I say, nearly in unison. “Good speaking.”
Two pairs of men move down the sidewalk. Lonnigan propped up by Clive, Colin by his father. Wes opens his truck door. Helps his son into the cab. Lashes the seatbelt across his hips.