Intent on the folder, Huysterkark barely glanced up. “A replacement part. From the Greek: a putting to, an addition.”
“Is that it?”
Huysterkark ignored the question, but he lifted his eyes to pin Walter with a look of shrewd appraisal. “Think of it this way,” he said after a moment. “What if your body was a machine, Walter — an automobile, let’s say? What if you were a Cutlass convertible? Hm? Shiny, sleek, right off the showroom floor?” Walter didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to talk about cars — he wanted to talk about feet, about mobility, he wanted to talk about the rest of his life. “Chances are you’d run trouble-free for years, Walter, but as you accumulate mileage something’s bound to give out sooner or later, you follow me?” Huysterkark leaned forward. “In your case, let’s say one of the wheels goes bad.”
Walter tried to hold the doctor’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He studied his hands, the sleeves of his hospital gown, the crease of the sheets.
“Well, what do you do? Hm?” Huysterkark paused. The foot sat like a stone in his lap. “You go down to the parts store and get yourself a new one, that’s what.” The doctor looked pleased with himself, looked as if he’d just announced a single cure for cancer, heart disease and yaws. “We’ve got it all here, Walter,” he said with a sweep of his arm that took in the whole hospital. “Eyes, legs, kneecaps, plastic heart valves and steel vertebrae. We’ve got mechanical hands that can peel a grape, Walter. In a few years we’ll have artificial kidneys, livers, hearts. Maybe someday we’ll even be able to replace faulty circuits in the brain.”
There was no breath in Walter’s body. He could barely form the question and he felt almost reprehensible for asking it, but really, he had to know. “Can I–I mean, will I — will I ever be able to walk again?”
The doctor found this hilarious. His head shot back and his smile widened to expose a triad of stained teeth and gums the color of mayonnaise. “Walk?” he hooted. “Before you know it you’ll be dancing.” Then he dropped his head, crossed his legs and began reshuffling the papers; in the process, the foot slid from the lap, fell to the floor with a dull thump and skittered under the chair. He didn’t seem to notice. “Ah, here,” he said, holding up a photograph of a man in gym shorts and sneakers jogging along a macadam road. The man’s leg was abbreviated some six inches below the knee, and a steel post descended from that point to a plastic, flesh-colored ankle. The whole business was held in place by means of straps attached to the upper thigh. “The la Drang Valley,” the doctor said. “An unfortunate encounter with one of the enemy’s, uh, antipersonnel mines, I believe they call them. I fitted him myself.”
Walter didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sickened. His first impulse was to leap from the bed, hop howling down the corridor and throw himself from the window. His second impulse was to lean forward and slap the therapeutic smile from the doctor’s face. His third impulse, the one he ultimately obeyed, was to sit rigid and clench his teeth like a catatonic.
The doctor was oblivious. He was busy fishing under the chair for Walter’s foot, all the while lecturing him on the use and care of the thing as if it were a hothouse plant instead of an inert lump of plastic manufactured in Weehawken, New Jersey. “Of course,” he said, as he straightened up, the recovered foot in hand, “it’s no use fooling yourself. You are now deficient”—he paused—“and will experience some loss of mobility. Still, as things stand, I believe you’ll find yourself capable of just about the full range of your previous activities.”
Walter wasn’t listening. He was staring at the foot in Huysterkark’s lap (the doctor unconsciously juggled it from one hand to the other as he spoke), a sense of hopelessness and irremediable doom working its way through his veins like some sort of infection, feeling judged and condemned and at the same time revolting against the unfairness of it all. Old Joe had the Huns to excoriate, Ahab the whale. Walter had a shadow, and the image of his father.
Why me? he kept thinking as the doctor played with the alien foot as if it were a curio or paperweight. Why me?
“No, no, Walter,” Huysterkark was saying, “in point of fact you’re actually very lucky. Very lucky indeed. Had you hit that sign a bit higher and lost the leg above the knee, well—” His hands finished the thought.
The sun was sitting in the treetops beyond the window. Out there, along the highway, people were going off to play tennis, shop for groceries, swim, golf, rig up sailboats at the Peterskill Marina or stop in for a cold one at the Elbow. Walter lay amidst the stiff white sheets, frozen with self-pity, beyond repair. But lucky. Oh, yes indeed. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
The night before, after Hesh and Lola and Jessica had left and the anesthesia had begun to let go of him, Walter had a dream. The pale glow of the corridor faded into mist, the whisper of the intercom was translated to the lap of dirty water at the pilings, the tide running out, the smell as keen as everything that has ever lived and died upon the earth. He was crabbing. With his father. With Truman. Up at dawn, traps flung in the trunk of the Studebaker, bait wrapped in newspaper, walking out along the Acquasinnick trestle where the river opens up at high tide to flow all the way up Van Wart Creek. Stay off the tracks, his father warned him, and Walter stared into the mist, half-expecting the 6:20 from Albany to break free of the morning and tear him in two. But that would have been too easy. This dream was subtler, the payoff more sinister.
The bait? What was it? Fish gone high, covered with flies. Bones. Marrow. Chicken backs so rotten your hand would stink for a week if you touched them. When people drowned in the river, when they lay pale and bloated in the muck, pinned beneath a downed tree or the skeleton of a car, when they began to go soft, the crabs got them. His father never talked of it. But the neighborhood kids did, the river rats did, the bums who lived in the waterfront shanties you could see from here — they did. Anyway, maybe the 6:20 went by with an apocalyptic roar that felt as if it would rip the trestle from the pilings, maybe it didn’t. But Walter pulled at the line and the net was stuck, wouldn’t budge. His father, smelling of alcohol, a cigarette clenched between his lips and eyes squinted against the smoke, set down his beer to help him. Work it easy, he grunted. Don’t want to snap the line. Then it was free, rising toward him, as heavy as if it were filled with bricks.
There were no bricks. There was no trap. Just Walter’s mother, she of the soulful eyes, her hair in a cloud and the crabs all over her, nothing from the waist down. Nothing but bone.
Next thing he knew the nurse was there. A big woman, middleaged, with something extra stuffed into her uniform about the hips and thighs, she took the room by storm, hitting the overhead light, the blinds, flourishing bedpan and syringe, plying the rectal thermometer like a saber. Sunlight screamed through the windows, she was whistling some martial tune — was that Sousa or the “Marine Corps Hymn”?—and he felt a brief fluctuation in the calculus of pain as the IV was jerked from his arm and clumsily reinserted.
The dream — horrible enough — was letting go its grip and Walter was waking to an insupportable reality. Everything came on him in a rush, the voice of waking rationality hissing in his ear like a bulletin from the front: You’re in the hospital, your ribs on fire, your arm a scab. And what about this: you’ve got no foot. None. Nothing at all. You’re a cripple. A freak. A freak for life.