Flesh Wounds, page 34
Arthur swatted the tomato from the boy’s hand. It bounced across the ground and rolled away like a child’s ball.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” Mike hissed. His hand went back, and before Arthur realized it was coming, Mike backhanded him across the face.
“Whoa!”
“Oh shit,” Pete sputtered. “Chill out, Mike. It’s just a stupid old man—”
“Maybe you want some of what I’m gonna give the old faggot, eh?”
“No, Mike. I just—”
“Just shut the fuck up!”
Arthur tasted blood on his lips. His nose and cheek stung and there were tears welling up in his eyes. He cursed silently. This was humiliating enough without crying.
“You ready for another one, pops?”
“Tough guy.” Arthur spit. Blood caught on his chin and hung there, angry and red. “Beating up an old man who can’t even get out of his wheelchair. What’ll you do for fun next, rape somebody’s grandmother?” Arthur reached cautiously to the small pouch that rode behind his chair, keeping his eyes locked with Mike’s the whole time, willing him not to notice.
“When I’m done beating the piss outta you,” Mike sneered, “I’m gonna shit on your old lady’s grave. How’s that grab you?”
“About as well as this’ll grab you.” Arthur brought out the mace and let Mike have it full in the face.
Mike leaped back, screaming and rubbing fiercely at his eyes, daisies scattering like yellow shrapnel. “He’s blinded me!”
Pete stepped in and batted the mace from Arthur’s hand. It spun away, bounced off the top of a cross-shaped headstone, and disappeared somewhere in the grass. “That was a real dumb thing to do, old man.”
“Mike, you okay?”
“Just make sure that bastard doesn’t go anywhere while I get this shit outta my eyes!”
“Let go of my chair,” Arthur demanded, his voice weak and small. He had no real hope that Pete would listen.
Mike shoved Pete aside, grabbed the chair by its armrests, and put his tear-streaked face an inch from Arthur’s. “You done fucked up good, old man! I’m gonna drill you a new asshole. Right here.” He drew back his fist and punched Arthur square in the chest.
For a moment, Arthur checked out, just blanked, slipping off to some dark netherworld where he hung transfixed through the heart by a chrome lance. The pain in his chest was all he knew, the sum total of everything he was and had ever been. The boy might have hit him again, might have beaten him to a bloody pulp, but for Arthur there was only this singular, blinding pain, an impaling lance of purest white fire, like the thorn through a shrike’s prey.
His return to the cemetery was fragmented. First there were voices. He became aware of green prison bars, then the smell of rich soil and grass, and finally the hard ground against his face. They’d knocked over his wheelchair. Even now, they might be about to kick him senseless, but—
But there was an intruder. A new voice. A young voice, like theirs—yet not like theirs.
“Back away from him,” this new voice commanded.
“Who do you think you are?”
“Just leave the old man alone.”
Arthur struggled to raise his head above intervening blades of grass. His vision was wavering, but he could see there were four boys now. One squared off against three.
“I’ll take care of this.” Pete drew something from his rear pocket. Arthur heard a metallic click. Sunlight glinted off bare steel. Switchblade?
Vision swimming red and grey, Arthur struggled to rise, but there was a loop of barbed wire drawn about his heart, tightening with every breath he took. His lungs seemed to have lost their ability to process oxygen. He was gasping like a drowning victim rising to the surface for the last time.
To Arthur’s bleary eyes, Pete was a fuzzy shadow as he crossed the short span of green separating the three from the one. The newcomer stood his ground.
There ensued a brief scuffle.
A second later Pete was screaming. “He’s got a knife! Oh God! Mike, help me! I’m bleeding, man. I’m bleeding bad.”
Pete stumbled back to his buddies, clutching his stomach and whimpering like a kicked dog.
“Get the son of a bitch, Daryl!” Mike ordered, finally giving a name to the third boy.
“You want him, you get him,” Daryl responded. “Look at the size of that knife. I’m not going near him!”
“I can’t see with this shit in my eyes!”
Pete was on the ground, rocking back and forth. “God, it hurts. Oh man, it hurts bad.”
Daryl hauled Pete off the ground. “We’re getting outta here, Mike.” A second later, Daryl was dragging Pete through the tombstones.
Mike stayed, wiping furiously at his eyes. “Soon’s I can see, I’m gonna shove that knife—”
Arthur’s eyes were still playing tricks, because the newcomer had suddenly become Bruce Lee. The distance between the newcomer and Mike had to be at least twelve feet, but the Bruce Lee clone sailed across it. At the terminal point of the leap, his right foot whipped around and caught Mike alongside the head.
Like a rag doll, Mike did a little somersault, ending up in a heap against the tombstone of one Horace T. MacAvie. Arthur’s vision was beginning to clear and he saw that MacAvie’s tombstone was smeared with sticky white apple. As Mike huddled against the stone, holding his head and moaning softly, Arthur envisioned MacAvie applauding from his box beneath the ground.
The newcomer knelt beside Arthur and pulled him to a sitting position. Arthur focused on a face no kinder than those who’d just tormented him. But when the newcomer spoke, his voice was weighted with concern.
“Where’re you hurt?”
Arthur tried to answer, but all that came out of his mouth was an agonized wheeze.
“Lemme get you in your chair,” the boy said. “Then we’ll see ’bout gettin’ some help. You need a doctor?”
“No,” Arthur managed to get out.
“They take anythin’ from you? Money? Medicine? Anythin’ like that?”
“Flowers.”
“Uh, yeah. We’ll get those later, man.”
“For Laurie.”
“Right. Here’s your chair.” It shifted when he tried to lower Arthur’s weight into it. “Shit. Lemme lock the wheels. There. Better?”
“Hurts,” Arthur wheezed.
“Jus’ take deep breaths.”
“Who are you?” Arthur managed to ask.
“Name’s Toby.”
“I’m Arthur.” The pain was lessening, but it was still hard to breath. Someone had clamped a vise about Arthur’s lungs. “I don’t know how to thank you, Toby.”
Toby shrugged. “Mama’s buried a couple rows over. If they hadna run on you, they’d a been over there in a minute or two. Either way, they was bound to piss me off.”
“The one they called Pete, did you cut him bad?”
“Bad ‘nuff.”
Arthur didn’t know what to say to that so he said nothing. He was surprised at how little concern he felt for the injured boy, even though he knew he was somewhere bleeding, perhaps even dying.
Mike surged drunkenly to his feet.
“You want I should hang on to him?” Toby asked.
“Let him go.”
Mike stumbled off through the graveyard, holding his head in his hands.
Arthur took out his soiled handkerchief and handed it to Toby. “Would you mind?” he asked, nodding towards the tomato juice running down Laurie’s stone.
Toby wiped the marble clean. “Where you live, old man? I’ll take you home.”
“Just let me rest here for a while longer.” Arthur closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. When he opened them a minute later, Toby had gathered what daisies had escaped trampling. He handed the bouquet to Arthur.
“Thanks.” Talking hurt like a dagger in his chest.
Toby gathered up the remaining daisies, all of them crushed and mangled. “You mind? Mom doesn’t get flowers often.”
For the first time, Arthur noted the filth on the boy, the unwashed hair and yellowed teeth, the ragged clothes and shoes, the haunted, hungry eyes. Odds are, he thought, the boy’s mom never gets flowers.
“Those are ruined. Your mom deserves better.” Arthur separated the daisies he was holding and gave half to Toby. “For Laurie,” he said, nodding towards his wife’s resting spot. “No finer woman ever lived. Given a choice, she’d have never left me. Of that, I’m certain. All I ask is that I not be much longer in joining her.”
Toby swept aside a few scraps of tomato and laid the daisies at the base of Laurie’s headstone.
Arthur handed him the remaining flowers. “Let’s go meet your mother, son.”
Toby wheeled Arthur to a simple plot with an inset marker that read Yolanda Simmons. The only other writing on the stone was the dates of her coming and going. Toby knelt and laid the flowers over the marker. When he bent down, Arthur saw the handle of a large hunting knife protruding from his waistband.
“For Mama,” Toby said, trying to sound as serious as Arthur. “She done her best and she always loved me.”
“A body couldn’t ask for more than that.”
Toby turned from his mother’s grave, his face gnarled with concentration. “You know, Arthur, don’t too many folks realize what you just said.”
Arthur smiled at the boy. “I like you, Toby. You speak in truths.”
A frown. “Not sure I understand you.”
“No matter.” Arthur reached out and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go home, son.”
“Home?”
“You don’t have a place to live, Toby. Do you?”
“Why you think that?”
“Because, like you, I see truths, Toby. You haven’t been eating right. From the date on that marker, I’d say you haven’t been eating right for about six days. Secondly, those bags under your eyes. Wherever you’ve been spending your nights, you haven’t been getting much sleep. Third: Well...” Arthur wrinkled his nose. “...you stink to high heaven, my friend.”
The boy frowned and Arthur wondered for a moment if he’d gone too far. He didn’t want the boy to leave. For one thing, the way his chest was hurting, he didn’t think he could make it as far as McGruder’s, even if it was all down hill. But more importantly, the boy had probably saved his life. Not that life these days was all that important to Arthur, but it was a debt requiring payment of some kind, even if payment amounted to nothing more than bed and board for the night.
“Come back to the house with me, Toby,” Arthur coaxed.
“I’ve nothin’ to pay you with.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything.”
Toby looked up, his frown making furrows in his dirty face. “Don’t want no handouts.”
“I wasn’t offering any. I need someone to help me get home. That should be worth something.”
“I woulda done that for nothin’.”
“Exactly. You offered because you wanted to. I want to help you as well.”
The boy nodded once as if the dickering had been completed and some bargain struck. “Best be gettin’ you home then.” And with that, he turned the chair and started for the nearest gate.
Halfway there something caught on the wheel and snapped, a brittle, dry crack, like breaking a pencil. Arthur caught a flash of color out of the corner of his eye as something flipped away from the wheelchair.
“What was that?”
“Dunno,” Toby answered. “Stick or somethin’” He dug in the grass and came up with about six inches of dowel. It was the fletched-end of an arrow. One strip of orange fletching remained.
The boy tossed it aside. “Jus’ an old arrow the wheel got caught on.”
“Rather odd,” Arthur said, “finding an arrow in a cemetery. Do you see the rest of it?”
“Huh?”
“Can you find the rest of the arrow?”
“Wha’ for?”
“Please. Just see if you can find it.”
The boy knelt and dug through the grass. Finally, he pulled free a long shaft, carefully slipping it out lengthwise to avoid snapping the old wood. It looked to have once been green, with red and white lettering on the shaft. The white lettering was small and precise. The red script looked to have been painted on by hand, neat but not nearly so precise as the factory lettering. It was in some foreign language. The arrow’s head was a knob of rust.
Toby handed the broken shaft to Arthur. The old man took it carefully, almost reverently, in trembling hands. “What is it?” the boy asked, sensing that something was wrong.
Arthur swallowed. “Nothing. Let’s go home.”
But he didn’t toss the arrow away. He laid it across his lap.
Toby got behind the wheelchair and maneuvered Arthur towards the nearest exit. Neither of them spoke, the boy pondering the mystery of the broken arrow, the old man still concentrating on his breathing. They’d reached one of the wrought-iron gates when Toby noticed Arthur clutching his left arm.
“You okay?” Toby asked.
“Just take... take me...” Arthur grimaced. “...down the street to the market.”
Toby pushed the gate open and pulled the chair through. As the gate swung shut behind them it let out an aberrant shriek, like the lid of a casket.
Arthur caught Toby’s arm. “Stop.”
“Gotta get you to a doctor, man.”
Arthur doubled over and would have fallen out of the chair, but Toby caught him. The old man’s face was pasty, glistening with sweat. His right hand was clenched about his left elbow, holding his arm tight against his chest.
“Pills,” Arthur gasped.
“Where?”
“Carry bag.”
Toby tore open the bag on the back of the chair and began tossing things out in the grass: another handkerchief, a small penknife, a tattered date book, matches, reading glasses, and a pipe.
“No pills!” the boy screamed.
Arthur said nothing. His gaze was fixated on the items Toby had spilled out on the ground.
“Doctor,” Toby muttered, grabbing the chair handles.
Arthur slapped on the wheel locks and the boy nearly pushed him over.
“What the hell—”
“Too late.”
“Bullshit!”
The old man smiled; the pain on his face seemed less.
“Doctor,” Toby repeated as if he could conjure one.
“Give me the pipe.”
“What?”
“The pipe. Give it to me.”
“Listen, old man—”
“Lost,” Arthur said, reaching as if he could grasp the pipe.
Toby grabbed up the pipe and put it in Arthur’s hand. If that’s what it took to get him moving...
“The really important things come back.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“I should have known when I saw the arrow.”
Toby noticed that Arthur seemed to have relaxed, the pain on his face was gone. I’ll go along with him for a minute, thought the boy. See where all this is leadin’, then I’ll get him to a doctor. “What about the arrow?”
“First time I ever met Laurie.” Tears rolled down Arthur’s cheeks. “In a field.” His sentences were short, spaced around ragged gasps for air. “Fifteen years old. Practicing with my bow. She asked to try it. God, I would have... given her the bow. Just to be near her.”
Arthur’s eyes glowed. “She missed the damn target by a mile. I never did find the arrow.”
“Arthur, that’s not—”
“It is.” Arthur took the shaft from his lap and ran his thumb over the red letters. “There were several archers using that field. We marked our arrows so we could identify the owner of lost ones when we found them days or weeks later.” He showed the boy the printing. “It’s my name in sanskrit.” Toby hadn’t the faintest idea was sanskrit was, but this had gone on long enough. “So you found an old arrow, what’s that got to do with gettin’ you to a doctor?”
“That field is eighty miles east of here.”
Toby frowned and was about to argue that this was all a very perplexing mystery, but hardly one worth sitting here and dying of a heart attack, when Arthur sank his fingers deep into the boy’s shoulder.
“Laurie gave me this pipe. I lost it several days ago.” His eyes glazed like a rabid dog’s. “Lost things have a way of coming back to a man in the end, Toby.”
“I’m not gonna let you die, old man.”
“Take me back to Laurie.”
“I’m takin’ you to a doctor!”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“I understand that you’re havin’ a goddamn heart attack!”
Arthur’s hand clenched tighter and Toby felt genuine pain in the muscles of his shoulder, but the old man’s eyes were pleading. “I’ve wanted this for so many years...”
In the end, Toby turned the wheelchair around and pushed it back through the gate—which closed this time without a sound. As he approached Laurie Patton’s grave, he thought he saw bright lights, an Aurora Borealis among the gravestones, but it was probably just the tears in his eyes. Or maybe not, for Arthur gasped and struggled up from his chair.
“Arthur!” he cried, for he had thought the old man totally confined to the wheelchair. But then he wondered if it was Arthur at all, for this old man walked straight and strong through the taciturn tombstones.
In the glow stood a woman, all sunlight and gold. Her flaxen hair was tossed by a wind Toby neither felt nor heard. She smiled once at Toby, this startling vision of beauty and light, then opened her arms to the old man.
Arthur went to her, his hair shining in her light, his head high and his back straight. They embraced. She buried her face against his neck and wept. Arthur stroked her long hair and ran his hand over her shaking back.
At the penultimate moment, the old man looked back. He smiled at Toby, his face young, smooth, and at peace.
“Goodbye, my friend,” the boy whispered.
Then the light was gone and Toby found himself on his knees beside a wheelchair and a dead old man. He touched Arthur’s weathered face once in farewell, then left the cemetery behind.
