“I think the boy’s in good hands,” Coach said. “Watts has been a doctor since you were cheerleadin’ in your little skirt and bobby socks.”
She turned back to me. “Demon. Would you like me to have a look at that leg?”
I said okay, and she sat down on the bed. I could smell her soap, the same fruity sweetness that followed Emmy around, and again I thought of Dori, wishing I knew what she smelled like. “How much you going charge me?” I asked, vaguely realizing I was slurring.
She gave me a wink. “Friend of the family discount. After you’re all better, you can come clean out my gutters.”
Upside-down boat houses have no gutters. I had to claw through some brain cotton to get the joke. She pulled the sheet down and whistled, long and low, like calling a dog. She was supposed to have a dog by now. What happened to Rufus? What does it mean if a doctor sees your injury and whistles? Not good. She touched and pressed on different parts of my leg, feeling the pulse at my ankle. If I’d ever imagined June feeling me up, not saying I did, this wasn’t it. She was all business. I was glad Angus had talked me into some decent gym shorts.
She covered me up and rested both hands on her lap, looked at me. Biting her lip. I wished I was asleep. Waiting to wake up from this assfucked turn of events.
“I saw your radiology report,” she said, “and I’m not very happy with it. I know you’re still waiting for your MRI, but I don’t think it’s going to be good news. I’m sorry, I hate this for you. But the only thing that will help this injury is a diagnosis and the right course of treatment. Not wishful thinking. Trust me. I’ve seen too many patients try.”
“There’s no fracture.” This was Coach.
She twisted around to face him. “I’m not happy with the X-ray because there could be trouble in the growth plate that got overlooked. It wasn’t a perfect angle, and there was no lateral mediolateral. If Watts or whoever’s supposed to be looking after Damon has neglected to order a follow-up, I can call that in for you right now.”
Coach said nothing. Twirling the lanyard around and around his finger. June turned back to me. “What would you like?”
To stop hurting like hell. I shrugged. “To be good enough to play by next Friday?”
“Oh, hon.” She put her hand on top of my hand, and something rushed my chest so hard I held my breath to stop from tearing up. She was shaking her head. I focused on the shiny mink pelt of her hair, and let the words turn to bubbles over her head. Out for the rest. Of the season.
Coach’s orbiting lanyard dropped dead. He said something. She said something. He dropped the nice and told her whose house this was. She grabbed up my pill bottle and shook it at him. “Playing with fire,” she said. And so on. I was the little kid wishing Mom and Dad would quit fighting. At one point she came back over and asked me, close to my face, did I know what I was taking. She said it was hydrocodone and something. Not oxy then, I said, and she said it was really no better than that. I was struggling for words and possibly catching the asshole bug from Coach because I asked her whatever happened to Kent’s “pain is a vital sign” and all that.
She hissed at me: “Kent Holt is a fucking hired killer for his company.”
Those words, from her mouth, stopped my clock. She and Coach left the room, but I heard them out in the hall. Coach using his fifty-yard-line voice, and she was also plenty loud enough, telling him she used to see two or three narcotic patients a year and now that many every day. Then she gave up on him and came back to work on me. Telling me how pain is a body’s way of taking care of you, letting you know when to stop. Telling me to think of my future. She had no clue. My future was football. Playing through the pain is what you do.
She left, I slept. Woke up confused, then ticked off. I wasn’t some child, having my little pharm party. I was going by the book, doctor’s orders. Being a General was serious work. Coach knew. She didn’t.
By the time I got in to see the bone doctor, the basketball-size knee was down to a softball. All week it had been parading its bruise rainbow: black-green-yellow-brown. Coach found me some crutches and I was getting around. It felt good to move. Except for hurting like hell.
The bone doctor turned out to be a long-jawed man with skeleton hands and no time to spare. He checked me over in the hospital waiting room, on his way to a day of cutting people up. All I could think of in those plastic chairs was the night Mom OD’d and I got thrown in the deep end of the foster shitpool. I’d been swimming ever since. I wished I was five and could hold Coach’s hand while I dropped my sweatpants and let Dr. Bones poke my leg. He said the same as June about not trusting the first X-ray. Even without the MRI he could see surgery was indicated. Meniscus this, ACL that, the leg needed to be stabilized, my PCP should get me into a cast and PT. More letters than you want to hear. He reupped my Lortabs and said to come back after I got the MRI. I thought Coach would ask him how soon I could get back to playing, but he didn’t.
After we got out to the car, I told Coach I didn’t want those skeleton hands cutting me open. He looked over at me, the square teeth behind his lips, freckled hands gripping the wheel. Rarely had I told him, flat-out, what I did or didn’t want. Any foster kid can tell you why.
“I hear you, son,” he said. Then he called Watts on his car phone and we went straight to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription. Coach was going to run in, but I said I’d go. Wanting to prove something. I got out and crutched across the lot, all stupid proud. I got this, I’m thinking, as the doors swoosh open. I got this, down the aisle to Pharmacy. They said fifteen minutes. I browsed magazines and condoms and found a place to sit down on a crate of Ensures.
Finally they yelled my name. I paid with Coach’s card. The white paper bag had a thing stapled to the outside, pretty obvious, that said OxyContin. That shook me. I was still trying hard, playing I got this, but on my way out I stumbled, running smack into a homeless guy.
“Whoah, you blind?” he said, in such a pitiful way that I sorried myself all over him: sorry, careless, my bad, sorry. Coach was watching from his car. I gave the guy another look and almost lost my breakfast. He must have said I’m blind. He had no eyes, just two caves in his wrinkled face. A big nursey dog on a harness. Not homeless, just a person going into Walgreens for whatever drug they give a guy so he can stand his life in the hopeless fucking darkness.
I got in the car feeling rattled. Those empty caves. Blind, blind, blind.
42
This was legitimate, not using. With all the blood pumping through my heart, I believed that, and vowed as much to Coach. I would follow doctor’s orders to the T, and he’d let me play.
And he did. Four weeks on, the mess I still was, idiot that I was, I got in there. Not every minute of the game like before, obviously. Key moments only, was the idea. Coach would save me for a sweep or a long-pass play where we needed it most. My first Friday back, there was no need. Against Northwood he generally let the second string have the run of the playground, we couldn’t lose to those jackasses if we ran backwards. I was dressed out on the sidelines till the last quarter, we’re up by 28, four minutes to go. Coach jerks his thumb at me, sends me limping onto the field just to light up the stands. All the cheering and stomping is practically dry-heaving the bleachers, Dee-Mon! Copper-head! Foster-to-fame poster boy, better than ever. Angus wasn’t wrong. While sleeping it off, I’d been crowned king of Lee County.
The next Friday was to be no such walkover. Riverheads, away. I got serious in the weight room. I was okay on upper body, but weighted front squats, nope. Even still, I would not let down my men. Or the school, Christ. My first day back, walking into the lunchroom: heads turn, trays clatter, everybody stands up clapping. Lunch ladies in hairnets are clapping. Most of me is thinking: They don’t know me. Free lunch kid. But one other small part of me is thinking: I have killed myself for this.
So I took my meds. And played like a guy on meds, slow on the uptake. Coach didn’t say anything, but he saw, and directed the play towards faster legs and less buttered fingers. That hurt me more than my leg, honestly. I tried cutting back, less butter on the bread. Just a hair, stretching to five or six hours on the Lortabs or the Percocets, a day and a half on the oxys. I was supposed to alternate or sometimes double up, as per written instructions. Doc had me well doped for practice, tapering off for game nights, giving me some of my marbles back to play with. Counting on me to play through the pain. Lord, I did. Hard enough to tear up whatever that knee had left to its name. Pain wasn’t even the main event anymore, I was numb some way, enough to try easing back on the meds. But if I stretched it out too far, especially between oxys, I’d wind up feeling tackled before I even dressed out. Bone ache, gut ache, puking in the locker-room head. And worse things, hard to discuss. I was shitting myself. This would come on hard and fast, chills and shakes and everything inside turned full-blast to running water. Which is so weird, because for the most part oxy constipates you like a motherfucker. Till you’re in withdrawals, and it doesn’t. So far I’d only gotten the runs at the house, before I left for practice. Scary as hell though. I might get them just from worrying about it. Homecoming was coming up. Not just the game, which is a big scramble anyway of mud, grass stains, piss, guys peeing in cups or towels or behind the benches, sorry if you didn’t already know that. I was thinking more of the halftime thing, homecoming court. Parading around the field with a girl on my arm in front of the entire Friday-night congregation. Home game, obviously. White uniforms.
I went back to taking the oxys on the clock.
Homecoming was a whole ridiculous thing. Yes, I would be crowned. So it was a lot of pressure as regards asking a date: the queen is mandatory. Girls laid it on thick. Food left in my locker, cookies, fine all that. But then came photos. Pouty lips and stiff nipples, thumb hooked in the unzipped jeans, and all I could think was: Who the hell took this picture? You’re halfway there already, go to homecoming with them. Maybe I’m a fool. But I liked the idea of starting from the top of the chase scene, not jumping in last second before the vehicle explodes.
My locker was easy to access. Angus, Maggot, various teammates and weed connections all had the combination, for practical purposes. So if these valentines turned up anonymous, which most did not, I only had to ask around. Sorry to say, I didn’t. Just not that into it. Who was into it was Turp Trussell. He had the locker beside mine and scored a lot of free snacks, since I didn’t feel right eating the cookies of a girl I wasn’t going to ask out. I don’t like owing anybody. Turp felt by the same line of reason, he should take possession of the photos. But I drew the line.
Then comes the day where Turp is waiting by my locker like a big red balloon fixing to pop. Kid was blessed with the pimply, boiled-meat type skin that gives you nowhere to hide. He’s dying here, busting a gut, saying “Open it, man! Open it!” Like it’s my damn birthday. He saw something go in, obviously. I felt like telling him to take it, whatever it is, just eat it. But now I was curious. Scrolled the lock, opened, and saw no cookies. No envelope with girl writing. Just a black scrap of something thrown in haste, hooked on the wire of a spiral notebook. I took a second to untwine it, and then I about shit. Underwear. A thong. I’d not ever seen one of those without the person inside. Nothing to it, lacy front, absentee the rest. Meanwhile Turp is doing something halfway between end-zone dance and asthma attack, like he’s not seen panties before, or no, evidently because he has. He keeps asking me if the safety seal is broken.
“Do what?”
We’ve got an audience now, watching Demon being a full fledge idiot. What Turp is asking me is: Clean, or did she wear them first? How the hell I’m supposed to know this, no idea. He snatches them from me, all scornful. “Dude,” he says. “Inhale!”
He pushes the crotch onto my face, and I get it. Full pussy, right between the eyes. And after this I’m supposed to go learn civics. The back of my locker is lipstick-signed, this is Vicki Strout. From that day forward to be known as Scratch-n-Sniff.
I feel bad for Vicki. This was a gamble on her part. To this very day, her kids’ nasty little friends might be calling her Scratch-n-Sniff behind her back, and that’s on me. If these ladies had caught me sooner, I would have been the dog on the bone. But now I was wrecked for anything but the best. If I went to homecoming at all, I’d have one queen only. Not Vicki Strout.
And I didn’t even have the guts to call her. Because I knew about life. As long as you haven’t yet asked, you can still have another day with some answer in your head other than “Go fuck yourself.” So it happened the way it probably had to. Dori came to me.
This was a Monday. I’d been laying low at home a lot, which maybe she knew from asking around. I was in bed, trying to go over plays in my head, winding up someplace between sleep, not sleep, Dori dream lap dance. Not that it was all sexual thoughts, you don’t just bang a fairy nymph. Or if yes, I’d not seen that particular manga. Anyway I was dead spooked to roll over and see her looking at me from the doorway. Zoo wee mama, standing there on her lace-up sandal feet like she’d flown in on my brain waves.
