Lost Echoes (2 page)

And when the coyote fell, Harry fell with him, and he never knew when he hit bottom.

“It was just the mumps,” Harry’s mother said. She was a slim, black-haired woman that looked a bit like a Depression-era photo. Pretty, but eternally in need of a dose of vitamin B with iron.

“It’s okay, Billie,” her husband said. “It’s okay.”

Jake Wilkes wanted to say more, but there wasn’t much he could say. He knew only that his son was sick and his wife was in pain. He was in pain as well. If he could have gotten hold of the pain, the cause of it all, he could have whipped that. He was used to handling things with his hands. His work. His problems, provided that problem needed a strong back and a strong arm, or wanted to tussle.

But this?

He had no idea what to do.

“I can’t believe he’s this sick,” she said. “It was just mumps. Every kid has the mumps. You and me, we were kids, we had mumps.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Jake said.

“I’m his mother,” Billie said. “I should have known he’d wake up after sleeping all day. Wake up and overdo. What if—”

“Don’t say it,” Jake said. “He’ll be all right.”

They were sitting in the hospital lobby, waiting. Jake had hold of Billie’s hand, and they were pressed up close together in the lobby chairs. Billie had on a dark blue nightgown and slippers shaped like bears’ heads. Jake had on blue jeans he had pulled over his pajama bottoms. He was wearing a pajama shirt and house slippers. The pajama top had little white clouds floating on a blue background. He thought—or imagined—he could smell sex in the air, a lingering perfume of lust. He and Billie had been making love, perhaps while Harry was roaming about the living room or sitting in a chair watching cartoons through the window. The fact that they had been making love and Harry had been up and they didn’t know, or that he might have been lying on the floor while they were doing the joyful deed, somehow made it all seem worse. Billie hadn’t said as much, but he knew she was thinking it, because he was thinking it, and after ten years of marriage you knew things like that. At least when the thinking was bad. Any other time it was a long shot, just a guess. But the bad stuff, you kind of developed a radar.

And he knew this from his radar, was certain of it, she blamed herself. And maybe on some level he feared she blamed him.

It would pass if everything turned out all right.

If not, Jesus help him. Jesus help them both.

“I should have brought him to the doctor today,” Billie said, not realizing Saturday was long gone and Sunday had sneaked in over the transom. “I should have brought him in for another look. I didn’t want to pay for the emergency room. Can you believe that? I thought maybe he was a little too sick, but thought I’d wait until Monday. We could have paid it out if I’d brought him in. We’d have worked it out fine.”

“Didn’t seem like an emergency,” Jake said, patting her hand. “Didn’t seem so bad then.”

“I’d brought him in, things might have been all right.”

“Doctor said it was mumps. We couldn’t have known.”

Jake said all of this as if saying it would make it true.

Morning light came down the hall at a slow bleed, and shortly, from the other end of the hall, the darker end, came the doctor. They saw him coming, white coated, moving with an even stride. As he walked his dark hair bounced and fell down into his eyes. He was a young man. Jake thought maybe too young. He wasn’t their doctor. Their doctor was out of town. Their doctor had diagnosed Harry with the mumps. Then he was gone. Said something about going up north for a while. Some kind of doctor shindig. A meeting of white coats. Probably a golf game.

This doctor was named Smatermine, and he was too young. Jake was sure of it now. Too young.

The doctor came down the hall and looked at them and smiled. “He’s going to be all right,” he said. “But the ear…He has quite an infection. It’s a little uncertain how his hearing in that ear will turn out. He could lose a bit of it, or he could retain it all. I know that’s not much to hang onto one way or another, except we’ll do what we can. For the hearing, I suggest a specialist.”

“He’s gonna be all right, though?” Jake said.

“Yeah,” the doctor said. “He’ll be all right.”

Billie began to cry.

3

Harry thought it wasn’t so bad, except for that pesky not-being-able-to-hear-out-of-his-right-ear part. He got to miss first grade for a couple of weeks, lie up in bed and watch TV. He found a channel that played old movies, and for some reason they appealed to him.

His mother one day, sitting by his bed, talking into his good left ear, said, “There are new shows, you know? These were old when your daddy and I married, baby. These are the dinosaurs of television.”

“I like them,” Harry said. “I like Tarzan.”

“There were a lot of Tarzans. Not just this one. Some of them were even in color.”

“I like this one.”

“All right,” his mother said, standing, moving toward the door. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

When she was gone, Harry turned his attention back to Johnny Weissmuller swinging through the trees on a vine. He thought he saw a kind of bar that Tarzan was hanging onto, and he wondered about that. Did they have that in the jungle? Vines with bars to hang onto?

He had to sit with his head slightly turned, his left eye and left ear focused on the television. He turned his head too much, the sound was strange. He reached up and tapped his right ear softly. He didn’t hear anything, just felt a vibration. The ear itself felt weird. Like someone had shoved an egg inside.

He tapped it again, a little harder. This time there was an explosion. It came from inside and burst out, and along with it came a stream of warm pus that surged out like water from a busted dam. It spurted on his cheek and on the pillow, a green, wet wad.

Harry let out a scream.

Pans dropped in the kitchen and his mother came running.

“Huh,” the doctor said.

It was a different doctor from the one in the hospital. An ear-nose-and-throat guy named Mishman. He was about forty and looked every year of it, plus a couple bonus years. His eyebrows were all over the place, like insect antennae. The Wilkeses had been seeing him ever since the day after they took Harold into the emergency room.

Harry was perched on the examining table, his legs hanging over the edge, his tennis shoes swinging back and forth, the doctor probing the inside of his ear gently with the tip of his handheld light.

Billie and Jake were near the table, Billie had her hand on Harry’s elbow, holding it gently.

“So,” Jake said, “he’s all right?”

“Well, there could still be some problems,” the doctor said. “You can’t say for sure about something like this. But he can hear again. The mumps, they affected his hearing, and he had this pocket of pus in there. Got to say I couldn’t see it. I looked plenty, but I didn’t see it. That’s just being truthful with you. It was behind the wall of the ear. It didn’t even make a swelling. Not when I saw him last. But what I think now is the obvious: It swelled while he was at home. And now it’s burst. It was tight with infection, and when he touched it, it was ready to go. He’s his own doctor.”

Mishman went silent, studied the boy for a long moment.

Jake said, “Something wrong, Doc? You’re kind of rambling.”

Mishman shook his head. “No. It’s just…Thing like this, something odd about it. Haven’t seen anything quite like it. It’s nothing big, not fancy in the sense of the medical books, but it’s just not playing by the rules.”

“The rules?” Jake said.

“It doesn’t act like a regular infection. But the important thing is, now he can hear, and I think we’re on top of it. Maybe another test or two, but I think he’s out of the woods…. Listen to him.”

Harry had lost interest in what the adults were saying, and as he sat there on the edge of the examination table, he had begun to hum and sing a few lines from “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”

He liked singing it because he could hear himself sing with both ears again.

He thought he sounded pretty darn good.

They ran more tests.

Mishman looked for a tumor.

Didn’t find one.

The ear looked okay.

But it was odd, way it had worked out. Mishman couldn’t say for sure why it was odd, but it didn’t feel right. This whole business, it wasn’t playing by the rules. It was a medical anomaly.

He would remember the problem as odd for a long time, and then, slowly, he would forget about Harry Wilkes and his ear infection. It was something to consider, all right, but when something other than his Spidey sense started to tingle and he started seeing a long-legged nurse, hiding it from his wife, it took up most of his thinking and his time, and eventually it caved in his practice. The nurse left him, and all he had were memories of how she liked to do it naked except for her nursing shoes.

It was a memory that trumped some kid with an oddball ear infection.

4

Harry noticed little things, but it really wasn’t a problem until he was twelve. Age twelve was the year his balls dropped and his hormones rushed, and he really took note of it. Not just the hormones and what they were telling him, but this business with his ear.

First time he experienced it in a memorable way, Harry was playing in one of the old cars out by the house. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but he often slipped out and pretended he could drive, sitting behind the squeaky old steering wheel. Sometimes he had his friend Joey Barnhouse with him, but other times it was just him. Most of the time it was just him. He had discovered that he liked to be by himself. A lot. He could make up whatever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. He didn’t have to consult with anyone about who was It in a game of tag, or which Ninja Turtle he was, who was Spider-Man, and who was the villain, that kind of thing. He could imagine wheeling about with some girl by his side, Kayla, for example. She had been changing lately, and he liked the change.

Day it happened, day he got a clue of what was to come, he had climbed inside the old fifty-nine Chevy. It had really gone to hell in the last few years. Its paint was all flaked and bubbled off, and someone—a kid most certainly—had thrown a brick into the already starred windshield.

His daddy was always saying if the guy who owned the property next to theirs got rid of all that shit, hauled it off, pressed it up, whatever, just got it out of sight of their house, it would be nice. But nothing ever happened and his dad never pursued it, thinking he ought not tell a fella what he should do with his own land, even if he didn’t like what he was doing.

Harry hoped the owner never cleaned it up. It was a great place to play.

When he climbed inside this time, closed the creaking, rusted door, pulled it shut hard, he had a sudden rush of revulsion. Lots of noise, like someone ripping several layers of aluminum foil down the middle, and there was a slamming noise, and in his head a combination of shapes and colors flashed and popped, and he screamed.

Or someone did.

He heard it clear as the proverbial bell, that scream, but he didn’t remember doing it. Wasn’t sure he had. It filled his head like air filling a balloon.

It was just a flash of color and images and sounds and discomfort. Real quick. A face vibrating and wobbling in his head. A red explosion. A white rip though the mind, followed by…

Exhaustion.

A sweat-beaded forehead.

Wet pants.

Nothing much, really.

Over with quick-like.

He got out of the car with his knees a-wobble, slowly closed the door, went in to change his pants and underwear, and never played there again.

5

Here’s what happened, down there in the honky-tonk below Harry’s house. One night, on a Saturday, after the tonk closed, and all the sights and sounds and parked cars were gone, and everyone at the drive-in theater across the way had long filed out, about three
A.M
., a half hour after closing, during cleanup time, there was a murder.

No one knew about it until Monday, about two
P.M
. when the bar was supposed to open.

Guy who discovered the body was a customer named Seymour Smithe, pronounced Smith, but spelled Smithe, and Seymour was always adamant about that. “Name’s Smithe, with an e on the end.”

Most people just thought of him as a drunk.

He had lost more jobs than a squirrel had eaten acorns.

Thing he did know was how to sell Bibles. He liked selling Bibles. He didn’t know dick about the Bible, outside of what he’d seen in
The Ten Commandments
, an old movie, but he could sell the hell out of those damn things, ’cause all the Christians, or would-be Christians, wanted one, liked to pretend they were going to read it.

He appealed to their fear. Fear was always a good way to sell anything.

Insurance.

Politics.

War.

And gilt-edged Bibles.

When Smithe wasn’t selling Bibles, he was drinking.

Now that was something he was good at. Drinking.

He was the goddamn Old and New Testament of drunks.

He was thinking about drinking, about how he had to sell some Bibles this day, and he was thinking of that woman he had talked to yesterday on her front porch. What a looker. And he sort of thought she had wanted him to come back, even if she didn’t buy a Bible or let him in the door.

But she had smiled. And she had been positive, even if she hadn’t bought anything. Something had passed between them; he was almost certain.

Almost.

He wanted to get certain, thought four or five beers would make him certain.

The door was open and the sign read
OPEN
, so Seymour went right on in. It was cool and dark in there and smelled the way it always smelled, like beer and sweat and sexual anxiety stirred by air-conditioning. But there was something else. It was faint, but he knew that smell immediately.

Once, for a summer, he had worked in a slaughterhouse, and once you smelled that odor, you knew it fresh, you knew it dried, and in each form it smelled different, and yet somehow the same.