Men in the Making (18 page)

Dean's never run such a job. With a dedicated run, you're either the closest driver to the consigner or you're not, and if you're closest you get the job, assuming you want it. After his morning specimen route, Dean's always standing by at the downtown lab, and these jobs, the ones that make the radios fall quiet, come from small-town hospitals, places without their own pathology units.

Still, whenever he hears a call come through from another driver, one who's ten-seven from some country hospital, one who's no longer quite alone in his car, Dean turns the FM radio off, turns the two-way down. He refrains from smoking. He keeps the windows rolled up and the a/c nice and cool. If Luanne sends a job across his pager, he accelerates slowly and makes smooth, wide turns. He imagines the woman, imagines her outside the hospital, standing from the wheelchair while her husband opens her car door and helps her into the seat, imagines she feels, in that moment on her feet, more off-kilter than she ever did carrying those thirty extra pounds of third-trimester weight. Dean imagines her emptiness, sees a car seat secured on the back seat, the way she catches sight of it as she lowers herself into the car, the way her husband notices her noticing, and the way he's all but gutted by the shame of not having been man enough to see this coming, to spare her yet another injury. He should have had the foresight to pull the thing out of there this morning when he went home to let the dog out, should have stuffed it back in its box, stored it up in the rafters of the garage.

Now Dean puts his cigarette out, rolls his windows up, grabs his handset, and lets Eighty-two off the hook. "Ninety-six, Luanne."

"Ninety-six, go ahead."

"I'll take that dedicated," he says. "I'm heading out now."

 

There is sunlight on land and there is sunlight at sea, and when Dean stepped from the hold of the crewboat as it rocked and slid in the offshore waves, his eyes still adjusting from sleep, he recognized the difference. In the distance, in every direction, the curved white line of the horizon beamed where the sun found the water and seemed to ignite the surface. The winds held steady and keen, the air thick enough with salt to abrade paint from steel before rust set in; gulls circled above the boat, their beaks downcast, unaware as of yet that they'd followed a boat with no catch, no bait, this far from shore.

Overhead, the rig's crane operator was lowering the taxi to the crewboat deck. It was the kind of ride Dean might have paid a half dollar for at a roadside carnival when he was a kid, a twelve-foot circumference of pipe with a reinforced rubber center, triangles of rope netting strung from the pipe to the hitch above. With four other men, he threw his duffel onto the rubber, stood on the pipe, grabbed tight to the ropes. And up they went, the gulf wind rocking the whole contraption as it rose over the water, up past the rig's lower platform, swinging them over stacks of pipe and safety-yellow handrails to the second deck. The men stepped off, grabbed their duffels, slid five-dollar bills into the binder clip attached to the netting, the crane operator's tip for safe passage, and then, amidst the shouts of the roustabouts and the clanking of pipes, they crossed the deck to the quarters, to the galley, for breakfast before the workday began.

Near noon, his belly still full of steak and eggs, his lungs inflamed even now with Randi's breath, Dean Covin broke a hard sweat in the wet darkness of the void tanks. All morning he and his fellow painter's hand, Gumbo Diggs, had been taking one-hour shifts in the hole. While one man sloshed through the dim cavities of the void tanks, crawling from hold to hold through the portals cut in their steel walls, the other would rest above, monitoring the air compressor and waiting for the tug on the rope that told him the buckets were full, ready to be brought up. So now, while Gumbo smoked in the sunshine on deck and mopped his face with the bandanna he kept tied around his neck, occasionally pulling the plug on Dean's worklight so that everything went black in the tanks—a common enough prank, as was killing the air compressor for a few seconds to stop the flow of fresh air through the hose—Dean soaked through his coveralls and worked a long-pole squeegee down the walls of one of the holds, scraping the old urethane sealant sludge to the floor. When the hold went dark, he cursed Gumbo, imagined him up there in the sunlight, a hulking black man with a shaved scalp and a schoolboy's sense of humor, a man whose mother had taken a first long look at him and named him after a concoction that began with burned flour in a cast-iron skillet. Now Dean waited in a dark so impenetrable that he imagined he could feel his pupils dilating. He wondered if, given enough time, they might expand so that he could actually see down here, see what it was that visited men, unbeknownst to them, in the dark.

Later, when the walls and ceiling were clean, he grabbed the shovel and slopped the thick sludge into a half dozen five-gallon paint buckets. His arms and thighs ablaze with the weight of the work, his lower back stiff from ducking and squeezing through the tight portals, he lugged the buckets one by one back to the main hold, affixed their handles to the rope slung down beside the ladder, and gave the rope a yank.

Above, Gumbo leaned into the sunlight that shot through the deck portal. "Back already?" he said. "What's your hurry this morning? We still getting paid by the hour, ain't we?"

Dean laughed, said he guessed they were.

Gumbo hoisted a full bucket up and gave the rope a little jiggle, raining some of the slop onto the ladder and down onto Dean, who ducked his head to keep the stuff out of his eyes. "Sorry about that," Gumbo said, sending the rope down for another bucket. "Accident."

"Sure," Dean said. "Just make sure you don't accidentally shut the lights off again."

"What the hell, boss. You afraid of the dark now?"

"Of this kind of dark I am."

By the time his hour below was up, Dean Covin had scraped the holds clean of old sealant. Now, because there wasn't enough ventilation in the void tanks for sandblasting, they'd have to work with needle guns to chip away any outcroppings of rust, and then they'd spray new paint and polyurethane. In a couple days the job would be done, but the work was endless. Once this network of holds was finished, Tully would work an impact tool on the flange bolts of another deck portal and they'd climb down into a different but wholly familiar labyrinth of dripping sealant and condensation and a darkness so thick that it too might as well have been liquid.

When Dean tied the buckets one by one to the rope, Gumbo hoisted them up, sloshing the sludge over the rims and raining it down again onto Dean. With the buckets all up on deck, Dean turned off the worklight, grabbed a rung of the ladder, and started making his way up, his boots sliding on the wet rungs, his fingers slippery with sweat. Overhead, Gumbo was laughing and the sun came sliding out from behind a cloud so that Dean found himself climbing into a loud and blinding light, breathing through his nose, searching his own body for a trace of Randi's breath.

Two-thirds of the way up, his boot soles lost purchase and his fingers slipped from their rungs, and when he realized he was falling, when he realized he wasn't dreaming and the fear flashed hot in his chest, Dean Covin began a prayer he has yet, twelve years later, to finish.
Please, God—

He hit hard on his back, his head slamming the tank's steel floor. Something sparked at the base of his spine and the world went red before it went black, and when he awoke he found his limbs rigid and twitching, his body no longer his to control. In his ears, a hot humming drowned out all ambient sound, and he couldn't hear Gumbo screaming on deck, calling for Tully, couldn't see anything but blazing white, a light so concentrated and piercing that he could feel its heat beneath his skin, a light so otherworldly that, if you'd been there, maybe up on deck with Gumbo and Tully, peering down into the hold at a man whose body was being racked by seizure, whose eyes were open but glazed and luminous, lit from within, whose apparent demise was spotlighted in such a way that your own body, your head and shoulders, didn't cast a shadow down onto him when you leaned over the portal—if you'd been there, looking down on Dean Covin, you might have dropped to your knees. You might have slid down the ladder to help him. You might have stood, as Gumbo did, momentarily helpless, wringing a sweat-soaked bandanna in your hands while Dean felt the bright touch of this light, felt it as a hand of fingers aflame, each of which were employed now to heat and heal, to cauterize ruptured vessels, to dam the hemorrhaging, to fill him inside with radiance where once there was only body and blood, with a light that seemed as vital now as his own breath, which he noticed was no longer tainted by the taste of salt air or chemical sealants or burning cloves, with a light, he knew even then, that came not from the sun or some high-wattage filament or an adrenaline-triggered flash of his brain's own electricity, but from a flaming hand that lit in him the memory of his mother reading to him, the Bible open on her lap—
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Later, after Gumbo carried him up the ladder on his back, after the life flight helicopter landed and lifted him off to the Medical Center in Houston, after a week in ICU, after the insurance settlements and a year of physical therapy, after Randi told him how sorry she was that this had happened—how it ate her up inside that he wasn't the same man anymore, a man she could love; how she wanted always to be his friend, someone he could talk to—after it all, he called her up one night from the house he'd bought in Deer Park.

"I got a new job," he said. "Caring for the sick." He didn't say how, though he believed it to be true, and he could almost hear her smiling on the other end of the line—a worried, sympathy-laced smile. He told her then that he was getting better, that the seizures weren't coming all that often anymore. He didn't tell her, because he knew it was useless and because it sounded to him more akin to sin than to love, that he'd been wishing, every day since his fall, that he'd been less vigilant on those nights they'd spent together, that he'd allowed himself, if only once, to fill her body with his. No, instead he said, "It was God, Randi. When I fell. He came to me."

"Dean," she said. "Listen. What medicines do they have you on?"

 

On Highway 90, between the Houston Medical Center and Liberty's Memorial Hospital, Dean keeps his foot heavy on the gas past thirty-some-odd miles of two-pump gas stations, one-room churches with paint-chipped steeples, past rice fields drained and baking beneath the late-summer sun, just days shy of their harvest. When he pulls into the circular drive of the hospital, only fifty minutes into his three-hour deadline, Dean turns on his hazard lights, slides his Gulf Coast Courier credentials onto the dashboard, grabs his clipboard and manifest off the passenger seat, and rubs the thigh of his numb left leg before climbing from the car.

Once inside, he double-checks his pager for the pickup location and rides the elevator up to the third-floor maternity wing, where a nurse with white hair and penciled brows looks up from her charts to find a man incapable of steadying both eyes on her at once, a man whose clipboard is quivering in a braced, crippled-looking hand.

"I'm with Gulf Coast Courier," Dean says, his ears suddenly abuzz with their sourceless humming.

The nurse nods, picks up her telephone and dials an extension. "Poor dear," she says, and Dean can't quite figure if she's speaking of him or of his cargo. "Frank? It's Judy up on three. That driver's here. From Houston."

Before she hangs up, she slides the pathology paperwork toward Dean and signs his manifest. He thanks her, and her clipped smile tells him how unsettling it sounds, to be thanked for this kind of help. "Okay then, Frank. He's on the way down."

In the basement, Dean is met outside the morgue by a towering, slump-bellied security guard holding a Styrofoam box no larger than the ones Dean's father sometimes ships to him around Christmastime from Omaha Steaks. The man shakes his head, says, "I wouldn't want your job today." He hands Dean the box, balances Dean's clipboard atop it, and makes the sign of the cross. "Right this minute," the man says, "I don't much want mine."

Outside the wind has picked up, washing a swollen cluster of clouds over the sun, ripening the air with the smell of cattle and late hay. Dean breathes through his nose as he rests the box against his hip, opening the rear passenger door, and then, thinking twice of it, pulls wide the other door and secures the box on the front seat with the safety belt.

With the engine running and the two-way crackling with static, Dean leafs through the paperwork. At the top of each page, the patient of record is listed as
Whiteside, Sarah Kneeland.
Besides the physician's signature, the only other name on the form isn't a name at all, and something about it—about a child who is no longer a child, who was never quite a child; whose lungs have never held air and whose mother has never held him alive to her breast or called him by name; who is now conspicuously out in the world, boxed up and belted into a strange man's car; whose name, for now, is
Whiteside (Fetal Demise, Male)
—something about it expands cold within him, and he recalls all those nights he'd spent with Randi, how he'd held her off, how she'd tried, with God's name on her lips, to convince him. Now, Dean knows, she's been married and divorced, married again. She's lost to him, except that she so often haunts him, breathing fire into his lungs, dripping sweat onto his skin, and as he puts the car in gear and heads toward Highway 90, the hum in his ears louder than that of his tires on the asphalt, a flash of anger ignites within him the desire to say a rosary for this child's mother, a rosary of imperatives, one that demands rather than begs that her emptiness be filled with something enduring, something solid. Something other than a nameless and bright and fleeting light.

Now he merges onto the highway and, as if to outrun the guilt he feels creeping up already in his wake, he stomps on the gas. For the love of God, isn't he due one day of shortcoming, a day when he can let his anger and self-pity melt away awhile at the chill of his resentments? Here he is, after all, a good man, by damn. A man stricken with purposeless afflictions, with a lazy eye and a bum leg and a nervous tic, with a hand he can't hold steady enough to touch a woman the way a woman wants to be touched.