This is Just Exactly Like You (13 page)

“Thanks,” says Jack.

“Blood can be a tough thing for a kid to see,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know that.” Jack wonders who doesn’t know that, then registers the fact that he’s actually tied Hen in place there in front of all of it. Fair enough.

An ambulance comes in from the other direction, siren off, lights off. It stops just past Canavan’s truck, then backs up, reverse warning beeping. Hendrick stares. Two EMTs, a man and a woman, get out and talk to the firemen, load Canavan and his lifeguard board onto a stretcher. A third EMT stands by the ambulance, watches. Supervises. They inflate something around his leg, a sleeve to stop the bleeding, maybe, or just to protect him, and they wheel him over the gravel toward the open back doors of the ambulance. One of them gets on the radio, and the other, the woman, comes over to Jack and Butner and the firefighters.

“We’ll take him to Moses Cone, in Greensboro,” she says. “Better trauma unit, almost as close.”

“OK,” Jack says. Hendrick picks the helmet up, puts it on, then takes it right back off again. It’s much bigger than his head.

The EMT says, “You guys know him, I assume.”

“Yes,” Jack says.

“Is there maybe someone you could call, tell somebody where he is?”

Butner’s getting ready to say something, but Jack says, “I can do it.”

“OK,” she says. “Terrific.”

“Do you know how bad it is?” Jack asks.

“It doesn’t look awful,” she says. “I mean, it’s bad, but I’ve seen uglier. Looks worse than it is, probably. More blood than anything. It’s kind of a messy cut.”

“Messy?”

“Chainsaws are bad. Knives are better. The edges are smoother, easier to patch up. Chainsaws are a pain in the ass.”

“OK,” Jack says.

“Moses Cone,” she tells him again, like she thinks he won’t remember.

“He’s got it,” Butner says. “He’s got it.”

“We should go,” she says.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “OK.”

They get ready to load Canavan into the ambulance, and Hen starts freaking out, starts doing his noises. Something’s touched him off. Everybody stops what they’re doing and watches while it gets worse, while he starts shrieking in short, staccato bursts. He’s out at the very end of the tie-down, pulling hard on it, leaning. Jack goes over to him, tries to calm him down, tries to hold him, tries state names. Arkansas. Kansas. It doesn’t work. He’s really ramping himself up now, kicking and screaming, spinning back into the strap, and Jack unties him, trying to make it so he can’t get too tangled, at least, and that turns out to be all he was wanting: Once he’s free of the tie-down, Hendrick runs over and stands next to the stretcher, silent. He stands eye level with Canavan, who’s not talking, not moving. There is blood on the stretcher. Hendrick leans in and kisses him on the arm. He actually kisses Canavan on the arm.
Some children with autism have difficulty showing affection of any kind.
Hendrick kisses Canavan, and he says, “These member stations.” He says, “NPR is brought to you by this and other NPR stations, and by contributions from listeners like you.” He says, “By the Ford Foundation, and by the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.” He says, “Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the World,” and then he steps back, having said what he needed to say, and the EMTs get Canavan loaded into the ambulance. Jack puts his hands on Hen’s shoulders. One of the EMTs gets in the back with Canavan, and the other closes the doors, hits them twice, gets in up front and they pull away, lights flashing now, but still no siren. Butner walks over to the Shell to talk to Cherry, who’s come out to see what all this is. The firemen start loading back up, and Hendrick’s talking again, saying something else Jack can’t figure out, a garbled mess of half-words and sounds, or maybe just sounds. Secret code. The ambulance is around the big curve and out of sight by the time Jack gets it figured out, gets hold of what he’s saying, which is
ecnalubma, ecnalubma.
He’s read the backwards printing on the front of the ambulance. A brand new word, yet another language. Ecnalubma. Hendrick sits down in the dust and puts the fire helmet on again. In it, he looks like he’s the wrong size for the world.

“I don’t know,” he tells Beth again, standing on the yard. He’s called her at Canavan’s. “I wasn’t looking. I was chasing Hendrick around, and when I looked up, he was down.”

“What do you mean, ‘he was down’?”

“I mean,” he says, “I found Hendrick over by the cedar, lining it up, and when I looked up again Canavan was down, and Butner was shouting.”

“You found Hendrick? Was he lost?”

“He wasn’t lost. He just got away while I was sitting with Butner. He was ten feet away.”

“So you don’t know what happened.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody does. He just cut himself. The EMT said it didn’t look that bad. She said she’d seen worse.”

“Of course she’s seen worse. She’s an EMT.”

“It wasn’t that bad. I only puked because of the blood.”

“You threw up?”

“Only a little.”

“Did he cut anything
off
? Like toes or anything? I mean, should you be going to get a bag of ice or something from the gas station and looking for toes?”

“He didn’t cut anything off,” Jack says. “I think he just let the saw slip off a branch, and it nicked him.”

“You don’t ride in an ambulance for a nick, Jack.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Have you looked for toes?”

“The cut’s on his shin. I saw it myself, remember? You want me to look around anyway?”

She sighs on the other end. “No,” she says. “I guess not.” Then she says, “There was a lot of blood?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “There was.”

“How’s Hendrick?”

Well, he’s fluent in Spanish, and he kissed your boyfriend.
“He’s fine,” Jack says.

“Where is he?”

“He’s right here.”

“He’s not lost again?”

“He’s right here.” He’s sitting on the step up into the office, tapping on the fire helmet with his yogurt spoon. “He’s got a fire helmet now.”

“What?”

“A fire helmet. One of the guys gave it to him.”

“One of what guys?”

“The firemen, obviously.”

“Why were there firemen? Was something on fire?”

“Fire’s usually the first responder,” he tells her. He’s an expert now.

“There was a fire truck?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.” She’s shuffling papers or something. “Look,” she says. “Are you going to the hospital?”

It hadn’t even occurred to him. “I guess so,” he says. He doesn’t want to, but it happened on his watch. “Maybe I should.”

“So I can see Hen there, at least,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.” And just like that, he’s going.

“Fine,” she says.

“Fine.”

“You really have no idea what happened?”

It’s something about her tone. “What are you saying?” he asks.

“I mean, Jack, just tell me you didn’t—”

“Tell you I didn’t what?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Never mind. I’m sorry.”

“Are you asking me if I did it? As in, did I go over there and take the chainsaw and just slash him across the shin?”

“No,” she says. “No. I don’t know what I mean. I know you didn’t do that. I’m sorry. I’m just—I don’t know what I am.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. He rubs the back of his neck. “For a second I thought the same thing about Butner.”

“You don’t think—”

“No,” Jack says. “I really don’t think so.”

“You would have seen that.”

“I might have paid to watch it,” he says.

There’s a long pause on her end. “Do you have to be that way?”

“Probably not,” he says. He should figure out some other way to be. He can hear well enough that she’s not entirely OK. And he can’t blame her. Things are now worse than they were before. Simple as that. Whatever else Canavan is to her, he’s now also wounded, and headed for the emergency room. Neither of them says anything for a long time, and then she finally asks him,
Moses Cone?
And he tells her
yes, Moses Cone
, tells her they’ll meet her there. Before they hang up, Beth says, “Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone should probably call Rena.”

Rena. In her little borrowed condo downtown. View of future redevelopment, of parallel parking, of men picking up after their dogs when they walk them in the evenings. “Probably so,” he says.

“Maybe you could?”

“Better me than you, I guess,” he says.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“I don’t have her number here,” he says.

“Hang on,” she says. “I think it’s somewhere in here.” He hears her walking through Canavan’s house. There are so many things not right with this. “Here it is,” she says, and gives it to him. He stands there on the yard, the sun so low it’s behind the piles of mulch now, and he doesn’t write it down. He doesn’t want to call anybody, doesn’t want to go to the hospital. He wants to go home, go back to before any of this happened at all. “Did you get that?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” he says. Then he tells her, “No.”

“No?”

“I didn’t have anything to write with,” he says, and slides past Hen into the office. “OK,” he says, and she tells him again, and he writes it up on the big delivery whiteboard.

“So you’ll call her.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Moses Cone,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“OK, then,” she says, “I’m hanging up now.”

“OK,” he says, and she does. This one thing’s probably true: If she didn’t sleep on the sofa last night, she will tonight. Canavan’s not going to be able to do anything for her with a cut like that. The sun catches the clear plastic of the greenhouse, lights it up. Hendrick moves the fire helmet to a new, better position on the step. Jack stands there and looks at Rena’s number.

Butner said he’d clean up the blood, he’d finish limbing the rest of the branches, he’d figure out how to get Canavan’s truck back to him.
Come in tomorrow whenever you need,
he said.
Me and Paco can work the lot pretty good. Call in the morning and we’ll let you know when we need you.
Butner leaned in through the truck window.
It’s OK you’re going,
he said.
Just don’t stay long. Show your face and then get the hell out of there,
he said.
Doesn’t need to be you sitting there all night just so they can tell you it’s seven hundred stitches or however many it turns out to be. Get out of there and take the little man somewhere good. Take him to one of those pizza places where there’s skeetball and go-carts and all that. Slides and shit.
Jack can’t imagine Hendrick inside a place like that. At school, or at the park, Hen stands in the center of all the kids while they run around. He likes the playground, likes to watch, but it doesn’t occur to him to play. He doesn’t really have any friends his age, doesn’t really know how to act around other children. It’s like it doesn’t ever occur to him that he’s one of them, too.

Jack and Hen drive 70 back into Greensboro. He’s gotten him into a new shirt, from an extra set of clothes he keeps at PM&T just in case. It’s got a cartoon character on it Jack doesn’t recognize. Beth must have bought it. They pass the Elks’ Club Lodge, where the sign says DEFEND OUR TROOPS. A couple of miles later, the L&M Clutch and Transmission sign says SIRLOIN$7.99. No explanation for why they’d be selling meat out of the clutch shop. They come in through the ragged neighborhoods outlying this side of Greensboro, long brick apartment buildings and old Sears houses half-rotting into the ground, the occasional house fixed back up, a pineapple flag out front and a neat little lawn. Then a clear-cut neighborhood of doublewides, Saving Grace Homes. On the scalped land the houses look like growths, like something that might have to be taken off. At Gentry Used Auto Sales, there’s a huge inflatable eagle on the roof, face airbrushed on. That’s a job. In another life he could have been an airbrush artist for promotional balloons. He points it out to Hendrick. Hen says, “Pin Oak.”