The Losers (6 page)

“Oh”—she laughed—“it’s
true
then. I’ve never liked scratching. It’s unladylike.”

“How the hell would
you
know?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly, and her voice took on an edge. “All the usual things, I suppose? Parked car, clumsy little gropings in the dark, the steering wheel?”

Raphael’s face flamed. She saw the flush and laughed, a deep, throaty sound that made him flush even more. “You
did!”
she exulted. “In a
car seat!
My poor Angel, I thought I’d taught you better. Are motels so expensive now? Or couldn’t you wait? Was she a virgin?”

“Why don’t we just drop this?”

“I think the boy’s in love, Junior,” she said to Flood.

“Here’s to love.” Flood toasted, raising his glass. “And to steering wheels, of course.”

“Oh, that’s cute, Hood,” Raphael said sarcastically. It sounded silly even to him, but he didn’t care.

“Don’t be nasty, dear.” Isabel’s tone was motherly. “It doesn’t become you.”

It was that note in her voice more than anything—that tolerant, amused, superior tone that finally infuriated him. “Don’t patronize me, ‘Bel,” he told her, getting up clumsily. “I won’t take that—not from you.”

“I don’t think I Eke your tone, Raphael.”

“Good. At least I managed to insult you. I wasn’t really sure I could.”

“I’ve had about enough of this.”

“I had enough a long time ago.” He picked up his jacket. “Where are you going?”

“Someplace where the air’s a little cleaner.” “Don’t be stupid. You’re drunk.” “What if I am?” He started to lurch toward the door. “Stop him, Junior.”

Raphael stopped and turned toward Flood, his jaw thrust forward pugnaciously.

“Not me,” Flood said, raising both hands, palms out. “If you want to go, go ahead.” His eyes, however, were savage.

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Raphael turned and stumbled out the door into the rain.

“Raphael!” Isabel called to him from the porch as he fumbled with his car keys. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come back into the house.”

“No thanks, ‘Bel,” he replied. “You cost too much for me. I can’t afford you anymore.” He got the door open and climbed into the car.

“Raphael,” she called again.

He started the car and spun away, the rear end fishtailing and wet gravel spraying out behind him.

Because he knew that Flood might try to follow him, he avoided the freeway, sticking instead to the narrow, two-lane country roads that paralleled it. He was still angry and more than a little drunk. He drove too fast on the unfamiliar roads and skidded often—heart-stopping little drifts as he rounded curves, and wrenching, side-to-side slides as he fought to bring the car back under control.

It had all been stupid, of course—overdramatic and even childish. Despite his anger he knew that his outburst had been obviously contrived. Inwardly he almost writhed with embarrassment. It was all too pat and far too easy to attach the worst motives to. Quite bluntly, he had found someone else and had deliberately dumped Isabel. He had been bad-mannered, ungrateful, and even a little bit contemptible. He knew he should go back, but he continued to roar down the wet, winding road, stubbornly resisting even his own best impulses.

He rounded a sharp right-hand curve, and the car went almost completely out of control. In a single, lucid flash he saw directly ahead of him the large white wooden “X” on a pole at the side of the road and the glaring light bearing down on him. As he drove his foot down on the brake, he heard the roaring noise. His tires howled as the car spun and skidded broadside toward the intersection.

The locomotive klaxon bellowed at him as he skidded, tail-first now, onto the tracks in front of the train.

The world was suddenly filled with noise and light and a great stunning shock. He was thrown helplessly around inside the car as it began to tumble, disintegrating, in front of the grinding mass of the locomotive.

He was hurled against a door, felt it give, and he was partially thrown out. Then the remains of the car rolled over on top of him, and he lost consciousness.

vii

At first there was only shattering, mind-destroying pain. Though he feared the unconsciousness as a kind of death, his mind, whimpering, crept back into it gratefully each time he awoke to find the pain still there.

Later—how much later he would never know—there were drugs that stunned him into insensibility. Vacant-eyed and uncaring, he would watch the slow progression of light outside the window of the room. It grew light, and it stayed light for a while, and then it grew dark again. And always, hiding somewhere below the smooth surface, the pain twisted and heaved like some enormous beast reaching up out of the depths to drag him down out of the billowy gray indifference of the drugs and feed upon his shrieking body again. Sometimes, when the drugs were wearing off and their thick, insulating cloud was growing thin, he would cry, knowing that the beast was almost upon him once more, feeling the first feathery touches of its claws. And then they would come and give him more of the drugs, and it would be all right.

There were many bandages. At times it was almost as if the whole bed was one enormous bandage, and there seemed to be a kind of wire cage over his hips. The cage bothered him because it tented the bedclothes up in front of him, so that he could not see the foot of the bed, but when he tried to move the cage, they came and gave him more drugs and strapped his hands down.

And then his mother was there, accompanied by his uncle Harry. Harry Taylor’s usually florid face blanched as he approached the bed, and Raphael vaguely wondered what could be so disturbing. It was, however, his mother’s shriek that half roused him. That animal cry of insupportable loss and the look of mindless horror on her face as she entered the room reached down into the gray fog where he hid from the pain and brought him up, partially sitting, staring beyond the tented cage over his hips at the unbelievable vacancy on the left side of the bed.

It was a mistake, of course, some trick of the eye. Quite plainly, he could feel his left leg—toes, foot, ankle, knee, and thigh. He half sat, feeling the leg in exquisite detail while his eyes, sluggish and uncomprehending, told him that it was no longer there.

viii

“Taylor,” the blocky, balding man in the wheelchair snapped, “get your weight off your armpits.”

“I was just resting, Mr. Quillian.” Raphael lifted his body with his hands.

“Don’t rest on your armpits. You remember what I told you about crutch paralysis?”

“All right. Don’t make a federal case out of it.” He went back to his slow, stumping shuffle back and forth across the small, gymlike therapy room. “This is bullshit,” he said finally, collapsing into his wheelchair near the door. “I told you people it was too early for this.” He sat massaging his aching hands. “They haven’t even taken the dressings off yet.”

“Taylor,” Quillian said coldly, “if you lie around for another two weeks, you won’t be strong enough to lift your own dead ass. Try it again.”

“Screw it. I’m tired.”

“Do you enjoy being an invalid, Taylor?”

“Come on,” Raphael objected. “This is hard work.”

“Sure it is. You afraid of hard work?”

“Where’s the difference? I mean, I’ve seen people on crutches before—sprained ankles, broken legs—stuff like that. They pick it up right away. What makes it so damned hard for me?”

“Balance, Taylor, balance. A broken leg is still there. You’re a one-legged man now. You’ve lost nearly a fifth of your body weight. Your center of gravity is in your chest instead of your hips. You’ve got to learn balance all over again.”

“Not all at once. I’m tired. I’m going back to my room.”

“Quitting, Taylor? I thought you were an athlete. Is this the way you used to win football games?”

“I’m hurting, man. I need a shot.”

“Sure you do.” Quillian’s voice was contemptuous. “But let’s not lie to each other. Let’s call it by its right name. You need a fix, don’t you? You’re a junkie, Taylor, and you need a fix.”

Raphael spun his chair around angrily and wheeled himself out of the therapy room.

Later, in the hazy euphoria the drug always brought, Raphael lay in his bed and tried to bring his mind to bear on the problem. “Junkie,” he said, trying the word out. It sounded funny to him, and he giggled. “Junkie,” he said again, and giggled some more.

A day or so later a starched nurse came into his room with a brightly professional smile on her face. “You have a visitor, Mr. Taylor,” she said.

Raphael, gritting his teeth at the pain that seemed to have settled in his phantom knee and knowing that it was still hours until they would give him another shot, turned irritably toward her. “Who is it?” he asked harshly. “A Miss Hamilton.”

“No! I don’t want to see her. Send her away.”

“Oh, come on,” she coaxed. “A visit might cheer you up.”

“No!” Raphael shouted. “Now get the hell out of here and leave me alone!” He turned his face toward the wall.

After the nurse had left and he was sure that he was alone, he cried.

Her name was Miss Joan Shimp, and Raphael hated her from almost the first moment he laid eyes on her. She was led into the room by the hospital chaplain, who said a few nice things about social workers and then left. Miss Shimp wore a businesslike suit. No starched white uniform for old Shimpsie. Nobody was going to ask
her
to empty a bedpan by mistake. She was a pear-shaped young woman with enormous hips, narrow shoulders, and no noticeable bosom. Her complexion was acne-ravaged, and she had dun-colored hair, an incipient mustache, a nasal voice, and what might best be described as an attitude problem. “Well now,” she started briskly, “how are we doing?” The nurses on the floor had all learned rather early not to say “we” to Raphael.

“I don’t know about you, lady,” Raphael replied in a flat, unfriendly tone, “but
I’m
doing lousy.”

“Self-pity, Mr. Taylor? We must avoid self-pity.”

“Why? It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

“This just won’t do,” she scolded.

“We’re not going to get along, lady. Why don’t you just go away?”

“We can play this either way, Taylor.” Her voice was sharp. “You’ve been assigned to me, and I
am
going to do my job. There are programs for people like you, and like it or not, you
are
going to participate.”

“Really? Don’t bet the farm on it.”

Things deteriorated rapidly from there.

Shimpsie talked about programs as if programs were holy things that could solve all the world’s problems. Raphael ignored her. His half-drugged mind was not particularly retentive, but he soon had a pile of books at his bedside, and every time Shimpsie entered his room, he would select a book at random and use it as a barrier. In one of his more outrageous moments Flood had once described social workers as representatives of a generation of bright young ladies who don’t know how to type. Raphael clung to that definition. It seemed to help for some reason.

Shimpsie asked probing questions about his background and family. She liked the phrase “dysfunctional
family,”
and she was desperately interested in his “feelings” and “relationships.” Shimpsie, he felt, was queer for feelings and relationships. On one occasion she even screamed at him, “Don’t think! Feel!”

“And abandon twenty-five thousand years of human development? Not very likely, Shimpsie.”

“Miss
Shimp!” she snapped.

“Whatever.” He said it as insultingly as possible. “Angleworms feel, Shimpsie. So do oysters, I imagine. I don’t know about you, but I hope
I’ve
come further than that.”

Just for the sake of variety he would sometimes lie to her, inventing outrageous stories about a background as “dysfunctional” as he could concoct. She lapped it up, her eyes begging for more.

He hated her with a passion, but he began to long for her visits. In a strange sort of way Shimpsie
was
therapeutic.

“That’s better, Taylor,” Quillian said a week later. “You’re starting to get the rhythm now. Don’t stump. Make it smooth.
Set
the crutches down, don’t jab at the ground with them. Try to keep from jarring your arms and shoulders.”

Raphael, sweating profusely, grimly moved back and forth across the therapy room, gritting his teeth at the burning pain in his arms.

“Why are you picking on Miss Shimp?” Quillian said in a half-amused way.

“Shimpsie? I pick on her because she’s an asshole.” Quillian laughed. “Never heard a woman called an asshole before.”

“Would you prefer asshole-ess?”

“Asshole or not, you’d better at least
try
to get along with her, Taylor.”

“Why should I bother?”

“Because you can’t get out of here without her okay. She has to sign a release before they’ll discharge you. Okay, enough bullshit. Get back to work.”

A week or so later Uncle Harry made another trip to Portland, alone this time. “Good to see you again, Rafe,” he said, shaking Raphael’s hand. He glanced at the crutches leaning in the corner. “I see that you’re getting around now.”

Raphael looked at him through the haze of the shot he had just been given. “What brings you down here, Uncle Harry?”

“Oh …” his uncle replied a bit evasively, “this and that. I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”

“I’m coming along.”

“Good for you. Have they given you any idea yet about when you’ll be getting out of here?”

Raphael shifted in the bed, wincing slightly. “I imagine that it’s going to be a while longer.”

“You going back to school when you get out?”

“I haven’t really thought about it yet.”

Uncle Harry gave him a speculative look. “I’m going to give this to you straight, Rafe. I think we know each other well enough for that.”

“Okay,” Raphael replied, “what is it?”

“It’s your mother, Rafe.”