Hero (4 page)

I howled and spun, and the last thing I remember was wetting myself before my head hit the pavement.

CHAPTER  TWO

WHEN I WOKE UP in the emergency room, the doctor, a heavyset man with more hair growing out of his ears than on his head, was giving Dad a routine list of things for me to avoid. Dad kept reminding him we'd been through this before, but the doctor was determined to finish reading the checklist.

"And last but not least, strobe lights are a big no-no."

Great, there go the disco lessons. I didn't need another list of special foods to avoid, or another series of MRIs, or an adjusted dosage on my medication. What I really needed was to avoid losing control of my bowels in front of my schoolmates.

"Oh, and I almost forgot," the doctor said. "I'll need your son's driver's license."

There are two things I really hate in this world. One is when adults refer to me in third person while I'm in the room. Second is having my license taken away for six months according to the state law regarding seizures. Rarely do I get them both at the same time.

Dad knew this was a severe blow to my independence, but I think he was secretly relieved, too. Playing dutiful parent overshadowed what that bratty little shit had said about me after the game. Dad put some compassion into the performance as he reached out his hand, sympathetically, for me to fork over my license. Any vestige of what had been said after the game was now buried in that special treasure chest where he locked away all his secret shames: His career. His hand. Mom. And now me.

I remember when I was a little boy, Martina Navratilova moved into our town for a brief time, in an expensive compound by the bay, where she could quietly train for the U.S. Open. The local paper did a cover story on her in the features section. With her racket slung over her shoulder, she posed by a crape myrtle bush and gazed wistfully into the sky. My father sat at the kitchen table with the paper that morning with extra care. His bad back had kept him up every night that week, and I knew to tread carefully when his back pain was flaring up. The only thing that pissed him off more than the pain itself was the way the government refused to pay for the medical bills. With his prior dangerous career, they explained, it would be very difficult for him to prove that the damage to his spine was a direct result of combat during his military service.

Mom gave Dad his eggs, sunny-side up, with tiny purple pills on the side of the plate. It took him a few minutes to position the fork carefully between the mangled nubs that remained on his bad hand. He was going through one of those phases where he'd convince himself that, with enough training, he could learn to use that hand. He carefully speared bites of egg and slowly propelled them to his mouth. He dropped the fork onto the plate a couple of times before he finally switched to his good hand. He read the paper and chewed for a while, and pretended like nothing was wrong. Then he looked up from his eggs and held the newspaper article out over my Crunch Berries.

"This is one of the world's big problems, son." He shook his head.

"Hal, leave it alone," Mom said from the kitchen and stifled a yawn.

He looked over at her for an instant. I thought he was annoyed at the yawn, a crime against his scintillating conversational skills. I had no idea at the time why he was really mad at her, what that yawn really meant. That would all come out later.

Mom served Dad more eggs and set a glass of orange juice in front of me. When I reached for the glass, she locked her pinky finger with mine, just for a moment, not long enough for my father to see, but long enough for me to know she was there for me.

"She's what you call gay," Dad continued, despite my mother's wishes. "That means instead of liking men, she likes to be with girls."

"I like girls," I said. It was true: Bretta Zimmer was my best friend in school that year.

"Damn straight," he said.

Mom disappeared down the hall to the laundry room.

"Do you know what you call a man who likes to be with other men?" Dad asked.

I peered down into my bowl. My Crunch Berries were

getting mushy in the milk. I hated mushy Crunch Berries.

"Hal!" my mother snapped from a remote, hard-to-pinpoint corner of the house.

"You call them queer" He cringed. "These people will never have a normal life. They are the ultimate downfall of our society, too, because if it were up to them to proliferate, there wouldn't be any reproduction and we would fail to continue as a species." Dad speared another chunk of eggs with his fork. "It's Darwinian."

I watched a Crunch Berry sink to the bottom of the bowl.

"What's Darwinian?" I asked. I tried to keep my eyes on my bowl; I didn't want to make eye contact with Dad. When I did look up briefly, glare from the morning sun caught my eye, and I thought I saw our dirty mop bucket floating down the hallway toward us, but I couldn't see Mom behind it. My eyes must have been playing tricks on me. I quickly looked back down in my cereal.

"Never mind," he said. "All you need to know is that it's wrong. In fact, the only thing you could be that's worse is one of these new, so-called self-professed 'heroes' with superpowers. Sons of bitches wouldn't know their asses from a—"

Sploosh!

The mop bucket floated above my father's head, turned upside down, and showered my father with a filthy, scummy lather. Through the glare of the sunlight, I still couldn't see my mother.

"They're ready for you at checkout," a perky, young nurse whose polished name tag said Randi! announced to us. Her ponytail, situated too far on top of her head, sprung out in all directions like a poorly bleached tropical fern. I wondered what she was thinking when they asked her to spell her name for the name tag and she added that explanation point.

"Careful you don't hit on too many of the nurses," Dad said as he wheeled me past checkout. "I don't want to come home from work one night and find the house full of candy stripers."

I mustered a weak smile. Now he was overcompensating. Maybe Dad hadn't buried that postgame comment yet after all.

Since the doctors took away my license, I'd had to beg for rides wherever I wanted to go. School would break for summer soon, and that meant I had my jobs to get to.

If I didn't make the van on time, I'd miss the morning shift on the highway custodial crew. The late guys always got stuck with mowing the median, a much harder chore than picking up trash off the side of the road.

My shift would end just in time for me to catch a local commuter train to the crosstown bus, which left me barely enough time to make it to the mall for the lunch and dinner shift at Schmaltzy's Cafeteria.

I could always tell exactly how late I was by the size of the stack of dishes in the sink beside the Hobart. Good thing I was a fast washer.

The late guy inherited the macaroni and cheese pan. All the scouring in the world couldn't scrape the crust off those things, but I did my best. I picked tiny bits of steel wool out of my hands every night before I crashed.

In a few weeks I'd have to add the summer basketball league to this crazy schedule. I'd smell like grease and detergent, but if I hustled, I could make it on time. Throw in my nights tutoring at the Student Life Center, and it made for one exhausted me.

The mad scramble for transportation got really old really fast. I was constantly late for everything. I felt bad when I stood up my students one night because the crosstown bus broke down.

And Coach had suddenly stopped speaking to me, which had never happened before. I hoped it didn't have anything to do with the comment that Gary Coleman twerp made. No, it was probably just because I was always late—he hated tardiness. His usual punishment included an agonizing series of wind sprints at the end of practice. But instead Coach did nothing. He gave me the total silent treatment, which was actually worse. One night after practice I just started doing the wind sprints myself, hoping to get back into his good graces.

Dad couldn't help me, either. Not because he didn't want to drive me, but because all my running around usually occurred during the long hours of his never-ending workday, and we depended on his overtime to pay off the third mortgage he'd raken out on the house by then.

Eventually, I just threw in the towel, went to the garage, and pumped air into the tires of my old dirt bike. Hell, it beat walking.

Except for when it rained. Or when you weren't in the mood for public humiliation. One day I was riding my bike to practice after work because Coach had asked to see me early. I was running late so I pedaled as fast as I could. I was more than a little annoyed when I stopped for a red light at a crowded intersection and found myself surrounded by a gang of kids on skateboards. The oldest one must have been at least a couple years younger than me. He was just getting the first whisper of a mustache on his lip.

"You kidding me?" He spoke through a menthol cigarette that dangled from his lips. "That bike's like twenty years old. Mag wheels?"

I rolled my eyes and waited for the light to change. When it changed to green I stood up on the bike to press down on the pedal as hard as I could to distance myself from this bad after school special, but the bike didn't lurch forward like it should have. Something was dragging behind it, holding it back. I turned around and saw the kid with the quasi mustache, his hands gripping the back of the bike for a free ride on his skateboard.

I thought about clocking him, but the only thing more humiliating than riding your dirt bike to school is getting in a fight with a bunch of kids.

"What are you doing, dumbass? Busy intersection, lots of cars."

The kid looked back at his friends and grinned. He was in full showmanship mode now, and it was only going to get worse.

"It's called skitching, asshole," he said to me. "It means I get a free ri—"

WHUMP!

The blur of a car whizzed by and knocked him off the back of my bike. He bounced off the car's windshield and flew high into the air. I didn't see him land, because it was clear on the other side of the street across from all the traffic. His skateboard veered across the intersection, somehow missed every car, and disappeared into a sewer.

The car screeched to a halt; the kid's friends raced over to his side. One of them had the good sense to use his cell phone to take a picture. The driver of the car called an ambulance, and by the time I got there, the injured kid, drained of all color, was coughing up blood.

I moved in quickly, before any of the stunned bystanders could protest, and I grabbed his head between my two hands.

"Hey, kid!" I tried to get his attention. His eyes were glassy, rolling back in his head like a porcelain doll's.

"Hey, dumbass! I'm talking to you!" I yelled at him to keep him conscious, to keep his attention on my voice while my hands did their work. My hands burned as I yelled. "Don't ever do that again, you hear me?!" I shook him by the shoulders, and I felt like my hands were going to melt. "You hear me?!"

Traffic had stopped by now, and people were gathered around me. A gruff man with a tire iron had organized a group of adults to move me away from the injured kid. They began to approach.

Finally, the boy's limp eyelids popped to life and he looked at the panic around him.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry." He wiped the blood away from his mouth. The coughing had stopped, and there was no more blood trickling out. He even stood up. "Really, I'm sorry. Is everyone okay?"

The ambulance arrived moments later, but I was long gone by then. I heard the paramedics had to treat the driver of the car that hit the kid more than they had to do anything for the kid himself. The driver was apparently in shock, hyperventilating from the whole ordeal, and the kid with the quasi mustache gave her the paper bag that carried his cigarettes so she'd have something to breathe into. The driver accidentally inhaled the receipt, and the paramedics had to fish it out of her windpipe.

I stopped in the parking lot in front of the gymnasium and puked into the bushes. I wiped my mouth. I didn't like throwing up, but I was getting better at this: my fingers didn't even twitch this time.

"You're late," Coach said when I finally arrived, disheveled and worn out. He clutched a tub of potato chips and offered me one.

"Uh, no thanks," I said.

"Listen, Thorn. I'm going to cut to the chase here." He shuffled a few papers on his desk. They were yellow with age. "How long have you played center for me?"

"Five years."

"Really? Is that all?" His eyeballs rolled up as he tried to remember, like he was trying to get a look back at his brain. "I thought it was more than that."

I stared at a coffee mug on his desk. It said NUMBER ONE DAD! in big, bright letters, and it was half full with coffee from the morning. The creamer had congealed into a thick film on the surface.

He chomped down on a potato chip, shook his head, and shrugged.

"Well, the point is, I've been looking after you for a long time now, and I only have your best interest at heart."

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

"This little medical problem of yours, it's got us worried. See, we have extremely high insurance premiums to pay here at school. It's getting to the point where I don't know how any athletic program can survive. Do you understand what I'm saying?" He fiddled with a burned chip in his puffy fingertips. He focused on the chip so that he didn't have to look me in the eye. Finally, he popped it in his mouth.

Why wouldn't he look at me? It couldn't be the seizures. People haven't thought you could catch those since the Dark Ages, since they thought all you needed to feel better was a good leeching. Plus, the coach had a daughter with cerebral palsy.

My mind drifted and I looked at a potted plant on his desk. It was made of three branches—the first branch was dark green and normal, the second was pretty normal except for the cobwebs on it, and the third was desiccated and dying. Coach spotted me staring at the dying branch, then watered the plant with the dregs of his coffee mug.

"Thorn, I don't think you can be on the team anymore."