Plunking Reggie Jackson (10 page)

He meant to come down with his foot on the base, but Huff's throw was enough behind him to throw him off stride. When he reached back for the ball, he lost his rhythm and stumbled over the bag. He rolled his ankle severely on the edge of the hard base and somewhat forward, just before he fell into the dirt in foul territory.

He couldn't recall some crucial details, like did he hold the ball and did he beat the runner to first? But he knew right away, the way he had snapped himself, that the injury was severe. The knowledge came first, before the pain. It came before the state of shock and the nausea. To have the knowledge didn't seem fair somehow—wouldn't the pain itself be enough suffering? He used his elbows to try to drag himself in the direction of the team bench.

He couldn't go far, though. By the time the furious pain in his ankle began its radiating path throughout other parts of his body, he was on his back. Blocking out the sky were the faces of his teammates, Coach Mason, and Odoms, the trainer on loan from the university. Coley wished they would all vanish so he could just throw up; the nausea came right in tandem with the cold sweats.

Odoms was breaking open his case to get an ice pack. While he wrapped it gingerly around the ankle (it was the right one) with a fresh ACE bandage, Coley closed his eyes. He tried taking deep, regular breaths, but they didn't come easy. He opened his eyes to discover that the faces of his parents had been added to the group. His father worked his jaw but didn't speak. Coley knew why: He wanted to know the extent of the injury before any such information was available. His concern about the pain and discomfort would come after.

“Get me that blanket,” he heard Coach Mason say.

“Don't move, man,” he heard Rico say. “Just lay still.”

Then Jamie Quintero said, “Yeah. Just lay still.”

Coach repeated himself, “Where the hell's the blanket? I said somebody get me that blanket.”

The words his mother spoke were, “Has anyone called an ambulance?”

Coley had to get x-rayed at the hospital before any plan of treatment was considered. By the time he was in the X-ray room itself, the symptoms of shock and nausea were diminishing. There wasn't much solace from this development, however. It only gave him room to concentrate on the acute pain in the ankle, which seemed to intensify with each passing minute.

The ER physician was a woman named Sloan. She removed the ice pack from Coley's elevated ankle so she could begin to probe the swollen damage with her fingertips. The pain was so intense a couple of times that Coley nearly cried out.

“The good news,” Dr. Sloan explained, “is that nothing's broken. The X rays are negative.”

“Okay,” said Coley's father, “what's the bad news?”

“The bad news is that nothing's broken.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Not really.” The doctor was looking at the ankle closely while speculating out loud. “It's a major sprain, that's for sure. It may have to be put in a cast, but it's too soon to tell.”

“A cast?”

“Maybe. We can't know that for a few days, or until this swelling goes down enough to reexamine it.”

“Are you talking about a hard cast?” Ben Burke wanted to know. “As in plaster of paris?”

“Maybe so, maybe fiberglass. The material's not really an issue, but there's internal bleeding here and ligament damage. The question is, how severe is it?”

“I hate to butt in,” said Coley impatiently, “but this thing here hurts like hell.” He was pointing at the ankle.

“No doubt,” said Dr. Sloan. “I'll send some pain pills home with you.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Dad firmly. “You're getting ready to send him home, but you're talking about putting his ankle in a cast?”

“We're talking about a lot of things,” said Dr. Sloan with a smile. She pushed her glasses up so they sat firmly on the bridge of her nose. “And most of it's premature. That's my point. The goal over the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours is to limit internal bleeding and reduce swelling.” She was speaking to Coley now. “You need to keep icing your ankle until it starts to feel numb, then take it off. That usually takes in the neighborhood of twenty minutes. When you feel it warming up again, repeat the process.”

“Even at night?”

“No, you have to sleep at night. You have ACE bandages at home?”

Coley nodded.

“Wrap the ankle in one of those when you go to bed. Compress it. Try to sleep with the ankle elevated by using pillows to get it above your hips.”

Coley shifted his weight in order to get on his side. “What about walking?”

The doctor was shaking her head. “You can't put any weight on it before it's reexamined. You'll be on crutches for a while, my friend.”

“No offense,” said Coley's father, “but are you a specialist, Dr. Sloan? Are you an expert in orthopedics or sports medicine?”

“Nope, I'm just your basic ER sawbones.” Saying this, Dr. Sloan returned her stethoscope to her ears and began listening to Coley's heart. Coley had to wonder if this was really necessary, or if it was the doctor's way of screening Dad out.

“Because,” Coley's father persisted, “we're going to need a second opinion on this. There's no way for you to know it, but this happens to be a crucial time in this boy's life.”

Dr. Sloan took the stethoscope from her ears before she said, “I think that's an excellent idea.” The doctor's demeanor showed that she was annoyed but in control. “Mr. Burke, what I'm trying to tell you is that you don't even have a
first
opinion yet. The procedure I've outlined is simply to get you to that point. In two or three days, when the swelling is reduced, I suggest you take him to the sports medicine clinic in Champaign.”

“No offense, okay?”

“No offense at all.”

The Darvocet pills Coley took smothered the pain, but they also put him in the fitful sleep that activated dreams. Some of the dreams were about Bree and some were about his brother, Patrick. They seemed to be rooted in actual events but embroidered with preposterous details.

His mother came down the first morning to ask him how the ankle was.

“It hurts like hell. I'm going to take some more of those pain pills.”

“Don't overdo that,” she cautioned him. “Just take them if you have to.”

“They put me to sleep and they give me dreams. You don't have to worry about the ankle, though. I'll be okay.”

His mother smiled without parting her lips. “I'm not about to worry about another sports injury, with all we've had in this house.”

That had to be the truth. Coley remembered the time Patrick played a whole football game with his broken hand in a soft cast.

“I've made up twelve of these,” his mother told him, holding up a Ziploc baggie full of ice cubes. “They're in the freezer.”

“Are you going to bring my breakfast down too?”
Fat chance
.

“I think you know me better than that,” was the answer. “You need help, but you don't need a servant.”

Coley peeled back the Velcro strips that secured the plastic ankle splint so he could apply the ice cubes. “Thanks anyway, Ma. For the ice, I mean.”

“Don't call me Ma. Are you going to school today?”

“Not today.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow, either.”

“Is that your decision, or your father's?”

“He doesn't want me to take any chances. On the stairs, or whatever. I haven't practiced much on the crutches yet. If it was up to me, I'd rather go to school.” Saying so, Coley thought of Bree. Maybe she could come over after school and help with the business of nursing him back to health.

“If it were up to you,” said his mother, repeating his own words but lacing them with innuendo. She took a seat on the edge of his bed and stared out the only window, which was just above ground level.

“Yeah. If it were up to me. I don't want to get caught in the middle of this, Mother.”

“Better me than you, Coley? Is that what you're trying to say?”

“You know that's not what I mean either.”

“That's the story of our family, isn't it? Caught in the middle?”

He knew what she was getting at. If she wasn't caught in the middle, then he himself was. “Except for Dad,” he said.

His mother looked at him. “He may be caught in the middle more than either one of us,” she said.

“
Him
? How?”

“Between sons,” was her quick reply.

“That's too much to think about. My head hurts.”

His mother was wearing the white ruffled blouse and the beige pleated skirt. She had on her high-heeled shoes. Before she left the house, she would put on the gold blazer with her name tag, then go sell houses. She would make lots of money doing it, but Coley had to believe that if she stopped getting paid, she wouldn't take much notice of the fact. She would probably go right on making appointments and showing houses.

Maybe I should talk to her
, he thought.
Maybe I should talk to her more
. “I've been having dreams,” he told her. “One of them was about Patrick.”

“Maybe it's the medication.”

“Yeah, I think maybe it is.”

“So tell me about the Patrick dream.”

“It was a dream about the time I went to visit him in Florida at the spring training complex. In the dream he was fixing me up with these beautiful chicks.”
Hoping to get me laid
, Coley thought without saying so out loud.

His mother turned to look at him. “Is that what happened when you went to Florida?”

“No, that's not what happened.”

“He didn't fix you up with
chicks
?” She spoke the word like an expletive.

“Of course not. I'm talkin' about a dream. The facts were, he let me throw some in the complex, I even got to take a little batting practice. You should've seen all the kids hangin' around and the way they envied me. At night he usually had dates or parties and stuff, but he gave me the key to his hotel room so I could watch HBO. One night he bought me tickets for this amusement park that was only a couple miles away.”

“That would be better than fixing you up with chicks, wouldn't it?”

Her sarcasm was annoying. “I'm just trying to make conversation,” he said. “I had a good time in Florida.”

“And why not? You got to watch HBO every night.”

“Look, why are you dissin' Patrick like this, anyway? I said I
dreamed
he was fixin' me up; it didn't really happen.”

“It just sounds like something he would do,” replied his mother matter-of-factly.

“Oh, get real.”

His mother returned her gaze toward the window before she said, “Patrick used to throw the neighbor's cat back into their yard by the tail. They called the cops on us.”

“Big deal. Maybe they needed to keep their cat where it belonged.”

“When he went to summer camp, they sent him home because he insisted on dunking people in the swimming pool.”

“Yeah, well, I got sent home from summer camp too,” Coley said without thinking.

“That was completely different. You got sent home from camp because you were homesick, not because you were tormenting other people.”

“What are you tryin' to say?” Coley hated the fact that his own slip of the tongue had resurrected the humiliating memory of getting homesick at summer camp.

“What I'm trying to say is that Patrick had a nasty streak. At times it was more than a streak. Nobody ever talks about it much because he was such a sports star.”

“No, you've got it wrong. Patrick was just mentally tough. That's the thing that set him apart.”

“That's certainly what the sports pages always said.”

“I don't know what you're tryin' to say here, but I can do without it.”

“So can I,” agreed his mother. She was getting to her feet. “I came down to find out about your ankle, not to get into an argument about Patrick. I'll be home for lunch. You can let me know if you need any books or homework from school.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Chapter Eight

The assessment of Coley's injury at the sports medicine clinic was no more encouraging than the one from the emergency room. It was a Dr. Nugent this time, who explained that the ankle would have to be in a hard cast for two to three weeks.

“Jesus Christ,” said Coley.

“Not good news, I know.” Coley's X rays were up on the wall in front of a bright screen. “This is somewhere between a grade two and a grade three sprain, which means it's moderate to severe. You've torn the fibers in the ligaments that cover the outside of your ankle.” Dr. Nugent was seated on a tall stool while he spoke, aiming a pointer in the direction of the X rays.

But Coley had more interest in the bottom line than in the pictures on the wall. “I need to pitch,” he said.

“You need to get well first,” countered the doctor.

“But I need to
pitch
,” Coley insisted.

Dr. Nugent smiled. It was obvious he'd had this conversation with injured athletes before. “You don't just need to pitch, you need to pitch well. That won't happen unless this injury is completely healed and then you take it through proper rehab. You with me?”

Coley closed his eyes and rubbed them. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. A sprained ankle? He'd had them before but been back in action in just a few days. “Jesus Christ,” he said again. “How much time are we talkin' here?”

“Worst-case scenario, two months. A month in the cast followed by a month of systematic rehab.”

“In two months our season will be over,” said Coley glumly.

“There's a wonderful thing about being eighteen,” said Dr. Nugent with another smile. “There are so many seasons left.”