The Birth of Super Crip (11 page)

Red quickly pushed the wave at the barrel of the
shotgun just as it went off. The shotgun somersaulted to the
ground. Red froze, listening for any sign that Jennifer had been
hit. Mr. Taylor stood in stunned silence, looking at his hands.

Sirens wailed to life in the distance. Red heard his
mom’s footsteps rushing down the hall.

The lights from three police cruisers kept flashing
through the upstairs windows in the front of the house. Ignoring
his mom’s orders to stay in bed when she checked on him after she
was awakened by the gunshot, Red eased across the hall into his
brother’s room to peek out front. It seemed like the entire
neighborhood was assembled at the edge of their driveway except for
the neighbors who had congregated in Rick and Dana’s backyard for a
better look.

Hearing the front door open and close, Red tried to
move quickly and quietly back to his room. The combination wasn’t
his strong suit and he knew it. Closing his bedroom door, he
scrambled onto his bed and resumed looking out the window. The
familiar sound of Scott bounding up the steps two at a time told
Red that his brother was coming upstairs even before he saw their
parents were still on the patio.

Scott swung the door open and said, “What’re ya
doing?” in a hushed but urgent tone, trying to startle his
brother.

Red managed not to spasm, though he felt his heart
rate spike, despite anticipating his brother’s dramatic entrance.
“You really want to startle me right now?” he asked.

“Good point,” Scott said, realizing an accidental
push from the wave could send him through the hall. “So what the
hell happened? Somebody said Mr. Taylor almost shot Billy and he
hid under his boat.” As he spoke he looked out the window over
Red’s shoulder.

“Comfy?” Red asked, looking back at him.

Scott had clearly noticed the boat on its side in the
middle of Mr. Taylor’s yard. “What did you do?”

“Relax, Dad,” Red said sarcastically. “I had to do
it. Billy was fighting with Jennifer and he
was
going to get
shot by Mr. Taylor.”

His brother’s look told him much more explanation was
needed.

“They were messing around by the boat. She told him
to knock it off, and I even heard a couple slaps. Then Taylor came
out and told him to get lost and leave her alone.”

“So?”

“They started yapping at each other, Jennifer
actually tried to get Billy to leave, the old man kinda threatened
him and went inside.” Red shrugged. “They always said he had a gun.
I looked back to see if Mom and Dad were up. All of a sudden Jen
screams. I look back outside and she’s fighting Billy off
again.”

“And you pushed the boat on him.”

“Started with the cover, but I figured it wasn’t
gonna hold him.”

Scott laughed a little. “What’re you, Super Crip?
Saving the girl?”

“Shut up,” Red groaned. “I was helping Billy too. And
the old man. He probably would have shot ’im and he’d be going to
jail.”

“Super Crip saves the day,” Scott teased.

Red rolled his eyes.

“Well,” Scott said, changing his tone, “any
problems?”

“Yeah,” Red said, looking back at his brother
wide-eyed with a nod. “Mr. Taylor really does have a shotgun. He
came out pointing it. Almost shot at Jennifer thinking it was Billy
running away after messing with his boat. I knocked it out of his
hands just as he fired.”

“I meant you, Einstein,” Scott said, his sarcastic
tone returning. “Any fainting spells? I thought you weren’t going
to do it anymore.”

“Oh,” Red said. “No, I was fine. I didn’t have a
choice anyway. I couldn’t just let it happen. Besides, I never said
I wasn’t going to use it.”

“Super Crip, spanning the backyard to protect the
innocent against teenaged mischief,” Scott said in his best
imitation of a movie announcer.

“Whatever,” Red said, shaking his head but still
laughing.

They both went back to paying attention to the slowly
calming scene outside the window. Billy sat on the edge of the boat
with a police blanket draped over his shoulders. Red thought he
looked even more bewildered than when the cops first discovered
Billy under the boat. Mr. Taylor was in handcuffs talking to
officers on his patio.

It wasn’t long before the boys’ parents came back
inside. They mostly tried to get both Red and Scott to go to bed,
but the brothers managed to pull a few details out of their
parents. Police found fragments of the bullet Mr. Taylor had fired
in the grass as if it had exploded when the gun went off. Damage to
the end of the shotgun seemed to explain why it had shattered, but
Mr. Taylor didn’t know when or how the barrel had become
dented.

“Just as well his shotgun misfired,” Tim said. “It’s
probably going to keep him out of jail tonight. He finally started
saying he shot into the ground to scare the kids off after the guys
coached him about five times on what to say.”

“What about Billy?” Scott asked.

His father shrugged. “Seems fine. Looked like a deer
in headlights when they brought him out from under the boat. Claims
somebody put the boat on top of him. Taylor can’t explain it
either.” Tim looked at his youngest son. “You see anybody do
it?”

Red shook his head. “I heard Jennifer with him before
Mr. Taylor and him started yelling.”

“Well, thank God no one was hurt,” his mom said. Mary
fixed Red’s covers and practically escorted Scott and her husband
out of the room. “Now we all need to get some sleep.”

The three of them laughed, but no one put up a fight.
After his mom turned out his light and closed the door behind her,
Red finally felt some heaviness in his eyes.

Chapter
14

The nurse showed Red into the exam room to wait for
the doctor. His mom walked in before he got himself onto the table
using a step stool.

“They said it was okay to come back,” Mary asked as
much as said.

“Oh, sure, honey,” the nurse said in her southern
twang, cracking the chewing gum she’d been working on all morning.
“He did just fine. The doctor should be right in. Can I get y’all
anything?”

Red thought he could read his mom’s mind as she
politely thanked the nurse, assuring her that they were fine.
Sitting in a chair next to the exam table, Mary put the book she
had brought with her to pass the time reading into her purse. Red
watched as the nurse turned in her two-inch heels, which weren’t
quite as tall as her hairdo that he assumed had been tamed from the
type of beehive hairstyles he’d see in reruns of shows from the
1960s and ‘70s. The tight skirt barely touching her fifty-something
thighs was almost as difficult to forget as the perfume that
lingered after she left any room.

“Doesn’t exactly instill confidence, eh?” Red said,
after the nurse closed the door behind her.

His mom swatted him on the leg and “Ssssh-ed” at him
despite smiling. “At least you don’t have to sit in the waiting
room for two hours,” she said. “Every move I make the chair creaks
like it’s about to shatter. And the receptionist is about 102 and
feels like she has to make conversation but can’t hear a thing you
say. If she said, ‘What’s that?’ again I was gonna tell her to turn
up her hearing aid.”

They both laughed, though they quickly tried to
stifle it. “Yeah, this place doesn’t exactly scream ‘cutting-edge
medicine,’” Red said, looking around the room. The walls were in
desperate need of a paint job, and the charts of the human body and
diagrams of various minor maladies like whiplash that hung on them
seemed like they had been there for decades judging by the clothes
and hairstyles of the people depicted. Even the empty bulletin
board on the wall to Red’s right seemed old, with a couple large
holes in the felt cover and badly frayed edges.

On their previous visit his mom guessed that the exam
rooms had originally been the dining room, divided in two when part
of the house was converted into a medical office. There was barely
enough room for the door to open without it hitting his mom on the
knees as she sat. Red suddenly wondered how someone who had to use
a wheelchair ever got into the room. Or down the hallway, he
thought. It was so narrow people had to walk single file. Thinking
about it more, he wasn’t sure someone using a wheelchair could get
in the front door. No way my power chair would make it.

“I’m just glad you weren’t moanin’ and groanin’ about
coming here this morning,” Mary said. “You usually don’t like
missing school.”

Red smiled, knowing that a few days earlier, he
would
have been less than thrilled at the thought of
spending the day going to Dr. Scheinberg’s office for another
treatment. The hour-plus drive to York started before the bus would
normally pick him up for school, so he didn’t even get to enjoy
sleeping in on a school day, and the next day he still had to go
through the aggravation of catching up on what he missed in each
class. Plus, he and his mom spent most of the time in the car
driving to the doctor doing a poor job of not thinking about Red
getting an experimental combination of drugs injected into his
brain.

Red’s dad heard about Ferdinand Scheinberg from a
customer back in June, but Mary had insisted on talking to their
family doctor about the treatments before scheduling Red for the
initial evaluation. Their physician was skeptical, but agreed to do
some checking upon Mary’s request. After a few weeks, he reported
back that Scheinberg was treating patients with an experimental
drug known as RS3, which he had been able to learn was a mixture of
brain-enhancing chemicals and steroids. He added that none of the
drugs should have any harmful effects when used in typical ways and
standard amounts. However, he stopped short of endorsing the
treatments, which he said he didn’t know much about despite his
best efforts to find information, and he made it clear that he had
only heard of Scheinberg in passing. In the end, though, Red and
his parents decided to move forward with the treatments.

In July, they made the trip to York for the
evaluation, and, after they met with Scheinberg to discuss the
treatment he was offering, Red’s first injection was finally set
for August. On the morning of the appointment, Mary could tell Red
was just going along with her efforts to downplay expectations. The
possibility of seeing his cerebral palsy improve excited all of
them, including his brothers, but his parents feared the
disappointment Red would experience if the treatments didn’t
work.

Knowing her son better than anyone on Earth, Mary was
convinced that the lack of results so far coupled with missing a
day of school, was going to make for a difficult morning. Instead,
he was up before she went to wake him, and she didn’t have to
hustle him along once.

A nervous energy woke him up an hour before he needed
to start getting ready. Questions filled his head. What would the
second shot bring? Would he be able to do more with the wave? Would
he have other powers? Was it really a power? Would another shot
reverse his new abilities? Should he tell the doctor what had
really been going on the last few days? Should he tell his mom?

“So, how’d it go?” his mom asked.

Red shrugged. “Same as last time,” he said, holding
the edge of the table with both hands and rocking his feet back and
forth. He was happy to be almost done, but knew the shot still
loomed. “Just a bunch of general questions, then the coordination
tests.”

The testing routine was already becoming familiar now
that he’d been through it three times. He took the same tests when
he arrived with his parents for the initial evaluation and a
meeting with the doctor to learn more about the treatments. When he
came with his mom about a month later, the visit followed the same
program with the added step of receiving his first treatment at the
end of the appointment after meeting with Scheinberg in the exam
room.

Almost immediately after arriving at the office, Red
would be taken into a back room to do some cognitive tests
administered by one of the nurses. The tests weren’t intended to be
difficult—they included basic mathematics, reading comprehension,
and questions involving general knowledge, such as the name of the
current president. He figured they were just comparing the results
to his initial testing to make sure the injection from the previous
visit hadn’t missed the mark and done any damage.

The coordination drills that followed started out
just as simple, but became progressively harder. After the first
two appointments, Red had complained to his Mom about having to do
the tests, calling them “stupid” and saying that he was being
treated “like a child.” This time around he didn’t mind them as
much. He could feel the wave begin to stir as he put together a
child’s puzzle and played catch with the nurse with a beach ball
while attempting, and mostly failing, to stand on one foot. In
fact, he began trying to do the tests without the wave as much as
possible, thinking that would be a truer test of whether or not his
cerebral palsy was improving.

His mom got off the chair and sat beside him. “Do you
. . .” she started to say, holding the
u
sound for a second,
“think it was any easier?”