..... I put him in the back with his head to the seat and his legs folded under, found the keys in his jeans and hit the gas. Carl didn't say a word; he just lay there bleeding and taking the air like an asthmatic pack mule. Forty-three minutes and we reached the sliding doors of Mercer County Baptist. They took him away. I parked the car, entered the building, bought a pound cake and a root beer from the machines in the lobby, ate the cake, put the can in my coat and went to sleep in the waiting room.
..... Sometime later I was awoken by what felt like a lion's jaw fastened to my collarbone. I opened my eyes to the hovering glare of a grey haired man with a weak chin. He had his hand to my shoulder and was slowly increasing pressure. The fingers loosened when I sat up. The man nodded, released me and took a step back.
..... "I'm Doctor Vidmar. You drove the boy here?"
..... I wanted to answer but couldn't. I felt weightless and the place was crowded. The whole situation sent a slow pulse to my stomach.
..... The doctor sat beside me and tried again. "The hunting accident. This morning. You drove the boy here, yes?"
..... I took the root beer from my pocket and pulled the tab. "Will he have hands after this?"
..... He removed his glasses. "That's hard to say." Leaning forward he massaged the bridge of his nose, craning his neck in an attempt to find my eyes and explain the situation as simply as possible. "It's not the hands. The palms and knuckles are fine. It's the fingers. It's complicated."
..... I took a long drink and turned to face him. "What good are hands without fingers?"
..... He removed a leather snap case from the lower left pocket of his coat, opened it, set the glasses to the red velvet lining, returned the case to his pocket, sighed and stood up. "Look son, we'll do our best. In the mean time, don't leave. Some men from the sheriff's office are on the way down to see you."
..... I drained the can.
..... The doctor then peeled back his sleeve revealing a large silver watch with a snakeskin band and a bell shaped birthmark on the underside of his lower forearm. "They should be here in about ten minutes, give or take. Just to ask a few questions, standard practice in the event of an accident. Most likely file a report with Fish and Game. See if the weapons and registration are in order, that sort of thing. It won't take long."
..... "Alright," I said. "Thank you, doctor."
..... He nodded, turned and set off down a long hallway before disappearing through a pair of double doors at the far end.
..... That's when I got up and left the room. After passing three sets of nurses, an open storage closet and the cafeteria, I found a side exit, walked out, drove to a pay phone and tried Carl's house. No answer. But that didn't mean the place was empty. I had seen his mother on the sofa, drunk, sometimes with these strange men. And the phone would ring, a cordless Panasonic that she never answered. I knew they didn't have a machine so after eight rings I hung up and got back in the car. There was an ice cream stand to my left that was closed and the top floor of the hospital was still visible in the rearview. I could tell you I had a plan, except I didn't. Until I remembered the guns were still out there.
..... I made the woods in decent time, followed the morning's prints to the stand, climbed the steps of the perch and nearly shit upon reaching the top when a colossal bird of some sort began to peck at my chest and flap and holler in defense of its newfound territory. I returned to the earth, found a few good stones and commenced to pelt the beast until it vacated, which thankfully it did after being struck in the face with a narrow piece of shale. While gathering the rifles I discovered Carl's pinky among the trash and the splinters. I placed the finger in my shirt pocket, descended the ladder with the weapons and made my way to the car. The skies darkened, the daylong preview of bad weather made good on its promise. The rains came.
..... I drove toward Knowlton and the house of my uncle in hopes of stashing the guns in his feed shed. After a succession of winding miles I found myself somewhere in central Morris County where a colossal dip in the road caused a slight detachment of the right hand side view mirror. And I was simultaneously in dire need of a piss. I pulled to the side, removing the small tool satchel from beneath the seat with the notion of repairing the mirror and got out. It was a sloping tree-lined street with little sound and no visible inhabitants. I put the tools on the trunk lid, moved a few feet from the vehicle, unzipped and began to urinate.
..... It was then that the fat man appeared with alarming speed, barefoot and unannounced from a towering cluster of roadside bushes. I turned, startled, shielding my parts, wetting my hands and my inner thigh with the remaining fluid I had yet to pass before tucking my penis into my pants.
..... He stood, legs apart, arm extended, back slightly bent in the fashion of an umpire, pointing and staring at the car. "Your wheel," he said. "Your left wheel." He took his eyes from the Ford and looked right through me. "It's on my lawn." He straightened his spine to the best of his ability, eyes drifting, and with his finger now thrust at the stains on my clothes, his words came soft and with an undercurrent of disbelief. "And you've pissed in my pines as well."
..... Slowly, a step at a time, with several pauses in between, he closed the gap until there was no more than two feet between us. I was too tired to move. And with nostrils flared he began to ask questions . "What would you do in this situation?" he asked. His teeth were the color of Turkish mustard and glistened when he spoke. "Tell me, if a stranger parked his heap on your lawn and whipped his pecker out a minute later, how would you handle it?"
..... I looked at his hands and the lines on his knuckles and saw that his right thumb was bent to such a degree that his nail was flush against his wrist. And I thought about Carl alone in that hospital with phantom fingers and cold sweats and I told the fat man the truth; that I couldn't answer him, that I had absolutely no idea how to handle things, that I was a thief and a bottom feeder and if I was lucky enough to own a lawn someplace I wouldn't care if it was full up with groundhogs and fire ants.
..... That didn't satisfy him. With a growl, he shoved me. I stumbled back. "No answer?"
..... He shoved again, getting his bulk behind it. I was up against the car. He came at me, glee in his eyes, like he'd been waiting for something just like this. He had both hands raised. I turned away as he grabbed me by the shoulders.
..... My hand came out of the tool bag with a six inch Irwin industrial wrench. I twisted from his grasp and swung, felt a jolt up my arm when it connected to his skull. Again he growled, but with a whimper in it. I swung once, twice more, full force blows to the right side of his head. I got a grip on the wrench with both hands, ready to strike again. "Stop!"
..... I don't know if he said it or I did. His eyes met mine as he proceeded to vomit. Blood flowed from his head down to the folds in his chin. He began to weave and stagger, still looking at me, and with his hand to his head he fell against the Granada. I opened the rear door, got behind him, grabbed what I could of his fleshy center and placed the mass of his back to the seat. I guess some part of me thought to get the fat man to the emergency room.
..... With his warped and gargantuan thumb to his stomach he soon let loose a rasping dry heave. Foam spilled from the sides of his mouth. I took hold of his belt and with my other hand to his collar pulled until he was no longer in danger of swallowing. His lower half was now on the floor with his chest to the seat and his head atop a pile of rags and old clothes. The retching ceased, and his frame, which occupied ninety percent of the available space to the rear of the vehicle, was still.
..... I searched his pants, no identification. Just a change purse containing eighty-two dollars and a packet of aspirin. I removed the contents, ate the pills dry, took the money and returned the purse to his pocket.
..... I got out of the car to grab the tools. They jangled to the ground, and I crouched to retrieve them.
..... That's when the first wave of sirens came down and passed through my body like a live current. I could feel it in my knees. Of course, some damn neighbor had witnessed the whole thing and called it in.
..... Confusion covered me over. I took off, pure instinct. I couldn't feel my face. I crossed the road in a mad dash toward the outline of the forest without looking back. I ran until I was sure there was nothing behind me. I stopped to wash the blood from my palms, some Carl's and some the fat man's, in a creek bed that I knew by the sound of the cars was close to a road. It was near dark. I went to sleep beneath a large pine, woke some hours later, found the road and walked it. At the sound of wheels I would scramble up the bank and take cover.
..... What must have been two hours later I noticed a glow, up ahead to the right and concealed by a dense band of trees. It wasn't police. It was red and powerful. What I eventually came upon was an all night gas station basking in the warm light of the neon Mobile Pegasus. The attendant was a black kid not much older than me with a flat top haircut a foot high and a nose that was a mass of painful looking boils. He was sitting on a chair in the middle of an open garage. I inquired as to the nearest bus station.
..... He pointed without getting up. "Five miles, maybe six. Stay on this road. You'll see it. Left hand side. Across from the cemetery."
..... I nodded, thanked him and moved on. I was sweating, I was also very cold. I placed my hand to my left breast pocket and felt nothing. I had lost Carl's finger somewhere along the way. It took some time to reach the station but I found it. It was there. Just like he said. Across from the cemetery. And with the money from the fat man's pants I bought a ticket and locked myself in the bathroom until I felt the engine beneath my body and the movement of wheels.
..... The last I saw of the roads of my youth was from the rear window of an Economy bus. Just over half a day and six hundred and ninety-five miles into the journey, during a scheduled pit stop in Valparaiso on the Illinois-Indiana border, I fell asleep in a restaurant called the Viking Chili Bowl. As I had slumped down in the booth, the driver, who apparently wasn't in the practice of taking head counts, gathered the other passengers and moved on without me. When finally I sat up it was to the sound of sickness, like a giant squid being bludgeoned to death in a vacant gymnasium. The room was in a half spin, full tilt and my tongue felt cooked. I managed to pay the bill and make it to the parking lot where it seems I hit the pavement soon after.
..... I was taken to a nearby hospital where they tell me I was borderline coma for a good ten hours. The first thing I remember is a sharp pain to the inner ankle. Pulling from sleep I tried to alter the position of my left leg only to find that it was cuffed to the iron post of the bed. I opened my eyes to the sight of four deputies. And so, on October the fifteenth, I was officially apprehended with a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees on the ninth floor of the Porter-Valparaiso Medical Center and charged with murder one.
..... The fat man, possibly in the midst of a seizure, had partially inhaled one of the rags from the pile, preventing him from receiving oxygen and thus killing him. He had done this, somehow, in the short time between when I turned him over to prevent asphyxiation to when the police arrived.
..... I stayed in that hospital for twelve days. The fever almost took me. But almost doesn't count. And with the doctor's permission, I was sent back East to await trial. Eventually, the day came and I was brought before the judge. Between the fingerprints on the corpse, the weapons in the trunk, the stolen money, the prints on the change purse and the eyewitness account of a neighbor, I wasn't optimistic. With acquittal no longer a reality, my defense team pushed for a reduction to involuntary manslaughter. A plea that went up in smoke after the prosecution convinced the jury that I had placed that rag in the man's mouth deliberately, and that it wasn't medically possible, considering the angle of the body, to ingest that amount of material. It was a short trial that began in shadow and ended in absolute darkness.
..... I currently reside within the confines of the Passaic county correctional facility, 11 Marshall Street, Paterson New Jersey. Carl now lives in West Orange with a prosthetic right hand, two remaining fingers on his left, a Puerto Rican nurse and her son from a previous marriage. Ben is still missing. My father doesn't write. Sheila moved to Delaware and to this day I have yet to find out what Carl was aiming at when his rifle malfunctioned.