But was I going toward Haines, or away from it? I couldn’t remember. The visible world was down to a single sharp circle about six inches in diameter. My head was splitting; there was a forest fire in my guts. When I fell, it seemed to be in slow motion, and the sidewalk felt as soft as a feather-pillow.
Before I could pass out, something prodded me. A hard, metallic something. A rusty voice eight or ten miles above me said, “You!You,boy! What’s wrong with you?”
I turned over. It took the last of my strength, but I managed. Towering above me was the elderly woman who’d called me a coward when I refused to step in between Lee and Marina on The Day of the Zipper. It might havebeenthat day, because, August heat or no August heat, she was once more wearing the pink flannel nightgown and the quilted jacket. Perhaps because I still had boxing on what remained of my mind, her upstanding hair today reminded me of Don King instead of Elsa Lanchester. She had poked me with one of the front legs of her walker.
“Ohmydeargod,” she said. “Who has beaten you?”
That was a long story, and I couldn’t tell it. The dark was closing in, and I was glad because the pain in my head was killing me.Al got lung cancer,I thought.I got Akiva Roth. Either way, game over. Ozzie wins.
Not if I could help it.
Gathering all my strength, I spoke to the face far above me, the only bright thing left in the encroaching darkness. “Call… nine-one-one.”
“What’sthat?”
Of course she didn’t know. Nine-one-one hadn’t been invented yet. I held on long enough to try one more time. “Ambulance.”
I think I might have repeated it, but I’m not sure. That was when the darkness swallowed me.
17
I have wondered since if it was kids who stole my car, or Roth’s goons. And when it happened. At any rate, the thieves didn’t trash it or crash it; Deke Simmons picked it up in the DPD impound lot a week later. It was in far better shape than I was.
Time-travel is full of ironies.
CHAPTER 26
During the next eleven weeks I once more lived two lives. There was the one I hardly knew about—the outside life—and the one I knew all too well. That was the one inside, where I often dreamed of the Yellow Card Man.
In the outside life, the walker-lady (Alberta Hitchinson; Sadie sought her out and brought her a bouquet of flowers) stood over me on the sidewalk and hollered until a neighbor came out, saw the situation, and called the ambulance that took me to Parkland. The doctor who treated me there was Malcolm Perry, who would later treat both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald as they lay dying. With me he had better luck, although it was a close thing.
I had sustained broken teeth, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a fractured left knee, a broken left arm, dislocated fingers, and abdominal injuries. I had also suffered a brain injury, which was what concerned Perry the most.
I was told I woke up and howled when my belly was palpated, but I have no memory of it. I was catheterized and immediately began pissing what boxing announcers would have called “the claret.” My vitals were at first stable, then began sliding. I was typed, cross-matched, and given four units of whole blood… which, Sadie told me later, the residents of Jodie made up a hundred times over at a community blood drive in late September. She had to tell me several times, because I kept forgetting. I was prepped for abdominal surgery, but first a neurology consult and aspinal tap—there’s no such thing as CT scans or MRIs in the Land of Ago.
I’m also told I had a conversation with two of the nurses prepping me for the tap. I told them that my wife had a drinking problem. One of them said that was too bad and asked me what her name was. I told them she was a fish called Wanda and laughed quite heartily. Then I passed out again.
My spleen was trashed. They removed it.
While I was still conked out and my spleen was going wherever no longer useful but not absolutely vital organs go, I was turned over to Orthopedics. There my broken arm was put in a splint and my broken leg in a plaster cast. Many people signed it over the following weeks. Sometimes I knew the names; usually I didn’t.
I was kept sedated with my head stabilized and my bed raised to exactly thirty degrees. The phenobarbital wasn’t because I was conscious (although sometimes I muttered, Sadie said) but because they were afraid I might suddenly come around and damage myself further. Basically, Perry and the other docs (Ellerton also came in regularly to monitor my progress) were treating my battered chump like an unexploded bomb.
To this day I’m not entirely sure what hematocrit and hemoglobin are, but mine started to come back up and that pleased everybody. I had another spinal tap three days later. This one showed signs of old blood, and when it comes to spinal taps, old is better than new. It indicated that I had sustained significant brain trauma, but they could forgo drilling a burr-hole in my skull, a risky procedure given all the battles my body was fighting on other fronts.
But the past is obdurate and protects itself against change. Five days after I was admitted, the flesh around the splenectomy incision began to turn red and warm. The following day the incision reopened and I spiked a fever. My condition, which had been downgraded from critical to serious after the second spinal tap, zipped back up to critical. According to my chart, I was “sedated as per Dr. Perry and neurologically minimally responsive.”
On September seventh, I woke up briefly. Or so I’m told. A woman, pretty despite her scarred face, and an old man with a cowboy hat in his lap were sitting by my bed.
“Do you know your name?” the woman asked.
“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”
Mr. Jake George Puddentane Epping-Amberson spent seven weeks in Parkland before being moved to a rehab center—a little housing complex for sick people—on the north side of Dallas. During those seven weeks I was on IV antibiotics for the infection that had set up shop where my spleen used to be. The splint on my broken arm was replaced with a long cast, which also filled up with names I didn’t know. Shortly before moving to Eden Fallows, the rehab center, I graduated to a short cast on my arm. Around that same time, a physical therapist began to torture my knee back to something resembling mobility. I was told I screamed a lot, but I don’t remember.
Malcolm Perry and the rest of the Parkland staff saved my life, I have no doubt about that. They also gave me an unintended and unwelcome gift that lasted well into my time at Eden Fallows. This was a secondary infection caused by the antibiotics being pumped into my system to beat the primary one. I have hazy memories of vomiting and of spending what seemed like whole days with my ass on a bedpan. I remember thinking at one pointI have to go to the Derry Drug and see Mr. Keene. I need Kaopectate.But who was Mr. Keene, and where was Derry?
They let me out of the hospital when I began to hold food down again, but I’d been at Eden Fallows almost two weeks before the diarrhea stopped. By then it was nearing the end of October. Sadie (usually I remembered her name; sometimes it slipped my mind) brought me a paper jack-o’-lantern. This memory is very clear, because I screamed when I saw it. They were the screams of someone who has forgotten something vitally important.
