child. Otherwise-what? Some kind of deep-rooted guilt rising up in a dying man? Roy had seen things like that on TV but didn’t know if they happened in real life.
He took the 411 exit, crossed the state line an hour later. Jerry caved in on the activity reports. Carol got him mentioned in the newsletter, page one. Jerry thanked her for everything she’d taught him. The narrator summarized what that was. There were seven points in all, subpoints really, since this all appeared to be part of the second step of the five-step program, but the narrator was still discussing the third subpoint-how to enlist the help of your biggest opponent-when Roy pulled into the visitors lot at Ocoee Regional.
“Patient’s name?”
“Hill.”
“That would be three twenty-seven. You can go on up.”
“I can?”
Roy went up, walked along a wide hall, all harsh blue from the fluorescent strips overhead. Doors were open on both sides. Roy didn’t like what he saw: a man reading from a Bible to a bald kid, an old toothless woman with her mouth wide open, a man with something hard to describe covering half his face. Roy began having problems with his air supply, felt in his pocket, wrapped his hand around the inhaler, held on.
The door to room three twenty-seven was closed. A transparent plastic bag full of dirty linen lay on the floor outside. Roy could see blood on the rolled-up sheets, lots of it. He glanced up and down the hall, looking for someone to ask a question he hadn’t quite formulated, but there was no one. He turned the handle, pushed the door open.
A room for two, but an old shirtless guy had it to himself. The old shirtless guy had little stick arms, a hollow chest, a hard potbelly, a few long strands of rust-colored hair crisscrossing his bald head. He was spooning Jell-O into his mouth and watching Roy with pissed-off eyes. Pissed-off eyes: that was the giveaway.
“You don’t look like you’re dying,” Roy said. That just came out. Sounded pretty bad, but he didn’t wish for it back.
“I’m a fucking medical miracle is what they say.” A blob of Jell-O-the green kind-quivered on his lower lip and dropped to the bedding. “Maybe if your ma had learned you some manners you’d know enough to hide your disappointment a touch better.”
The deep-rooted guilt thing was out.
EIGHT
Roy’s father finished his Jell-O. “Seeing as how you’re here anyways,” he said, “maybe you could be runnin’ one or two little errands for me.”
“Like what?”
“I could use a few things from out at the place.”
“Where’s that?”
“My place? That what you’re asking?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t know where my place is?”
“Why would I?”
“Why would you? You were born in that fuckin’ house, for Christ sake.” His father turned that pissed-off look full on him.
“And then?” Roy said.
They stared at each other for a moment or two before his father looked away, gazed out the window. Or possibly at the window itself: it was fully dark now and the glass reflected his TV program, cars going round and round a dirt oval. “Guess I fooled the shit out of them, anyways,” he said, after a while.
“Who?”
“Goddamn doctors is who. Know what they thought?”
“No.”
“I was a dead man less they stuck some new liver in me. Who’s gonna argue with the old one now?”
Roy didn’t argue.
“Know my number on the list?”
“What list?”
“Got to get on a list for every goddamn organ. I’m in the fucking thousands.” He squinted at Roy. “Want to hear what’s even more fucked up than that?”
Roy said nothing: he had an idea what was next.
“The liver they give you-it could be a nigger’s.”
As he had expected. But Roy hadn’t heard the word in some time and it gave him a sick feeling in the gut, partly from the word itself, more from the fact of it coming from the lips of this man, his father. A nurse entered at that moment, didn’t say, “All done with your supper, now, Mr. Hill?” or “Got a visitor, I see,” or any other amiable remark Roy would have expected from the habitual cheeriness of her face. She just took the tray and left in silence. She’d heard, all right.
His father turned to him. Roy wondered whether he was embarrassed. “Any case,” his father said, “it’s not far.”
“What’s not far?”
“My place, of course. They don’t listen where you come from? Key’s under the mat. What’re you drivin’?”
“An Altima.”
“One of them little Jap shitboxes?”
Roy didn’t answer.
“You’re working, right? Got a job of some kind?”
Roy nodded.
“What as?”
“Shipping.”
“Lumber yard, that nature?”
“I’m with Globax.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Used to be Chemerica.”
“Never heard of that neither.”
Roy offered no explanation.
His father noticed a tiny bit of Jell-O on his plastic spoon, licked it off. “How’s the pay?”
“Not bad.”
“What’s that mean in dollars?”
“It means not bad.”
Roy’s father watched the cars racing on the inside of his window. “How’s that wife of yours?” He might have said yourn; Roy wasn’t sure.
“Good.”
Roy’s father raised his eyebrows. “Still together?”
“That’s right.”
“And the kid?”
“He’s good too.”
His father was toying with the plastic spoon, twisting it in his hands. “Why’d you go and give him a name like that for, anyways?”
And they were right back where they’d left off ten or eleven years ago. Roy and Marcia, at Marcia’s insistence, had brought Rhett up to see his grandpappy. It was Marcia’s first meeting with him too: Roy’s father hadn’t made it to the wedding. The get-together, at the Pizza Hut off exit eleven on 75, had lasted forty minutes, about twenty minutes too long.
“Why don’t you give me directions and a list of things you want and I’ll be going,” Roy said.
