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19 THE ACCIDENT
Tach it up, tach it up,
Buddy, gonna shut you down.
— The Beach Boys
That was the last time I talked to Arnie—really talked to him—until
Thanksgiving, because the following Saturday was the day I got hurt. That
was the day we played the Ridge Rock Bears again, and this time we lost by
the truly spectacular score of 46-3. I wasn't around at the end of the game,
however. About seven minutes into the third quarter I got into the open, took
a pass, and was setting myself to run when I was hit simultaneously by three
Bears defensive linemen. There was an instant of terrible pain—a bright
flare, as if I had been caught on ground zero of a nuclear blast. Then there
was a lot of darkness.
Things stayed dark for a fairly long time, although it didn't seem long to me. I
was unconscious for about fifty hours, and when I woke up late on the
afternoon of Monday the twenty-third of October, I was in Libertyville
Community Hospital. My dad and mom were there. So was Ellie, looking
pale and strained. There were dark brown circles under her eyes, and I was
absurdly touched; she had found it in her heart to cry for me in spite of all the
Twinkies and Yodels I had hooked out of the breadbox after she went to bed,
in spite of the time, when she was twelve, that I had given her a little bag of
Vigoro after she had spent about a week looking at herself sideways in the
mirror with her tightest T-shirt on so she could see if her boobs were getting
any bigger (she had burst into tears and my mother had been super-pissed at
me for almost two weeks), in spite of all the teasing and the shitty little I'm-
one-up-on-you sibling games.
Arnie wasn't there when I woke up, but he joined my family shortly; he and
Leigh had been down in the waiting room. That evening my aunt and uncle
from Albany showed up, and the rest of that week was a steady parade of
family and friends—the entire football team showed up, including Coach
Puffer, who looked as if he had aged about twenty years. I guess he had found
out there were worse things than a losing season. Coach was the one who
broke the news to me that I was never going to play football again, and I don't
know what he expected—for me to bust out crying or maybe have hysterics,
from the drawn, tense look on his face. But I didn't have much of a reaction at
all, inwardly or outwardly. I was just glad to be alive and to know I would
walk again, eventually.
If I had been hit just once, I probably could have bounced right up and gone
back for more. But the human body was never meant to get creamed from
three different angles at the same time. Both of my legs were broken, the left
in two places. My right arm had whipped around behind me when I went
down, and I had sustained a nasty greenstick fracture of the forearm. But all
of that was really only the icing on the cake. I had also gotten a fractured
skull and sustained what the doctor in charge of my case kept calling "a
lower spinal accident", which seemed to mean that I had come within about a
centimetre of being paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of my life.
I got a lot of visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some
ways, very enjoyable—like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.
But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn't sleep; I got an
arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they
both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast what is
called a "presser cast"—around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the
prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that
chamber of horrors so innocently labeled the Therapy Wing.
Oh and one other thing—I got a lot of time.
I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few
occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I
asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.
I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my
suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more
difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn't
losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting
—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more
than half in love with my best friend's girl, as well.
Time to think too much time.
Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh.
Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of
Arnie Cunningham… or Leigh Cabot… or of Christine.
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