Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [36]
When I tried to push myself up out of the chair, my legs felt weak.
“You leaving?” the hundred-year-old woman asked.
I nodded.
“Whatsa matter? She do a pooper?”
“No. She’s okay. Just time to go.”
“Have a good day, mister.”
“I can’t see it getting any worse.”
18. WANNA BET?
Room 111 was just down the corridor. I couldn’t tell you what made me stop there. It wasn’t proximity, because during the past three years I’d been proximate plenty of times without stopping in.
On the wall next to the door were two easily disposable paper labels: FUJIMOTO—SWOPE.
I pushed the door open.
Again, two beds, minimal personal effects, some newspaper clippings on the walls, a few photos cut out of magazines. Your basic jailhouse decor.
My father was slumped in a wheelchair next to the window at the foot of the second bed. His roommate was out playing paddleball or racing wheelchairs up the halls, chasing the nurses. Whatever.
My father’s back was to the window, his face squared up with the heat register. The window behind him afforded an awkward view of some shrubbery. A few tall shafts of June sunlight penetrated the thicket and lit up the windowpane. There was little difference between my father and Jackie. Thirty years was all.
I squatted until we were at eye level. I don’t know what scared me more, the possibility that he would look at me or the possibility that he couldn’t look at me.
“Dad? It’s me: Jim. It’s been awhile.”
After a minute it became clear that he wasn’t going to reply.
Not long after moving to North Bend to be near his granddaughters, my father had suffered a CVA and had, after a brief hospital stay, been incarcerated here. As far as I knew, during his entire three-year tenure he’d never received a visitor. I’d certainly not been here before.
After a few minutes of silence, the day began caving in on me. I thought about how insubstantial were my reasons for not visiting sooner, about Stan’s death, Joel McCain’s condition, Holly’s coma, about my own future or lack of same. If my worst fears came true, I’d end up staring at a wall, too. Except it wouldn’t happen when I was seventy-six; it would happen at the end of the week. At age thirty-four.
Somebody had taped a clipping from the local newspaper to the wall over the heat register. It was this article my father was facing, as if studying it, which of course, he was not. It included a black-and-white photo of me in my fire-fighting gear kneeling alongside two toddlers; there was a second photo of a burned-out Ford Explorer.
I’d forgotten about the article. About the incident. There had been a clipping in the fire station for a while, but eventually it had been thrown out with the trash. It was one of those embarrassing moments when the newspapers proclaimed you a hero for doing your job. I’d been driving my private vehicle, spotted a car fire on North Bend Way, and did nothing more than open the back door and remove two toddlers while their mother and a bunch of bystanders ran around in a panic. Because I’d received some minor burns, they called me a hero. It was bullshit, the result of a small-town newspaper reporter jacked up on caffeine with nothing to write about.
Kneeling on the floor beside my father’s wheelchair, I said, “ ‘Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou has enlarged me when I was in distress: have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.’ ”
I thought about what I was doing and began to laugh. How many prayers had I uttered during my first sixteen years of life? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And how many times during those years had I prayed alongside my father? A better question was how many of those prayers had been answered? Certainly fewer than the laws of probability would suggest—which had caused me to conclude long ago that if I