Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [60]
From now on, Danny would see things from four feet off the ground. Melancholia robbed him of speech, he could barely grunt a yes or a no when Sandra came to see him again, her belly rounder still. Every few days she seemed to get bigger. He was helpless before her stomach, the child growing underneath the hard shell of a belly she forced him to touch. “You’re going to walk again,” she said emphatically. “You are. I know it.”
When he went back to school, he became, briefly, an object of curiosity. The girls took turns wheeling him around and putting their arms on his shoulders. One girl rubbed her fingers through his hair affectionately, but this only depressed him more because it reminded him of those parts of his body where he could no longer feel anything. For a week or so, the guys on the football team took turns pushing him around school, and for one game he sat in his chair next to the team bench, the helmeted players patting him on the cheek near the scar of his first bullet “for good luck.” Danny sat and sulked all game long. They didn’t invite him back.
People began to avoid him, ducking into side passages when he wheeled down the hallways. No one asked to see the scar left by the second bullet, the angry red welt below his ribs, and the meandering scar in his back where the doctors had removed the metal. No one asked to hear stories about what it was like to be dead—a second time—and to come to life again. He became a ghostly, solitary figure, haunting the campus, pushing himself across the quad, inching forward with a stop-and-go roll. Sandra sometimes followed alongside him, until she became too big and round to go to class. Eventually he stopped going to school too, despite the pleas of his mother, who grew frustrated and irritable with him. “No seas mujer,” she snapped at him. Don’t be a woman. But even that insult couldn’t shake him from his leaden mood.
Mostly, he watched television. In the movies, he noticed, people who got shot were never paralyzed. They bore their wounds with a grimace and rose to their feet, chasing after their enemies; or they died dignified deaths, giving long speeches before they closed their eyes forever. No gunslinger ever suffered the humiliation of sitting all day in a vinyl chair, trapped with the vinegar smell of his inert legs, forced to endure the protracted lamentations of his mother and his pregnant girlfriend, who both wondered how they would feed the baby, once it was born.
After a week rooted like an angry weed to the floors of the bungalow, Danny finally got fed up and decided to wander the neighborhood in his wheelchair, joining the parallel universe of mumbling bottle collectors and lunatics who made their home on the sidewalks. He inched along slowly, deliberately, pushing hard to roll the wheelchair over the concrete squares where tree roots had raised the sidewalk, and up the steep ramps that were cut into the curb at each corner. It was during one of these excursions that, one afternoon, three blocks on from his house, he coasted down a slight slope, half hoping he would gain speed, lose control, and bounce into traffic. Instead, he came to a stop at the construction site across the street from his old elementary school. The dirt trenches were