Fighting in the Shade by Sterling Watson

Author:Sterling Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2011-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

At the reception desk of Oleander Memorial Hospital, Billy gave his name to a young woman wearing a blue suit and an orange scarf. He asked for Sim Sizemore’s room number.

She consulted a form. “I’m sorry. You’re not on Mr. Sizemore’s visitors list.”

Billy hadn’t expected this. And he hadn’t anticipated the woman’s hard eyes and unforgiving mouth. He looked at her, trying to think of something. She helped him.

“Dyer? Billy Dyer? You’re the football player?”

He nodded.

“I saw you catch that pass against Manatee. That was—”

“I’m his teammate. I need to see him before…” He did not know how to finish.

“All right. I guess we can make an exception. He’s in 607. But you can’t stay long. He’s very sick, and we don’t want him… well, you know.” She smiled, a reprieve of the unforgiving mouth.

Billy nodded, thanked her, and headed for the elevators.

Room 607 was empty, but the bed was unmade and a meal had been delivered. Steam rose from a covered bowl. Whatever was in the bowl smelled stringent like the air here on the sixth floor. Billy heard a voice from the hallway and a Negro orderly pushed Sim Sizemore through the door in a wheelchair. A sheen of greasy sweat covered Sim’s pale face. He was breathing hard when the chair reached the bed and, as Billy watched, the black man gently worked his hands under Sim’s legs and lifted him like a child to the bed. And Billy thought, Those legs. They dangled, thin and stunted from a green gown. Sim’s whole body was smaller, so much smaller, and so pale, and his face so gaunt, flesh gouged from his once-sunny cheeks. But the legs. The legs thin and withered, the skin at the ankles an ominous blue. The muscles, fashioned by so much beautiful struggle, were… just gone. And in only two months.

Billy thought of his father and the war. The broken young bodies he had seen and never talked about. Men shot to pieces in airplanes, lives reduced to gore in twisted metal and flushed away by hoses.

After settling Sim in the bed, the big black man stepped back and looked at him from calm, passionless eyes. He had lifted the damaged boy without effort of body or apparently of spirit. He said, “Mr. Sim, a friend of yours here to see you.” He turned to Billy. “You two play on the same team?”

Billy nodded. The black man turned from Billy’s troubled face back to Sim who slumped, uncomprehending. The orderly positioned the wheeled table that held the steaming bowl across Sim’s chest. “Well,” he said, “I leave you young mens to your conversation.”

Billy could not make himself approach the bed where Sim Sizemore sat like something hung from a hook, bony shoulders poking up the cloth of a blue cotton gown. He watched Sim grope with trembling hands for a spoon. Oh, Christ! Billy stepped forward and helped the spoon into the curved claw of Sim’s hand. Sim’s eyes slid toward him, grim and soporific.

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