The following week was a blur. Marty had to work, but was on the phone a great deal, explaining to their friends what happened to Mike, and lamenting poor Randy and Tom. Mike had the second surgery to clean up his face, and towards the end of the week he was able to sit up and look around. He recognized all of them but couldn’t speak yet – the nurse said something apparently struck him in the throat, too. She showed them a vial of all the glass particles they removed from his face and arms, and said he’d probably have tiny pieces coming out of his skin for months. He had a huge laceration and over 60 stitches in his cheek where the zygomatic bone was broken, and one day when Marty arrived they were changing his bandages. He was massively shocked at his brother’s appearance! Handsome Mike, the idol of all the girls at school, now looked like Frankenstein. Marty put on a brave mask because Mike was locked on his eyes the whole time, wanting to use his face as a mirror. He could tell it was bad, and closed his eyes in sad resignation.
The funeral for Randy was that weekend, but Marty had to work. He hardly knew him anyway, and didn’t want to face his parents. Tom was still in critical condition with severe brain damage. They had to remove part of his skull to relieve the pressure of the swelling. Bart told him he and Randy had been traveling at a high rate of speed “like 90 miles an hour” and left the road at a place where the hill dropped off steeply. Tom flew off the Honda into a tree, but Randy was found still clinging to the handlebars. Bart had three brothers, and they were often at the hospital with his mom and dad. Marty got to know them quite well under the circumstances, and it turned out they were a very religious family, naming their four sons after apostles. They prayed in the waiting room for Tom’s recovery, and it was sad to see his mother crying abjectly, putting her faith in a God that took great care with her son’s spiritual needs, but left his body in a heap of wreckage just to make a point.
When Mike finally spoke, his first question was about Tom. He had been hearing parts of conversations, and wanted to have the whole story. He closed his eyes for a long time, and looked away into the distance after they finished. Annie spent so much time at the hospital that the nurses put her to work, feeding Mike and telling them when he needed something. Marge was moody and silent at the pet store, and avoided talking about the accident, except to say meekly, “I hope he comes home soon.” All the drama and bravado couldn’t hide the fact that Marge was ultimately responsible for what happened at that party, and she knew it. She seemed very distant and subdued, and locked herself in her room whenever she was home.
Marty reflected sadly on the choices she had made about allowing her kids to have beer parties at a young age. She wanted so badly to be the “cool mom” after the tyrannical oppression their father had imposed on them, but he could tell she thought her leniency had backfired. The logic that “boys will be boys” was certainly true – if she didn’t sanction the parties at her own house, they would have found other ways to drive around and get drunk. But temperance was an important part of the lesson that was somehow left off the curriculum. At the end of the day, the decisions her kids made were their own, but her role as a parent was to provide an example and prepare them to make the right choices. The more Marty thought about that, the more he realized she had failed them. Like many parents, she used the best tools she had to construct a framework for their lives, but by encouraging them to party to excess, she demonstrated that it was okay to go over the edge, where falling was inevitable. Sometimes, unlike the cartoons, one cannot look down and scramble back to safety.
When Mike finally left the hospital, he tried to crack a few jokes for the first time. “Somebody put a tree in the middle of the road,” he said by way of explanation for how the accident happened. He probably didn’t remember the details, and it was just as well. He didn’t want to see his car. “It’s gone, man,” he shook his head and murmured with hollow sadness, as if he had lost a dear friend. Before he left the hospital in a wheelchair, he insisted that Marty roll him in the room next door so he could say a few encouraging words to Tom, just in case he could hear him. The younger boy was still in a coma, and had casts on both arms. The machines around his bed whirred and clicked unemotionally. The nurses watched for any sign of reaction (but Marty didn’t see any at all), and they wrote something into a thick chart they had in his room. He could tell from their faces that Tom’s prognosis wasn’t good, and any event – however small – was being recorded as a sign of hope. That made him sadder than anything else: that Tom’s life had been reduced to machines and paperwork.
Annie appointed herself Mike’s home nurse, mainly because everyone else had to work in order to pay the hospital bills. The county stopped paying for him as a foster child when he turned eighteen. She drove him to his physical therapy and doctor’s appointments, and made sure he took all his medications. He still had a small bandage over his cheek until the stitches came out, and at first he didn’t want her to see his scar, but she insisted, and said sweetly, “I think it’s really sexy, like Young Frankenstein.”
“I guess that makes you Frankenstein’s Bride,” Marty joked, and took the inevitable punch on the arm like a man, in respect for all that she had done for his brother. It was true, he did have a very distinctive scar: U-shaped and livid on top of his reconstructed cheekbone. The skin had probably been ripped off in a flap and sewn back on like a pocket… never mind – he had far too graphic an imagination sometimes.
Now that Susie was 14, and had such a horrible outcome from her birthday party, she was developing a real attitude. She seemed to lose all respect for Marge, and openly challenged her on every point of parental involvement in her life. She spent most of her time at the McAuliffes’ house, which meant she could go out with her friends without having to ask permission. She came home when she knew Marge was at work, to change her clothes or get something from her room. She didn’t have a dresser anymore, and her clothes were stored in trash bags that took up half her tiny room. One day Marty confronted her as she was sorting them on her mattress, which lay on the floor.
“Hey, where have you been?”
“Oh what, you’re my dad now? Just go smoke a bong hit, okay?” She couldn’t look him in the eye, and Marty could tell something was bothering her.
“Susie, are you okay?” He said this with such sincerity that it conveyed everything he wanted to tell her but couldn’t put into words: how they had suffered so much being raised by parents they didn’t get to choose, and how hard it had been, and he just wanted to tell her he loved her and that life could be better than what they had been experiencing. He was awash in a surge of emotion that was impossible to put into words at the time.
Susie seemed to resonate with her big brother’s underlying message, and put her clothes down on the mattress, then embraced him long and hard, swaying to some unknown dirge of lament. She pulled away and gazed at his eyes; not locked on but darting back and forth to look first at one eye, then the other. “I just need some time away from here, okay? I’m all right. I’ll see you at Drake next month.”
“Well, you’re just next door, you know. If you need anything you can call me.”
“Okay, big bro,” she said teasingly. “You did your duty. Now get out of my way, you’re blocking the door.” It was true, her room was so small he couldn’t fit all the way inside.
Marty didn’t want her to leave that easily. “Susie are you okay? Really?” He knew there was something wrong, but she wouldn’t tell him. That was her way. She could never talk about the hard stuff, she just took it all upon herself as if she was the only victim. She made a faux happy face and kissed him on the cheek, then skirted around him and out the door.
The Rusty Bucket Ranch never fully recovered from that tragic party. Oh sure, they cleaned up all the cans and bottles as usual – following Ent’s example – it had become an obsession of Marty’s to find all the empties and recycle them, as a way of cleansing the land and removing the stains of human callousness. But the sense of family bonding was forever tarnished. They used to struggle together like shipwrecked survivors, pooling their resources and laughing at the storms, but now it was more like a mutiny, where everyone looked after only themselves, and poorly at that. Marge dragged the TV into her bedroom again, and rarely came out when she was home. Susie was ensconced at the McAuliffes’ house. Julie hadn’t even bothered to come and visit Mike – in the hospital or at home – since the accident. Marty would be eighteen in a couple of months, and began to feel like it was time to go out and live his own life, too, but there was still the problem of graduating from high school to be dealt with. As John Lennon once said, it’s funny how life just happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
He drove Mike over the hill to watch Apocalypse Now, which they both wanted to see before the accident. It had been a long time since Mike had been a passenger, and his normally cocksure personality was pruned back considerably. He glanced wistfully at the nice rides in the parking lot, knowing he had wrecked a very special car that could never be replaced. It would be a while before he got his driver’s license back, anyway. The movie was phenomenal – a brilliant psychological trip into “the heart of darkness” that exists in everyone. The new actor, Martin Sheen, turned in an intense performance the likes of which Marty hadn’t witnessed since Brad Davis in Midnight Express. Movies were growing up before his eyes – taking on more challenging subjects – and each blockbuster had to try and outdo all the films that came before, which made for astonishing entertainment. Marty enjoyed Francis Ford Coppola’s art, but never liked his Godfather movies that much, due to the glorified violence. Apocalypse Now was different. The violence was cathartic; even prophetic in ways that went far beyond the blood and gore. It was a mesmerizing glimpse into the depths of human insight that could be reached in the medium of film.
Labor Day was around the corner, and right after that they would begin their senior year at Drake. Otter made an appearance soon after Mike got home, and it was strange because Rabbit wasn’t with him, and he locked himself in Marge’s room for over an hour before talking to Mike or Marty. They could hear his voice raised several times – apparently he was giving her a message she needed to hear. He came out with his jaw set, but he looked old and weak. He had a few gray hairs in his long black mane, and Marty wondered if those were new. He came into their room with a purpose, and took off his battered cowboy hat, saying there was “man talk to be done,” so nurse Annie made an excuse and left. She had been at Mike’s side almost constantly since he came home, and needed a break anyway.
Otter put his hat back on and got right to the point. “This is bullshit. You men need to take responsibility for yer lives. It’s the only one you got.”
“Wait a sec –” Marty started to object, but the old Inuit cut him off.
“This ain’t no discussion, I’m tellin’ you.” His eyes were hard like obsidian. “Drinkin’ and partyin’ killed me, and I don’t want it to kill you, too.”
Marty was puzzled. “What? You ain’t dead yet.” He had developed the habit of talking like the person with whom he was conversing, as a way to identify with their point of view.
“Doc said I got two months to live, but if I quit drinkin’ I might make it eight weeks.” He winked at his little joke, but his impassiveness remained like a wall. Did he just say he was dying? Marty noticed again the yellow tint to his skin, and how he was sweating on a cool day.
“What? But you’re so young!”
“I got a liver that’s about 200 years old because I can’t stop drinkin’ …I fucked it up, so I’m already dead.” He put his arms out as if to say, don’t let this happen to you, and then he teared up and exited quickly, saying he had something in his eye. The empty space he left by leaving the room didn’t get filled for a long time.
Mike was the first to speak. “What a fucked-up summer this has been.”
Otter disappeared entirely after that, and Marty never got the chance to say goodbye, or let him know how much he loved and appreciated him. A couple of weeks later, Rabbit came over and fell into Marge’s arms, which would have normally been funny because she was about twice her height, but Marty knew what had happened and yanked the plug on his stupid joke machine. Otter was gone. He remembered him saying he was gonna go off somewhere and die like an Injun, and that’s just what he did. They found him in a tent where he liked to go fishing, and Rabbit arranged to have his ashes sprinkled on the spot. He had no family that anyone knew of, so that was the end of a life that was fully lived in less time than it takes some people to do nothing at all.
I think over again my small adventures, my fears,
Those small ones that seemed so big.
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing,
The only thing.
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
— Traditional Inuit Song