If the sun were any brighter, fiercer, Randy would have spontaneously burst into flames and been reduced to cinders right there on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Hendricks’ house. As it was barely two in the afternoon, he supposed he had nothing but increasing quantities of this inferno to look forward to in the coming hours, for each of which he would be compensated but seven dollars and fifty cents, scarcely sufficient to justify the apocalyptic discomfort, certainly not enough to pay for the skin grafts he felt sure would be required by the end of the week.
It was barely mid-May for Christ’s sake and already Baxter had endured twelve mind-numbing days of above-one-hundred-degree temperatures with above-ninety-percent humidity, figures that put the small Midwestern town somewhere between the Philippines and Ecuador in terms of heat index. It was a time of year when the town’s well-above-the-national-average-age denizens would normally have expected to walk around in sweaters, maybe even jackets, commiserating with each other about the failure of spring to have yet made its appearance. Instead spring had arrived this year with such insufferable vigor that most had fled either for Lake Jackson or driven to visit relatives as far north as they could be found.
Randy bent for the fiftieth time that day at the waist to grapple and lift another of the large smooth dark rocks (a technique he would pay dearly for later that night when sharp twinges in his lower spine would wrench him from a sleep already made fitful by forces shortly to be explained) and swore that the sweat on his fingers actually sizzled as they came into contact with the sun-baked surface of the stone.
“Christ Almighty,” he intoned, quickly, dexterously sliding his hands beneath the stone’s cooler moister underside and hefting it with a grunt. As he rose, a bead of sweat rolled down the furrows of his forehead into his left eye, and he shook his head violently in a vain attempt to alleviate the sudden sting. The jerking motion elicited just enough imbalance in Randy’s already precarious posture to cause the ponderous boulder to slide from his sweaty hands and drop with unerring verticality onto the big toe of his right foot, whose meager complement of bone and flesh offered only nominal resistance to the rapidly-accelerating granite oval.
Had the ground beneath Randy’s right foot been sod or other pliable matter, anything but a concrete sidewalk, the damage to the toe might have been fleeting, or at worst minor. Instead, the impact of the plummeting seventy-five-pound stone upon flat unyielding concrete was not in the remotest sense impeded by the incursion of Randy’s toe, the result of which impact was a sudden and rather more than ordinary or comfortable two-dimensionality than one typically finds in a human toe. Thus, what had, a second earlier, been a digit comprising but three linearly joined distal, middle, and proximal phalanges, was now, that is to say following the impact of granite upon concrete, a highly randomized assortment of bone fragments, fleshy protuberances, and more than a few profoundly stimulated nerve endings whose shouts of protest brooked no delay in making their way up Randy’s spinal column to the pain centers of his brain. The pain centers, having thus correctly received and processed the signals from Randy’s crushed toe, immediately sought appropriate expression by consulting with his verbal processing centers, finding there a more than adequate vocabulary of words and tones with which to describe the unfortunate occasion.
“FUCK! Fuck shit goddammit son of a bitch jesus h christ”, etc, etc for several strident seconds, a diatribe of vituperation so rapidly and seamlessly rendered that before the falling rock had even ceased rolling onto Mrs. Hendrick’s lawn Randy was already well into his twenty-fifth (not including repeats) language fragment. Indeed, his mind, so recently thrust into activity from its previously torpourous state, scarcely had time or capacity to reflect upon the irony of his fateful decision earlier that morning to forego wearing steel-toed shoes in lieu of his more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing new Air Jordan basketball sneakers, whose white artificial canvas upper was now not only torn at the right big toe from the rock’s impact, but also hopelessly blood-stained by the fervent and incarnadine fluid pouring from the end of Randy’s foot.
To accompany the outburst of profanity, there ensued, to the uninformed amusement of Randy’s coworkers, several seconds of unexpectedly agile hopping on his remaining good foot before the combination of exhaustion, pain, and heat prostration forced Randy onto his back on Mrs. Hendricks’ lawn, as it happened immediately adjacent to the offending but now motionless boulder.
At this unfortunate juncture, we will leave Randy to thrash about and wax verbally creative for a few seconds while his colleagues tend to him (“Christ Almighty, Argent. Boss ain’t paying you to lay around screeching like a goddamned lunatic.”) and we digress to provide a bit of context as to how he found himself in this situation to begin with.
The blood leaking so profusely from Randy’s right big toe is Argent blood, Red and Erma Argent. It is Savannah blood as well, which partly explains why he has, since arriving in Iowa nearly two years ago, been able to function well in unseasonably hot weather while others around him, career Yankees most of them, have a tendency to wither and complain whenever it gets over seventy-five. None of which much explains why Randy is in Iowa to begin with, or why he is, on the day we first meet him, lifting large round rocks in front of Martha Hendricks’ small but tidy bungalow home.
Red Argent, Randy’s father, when he was younger played semi-serious football; serious enough to be a starter for a reasonably well-known Southeastern Conference college team; and serious enough to be mightily disappointed when the NFL demonstrated no interest upon his graduation. Which is mainly how he ended up a career military man, seeing as how his college major, like that of so many athletes, had been a largely fictitious one, designed to allow an easily achievable minimum grade point average that would facilitate his continued football playing, which was after all the real reason he was there. All of which is another story entirely, but has passing relevance here because it was Red’s football career that engendered in Randy the desire to have one as well.
Except that Randy wasn’t quite as gifted or large or fast as his father had been, which meant that only with lots of prodding and practice and working out, had he become good enough to play with some success in high school, but hadn’t been offered any college scholarships. Pushed nevertheless by Red, Randy had applied to several programs and been accepted and invited to try out, only with no promises of course. Long story short, his decision had come down to one well known by many marginal high school athletes who want to continue pursuing the dream against what appear to be increasingly dubious odds—go to the serious big-time school and sit on the bench or go to the second-tier school and have a shot at actually playing. Randy had chosen the latter, and it had happened to be in Iowa. It also happened that the offer had come with no financial support, only minimal of which Red and Erma were in a position to provide, which is why Randy has spent the past two summers working to earn enough cash to remain at school. Being large and strong like any collegiate athlete, spending his summers doing landscaping work, which on this fateful day had happened to include moving large rocks, while menial and not overly lucrative, offered the not-inconsequential benefit of being an almost constant form of working out. Which meant he could get paid for staying in shape all summer, thus giving him a leg up when fall came and with it the new season. He also has had little desire to return home to Savannah for his summers (for reasons too abstruse to venture into here), so that the summer landscaping job provides a convenient excuse for staying in Iowa year-round, or at least until graduation anyway.
It took Randy’s coworkers maybe two minutes to realize that something fairly serious was apparently going on with his foot. He was now past that initial holy-shit-that-really-fucking-hurts stage of the injury and well into the early stages of the body-denial-numbness-maybe-this-isn’t-so-bad-after-all stage, which was an improvement of sorts. He was still sitting on Mrs. Hendricks’ lawn, but had by now removed the blood-stained Air Jordan, his pain having subsided sufficiently to allow him to direct a bit of wry invective at the ruined hundred-dollar shoe. One of his coworkers had taken the initiative to retrieve from Mrs. Hendricks’ garden a hose with which Randy was simultaneously washing and cooling off his damaged toe. At this point no one was working any more. They were all standing around Randy, offering increasingly florid observations about the state of his mangled digit.
“Jesus, dude, that thing is righteously fucked up,” offered Trent, the oldest member of the crew and de facto if not official foreman on the job.
“Looks like the time my Aunt Penny ran over our dog’s leg when I was like twelve,” said Chris, the only native Iowan.
And finally, “That’s gotta hurt like a bitch,” from Mitch, the closest to a genuine slacker on the crew, always on the lookout for something to divert his attention away from the task at hand.
This last assertion was astutely accompanied by the offer of a ride to the nearest hospital, Randy’s coworkers having the perspicacity to realize this was neither an ordinary stubbed toe nor the feigned machinations of someone trying to get out of working. And that was great and much appreciated, as far as it went, only Randy’s coworkers weren’t exactly EMS workers, and they certainly didn’t have an ambulance at their disposal. Nor were they inclined to call one, what with the toe already looking marginally better but for the entertaining shades of blue and purple now starting to appear, the kaleidoscope of which was drawing all sorts of creative analogies from the crew, some bordering on the poetic (the word sunset even came up once).
In any event, the best they had to offer by way of transportation for the eleven mile-ride to St. Luke’s Memorial was Trent’s venerable F150 pickup. The truck ran well enough. The only problem was that the passenger side was overflowing with a wide range of miscellanea, a good deal of which was so completely compressed into the foot well and onto the seat itself that it hadn’t had human eyes laid upon it since the Carter administration, which was in fact when Trent’s father had bought the truck. It would not meaningfully advance the narrative to attempt to enumerate the myriad of objects wedged beneath, next to, or otherwise in the proximity of the passenger seat of the F150, except perhaps to provide a bit of historical perspective inasmuch as the collection represented a sort-of time capsule of the ensuing thirty years since the vehicle’s purchase. The point of bringing up the whole dreary subject is simply to explain why Randy ended up being transported to the hospital in the bed of Trent’s pick-up, along with another nearly as boundless but less historically illuminating collection of detritus that differed from that in the front seat only insofar as it was insufficient in quantity to preclude accommodating Randy, Chris and Mitch, the latter two of whom demonstrated great dutifulness and camaraderie (to Randy if not to their employer) by accompanying him to the emergency room. As a side note before describing the journey, it is worth noting that the crew’s actual supervisor, having left the four workers a half hour earlier to run an errand, would return to the work site perhaps five minutes after the departure of the pick-up for the hospital. Failing to find or know the status of the crew’s whereabouts would be the source of no small angst and a less-than-pleasant encounter in the hours to follow. That, like several other digressions herein mentioned, is another story entirely.
Several logistical challenges came into play during the course of the forty-five minutes it took to get Randy to the St. Luke’s Emergency Room. First and most easily solved was that Trent’s F150 was very nearly out of gas. This put the group somewhat out of their way, as the nearest station was Hodgkin’s Sunoco, and that was a mile and a half in almost exactly the opposite direction from the route to the hospital. At the station, things went more or less as one would expect, aside from Trent’s credit card being rejected by the pump card reader, which necessitated his walking into the convenience store to rectify the matter, which, in turn, precipitated a somewhat animated conversation between Trent and his erstwhile girlfriend Bethany, who just happened to be working the counter that day, and who had not yet entirely come to grips with the full implications of having seen Trent walking with Holly Favreau two nights preceding. All of which drama resulted in a delay of some fifteen minutes before the truck departed the station bearing five dollars worth of unleaded regular, that being the only cash Trent had been able to muster inside the store when no progress had been made with his credit card.
The sequence of roads that led from Hodgkin’s Sunoco to St. Luke’s Memorial was functional and fairly direct, though not without its faults, not least of which was a plethora of potholes, remnants of several previous winters’ frost heaves and the town’s continuing inability to find sufficient money to repair them, what with all excess budgetary funds that year having been earmarked for the new fire station. As a consequence, the ride to the hospital was a fairly raucous affair, made somewhat more unnerving by the growing sense on Trent’s part that he, in fact, wasn’t sure how to actually get to the hospital that was their destination. This necessitated asking directions from whichever of the three individuals in the back of the truck might happen to know. Sadly for this narrative (and shortly for Randy), Trent’s truck was of an age that preceded the now-common inclusion of a sliding window in the rear of the cab. His sense of duty and growing concern for the supervisor’s reaction upon finding the work site abandoned caused Trent to attempt obtaining directions to the hospital without the expedient of pulling the truck over and stopping. Instead, he endeavored to communicate with those in the back by turning his head and shouting loudly enough to be heard above the road noise and the emanations of the trucks’ only-marginally-functional muffler. After much shouting and gesturing back and forth, some of which was actually concerning their route, but much of which was to alert Trent to his drifting over the yellow line and into oncoming traffic as he continued looking out the back window while driving forward at some fifty mph, Trent felt he had gotten the gist of the route.
Throughout the journey Randy was sitting with his back against the truck’s cab, this being the only position that allowed him to fully extend his legs through the morass of garbage that occupied the truck bed. His two colleagues sat on top of the collection and thus somewhat further away from the truck’s small rear window. This left Randy to attempt most of the navigation, which meant turning his torso awkwardly around so as to address Trent without moving, any more than absolutely necessary, the position of his legs and feet against the truck’s bed. Which is how it came to pass that while Randy was turned thus trying to communicate with Trent, who was facing rearward while driving forward, the truck impacted a sizeable pothole almost exactly where Potter’s Fertilizer Barn had burned two summers ago, leaving an as-yet unsalvaged black hulk adjacent the road.
The violent jolt of the truck’s left front wheel into the pothole brought Trent’s attention again fully onto his vehicle’s forward progress, which was more or less unimpeded, though it did provide one more nail in the coffin of the vehicle’s left front wheel bearing, which would give up the ghost once and for all on this very stretch of road some two weeks hence. As it happened, the jolt also brought Randy’s nose, already pressed closely against the rear window so as to maximize the audibility of his driving directions, into abrupt contact with the glass, luckily not breaking it (his nose, or the glass for that matter), but causing a sufficiently severe blow as to elicit copious quantities of blood, whose flow would not at all abate between the moment of impact and his entry into the St. Luke’s Emergency room. As if this unfortunate occurrence weren’t enough to give Randy a black view of his day thus far, the impact with the pothole also had the tertiary effect of dislodging rather a lot of the random and tenuously secured material in the rear of the truck, and on which Randy’s two colleagues were seated. One particularly ponderous item thus dislodged was the truck’s jack, which slid with the impact from its precarious perch and squarely onto the kneecap of Randy’s good leg (i.e. the one without the multiply broken toe). If there was a good effect to all of the mayhem taking place in the truck’s bed, it was that the injuries to his knee and nose had, for the moment, almost completely taken his mind off the again growing pain in his crushed toe.
“Jesus,” Mitch said, half smiling, half grimacing as Randy drew a shirt-sleeve across his copiously flowing nose. Several such efforts to staunch the flow had resulted in his entire left sleeve being now stained with blood. The impact of the jack upon his knee had torn the fabric of his jeans and there was a visible red stain blossoming there as well. “You look like you got run over by a bus or something.”
“Yeah well, thanks for the good news,” Randy replied, lifting gingerly the leg with the damaged knee and trying to flex it slightly. Trent had made the turn onto Carter Street and was within a mile of the hospital. The road was two lanes in each direction now and he wisely elected to focus his attention forward, relying as best he could on his recollection of the directions Randy had provided through the window.
“Does he know where in the hell he’s going?” Randy shouted to either of the men in the rear who might happen to know the answer.
“Rate you’re getting tore up, I’m thinking we might oughta’ tell him to drive to the cemetery instead of the hospital,” Chris offered. “How’s the toe anyway? Or don’t that even register any more?”
“Oh it’s registering just fine, thanks,” Randy replied. Which it was, still being easily the most severe, if not the most visible, of his injuries, the considerable blood from his knee and nose notwithstanding. The twenty minutes of more or less incessant jolting of his foot against the floor of the truck bed had well and truly awakened the nerve endings in his toe, and the pain messages were again making their way with fidelity and alacrity to his brain. Each new jolt of the truck elicited a grimace and a quiet curse. In a final insult to Randy’s still degrading situation, Trent swung the F150 under the portico of the St. Luke’s Memorial Hospital Emergency Room and brought the truck to a stop with a sudden application of the brakes that resulted in a dramatic squeal of rubber on pavement and a further dislodging of miscellanea in the truck’s bed, a mercifully small bit of which (old brake pad) was thrown directly onto Randy’s crushed toe. Thus was the squeal of the brakes easily drowned out by the shriek with which the patient made known his arrival at the ER.
And it did indeed look somewhat like the remnants of a bus accident when Randy entered the emergency room of St. Luke’s, supported on one side by Trent and on the other by Mitch, with Chris in the lead, opening doors and generally preparing the way. With Randy bleeding from no less than three recently created perforations, and to the uninformed observer likely more, what with his shirt sleeve and chest coated in blood from his nose, the four men approached the receptionist window, only to be greeted by an insouciant “How may I help you?” from a nurse too consumed with her daily duties to even bother looking up.
After an incongruous series of looks back and forth between the four men Randy replied,
“I’m here to get my toe looked at. I think it might be broken.”
Which elicited at last a look up from the attending nurse and a resulting confused expression, seeing as how Randy was standing quite close to the window, affording a view from only the beltline up, and looked entirely bloody from his nose to his hand to his chest.
“Your toe?” she responded, looking doubtful and leaning ever so slightly forward as if to assess the digit’s condition by peering over the edge of the counter.
“I dropped a rock on it,” he said, feeling a sudden inescapable need to clarify.
“A really big rock,” Trent offered, adjusting his grip on Randy’s right shoulder.
“I see,” the nurse offered, reaching for a clipboard, pen, and daunting collection of papers, which she proceeded to hand through the window to no one in particular, holding it out until at last Chris stepped in front of the three and took it from her.
“Kindly fill these out and the doctor will be with you shortly.” She turned peremptorily and set to some other administrative task.
And so, with an efficacious combination of limping, hopping, and assistance from his colleagues, Randy took a seat on the other side of the inauspiciously crowded emergency room and set to work. He sat and he wrote and he wrote and he sat, and after thirty five minutes and with a suitable mixture of recollection and creative writing managed to complete the nine detailed pages of his medical life history. These took the form of check-the-boxes, multiple choices, and even a couple of small essay questions, all of which experience felt more like taking an SAT than visiting a hospital. To Randy’s recollection, the only standard format of test question missing were True/False. The questions ran the gamut from easily answerable (“Do you require prescription eyewear of any kind?”) to those whose answers resided an obscure distance in the past and only some of which he actually knew the answers to. He was reasonably certain he had had both mumps and chicken pox – hadn’t everyone at some point in their adolescence? And which was the one that got you that funny looking round scar near the top of your left arm? In cases where he had absolutely no idea (“When was your last flu shot? Does anyone in your family have a history of…?) he was happy to accept the fictional recommendations of his friends. Which ill advised choice of advisors would lead the admitting physician to wonder later at Randy’s indicated family history of alcoholism, depression, high blood pressure and diabetes.
And there were a few questions that caused Randy to draw his arm furtively across the page to block the curious eyes of his comrades, all of whom were having rather an entertaining time of watching the process and occasionally contributing their own answers regarding Randy’s medical history. They were particularly fascinated and generally derisive when he got to “Do you get up an inordinate number of times each night to urinate?” and “How would you describe your level of sexual activity?” with all the unintended ambiguity that this latter question entailed.
The survey contained a great majority of questions whose direct relevance to Randy’s admittedly broad range of injuries was suspect, most notably those inquiring into preferred birth control methods, use or lack thereof of seatbelts, and whether he used a bike helmet or had been abused at home. Throughout the more than half an hour required to complete the battery of forms, Randy’s nose came unstuck and began to bleed again on two occasions, the second time so copiously that page seven of the forms was spotted throughout with crimson droplets that extended all the way from the inoculations questions to the lengthy section about sexually transmitted diseases.
Trent volunteered to hand the completed forms back to the attending nurse, who seemed unmoved by the bright red tincture now decorating page seven. He supposed that in an emergency room, more or less free-flowing blood was the order of the day, seeing as how it apparently engendered no particular sense of alarm or urgency on the part of the attending staff. Since the arrival of Randy and his colleagues the nurse had, every ninety seconds or so, blurted out a name through the glass which caused a general start throughout the room, and which caused either one person or a couple of them to rise, adjust one or more garments that had been pressed into unsightliness by the protracted wait, and follow someone dressed in white through a doorway and out of sight.
Forty-five minutes and one additional eruption from his nose later, the attending nurse, now a different and even more vociferous one than had admitted them, shouted from behind the glass “Randolph Argent”, which formality got a snicker out of Trent followed by a good natured scowl from Randy. He rose gingerly and hobbled, by himself, toward the open door and the nurse standing therein. One and a half hours and one extremely irritated phone call to the crew’s supervisor later Randy emerged from the same door, newly accoutered with crutches and a cast that extended from the middle of his foot down and over his big toe, subsuming as well the adjacent two. He seemed, as he approached his friends, to be smiling, and it occurred to more than one of them that he might in fact be under the influence of one or more pain reducing (and hence reality altering) substances.
It was by this time nearly seven thirty and long past the end of a day more eventful than any of them had envisioned upon waking. All that remained was to drive back to the work site and clean up the tools and what not, drive Randy back to his apartment (with Chris following in Randy’s car, which he would have some difficulty driving in the coming weeks), and then get themselves home. Tomorrow would be even more demanding, what with having to explain this whole affair in even greater detail to their supervisor, and then work that much harder (assuming they all still had jobs), seeing as how their injured colleague would clearly not be working for some days to come. Randy would spend the evening (or at least a small portion of it) calling home and explaining the afternoon’s events to his mother, who would freak out halfway through his first sentence and insist on getting on a plane to Iowa that very minute, and to his father, whose immediate concern would be not so much Randy’s toe but rather his football future, which, unbeknownst to either of them, had ended for good at precisely the moment the boulder had descended onto his toe.