A LYING WONDER

On a cold and snowy morning, Shane sat watching Looney Tunes while waiting at the living room window for the school bus to go up the road. This meant he had about five minutes to walk to the gas station a few yards from the house to catch it. The bus driver was punctual this way, and Shane knew if he was still standing beside the heating vent warming himself when The Three Stooges came on, he was going to be late and miss his ride to school.

This snowy morning, the bus didn’t come. He and his friends walked back to their houses, and when Shane got home he watched the rest of the episodes that aired of The Three Stooges, then bundled up and went into the snow. He played for a while in his yard and then, hearing his friends playing somewhere nearby, left to find them.

They had convened on the big hill behind the old furniture store, a steep and severely pitched slab of hillside ending at the furniture store’s second-story back porch. There were five of them, counting Shane. Everett, the son of a local body garage owner, and Joey, Everett’s younger brother, along with Tammy Damron and Anita Newsome, two of the prettier girls from school.

Anita lived across the street from the big hill—otherwise, she wouldn’t have been there. She and Tammy spent their time playing while trying to ignore the boys. The girls had sleek, flat sleds they could lie back on or belly flop on and shoot down the hill in barely controlled zigzags. The rest managed without sleds, making do with two large plastic garbage bags that Everett and Joey brought from home. The three of them shared the bags.

A few times down, Shane realized there was a problem being the only one without gloves. He realized this because he’d gone to pee behind a large walnut tree at the furthermost corner of the property and couldn’t get his zipper down; his fingers were frozen in place, eight digits slightly curled and lifeless as chunks of rock. There was no way he was going to tell the others what happened. Instead, from time to time looking back over his shoulder at Anita with her black hair flowing like pitch from the back of her noggin, he walked home.

His grandparents called his father and forced him to come to their house and take him to the hospital. His dad was an infamously horrid human being, one the entire community recognized as such. Shane’s grandparents had raised him from the time he was five, six years in total and counting, while his father lived his own life exactly as he wanted it less than a mile away. Shane saw him for the third time in four months when he blasted through the front door grimacing in ways only animals might understand.

Forced to perform his duties, his father drove slowly without speaking, his mind obviously elsewhere. Shane could guess where his father’s mind might have been. He wanted to be watching television or drinking or calling women or doing sex with woman or combing his hair or taking his Firebird through the car wash, using special wax spray on the inside, the dashboard and seats, or remembering how, when Shane was small enough, he would hold him upside down by one ankle and use his meaty fist to hammer strike him in the ribs, once, possibly by accident, to the side of his head.

The emergency room went at hyperspeed. Lobby, through the bay doors, ER room, nurse, doctor, nurse again, doctor again. They stuck needles in Shane’s hands and fingers. The color went from a crude blue to a flushed pink in about ten minutes.

Shane’s father was quiet again on the way home until he suddenly sat up straight in the seat right before turning into the driveway. He made a small smile, almost a grin, but not enough to qualify; just enough to get by. He again smiled tinily after throwing the car in park and jumped out and was inside the house before Shane had a chance to open his door.

Inside, the kitchen was buzzing. Everything was bright brown from the varnished wooden table and chairs, the yellow wallpaper, the lights glinting off the clean stovetop, the silver toaster. And his father and grandparents talked so fast all the words scrambled. Shane could only tell they were happy when they stopped speaking to laugh and hug one another.

It was a miracle; Shane’s father might be a healer, blessed to touch others and heal them as a direct conduit from God Himself.

“I prayed all the way there,” his father kept repeating when all the words unscrambled. “I prayed all the way there, and by the time we got there, his hands were warm as biscuits! Like nothing ever happened!”