chapter 38

JOHN

ONE of the few people who had to know where we were moving was my doctor in Boston, Dr. David Keith. The town I moved to wasn’t important, just the state, so he could set me up with some doctors there for an occasional checkup. The team in Boston would still do my major surgeries, but I needed someone closer for the in-between progress checks. Once they knew where we were headed, the team in Boston set up a meeting with the maxillofacial doctors at Vanderbilt University Hospital. Shortly after we were all settled in, we drove to Nashville and did some sightseeing on the day of my appointment. We went to the replica of the Parthenon and to some country music historical sights.

The doctors at Vandy were pretty happy to see me; I was an interesting case, to be sure. But they quickly discovered that the latest round of bone marrow transplants hadn’t taken—nothing was growing on the right side of my face, even after all these months. They talked to me about another option. They wanted to start repairing my face by surgically removing the transplanted bone and going with a metal-and-plastic prosthesis instead. This would also involve attaching a ring to my skull, a halo held to my head with screws, which would have to stay in place for months. No thank you. I got in touch with the doctors in Boston to fill them in, and they set me up with another round of marrow transplants for December.

Come December, I grabbed my blender and hit the road for Massachusetts. After my surgery, I planned to be at Joe and Kate’s house to recover, then drive back down and hopefully be home for Christmas. Polly was working at Cookeville General Hospital by now, and the kids were in school. The first day on the road, I drove from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. and stopped at a hotel on the Pennsylvania/New York border. The place was cold. I’d already forgotten what the northern winters could do to my head, and I woke with one of my mind-blowing headaches. I blended up a milkshake and hit the road again. In the car, I turned the radio on to NPR and heard the top story—John Lennon had been killed the night before. His last words were, “I’m shot.” I knew exactly how he felt. I was sure I was dying too. They say you don’t hear the one that kills you, but people who say that haven’t been shot and lived. You know quite suddenly every minute detail. Time dilates. You’ve been shot. I’m going to have to see a dentist. You’re dying. Please turn the lights off in my car so the battery doesn’t die.I wondered what Lennon’s last thoughts were. “Rest in peace, partner,” I said to myself as they played an old Lennon song on the radio. “You deserved so much more life.”

When I got to the hospital, Dr. Keith told me that they’d take the cells from my other hip this time. Yippee. I’d have symmetrical scars and two dead zones. But in recovery the next day, I found that they’d actually gone into the same pelvic crest and my right thumb was totally numb.

“How are we doing today?” asked the doctor who came in to check on me. ‘Any numbness in your leg?”

I wrote him a note: “It’s been numb there since the first surgery.”

He explained that they probably nicked a nerve, but the chances were slim that the numb area would expand any more with this latest surgery. That’s why it was better to go back in where the damage was already done.

I wrote him a note about my thumb, which was now turning red and really starting to hurt. He looked it over and was baffled. So were the other doctors. The pain meds they were giving me for the pain helped my face but didn’t do much for the thumb, it hurt that bad. Then, after three days, it was like a switch was thrown and the pain stopped. By then, my thumb was a normal color again, but the skin had started to peel off it in big chunks. Finally, one doctor on the team had an explanation. “You were lying on your thumb during surgery, and because you were unconscious, your body didn’t tell you to roll off of it. So it lost circulation for a few hours,” he told me. “It should return to normal in a few more days. We would probably know already if you were going to lose it.”

So I had a numb leg and a thumb that almost needed to be amputated. Their attitude was, “No big deal, it’s the face that counts.” It had been almost sixteen months since the shooting, and I’d been wired shut the whole time. I was still facing several more months this way. They had said it would take a few years to rebuild my face, and they weren’t kidding.

There were no guards this time; I was keeping a low profile. There was no point in even letting the police department know that I was back in the state. This also meant that I couldn’t visit old friends, but those days were behind us anyhow. There wouldn’t be any more visits. The hospital staff were under orders not to release any information about me to anyone, and hospital security was watching my room for any problems, but there weren’t any. No one knew where I was, and by the time Falmouth got the bill, I was long gone.

After a week I was temporarily released, but I needed to come back in and get the okay to go home. As planned, I went to Joe and Kate’s place, where Kate checked me every few hours with her nurse’s eye for any counterindicative signs and doled out the pain pills. She seemed to think things were okay after a few days, so I decided to use the time to visit some family—knowing that it could be a long while before we would get the chance to do that again. I went to see my uncle John, my mom’s youngest brother, who lived with his family in Bellingham. He was only ten years older than me, and we’d always been close. He took after that side of the family and weighed about three hundred pounds—the curse of the big bones.

Uncle John was the family genius, with a photographic memory and a great mind for jokes and stories. He never forgot anything and was always happy to startle you with his total recall of events, names, faces, and places. He was an electrician by trade and could build up or take apart just about anything that ran on electricity. He’d read about electric chairs being used to kill prisoners when he was a kid and actually built one—talked a friend of his into sitting in it and was about to throw the switch when my mother—his older sister—stopped him and made him take it apart. A brilliant guy with a bit of a mean streak.

After we visited for a little bit, he said, “Come with me into the cellar, I’ve got a project I want you to take a look at.” It was a .22 bolt-action rifle equipped with a silencer and a device to catch shell casings as they ejected, leaving no evidence. The serial numbers had been ground off, so attempts to trace the gun would be futile. It shot .22 longs, good penetration; we’re talking head shots here.

My uncle demonstrated a few shots into a sandbag bunker he had set up. “Sounds like someone coughing,” he said, taking a shot with the silencer on. “Not too bad, huh?” I could tell he was proud of himself, and he should have been. The gun was perfect.

“The accuracy might not be the best since the silencer isn’t grooved the same as the barrel is,” Uncle John pointed out. “But it’s got a scope and you ought to be able to put it within six inches of center at one hundred yards.”

As he spoke, I could see myself setting up the rifle in the woods by the town dump, waiting to blow Meyer away. I knew all the trails between there and Hatchville Road. I’d run them for years. I’d just park under power lines in Hatchville, take this gun and hoof it to the dump, do the deed and hoof back. I’d been jogging again, although I’d probably have to walk since I just got out of the hospital and all. But still, it was doable.

The question was: did I want to do it?

It wouldn’t be hard to find out that I’d been in Boston; the hospital would have to release that information if there was a murder investigation. But how hard would the cops—any cops—try to convict me under the circumstances? Who knows. It was getting harder and harder for me to picture myself pulling the trigger.

I was still mad as hell, but the anger had changed and morphed into something else. I hated to see my face. I hated the three-day-long headaches. I hated not being able to eat. But the hatred of these things was no longer focused on Meyer. Maybe I just wasn’t the hard, coldhearted, revenge-generating psycho that I thought I was. In reality, I was just a man who got somebody mad—mad enough to want to kill him—and survived it. Maybe it should end there.

I looked at the gun my uncle John had put together for me. This was my chance. I wrote a few words in my notebook and showed it to him. “Thank you for all the effort. I won’t need it.” He looked at the note quietly, then patted me on the shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was proud of me or disappointed.

“The gun is our secret, nephew,” he told me quietly. “No one else knows it’s here. If the need arises...” He didn’t say more. He didn’t need to.

I went back into the hospital the next day for a follow-up and was cleared by Mass General to head home, so I packed up and started the drive back down south. I’d be back in six to eight months for another look at this transplant, to see if the marrow had taken this time, if bone was growing in my face. When I stopped at a hotel to spend the night, the look on the clerk’s face said it all. I was bandaged, swollen, couldn’t speak. I looked like someone who’d been in a terrible accident. I wrote him a note telling him that I needed a room for the night, and he filled out all the forms and took my money without ever taking his eyes off my face. It was clear that he was horrified but couldn’t look away. He was kind enough not to ask any questions.

In the room, I used my blender to make dinner, looking at my face in the mirror over the dresser. It was getting hard for me to see how I must appear to others; I’d already grown so used to this as my life.

When I arrived back in Tennessee, I was glad for the seclusion of our farm to rest and recuperate. Maybe the marrow in my jaw would do its trick and start making me whole again. The kids were happy to see me, as bandaged and strange as I must have looked. They had grown used to this life too. And Polly had a surprise for me. She led me out to the barn to show me something—in the few weeks while I was gone, she’d bought a horse. A big chestnut with a white line down her nose, a Tennessee Walker. Polly had always loved horses and learned how to ride when she was young—she was an excellent horsewoman.

“I thought since we have a farm, why not, right?” she explained. A coworker at the hospital was selling her, and Polly jumped at the chance. “What do you think? She’s beautiful, huh?”

I nodded my approval. This was our life now. A barn, and a horse to go in it. There would be no going back. For a moment, the image of that gun in my uncle’s basement flashed into my mind—the .22 longs in their box, sitting there, waiting for me. “If the need arises, nephew...”His hand on my back.

“Here, pet her,” Polly said, guiding my hand. I ran it along the horse’s side, feeling her strong muscles ripple beneath. “I figure I’ll teach the kids to ride.” Polly smiled as she looked at her new horse. I watched her face. She looked happy, really happy. It was the first time I’d seen her look like that in a long, long time. And I was glad to be home.