The Volunteer
5
THE FREE CLINIC was on 8th, just across the railroad tracks. Twice G2 realized he’d turned the wrong direction and was heading away from it. He sat to rest, sleeping a while each time. When he reached the tracks, he stumbled and fell. He just lay there, thinking that if he didn’t get up he’d get run over, but too exhausted to drag himself further. While he was lying there, Ben Johnson came across the tracks. G2 had ridden the rails with Ben a time once before. Ben was good company and told stories to fill the air. He seemed to accept that G2 didn’t talk much and would be happiest left alone.
“Hey, G2. Ya gotta get up off the tracks, buddy,” he said. He offered G2 a hand but G2 wasn’t strong enough to raise his up. “You’re pretty out of it today, man. Which direction you headed?” G2 raised a waved his hand vaguely toward the clinic. Ben looked that direction. “Yeah, that’s a good one. Let me give you a hand.” He bent down and helped G2 to his feet and supported him as they stumbled across the next set of tracks. It seemed like a long way across the yard to the clinic and there were two freight trains stopped between them and the other side. Ben led G2 down the length of one of the trains. He stopped beside a cattle car, inspected it a bit and then moved on to a box car with an open door. “This looks good,” Ben said. “Better out of the wind than the cattle car. I’ll bring you a bunch a straw and you’ll be all set.” He boosted G2’s light frame up into the boxcar, shoved his feet in, and ran back to the cattle car. Before he got back, the train began to move. G2 lay huddled in a corner of the box car. He wasn’t going to the clinic after all. Well, the train was a better place to die than a hospital.
G2 woke up in a hospital room with five other men in beds. A tube was attached to his arm and a clear plastic bag at the other end dripped slowly into it. Some of the men snored. One tossed and rolled on his side. The man in the bed next to G2 lay flat on his back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes staring at the ceiling. So intent did that stare seem to be that G2 looked up to see what the other man saw on the ceiling. Acoustical tiles, yellow with age. G2 looked back at the man. His gaze never wavered. He never blinked. G2 had seen it before.
Uncle Al was a bus driver in a city about an hour from where Gerald lived. He had a grown son, a son about two years older than Gerald, and a daughter about the same age as Gerald’s sister Marian. Gerald loved to visit Uncle Al and Aunt Millie, even though technically they weren’t related to him at all. He got to ride the bus to the garage with Uncle Al. Uncle Al once gave Gerald the job of “shooting” the birds. When the starlings kept squawking in the trees outside their house, Uncle Al taught Gerald how to press a board beneath his foot and slam it on the sidewalk so it sounded like a gunshot. The starlings would all scatter and it would be quiet for about half an hour. Then they’d come back noisy as ever and Gerald would “shoot” them again. Uncle Al said he wished it was legal to use his shotgun in the city limits. He’d end the starling problem once and for all. Denny, the younger of Uncle Al’s sons, had a paper route before Gerald did. He took Gerald out with him one day and it was all Gerald could do to keep up with the older boy as he sped on his route. He was following behind Denny across a street when he ran straight into the curb on the other side. Gerald flew over the handlebars and landed in the lawn. Denny said it was a good thing he didn’t hit the sidewalk. The bike couldn’t be ridden after that. The front wheel was caved in from the impact with the curb. Gerald was very apologetic, but Denny didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve got another wheel in the garage,” he said. Then he showed Gerald the trick of pulling up on the handlebars just before you reach a curb to lift the front wheel over. “Should have showed you that earlier,” he said. It was later that year, though, that Uncle Al got sick. Gerald’s family went to visit almost every weekend and took food to Aunt Millie and the kids. It seemed like everyone had something on their mind and the younger kids were left at home while the adults went to the hospital to see Uncle Al. The girls sat and played with Barbie dolls in the living room and Gerald read a book for a while. When he got bored, he wandered around the house looking at Aunt Millie’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. His family always brought unique salt and peppers for Aunt Millie from wherever they traveled and apparently so did everyone else they knew. She had hundreds of pairs in glass cabinets. Gerald saw the carved cedar set his family had bought when they went to the Ozarks in the Packard. The whole store where they bought those was full of cedar carvings, including the salt and pepper that were balanced on either end of a saw sticking through the trunk of a tree, all about three inches across. Gerald had a cup and ball from that store, but his father wouldn’t buy him a sling shot. The store’s smell was like a closet only a hundred times more. Everything was fresh cut cedar wood. Gerald’s favorite salt and pepper shakers in Aunt Millie’s collection were the owls. Two brown owls held salt and pepper, but beside them were three smaller owls that were simply their family. Eventually the day came when everyone visited Uncle Al in the hospital. It was time to say goodbye, Gerald’s mom told him. Is he going to die now? Gerald wanted to know. Very soon. But he wants to see everyone first. Gerald didn’t know that when it was time to die you could wait until you saw everyone first. That was good to know. When it was time for him to die, he was going to think of someone who would take days or maybe years to get to him so that he could stay alive until he saw them to say goodbye. There was bad traffic that day and their car overheated. Gerald’s dad had to call AAA to get help. That took a couple of hours while Gerald and his sister finally went to sleep in the back seat of the car and his mother sat with her head bowed in the front. They drove faster than his dad usually drove when they could finally get started again and arrived at the hospital just in time to see Aunt Millie come out of Uncle Al’s room. Gerald’s mother swept her into her arms and his father wrapped his arms around both women. Gerald peeked through the open door. Denny and his brother and sister all stood silently on the other side of the bed Uncle Al lay in with their heads bowed and tears running down their cheeks. Gerald had never seen Denny cry. Uncle Al lay on his back with his lips slightly parted, staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe. Apparently Uncle Al couldn’t wait.
G2 woke up thinking. The man in the bed next to him was snoring loudly. Different man. The dead one had been replaced almost as quickly as they could change the sheets. He wondered if this was where he would die and who he should ask to see before he went. Appendix, the doctor had said. They brought a form to him and asked him name, address, and a lot of information G2 didn’t know. He took the form from the doctor and wrote his name in block letters: Gerald Good, G2. He didn’t have an address, didn’t know if any of his relatives were living, didn’t know his medical history. He dragged a disused memory from the depths of his subconscious and wrote down a social security number. He thought he remembered it right. And how old was he? 50? 52? He wrote down his birthdate, but wasn’t sure if it was September or October. Well, it was close enough. Then he remembered one other thing. There wasn’t a spot on the form for it, so he wrote it in the address blank. “M16-999.” You never forgot your first license plate. It was still on the old Chevrolet Impala his father kept in the garage, even after he bought the new Gremlin that he died in. Some things were very clear. Others didn’t seem to make any sense at all.
Gerald woke up that Saturday morning thinking he had to get out and make his deliveries before 6:00 a.m. He was going on seven months without a complaint or a missed collection. He was well on his way to becoming carrier of the year and winning one of the trips to Disneyland next summer. Only six trips would be awarded to the top six carriers of the year. Junior High was much more fun since Gerald got the paper route. He had a transistor radio—not the old crystal radio—that he bought with his earnings from the route. It had five bands, AM, FM, two Short Wave bands, and a Weather Band. Late at night, Gerald could tune in Quito, Ecuador on the Short Wave, and had found performances from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
He got up and dressed in his long underwear, jeans, and a pair of coveralls and then pulled on the hooded parka he loved. The weather had turned bitter cold that week and with the fresh snow, there was no way he would be able to ride his fat-tired bike this morning. Once the snow had been plowed, shoveled, and packed down he could go just about anywhere on that old bike. Of course in the summer he would ride the new 5-speed Schwinn that he got for Christmas. But for hauling his heavy load of papers, there was really nothing like the big Monark with fenders, carrier rack, generator light, and shock absorbers. Both bikes would stay in the garage this morning. He pulled the twin bags over his shoulders and left through the garage, patting the big car on the hood as he stepped out into the cold. “Agent M-one-six-niner-niner-niner on assignment,” he said to himself. The first bite of wind reminded him to wrap the scarf around his face. The bags were heavy, but he knew they would get lighter as he went. He fell twice before he delivered the first paper. It was going to be a long morning.
Half an hour later, tears had frozen to Gerald’s cheeks. His fingers were numb, even inside the two pairs of heavy gloves he wore. His ears beneath the stocking cap and parka were burning. He wasn’t even a quarter of the way through his route, slogging through the big drifts between houses. He couldn’t feel his toes. Gerald turned the corner and saw his father’s big Chevrolet idling in front of his next delivery. He was so thankful to see the big car that fresh tears ran down to join the ones frozen on his cheeks. He opened the passenger door and his father beckoned him. “Get in and get warm,” he said. “With both of us delivering we’ll get them delivered in time.” Gerald shoved the bags between them on the front seat, pulled his gloves off to lay his hands directly on the heat vents. As soon as his teeth quit chattering he said softly, “Thanks, Dad.” His father didn’t have to get up on Saturday morning, so Gerald knew this was special. “You showed your commitment this morning, son,” his father said. “I’ll always be there when you are committed.”
Of course, G2’s father wasn’t there now. He hadn’t been there since a year after that morning when he crashed the new Gremlin on an icy road.
But that morning the Impala was Gerald’s salvation. His father would roll to a stop in the middle of the street and the two would grab a handful of papers and jump out of each side of the car. His father took one side of the street and Gerald took the other. The newspaper publisher always gave him a lot of extra papers, so they delivered to every house, whether it was a subscriber or not. They raced each other up the block and back to the car to drive to the next block. In half an hour, Gerald was jumping out of the car to deliver the last paper on his route. That was when he slammed the door shut on his finger. His gloves were so thick and his hands so cold that for a moment Gerald thought he had only caught his glove. Then the stinging pain broke through the numbness and arced into his mind like a bolt of lightning. His scream was still echoing down the street when his father wrenched the door open, took the last paper from Gerald’s hand, snapped a rubber band around it, and flung it sidearm at the last house. It clanged against the aluminum storm door. Even through the pain and tears, Gerald remembered thinking “Bullseye—way to go Dad.” His dad got Gerald into the car, and they were home in ten minutes. The pain was terrible. It felt like his whole arm was going to explode. Once the garage door was down and they got into the house, Gerald’s father was stripping the coat and gloves off his son to look at the damage. The ring finger was already beginning to turn an angry purple. “You’re going to lose that one,” his father said. Gerald cried out as a new flood of tears, this time in panic, hit him. “Not ze finger,” his father laughed. “Yus ze nail.” The whole family had laughed when they sat around listening to a Danny Kaye album of fairy tales. “Clever Gretel” came to mind. In order to conceal her gluttony she told the guest that the master was going to cut off both his ears. The guest fled from the house and Gretel told the master that he had stolen both chickens. The master, with knife still gripped in his hand, ran down the street after his guest screaming “Not bos, yus one!” Gerald choked back the tears to laugh at his father’s imitation. He broke ice cubes out of a tray, wrapped them in a dish towel, and smashed them with a kitchen mallet. He wrapped the ice towel around Gerald’s finger and Gerald winced, but was determined not to cry again. “I know it’s cold and it hurts, son, but if we don’t ice it will swell up so big you won’t be able to put your hand through your shirtsleeve.” That was terrifying, so Gerald bucked up and kept the ice in place. “You keep that on,” said his father, “and by the time I get pancakes and hot chocolate made, the worst will be over.” Gerald thought that was a little bit of an exaggeration. He ate aspirin with his pancakes at his mother’s insistence. Later in the day, the blood had pooled beneath the nail turning it black and it hurt worse, even though Gerald had kept his hand above his head all day. His father looked at the nail before bed and decided to operate.
Gerald’s father always carried a pocket knife. It was small—what some people would call a penknife, though Gerald didn’t know why. It was very sharp. Gerald had watched his father hone an edge on the knife often. The knife was often called into play if someone had a splinter. His dad could use just the tip of his knife to lift a splinter right out of your hand. This time, though, his dad lit a sulfur match from beside the kitchen stove and ran it up and down the length of the knife blade. Gerald wasn’t sure what his dad intended to do, but he waited patiently at the kitchen table with his injured hand palm-down, flat on the table. His father sat down beside him and touched the blade of the knife to the back of his own hand to show Gerald that the blade would not burn. Then he placed the tip gently against the center of the nail and began twisting the blade rapidly back and forth. The result was a small hole, drilled through the nail. As soon as the knife point broke through the nail, blood began to seep out through the hole and with the blood, the painful pressure. His father sopped up the blood with a cotton swab and when the bleeding slowed down he poured alcohol over the wound and put a Band-Aid on it. “I’m not really a doctor,” his father intoned solemnly. “But you play one on TV,” Gerald supplied. They laughed and Gerald went to bed. For the next few days, the pressure under the nail would build and Gerald’s father would relieve the pressure by reopening the hole. Eventually, about three weeks later, the nail fell off and a new one began to harden beneath it.
G2 still remembered the pain in that finger. It started up again when the weather turned cold. It wasn’t the acute pain of the injury, but a nagging ache, like it was doing now. Gerald strained to see out the window, over another bed in the ward where he was recovering. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like it was snowing.
“Mr. Good, I’m Mr. Stanley, your social worker. The doctors tell me that you are healed up enough to leave the hospital now, but we have to have somewhere to take you. We can’t turn you out of the hospital and onto the streets, especially in this weather. So I’ve arranged a stay in a halfway house for you. You won’t need to do any work for the next two weeks, but as soon as the doctor says you are fit, they’ll send you out on light jobs to help pay for the housing and food. You need to stay clean and sober during your stay. This is a great opportunity for you to get healthy. You might find a way to turn your life around with this little incident. You are lucky to be alive.”
The weather Mr. Stanley was talking about included at least a foot of new snow that Gerald gazed at out the front window of Mr. Stanley’s car as they drove to the halfway house. The social worker drove a small foreign car and G2 could bet that didn’t make him popular among out-of-work autoworkers. Just across the bridge they were passing, was Canada. G2 didn’t think Canada had many homeless people. The winters would kill them off. He wasn’t sure how he got to Detroit but assumed the train Ben Johnson had dumped him on was northbound instead of southbound. Trust Ben to send him into a frozen hell. Maybe that had saved his life, though. The yardmaster in Detroit had called an ambulance when he found G2. Would they have done that in Mobile?
Mr. Stanley led G2 into the halfway house to meet the manager, Bob Brown. Bob told G2 where to sleep—in a room with three single beds—when he could shower, and what time to sit down at the table for dinner. He laid down strict rules. There would be no alcohol in the house and if the resident was found to be intoxicated he would be placed on probation. A second violation would result in termination of the resident’s stay. G2 would be excused from maintenance except that of his personal area for the first two weeks at the doctor and social worker’s request. He would still be required to attend one of the two 12-step meetings held in the house each day. While he was recovering, G2 should work jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, read the newspaper, read a book each week, and help around the house as he could. There would be no harm in his sweeping or running the vacuum cleaner, and the manager was sure he could do dishes within a day or two.
“I’m Bob Brown and I’m an alcoholic,” the manager said by way of introducing the first 12-step meeting. “Hello Bob,” responded all the men in the house. “I’ve been sober 7 months, 2 days, and 18 hours and there isn’t one hour of that time that I haven’t been tempted to find a bottle,” Bob said. He asked G2 to introduce himself. G2 struggled to get words to come out of his mouth. They all expected him to say “I’m Gerald Good and I’m an alcoholic.” They would all respond “Hello Gerald,” and he wouldn’t know who they were talking to. He’d left Gerald behind years ago. There was no one left but G2. The words simply wouldn’t come out of his mouth and tears began running down his cheeks from the effort. Manager Bob laid a hand on G2’s shoulder and told him that the hand of God was on him, casting out the demons of alcohol and his old life. They were all there to help G2 get through this hard time and he could sit down and take his time. G2 breathed an almost silent “God bless,” and sat back down sobbing. He didn’t know what happened during the rest of the meeting, but by the end, G2 had been paired with a kind black man who simply sat with him and said he was G2’s sponsor. Together they’d help each other find victory over the bottle and salvation in the love of God. Amen.
G2 was in prison. His sponsor, Muhammad “Go-Lightly” Jones, was pleasant company. He’d been in the halfway house for six weeks and sat with G2 while they worked the unending jigsaw puzzles. They went to meetings together and sat to eat together. But they never left the house. G2 could not leave the house unless he was accompanied by either Manager Bob or his social worker, Mr. Stanley. He kept his little canvas bag with him all the time, in case he was allowed to leave, but neither man saw a reason for him to go out, so G2 sat quietly in the house and thought as he looked out the window at the mounting snow.
Gerald had never seen so much snow as that winter when he was nine. The winds blew in off the lake and dumped foot upon foot of snow in his community. School was closed for two weeks and there was talk of extending the school year into the summer if the snow didn’t clear soon. Gerald was only four feet tall, but the snow drifts were twice his height or more. Cars sat buried along the street and the one time a snowplow came down the middle of the road it piled the drifts against the cars even higher. The good part was that Brian’s mother brought him by Gerald’s house and the two stayed together for the next five days. Once the snow stopped, it stayed cold, but was bright and sunny. The boys were dressed in snowsuits and sent outside. It was a different world. The sun warmed just enough during the day to melt the top layer of snow which then froze during the long cold night. As a result, they could walk along on top of the drifts if they were careful. They sledded down the street and ran into the snow banks on either side. It was truly a winter wonderland.
But the best was when Brian broke through the ice and plummeted down into a drift. He was up to his shoulders and each time the boys tried to get him out, a new chunk of ice would break at the surface. That was when the “great idea” came to him. Gerald ran to get the coal shovel from the garage. About ten feet away from Brian, he broke through the side of a drift and began shoveling out the snow inside the drift. Brian used his mittened hands to scoop and pack the snow to the side as he tunneled toward Gerald. It was a near disaster when the shovel broke through the last membrane of snow between the boys and almost hit Brian in the head, but they had discovered the joy of having a snow tunnel. The sunlight filtered through the ice and snow above them making the tunnel alive with a diffuse light. Brian and Gerald were explorers in a strange new alien world where a soccer ball left outside before the snow started became a rare life form discovered as they conquered their snow-planet. They didn’t need to remove much of the snow from the tunnels they dug over the next few days. Mostly they could pack it down on the floors and walls of the tunnel. The snow that they removed, they packed into a box that they moved on the sled dragged into the tunnel behind them. The cubes of snow dumped out of the box made the walls of an elaborate snow fort with crenulated parapets and a tower with real ice block stairs. They even tunneled between two snowbound cars and broke an opening through to the street. Mr. Harmon had not been happy when the snow melted enough to get his car out and he found shovel scratches along one side where the boys had run into it and then tunneled along it to find the gap between cars.
That winter was the best winter of Gerald’s life. Even when the snow started to melt and their ice cave ceilings fell in, the maze of tunnels stayed and were great for playing tag or their own warped version of fox and geese.
G2 hated winter now. Snow outside meant that he had to find shelter and shelter meant no wine. Shelter also meant closed spaces with men snoring and farting through the night. Staying inside meant long hours with nothing to occupy his time but thinking. And that’s what prison was. Having to be all alone with the thoughts in his head.
He tried to follow the advice of Manager Bob and work jigsaw puzzles. He swept the floors every day. He had spent hours with a crossword puzzle, but when Manager Bob saw the neatly penned license numbers filling every square in the grid and the underlined words in the clues he told G2 it would be better if he left the crosswords to some of the other men. G2 vowed to himself to escape or die trying. He only needed to wait for his opportunity.
It came ten days later. Mr. Stanley picked up G2 to go to the hospital to get his stitches out. G2 planned everything ahead. His little bag stayed packed. There wasn’t much in it anymore, but he didn’t want to be seen stuffing things into it just before he left the house. When Mr. Stanley arrived, G2 pulled his bag over his shoulder and put the army surplus overcoat on right over the top of it. He signed out of the house under the house manager’s watchful eye and Mr. Stanley signed as escort. They would be gone no more than two hours and G2 was expected to sign back in. The doctor at the hospital examined G2’s appendix incision and snipped the end of the staple that held him together while the operation healed. “Treat it gently for a few days, G2,” the doctor said. “You should be back to your old self within a week.” The doctor went out to talk to Mr. Stanley who was in the waiting room. G2 pulled his hat and coat on, shouldered his bag and left before they returned. It took him a while to find the freight yard. He had to make sure he wasn’t spotted by Mr. Stanley driving around looking for him. But curled up in the army surplus coat in the back of a boxcar, G2 left Detroit on a southbound train.
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