Free Graphic the Valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister Page B

I watched her eyes as they did not look at me. Her hair across her face.
    “Did you?” I said.
    She wiped her hair out of her eyes. “Did I what?” she said.
    I swallowed the Percocet, cracked the Sprite, and took a sip. Lay back down. Laughed that Lucy and I both hurt our right hands. Lucy’s index finger still unhealed.
    My hand itched. I looked at the bone there, peeking through like something on the road, car-crushed. I felt it with my left thumb, the end of the fracture where it stuck out.
    The medical student was gone again. My head rolled, the pills weighting. Even when I touched, there was only a nudge of pain, back where the bones didn’t connect.
    • • •
    In Tuolumne. Fourteen. I rest my face in my palms. The night smells like pine mold. No clouds, this clear night, even, the sky stretched like a child lying in a field of grass. I watch the stars, recognize their slow shift around Polaris, the Ursas, Draco, The Charioteer, and Perseus, their rotation around a point 2 degrees from perfection.
    A coyote yips from my right and another answers from my left. I’ve seen them run dog-like in the morning, ferrying stolen food packaging, Ball Park Franks’ wrappers and steak paper dripping at the corners of their mouths.
    He didn’t have to die. An accident like bruises beneath the skin of fruit.
    I hoped that the superintendent would fall, but he flipped upside down and turned, curled underneath, headfirst and down.
    I picture him off the end of the boardwalk, lying in the reeds, smoking his cigar. Alive again and he puts the cigar to his lips, drawing smoke into his mouth, holding it, then exhaling at the corners.
    My bones flourish like grass. His worm will not die.
    • • •
    I wanted to fix my hand. There was no one else in the tent, not the medical student, not the other volunteers, no other patients. Rows of empty cots and white sheets.
    The haze of the Percocet as my head fell forward and drool pooled in my mouth. I let it slide to the floor. I stared at my hand, then pushed the bone down, pushed the bone back toward the opening in the skin. The pain came but I let that slide like the drool. The drugs put it on the floor, and I kept pushing the bone down and in.
    The river ran clear, a rainbow finning upstream. I flicked a grasshopper out in front, the bug on a single worm hook, struggling on the surface. The bridge, fifteen feet with ledges on the underside, and the bone slid under the skin.
    Dark rose in the hole and seeped. I clenched my teeth and squinted my eyes. On the pills, heavy, I pushed. A second time. A third. Adjusting the bone underneath the skin. I whispered to myself, “Just need to…” and hooked my left thumb into the opening to gain leverage. The bone moved with the sound of a rainbow trout’s skull crushing.
    • • •
    When the orthopedist came in, he felt the newly straightened bones in my hand. He said, “The med student told me this was a compound. But this looks good actually. There’s a hole here, but somehow the bone popped back in.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Alrighty, let’s see here,” he said. “Hamate and pisiform don’t feel turned, everything in the correct place here.” He pinched to the ends of my fingers. “Lots of swelling out here, but nothing out of place which is good…” He dabbed antibiotic ointment onto a Q-tip and slathered it over the wound. “A few sutures at the exit, and we’ll be ready for plaster.”
    He left and returned with a kit. Then he sewed the fracture hole closed with three black sutures. The medical student came in with plaster packets and a metal mixing bowl. The orthopedist said, “This will be an old-school cast, a bit heavy, but you seem like you can handle that since you fight lions, right?”
    I wiggled my thumb.
    The medical student mixed, then dipped the strips. Added more water.
    The orthopedist said, “Keep this really still while I cast. I don’t want any of those bones moving around.”
    He was quiet while he