The Scar Boys

No Surrender

It was late the following afternoon when I mustered the courage to visit Johnny. The promise l'd made to Chey was the final push I needed. I wasn't scared about seeing Johnny's amputated leg. When I was younger and going through all kinds of rehabilitation, I spent lots of time in waiting rooms with amputees. There was this one kid, about my age, who decided to introduce himself to me.

"Hi, I'm Stumpy Joe." I must've looked at him cross-eyed, because he laughed and said, "Nah, that's not really my name, but it breaks the ice. My real name is George. What's your name?" As usual, I was frozen and couldn't think of a response. Not even my name. I guess he figured that I was both deformed and a bit challenged, because he turned to the kid sitting on the other side of him and said, "Hi, I'm Stumpy Joe."

So missing arms, missing hands, missing legs weren't anything new to me. Seeing Johnny's stump wasn't going to be a problem. It was the rest of him that was making me nervous. The part of him that would remember that I was the guy who'd hit (slapped) him, and that I was the guy who'd started the chain of events that ended with his leg on an operating room floor.

When I rang the doorbell, Mrs. McKennaa tumbler of brown, translucent, and potent-smelling liquid in her hand-greeted me cordially, which was all she'd ever done. Johnny's parents wished he'd hung out with a better class of friends, and given how things turned out, you can't really blame them.

The cubes of ice were clinking against the sides of her glass and echoing through the hall as she escorted me to Johnny's bedroom door. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "See if you can help him, Harry." The tone in her voice suggested no else had been able to. She walked away down the hall and I went in.

I found Johnny sitting up in bed, the covers pulled to his waist, his missing leg hidden from view. He was reading a weathered, library copy of The Catcher in the Rye and looked up when I entered. He didn't smile.

"Hey," I said. Johnny nodded in response. "How're you doing?" He shrugged his shoulders. I sat down on the edge of his bed. I saw something in Johnny that I hadn't seen in a lone time. A decade, to be exact.

Written in the creases of Johnny's brow, in the glass sheen of his eyes, in the tension in his neck and back, on his foul breath, in the dirty pajamas he wore, in his unkempt and uncut hair, and across the expanse of clutter in his room-written in every fiber of Johnny's being was the same agony l'd felt after the thunderstorm. 

He was trapped in the disaster of himself and couldn't find a way out. Seeing him sitting there, seeing myself sitting there, I realized that I'd never left that place. And suddenly, I felt like a fool. Like the biggest god damn fool on the god damn face of the god damn Earth. This is what Dr. Kenny had been trying to tell me. That I was a fool. I was such a fool that I had to laugh out loud.

"Jesus, Harry, did you come here to laugh at me?" Johnny's face was turning red.

"What? Oh, no, no. I was thinking of something someone said to me a long time ago, after the lightning strike. His posture relaxed. He waited for me to continue.

"Do you know anything about Chinese butterflies?" I don't know if I did Lucky's story justice, or if it helped, but it was enough of a distraction to allow. Johnny to loosen up. He asked me questions about the day Lucky came to see me, and for the first time in a long time, we just talked, like we used to, before, well, before everything.

After a while there was a break in the conversation, so I steeled my nerve and said, "Johnny, I saw Cheyenne" At the mention of Chey's name the temperature in the room dropped fifteen degrees, Johnny looked darts at me. "What about Chey." he said.

My first thought was that he somehow knew that she and I had kissed, but I couldn't imagine how so I pressed on. "She thinks you hate her."

"Good."