The Mothers(37)

He was heading back inside when he saw the Cobras. Finch and Ritter and Gorman and five others, all coming down the alley.

“Yo assholes,” he said, “I can’t get all of you free beer, so don’t even ask.”

He knew something was wrong when no one laughed or insulted him back.

Years ago, Luke would’ve been fast enough to duck inside the restaurant. But before he could even turn, he caught Finch’s right hook. He blacked out before the Cobras started stomping on his leg.





SEVEN


In rehab, Luke learned to walk again.

Not all at once, but slowly. He spent his first two weeks pushing a walker down the four halls of his floor. He learned the halls intimately, like a policeman memorizing his beat: the mint green checkered linoleum, the nurses’ station, the corner where old women knitted and gossiped. He dragged himself down the halls, stunned each morning by how difficult a simple action could be, the placing of one foot in front of the other. He now had a titanium rod screwed in his leg, from his knee to his ankle, which would remain there for the rest of his life. He would set off plenty of metal detectors, the surgeon had told him, but someday, he’d be able to walk again. For now, he had to work on strengthening his ankle, bending his swollen knee, developing his quad and hamstring. He slid his foot forward, straining to place the heel down, then the toe, while his rehabilitation aide Carlos followed, just in case he fell. Carlos’s father was Colombian, his mother Nicaraguan, but everyone called him a Mexican.

“Always a Mexican,” he said. “They ask me, ‘Ay Carlos, why don’t you fix us up some tacos?’ I don’t know nothing about no fucking tacos. Go fix me some tacos, you like the goddamn things so much.”

It was true. When Luke had first checked in, a nurse told him that the aide assigned to him was Carlos, the Mexican guy.

“You’ll like him,” she said, “he’s real funny. Little guy but he’s strong. Those are always the strongest ones, the little guys.”

Carlos was barely five-five, broad-shouldered and stout. He used to be a personal trainer at a gym. Luke had always thought of trainers as yoked men with muscles bulging out of their tank tops, but Carlos looked more like the type you might trust if you were a fat housewife looking to lose a few pounds. He was tough but encouraging. He lectured Luke about taking his pills, all of them, even if he didn’t feel like it, the antibiotics to prevent infection, the aspirin to stop blood-clotting, the pain medicine. He helped Luke stretch on the table, massaging his leg first with aloe vera lotion. Luke was used to trainers rubbing down sore muscles, easing out cramps, or taping sprained ankles, but that was in the locker room. He felt awkward, splayed on a table in an exercise room, another man rubbing lotion onto his skin. Maybe Carlos was gay. Why else would a guy take a job where he had to lotion other guys? But Luke never said anything because Carlos’s massages felt good. The tissue damage went deep.

“Christ, those guys really hated your guts,” Carlos said. “They didn’t want you to ever walk again.”

Luke had never told his parents that the Cobras had jumped him. It’d be one thing if he had slept with Cherry—he would’ve accepted his punishment then like a man—but to be jumped for seeking her friendship seemed too shameful to admit. Besides, his parents would only tell him that they had been right about the team all along. So he’d told them that some guys had tried to mug him, and no, he hadn’t seen their faces.

On the overhead television, Carlos played fútbol matches while Luke did his daily exercises; panting, leaning against the wall, Luke followed the tiny ball across the ocean of grass. He’d always found soccer boring, but he grew to like the nonstop pace, the constant movement, the flashy celebrations. Maybe he would’ve been good at soccer. Maybe he could’ve found a sport to love that wouldn’t have destroyed his body.

“You used to be a big man,” Carlos said. “You ain’t anymore. Gotta accept that. It’s okay to not be a big man. It’s enough to be a good one.”

It didn’t matter who you’d been out in the world. In rehab, you were just like everyone else, struggling to gain control of your body. Luke was the youngest person in the center. Most of the patients were elderly; in wheelchairs, they scooted down the hall with their feet, like children who’d outgrown their strollers. Between therapy sessions, Luke liked to sit in the hallway and play cards with the old men. Stroke victims, most of them. His favorite was Bill, a retired jailer from Los Angeles.

“I grew up in Ladera Heights,” Bill told him. “Back when it used to be black. You can’t even go in there now. Got taken over by all those—” He dropped his voice, pointing at Carlos walking down the hall. Mexicans.

Bill had fought in the Korean War but he’d ended up at the rehab center after tripping on the sidewalk and breaking his hip. The man had survived war and prisoner riots, only to be brought down by upraised pavement. He wasn’t married. He had been—three times before—so he was the marrying type, just not the stay-married type. He’d always been a ladies’ man—Luke spotted him flirting with the nurses, holding their hands as they wheeled him down the hall, sweet-talking them for an extra cookie after dinner. Luke used to think he might be that type of man, the kind who never settled down, but what good did that do you when you were eighty and alone at a rehab center?