Lawn Boy(40)

“Good thing you’re such a crappy shot,” I said to the cop as he walked back to the cruiser.

“What was that?”

“He didn’t say nothin’,” said Freddy.

In the car, Freddy berated me, mostly with silence but with a little mumbling, too. “Pfff . . . plain stupid . . . damn lucky to drive away from that mess. . . .”





Big Mac Attack We were twenty minutes late to Nate’s doctor’s appointment, but it didn’t matter, they would never have been ready for us, anyway. As ever, the waiting room was packed. I don’t know what medical care looks like for the wealthy, but let’s talk about the waiting room at Nate’s doctor. You never see a guy in a polo shirt or a kid with braces or a girl in ballet shoes in there. No, it’s always the miserable hordes, the morbidly obese, trundling oxygen carts. Diabetics in sweatpants. Bent old ladies with cat hair on the butt of their pants. There’s always at least one person in a surgical mask with a relentless, rattling cough. And usually a kid with Down’s, talking even louder than Nate.


A Mexican girl, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, nursed her dark-haired baby while a toddler lolled around at her feet and a dirty-faced boy of about three perched in the chair next to her, sucking on his finger. He had the dull-eyed, complacent look of somebody who’s undernourished. Sometimes when I see a kid like that, I try to imagine what his life is going to look like in thirty years. Will he shape himself? Will he become a doctor or a lawyer? Or will he be shaped, bent, and molded by the external pressures of poverty and injustice? I think you can probably guess the answer to that one.

After about an hour, a squat lady in purple scrubs called out Nate’s name.

“You want I should take him?” said Freddy.

“I got it,” I said.

Scrubs led us down the corridor. She needed to weigh Nate, so I coaxed him up on the scale, where she had to move the top counterweight as far to the right as it would go. She jimmied the bottom weight until the arm achieved balance. Nate weighed 305—just like the highway. After she marked it down on her clipboard, Scrubs led us to a room down the hall and instructed Nate to sit on the edge of the exam table. Fastening the blood pressure apparatus to his arm, she pumped it up and released the air, looking slightly unnerved as she eyed the gauge. Immediately, she repeated the procedure and marked the results down on her clipboard.

“Any dizziness?” she asked Nate.

“Not that I know of,” I said on Nate’s behalf.

“You said shortness of breath?”

“Yeah, like he’s been exercising or something. Except he hasn’t been exercising.”

She made a note briskly on her pad. “Dr. McFarland will be with you shortly,” she said, hurrying out of the room.

Normally we’d be sitting there for a half hour, with me wishing I’d brought that issue of House Beautiful I was vaguely thumbing through in the waiting room, but today the doctor arrived almost immediately, looking every bit as tired as her patients. You could tell she was once athletic, before she started eating out of a vending machine and keeping bad hours.

“Hello, Nate,” she said, glancing at the chart. “I’m Dr. McFarland.”

“He’s kind of shy,” I said.

“Shallowness of breath?”

“Yeah, a couple of times. And he’s just seemed kind of listless the past week.”

She put a stethoscope to Nate’s chest and a thumb on the inside of his wrist, and staring at a fixed point on the wall, she listened to his pulse, silently counting.

“His blood pressure is a major cause for concern,” she said, glancing at the chart. “If we don’t manage it, we could be looking at some real complications. We need to make some lifestyle changes immediately. Like yesterday.”

The way she looked at me, the implications were inescapable. This was my fault. What the hell kind of brother was I? Nate was a child, incapable of making sound decisions. I was an adult. I should have monitored his diet. I should have kept him on an exercise regimen. I should have been coercing him all along, fighting him for his own good, no matter the inconvenience, no matter the black eyes, the errant saltshakers. But I took the path of least resistance. I accepted the fact that things would get worse for my brother. That’s old Mike Mu?oz for you: Take the easy way out. Accept the worst like it’s inevitable. It’s easier than changing the game, isn’t it? Why bother changing the game when you can just talk a big one: talk about writing novels and saving the world, but at the end of the day, you’re just plying your special-needs brother with cheeseburgers and Oreos and phoning in the rest.

We left with two prescriptions, about twenty pages of literature on high blood pressure and one very guilty conscience. The minute we climbed back into the Tercel, Nate had a Big Mac attack.





Los de Abajo The following day, I dropped off an application at the new Rite Aid on 305, then wandered down the hill to downtown Poulsbo to kill some time. When I got to Front and Jensen, I found Andrew the librarian standing there with a clipboard, collecting signatures. He was wearing a pea-green cardigan sweater with big brass buttons over a homemade T-shirt that said ACT!


I had to hand it to Andrew, the guy took initiative. He was socially engaged, highly motivated, and unwavering in his convictions. Pretty much everything I wasn’t.