The Homecoming (Thunder Point #6)(21)

The following weekend it was time for him to head to Seattle to visit his friend Oscar Spellman. He was driving up on Friday afternoon, would spend Saturday with Oscar and return to his home in Bandon on Sunday, ready to take on Thunder Point on Monday morning. The timing for a long drive alone in the car couldn’t be better.

Friday night was clear and the weekend was sunny, not so unusual on the coast of Oregon in October but in Washington it was a treat. All the way up the freeway he’d been thinking. Remorse is a lot of hard work and boy, had he done a lot of hard work.

He’d been drafted by the Seahawks when he was in his first year of college. He heard they’d been surprised to find him available, but they wanted him before he got hurt because he was fast and strong and there was a very good chance he’d make them money. He got himself an agent to negotiate a good deal. His first pro year, during which he’d played a little bit, he made four hundred thousand dollars, all of which he spent on taxes and a late-model Ferrari sports car. Considering he’d never driven anything but his dad’s old clunker truck, he really thought he was somebody. And one night, right before training camp for the Seahawks started, he took his new car out for a long drive along some Washington back roads. A miserable old Chevy sedan blew through a stoplight in front of Seth and Seth couldn’t stop. He tried to avoid a collision but his car basically T-boned that old Chevy.

That was Oscar.

It was determined that Oscar had fallen asleep at the wheel after working a double shift at a manufacturing plant near Seattle. He was a forty-five-year-old machinist with a wife, Flora, and two kids. There had been two witnesses stopped at the same crossroad who could validate it. Oscar had been responsible for the accident. But Seth had been going eighty in a fifty-five zone. Ironically, he had just slowed down around the curve. He’d probably been doing ninety, maybe more. He was cited for speeding.

Both drivers were rushed to the hospital after being cut out of their cars. Seth hit Oscar’s car on the driver’s side. Seth and Oscar were both gravely injured, but Seth recovered. It took a long time, several surgeries and a lot of determination, but Seth pounded his way through the worst of it. Oscar’s spinal cord was severed.

About a year after the accident lawyers for Oscar Spellman filed a civil suit alleging that the injuries to Oscar would not have been as catastrophic if Seth had been traveling at the speed limit, if he had exercised caution while entering the intersection. All Seth had left was his signing bonus, but it was huge to a kid from Thunder Point...or a crippled black man and his family from Seattle. Seth’s league insurance had paid for his hospitalization and rehab, but Oscar, a husband and father, was going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, unable to work, without the use of his limbs, without income. And all for the thrill of seeing how fast that little silver car could go.

“Don’t worry. We can win this,” Seth’s lawyer had said.

But that wasn’t a concern for Seth. “I don’t want to win it.”

He’d lost his education, his career, his savings, his potential to play sports all in one split second. All for a stupid mistake.

He’d visited Oscar for the first time about a year after the lawsuit. Seth was still walking with a cane, the scar on his face still bright pink. The first half-dozen visits had been really short and awkward, but then Oscar started to just sigh deeply whenever Seth appeared. “What the hell you doin’ back here, boy? Like I ain’t got enough trouble in my life?” he’d say.

Over time, Oscar regained the use of his left arm and hand. It was clumsy and not very strong or reliable, but he could feed himself and he could play checkers. He was a smart man and Seth taught him to play chess. Oscar had more time to learn about the game and practice than Seth did so the challenges became pretty one-sided with Oscar on the winning side.

“At least you have your mind,” Seth said. “Ever think of being grateful for that?”

“Ever think it might be a curse?” Oscar replied.

For the past dozen years Seth had been dropping in on Oscar and Flora every other month or so. He went to the graduations of Oscar’s kids and held a new grandchild. Seth always called ahead to make sure they weren’t having friends or family in. He didn’t want to be in the way. Oscar was sixty now and his health was rocky; just being confined to a wheelchair meant all kinds of medical problems chased him. He occupied the same motorized wheelchair with a neck brace that he’d been riding around in for years, but his kids and his church had fixed him up with some computer equipment so he could study, read, learn everything under the sun he wanted to know. With the fingers of his one good limb he could write and he had developed a whole network of friends outside the walls of his home.

Flora opened the door to Seth on Saturday morning. She’d mellowed a little over time and she’d grown beautiful in her maturity. She had help tending to Oscar from her son and daughter, and a nurse’s aide visited regularly to bathe him and exercise his limbs. Flora’s life was challenging but it wasn’t a torture of hard labor. It was safe to leave Oscar for a few hours at a time and she could take him places sometimes. When she saw Seth she smiled at him and he admired her handsome face. She was also sixty, but her face was smooth and unwrinkled. She kept her hair very short and black; she was trim and muscular, a vision both admirable and unfortunate to him. She had to work hard every day of her life.

She hugged him. “How you doin’, son?” she asked, her arms holding him sweetly.