“Now the only thing that made it possible for the operators of the hot dog machine to work so closely with the grabbing metal fingers was that the prongs never touched the pans. They would scrape within two inches of the pan – never closer. An experienced operator could nudge a bun back into place even as a prong was swinging in to get it because the operator knew he had those two inches to work with. Never, never, would he let his fingers stray more than that distance above the pan.
“John was experienced. He had the reflexes of a cat. He knew his exact margin of error. He knew it in his sleep. He knew it blindfolded. He reached out to flick the bun into place just as he looked up and winked at Tyler and his pals. The machine had been on a full ten minutes and this was the first time he had to do anything. He had proved his point. He had the brains, it was obvious. The bakery job was just a stepping-stone for him. He was headed for bigger and better things, while a guy like Tyler was going to be in the bakery twenty years from now, still smelling like the Pillsbury Doughboy and still boasting to a bunch of people with cinnamon rolls for brains how he had improved the efficiency of the plant thirty per cent.
“But John picked a bad time to look up. His margin of error – those precious two inches – weren’t there that day. The metal fingers swept down, and although they didn’t scrape the pan, they came mighty close. You might ask, why didn’t John notice the prongs were cutting it unnaturally tight? The answer is he should have noticed, but he was too busy gloating about how silly he was making Tyler look. To give him some credit, though, the metal fingers moved like a blur. It was possible he wouldn't have noticed they had been lowered unless the machine had been turned off and each arm was manually swung through its range of motion. John was never to know for sure.
“The metal prong grabbed him. It got hold of his index and middle fingers. At first John felt the catastrophe as nothing more than a hard yank on his right hand. He felt little immediate pain – physically that is. But when he looked down, and saw that two of his fingers had been torn off, he almost fainted.
“He went into shock and it was a pity. Because had he been able to keep his wits he probably would have been able to collect his fingers. Then a skilled surgeon could have sewn them back on, and who knows? They might have worked. He might have been able to play guitar with them – piano. Medical science can work wonders. But John was never given that chance. The prongs had grabbed his fingers and stuffed them in with the hot dog buns. They disappeared into the tunnel of the long fiery oven as John’s blood gushed on to the floor. John just watched them disappear. The sight of half his hand missing was too much for him.
“The others ran to his aid. Tyler was the first at his side. The man grabbed a small white towel – he seemed to have one ready in his pocket – and wrapped up John’s right hand. The towel turned red in an instant. John was bleeding bad. He had lost not only two fingers, but a portion of his actual hand. A big vein was open and squirting. Tyler hurried him to his office, practically carrying him, and an ambulance was called. While waiting for the paramedics, Tyler applied a tourniquet to John’s wrist. The bleeding began to slow down. If Tyler hadn't been there, John might have died. In a sense Tyler saved his life. What a swell guy.
“The doctors operated on John for over four hours. He didn’t wake up until the next day. His hand was in a cast. It felt as if it was on fire, as if the two fingers that had gone into the oven were still attached, cooking his flesh to cinders. Later he learned that his fingers emerged from the far side of the oven, each wrapped in a fresh hot dog bun. Two women on duty saw them and one of them fainted. Of course, after the fingers were cooked, they weren’t worth sewing on.
“John was in the hospital five days and it must have been the third day before he figured out what had happened. Tyler had lowered the metal fingers – it was the only logical explanation. Tyler had disfigured him on purpose, all because John had embarrassed him when Tyler had taken credit for something he hadn’t done. John couldn't get over the immense unfairness of it. It was like the incident with Mr. Sims. He had just been helping his girl get a good grade and he was sent to juvenile hall and barred from a decent college. He had just been trying to improve production at the bakery and now he was crippled for life. John had no illusions about making a full recovery from his injury, although his doctors kept telling him he had to keep a positive mental attitude. ‘Does a guillotine victim have to keep a positive mental attitude?’ he shouted at them. What did it matter when your head was rolling in the basket. What was gone was gone.
“But John wanted revenge. It was all he could think about. But because he gave it so much thought, he started after it in the right way. He didn't just go after Tyler with a gun. John hired a lawyer when he got out of the hospital, who agreed to help him for a third of the anticipated settlement. That there would be a large settlement seemed likely. John had been hurt at work by a machine that was acknowledged to be dangerous. But John wasn't just after money. He intended to put Tyler in jail. He believed he could prove that Tyler had purposely lowered the metal fingers. He filed two lawsuits, one civil, the other criminal. He asked for a million dollars in damages, a nice round number.
“The matter went to trial, with a judge and jury. The criminal trial came first. The civil trial was supposed to come later, but not too much later. The civil trial would be a mere formality if the criminal trial went well for John. In fact, it would probably be unnecessary. The company would pay up and Tyler would be sent to jail.
“But the judge made a weird decision before the trial began. He agreed to allow John's previous history of teacher beating and juvenile hall time as evidence. It was a ridiculous thing for the judge to do, but more common in those days than now. Naturally Tyler knew of John’s past. John had told him about it when they were friends. Who appeared at the trial but the lovable Mr. Sims. John's lawyer, who was as inept as the lawyer who had represented him before he was sent to juvenile hall, couldn’t get the court to focus on what had happened to John’s hand. He spent most of his time defending John from personal attacks of being violent and paranoid. John didn’t help matters by jumping up three times during the trial and screaming at Sims and Tyler. John was found in contempt of court and had to spend a night in jail without his pain medication.
“John had been discharged from the hospital already addicted to morphine and codeine. If he didn't take the drugs, the pain was unbearable. The injury had caused extensive nerve damage – there are an unbelievable number of nerves in the hands. He couldn’t sleep without drugs. He couldn’t think or even breathe properly. Each time his pills wore off, he’d break into a cold sweat. Just the thought of the pain was enough to terrify him. He was a walking drugstore, a junkie with a doctor’s prescription. He felt like an old man and he was only nineteen.
“John lost. Tyler got off. John had plenty of evidence, but he couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Tyler had lowered the prongs. Certainly, they were in the proper place when the police examined them three days after the accident. John was also hurt by the fact that he had to admit tampering with the machinery without permission. No one cared that his tampering could have saved the company lots of money. It was even insinuated that his adjustment of the conveyor belt had something to do with his losing his fingers.
“When John’s lawyer lost the first round, he wasn't interested in pursuing the second. John had to hustle to look for another lawyer, but couldn't find one. The bakery company offered to settle with him – ten thousand dollars if he would just sign a piece of paper – but to John that was a mere pittance. He told them to take a hike. He had been crippled. He’d never be able to hold a normal job again. They owed him a million. They owed him justice. They owed him something for God’s sake.
“But all he received was pain. It's a wicked life – the life of constant pain. Some say emotional pain is worse, but those same people usually have nothing physically wrong with them. It was hard to say which was more difficult for John, the days or the nights
. Each day it was hard to do the simplest of things – like getting dressed or opening a can or a bottle. Then he had to cope with the fact that he had a deformity that people stared at. That was particularly hard for John because he took pride in his looks. He’d go into a store and people would follow him with their eyes. Even when they weren’t following him, he thought they were. If he hadn’t been paranoid before, he was now. His self-esteem was wrecked. He couldn't even flirt with a girl anymore. He worried that when he did see Candy again, she'd find him repulsive. He got so he never went outside without bandaging up his right hand, even when he no longer needed the bandages.
“Nights were equally hard. The effect of his pills only lasted three hours at most. He could never sleep the night through without getting up to take something. It was rare when he slept more than three hours. He’d turn over the wrong way and brush his hand and it would be enough to send pain shooting up his arm. Sometimes he didn’t even have to move. He’d just lie there and the hand would throb – the severed fingers would, too, and they weren’t even there anymore. Talk about phantom pain. John had demon pain. It was as if something had possessed him. He would lie flat on his back at night, sweat, and think about how his life had gone so wrong. That was all he thought about.
“He was on disability for a while but that ran out. Then he was broke. His case against the bakery began to drag on. When they realized he had no legal representation, they withdrew their offer of ten thousand dollars. Now he needed to sue them to get money out of them, but he couldn't afford to sue. He still couldn’t find a lawyer. Part of the reason was his temper. He would walk into a lawyer’s office and immediately start raving about how unfair the whole world was. The lawyers thought they could never put this guy up on the stand – he would bury himself.
“He tried getting another job but couldn’t find one. He had no real skills, except as a mechanic, and with his injury that was out of the question now. He couldn’t even work in an office. He couldn’t write left-handed, or even open an envelope. But, once more, he was his own worst enemy while he was trying to find new employment. He didn’t get a job because he didn’t want one. Because he wasn’t sleeping right, he was too tired to work. All he really wanted to do was sit around and read and watch TV and take pills.
“He was taking more pills than ever. He had given up on the codeine. Morphine was the only thing that put him in the space he wanted to be in. Ten one-gram pills a day – a lot of opiate flowing through the old veins. The morphine didn’t exactly improve his energy level. He would sit most days like a rock, never exercising, and eating only junk food. But he didn’t gain weight. On the contrary, he turned into a rail. Nerves can do that, damaged nerves. He went to a pain specialist, who took his last few dollars. All the guy could tell him was that he’d have to learn to live with it. The doctor also thought John was exaggerating when he said how much it hurt. John prayed he could give the pain to someone else, like Sims or Tyler. Had the devil approached him with a deal right then, John would have signed on the dotted line without reading the fine print. He would have done anything to feel normal again.
“If it’s a drag being sick or injured, it’s doubly bad being broke and sick. John didn’t have money to pay his rent or buy groceries. He didn’t get aid from a single government agency because he wasn’t good at filling out forms, and was worse at waiting for people to get back to him. He was heading for a critical point. Two things converged on him at once. He spent his last dollar just as his personal physician decided it was time he quit taking morphine.
“Now John’s doctor was right about one thing. John had become an addict. But his doctor was like the pain specialist. He thought a lot of the reason John took so many pills was because he liked what they did to his head. He refused to renew John’s prescription for morphine and only wrote him a prescription for Tylenol and codeine, which was like giving a soldier a BB gun after he’d been used to an M16. John’s enemy was pain and now he had nothing to fight it with. Nothing legal.
“John turned to street drugs, and those cost. Until then, he had never stolen a thing in his life. But his situation left him no choice, he thought. He felt robbed of his dignity.
“He sat in his crummy apartment and made plans. He was clever – a good planner. He figured the best way to get money was from inanimate machines that couldn’t fight back or identify him. He knew a lot about machines – soda machines, candy machines, cigarette machines – how to get inside them. He bought himself equipment with a bum check: a portable power drill, a crowbar, a set of screwdrivers, and an adjustable wrench. He also got a hammer. Every thief needs a hammer.
“Then began his nights of prowling the streets. In many ways it was better than staying home alone with his pain. When he was doing a job, with the adrenaline pumping, he would actually forget the pain. In those moments, when the quarters came gushing out, he would feel satisfaction, a release from what he had been put through.
“Something else gave him release in those days. Morphine’s stronger cousin – heroin. It was hard getting morphine on the streets, but there was plenty of smack. John waited a while before trying it, knowing in his heart it might be something he couldn’t control, but also knowing the white powder was just waiting for him, like an exotic prostitute, who gave undreamed of pleasure, but who always kept her blade nearby – to insure prompt collection for her services. Ah, heroin, the king of all drugs. At first he just snorted it, and the relief it brought was extraordinary. But soon he was boiling it up in a silver spoon and skin popping it with needles a doctor wouldn’t have stored in his black bag. The high was wonderful. For a while John felt as if he had found a true friend.
“Yet even at the start he realized how demanding this friend was. If you didn’t give him money, he never visited, and if he stayed away too long it was not only the pain that came, but nausea and cramps – the familiar companions of withdrawal. I said before John was a junkie. Now he was a strung-out criminal. The spiral kept spinning, and for him it could only spin downwards. Yet he still had a way to go before he hit bottom.”
Free fell silent. Once more Teresa felt disappointed as the tale halted. Still, Free spoke of John as if from a distance, uninvolved. Yet, paradoxically, there was great passion in the choice of words Free used to describe John’s adventures. It was as if he were telling the story on two levels simultaneously. One level for each of his listeners, perhaps, Teresa thought.
“I’d like to hear what happened next,” Teresa ventured.
Free glanced over at her. “I think we should stop soon, get a bite to eat,” he said.
They had been on the road slightly over three hours. She had gasoline left, a quarter of a tank, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to fill up. She wasn’t particularly hungry, though.
“Where would you like to stop?” she asked.
“A Seven-Eleven maybe,” Poppy said from the back seat. “An AM PM Mart. A Stop ’N’ Go.” She hadn’t made a sound while Free had talked. She hadn’t even moved.
Free slowly smiled at her suggestion.
“My favourites,” he said.
“I don’t mind stopping,” Teresa said. Free just nodded. She added, “Did John end up back in jail?”
“No,” Free said.
“When did he see Candy again?” she asked.
“Poppy told you,” Free said. “On a dark and stormy night.”
“Was it much later?” Teresa asked.
Free showed impatience. “Much later than what? Than when he started taking heroin? Than when Candy had her baby? Those are all relative events, it’s true, but they're not necessarily relative to each other. Time doesn't always move in the same straight line for everybody. When you're in pain time moves real slow. John was in constant pain. Time for him was walking up a steep hill.”
“Candy wasn’t exactly coasting along on a bicycle,” Poppy quipped.
Free turned round. “You're the one who said how happy she was after she had her kid.”
“I said ho
w much she loved her little boy,” Poppy said. “You can have love and still have plenty of pain. I’d say they usually go together.”
Free wasn’t interested in continuing the argument.
He turned back to face front and put his hand on Teresa’s leg. His fingers were warm now; she felt the warmth through her trouser leg. Or maybe it was his electricity entering her body, his magnetism. There was no denying it, sitting beside him, listening to him, she found him more and more attractive. Clearly, he was not romantically involved with Poppy. If he was they had the weirdest relationship she had ever seen. Free smiled at her.
“I want to hear the rest of your story,” he said. “Everything that happened to you and Bill.”
The way he put emphasis on the word everything made her uneasy but she rolled with it. It wasn’t as if she had anything to be ashamed of, she thought. She had every intention of telling them everything that happened, at least everything she could remember.
But it was only tonight. Of course I can remember tonight.
Teresa reached up and scratched her head, feeling once again how clammy her skin was, how hot she was. It was her illness – that was why her memory was off a little. So she couldn't say exactly what had happened just before she left. It would come to her as she talked, and if it didn't, what was the harm? She had enough facts to convince them that Bill was a bastard and that Rene was a bitch.
“I thought you wanted to eat first,” Teresa said.
“I do,” Free said. “Then it’s your turn to talk. Then we’ll stop and visit my mom.” He grinned again. “You’ll like my mom. She lives in a big stone house by the sea. She can read fortunes.”