The Ward of New Kettering

By four o’clock the asphalt on Route 9 had gone soft enough to keep a shoe print, and the cicadas in the two surviving maples outside the laundromat had not let up in a week. The light at Hillside was red. It was always red. Three young men stood in the shade those maples threw, smoking, waiting on it. “Question,” Arno said, around the cigarette in his teeth. “How does a blind guy cross a street?” Dex took it seriously. “Guide dog. Or somebody walks him. Or the light talks to him — they’ve got the ones that talk, over on Ninth.” “He’s on Route 9.” “Then a dog. Or a person. Or he taps.” Dex dragged on the cigarette and let it out. “Cane out front, sounds off the curb, one step at a time. That’s how they do it.” “Except there’s no dog,” Arno said. “There’s no talking light. And the cane’s up on his shoulder holding a gallon of oil.” “…Are you being funny right now?” “Look.” Across the intersection, on the far corner, a boy in a black T-shirt stood with his weight on one hip. Black cloth was wound around his head — four turns, maybe five, thick enough that nothing was getting in and nothing was getting out. A white cane lay across the back of his neck like a yoke, and the handle of a gallon jug of cooking oil was hooked over its far tip, the plastic yellow enough to see from a block away, lit up by the sun like a jug in an ad. His shoulder took the weight of it. In his left hand was a doubled-up grocery bag with green onions and a box of cereal sticking out of the top. Cloth over the eyes. Cane on the shoulder. Vegetables on one side, oil on the other. The two women at the bus stop had stopped talking about whatever they had been talking about. “Nobody wears a blindfold anymore,” one of them said. “Everybody’s got the sunglasses now. You can get them at the drugstore.” “In this heat? He’s going to cook in that.” “Say what you want about it. That’s commitment.” The light went yellow, then red the other way, and the cross signal came on. The boy hadn’t moved. His head was up and level, facing nothing in particular. Then a girl came up the sidewalk on the far side, twelve or thirteen, in a school polo two sizes too big, a backpack pulling one shoulder down. She stopped a few feet off, the way kids do when they’ve decided to do something and haven’t yet decided to say it. “Um. Do you want help? Crossing?” The boy turned his head toward her voice, and the corner of his mouth moved. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” He switched the grocery bag to his right hand and wiped his left palm down the side of his shorts, once, twice, before he held it out. She took it. The signal started its chirp. She checked left, then right, then left again, and set off. He walked beside her, steady, at her pace and a little ahead of it. From the corner it looked less like a girl walking a blind man across than a kid being walked to school. Halfway over she said, “It’s okay. We’re good. We’re good,” and his head came around to her voice and he smiled down at her. They reached the other side in fifteen seconds. He let go of her hand. “Thank you,” he said, and walked off down the alley beside the laundromat, and did not turn around. The girl stood there with her hand still a little out in front of her, then pulled it back and ran to catch the light. “He’s not blind,” Arno said. Dex squinted. “He could be—” “He can see. I’d put a week’s pay on it.” Arno dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “He was walking straight at the paint. She was the one checking traffic.” “He’s doing a bit,” Dex said. “I bet you it’s a bit. Like that guy. The blind guy in the—” He made a shape in the air with both hands. “You know the one.” Arno hit him in the back of the head, one clean shot, and Dex said *ow* and rubbed it. “It’s ninety-one degrees,” Arno said, “and you think a man’s out here on Route 9 doing a bit.” He fished for another cigarette and didn’t find one. “And that guy’s mask is red, genius. Red. That’s the entire point of him.” “You know what color the mask is, but I’m the—” “Shut up.” “Okay.” Behind them, Rudy hadn’t said anything. He had his arms folded and his chin down, and he was watching the alley the boy had gone into. “What,” Arno said. “I know him.” “Know him how.” Rudy took a while. “My cousin went to Lincoln Elementary. Third grade, fourth, that year. There was a kid at that school. Something happened to him.” He nodded at the alley. “To his eyes. And there was the other thing. He had problems.” “Problems.” “His head. The doctor kind.” Rudy shrugged one shoulder. “That’s how it got said.” “He seemed all right to me,” Arno said. “It was ten years ago. Maybe he’s all right now. But it was a whole thing back then. He was out of that school inside a week. After that he went to one of the schools. For blind kids. Somewhere over in Delton.” Dex flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter. “What happened to him? Like what was the accident.” “I don’t know.” “Come on. Something takes out your eyes and your head? That’s not a car.” “No,” Rudy said. “It wasn’t a car.” He watched the alley a second longer. “I heard it was worse than that.” Dex opened his mouth and then closed it. Arno breathed out through his nose, slow. “What’s his name.” Rudy thought about it, and then it came to him. “Adrian. Adrian Voss.” *** The back door of the house on Hillside was old and out of square, and it made a noise when you pushed it, and the noise got lost, because the smell came through first. Onions. Hot oil. Paprika. Something with vinegar in it. Adrian got the door open with his shoulder and stood in it a second with his mouth watering. “Ade.” Aunt Dana came out of the kitchen with a dish towel over one shoulder, wiping her hands on her apron, and stopped when she saw him. “You could’ve made two trips.” “Better than two trips.” “That’s a gallon.” “It’s cheaper by the gallon.” She took the jug out of the cane’s handle with both hands and set it on the counter like it was something that might go off. Then she turned it a quarter turn so the label faced front, and looked at the label. “This is the name brand.” Her thumb went over the plastic where the dust had settled on it from the walk up, and she rubbed it clean, slowly, and stopped rubbing. “Ade. You used the check.” “That’s what the check is for.” “That money is for school.” “I used some of it. I’ve got the rest.” “Some of it.” She set the towel down. “I work second shift. That’s enough to feed the three of us. That’s what the shift is for. I’ve told you that.” “You’ve told me.” “So don’t—” She stopped, and picked the towel back up, and put it on her shoulder where it belonged. “Fine. Fine. It’s a good jug. It’ll last us to Christmas.” He set the grocery bag on the counter and she opened it and started taking things out and putting them in the cabinet in the order she took them out. “Wait,” she said. “Hold on. The hill. The cane, the bag, the jug — how did you get all that up here?” “Some people helped me.” “Just like that?” “Just like that.” She looked at him for a second, and then she nodded. “Well. Good. There’s still decent people left. Did you thank them?” “I thanked them.” “Properly? Not the little mumble you do.” “Properly.” “All right.” She rolled her right shoulder and tipped her chin up the way she did when her neck was bad, and went back to the stove. “Toby’s out on the porch. He’s supposed to be doing the math sheet, not the dog.” “Scrap’s not much of a math student.” “Scrap’s the smartest one in this house.” She turned the burner down. “Listen. A man came at four. From Halcyon.” Adrian put the cane in the corner by the door, where it went. “Estrada?” “No. Somebody new. Young one. He’s in your room with the fan on.” She stirred something. “I told him you’d be back by five. Go on and let him look at you, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.” He went down the hall. On the porch, through the screen, Toby was lying on his stomach on the boards with the math sheet under his elbow, pencil in his hand, his feet up and crossed at the ankle. Scrap was under the steps in the dirt, an old black-and-gray dog with bald patches on her hips, and she lifted her head and let it fall back down and her tail moved twice in the dust. Toby looked up. “You got the big one.” “I got the big one.” “Mom’s going to yell.” “She yelled.” “Did she yell a lot or a little?” “A little.” Toby nodded, satisfied, and went back to the math sheet. Scrap put her chin back on her paws. Adrian stopped at his own door. He knocked on it with two knuckles and waited, and a voice inside said, “Yeah — come in.” *** The room had a bed and a dresser and a desk, and a box fan in the window that had been running long enough that the air in the room had given up on being cool and settled for being moved. The man sitting on the folding chair by the desk stood up when the door opened. “Adrian. Hi. I’m Dr. Kessel.” He got a hand out and then seemed to think better of it, and then got it out again anyway. “Sorry. I didn’t— Hi.” Adrian shook it. The hand was dry and a little cold for August. “Halcyon State,” Kessel said. “I’m with Halcyon State.” He had thick black-framed glasses and a canvas bag on the floor with the file folder already out of it and open on the desk, a pen lying across the open page. “Mind if I sit?” “It’s your chair.” “Right.” Kessel sat, and the folding chair took him in with a creak. “So. Once a year somebody from the hospital comes out and checks in with you. This year it’s me, which means it’s my first year, which means I’ve read your file twice and I’m still going to ask you things that are in the file.” “Okay.” “I used to work with Dr. Estrada, actually. Before the—” He gestured at the ceiling. “He was promoted. Last fall.” “Vice director,” Adrian said. “That’s right. Yeah.” Something crossed Kessel’s face and got put away again. “He’s good. He earned it.” He cleared his throat and sat forward with his elbows on his knees. “So. Background. Full name?” “Adrian Voss.” “Age?” “Seventeen.” “Birthday?” “October fifth.” “Okay.” The pen came up. Ink went onto the paper. “The file says the sight went ten years ago, and that you were with us that same year. For—” the page turned; Kessel’s finger went down a column “—for some other things, at the same time.” “Yeah.” The fan turned its head toward the bed, then toward the window, then back. “Voss,” Kessel said. “That’s German?” “I don’t know.” “No. Right. Sorry.” He laughed at himself, a short one, mostly breath. “Bad habit. Ten years of files and I start asking things that aren’t on the page.” The pen tapped once and stopped. “Okay. The file doesn’t say what happened. The accident. The reason for the—” he moved his hand in a small circle, taking in the room, the cloth, the last ten years of it. “I’d like to hear it. From you. And I’m not asking to be nosy — the more I know about a patient, the better I can do for him. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m not going to sit here and make you.” Adrian sat on the edge of the bed with his hands loose in his lap. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he said. “It’s that you won’t believe it. And then you’ll write it down, and somebody reads it, and I’m back in that place for another year.” Kessel put the pen down. “Let’s take the doctor-and-patient thing off the table,” he said. “This is two guys talking in a hot room. That’s all this is. Nothing goes anywhere it shouldn’t.” He leaned back, and the chair complained again, and he half smiled, easy, the way a man smiles when he has said this four hundred times and means it every time. “I promise you. You could sit there and tell me you got taken up in a spaceship, and I’d write it down and we’d still be right here, having this conversation.” Adrian was quiet for a while. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I liked astronomy.” Kessel picked the pen back up. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” “I had a book. All the moons. I used to go out on the roof of the old house, the one we had before this one — the porch roof, it’s flat, you could get out the window onto it. And I’d lie there and look at the moon.” The fan went around. “And what did you see?” Kessel said. “Clouds? The man in the moon?” Adrian shook his head. He was sitting very still, and then his hands came up in front of him, about a foot apart, and held there. “No,” he said. “I saw an angel.” The pen did not move. “Six wings,” Adrian said. “All of them open. White. It was standing up there in the middle of the—” his hands turned, cupped, like he was holding a bowl “—in the middle of it. And it was gold. All of it. Everything around it, all the way out.” He lowered his hands. “A seraph,” he said. “Six wings. Wrapped up in light.” Kessel’s smile was still on his face. It had stopped where it was, halfway, and had not come off and had not gone any further, and the room was quiet except for the fan and, through the wall, the sound of a pan going down on the stove. “Ade!” Dana called from the kitchen. “It’s ready!” Neither of them moved. The pen was still up over the page, an inch above the paper. It did not come down.