The Accident

("Postcards from Nowhere")

My day off was odd and disappointing, but it served to make work worse, too. I'd become programmed, I guess, unable to do anything else and hating what I was doing. Was this what prepared us for life I wondered?

The construction site was beginning to look like a hotel. Oddly, the rooms were being dropped in by cranes, prefabricated, whole. The modular units looked strange and plastic, but floor by floor, day after day, a hotel was being trucked in. It was like building with large toys. But there were lots of mistakes. Cement floors were poured before the plumbers put in the pipes and had to be torn up. Walls were closed before the electricians were finished. The project fell further and further behind schedule and everyone was feeling the rush.

One day we were told to move a big pile of metal beams. Laborers were brought over to move them by hand. They were long, heavy beams and we stood around a moment trying to figure things out. We formed a row and put our hands to a beam and began to lift. It was too heavy and unbalanced and several men let go and jumped back. I didn't and strained fruitlessly to hold up my section. The beam fell to the ground trapping the fingers of my right hand under it, and immediately I made a desperate pull to free them. When they came out, the skin at the end of the nails had ruptured and blood and flesh and something else dangled in odd lumps from them. Gingerly and helplessly, I held my right wrist with my left hand and wide-eyed in panic looked around. I turned to a fellow next to me and said,"I think I need a doctor." And with disdain, the bastard turned away saying, "Then I guess you'd better get one, hadn't you." The son of a bitch had a slight grin on his face. It had happened to the hippie.

Donny's father sent word up to get Tommy. I sat on the floor leaning against a wall feeling sick, things pitching and heaving in slow waves about me. I heard voices without listening to them, thinking about my crushed fingers and nothing else. When Tommy got there, we went down the elevator, across the muddy lot, and got into my car. The numbness was leaving my fingertips now and they were really beginning to hurt. I wanted to puke.

But what can you do? Tommy drove me along familiar roads on the way to a medical clinic where all the injured workers were taken. "Well," I said, "I guess I won't be playing guitar any more."

The doctor who saw me gave me some pain medicine and cleaned my fingers. Two of them were crushed, he said, but they would heal. I may lose feeling in them, though, he said, but it might come back in time.

That night at home, I got a call from a fellow who worked for U.S. Steel. He asked me what the doctor had told me. He said not to come to work for the rest of the week. No shit, Sherlock, I thought.

When my father got home, he was angry. Why in the hell was I trying to pick up a beam, he wanted to know.

I kept thinking about the son of a bitch who hadn't cared that I was hurt. What sort of man was he, I wondered? I didn't remember having ever seen him before. I had never done anything to him. But he didn't like me at all. He sure didn't, and it was wrong. I felt that as deeply as the pain in my fingers. The expression on his face, the tone in his voice. I couldn't shake them.

That night, lying on the couch, I thought about Abby's apartment, the fabrics and the fragrances. I thought about her hair and the curve of her pale neck, and I thought about the rise of her breast beneath her thin white top. I wanted to call her and tell her I'd been injured. I wanted to lie on her bed and listen to music.

It was hot in the cracker box house, too hot to sleep. I lay there in a daze, sweating, the pain in my fingers coming in waves through the medicine the doctor had prescribed. Lingering on the borderland of consciousness, I thought that it had been a pretty shitty day.