The next night John stopped at a secondhand sporting goods store on the way to the hospital, where he bought himself hockey goalie gear and the longest stick he could find. When the clerk asked him if he needed skates, John fancied a brief image of himself padded and blade-footed, towering over the gymnasium rats and severing heads and tails with mighty, sword-like feet. But he quickly realized he would just as likely tumble from the skates and be gnawed to death, leaving behind a hockey-costumed corpse his wife would be left to explain.
Immediately following Larry’s eleven o’clock treatment, John suited up and wrapped his ankles, wrists, and neck in heavy lengths of duct tape to prevent rodents from crawling inside his several layers of clothes. Only after he sealed himself in and began to sweat did he realize that it might be wise to fire up the lights in the gym from the plug in Larry’s room and let the rats adjust to the intrusion of light for an hour or so before he went in.
John plugged in the extension cord to Larry’s room, then lowered himself stiffly into the chair beside his father’s bed. He sat in silence, suffocating inside the hockey gear while watching the minutes tick off slowly on the clock on the bed stand. This would have been a really confusing time for Larry Husted to wake up to see what his son was up to.
* * *
Half of the boxes housed rat nests, many containing bubble gum–pink babies and a mother really unhappy to have her brood menaced. The first lid that John disturbed burst open like a jack-in-the-box, the rat flying out and sinking its fangs into his chest protector and refusing to let loose no matter how much John clubbed himself with the hockey stick. After that, he learned to inspect each box for gnawed-out holes that indicated something living inside.
If the rats had taken over a box, the records inside were shredded and caked in decades worth of shit and piss. This simplified John’s quest as he skipped over the infested boxes. He decided to concentrate on files from the latter half of the seventies—after Larry’s rise to professional dominance began, before his work on the new hospital started to monopolize his time. If John found a box from those dates not full of vermin or black with mildew from years of water seepage, he’d carefully drag the box to the hall outside the gym. Despite grant writing projects starting to pile up, he knew he’d spend the next several nights seeing what was left of his father in those boxes.
* * *
The files were all frustratingly free of dramatic narrative. Meticulously noted numbers filled the forms—time of admission, body temperature, blood pressure, hourly notations of medications dispensed and urine passed—but it was hard to discern the story of the patient and the doctor. Nowhere—not once—was it recorded: “Dr. Husted burst into the room and, despite exhibiting a winsome air of regret at time not spent with his younger son, rolled up his sleeves to pull the patient back from the eternal chasm of death to the amazement of staff and the grateful embrace of humbled loved ones.”
Not every patient made it. John began girding himself as he moved from file to file, wondering if line 25 on the patient form—the time of death line—would be filled in above his father’s signature. John found eight deaths in the first box of files alone for which Larry was the attending physician.
Was eight a lot? John thought not, given the remarkable number of cases Larry probably took the lead on. The odds and the immutable appetite of mortality caught up to even the best doctors, but eight didn’t seem alarming. And maybe subsequent file boxes would see fewer die. Maybe John just happened to peer in on his father during a bad patch.
* * *
In the six cartons of records from 1975 to 1980, Larry Husted signed off on twenty-three patients who died in his care. Of those, John discarded most into a pile that indicated circumstances beyond his father’s control: car crash, gunshot wound, cardiac arrest. They were internal or external attacks on the body that did more damage than their doctor could rectify.
Of the twenty-three terminal cases, nine left questions. The dead were on the young side (five were children), and none had endured traumatic injury or system failure at the time of admission. Again, the medical terminology and alarmingly poor handwriting of the notetakers made certain that a layman like John would never make sense of what transpired.
Digging through Larry’s past would have just been a few nights’ diversion if not for one remaining file. It was much thicker than all the others, packed within a number of folders and bound as if intended for extensive reviewing. The powdery remains of a thick rubber band fell away as John retrieved the documents, and the top folder still had routing slips to the district attorney and Bob Schurmer, Larry’s friend and lawyer. The date of a subpoena was stamped imperiously in a corner.
The pages inside had notes scrawled between notes, now in the more precise handwriting of lawyers. Words like negligence and misdiagnosis were discernible amidst the legalese. Questions from attorneys joined the initial questions of the doctors, and these seemed to press for answers. And a determination of responsibility.
John sat at Larry’s bedside, looking from his silent father to the files closed tightly on his lap. And he began to read.