Larry was reading the newspaper that morning in 1985.
“Donald Duck has died,” Larry Husted observed to Walt Bolger, who raised a skeptical eyebrow. Walt was going over the chart of a difficult case he’d be seeing later that morning.
“The guy who did the voices in all the cartoons. He died,” Larry explained from behind the front page. “Clarence Nash. Leukemia. Eighty.”
“Hmm,” Walt mumbled.
“He made his first cartoon in 1932, and he retired just two years ago,” Larry read. “We save lives, and this guy goes into the office and talks like a duck. For fifty years. Think you can get rich doing that?”
Walt said nothing as the medical records before him absorbed him. Ignored, Larry turned the page on the obituary. “I liked Daffy Duck,” he shrugged.
Like most mornings, Larry and Walt shared a cup of coffee as they went over the newspaper before their rounds. Just the other day the paper had reported that a third artificial heart had been installed successfully in a man down in Kentucky, and now there was word that the owner of the second mechanical heart had just become the first to venture outside the hospital—for a whopping fifteen minutes.
These were days of miracles and marvel, but there was still no saving Donald Duck.
Larry’s nurse stuck her head into Walt’s office to tell Larry that his workday was due to commence. He rose from his chair in mock anger, doing a credible imitation of a grouchy cartoon duck as he headed back to his office. Walt shook his head at his friend with a familiar, bemused smile.
“I think I’ll talk like Donald Duck to my patients this morning,” Larry said. “I don’t think that would worry them at all.”
Walt finished his first file and opened the second when there was a commotion and the rustling of papers from the other side of the wall. Engrossed in the next case history, he didn’t give the noise much attention.
“You okay in there, Donald?”
* * *
By the time Walt’s wife, Marie, brought Rose to intensive care, Walt was gravely concerned by the initial assessment of Larry’s condition. He summoned a show of strength as he met Rose with a measured hug—not too long to foreshadow the worst, not too short to underplay the seriousness of the situation. It was not in him to tell Rose what he feared to be true as he led her to her husband’s bedside.
Larry looked peaceful, trapped in a nap that had quietly, violently short-circuited him. He hit his desk as he fell, and a gash under his left eye was crudely stitched and stained by drying blood.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice a trembled whisper.
“He had a stroke, honey,” Walt said. “We can’t tell yet how serious it is, but we’re concerned.”
He looked past Rose to Bart Ladmore, the neurologist on duty; his face was ashen as he studied Larry’s chart. Nurses who worked daily with Larry, who routinely rode out trauma events with professional detachment, hovered anxiously. It would be invisible to a civilian, but their wordless interplay confirmed for Walt that his friend was being swept away while they flailed impotently for lifelines that would all prove to be yards too short.
They all knew. Except Rose.
Walt took her hand. “We’re doing all we can. Bart has been on the phone to a neurologist in Chicago, one of the best in the country. He’s on his way. But right now, all we can do is monitor his condition and pray he has the strength to fight this.”
Rose gently pulled away from Walt and took Larry’s hand. She stroked his hair and concerned herself with the cut on his face.
“We’ll get this stitched up right,” she whispered to her husband. “I can’t be staring at a scar for the rest of our lives.”
* * *
John remembered coming home that February day in ’85 to floorboards that were heaving. Screw Tool, Mike’s latest band, had settled into the basement months earlier, and the hours after school were prime for jamming. From whenever Mike bailed on his classes until shortly before dinner, the jackhammer ditties of Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, and the Scorpions thudded up from the cellar in bone-rattling waves. As he headed home from school, John could hear the bass end as it pummeled the core of the Husted home, a modest but pristine house in a historic part of town.
Neighbors had already called the police a few times about the noise, creating an awkward civic standoff as Larry’s status necessitated delicate treatment. Larry had been furious that Rose allowed the band into their home, unswayed by his wife’s logic that if Mike was determined to run with a bad crowd, better to have him where they could keep an eye on him.
Larry was not a fool; he knew the band was smuggling liquor in along with their gear, he could smell the pot that hung in the air. While he toiled at work, he imagined Mike and his friends giggling in the basement and exhaling smoke into the window wells, thinking they were getting away with something.
A blowup loomed, and Mike was about to find himself kicked out of the house along with the band equipment. If Rose protested, that was a strain Larry was prepared to subject his marriage to. The level of contempt between father and son would not continue under his roof.
Arriving home that snowy winter day, thirteen-year-old John shoveled the driveway as his father had instructed over breakfast, then he came in through the back door. His dog, Jerry, who cowered in the coat closet whenever the band played, skittered his way to John’s ankles and begged for escape. John held the door open for him.
He grabbed a cup of chocolate pudding from the refrigerator and dug his homework from his backpack as the Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” tingled the soles of his feet. John and Mike had a relationship that was typically ambivalent for teenagers born a couple years apart. John resented the perpetual tension that Mike’s presence brought to the house. On the other hand, Mike’s rock-and-roll status and his rep with the outlaw crowd at school provided John some tangential cool.
And Screw Tool rocked. The sonic assault that cleared bird feeders three houses down resonated with John in a way that was not unconducive to homework. He dumped his textbooks on the kitchen table and set to studying, his heels dancing in rhythm to Eric Alvin’s kick drums.
Only a desire for more pudding forty-five minutes later broke John’s focus long enough to find the note lost under his homework. He read it twice, then headed down the basement with a rising sense of fear.
From the bottom of the stairs, the sound of the five-piece band was clean and furious. John shouted fruitlessly into the gale force onslaught of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” to get them to quit playing.
Only when he flicked the basement light on and off, traditionally the sign that their mother was on her way down to change over the laundry or alert Mike to a phone call, did the music crash to a ragged stop.
Mike quickly stashed an open beer while lead guitarist Jay Taggert stubbed out a joint and waved away the smoke, only to see that it was just Mike’s kid brother.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Mike sneered at John. “Get outta here!”
The band glared at John, then Eric exploded into the stuttering drum pattern that kicks off “Hot for Teacher.” John threw himself into the middle of them—all older and easily provoked into kicking his ass—and demanded that they stop.
Mike slammed his mike stand to the floor with a hateful stab and shoved his brother backward. “You want me to kick your ass, faggot?”
John met his threat with uncommon spine as he waved the note in Mike’s face. “Something’s wrong with Dad! We’re supposed to go to the hospital!”
The staticky buzz of the amps filled the silence as Mike read the note and quickly ran the calculus of how he should respond. Even if it mattered only in how it impacted him, he sensed he should care that something was up with his father.
But here in front of his friends—his dead-souled, heavy metal friends—it would be faggot indeed to show that he cared.
“Fuck it,” Mike drawled, flicking the note back at John. “If it was serious, she wouldn’t leave a fucking note.”
John felt the anxiety rising; he worried that he would cry. “I can’t get there by myself! You have to drive me!” Mike, license-less at fifteen, had been known to help himself to the family car when his parents wouldn’t know.
Mike studied his little brother, some distant twinge of affection piercing his hard-ass pose.
“Shit,” Mike sighed as he turned to his band. “I’ll be right back. Keep practicing.”