Pain, Roberto A Robles [best classic novels txt] 📗

was successful.
The doctor gave us all assurances that he had succeeded in removing the tumor and that it had not visibly metastasized. Personally, I didn’t like that adverb, visibly, but what did I know? I made no comment. I didn’t like the way he prattled on about his new instruments, either; about the marvelous, new laser technology he had employed in the operation. Here’s a word of advice for you, if your doctor seems extravagantly enthusiastic about new instruments, equipment, or techniques he’d like to try on you or your loved ones, run as far as you can, as fast as you can. We should have known that any doctor whose eyes shine when describing a procedure, hasn’t actually performed it many times before. Otherwise, it would have lost its glitter already and become routine for him.
Ginny hugged his mother and I hugged Trenton, then we switched partners and I hugged his mother while he hugged his sister. Sadly, the partner-switching-hugging routine ended, so I didn’t get a chance to hug Ginny. I found it strange, though, that Trenton didn’t try to comfort his mother, or share her relief.
Mr. Dobbs was released from the hospital two days later. That new laser technology did have an advantage– since there were no major incisions cut into Mr. Dobbs, he would be up and, well, maybe not running, but shuffling along, in a few days. In the course of two to three weeks, he would be walking normally without worrying if the piping down there would seize up and start smoking in a delayed reaction to having been submitted to a laser burn.
The day Mr. Dobbs arrived home I didn’t come to visit. I felt they’d like to enjoy those first moments of the rest of their lives post-C by themselves.

Father Tim McDougal was an Irish bear of a man who ran our small community’s church with an iron hand and a compassionate heart. He seemed to me the prototype of what a Catholic priest should look like. I wouldn’t have been surprised to look up “priest” in an illustrated encyclopedia and find his photo there, next to the definition.
He had eidetic memory, too, when it came to who had not attended mass last Sunday, and who had promised some service to the church or the community and had welshed so far. He never forgot your telephone number if he was in need of a couple of hands for a youth retreat. However, he never forgot the birthday dates of his parishioners, their anniversaries, the names of their children and relatives, and so on, so I’m sure his good memory was not self-serving.
He called me on what I thought of as my first Saturday of Freedom; the day after I finished exams and was liberated from that commonly accepted death camp society has renamed “higher education” (how did he always know when you were on a break from school?). The heat of July was already overwhelming and I had been holed up in my room, going through my school books, notebooks, graded essays, and what have you, for the better part of the morning, relishing every second I spent shredding all the junk I thought I would never need again, and was therefore sweating as a logger in flannel shirt attire, chopping down trees somewhere in a swamp in Louisiana. As soon as I picked up the phone, Father Tim’s rumbling voice asked me if I would like to help him help Jesus lead other youths like me into the right path and away from speed and crack and booze and premarital sex. That’s exactly how he put it, I swear. I could never string all those words together in a sentence all by myself. He told me he needed me for three days, and three days only, as he knew I would like to “take advantage of the well-deserved rest and restoration I had earned through my good work at school.”
Three days was the length of a youth camping trip, sure, but he had planned five camping trips in a row- one for little children, eight years and under, boys and girls; one for older children, twelve years and under, boys only; a third for girls, twelve years and under; a fourth for boys and a fifth for girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Once he had me out in the middle of nowhere, away from a phone, a TV, and tap water, he told me some of the young men and women who usually helped him were unable to make it, so he was shorthanded, and would I please stay? The last two camping groups were made up of people my age, sure, but with my experience my help would surely prove invaluable, and I’d be able to meet new friends and have fun. He had already cleared everything with my folks.
I loved him, I tell you, but he could be devious and instill violent thoughts in your mind, on occasion.
I had fun. I loved being around Father Tim, and I found those little boys and girls exhilarating to work with, even if they did have a tendency to let their excitement run wild, long past the time I would have subjected my body to the dubious comforts of rocks, loose branches, and rugged ground under my sleeping bag.
When it was time to go home, Father Tim told me he had recommended me to a friend of his who ran a summer camp facility nearby. His friend offered to take me as a summer camp hand for a full eight week stint, if I was interested. I was.

All in all, I had been away from home for a little over eight weeks, staying in touch with my folks and Trenton on the phone, though maybe not as often as they would have liked me to, especially my mom.
Almost as soon as I came back to the world to rediscover the pleasures of a comfortable toilet, I was greeted by two painful discoveries. The first I learned through my mom; she told me Mr. Dobbs was taking a long leave of absence from his work because the cancer had come back; although everyone wished him well and encouraged him to get back on his feet and back to his office as soon as possible, nobody expected him to return. He’d been home, in bed for all she knew, for the last two weeks.
My second surprise came from Ginny herself. It was the Sunday before the start of classes and I still hadn’t seen Trenton, so I went to look for him. Armed with the news about his father, I didn’t go directly to his house. Instead, I climbed the hill behind the Dobbs’s house, hoping he’d be there, reading a novel or working on one of his fabulous drawings, as he frequently did when nothing much was going on.
As I reached the top of the hill, I didn’t find Trenton, but Ginny was there. She looked gorgeous, sitting on the ground, her back against an old oak tree all three of us had climbed a million times when we were kids. She was fingering the strings on her fiddle, the bow cast beside her on the ground, for the moment. The sound was idle; she wasn’t playing a real tune or anything like that, she was just plucking notes, willing the evening away.
“Hey, Gin,” I said as I reached her.
“Hey yourself, Priest,” she said looking up. She rearranged her skirt, securing it between her knees and the grass, which I took as an invitation to sit down.
“Ready to go back to school?” I asked just to say something.
“Dreading to go back to school,” she replied.
I laughed, “Oh, it’ll be fun,” I said, “The end of Middle school is supposed to be fun, you know?”
“Not for me, it won’t,” she said with finality. I was suddenly curious.
“Why not?”
“Did you hear about my dad?” she asked, evading my question, looking down and idly plucking a blade of grass from the ground, holding it between two fingers for a moment, before casting it away.
“My mom told me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Is this like before?” I didn’t know how to ask how bad it was, without sounding too brutal, as I would have done with Trenton, perhaps.
“Worse,” was all she said.
As much as I liked Ginny, I didn’t have much experience talking to her alone, and I was finding it difficult to move through our conversation. “Ginny, where’s Trenton?” I asked.
“You’re a sweet person, Priest,” she said. The look on my face must have been a study in mental deficiency, because she laughed out loud and said, “Close your mouth before you swallow a mosquito.”
“You’re also a good friend,” she went on. “I used to have a crush on you, you know?”
Huh?
“When?” I asked, providing material for those in charge of the mental deficiency study.
“Couple of years back,” she said sounding as if it wasn’t news as big as an extraterrestrial invasion. “I got over it.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, encouraging my brain cells to go back up to speed.
“I guess I’m saying I’m sorry,” she said compounding my idiocy with bafflement.
“Sorry for what?” Of course I asked.
“For what you’re going to find out,” she said, starting to get up. She was almost sixteen and she was grace personified as far as I was concerned. She had always been agile, graceful, frisky. Yet, it seemed getting up from the ground took some effort for her, as if her old nimbleness had deserted her. I figured she’d been sitting here too long, and her legs had grown numb.
I had no idea what she was talking about and I said so.
“Daniel…” my name on her lips sounded so engaging; she’d used it so little across the years. “I’m pregnant.”
Once, Trenton and I had been cruising around on his dad’s car at night, one of those rare occasions when he’d allowed us to drive it to a party. The party had been a bust, so we’d decided to take a ride and check out the action around the town. Looking out the car’s window, as we cruised in front of a dilapidated wall covered by mostly incompetent graffiti, I’d gotten a glimpse of a fantastic rendition of a multitude of elongated, iridescent bubbles flying over a mountain, under the legend “Yog Sothoth rules Cthulhu.”
The feeling of dread that stroke my spine as I saw that thing and turned on my seat to get a better look at the receding artwork, is hard to explain even now. And those words were as unintelligible to me as the ones Ginny had just spoken.
I looked at her for a moment longer, still sitting on the grass, as she picked up her violin and bow and started to walk away. She seemed to have gained a few pounds since I last saw her. The total absence of fat around her waist had always been one of the things I found so appealing in her. She turned around one final time. “I don’t know where Trenton is, he’s not at the house but, when you find him, don’t believe everything he says about me.”
With that last caustic incantation, she left.

Trenton didn’t come to school the following day, so as soon as I got home, I dropped my bag in my room, grabbed a coke from the fridge, pecked my mom’s cheek, and told her I was off to look for Trenton at this house. I made some inane comment when she asked if everything was alright, and walked to my car.
He opened the door a full minute after I rang the bell, just as