Joe's Black T-Shirt by Joe Schwartz Read Free Book Online

would be coming back. They shook hands and then hugged. Before lunch, he was on the road.
     
     
    ***
     
     
    He drove all night thinking about how quickly life changed. The idea that a man as vibrant as his father could suddenly be dying angered him.
    His father’s whole life had been in the service to others. Trivial ideas of retirement, hunting and fishing as the seasons afforded themselves, golfing for the hell of it on a Wednesday morning, were gone. As painful as the thought of his mother being alone was, the reality he believed would be a thousand times worse.
    On the phone his mother had said they had discovered Father in a closed flea market a hundred miles from home. Later, they found his truck in a ditch, still in drive and the engine running.
    The owner had come upon him while picking up litter. By the cuts on his hands and his torn clothes, it was obvious he had climbed over the barbed-wired fence. The owner asked him what did he think he was doing there? Mike’s father said he didn’t know. When he told him he better get out, he didn’t move. The owner said he was going to call the police. When he still didn’t move, he did exactly that.
    The police came, and like the owner, asked him the same things. Again, he said he didn’t know. They asked him for his name. For a moment he stared at them, seeming not able to understand their question. His mind was a freshly cleaned blackboard. The indecipherable faded chalk lines that used to be knowledge now meant nothing to him. Then, he told them the only thing he could. “I don’t know.”
    The police asked him to stand to be searched and he automatically complied. The younger officer pulled a billfold from Father’s back pocket and handed it to the older cop. When he opened it and found a gold badge along with his drivers’ license, they ceased their interrogation and called for an ambulance.
    In the hospital the standard tests were conducted. The man was the epitome of physical fitness. It wasn’t until the MRI machine revealed an egg-sized black mass above his spine that a diagnosis was made.
    It was inoperable, malignant, and would turn him into a vegetable shortly before it killed him. The tumor had been growing for at least the last three to four years. Even if, by some miracle, it would have been found back then, aggressively combated with chemo and radiation, the odds of him living much longer than he already had weren’t any better.
    Mother had asked Mike to come specifically to help. She would be by Father’s bedside from six in the morning till six at night, then Father’s brother Henry would be there until eleven. Mike’s shift would be those uncomfortable hours of total darkness, allowing his mother and uncle to rest. It was a vigil to be enforced without excuse.
    A litany of comfort meds kept Mike’s father mainly unconscious at least four out of every six hours. When he awoke it was anybody’s guess if he would be lucid or hydrophobic. The doctors said that as the tumor progressed, an induced coma would be necessary due to the pain. Until then, they could have him, if only occasionally.
     
     
    ***
     
     
    He had found Mother as he had expected. Perched silent next to Father in a semi-comfortable hospital chair. She held his hand and looked lovingly, hopefully at the man she loved.
    They married the day after he had graduated from the St. Louis Police Academy. After a short stint with city law enforcement and quite possibly by divine providence, he became the new under-sheriff in rural Jefferson County. A year later, the old boy he answered to died of a major heart attack in an Illinois brothel. Youth, integrity, and charm got voters to elect him Sheriff the first time. His vigilance for keeping the peace year after year got him re-elected.
    The area had risen up since Father began. He liked to say that they may have the same problems of a big city, but they still had small town values. By that he meant, he still called men older than