Mohawk by Richard Russo Read Free Book Online Page A

attention. Shoeless, he is wearing a bright orange beach towel about his middle in lieu of trousers. The towel sticks out in front comically, and the large woman stares down at the protuberance maliciously.“
Look
at you, you dumb fuck,” she says. Her voice, though not loud, is brittle and carries marvelously even in the crowded room.
    “Look at yerself, if you can stand it.”
    “You don’t even have enough sense to feel like the dumb fuck you are,” the woman says. “Everybody’s looking at you, you dumb fuck.”
    This happens to be true, but the man wearing the beach towel is undaunted. He uses a simple four-letter word to describe his companion and it is a part of her own anatomy. Despite the name-calling, neither is truly angry. Their language alone is inflationary. They’ve been calling each other such names for so long that it’s now beyond the power of mere words to stimulate passion. At this moment they are closer to humor than anger.
    “You’d see what a dumb fuck you was if you wasn’t so proud of yerself. You just never had no hard-on get so big and last so long.”
    “I just wisht I had a woman worth it.”
    She ignores this. “I don’t see why yer so proud, anyways. It ain’t every man has a weeny the size of a wedding ring.”
    “Least I got a weddin’ ring, which is more than you’ll ever have.”
    This is clearly the best shot in the volley, and the woman reacts as if he has punched her good. “How’d you like me to slap that worthless little weeny, dumb fuck.”
    The man turns away from her. “You’re just mad ’cause I won the bet.”
    “I shoulda knowed, that little thing.…”
    Someone in the room wails loudly, and the man and woman are no longer the center of attention. People crane their necks to see who howled, but no one looksparticularly guilty. When one of the emergency room doors slams open, an ambulance siren is heard—at approximately the same pitch as its human counterpart— and everyone concludes it must’ve been the ambulance siren all along.
    The ambulance driver winds the vehicle around the back of the hospital, over the trail of broken glass toward the yellow crease of light at the end of the long drive. In the rear is a fifteen-year-old who probably will not live to see the morning—after a wreck that took the rescue workers half an hour to get her out, she’s in very bad shape. Inside they will do what they can, then take her by helicopter to Albany Medical, but the driver knows the girl is too badly broken to live no matter what they do. He’s a young man himself and he doesn’t like to think of her young life ending, but there is nothing he can do about it. For all he knows, she’s already dead. Sometimes they tell him when a patient dies; other times they let him drive like hell with the corpse. As he nears the leaking yellow lights, he hits the brake hard to avoid hitting something in the road, which disappears immediately. There is a chorus of “Heys!” from the rear. When the driver docks beneath the red EMERGENCY sign, the back doors fly open and the young girl is hurried inside, which means that this time, anyway, he has been transporting a living person.
    Rather than get out, the driver sits by himself in the ambulance, staring out the window at nothing in particular, listening to the thick static on the CB and the low twang of a country singer on the conventional radio. After a few minutes he remembers and grabs a flashlight. Fifteen minutes later, one of the ambulance attendants finds him far down the drive at the base ofthe hospital’s gutted south wing, shining the flashlight into the cavelike windows.
    “What was it—some kinda animal?”
    “I guess.”
    “Next time, hit it.”
    “How’s the girl?”
    “Just died. Come on. There’s busted glass all over the place.”
    They walk back toward the red EMERGENCY sign, but every now and then the driver looks back over his shoulder at the dark windows along the third and fourth floors.