Requiem for the Bone Man. R. A. Comunale M.D.
heard the other men complaining, but with sixteen brothers and sisters back home, it was nothing to him. Double-bunking was a luxury compared to that.
“Edison!”
“Yes sir?”
“Think you can do something about the air in here? You’re a machinist’s mate, ain’t you?”
The chief knew the extra men on board would make it like an oven in the bunks.
He had the fan unit apart in no time. He pulled out the heavy-duty C wrench from the tool kit and began to work. Within minutes the fan was purring again. He hefted the wrench and began to clean off the grease. Beautiful workmanship, he thought as he read the markings stamped on the handle: NEWARK FOUNDRY 3.
Now he had to endure the gauntlet of backslapping and hair rubbing from the happy men.
They all heard the heavy boots tromping down to their level. The door opened and a gravelly voice boomed out:
“Awright, you jarheads! Git yer gear stowed! The Navy is sharing its luxury accommodations with us, so no fights or crap like that. Anybody steps outta line, you gotta deal with me!”
Tired-looking Marines poured into the compartment. One stopped by his bunk, a short, powerfully built, Levantine man, with eyes sunken in chronic sadness.
He stood up and held out his hand.
“Ron Edison, machinist’s mate.”
The guy looked at him.
“Seligman, Ira Seligman, corpsman. Thanks.”
“So who’s the foghorn?”
“That’s our old man, Gunny Crowley. He’s twenty-five if he’s a day.”
...
His mind continued to flip through those past scenes of men under wartime stress, occasionally coming back to the present as he pushed slowly through the crowd. Judges were all around the girl’s display now, but the face he thought he’d recognized wasn’t there, so he kept heading toward the boys’ entry. Then he spotted his son off by himself staring across the room at the red-haired girl.
She’s really cute. I just can’t believe a girl, and a seventh grade girl at that, could do a project called “Avitaminosis A and its effects on baby mice.” She must be smart. But she’s too young for me. I’m sixteen! Uh-oh, Dad’s coming over. I’d like to try and talk to her, but I’d better get back with Galen.
As Galen waited for his friend to return, his mind drifted, too.
I wish Papa and Mama could have come. But they probably wouldn’t be comfortable here. Besides, Papa has to work.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the judges have made their decisions. Let’s start with the younger folks first. For junior high school, best original idea and best in her category: Nancy Seligman.”
Applause rang out from the crowd as the principal read each award category.
Edison grew nervous. Someone else won in their category, a kid from Virginia. He hadn’t quite heard the name, but it sounded like Crowley.
“Now, the winner of the Grand Prize and the science scholarship. This one’s a twofer, folks, in more ways than one. For the second year in a row, our winners are the team of Robert Edison and Robert Galen. Congratulations, boys!”
The project had come out just as they’d planned it, from the design of the circuitry to the demonstration of their device’s ability to restart a frog’s heart with a time-pulsed direct current. But neither one of them dared tell anyone how they had hatched the idea. Even now Edison had nightmares about it. What if they’d been wrong?
...
“Sweet Jesus!”
Edison’s words rang out as they watched the ’51 maroon Ford veering from one side of the quiet stretch of road to the other before finally ramming into the power pole. The hood sprang open and steam poured out of the ruptured radiator.
As they ran toward the car, Edison’s first glimpse of the driver made him stop and spew up his lunch, but Galen kept going.
The guy, who looked old to them, maybe mid-thirties, wasn’t going to have any more birthdays. His head stuck halfway out the broken windshield, his body impaled by the steering post.
Automatically, Edison started thinking about the idea of a collapsible steering column and maybe even some type of restraining belt to halt the body’s forward momentum. Then the nausea hit again. What remaining bile he had in his stomach ended up on the pavement.
“Hurry up, Edison! There’s another guy in here! We need to get him out in case the car goes up.”
They both grabbed the passenger door and pulled. It moved slowly and Edison figured it probably yielded more to Galen’s strength than his own. The passenger had been thrown forward but hadn’t gone through the glass. And there was, of course, no post to skewer him.
Galen was muttering to himself.
“Dr. Agnelli said to always check the airway and neck first—then the mouth, chest movements, heart pulsation.”
He was running his hands along the man’s spine.
“Keep his head and neck still while I lift him out, Edison. We can put him on the grass.”
Slowly, very carefully, they maneuvered the man onto the roadside grass. He was breathing slowly but steadily. Galen put his head against the man’s chest and tried to listen.
He looked up at Edison then jumped back in surprise when the man’s body started to arch and twitch, then lay still. Galen put his head on the chest once more: no heartbeat. He remembered something Agnelli had told him about a way to restart a person’s heart by shocking it and pounding on the chest.
“Edison, we need electricity!”
The big kid started hitting the injured man’s chest.
Edison was almost tempted to laugh, whether out of astonishment or at the juxtaposition of his name and electricity, or both. Then his mind kicked into overdrive. They couldn’t tap the power pole. The only electricity available was from the car battery. He ran to the open hood and saw that the battery had been jarred out of its holder. He yanked with all his strength and it came loose with the wires attached. It was heavy, but he managed to get it over to where Galen was still pounding away.
By then Edison had worked out the procedure.
“I’ll hold one wire, you hold the other, and when I say ‘go,’ we touch the two wires to his chest. Ready? Go!”
The contact from the wires caused the body to convulse suddenly then fall still again.
Galen put his ear to the chest and smiled.
“It’s beating!”
They stayed by the man, debating whether one of them should go for help when they saw a car coming up the normally deserted road. They ran toward it, waving their hands. The driver slowed then stopped as he saw what had happened. Edison went up to the car and quickly explained that the guy was still alive.
Twenty minutes later the police ambulance pulled up.
“Don’t tell them, Edison,” Galen whispered as the ambulance driver and his partner approached. “We’ll probably get into trouble if they find out what we did.”
“Won’t they reward us?”
“That’s not the way it works, Little Brother. No good deed goes unpunished.”
...
Edison stared into the mirror. Taller now, still slender, zits still marking his maturing face, he knew himself better now and what he could do. Time, hormones, and the gym had done their job. He was no longer the scrawny runt he had been;