X-RAY

By

Jon Chopan

Pony’s arm looks like it’s going to fall off, looks like a raw cut of meat, like something from a sci-fi movie.  I’ve told him to go to the doctor but he doesn’t have health insurance and can’t afford the bills.  He’s living in his car outside of the KFC he’s working at.  It’s his doping arm and he’s worried about HIV.  I’m worried about gangrene. Either way he can barely move it.

“They’re going to want to x-ray it,” he says.  “And I don’t like that thing.  It scares me.”

What scares him is the image, the photograph of the bone, the fact that it can see through his skin.  I don’t tell him but I have a collection of x-ray pictures, which my mother has gotten for me from the hospital she works at. I collect them because I am fascinated by their ability to see things. I wish I could see like that. I wish I could tell the future the way Pony imagines the x-ray does, so I can warn him or stop him or something. 

We’re under the walking bridge drinking forties and heckling people as they walk over us.  Pus oozes from Pony’s arm and blood, too. “Will you go to the Hotel Cadillac with me?” he asks.  Which isn’t a hotel anymore but a clinic where he can get tested for HIV for free.  I tell him I’ll go. I’ll even get tested if he wants. We get quiet because we hear a couple talking above us. The boy is telling the girl how much he loves her and respects her and all those other lies boys tell girls in order to get their fingers down her pants or when they want her hand down theirs.

“Have some respect, man,” Pony says.  “Tell her what you really want.”

And I say, “Come down here honey and we’ll show you love.”

We laugh at our own stupid jokes.  Me, who will move away to college in a few months, who will run away from this place, who will guess at what Pony is in for and never say a word. 

“Fuck you, man,” the kid shouts.  “I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

“It’s going to be hard from up there, pal,” Pony says.  We taunt him because we know he won’t come down, know that it will take him too much time, that climbing out under here always involves risk.

“Come down here and make me respect you,” I say.

They move on but not without more minor threats, the girl ending it by calling us assholes. When they’re gone we get quiet. Pony plays at slipping like he’s going down toward the river, as if he knows he’s headed in, bound for it, sooner or later, now or three months from now. It is early in the summer; motorboats zoom by underneath us carrying women without tops on, fishermen with cases of beer and cans of worms. Pony’s face is all sweat because it’s warm under the bridge and because of the pain in his arm and because of the beer we’re drinking.

We don’t stay under there much longer, but head topside instead. This is the bridge where handfuls of kids will get their bikes stolen this summer, where kids our age, with more energy and a more cruel sense of humor, will take them. It’s the bridge that separates the city from the suburbs, the bridge families come out on after trips to the zoo, which is down the road, to see the river and Kodak’s buildings and the Rochester skyline.

I think every place knows loss like this.  A family of four walks by and gives us a dirty look. The father seems like he wants to say something to us, but seeing Pony’s arm or how sick he looks the man decides against it.

Pony puts his forty down and picks at the hole in his arm. “Hotel Cadillac,” I say, pointing towards the city side of the river where we’ll have to catch a bus and a transfer to get there, but there will be air conditioning— some form of relief.  And we both stand, launching our near empty bottles over the railing and into the river below.

They fall without caring what they hit.