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Critical Mick Exclusive Excerpt from Michael Loyd Gray's forthcoming (now available!) novel,

December's Children

Chapter Three - GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Mrs. Fleener suggested that the heroic rescue of Purdy Boy was a sign Billy Ray should plan for medical school, so intense was her exaggeration of his medical acumen/potential in bringing Purdy Boy back from The Weiner Dog Land of the Dead. That and her palpable relief that Billy Ray had finally done something to suggest he wasn't destined for a life of torpor punctuated by occasional moments of actual malice.

Then she went back to baking cookies.

"Medical school?" Billy Ray said. "I'm just a junior in high school."

"That's not so," she said, sliding a sheet of cookies into the oven. “You're a senior now."

"Not till fall."

"You completed your junior year already, so you're a senior. You have to plan ahead if you want to be a doctor."

"Who says I want to be a doctor?" But he had a sudden brilliant thought: Doctor Billy Ray, the Surfing Surgeon of California. It had a nice ring to it.

"What's wrong with being a doctor?" she said. "The University of Illinois has a good medical school, and you'd be close to home."

"Live in Peoria?" Billy Ray said. "That's geekville. Maybe I want to do something other than medical school."

She placed her hands on her hips, a posture Billy Ray knew always signaled a lecture on the way:

"Like what?" she said. "Surfing? Really, Billy Ray. Where does that come from? Doctors make a lot more money than surfers. Do surfers even make money at all?"

"They have tournaments," Billy Ray said. "All over the world."

"Do they get paid for these tournaments?" She was wiping her hands on her white apron. "Doctors don't have to go to surfing tournaments to make a living, you know."

"I didn't know that," he said, and she shot him her standard don't-get-cute-with-meyoung-man look.

She peered through the tiny oven window at the cookies. "Well, you showed great presence of mind in saving Minnie Sullivan's dog. You know how she loves that funny little weiner dog. Great presence of mind is something doctors have to have in abundance."

"So they can rip people open and look inside at their guts?"

"That's what doctors do. It's a really important job."

Billy Ray sat down at the kitchen table. "I know. But I don't think I'm cut out for it."

"Why, Billy Ray? Don't underestimate what you did to save Minnie's dog. Grace under pressure is what Ernest Hemingway called it. Doctors have to have it. Did you know Hemingway's father was a doctor, Billy Ray?"

Mrs. Fleener had read all about Hemingway in Reader's Digest at the dentist. "Yeah. I read about it in English class. He killed himself."

"I know that Ernest Hemingway killed himself," she said. She was poking the cookies with a butter knife to see if they were done.

"I meant his father,” Billy Ray said.

She wiped her hands on the apron and then looked up at Billy Ray. "What about his father?"

Reader's Digest had left that detail out.

"Hemingway's father killed himself, too," Billy Ray said. "He was a doctor, but he killed himself. With a gun."

"I didn't know that," she said. "Here, try this cookie."

He took a bite. "Still too soft."

"I thought so," she said. "You know, not all doctors kill themselves. That's just-one case. Is that why you can't be a doctor?"

"No. I can't be doctor because when my health class went to ISU back in January we visited a really creepy cadaver lab. "

"You didn't tell me about that." Her mouth hung open a little. "How come you've never mentioned it?"

"I don't know." Billy Ray looked off into space for a moment.

She felt a little shocked. "I'm just so surprised no one told me about that."

"What's there to tell, Mom? It was part of our health class field trip. You signed the permission slip."

"I know. But it didn't say anything about you kids seeing something so serious as that. I would have liked to know about it ahead of time."

"I guess they forgot to mention it," Billy Ray said. "Would you have still signed if you'd known about it?"

She rubbed her nose absently and seemed frozen for a moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "I really don't."

"Well, I’m sorry," he said. "It was a shock for me, too. When some of the kids mentioned it, I thought they were kidding. And then we went and walked into this room and there they were."

"Dead people," she said in a flat voice.

Billy Ray blinked his eyes a few times. "Yeah. Moss Newbury called them stiffs and the attendant gave him a dirty look. One of them - one of the cadavers - was some old guy from Bloomington who donated his body to science. He looked like he was smiling, but I don't know what he had to smile about. I wasn't smiling and I was the one who was alive."

The visit to the cadaver lab had come just six months after the death of his Uncle Milt, a slab-faced marine who was among the first to die in Vietnam. Milt had stepped on a mine, which reduced his six-foot-three frame to something much more compact. Billy Ray had lately decided he must be harboring feelings and questions about death inside him ever since. Saving Purdy Boy had actually made him ponder death, but just as a fleeting, abstract thought. Now he knew the questions he couldn't ask that day of Mr. Fields, his health class teacher, while they hovered somberly over cold metal tables and gawked at transparent human wrecks: what was it like when someone died? How much did it hurt? And did they rise, like Jesus, and go to a better place? Could they look down on their former bodies and marvel at what they once had been?

A marine at the memorial service for Milt in Argus had told him soldiers' deaths were nothing like on TV shows, such as Combat, where Vic Morrow would shoot Germans with his tommy gun and they'd just sort of plop over and look like they were sleeping. But the marine stopped short of gory details, and Billy Ray had been afraid to ask more.

Now Milt was sleeping in a grave in Helena, Arkansas, where Milt and Billy Ray's father had grown up. Billy Ray missed Milt, who had been carefree and understanding, an appealing alternative to his conservative father. Someone he could talk to. And Billy Ray had yet to see Milt's grave. He had his tonsils out unexpectedly after the service and was too sick to make the trip to Arkansas. When they had given him the ether to put him out for the operation, Billy Ray had floated for a moment in the fuzzy no man's land between reality and unconsciousness and saw Milt beckoning to him with a smile and a halo circling his head.

Mrs. Fleener noticed he was lost in thought. "Tell me more about it, Billy Ray."

He could picture the cadavers, and he remembered, too, the stale, gray odor of the room. "There were all these men, and some women, too. They were all sectioned into layers. They were like human onions or something like that. You could see their veins and arteries and livers -- everything."

He had a fleeting thought of Milt in sections, but managed to suppress it.

Mrs. Fleener put a hand to her mouth and talked through it. "How did you feel about it?"

He squirmed in his chair. "I didn't feel like becoming a doctor, that's for sure."

"That's all? That's all you felt?"

He chewed his lower lip and avoided her eyes. "I didn't feel anything," he lied. “It was just creepy, that's all."

"Nothing, Billy Ray? Nothing?"

"No, nothing. I didn't feel anything."

"I see," she said. "Well, did it make you think of Uncle Milt?"

He knew he couldn't dodge that one. "Yeah. I did think about Milt."

They sat quietly for a while, and then the cookies were finally done. They were chocolate chip. Billy Ray's mom poured them both glasses of milk. Her glass had Bugs Bunny on it and his had Daffy Duck. They munched their cookies in more silence until one of the neighbors started a lawn mower, but the noise grew faint after a while.

"Death is part of life, Billy Ray."

Billy Ray munched faster until his cookie was gone. He reached for another. He was trying not to think about death, or even ever getting sick. He didn't believe death was part of anything but death and should be avoided at all costs.

"Say something, Billy Ray."

He reached for a washcloth hanging over a chair and wiped cookie crumbs off his hands and mouth. "I remember a Hemingway story from English class last year," he said. "At the end, a boy a lot younger than me asks his dad if dying is easy."

She looked at him quite a while in that quiet little kitchen, and Billy Ray had to admit that all the while he felt as though he was under a hot spotlight.

"Oh, my goodness - you're asking me, aren't you." She was very surprised. He thought again of Vic Morrow and Germans throwing up their hands or clutching their chests or arms or wherever it was Vic got them - usually in the gut -- and then flopping around for a moment before the Big TV Sleep. On TV the soon-to-be-dead asked for water and then their mothers, and although it was just actors, Billy Ray had begun to suspect that what the marine had wanted to tell him at Milt' service was that death could be horrible and hurt more than anyone could imagine.

Mrs. Fleener started to speak, but the lawn mower grew very loud again for a minute, and then it gradually retreated.

"You know," he said, "Purdy Boy didn't seem to be suffering at all before he came back to life." He met his mom's gaze. "I don't know if he actually died and then came back, or what. But he seemed peaceful right up until when he opened his eyes. He sure looked surprised, I think."

"I'll bet he was," she said, fidgeting for a moment with her empty glass. She got up and rooted around in the utensils drawer for a while, but didn't take anything out. The baking sheet was in the sink and she retrieved it, wiped it off carefully, and placed it on one of the counters. "We ate all the cookies. I should make another batch. Your father will want some."

"He doesn't like chocolate chip," Billy. Ray said to her back.

"I know. I'm making oatmeal this time."

Billy Ray went to the refrigerator and filled his glass again with milk. He looked out the kitchen door and saw the Nelson's cat next door, stalking something in the tall evergreen bushes.

Behind him he heard his mother ask, "Billy Ray, are you really going to become a surfer?"

He turned back to her. She was busy making cookie shapes.

"I don't know," Billy Ray said. "I just might."

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Yo! This excerpt is copyright 2006 by Michael Loyd Gray. All other content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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This Page Was Last Updated On 26 May, 2007.