Hotel Honolulu

14 The Key Chain

Those plow-shaped metal detectors that old men on beaches use to find lost jewelry and money in the sand — the kind you wish you had, which looks so simple and profitable, "like an advanced form of agriculture," said Hobart Flail, who told me this story — the man in question had one. He was making his way down Ala Moana Beach, where the water is calm because of the reef. This was Glen Cornelius, from St. Louis, a shoe salesman, on his second day in Hawaii. He was the scuba diver we called Scooby-Doo.

"I dropped my key chain in the water," a small boy said, approaching

him.

Glen glanced down at the squinting sun-struck boy, who was about the same age as his own son, Brett, a nine-year-old.

"This thing doesn't work in the water," Glen said, the metal detector in his hand.

"You've got a mask and flippers."

The kid was observant: the mask and flippers were in Glen's scuba diver's backpack, which, constructed of strong mesh so they would drip dry, made them visible but not obvious in the bulgy netting.

"It's a red key chain," the small boy said.

Glen had found the usual junk with his metal detector — buttons, foreign coins, rusty nails — but he hoped for more. He had brought the metal detector from St. Louis. It was new and worked perfectly, emitting a whistle when buried metal was nearby. You could strike gold. Alice, his wife, had taken Brett to a movie — that dinosaur one. He had the afternoon free, for treasure hunting and maybe a swim later.

"I was out swimming," the boy said, "and reached into my pocket for my earplugs and pulled out my key chain and dropped it."

Glen wanted to think that if Brett had asked a stranger to help him, the stranger would oblige, especially if it was as serious as a bunch of keys. So he told the boy to mind his metal detector and earphones, and he put on his mask and flippers and swam out to the reef where one hunk jutted like a shark's fin, which the boy had indicated.

The seawater sloshing across the reef was soupy with suspended sand flecks, which blunted and twisted the light. The flattopped reef itself, now skeletal, like dead pitted rock, was coated with the mouse fur of accumulated algae. Glen dived deep three times and saw nothing, not even the bottom. Some yellow antlers of coral drew him onward, for their shape alone, nothing to do with the keys, but when he got close he saw the silly thing under that cluster of antlers. He dived down — the key chain was lodged within the prickly prongs — and after a few tries he plucked them from among the antlers. Short of breath now, he thrashed to get to the surface, pushed his arms, kicked his legs, and with one of the kicks felt a sudden pinch against his shin. Swimming back to the beach, he saw that he had nicked himself, but he was smirking at something else. There were no keys on the key chain.

"I said it was a key chain — I didn't say it had keys." The boy spoke in a pedantic monotone, a bored indignation, as though he had been unfairly contradicted by this simple-minded adult.

"Where's my metal detector?"

"Your brother took it."

"What? I don't have a brother," Glen said, and then howled an obscenity.

He was still furious, muttering swears, when he met Alice later, but she reassured him, telling him he had done the right thing. He had volunteered to help the boy. It was not the boy's fault that some sneak had stolen his metal detector. The police had listened sympathetically but had not held out much hope for the recovery of his stolen goods. They repeated what Alice had said: It could have been worse. And instead of challenging them, Glen saw the logic of this. Yes, it could have been worse.

"The stupid key chain was just like Brett's, one of those McDonald's dinosaurs."

"It's a velociraptor, Dad!" Brett said. Another pedantic juvenile.

Within a few days, the nick on Glen's shin became infected. But it didn't hurt. "It just feels a little tingly." He used the Neosporin he had

brought from home. That was another thing about Hawaii. The same tube of Neosporin would have cost him almost twice as much here. Within a week his wound looked like decayed fruit and he was running a fever. The fever subsided after he dosed himself with aspirin, but his lower leg was badly swollen.

"I'm not covered by my medical plan here," he told his wife when she said he should see a doctor.

His leg grew worse. He could hardly walk. His temperature rose again. He reluctantly went to the hospital, dreading the expense, and was asked whether he was allergic to any antibiotics. He said no and was given large doses of an antibiotic that brought on nausea and dizziness and made his flesh creep with a kind of skin disease that gave him large welts all over his body. Various other treatments were applied — heavily sedated, he was scarcely aware of them; Alice was in charge now — but the leg infection worsened, and his foot was purple with gangrene. He lay in the hospital bed as though in a trap, observing a succession of sudden decisions. "We'll have to operate." The leg was amputated just above the knee. "You're lucky to be alive."

A month later — a two-week vacation had become six weeks — he was on his way back to St. Louis. He was one of those wheelchair passengers who boarded the plane first and got off last and often blocked the aisle. On the plane he noticed that Brett no longer had the dinosaur key chain on his belt loop. Glen could not bear to ask his son if he had lost the thing and whether he cared.

His boss at the shoe store was sympathetic: "It's just plain bad luck." And, seeming to console Glen, he stated the obvious — that a shoe salesman was always on his feet or kneeling when fitting the shoes. Glen was forty. He had a young child. The boss went on to say that he could take a leave of absence but that he would not be paid. "Maybe you could apply for workers' comp." Glen said he would be getting a prosthesis, virtually a new leg. Now the boss reminded Glen that the store sold mostly sports shoes. "A wooden leg would send the wrong message."

The man quickly apologized when Glen turned on him, raging, but at home the expression "wooden leg" kept invading his thoughts, taunting him. And the new leg was not wooden at all, but metal and plastic. It even flexed, and there was a new shoe on the end. He tried it out using crutches.

"Here comes Long John Silver!" his friends said. "Get yourself a parrot! 'Arrrgh, Jim, me lad!'"

Glen knew they didn't mean to hurt him with their mockery. They were being hearty. They told him every wooden-leg joke imaginable. They believed that if they made crass jokes about his disability, he would be encouraged to do the same. But Glen went home and wept. He didn't go back to work. Even Alice failed to lift his spirits, but she was hearty too. Seeing his tears, she said, "You're just feeling sorry for yourself," which was true, but so what? No one else seemed to care. Why was it that everyone seemed to think that brutal mockery was a cure for such a loss?

"I'm too old to learn how to walk," Glen said in defiance.

"Well, at least I'm not a cripple," Alice said, wounding him again. She returned to her old job as a legal secretary, the job she had left to raise Brett. Now Glen, who was home, could look after him.

Brett complained to his mother that Glen hit him. Glen admitted it. Brett was selfish and frivolous and ungrateful, like that horrible little boy in Honolulu who had demanded that Glen risk his life to find his key chain.

Seeming to fear Glen for his depression and futility, Alice stayed away from him for most of the day, calling only to speak to Brett.

"Mummy's stuck at work again, honey." She developed another life outside the house, not just her work at the law firm, where she was liked, but her small investments in the stock market that were appreciating; the man who was giving her investment advice, a young paralegal, became her lover.

Glen was possessed by the delusion that the plastic and metal leg strapped to his stump was the only part of his body that worked; the rest of him was faulty. He was very angry, and the loss of his leg was also the loss of his potency. His head ached, his stump gave him pain, and he could not shop. He wanted to hit his wife, but his child would do — that would hurt her. One day he succeeded in injuring Brett — gave him a nosebleed — and that night Alice moved out, "for Brett's sake," and took out a temporary restraining order on him. It happened so quickly that Glen was impressed by the way Alice had organized it. But then he discovered she was living with Milton, the paralegal, and he despised her. She told him what she had done.

There was no worse, no more demoralizing taunt than someone telling you the truth. Glen Cornelius wondered whether he should kill himself. He drank instead and his drinking helped, but he knew his life was over in this wolfish world.

"This sort of thing happens a lot," Hobart Flail said. "Most people don't know that.