The Turnaround

Six

He was a physical therapist at Walter Reed, the army medical center up on Georgia Avenue. His name was Raymond Monroe, but because of the gray salted into his hair and because he was considered to be rather old, some of the soldiers and several of his coworkers called him Pop. He had been in this line of work for many years and had been at the hospital for two. Monroe felt that he was pretty good at his job. The pay was respectable, the work was steady, and most mornings he found himself looking forward to his day. Like his father and his older brother, James, he liked fixing things.

Monroe had worked for various clinics over the years, never having the business acumen or ambition to own one himself, and he had done fine. When his son, Kenji, the product of an early marriage, had enlisted, Monroe applied for a position at Walter Reed. Much of the medical staff at the hospital was active-duty military, GS employees and contractors, but Monroe had served in the army, stateside, for four years out of high school, which had been helpful in getting him on board. He figured that the service had been good to him, as his benefits had provided the tuition money to get him through college and all those postgraduate years he’d put in at the University of Maryland’s Eastern Shore campus. Now he was giving back. Plus, he felt the need to do something, if only symbolically, to support his son.

Private First Class Kenji James Monroe had been deployed to Afghanistan and was stationed at the Korengal Outpost. He was a soldier in the Tenth Mountain Division, First Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, Third Brigade Combat Team, out of Fort Drum, New York. Monroe had memorized all the numbers, which gave him the secure feeling, illogically perhaps, that the military was actually organized and would be equipped to protect his son. He wasn’t one of those army parents who went overboard behind the flag waving, with the reveille ring tones on the cell phone and such. He was detached from all that, and still, he was very proud of his son.

Monroe had fathered only the one child. His wife, Kenji’s mom, had died of breast cancer when the boy was ten. His wife’s name was Tina, and she was good to the heart. Tina had pulled him out of his funk, all those years carrying that thing, worrying on his brother, holding in his bitterness and distrust, not growing out of his young and angry mind-set until she’d come into his world and helped him become a settled man. Her death had knocked him back down. But he got up, knowing he had to for his boy. Monroe, with the help of his mother, had raised Kenji himself.

He had a thing with a woman now, a nice career gal who was a licensed clinical social worker at Walter Reed. It was the first serious relationship he’d had since the death of Tina. Kendall Robertson had a little boy named Marcus. The boy’s father was not in any of the framed photographs around her place, which told Monroe that the man was not welcome back. Kendall was thirty-five, fourteen years his junior, and the boy was eight. They had met at church, and in their first conversation, at coffee hour, they discovered they worked at the same facility. Monroe now spent the night at her house, a row home in Park View, a couple times a week. Marcus seemed to accept him. It was working out all right.

Monroe was seated at a small table off Kendall’s kitchen, watching her get her boy ready for school. In his hand was a cooling cup of coffee, a Georgetown Hoyas mug with a drawing of the bulldog mascot on its side.

“Where’s your spelling words?” said Kendall.

“In my homeroom packet,” said Marcus. “You put the paper in there your own self last night.”

“That’s right,” said Kendall, zipping up his book bag. She was leaning over him, a wing of hair fallen about her face. “Don’t you forget to turn that sheet in.”

“I always do.”

“You forget. That ’ s what you do. You don’t turn it in, how’s your teacher gonna know you did the work? Homework’s part of your final grade.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“I got to get him up to Before Care,” said Kendall, now looking at Monroe. “You comin out with us?”

“I’m gonna finish up this coffee and the sports page. I can still make it up to First Formation. I’ll just catch the Seventy.”

“Seventy-nine’s less crowded,” said Kendall. The Metrobus ran every ten minutes up and down Georgia during rush hour and made far fewer stops than the 70. “Quicker, too.”

“If I see one, I’ll get it,” said Monroe.

“Wizards win?” said Marcus. He was short for his age, wiry, with an athlete’s heart, and ears too big for his skull.

Monroe nodded. “Gilbert looked into his head and torched the Mavs for thirty-nine. Caron and Antawn did some damage, too. Now, if we could only get us a center with hands…”

“Tell Mr. Raymond good-bye,” Kendall said to Marcus.

“Bye, Mr. Raymond.”

“All right, Marcus. You have a good day at school.”

Kendall came over to Monroe and kissed him on the mouth. He let it linger just a moment and then pulled back, so as not to cheapen her in the boy’s eyes.

“You look nice,” said Monroe, looking her over.

She wore a pantsuit she had purchased at the Hecht Company, now gone, up in Wheaton. With the coupons and the sale price, Kendall had bought it for next to nothing. She didn’t need to buy expensive clothes to look good. She was a handsome woman, with puppy brown eyes and a full mouth. Curvy, and not too small anywhere, which he liked.

“Thank you,” she said, blushing a little. “Call me, hear? Maybe we can meet for lunch.”

“Right,” said Monroe.

When he was done with his coffee and the paper, he left Kendall’s house, locking the door behind him. He went down to Georgia Avenue and took it north on foot. He passed the D amp;B market, Murray’s steak and produce, a Spanish-owned auto repair. Many of the folks he was passing were dressed cleanly, on their way to catch buses or taxicabs to their jobs. The neighborhood was changing. He expected that it wouldn’t be long before most of these businesses would be replaced, too. Cafes, bars that weren’t about pussy or violence, a theater that would show plays, something akin to a Starbucks. It was coming.

Still, there were the usual men outside the liquor store, waiting for it to open, to remind you of what had been. Monroe said hello to the group, and one of them called out to him by name. He saw a midget wearing chains over a Len Bias Celtics jersey and boy’s-size Nike boots, going for that street-retro thing. Little man was frequently out on the same corner of the Avenue. Monroe had greeted him once but gotten only a scowl in return. Dude was just the angry type, Monroe surmised. Then he thought, I would be angry, too.

Monroe went on. He passed a couple of bus stops before he lighted on one. He lived in his mother’s house in Heathrow Heights, and he did own a car, but when he slept in town, he sometimes liked to enjoy the experience of the city. Walking and riding the bus, having contact with folks, that was how he liked to go.

If he got off to work early enough, Raymond Monroe would start his day at First Formation, a kind of roundup after reveille on the Walter Reed grounds. The hall where the soldiers gathered resembled an American Legion auditorium. Here, badly wounded patients mingled with those who were being treated for less-serious injuries. Amputees wore the evidence of their wounds most obviously and permanently, as did burn victims in the late stages of recovery, and men and women with rows of stitches and patches of bald spots now bearing stitches. Others did not outwardly appear to have been wounded at all but were suffering from mental disorders. Many of those who made it to First Formation were in the final stages of their hospital stay and headed for the Temporary or Permanent Disability Retirement List, which the soldiers called the TDRL and the PDRL.

Monroe had missed reveille but got into the hall in time to get up with a couple of the guys he had treated. He approached Private Jake Gross, who stood by a folding table near one of the hall’s many doors, leafing through a NASCAR magazine. The table was covered with similar fare, muscle-and-drag-car periodicals, flyers offering free nosebleed seats to Wizards games and Nationals contests, crab feasts, and trips to Six Flags and other nearby amusement parks, all reflecting the geographical backgrounds, interests, and ages of most of the soldiers.

Gross, twenty, was scheduled to leave the hospital shortly, having made the PDRL, and was headed home to Indianapolis. His build and bearing were military made, but his face was still as freckled and free of stubble as a sixteen-year-old boy’s. His right leg was artificial. His plastic knee was robin’s-egg blue, and his shin was a metal pole that ended in a New Balance sneaker. He had come far since Monroe had met him. He was a fit and energetic young man to begin with, but athleticism was only a small part of getting him mobile. He had the necessary will and heart. He was walking as well on the new leg as anyone Monroe had treated.

“What’s goin on, short-time?” said Monroe. “You ready to go home?”

“More than ready,” said Gross.

“You gonna be staying with your parents?”

“My girlfriend. Her father got me a job at the big printer they got outside Indy. They’re a bookmaker, like.”

“Say you’re gonna be a bookie?”

Gross blushed. “Not like that. They print books up and put ’em together. They printed The Da Vinci Code there.”

“Never heard of it,” said Monroe.

“Yeah, right. Anyway, it’s not like a factory job. Everything’s computerized. Big as a rack of football fields, too. You should see it.”

“If I’m ever out that way, I’ll let you give me the tour.”

“Count on it,” said Gross, putting his hand out. “Thanks a million for everything, Doc.”

“I’m no doctor.”

“Heck, you fooled me.”

“You just made my day, Private.”

“I’ll stop by before I ship out.”

“Do that,” said Monroe.

Outside the hall, Monroe saw Sergeant Major O’Toole, a soft-spoken Vietnam veteran who had come out of retirement to work with soldiers through the army’s Wounded Warrior Program. He was talking to a young man seated in a wheelchair near a couple of his friends, who were standing on the sidewalk. One of them was on new legs. Monroe had treated the wheelchair-bound young man, Private William “Dagwood” Collins, so nicknamed for his tall, thin build. Collins, the victim of a roadside bomb, had lost the use of both legs. He had initially refused a double amputation, which would prepare him for the next step, the fitting of artificial legs. But Monroe had heard that the young man was having second thoughts. Monroe caught O’Toole’s eye but did not stop to talk to him or Collins. He walked across the campus to the main hospital and took the elevator up to his floor.

Raymond Monroe worked primarily in the occupational therapy and physical therapy rooms of the hospital. A therapy dog, Lady, roamed both rooms, playing with toys, sniffing at outstretched hands both flesh and plastic, and allowing herself to be petted. The facilities included free weights and weight machines, treadmills, mats and medicine balls, and a well-used pool. Raymond Monroe did much of his work on the occupational therapy room’s many padded tables, stretching his patients and increasing their range of motion and flexibility through repetition. The hips and shoulders were crucial areas. Prosthetics, burns, and scars aside, the problems he dealt with here were not much different from those he had encountered when he had worked as a PT at sports medicine clinics. He was bringing people back to some degree of active normalcy, postinjury.

Monroe’s first patient that morning was Sergeant Joseph Anderson of the First Cavalry Division, who had lost his right hand near Mosul. Anderson had a wry sense of humor and a positive attitude. He liked classic rock, redheaded women, and ’66 Mustangs, and he had an admirable abundance of confidence, despite the fact that his face had been badly scarred.

“Ali Baba tossed a grenade into our Humvee,” said Anderson the first time he met Monroe. “I picked it up and tried to throw it back to him, as a courtesy. But I guess I was a little late.”

“Word is you might have saved a couple of your men.”

“I sure would like to have my hand back, though. And my dashing good looks. Didn’t work out like it does in the comic books, sir.”

“No need to call me sir. I’m a civilian.”

“I was raised to call my elders sir. ’Less they’re ladies, and then I call ’em ma’am.”

“Where was that?”

“Fort Worth, Texas. As in, don’t mess with it.”

“You a Cowboys fan?”

“There ain’t no other team.”

“I won’t hold it against you.”

“You must be for the Deadskins.”

“Don’t play.”

Anderson had a prosthetic hand. On it, he had recently tattooed something, looked to Monroe to be a word spelled Zoso. On the flesh of his forearm were three symbols inked in blue. The one on his hand was known as a continuation tattoo. Many of the soldiers had gotten them applied to their prosthetics to replicate the portions of tattoos that had been lost to injury or amputation.

“You like my new tat?” said Anderson.

“If you like it, then I do, too,” said Monroe, who was kneading his fingers into Anderson’s forearm, doing it roughly because the young man could take it. “What’s it mean, anyway?”

“It’s a symbol. It looks like a word, but it isn’t. They call it a glyph. Don’t ask me why. Four members of Led Zeppelin each chose a symbol, and they put them on their album. Four band members, four symbols. Led Zeppelin Four, get it? The greatest hard-rock record ever made.”

“All right,” said Monroe.

“I envy you for being around when they were playin,” said Anderson. “You ever see ’em live?”

“Musta missed it.”

“Tell me you were a Zep fan, Pop.”

“Can’t say I was.” Monroe issued a barely detectable smile. “Matter of fact, I didn’t even know it was a group. I used to think it was one dude. My older brother set me straight, like he always did.”

“Mine liked to school me, too.”

“That’s how big brothers do,” said Monroe.

Later, after Anderson had left, after he had treated a couple of other patients, Monroe broke for lunch. His intention was to meet Kendall in her office.

Beyond the swimming pool, in a hall that led to a bank of elevators, he saw a general and some lower-ranking, freshly scrubbed officers; several doctors were giving the visiting uniforms a tour of the facility. The group parted as a young man and an older woman came down the hall.

The young man was a private out of Minnesota who had recently gotten his new legs. He wore a harness and a leash. His mother followed him as he wobbled on plastic knees and shin poles fitted into sneakers, his hips gyrating wildly as he took tentative steps. His face was pink with effort and concentration. His forehead was damp with sweat, and he bit down on his lower lip. The young man’s mother held the leash, steadying him, just as she had done twenty years earlier in their home in Thief River Falls, when he was eleven months old and taking his first steps.

The general, the officers, and the doctors began to grin painfully and clap their hands in unison for the enlisted man as he moved through the crowd. Monroe could not bring himself to join in. He had love for the soldiers and marines he treated and nothing but respect for the countless doctors, therapists, career military, and volunteers who were making their best efforts to help them. But he wasn’t about to join these officers with their frozen smiles.

Monroe walked quietly to the elevators as the private and his mother passed.