My older brother Clay had come to visit me in Georgia for my 66th birthday, but our plans were interrupted when a neighbor needed a ride to the emergency room. I couldn’t say no, of course, so we turned off the pre-game analysis for an NBA finals game and picked up Johnson down the street. He was having chest pain. Clay thought we should call an ambulance. “I called my doctor, damn it,” Johnson said, frowning in the back seat, his hand gripping his shirt pocket. “He said to just get myself to the hospital.” Johnson was as old as we were. He rented a Tuff Shed with amenities behind a regular house. He didn’t have a car. Public transportation was slow any day, especially Sundays, so he called me, maybe because earlier he’d said he was feeling grim when I invited him to watch the game with us. All three of us lived alone.
I was headed to the nearest trauma center, but Johnson said no. He liked a different hospital, further out. I sighed and got on the interstate headed north. I heard him rustling a wrinkled paper bag he had with him. In the review mirror, I saw him take out a plump, maroon Bible. He held it on his lap, unopened, as he grimaced out the window. I didn’t know a lot about Johnson. He hadn’t lived on the street long. He worked the seafood counter at the grocery store, where I met him, and I had told him about the Tuff Shed for rent when he asked if I knew of any vacancies. He couldn’t afford the motel anymore. I had wondered what he brought in the bag.
The waiting area was practically empty and Johnson was taken right away. We figured it would be a while for X‑rays, an EKG, likely an MRI, plus blood work and maybe even a stress test. If something more, we figured he’d have to stay the night, or longer. Clay and I didn’t think it was a heart attack. Maybe angina. Gas. Indigestion. Bile. Heartburn. A demon. Gerd. Something stuck in his craw.
Maybe that was mean, joking like that, minimizing, but we were being optimistic. We sat on wide, green vinyl chairs and picked up parts of a newspaper from a table in front of us. I read the comics and advice, then switched with Clay and read the sports and weather. We watched more people come, check in at the front window, take seats in the waiting area. No one came in bloody. No one on a stretcher. A man had his hand wrapped in a towel, like a giant Q‑tip prosthetic. He sat in a corner. A woman in flannel pajamas and a pink satin bonnet helped a limping teenage boy find a seat opposite us. They played a card-guessing game for a while. Soon, all the patients were called back. The woman in the bonnet went with the boy.
Hours passed. We were bored, having tired of snarks about how scared, overreactive, and entitled Johnson seemed, about whether or not he knew what to read from his Bible, and about how he imagined it would help him. Maybe it calmed him. Maybe we were arrogant, enjoying our closeness while Johnson apparently had no one.
Sometimes we could communicate without speaking. But we talked about the time our father had a heart attack, when we were boys, and remembered waiting with neighbors while our mother rode along in the ambulance. Clay said he had prayed in the neighbors’ bathroom while I watched Bonanza or something on their TV. They’d been the last neighbors to get indoor plumbing. I said I had stared into their fireplace, watching logs burn and embers rise, hypnotized by the patterns and colors of the flames, zoning out the terror. The neighbors were a childless couple. They didn’t have any toys or games.
Once, the wife had come to our house crying in fright and shame because her husband had pointed his rifle at her, threatened to kill her. Why? Our mother comforted her, sat her in the kitchen with some coffee. And our dad went next door to talk. We’d been afraid the neighbor would shoot our dad. It took a long time. But that long night when we were at their house we were terrified our dad would die at the hospital, or was already dead. They heated up Campbell’s vegetable soup for us, served it in round white bowls. Never was I to be so grateful for canned soup.
“Mmm-good,” Clay said, stretching out his legs so that his new Hokas were under the table. He’d brought me a pair for my birthday, so we both had on fat white shoes that looked like generous slices of cake.
At the check-in window I asked the attendant to have Johnson phone me when he was ready or if he’d be kept for the night. I gave her my number. Clay had a joint he wanted to fire up, and I had read in the paper about the Strawberry moon that should be visible, so we went outside. The hospital buildings rose tall around us, blocking most of the sky. We drove to the top of the parking deck and that’s where we saw it. It wasn’t red or pink. It was big and white. Perfectly round. Clay said it coincided with the traditional Native American harvest of strawberries in June. I had read that, too, and I knew it wasn’t supposed to look like a strawberry, but I would have been happy if it had a rosy tint.
We began to list all the moons we’d heard of. Wolf moon, Blue moon, Beaver moon, Blood moon, Flower moon, Corn moon. I recalled the Harvest moon, which must have been the Corn moon, when we were in elementary school. It occurred around the time of the Harvest Festival. Kids who sold the most tickets to the festival would be crowned Harvest King and Queen. I was Harvest King twice, I reminded Clay. A raffle offered prizes like a straw basket of vegetables and a live turkey. The King and Queen got a silver dollar and a cardboard crown decorated with construction paper ears of corn and leaves. I was shy about wearing the crown, standing on the stage at the far end of the basketball court beside whatever little-girl Queen. Parents applauded. They’d actually sold the tickets. Or bought them. I cherished the silver dollars, hiding them in my shoes, walking around like that, uncomfortable, certain they would be worth a fortune in the future. And I’d buy us a new house. More than half a century had passed since then, so if I’d been right, and kept the coins, I’d have been rich. We gazed on the Strawberry moon, which now looked like a silver dollar. We were both thinking that.
“When’s the last time you saw or held one?” Clay asked.
“Not since I was King, probably.”
“In the Old West, you’d pluck one from your vest and spin it on the bar for a shot of red-eye.”
“Leave the bottle,” I said.
“You know, my barbershop is called the Silver Moon,” Clay said.
“Huh. Unusual barbershop name.”
“Good for a saloon, though, I always thought.”
“Must be a poetic place. Barber poets. Shorn poets.”
“More of an argument place. Last week, I’m waiting like an hour while five people shouted about the difference between a schedule and a routine. I’m thinking I had a schedule to get my hair cut, while they routinely argued.”
We had the windows down and the moon roof open, although we viewed the moon through the windshield, the parking deck bathed in chrome light. There were no other cars around. The night was warm. The smoke drifted out. This part was purely sublime.
“I had a wreck once because I was looking at the moon,” Clay said. “I don’t know which moon. Summer, so it could have been this one. I hit the curb hard and bent a wheel. Had to call a wrecker. It was embarrassing, but I was alone. Except for the tow truck guy. He hooked up the car, and I kept the moon in sight. How did I get home?”
“Were you high?”
“I don’t think so. I’d been visiting a woman I didn’t really like. I mean, she was nice but not all that appealing. So I was confused about why I’d gone to see her, and the moon had been a surprise.”
We were silent for a long while. Thinking about the past. We’d been fortunate boys. But our dad didn’t survive his heart attack. Our mother lived longer. And we’d had some missteps over the years. Romantic, financial, legal. Also, we both had lost a spouse. Thyroid. Pancreas. We weren’t new to emergencies or to doing time at hospitals. But Clay had a daughter in Barcelona and I had a son in Hawaii, good places to visit on occasion. I didn’t mention this to Clay, but I remembered feeling awe when the same night sky as our childhood in Virginia developed over tropical Hawaii, and being furious at the moon when my wife died.
Clay said, “It was a full moon when Dad died, too. Remember?”
“No. Not really. That’s interesting.”
He was searching on his phone, its glow on his face. “The Worm moon,” he said.
He checked for the score of the game. He knew about all the players, the stats, the bets. He seemed satisfied. Then my phone rang. It was well after midnight. Johnson said he was ready. He said he had a pulmonary embolism, although he stumbled over the words.
“What’s that?” I asked. “I ought to know, right?”
“I’ll tell you. I’m standing outside.”
We started our descent through the parking deck, the moon light gone but sodium lights brightening the empty concrete levels. Clay had information about embolisms. He said some cultures thought the moon played a part. He said he’d had one in his leg two years earlier. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “What exactly is it?”
“It wasn’t a big enough deal. I mean it could have been, but it wasn’t. I took a blood thinner for a few months and it went away. It was after my trip to Spain. I should have worn compression socks.”
“So, it’s a blood clot?”
“Yeah, like an obstructive bubble.”
“So, Johnson has a lung bubble.”
“Yeah. Dangerous. It probably started in his leg.”
All this was worrisome. I didn’t want Johnson to up and die. Clay either. We pulled up to the entrance, and Johnson stood there looking old and vulnerable in red-and-white light from the Emergency sign, clutching his Bible-in-a-bag. He got in the backseat again.
“I have a blister,” he said.
“It’s not a blister,” Clay said.
“What is it, then?”
Clay shook his head.
I laughed. I was thinking a strawberry, then a moon in his chest.
Johnson said, “You boys know so much. Which one of you is a doctor?”
We got back to the neighborhood. On the way, Johnson described his medical experience, but the way he told it didn’t make sense. He got confused about the tests they performed, called the EKG an EEG and seemed to think that the squeeze of the blood pressure cuff was a stress test. He showed Clay his prescription bottle. They had given him Eliquis which he called Elegant. But he was relieved he didn’t have a heart issue. “That’s water over the bridge,” he said.
Johnson moved in the moonlight through the gate at the side of the house. It was a big house, white and cube-shaped, luminous now. From where we sat, we couldn’t see the shed, or Johnson go into it. I figured he’d be okay. He’d managed, somehow, this long.
“Good birthday,” I said, backing out the driveway.
Clay said, “Sweet.”
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John Holman is the author of Squabble and Other Stories, Luminous Mysteries, and Triangle Ray. He teaches writing at Georgia State University.