Lost Echoes

3

Harry thought it wasn’t so bad, except for that pesky not-being-able-to-hear-out-of-his-right-ear part. He got to miss first grade for a couple of weeks, lie up in bed and watch TV. He found a channel that played old movies, and for some reason they appealed to him.

His mother one day, sitting by his bed, talking into his good left ear, said, “There are new shows, you know? These were old when your daddy and I married, baby. These are the dinosaurs of television.”

“I like them,” Harry said. “I like Tarzan.”

“There were a lot of Tarzans. Not just this one. Some of them were even in color.”

“I like this one.”

“All right,” his mother said, standing, moving toward the door. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

When she was gone, Harry turned his attention back to Johnny Weissmuller swinging through the trees on a vine. He thought he saw a kind of bar that Tarzan was hanging onto, and he wondered about that. Did they have that in the jungle? Vines with bars to hang onto?

He had to sit with his head slightly turned, his left eye and left ear focused on the television. He turned his head too much, the sound was strange. He reached up and tapped his right ear softly. He didn’t hear anything, just felt a vibration. The ear itself felt weird. Like someone had shoved an egg inside.

He tapped it again, a little harder. This time there was an explosion. It came from inside and burst out, and along with it came a stream of warm pus that surged out like water from a busted dam. It spurted on his cheek and on the pillow, a green, wet wad.

Harry let out a scream.

Pans dropped in the kitchen and his mother came running.

“Huh,” the doctor said.

It was a different doctor from the one in the hospital. An ear-nose-and-throat guy named Mishman. He was about forty and looked every year of it, plus a couple bonus years. His eyebrows were all over the place, like insect antennae. The Wilkeses had been seeing him ever since the day after they took Harold into the emergency room.

Harry was perched on the examining table, his legs hanging over the edge, his tennis shoes swinging back and forth, the doctor probing the inside of his ear gently with the tip of his handheld light.

Billie and Jake were near the table, Billie had her hand on Harry’s elbow, holding it gently.

“So,” Jake said, “he’s all right?”

“Well, there could still be some problems,” the doctor said. “You can’t say for sure about something like this. But he can hear again. The mumps, they affected his hearing, and he had this pocket of pus in there. Got to say I couldn’t see it. I looked plenty, but I didn’t see it. That’s just being truthful with you. It was behind the wall of the ear. It didn’t even make a swelling. Not when I saw him last. But what I think now is the obvious: It swelled while he was at home. And now it’s burst. It was tight with infection, and when he touched it, it was ready to go. He’s his own doctor.”

Mishman went silent, studied the boy for a long moment.

Jake said, “Something wrong, Doc? You’re kind of rambling.”

Mishman shook his head. “No. It’s just…Thing like this, something odd about it. Haven’t seen anything quite like it. It’s nothing big, not fancy in the sense of the medical books, but it’s just not playing by the rules.”

“The rules?” Jake said.

“It doesn’t act like a regular infection. But the important thing is, now he can hear, and I think we’re on top of it. Maybe another test or two, but I think he’s out of the woods…. Listen to him.”

Harry had lost interest in what the adults were saying, and as he sat there on the edge of the examination table, he had begun to hum and sing a few lines from “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”

He liked singing it because he could hear himself sing with both ears again.

He thought he sounded pretty darn good.

They ran more tests.

Mishman looked for a tumor.

Didn’t find one.

The ear looked okay.

But it was odd, way it had worked out. Mishman couldn’t say for sure why it was odd, but it didn’t feel right. This whole business, it wasn’t playing by the rules. It was a medical anomaly.

He would remember the problem as odd for a long time, and then, slowly, he would forget about Harry Wilkes and his ear infection. It was something to consider, all right, but when something other than his Spidey sense started to tingle and he started seeing a long-legged nurse, hiding it from his wife, it took up most of his thinking and his time, and eventually it caved in his practice. The nurse left him, and all he had were memories of how she liked to do it naked except for her nursing shoes.

It was a memory that trumped some kid with an oddball ear infection.