Sometimes he is able to remember more than a fragment. It's more like a page or a scene, brief. There is an image of a rusted fire escape. It had been painted blue once, but years of rain and snow and New York winters had leached the color from it, leaving rusted patches blooming on it in unexpected places. Despite that, they used to climb on it when they were kids. One time he had found just the wrong spot and sliced his hand on the rusty metal, pain biting into him as his palm dripped frighteningly red.
"Hang on," he remembers Steve saying, pulling the handkerchief his mother had given him out of his pocket and wrapping it around the wound. "Mom said you can get lockjaw that way. You need to see the doc."
"Ain't got no money for the doc."
"Let me worry about that."
Steve had run up the fire escape and disappeared through his apartment window. He remembers waiting, blood soaking the handkerchief, feeling like it was taking him forever. Then Steve erupted out the window again and nearly jumped down to the ground, tiny though he was.
"Got it. Let's go."
The doctor on the corner had given him a tetanus shot, and Steve had paid him the princely sum of fifty cents.
"Where'd you get all that money?" he'd asked. "You steal it?"
"Nah."
"What'd you do?" he said, but when Steve wouldn't answer, he stopped in the middle of the cracked sidewalk and refused to move. "Steve, what stupid thing did you do?"
"How do you know it was stupid?"
"Cuz it's you, runt," he'd said. "Now tell me or I'll sock ya."
Steve gave a sheepish smile and said, "You remember how Rudy Marconi liked my baseball glove?"
"Well, sure, who don't? The Babe signed it himself, right there on the⦠Steve, you didn't."
Steve said nothing.
"You did. You sold your glove to Rotten Rudy for fifty crummy cents!"
"It's only a glove," Steve said, shrugging it off.
"Are you nuts?"
"So you keep telling me."
He'd shook his head at him, but he'd felt warm around his heart too.
When he lost his arm, he lost the scar from that day. When he wakes, he knows he won't remember to miss it, and the pain bites into him again.
