Chapter Two

Bethlehem, Alabama
December, 1988

Caleb Philpot sat on an old cot in a dimly lit cell in the Bethlehem High School basement. In what was left of his mind, he pictured an old prison cell of similar dimensions,onehe spent fourterrible monthslocked inside,struggling to maintain his sanityduringWorld War II. From Philpot’s warped view of reality, he saw the hue of the two rooms separated in time and contrasted with nothing but the vacant middlehe now occupied. He fixated his gaze on a single beam of light from a solitary window as it illuminated particles of dust floating aimlessly down to a chipped concrete floor.

Philpot took his old wrinkled fingers and began the familiar probe. It was a sickening mass growing a few inches below his bellybutton, hanging over to the right. It was his closet companion all these years: a large tumor, a flaky red texture masked with patches of black infection. Since the war, his tumor was the very center of his timeless world; the one thing he believed was truly his own, a vestige of memory of a time now passed. Overwhelmed with both pain and joy, he fondled.

The noise in the room moved through the same quiet crescendo as the Beethoven which saturated Philpot’s cell from a radio beside the bed. He leaned back on his cot staring into the spaces of what used to be, spaces of mind and melody.

At seventy-five, Caleb is strong and determined; although his protruding facial structure gives many people an impression that he is mildly retarded. The pain of his large, fleshy tumor rockets through him daily in waves. He glances down at his fingers, still caressing the mass gingerly. For an instant, Philpot imagines the bulge curling around his thoughtful digits, vivacious and eager to greet him. Each year the tumor has grown larger, and more painful, and yet he serves as its willing and humble host.

When the sound of boy’s cleats begins a solemn shuffle down the high school hall, he hears the old German boots in the distance and is jostled back and forth between two worlds. A young Caleb Philpot rises from the mist of his memories. He is nearly naked, and lying on a blood-stained sheet, clutching a bullet wound in his lower abdomen. What a fateful origin of cancerous luck, in the hell hole of Hitler’s making. And then, as if out of place, the sounds of teenagers murmuring outside the door rise and fall behind the swastikas of cell keepers. Keys jingle and Caleb Philpot is horrified once again. The handle turns ever so slowly and the door creaks open to reveal a middle-aged doctor in a white robe, holding a syringe in his hand. Philpot’s eyes begin to blur and an audible gasp ripples out and up as he slips back into his wrinkled frame, now curled up into the shell of age. Caleb is a far cry from the image in his mind, the image of what he once was. He is no longer riveted with muscles, no longer wounded, no longer carrying the pride and honor of his nation in his backpack. He is all but absent of the shimmer found in the vigor of his youth; all but absent from his mind.

Caleb remembered how his former captors knelt beside him, injecting a green liquid into his wound. Now, oddly mixing past and present, he watches as three boys dressed in football uniforms enter his cell religiously. Caleb knows why they are here; they know just as he knows, the tumor growing from his side brings good luck. The boys have lined up this way for years, generations of them; lined up to caress his leaky pus in a ritualistic pattern. And as the first player reached down to touch the tumor Caleb rested in the knowledge that he is in some way serving his country once again. One of the boy’s hands clutched his helmet by the facemask while the other hand timidly offered a quick series of pats to the fetid growth. As his hand folded around the mass, the boy released a sigh of disgust, barely heard among the echoes of Beethoven bouncing across the basement’s acoustic block.