Chapter 15: The Cast

I didn't sleep Sunday night.

I sat on the floor of my new flat with my back against the knocking radiator and looked at the picture.

The cast was new.

Bright white, no names on it, the edges still sharp.

A doctor had put it on, or somebody who'd watched one.

Uncle had never paid for a doctor in his life.

Unless a cast was worth more than a doctor cost.

I knew the math.

I'd done it for him.

A kid with a cast takes in double on a church step in December.

He hadn't broken her arm to punish me.

He'd broken it to make money and to punish me, at the same time, because that was how he liked things.

At six in the morning I got up, clipped my legs on and walked to the bus.

The prosthetist's workshop was a converted garage in Pilsen, all sawdust and carbon fiber and a radio playing oldies.

He was sixty, with forearms like a carpenter and reading glasses pushed up into gray hair.

He'd fitted my legs in the hospital and told me I walked like a person apologizing.

He looked at my face when I came in.

"What happened?"

"I need to run," I said.

"You need to heal."

"I need to run by Sunday. Six days."

He took off his glasses and looked at me for a long time.

Then he went into the back and came out with two curved carbon blades, shaped like the letter J.

"Running feet," he said. "Clip in at the same socket. They're not for walking. They're for going."

"Then we'd better not waste the first one talking."

The workshop had a strip of rubber track along one wall, twenty yards long, with parallel bars at one end.

I fell on it a dozen times on Monday.

The blades wanted to throw me forward.

My stumps wanted to quit inside the liners.

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