Marie Goyette

The Destruction of Jerry

As I stepped outside the school, a cold wind whipped around the corner and entered my unzipped coat, filling its loose folds like a balloon. My classmates streamed past me as I stood on the sidewalk, feeling suddenly weightless, as if I might lift off the ground and sail above them all. Above the squat brick and aluminum Samson Middle School building. Above the old-growth maples that huddled along the eastern edge of the school’s property. Above the splintered concrete basketball court upon which my PE class had gathered, searching for me, their heads shifting left and right, but never up. But as the wind settled, the weighted reality of my body returned, the fantasy dissipating like my own warm breath.

“Cole,” Mrs. Schmidt said, her hands resting on the shelves of her hips. “Do you want to play or keep score?” She didn’t usually give me the choice, but today she did, and we both knew why.

As I looked from face to face, each kid averted their eyes. Finally, I looked at Anthony, who had taken a basketball from the metal rack Mrs. Schmidt had wheeled out and was bouncing it between his legs. When he saw me looking at him, he stilled the ball and looked away, just as the others had. Anthony and I had been friends. We’d stayed in the same dorm suite at basketball camp. We learned to play together. But now, the way he wouldn’t even meet my eye, it was like all of me were gone, not just my leg.

“I’ll keep score,” I said. Before I stepped off the court and settled onto the strip of yellow grass between the concrete and the chain-link fence, I grabbed one of the balls off the rack. Easing myself down, I leaned against the fence, feeling the dry, chalky metal press into my back and scalp. I held the ball firmly against my stomach, and rested my hands on it. The feel of the ball between my palms was the same as it had been when I first learned to play, when I had potential. My physical therapist explained that someday I could get a prosthesis that would allow me to run, to play sports again, but it was pointless to get one while I was still growing. The prosthesis I had now—essentially a flagpole with two simple hinges for walking—wouldn’t even allow me to jog without pain, let alone sprint forty feet down a basketball court.

I turned when I heard a car pull up behind me.

“Cole!” Audra called, leaning out the passenger side window of a rusted white Taurus. I grabbed hold of the fence and pulled myself up.

 “Hey, little brother,” she said, climbing out of the car. Audra’s face was both familiar and foreign, her features obscured by flesh both stretched and blooming. She had gained probably twenty-five pounds since she left for college, and I always forgot how different she looked now. At barely five feet tall, the weight transformed her. There were plenty of fat kids in my class and, standing there, looking at my sister through the fence, her fitted pink shirt hugging the swells of her belly, I hated myself for how I looked at them.

“What are you doing home?” It had been since Christmas since I’d seen her.

“It’s good to see you, too, jerkface,” she grinned. “Can’t a girl just come visit her family?” Then, motioning toward the pale, lanky man pulling himself out of the driver’s side of the car, “That’s James.”

Mrs. Schmidt blew her whistle and everyone turned to look at us. “Cole!” she barked, her hands back on her wide hips.

“It’s my sister!” I yelled back at the same time Audra called, “Hi, Mrs. Schmidt!”

“One minute, Cole,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “That’s it.” Then she blew her whistle and the game resumed.

“You’re not playing,” said Audra.

I shrugged.

She glanced down at my left leg, sheathed in denim. “How’s Jerry?”

“Still an asshole,” I said, watching James, who had leaned his long body over the hood of the car, his head propped on his hands. The sun shone on his face, illuminating his meaty and deeply pockmarked skin. His thick black hair fell in a blade across his forehead.

Noticing me watching him, James said, “Hey, guy,” a strange smile on his lips.

Mrs. Schmidt blew her whistle. “Cole!” she yelled. “Time’s up!”

Audra backed away from the fence. “Mom and Dad have plans, so you’re with us tonight.”

***

I lost my leg two years earlier, when I was eleven. It was severed just above the knee after the car in which I was riding lost control on Highway 63 and spun across the grassy median and into oncoming traffic. We clipped a small white pickup, which careened back across the median and the two southbound lanes and into a cluster of Douglas firs. We spun the opposite way and came to rest nose-down in a shallow gully ten feet from the road. The driver, my friend Jason’s dad, had insisted before we left the house that I ride up front with him.

“Jason’s been on this ride before,” he told me. “You need to see for yourself what the Firebird can do.” And so it was I, not his own son, whose left leg was pinned against the passenger’s seat by the hot, humming engine of the car, which had pushed itself violently through the dashboard.

When I awoke in the hospital the next day, only Audra was there. I opened my eyes, and she rose immediately from her chair in the corner. “Cole,” she said, a glimmer of intensity passing over her face. She looked toward the open door. “Mom and Dad are talking to the doctor.” After a moment, she said, “Are you okay?”

Beneath the blanket, my body felt composed less of blood, bone, tissue, than of air, alive and shuddering. My left knee ached deeply. “I think so,” I croaked. “What happened?” Images flickered in my mind: the elaborate web of cracks in the windshield, the wall of the ambulance with its brightly colored boxes and wires, endless green curtains.

Audra hesitated. “You were in a car accident.”

“What—” I began, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask.

“Cole, Mom and Dad are coming right back. Just wait, okay?” She glanced toward the door again.

“Wait for what?” I demanded, using all my energy to lift my head off the pillow and prop myself up on my elbows, awakening pain in my back and shoulders.

“They’ll tell you,” she said.

“Screw this,” I said, and began to wrestle the blanket from my body.

“Cole!” Audra hissed. “Stop!” She walked quickly to the doorway and whipped her head from left to right. “Where are they?”

As weak as I was, I still hadn’t managed to remove the blanket by the time she sighed, “Fine. Calm down and I’ll tell you.” She perched on the edge of her chair. “The accident you were in, you were with Jason and his dad. You probably remember. They’re both okay.” She spoke noticeably slower, taking long pauses. Finally, she sighed, “Your leg. It was crushed. Mr. Park was going so fast and then he lost control.” Tears shimmered in her eyes and I felt momentarily guilty for putting her in this position. Staring at the form of my body, I noticed then that the blanket dropped off at my left knee, and I understood that my leg was not just damaged, but gone.

“Can I look now?” I whispered.

Audra came to me and gently peeled the covers away from my body. I looked down. Only one leg extended from the bottom of my hospital gown. Then she pulled the left side of the gown up about eight inches to reveal a swollen, bandaged stump; green and purple bruises bloomed from beneath the gauze. “Oh my god,” I breathed.

Suddenly my parents burst through the doorway, their eyes wide. “Cole,” they both said. My father allowed my mother to go to me. “You’re okay,” she said softly, and lay her hands on my chest, kissed my cheek. Her smell was harsh and briny, as if she hadn’t showered for days.

“What did they do with my leg?” I asked my parents. Audra and our father exchanged a look.

“Bud,” my dad said, and took an infinitely long pause. “They’ve probably incinerated it. Burned it.”

“They burned my leg without asking me?” I said, hefting myself into a sitting position, and then shuddered at the pain. “It’s mine.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s dead tissue, Cole.”

“But it’s still mine,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “Not theirs to just burn up whenever they want.”

“You’re tired,” my mother said.

From behind my father, Audra spoke. “Cole,” she said, and stood. Both our parents looked at her with the same peculiar glint of desperation in their eyes. Audra’s expression suggested an escalation of thought, that she hadn’t yet arrived at what she wanted to say. “It’s just gone,” she said finally, simply.

***

That night Audra and James picked me up and we went to Randy’s Hole in the Wall, a pub downtown. I had been to Randy’s a few times on Sundays, after church with my parents. At night, with Audra and James, it was darker and filled with smoke. The hostess led us to a booth in the back and motioned languidly for us to be seated. As we waited for our waitress, I watched Audra and James bump shoulders and exchange conspiratorial smiles. I tapped an uneven rhythm against the floor with my right foot, feeling as if my left were tapping in tandem: the phantom limb phenomenon everyone asked me about. I hadn’t experienced phantom pain—pain emanating from the former limb—but I commonly experienced the feeling of existence: the pulsing of blood and constricting of muscles that weren’t there anymore. Sometimes, before I attached Jerry in the morning, I fell off the bed, feeling both legs on the floor beneath me as I attempted to stand.

Our waitress pushed through the swinging doors behind me. “Start you with some drinks?”

“For us,” said James, “a couple drafts. Whatever’s on tap.” When she looked at me, James said, “And he’ll have a Maker’s Mark. Neat.”

“Cute,” said our waitress, who was plump, shaped much like Audra. Her nametag read Suz. She looked at me. “What do you really want?”

“The kid wants a whiskey. Right, Cole?”

I studied James’s face, amplified and glistening beneath the light hanging over the table. “Right,” I said, following an impulse I didn’t fully comprehend.

“Give him a break, Suz. He’s disabled.”

“James!” Audra snapped. “Shut it.”

He continued, “This little dude, he got his leg ripped off in a car crash.”

I glared at Audra.

“And he keeps on trucking.” James’s gaze shifted back to me. “You lived through something that would turn most men into sniveling babies. You know that pussy driving the car, he couldn’t handle it. He’d have probably dropped dead on the spot from all the pain. And he would have deserved it, too.” He paused. “Show her, Cole.”

Suz looked at me, a hand on her hip, waiting. When I made no move toward Jerry, James leaned his long body over the table, that strange face bearing down on me. He rapped his knuckles against the spot where my lower thigh would have been, connecting with the plastic socket and producing a sharp, inanimate sound. The reverberations buzzed through my body.

Five minutes later, Suz set down a glass of brown liquid in front of me and gave Audra and James their beers. Immediately, James grabbed the whiskey, downed it three swallows, and smirked at Suz. Then he got up and announced he was going to bum a smoke.

Once Suz had taken our orders, Audra pushed James’s beer over to me. “You can have it,” she said. “Just keep it on my side of the table.” I’d had beer one other time in my life, last year at Jason’s when his mom wasn’t home. I picked up the tall glass and as I drank, the memory of that day came flooding back: the stale smell of the pantry where we found the beer, the feel of onion skins beneath my bare right foot, the sound of the television on in the den, Jason’s nervous laughter.

“Is James your boyfriend?” I asked.

“We’re better as friends.” She settled her elbows on the table. “You’ll understand that someday.”

“Makes sense now.”

Audra wrapped her hands around her glass. “Sorry I’m not around more. I’m a shit sister.”

I shrugged my shoulders fast, like a tic. “Not really,” I said. “I know you’ve got school and work and stuff.”

“It’s not just that I feel obligated.” She raised her glass to her lips and held it there a moment before drinking. “I miss you guys. Mom and Dad, but especially you.” She chuckled. “You’re probably my best friend.”

If that were true, wouldn’t she have come home for longer than two days last Christmas break? Wouldn’t she ask to talk to me on the rare occasions one of our parents caught her on the phone? Wouldn’t she make a greater effort to be part of my life?

Instead, her absence had congealed into a warm, sentient force that my parents and I tiptoed around, trying our best not to bump into. Recently over dinner, our mother complained that she only heard from Audra if she wanted something. When both she and my father looked to me, I’d said, “What?”

“Don’t you do that to us someday,” my mother said, and then glanced at my sister’s empty chair, at the ghost pulsating there.

I took another deep drink from the glass, my tongue coated and bitter, and wondered if I would ever tell Audra any of this.

She leaned toward me. “Can I tell you something else?”

***

Before the accident, Audra and I used to shoot hoops outside our house after school. One cold gray November afternoon, Audra’s hands sheathed in pink cotton gloves, she bounced the ball, the curvature of her rigid hand failing to shadow its perfect contour. Coach had taught me when I held the ball to feel it with my entire hand. “Skin to skin,” he’d said.

Audra took a clumsy shot at the basket, nicking the bottom corner of the backboard, and I laughed.

“How was school today?” she asked, bouncing the ball to me.

I smirked. “Fine, Mom.” I dribbled twice, lined up my shot and sank it. “There’s a new kid in my class,” I started. I never spoke with my friends while shooting baskets, preferring to focus on the handling and movement of the ball, but with Audra, after school in our driveway, I felt a compulsion to release. “During gym he shoved me when Fetchko wasn’t looking.” I caught the ball and tossed it to her.

Her next shot kissed the rim. “What did you do?”

 “It’s not like I was going to fight him.” I knotted my hands together and blew on them.

Audra set the ball on the concrete, rested a foot atop it, and sank her hands in her jacket pockets. “He’s new, he’s probably trying to,” she paused, “establish dominance or whatever. Smack him in the head tomorrow. He’ll leave you alone.” She grinned. “Sometimes violence is the answer.”

The floodlight mounted over the garage illuminated the driveway. I looked from Audra’s face to the basketball under her foot. Beneath the utter stillness of dusk, the ball’s dusty leather casing appeared to quiver and pulsate, a heart beating, floundering.

“Yeah,” I said, moving forward, reaching for it. “Maybe.”

***

I created a “V” with my hands and rested my face in it, my hands cool from the glass and my cheeks warm from the alcohol. “What?” I said. My thoughts were suddenly dim and harder to track.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

My arms dropped to the table. “How do you know? Did you,” I hesitated, “take a test?”

“Some things you just know,” she said, resting her hands on her belly. “But if you want some hard evidence, I’m tired as hell. My boobs hurt.” Disgust flickered across her face. “My nipples are practically black.”

Fire flared beneath my skin. I couldn’t think of a time I had even seen Audra in a bathing suit—even before she gained the weight, as far back as I could remember, she always wore a t-shirt in the pool. My eyes fell on her glass, still mostly full. “You shouldn’t be drinking, right?”

She smirked. “It’s just a beer.”

“What now?” I asked quietly.

“Well, obviously, being in school, I can’t have a kid right now.” She stared at me as if she’d answered my question. After a moment, she continued, “I could get an abortion, give it up for adoption.” She lowered her voice. “Really, though, I’m pulling for a miscarriage. “That’s when you suddenly lose the baby. It just—”

“I know,” I interrupted her, though I had no idea. “Who’s the dad? James?”

“It’s not James.”

“Why can’t the dad help?”

“Audra sighed. “Cole,” she began.

“Or why can’t you keep it yourself? Mom and Dad could help.”

“Do you have any idea how much it costs to raise a baby? I’m already loaded down with debt from school loans. Mom and Dad work during the day. And they don’t have the extra money. They’re still paying off your leg. You know that, right? Dad’s crap health insurance barely paid anything. Do you have any idea how much Jerry has cost them?” The change of subject jarred me, and before I could respond, Audra said, “This baby is just not an option.”

***

James pulled into the Chevron station on Leland to buy cigarettes. Inside he and Audra went straight to the counter, and I headed to the magazine rack at the back. I’d finished the beer at Randy’s, and my body swam from the warm churn of alcohol in my veins. All of it but Jerry. It was a strange sensation, the sobriety of only one limb.

I skimmed through Sports Illustrated until I sensed someone standing beside me. I looked over to see Mr. Park staring down at me.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “How you doing?” He held a two-liter of Coke under his arm and a brick of yellow cheese in his hand. It occurred to me that we’d never been alone together. Jason was always there, or my mom if we ran into him around town. It had been months since I’d seen him, and he’d clearly been hitting the gym; his biceps bulged beneath his shirtsleeves.

“Hi, Mr. Park,” I said.

“Call me Jerry. After all we been through, seems right.” He stared at me, smiling out of one side of his mouth. “Hey, Jason told me he’s been trying to talk you into signing up for basketball camp this year. Even if you can’t run too fast, every team needs a good shooter.”

Blood rushed to my face, and my right leg buckled. Mr. Park reached out to steady me, but I dodged his hand and grabbed the magazine rack for support. Audra called my name, and we both turned toward her voice. When she saw who I was talking to, she ran toward us, calling my name once more.

“Audrey, right? I’m Jerry Park, Jason’s dad.”

She ignored him. “Cole, we have to go.”

“Well, it was good seeing you, Cole. You’re looking just fine. Looking like a million bucks, actually.”

Audra whipped around to face him. “Fuck you, Jerry,” she said. Then she grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me toward the door.

James was in the car, struggling to remove the plastic wrap from his pack of cigarettes. By the time I settled into the backseat, he’d extracted one and lit up. He leaned his head against the headrest and exhaled a milky swell of smoke.

I opened my mouth to object, to make the point that James shouldn’t be smoking around Audra, but closed it when I realized James might not know. That I might be the only one who knew. Audra’s words—you’re probably my best friend—echoed in my ears. I was relieved when James cranked the window down, allowing a cool gust of wind to snake through the car.

I kept waiting for Audra to say something about what had occurred inside the gas station, but she didn’t. We sat in silence until James stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and said dreamily, “Cole, I think it’s cool you’ve got a fake leg.” He flicked his dark eyes toward me. “When you get older, I bet there are some chicks that’ll really get off on it. Dude, there are so many fetish sites out there for amputees. Someday you’ll be glad this happened.”

“I will not. My leg is gone. And this thing,” I said, pounding a fist against Jerry, “isn’t my leg. Both Jerrys can eat my damn ass.”

Audra laughed, but James looked bewildered. “Both Jerrys?”

“I told you this,” said Audra. “He named his leg after the guy who caused the wreck. Jerry Park. We just saw him inside.”

James sat up. “Is he still here?”

“Doubt it,” said Audra, peering around James. From the side of the building where he’d parked, one row of pumps was visible, and no cars or people.

James turned around. “Did you talk to him?”

“A little.” Fury glimmered through my chest as I remembered. “He doesn’t even feel bad about what he did.” The lights outside the gas station clicked off, intensifying the darkness in the car. “Jason hates him, too. He’s always pissed when he has to go stay with him.”

Audra looked at me. “They got divorced?”

“Yeah. Last year. He’s living with his girlfriend now. I guess he moved in with her, like, right away.”

“Let’s destroy something of his,” Audra said suddenly, her face hovering in the darkness like the moon, pale and full. “Seriously, Cole. It’s only fair.”

James righted his seatback. “We shall be vehicles of karmic justice,” he said, and punched the roof of the car.

“Cole,” Audra began, her tone that of an adult asking a child to understand a serious matter. “What should we do to him?”

***

In the shadow of a looming oak, we sat in front of his house—his girlfriend’s house—at the end of Barrow Road, one of two houses on a wooded cul-de-sac. James had wanted to spray-paint obscenities all over his house, an idea that made Audra throw back her head and cackle. I think they were both surprised when I said, my voice small in the backseat, “Not the house.” The house wasn’t even his; it was his girlfriend’s. “Let’s get his car instead.” 

Mr. Park’s car, an ’84 Porsche convertible, rested vulnerably within the carport. He purchased it after the accident, a replacement for the unsalvageable Firebird. Jason claimed he loved the Porsche even more than his previous car. “More than me, probably,” he’d added with a laugh, as if he couldn’t fault his old man’s priorities.

Once James had turned off the engine and headlights, all I could see with any clarity was the small house, illuminated from within by a single light in the living room. The neighbor’s house was dark. I picked up the cans of spray paint we’d grabbed from home. At first, I’d expected to be part of it, but on the drive over, Audra told me no, that it was dangerous and, with a pained look, that Jerry would keep me from running, if it came to that. Passing the cans into the front seat, I said, “Please don’t get caught.” It didn’t occur to me until that moment the fragility of Audra’s circumstances, how much she stood to lose if this went badly. The pieces of her life I considered first were her already tenuous relationship with our parents, her education, her job. I even thought of the financial debt she’d mentioned before I remembered what she told me at the pub, the possibility of life within her own. But in the face of what was about to happen, that life was merely a notion. Knowing that Audra would protect me, insist upon my innocence, claim I was never even there—that’s what brought comfort.

I tracked their forms as Audra and James dashed along the perimeter of the front yard. When they passed the front porch, a light over the door blinked on. All three of us hunkered down, frozen. When no one appeared at the door, though, I realized the light was on a sensor. Audra and James began to inch toward the Porsche. After a minute, the light blinked off. The sudden darkness was all-consuming, nothing visible but the single glowing window.

I pulled the hem of my pants up past the joint, wrenched it halfway up my thigh, as far as it would go. To release the suction, I peeled the neoprene sleeve from my thigh and rolled it down. I removed Jerry from my body and lay him on the seat beside me. Once I pulled off the padded sock, I cupped the bare stump in my hand. For the first few months after the accident, the flap of skin that had been sewn over the stump was raw and tender. It had toughened in two years and become callused, but even now, when I touched it, there were echoes of that tenderness. I removed my shoe, and then I held Jerry in front of me with both hands. My eyes had adjusted to the dark and I could see the intricacies of the prosthesis: the flesh-colored socket, the long metal pylon, and the ridiculous fake foot protruding from the other end. I brought it to my chest and rocked it back and forth, but the motion and embrace were unnatural. Jerry and I were a fusion of organic and inorganic, man and man-made. We were incompatible.

I eased the car door open and slipped out, Jerry tucked beneath one arm. Dropping onto my hands, a three-legged animal, I stalked toward the front tire. As I wedged the socket beneath it, the material felt suddenly malleable and warm, almost human in my hands. The impulse to lift it from the ground and bring it with me back into the safety of James’s car—the anxiety of imminent regret—flared and fizzled, leaving my conviction even stronger. Once Jerry was securely trapped beneath the tire, I used the car to pull myself up. I sensed movement in the darkness near the house, but I couldn’t make out my sister or James. I heard James laugh, a loud braying sound followed by a reproachful shush from Audra. When a sudden blast of wind rocked the car, I lost my balance and fell to the ground. I scrambled back up in time to see the porch light click back on, illuminating the front lawn. Audra and James lingered near the periphery of the light. I couldn’t make out Audra’s face, but the shape of her body was distinctly her own. 

“Go,” I heard her say, laughing and pushing James forward.

As they rushed across the blanket of light, the front door swung open and Mr. Park stepped onto the porch. “Hey!” he yelled. “The hell are you doing?”

“Go!” Audra screamed, and grabbed James’s hand. Instead of getting into the car, I allowed my eyes to float over the scene, now illuminated by multiple floodlights, the entire house aglow from within. Mr. Park’s girlfriend had joined him on the porch, her expression frantic, her hand on his chest. Mr. Park screamed obscenities, but made no move forward. My eyes fell on the car. In tall, cramped letters, written in white paint along the passenger’s side, were the words this is for my brother. The ground beneath me dropped away and I hovered in the air, a balloon nearly sapped of helium, until Audra’s hand grabbed my arm and forced me into the backseat of the car and leapt in after me.

As James sped away, neither he nor Audra mentioned the subtle jolt and the cracking sound of the prosthesis being crushed by the front tire, and then the clang of the rear passing over the metal pylon. I turned around in my seat, propped on my right knee, and looked back at it on the pavement, barely visible in the reaches of the floodlights. It was a dead thing now, as if it had ever been anything else. Nothing but scraps of broken plastic and bent metal. Its features, its function indiscernible. I imagined Mr. Park finding the detritus in the street tomorrow morning, standing over it, nudging a flesh-colored hunk of plastic with his toe. It would mean as much to him, I knew, as any roadkill.

“Hey.” Audra nudged me. “Seatbelt.” She buckled herself in next to me, and we sat together, our legs touching, our bodies close enough to be one and the same.

Marie Goyette earned her MFA at University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she won the Graduate Prize in Fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Meridian (runner-up, 2025 Short Prose Prize), StoryQuarterly (winner, 2024 Fiction Prize judged by Deb Olin Unferth), Massachusetts Review, Five South, North American Review, Feminist Studies, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She is co-fiction editor of Literary Mama, and is at work on a novel. Learn more about Marie, or, more importantly, see pictures of her doggos, at mariegoyette.com.