Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  “It’d be okay.”

  “Turquoise might look good,” Carla said, holding her hands up and moving them along the wall, then seeing it. “Yeah, there it is.”

  Mikey handed Carla a plastic cup, red to the rim.

  “‘Scuse me one second while I educate this novice at the ancient and honorable game of Go,” Seymour said.

  “So how much do I owe you this time?” Hawk asked Seymour.

  Seymour calculated in his head a minute.

  “Four dollars and fifty cents, including parts and labor. Any form of cash payment accepted.”

  Seymour nodded to Carla and grinned. Then he walked to a refrigerator by the sink and brought Zoey an Italian ice.

  Zoey peeled off the cherry-coated lid and tore open the packet containing the small, flat wooden spoon.

  “I could have that sign in two weeks,” Carla said, wincing at a taste of the wine.

  “You know,” Seymour said. “I think we can work something out.”

  16

  IF A CUBAN ROLLS A CIGAR IS IT A CUBAN CIGAR?

  Behind the desk on the fourth floor of Mount Sinai Hospital there’s a terminal with patient information—patient ID numbers, room numbers, patient names, physicians. All color coded like an airport monitor. It should say Estimated Time of Recovery, Hawk thinks, or Estimated Time of Death. His heart pounds with something strange. His back is soaked with sweat. Is old Sammy really headed for Graceland, as he always calls it? The message on Hawk’s answering machine said the old man had a heart attack, was operated on, and is recovering. He might need follow-up procedures.

  Hawk had come back to the loft, just past midnight, after winning two bills in the small stud game at the IHOB, thinking he’d get some sleep before the drive the next day, get out his maps from his van-driving days, and plot a route. There were three messages on his machine. The first was a friendly reminder from Armand that another two grand would be due in a week and giving a time when he would be by the loft to collect. The second, from Carla, said she’d borrowed a cooler from Carlos for the drive. Hawk could pick up a couple of six-packs and sandwiches and potato chips and Cheez Doodles and gummy bears for Zoey. She’d be out front of her apartment at eight o’clock. The third message was about Sammy. Visiting hours weren’t until the next morning or Hawk would have cabbed there right then.

  Hawk enters Sammy’s shared hospital room quietly, passes a nurse putting roses in a vase, a medic in a shower cap, and stops when he hears Sammy talking to Harold, not wanting to interrupt. He can hear Flo humming one of her songs from the corner of the room, but can’t see her. He imagines her sitting there doing a word-search puzzle and picking her teeth with fork ends:

  You worry when the weather’s cold

  You worry when it’s hot

  You worry when you’re making dough

  You worry when you’re not

  It’s worry worry all the time …

  Hawk realizes he’s standing at the foot of another hospital bed, a potted plant in his hand with brown-edged leaves, and he turns to see an old man asleep with patches on his eyes and tubes rising from his arm to a suspended bottle. The room is filled with odors of sweat, urine, medicine, and Clorox. Hawk hears buzzers and pagers at varying distances.

  Why wouldn’t Sammy get a private room? Was the old man, even here, doing his usual geometry on costs? Or did he still have to worry about money? Staying in hospitals, heart surgery, it had to be expensive and maybe Sammy, like just about everyone Hawk ever associated with, didn’t have a health plan. Still, since he’d probably been unconscious when they brought him in he couldn’t have been the one haggling and shopping for the cheapest surgeon. It would have been Harold’s call. Or maybe Hotel Hospital was all booked up and didn’t have any single suites available.

  Hawk looks around, seeing the showerlike drape behind which Sammy must be lying, Harold attentive at his side, leaning toward him. He tries to arrange a hopeful look, and waits for the conversation to break to make his entrance. He looks down at the plant he bought on the street outside the hospital from a woman who told him that with a little water and care the leaves would go green again.

  “These doctors don’t know you, Sammy,” Harold says.

  “Maybe one of these doctors got his degree off a matchbox cover,” Sammy says. “He attaches your tubes wrong. In some of these places your injuries start healing themselves before they get around to you.”

  “Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the best,” Flo says.

  “Harold. If something goes wrong, I have a few things I want you should handle for me. You’d do that?”

  “I would.”

  “In the Sucrets box in my desk there’s a key. Anything happens to me, there’s a box behind the Barnum poster over the TV, you know which one. In the box there’s some envelopes with instructions and some cash. The envelopes explain everything.”

  “I thought your will was with Abe?”

  “Abe deals with our Uncle Sam and my ex and my kids and their kids. These are a few other matters I choose to keep private from our government.”

  “God forbid, Sammy, I’ll do it.”

  “You are a loyal person, Harold.”

  They discuss a few other matters and then it’s silent and Hawk gives a sort of cough and shuffle and steps up to the curtain and around.

  “Hey, Sammy. How you doing?” he says.

  “Nice to see you Hawk, dahling,” Flo says, and sings:

  Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself

  It’s later than you think

  Another birthday’s here and gone

  You turned another page

  And suddenly you realize

  That you reached middle age.

  Just think of all the time you’ve missed

  Has made you kind of sad

  It’s better to have had your wish

  Than to have wished you never had!

  “I never knew you were a singer,” Hawk says.

  “I’m singing for Sammy,” Flo tells Hawk, taking a bite from a jelly doughnut. “It’s music from another era.”

  “It’s nice,” Hawk says.

  “I offered him super sex,” Flo says. “But he said he’d take the soup. Hawk, you want a jelly doughnut?”

  Sammy hasn’t turned to look at him yet.

  “Talk slow and loud or he won’t understand,” Harold says.

  “Hey, Sammy,” Hawk says, voice raised.

  Sammy says something incoherent, then cackles faintly.

  “Put your teeth back in, Sammy. You’ve got company,” Harold says in a raised voice. And then to Hawk, “Since the operation he’s been mainly speaking in Yiddish.”

  “Hey kid,” Sammy says, finally, holding up his hand to shake. There’s an ID on his wrist like he’s been shipped here Federal Express. “I didn’t hear you come in. Everyone wears paper slippers in this place.”

  “I got you some flowers,” Hawk says. “And a cigar for when you get back on your feet. It’s a real Cuban.”

  Sammy opens the Ziploc and runs the cigar by his nose, though he probably can’t smell anything, what with all the tubes through his nostrils like tribal nosewear.

  “Okay,” Hawk says. “Okay, look. I don’t know if it’s Cuban. The place said ‘real Cuban cigars rolled on the spot.’ They’re a couple of guys fresh off the boat from Havana. If a Cuban rolls a cigar, ain’t it a Cuban cigar?”

  Sammy hands Harold the cigar, who smells it, frowns.

  “That’s too philosophical for me, kid,” Sammy says.

  “Get me my boots. It’s getting deep in here,” Harold says.

  “I’m going to blow my nose,” Flo says to no one. “Now I need a Kleenex. I’ll just go into the bathroom for a paper towel.”

  Hawk pulls a seat up next to Sammy and stares at the old man. He’s never seen him looking this tired, voice crusty.

  “One hour until visiting hours are over,” the nurse says to Harold and Hawk.

  The phone rings and Flo says, “I’ll g
et it. If it’s important I’ll let you know.”

  “Pull up a chair,” Sammy says to Hawk.

  “They giving you good dope?” Hawk asks.

  “They’re making a junkie out of me. Sit down, kid. I was thinking about you before Harold came to visit.”

  “I came when I heard. We were just about to go to the country today. Take a drive around Jersey. Maybe go down to Six Flags with her kid. See some rocks and birds and trees and stuff. Carla, me, and her kid.”

  “What country? They got rocks and trees and squirrels in Central Park.”

  “Not to speak of pigeons,” Flo says.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I got Harold’s message,” Hawk says. “You were dancing up a storm at the Broadway show just the other day.”

  “I’m ready to dance right now, kid. I got my eye on one of those oriental nurses.”

  Sammy grasps the triangular hand rest hanging over the bed that looks like some device you’d find in an S and M shop.

  “That broad you were with, outside of Zabars the other day with the girl. That’s the one you’re going driving with?”

  “Yeah, we’ll do it another day.”

  “That’s a nice-looking filly,” Sammy says, something like fondness in his eyes.

  His hair seems grayer and wispier. His laugh is an exertion, and then he’s coughing.

  “Take it easy, Sammy,” Hawk says, and offers the old man a roll of LifeSavers. “Take one of these if the pain gets too great.”

  “You’re a good kid, Hawk. I always thought that.”

  All these years and it’s as close as Sammy’s ever gotten to expressing a feeling directly and Hawk turns his head so the old man won’t see the tears in his eyes.

  “Three-to-one you’re back on your feet in a week.”

  “You getting a lift ’cross town from Harold?”

  “I can’t afford it,” Hawk says. “He put a meter in the van.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Bye, Hawk,” Flo says, and kisses Sammy on the forehead. “You’ll want to talk. I’m going for a walk down to the corner. You want the papers and some doughnuts, Sammy? I would do that for you. The jelly in these doughnuts isn’t fresh. You want anything from the coffee shop on Ninety-seventh? Their coffee cake is ambrosia.”

  17

  THE CELL FOR BRILLIANCE

  Hawk takes the number 1 train to Columbus Circle, where he sits under the stone monument to the valiant seamen of the Maine, licking a mango ice and thinking that somewhere south of here someone’s licking an ice under a statue honoring those who sunk the Maine. A ring of vendors sell framed photos of celebrities, watercolors of city scenes, replicas of city monuments. A dirty boy asks him for “change for a bagel” and Hawk hands the guy a quarter. A vendor yells “peanuts, I got your nuts, I got your peanuts” over and over until Hawk’s mouth is salty and he craves a cold pint. Roller skaters disappear into the hot gray-greenness of the park.

  Then Hawk walks across Fifty-ninth and turns uptown toward the zoo, hoping to buy a creamsicle from Two Hats Gonzalez—who walks around with a Q-tip sticking straight out of his ear and two hats, one on top of the other—and have a session with Elton the gorilla. Human DNA is only 1 percent different from an ape’s, Jep says, without saying which species should feel envy. Elton has a face more expressive than that of any human Hawk knows. He can look at you with the deepest compassion or wipe you out with a nose-pick. Gorilla therapy is the finest Hawk can afford.

  But the old zoo has been bulldozed as a succession of mayors threatened. Just a few weeks ago he’d been there with Zoey, watching sleek, torpedo-like seals and polar bears with massive buttocks glide on their backs and Japanese snow monkeys hop around rocks scratching their assholes. A cop tells him the new zoo opens in a week. The gorillas were transferred to the Bronx Zoo and there’s no sign of Two Hats Gonzalez. Maybe he couldn’t stand to be separated from Elton.

  Hawk walks through the park looking at trees and brown drying plants and realizes that he doesn’t know any of their names. He enters a playground and sits beside a teenage girl nursing a baby, his eye catching the dim figure of a cans man going through the trash outside the circle of bars. On his other side, women talk about their children, as if there were no other stories in the world. Groups of kids not much older than Zoey chase each other with sagging water balloons, screaming with delight, sole proprietors of swings and slides. Hawk waves and makes goo-goo eyes at the young mother’s baby, but the baby looks at him and begins to cry.

  “I need a push for starters,” says a girl on a swing, but when Hawk walks over to give her a push the girl recoils and runs back to one of the women on the bench, who frowns at him.

  Hawk slinks out of the playground and at Broadway heads downtown, stopping to eat a few grilled fifty-cent Nathan’s dogs on a bench on a traffic island on Forty-fourth. Bites of news for August 10 scroll by on the side of a building. It’s ninety-six and sunny. Fifteen days in a row over ninety degrees now is believed to be a modern-day record. Cost of the drought for the summer of 1988 is now estimated in the billions. Drought killed 166,000 chickens and 15,000 turkeys in North Carolina last week. Wildfires claimed millions of acres in Yellowstone Park. Mississippi River is at lowest recorded level since 1895. Drinking water salty in Louisiana delta. An ad for Rush Limbaugh on the side of another building changes one dot at a time until Oprah Winfrey emerges. A messenger in a Godzilla suit enters a building carrying colored balloons. Streams of traffic converge on Hawk, but the flashing cars never hit him.

  Hawk sits on the bench and thinks about Sammy, pale and thin, receiving a drippy dinner through his veins, unable to piss on his own, a nurse changing his bedpan. His fingers uncertain and trembling when he reached to shake good-bye, like a chess pigeon’s. And then, like he’d been keeping it wrapped in his mind, saving the thought like a shrink-wrapped porno magazine, he imagines the safe in Sammy’s apartment.

  Man, the old guy’s a secretive, odd duck. Not even telling Harold about this box until his heart clogs and they call in the plumber. Maybe this was a place, apart from the bookkeeping, where he stashed extra money. Him and Norman maybe nicking each other, what with all their shared interests. There could be keys to other boxes in the envelopes. Numbered accounts in Switzerland or Freeport in the Bahamas. Places where Sammy wouldn’t be taxed, since he was all for skimming the government every chance he got.

  Sammy always told them as boys during count-out that if you were going to break the law you were best off doing it inconspicuously, gently—gently, boys, gently—so you didn’t upset the system. If you didn’t upset the law, the law wouldn’t get upset with you. Hawk wondered even then what Sammy meant by The Law, since it was the law or it wasn’t no matter how gently you broke it. Maybe The Law was just some morning line that set the odds on how likely you were to get away with something, divided by how much it would cost you if you got caught.

  Even today he can never see Sammy’s various schemes as fundamentally different from Fives’ enterprises, or those of legit corporations. You tried to take in as much money as you could and pay out as little as possible. That was business. You respected the law if it suited your interests, paid it off or monkeyed with it in your favor, and it respected you when it was in its interest. The law was on the side of some, against others, and ignored most until they made a disturbance, in which case it slapped their wrists or executed them or locked them out of sight. Little people had no faith they’d get a fair shake and only counted on not being noticed. It stands to reason that only those with a chance in the system could have faith in it.

  For himself, Hawk had learned to keep the lowest profile. He was all cash. All the bills to the loft were in Sammy’s name. Hawk had never registered to vote, never paid taxes, never registered his car or had a license, even when driving the van. Officially, it was doubtful that he existed.

  Days later, Hawk sits in the Family Surgical Waiting Area with Harold and Flo. Sammy has had follow-up surgery,
which went well, and they’re waiting for the green light to visit. Flo paces up and back, her long slinky legs a medley of pink-and-black cling pants, her socks matching the bows in her hair and a thick leather belt.

  “I just hope the surgeon is Jewish,” she says, sitting down. She picks her teeth with a plastic fork end, hesitates, and then lays down a card. “Here’s a seven of diamonds just for you, dahling.”

  “Many of them are Indians or Chinese these days,” Harold says.

  “I guess that’s okay if they’re trained in the right kind of surgery,” she says.

  “Ginsky,” Hawk says, looking up, surprised. “You sure you’re okay, Flo?”

  “They don’t let you out until you suffer,” Flo says.

  “Hard to imagine Sammy laid up like that,” Harold tells Hawk, his wide face drawn. “Remember him racing Norman over the fence last year on a five-dollar bet. Norman says, ‘You’re getting old’ and Sammy says, ‘Old, you call me old?’”

  How could you forget the way these old foxes carried on. The gang saying at first, “Don’t hurt yourselves, play him a hand of gin instead,” and Sammy saying, “Oh, no, Gramps doesn’t get off that easy.” And then the white-haired guys squirreled up the chain-link fence by a cracked and glass-strewn basketball court, the gang hollering and making side bets. At the top, both looked dangerously about to pitch over, feet making swipes over the barbs, then one shoe in firm and the other scissoring over. Sammy dropped the last few feet, shimmied through a rip in the rusty fence, then took his feathered shuffleboard hat from Harold.

  “I love how frisky you are,” Norman said, panting as he stripped a fiver from his grapefruit roll, rubber banded in all directions. The chintzy bastards would have thousands in their pockets and play gin with Flo for five cents a point.

  “Who’s old?” said Sammy, adjusting the feather in his hat, that cackle of his like tearing duct tape off a spool. “You hard-of-hearing-bastard. I came two times last night!”

  “I only hope they didn’t charge by the hour,” Flo said.