The Devil's Only Friend

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “Listen, Federle,” I said, talking low so he’d lean close, “any chance you could get your hands on a gun for me?”

  He sat back in the chair. “Sure, I could, probably. But—ah—what exactly were you thinking of?”

  “Something I could hold in my hand. Something that wouldn’t show under a jacket.”

  He mulled it over. “Sure. Maybe I can see. But what’s the case?”

  “I’ll be out in a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll come and see you.”

  I could see how it hurt when he pushed himself out of the chair. Just a small grimace he tried to clamp down on.

  “Get some sleep,” he said. “That’s what you need.” He looked down at me tenderly, like he wanted to say something more. But then he resigned himself and walked stiffly out of the room.

  To watch him go I had to shift my head, which jangled my neck so much that I saw colors. I couldn’t see how I had ever been friendly enough for Federle to make him want to latch on to me like he had. Maybe he had been through something over the ocean. Maybe I reminded him of somebody else. Except for me—a sour, tangled man—the room was empty, and I was left with the idea that I should not have involved Ray Federle in the mess I was about to make. He had a woman and kids to think of. I wasn’t clear in my thinking.

  I could see a number of robins and some starlings sitting at the top of the paper birch outside my window. Smoke or mist from somewhere drifted upward and faded into the sky. In the bowels of the hospital something knocked and whined and echoed through the walls. There was melted together the smell of bleach and piss and vomit and a relentless humming that finally lulled me to sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wednesday, April 12

  When I woke up she was pressing her kerchief to the side of her nose to keep from having to blow it. Tears streamed down both sides of her face, and she dabbed here and there to keep the water from going down her neck. To my fuzzy eye she seemed to quiver, holding back sobs.

  My effort to speak brought a catch in my throat and a hacking cough. If Eileen had not been just inches away I would have spat the blob of mucus and filth from my mouth. Instead, I just choked it down and clenched my gut to keep from retching.

  She rose and put a hand on my bed rail.

  “Pete, for God’s sake,” she said.

  “God’s sake nothing,” I croaked.

  She leaned her plump hips against the rail and let her hand come down lightly on my shoulder. She touched my hair and ear and my cheek, and I winced because the touch was something like pain.

  “Who could have done such a thing?”

  “Some hard fellas.”

  “But why?”

  “Hell.”

  “They only just called me,” she said. “Why did you wait so long to tell them to call me? I could have come yesterday.”

  “I didn’t think about it,” I said. But I was thinking, I never told anybody to call you.

  “It looks bad, Pete.”

  I rolled onto my back and tried to sit up a bit. The pain had subsided but I was getting more and more stiff and swollen. I could barely see because my cheek and brow had puffed up to cover my eye.

  “Have you got a mirror?”

  She turned and fumbled with her clutch. Her swooping little hat stayed tight to her head as she bent over; it matched her short coat and her skirt.

  “Here—but you shouldn’t…”

  She opened her compact and handed it to me. I couldn’t stretch my arm out far enough to see my whole self, and my hand shook so much that my reflection reeled. They had brought me a new patch for my eyehole, shiny and cheap-looking. Blood vessels had broken all over my face, and the swelling and redness made me look fat and old and dyspeptic. I brought the little mirror so close that I could smell Eileen’s powder, a delicate odor that sharply reminded me of the time I had been close to her. The brown part of my eye looked the same but what had been white was now shockingly red all around, not just bloodshot but strongly and solidly red, like a demon’s eye. The bright light of morning hid nothing. I closed the makeup kit and gave it back to her.

  “It’ll get better, Pete. Things will get better.” She had at least stopped the tears, but worry screwed her face away from how pretty it was.

  “It’s ugly to look at,” I said.

  “The swelling will go down.”

  “Did you tell my mother?”

  “I’ll go over there today,” Eileen said. “I can bring her by.”

  “Don’t say anything to her. Don’t say anything to anyone.”

  “All right.”

  She was still shaking a little. With the kerchief still wrapped around her finger, she clutched at my hand.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said. “But you should stay away.”

  “Have you fallen into something again?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “I have to help you, Pete, if I can. You can see that’s true, can’t you?”

  She had put on a few pounds, and she seemed uncomfortable with the weight. With her free hand she tugged down her jacket and smoothed the skirt.

  “You can stay at the house while you heal up. I’m working now but I can cook—”

  “I heard you got a fella.”

  “Well, Pete.”

  “It’s all right. He’s a good guy?”

  “We’ve been out to the show a few times.”

  “It’s good for you,” I said.

  “Does it make you jealous?”

  Maybe it was the first time I had tried to smile in a while. “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s a shame how things work out.”

  “Listen now. It’s for the best if you just keep away from me. For a girl like you I’m nothing but hard times. I don’t mean to be that way. Go on with your fella and—”

  “Don’t be overdramatic, Pete.”

  “I’m trying to say I care what happens to you.”

  “I know you do.”

  She sat back down in the chair and crossed her ankles. Her hands picked at the kerchief in her lap. Gradually the lines of worry eased from her face, and she looked at me seriously for a long time.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “My shoulders are torn up. Probably I won’t play baseball anymore. My back is funny. My feet are tingly. You wouldn’t want to see how they stitched me up.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “I’ll tell you someday. When we’re old, it’ll seem funny.”

  She glanced around the room for a clock.

  “I’d better go,” she said. “I told them I’d be back before lunch.”

  “Go on,” I said, now with a bone of regret in my throat. “Again I have to tell you how sorry I am. I’m a sorry bastard.”

  She got up quickly and leaned as well as she could over the rail to get close to me, close enough so that her familiar sweet smell brought a rush of emotion. I pressed my lips together and soon enough tears welled up in my eye. I blinked them away.

  “How did you find out I was here?”

  She stood up and tugged her jacket down again. “Somebody called. They left a note for me at work,” she said.

  “Who called?”

  “Pete, I couldn’t say.”

  I pressed my eye shut and took in as big a breath as I could. It was like a tendril of malice that could reach out to brush her cheek. Had I told anybody to call her? Were the four goons putting another touch on me? My hands were too swollen to squeeze into fists.

  “Don’t come back here,” I said.

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll come to see you after a while.”

  “Just let yourself get better, Pete. Please, please.”

  She came down again to put a kiss to my hot forehead, and then she had to push off me a little with one hand on my chest to get back upright. It feels just like tearing wet paper when your stitches rip.

  “I’m so sorry, Pete. I have to go.”

  She grabbed her bag and skipped
out. I listened to her heels clicking down the hall and began to think about how to drop the rail on my bed.

  CHAPTER 10

  Eileen was the only one I cared about, the only one who could get me worked up. I cared about her son Alex, but it wasn’t the same. The boy had gone off on his own, and it gnawed at me to think that the blame fell to me, but I had no worry that Alex could hurt me like Eileen could. She was like a gate right into my gut. I suppose the sentimental guys would say heart.

  It’s the sort of thing that comes to you in a dream, and so I was not sure that I had actually ever been on Estelle Hardiman’s lawn. Nobody was talking about any of it at the hospital, least of all me. Certainly in my dreams I’ve had to answer to the ghosts of my guilty past many times. I wake up and doze off so many times on a regular night that it’s like cream swirling into black coffee; I can’t always keep straight what’s real and what’s just bubbling up from memory and imagination. Of course, I wasn’t in the best shape. A little pain can brighten your senses, but such a mess of it brings the fog in.

  Estelle Hardiman cared not a bit for me. Maybe the boys who had worked me over were T-men or G-men, or maybe they were just out-of-town thugs she’d imported from Palm Springs or Brooklyn. From the way they tossed me over, I knew I was only a nuisance to them, and not worth a proper disposal. They were looking for something on Lloyd, the only fish big enough for the old broad to put her hook into. But if Estelle Hardiman was on the inside of the whole thing, then the whole game was rigged beyond my ability to tip. I couldn’t turn to the police or trust any judge to see it my way if I wound up in the slammer. Since I wasn’t a copper anymore, I couldn’t go where I wanted like I owned the place. If I walked into any trouble carrying a gun, I might wind up in the can, and if I wound up in the can, I knew there was a good chance I’d bump into some punk I’d rousted at one time or another.

  I couldn’t put down the rail, so I slithered toward the foot of the bed on my belly and lowered my feet down off the corner. I pressed my face down into the blanket to quiet the moaning. All up and down my whole backbone it seemed like an ice pick was jamming first up one side and then the other. When my feet hit the floor I yelped just like a dog, like any animal would. Though my back was shot to hell, my legs were all right, and so I was able to stand after a few minutes of wrangling clear of the bed. It didn’t hurt, but I could tell from the warm fluid oozing over my skin that I had torn up the stitches on my arms and chest.

  Then I realized that I did not know what they had done with the bundle Federle had brought. There was a kind of bin or locker they used to store linens, and I staggered across the room to it. A young volunteer with a beet-red birthmark on her face like a map of Italy stepped into the room and gasped.

  “Oh, dear!”

  “Nurse said I could take a crap on my own,” I said.

  “Well, let me help you.”

  She came over and tried to take hold of my elbow.

  “Go on,” I told her. “It’s part of my treatment.”

  “Just to the lavatory.”

  “All right, but just be careful, can’t you?”

  I put out my mangled hand and squeezed hard on her little mitt when she took it. She had to hide her surprise at the odd contour of my hand but to her credit did not pull away.

  “Listen, girlie, what time do you get off?”

  “Why, I don’t know.”

  “They work you like the devil around here, do they?”

  “I—I only just started today.”

  We reached the door to the little toilet.

  “If you’ll stick around until I do my business, maybe I’ll lay a little sweet talk on ya.” I put on a broad smile so she could see my cracked teeth, and I made my red eye wander all over her. But for the birthmark she wasn’t bad off.

  “I—I—I’m—”

  “What’s the matter, you got a fella already?”

  “I—I—I—yes. Yes, I do.”

  “That’s all right, then. But if he don’t keep the candle lit, you’ll think of me?” I pulled her clammy hand toward me and leaned my big head down so close that she had to bend backward to keep away. Then I let loose, stepped back into the head, closed the door, and hoped she’d run off without telling anyone. Truth was, I needed a trip to the toilet anyway. But I stood with an ear to the door for a moment, and then stepped out to retrieve the bundle of clothes. I went back into the toilet and locked myself in.

  There wasn’t much room to move, but there was plenty of stuff to hold on to. I pulled off the hospital gown and took a good look at what they had made of me. Blood had mushed around under all my white skin, and there wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t some odd color, from the top of my ruddy forehead to the blackened nails of my toes. Bandages had been taped over the deeper stitches, but they were now darkened in spots with seeping red. The stitches I could see wandered like rivers where I had torn myself against the binding cords.

  But it was my face that was most amusing. The light in the bathroom seemed set up to make you look ugly on your best day, but still it made me grin to see it. My whole head was swollen and round. Unlike the rest of me, the face was a uniform bright red, as if I had been caught forever holding my breath. My dark, greasy hair was combed back, but the swelling made it stick out over my ears. My eyeball, too, was bright red all around the brown iris, though the swelling of my cheeks allowed only a slit to show through. The cheap patch they had given me was glossy like satin and added a formal flair. The best part was the smile. Through all the gnashing I had chipped the corners off two of the front teeth, and now the grin looked crazy and overwhite, like a mutt with the rabies.

  Since I was getting only half lungfuls when I breathed, the exertion of making it to the lavatory left me panting. I opened Federle’s bundle and found a set of clothes neatly packed around a pair of shoes. The shirt and shorts and trousers were so daintily packed that it struck me immediately that his loco wife must have done it. But I remembered that Ray Federle had been in the service, and even in my degraded state it touched me that he would take the care to fold my frayed and dingy shorts like a nursemaid. I found my wallet tucked inside one shoe and a pair of socks in the other. My money and my operator’s license were still inside the wallet.

  I kept thinking that they would come and start pounding on the door to the head. Getting out of the gown had been easy, but getting into the shirt was hell. My hands had not been injured so much, but my fingers were swollen to twice their normal size. I don’t know how long it took me to button up and to tie my shoes, but it seemed like time enough for some nurse or doctor to set an alarm that I was out of my bed. Finally I shrugged into the jacket and managed to button it in front. Really, I didn’t look bad, but from the neck up it was a catastrophe. Federle had not thought to bring a hat—with my bean the size it was, none of my hats would have fit anyway. I figured I’d just have to be seen only walking away from that point on.

  Everybody uses the elevator in a hospital, even when it would be quicker to use the stairs. And another thing—no working stiff will roist you if you’re walking through any part of a hospital where you don’t belong as long as it looks like you’re on your way out of the building. I lumbered my way to sunshine with only a slight jangle of pain at each step.

  It took some time and a bit of wrangling at the bank to get them to admit they knew me. I smiled a lot because I liked the effect it seemed to have on people. They couldn’t get me into my safety box because I didn’t have the key with me, but I did empty out my regular account. It was enough money to float for a few days.

  I was all set to take a flop down by the river near the cement factory. I knew some guys there who knew how to go all around under the city in tunnels. But then I thought I might as well go back to my place. Sure I was afraid. But sensibly there wasn’t anything more they could take from me. They had run right through me. Then again, you can’t always depend on people being sensible. It would have been sensible for me to load up all my truck and go down
to live in a swamp in Florida. There was just the alligators to worry about down there, I had heard, and they were generally more trustworthy than the average guy.

  The super at my building gave me an extra key for my room but only after I had to hear about his bad foot and how his children were no good and about all the trouble I had caused. I could see that he only wanted a friend to listen to his troubles but I just took the key and walked away from him. He was still talking as I made it out of earshot.

  Across the street and up at the far end of the block there had been a little guy watching for me to come. He was leaning on a post there by the newspaper boy’s box, and he rolled into the phone booth to make a call just as I stepped into my building. And so as I clumped slowly up the back stairs, I figured somebody would come to see me eventually. It didn’t make any difference who it would be. Maybe it had been Chew’s boy, or Lloyd’s, or Estelle Hardiman’s, or the volunteer’s boyfriend. Maybe there had been a number of guys I hadn’t seen all up and down the street. They might all come to see me at the same time, and we could make a regular party out of it.

  Already I had some regret about leaving the hospital. Though it was dead boring there, and though I could not get used to the stench of sickness, at least they brought me food and drink. They were taking care of me. Without the medicine, I knew, and without a nurse to properly change the bandages, the pain and the possibility of infection would be worse. It wasn’t likely that I could sleep as well in my own bed as I had in the hospital, either. There wasn’t any real plan brewing in my mind, any urgent course of action. In fact, I didn’t have any recollection of making a decision to leave. I thought maybe the swelling had damaged my brain. I thought, What a difference it would make if I turned into a retard.

  As I turned the key to slide back the dead bolt on my door, I was thinking that it might be nice to listen to the radio. I wondered what progress Ray Federle had made toward finding me a gun. It was only then that something knifed into me: Eileen had told me that someone had left a note for her at work. Federle? Even with my brain as addled as it was, I knew it was not possible that I could have told him anything about Eileen. Why should I have believed it was him? Probably the coppers called her. Sure, they knew me well enough.