by Howard Owen
So Abe came downstairs and got me on my feet, or at least leaning and bleeding on my car. I didn’t want to call the cops, but he didn’t ask for my input. They came, two younger ones I’d never seen before. They took all the information, which wasn’t much, and acted concerned, but they’ve got bigger felons to fry, and I don’t expect justice to be served up hot and steaming.
They and Custalow heeded my demand not to be taken to the ER. Don’t go to the hospital, Peggy used to say. It’ll make you sick. Maybe not good advice, but I could tell that nothing serious was broken, just maybe the nose a little, and it’s been broken three times already. Maybe Mr. Nunchuck has straightened it some.
My ribs are sore, but I think I know the difference between sore and broken. There are some asphalt-induced scrapes and bruises. Amazingly, I don’t seem to have lost any more teeth. I have a knot the size of a baseball on the back of my head, but I know what day it is. Put me back in, Coach.
Custalow helps me out of bed. I still have last night’s clothes on, and there are assorted bloodstains on my favorite shirt. I used to get in fights. Once, in my teens, I was jumped by four guys from somebody else’s posse—girls were involved—and beaten probably worse than I was last night; but it’s amazing how much more of an impact an ass-kicking has at forty-nine than it does at seventeen. I only hope that little crack I felt was the ski-mask guy’s jaw breaking.
I manage to eat some toast and eggs. Custalow is keeping an eye on me, and tells me later that it’s a good sign that I’m not nauseated. He asks me to read the letters on an ESPN scroller.
I make a show of squinting and tell him I can’t see a thing, then feel bad when I see that he believes me.
Long story short, I’m lucky. I’ve seen, on my second night cops tenure, what people you’ve offended can do to you. Even when I go to the bathroom and my piss has a pinkish tint to it, I’m thinking this is minor damage, maybe a message beating.
I’m very happy to just sit there, sports gossip spewing from the tube, basking in the sunlight, savoring the little things like oxygen and a heartbeat.
Gillespie calls around eleven.
“Hey,” he says, after Custalow hands me the phone, “you OK?”
I’m thinking about what the guy who’d used me for a football said, about the blog. I didn’t mention that part to the cops last night.
Gillespie’s not much better at words than he is at police work.
“I just wanted you to know, uh,” he pauses, then continues. “Uh, what I said? About wanting to kick your ass? It was just words, you know?”
I’m quiet so long he asks me if I’m still there.
“Yeah.”
“Well, whoever did it. You know, it wasn’t nothin’ about police shit—stuff.”
I ask him how he knows that, and he doesn’t say anything else.
I have grace enough to thank him for calling, and he advises me to “watch your ass.” He seems to care more about my wellbeing than I would have thought possible. I make a mental note to cut Gillespie some slack.
I believe Gillespie, but I don’t give the entire Richmond police force a blanket pardon. Who else gives enough of a damn about my blog to kick my butt?
Word about the beat-down gets out. It’s a small town.
Soon, Peggy’s calling. She wants to come over and take care of me. I tell her to just keep Les off the roof, and that I’ll come by soon and let her see how unscathed I am. McGonnigal calls, and we talk about how we’d have handled this, back in the nongeriatric day.
Around noon, I get a call from the phone in the lobby. Andi’s down there, and she has Jeanette with her. Andi’s been up here maybe three times, once since Kate and I split. Jeanette’s never been. I feel cheated that they’re catching me at a definite low ebb. I look like crap, wearing yesterday’s blood-ruined clothes; and despite Abe’s best efforts, the place has the definite look of an apartment that’s being more or less maintained by two heterosexual bachelors.
But there’s no choice, really. If Andi was standing on the other side of a pit of burning coals and asked me to come over, barefooted, I’d do it.
Custalow gets the door.
Jeanette, whom I haven’t spoken to in some months, looks around.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” she says. She could always make me laugh, even when it hurts like hell.
They were having lunch when Peggy called Andi and told her about the beating.
“Who do you think did it?” Andi asks. “You need to get a gun, Dad.”
I realize that she probably already has one, and I hope she knows how to use it. I see all kinds of people, in the East End, who need a gun for self-preservation, but I see and hear a lot more about self-inflicted wounds, about kids finding Dad’s “empty” gun in a desk drawer and using it. I cover the shootings where the clueless would-be victim has the gun taken away from him or her, and a beating turns into something much worse.
Still, it would have been nice, last night.
Jeanette and I talk awhile. She’s put on probably twenty pounds in the last twenty-five years, but she still looks good. About the only wrinkles she has are smile wrinkles, and she has the kind of smile that spreads all over her face like sunrise over a darkened land. In one of the few pictures I have of the three of us, we’re all supposed to be beaming into the camera. Jeanette’s about 150 watts. I’m a night light with a ten-watt smile and something you might mistake for a touch of sadness about the eyes. She was always after me to “smile big,” and I tell her I think I am, but then the camera makes a liar out of me.
Some people, I would tell her, just have sad faces. It’s only skin-deep.
“I hope so,” was about as close as she ever came to buying that.
After I destroyed our marriage, I would find myself thinking about what would have happened if we’d stayed together, if I’d been able to keep a tighter rein on Mr. Johnson, if I’d just crawled back and begged for forgiveness.
Even now, I do this, although you never talk about crap like this. I fantasize about me and Jeanette and Andi, and I add another kid, a boy a few years younger. I imagine us going to the beach, me teaching the kids about sports and giving the kind of life lessons assholes like me shouldn’t be allowed to give in the first place. I imagine us at dinner, passing plates, listening to what each other did that day.
You’d think something like that would be a downer, but somehow it isn’t. It’s like this other life, locked tight inside my bald and befuddled head, that I can retreat to. The fact that the only reason I don’t have that life is looking at me in the mirror doesn’t seem to faze me.
Maybe I need a shrink.
Jeanette and Andi are only there for about forty-five minutes, and I’m sorry when they leave, but I’m also starting to yearn for a nap. I call Sally Velez, the weekend editor, and give her the basic details of last night’s festivities, much of which she—like half the town, apparently—knows already. When I tell her I might be a little late, she says she’ll have me arrested if I set foot inside the newspaper’s lobby.
“Rest, you dumbass,” is her recommendation.
I wake up from a really bad dream to a ringing phone. Custalow must have gone out. He could be in his last two days at the Prestwould, but he’s got a terminal case of work ethic. Half the people here think he’s a thief and the other half are sure of it, but he still answers the bell when he’s needed. He says people have a tendency to stay nearby these days when he’s unclogging a sink or installing somebody’s dimmer switch for a ten-buck tip.
With McGrumpy on the board, I have a bad feeling that I’m about to lose an apartment mate.
The answering machine picks up before I’m conscious enough to reach for the phone, and then I hear Kate’s voice:
“Willie. Call me back. Fell tried to kill himself.”
I pick up. She sounds exasperated.
“What, are you screening your calls now?”
Apparently, Kate is the only person in Richmond who doesn�
�t know about last night. I tell her I’m a little under the weather. She doesn’t seem that interested and tells me about Fell.
“His mother called me. She’s staying at the Quality Inn. They took him out of goddamn isolation,” she says. “He’s been in the general population since yesterday morning. I just got back from out of town three hours ago, or I could have stopped it.”
Martin Fell apparently had a very bad night. If his T-shirt had been made of sterner stuff, he might have succeeded. Instead, it ripped, and he fell from the ceiling fixture before he got anything more than a sore neck and a bruised larynx.
“Can you come over?”
I ask her to give me a few minutes. We agree to meet in one hour at the jail.
Abe probably would have stopped me, and I feel bad for what he might think when he comes back and I’ve disappeared. I leave a note on the kitchen table about an emergency, take a couple more Tylenol and head out.
I sneak a quick glance in the mirror in the hallway, not really wanting to see. The area around my eyes and nose is turning a spectacular greenish-purple. I could use the ski mask from the guy last night, although it might not play that well at the city lockup.
When I get there, Kate seems a little surprised.
“When you said ‘under the weather,’ you weren’t kidding,” she says.
Louisa Fell has gone to get her son some things. They’ve already taken him to the hospital, determined that nothing needed fixing, and have him back in isolation.
They let Kate in, with me in tow as her “assistant.”
Fell looks worse than I do, if that’s possible. He has some kind of neck brace on, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. He’s even more slight and pale than before. Jail food is an acquired taste, best savored by those who are multiple repeat offenders. Fell’s once hip-and-spiky hair seems to have surrendered any pretensions to style. It lies as defeated as Fell himself.
“Where were you?” he croaks.
“I had an appointment,” Kate says. “I was out of town.”
I apologize for canceling our meeting on Wednesday. He looks me over and shakes his head.
He says something else. I can’t hear and lean in closer.
“I said, your music reviews still suck.”
I agree that, yes, they do.
At least he has his sense of humor.
“Why?” is Kate’s question.
“Why do you think?” Fell responds.
I can see from that look in Kate’s eyes that the weather report around the city jail is calling for major shit-storms.
Martin Fell looks at me.
“Thanks,” he manages to get out. “Thanks for the story. But nobody believes it.”
“Who’s nobody?” I ask him. My blog responses are running about fifty-fifty. Kate’s still talking about getting the trial moved somewhere else.
“Cops,” he says. It turns out that some of our finest have been dropping by to tell Fell what a scumbag he is, what a lock he is for the Big Needle.
“We’ll take care of that, too,” Kate says.
He looks at her.
“I didn’t do it,” he says.
Kate pats his arm.
“I know. We’re going to fix this.”
Fell looks at me again and suggests that I need a gun.
Louisa Fell comes back while we’re there. She may look worse than her son.
“You’ve got to get him out of here,” she says, looking at Kate and me, hoping there’s some relief there somewhere.
Kate gives her a hug and tells her we’re doing the best we can.
On the way out, Kate unfocuses enough to ask me for details about the beating.
I fill her in, leaving out my assailant’s parting shot about blogs.
“Do you think the cops are behind this?” she asks me. “You’re pissing them off more than me. I’m kind of duty-bound to defend my client. I think they see you as more of a volunteer pain in the ass.”
I tell her I’m not sure. I’m lying, of course, but there’s still one more thing I need to nail down. And I’m sure I can do it on my own, without dragging Kate into it. I’m doing so well thus far. My face is Exhibit A.
I ask Kate how Mr. Ellis feels about his wife consorting with her ex-husband.
“I’m not consorting,” she says. “I’m consulting. Big difference. And Greg doesn’t have to know everything I do. He trusts me. Especially with an old goat like you.”
“Yeah. You’d have to put a bag over my head to fuck me today.”
She puts a hand to my bruised face, gently as if she’s petting a skittish dog.
“You really do need to be more careful,” she says. “I think somebody doesn’t like you very much.”
I tell her that’s impossible, that I’m beloved by one and all.
To avoid being arrested in the lobby, I do follow Sally Velez’s orders and stay away from the paper.
On the way home, though, I take a detour, on the odd chance that Peachy Love is off.
I get lucky. She answers the door after glimpsing me through the peephole.
“Good God,” she says, pulling me in before she’s seen with me. “What the fuck?”
She was off yesterday and hasn’t heard, so I give her the Cliffs Notes version. By now, it’s down to, “Couple of guys jumped me in the parking lot last night.” That’s all she really needs to know.
“You heard about Fell trying to kill himself?”
She puts her beer down.
“Yeah. That I heard. Got a call.”
“Who put him back in the general pop?”
She’s avoiding eye contact, but that could be because my eyes probably are pretty hard to take right now.
“I don’t really know. Just what a guy I know down at the jail said.”
“C’mon, Peachy. It’s just you and me.”
“Well . . .” she looks around and then lowers her voice as if someone might be listening in the next room. “I heard it was a guy by the name of Jenkins. Been working at the lockup for several years. I heard he said he’d gotten orders to move him back, but nobody takes credit for that, so it’s probably on him.”
“You know anything about him?”
She shrugs.
“Not much. He’s a white dude. As a matter of fact, he might be from your neck of the woods. The Hill.”
“What’s his first name?”
She thinks on it for a minute, then says, “Wait. I’m pretty sure his name is Robert. Yeah. I heard somebody call him that.”
I think for a minute, and then the light bulb comes on.
“Older guy, maybe early fifties? Red hair?”
“Yeah. What’s left of it.”
Bobby Jenkins was a piece of work. We always figured he’d wind up at the jail, but we were betting on the other side of the bars.
I thank Peachy, who gives me a promising kiss and asks me if I want a drink.
I assure her that I do, as always, want a drink, but that I’m getting my buzz from Tylenol today.
“Well,” she says, “come by when you’re not on painkillers.”
I promise her I will. From what I remember of sex with Peachy, it wouldn’t be recommended for a man not at the top of his game, and I’m just about at the bottom of mine right now.
“Honey,” I think I remember her saying, the last time we untangled from each other, “I’m not sure you’re black enough to handle this.”
Back at the Prestwould, I find the box I’m looking for in the back of the closet, unopened since Kate and I moved here. She could never understand why I wanted to keep high school yearbooks.
You never look at them, she said.
I might someday, I told her.
I was right.
My freshman yearbook is right there where I left it after Jeanette and I split. It’s been moved from apartment to apartment, wife to wife.
I find what I’m looking for. The photo isn’t exactly like I remember it, but it’s close enough. A group of kids, mostly
seniors, are trying to look tough. They were part of a definitely not school-sanctioned club called The Wild Bunch. They used to scare the crap out of me, even the girls.
There’s skinny, acne-faced, red-haired Bobby Jenkins, wearing the same leather jacket as the rest. Also like the rest, he’s trying to work up a good sneer, but on Bobby, from the perspective of thirty-some years, he just looks like a doofus with a bad haircut.
Next to him, with his arm around Bobby, looking scary without even trying, is David Junior Shiflett.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sunday
I can’t get a flight for Boston until tomorrow morning without paying a king’s ransom. Just as well. I feel worse than I did yesterday.
When I was a young man, a hard workout after a long stretch of lazy would mean sore muscles the next morning. Now, the pain’s more likely to wait a day to really kick in.
Turns out, the same general rule applies to beat-downs. Muscle, bone, tendons, eyeballs, hair, pretty much anything that can hurt does hurt more than it did yesterday.
Kate calls to see how I’m doing, and fills me in on her efforts to tear the city jail a new asshole. She’s found out who put Martin Fell in harm’s way, and she knows that Bobby Jenkins claims he got “a call” telling him to take Fell out of his safe, single cell, but that he says he isn’t sure who made that call. She has spoken directly to Chief Jones, who promises justice.
I have a story in this morning’s paper, written from my laptop and emailed to the office yesterday afternoon. “Jesus Christ,” Sally Velez said when I called to make sure they got it. “Didn’t I tell you to rest?”
“I can’t just let you all wander around blind in the wilderness,” I explained, and she had to concede that, no, Chuck Apple had not tumbled onto the attempted suicide.
It isn’t Apple’s fault. If he’d slept with the police flack and the defendant’s lawyer, he might have inside information, too.
I’m reminded of a guy who used to work with me on the legislative beat. He kept getting his butt whipped by this bright, pretty, ambitious young female reporter from Norfolk.
