Dead Heat with the Reaper

by William E. Wallace

  Baldocchi tried to smile but the scar tissue around his mouth wasn’t flexible enough. Also he was fighting off the miserable headache his hangover had left behind. The pain in his skull made demonstrations of humor difficult.

  “I still have pores?” he said. “I would have thought they’d be burned off, like my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes.”

  Smith ignored the crack. “I told you before, you keep drinking like you do and you’ll be dead in a few more years.”

  The big man with the scars shrugged. “Instead of being dead for the last two years, like I should have been in the first place.”

  Where he was sitting on the edge of the examination table, the mirror on the wall across from him made it impossible for him to avert his eyes from the claylike wound that was his skin. He wasn’t used to this much illumination. Baldocchi kept the motley collection of table lamps in his flat at the Claymore turned off until he wanted to read something. He didn’t mind the gloom; at least it helped conceal what he looked like. He shuddered.

  “Can I cover this up?” he asked.

  Smith nodded. “Have you seen Dr. Kennedy yet?”

  Baldocchi pulled on his shirt. Kennedy was the psychiatrist Smith had referred him to for his post-traumatic stress disorder. “Yeah, I saw her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That I should stop drinking.”

  Smith frowned. “I meant about your... depression.”

  Baldocchi shrugged again. “She said I was depressed. I asked her if she knew why. She said no. I told her she’d be depressed, too, if she looked like I do.”

  Smith sighed. “It doesn’t sound like it was a very fruitful consultation.”

  Baldocchi tried an ironic smile again, but had no more success than he’d had the first time. The scar tissue was too stiff to allow normal expressions; a grimace was all he could muster. It had to serve as his smile, his frown, his look of sympathetic concern.

  “It was fruitful for her,” he said. “She got paid for my visit. They do still pay you Veteran’s Administration docs, don’t they?”

  “You know, you have a remarkably poor attitude for a man living on borrowed time.”

  “Maybe I don’t like the interest rate on the loan,” Baldocchi said. “I didn’t ask to be a survivor and if I’d known how I was going to end up, I would have blown my brains out, myself.”

  “That’s not very likely, Mr. Baldocchi. When they pulled you out of the Bradley, you were unconscious and in shock. You were barely alive. If it had taken a few minutes longer to get to you, you probably wouldn’t have made it at all.”

  “Lucky me,” Baldocchi said. He’d had this conversation with the doctor before. It bored him.

  “Tell me, when do you usually start hitting the bottle?” Smith asked.

  Baldocchi thought about it. He didn’t really want to answer. Like most out-of-control drinkers, he didn’t like thinking about how much alcohol he consumed.

  “I usually wait until the sun is over the yardarm,” he said, finally. “Generally not before 5 p.m.”

  The doctor gave him a skeptical look.

  Baldocchi snorted. “It’s after five p.m. someplace all the time.”

  “And you drink until, what? Closing time?”

  Baldocchi nodded. “Generally, yes.”

  “Why don’t you do something else for a change? Go to a movie. Read a book.”

  Baldocchi grunted. “Fact is, I’m reading a book, right now. I even take it to the local bar with me.”

  Smith looked at him dubiously. “Yeah? What are you reading?”

  “It’s something by a guy named Hubert Selby,” Baldocchi said. “It’s called Last Exit to Brooklyn.”

  Smith rolled his eyes. “That’s a great picker-upper. And here I was wondering why you’re always so damned melancholy. That book is one of the most depressing things I ever cracked. Why don’t you read something lighter?”

  Baldocchi shrugged. “I get absorbed in the characters in a book like Last Exit,” he said. “What do you want me to read? Brothers Karamazov? Mad magazine? Pride and Prejudice?”

  Smith snapped his fingers. “That’s it, Jane Austen! Why don’t you read Pride and Prejudice?”

  “I did, two months ago. I’ll tell you what’s depressing—Elizabeth Bennet’s stupid younger sisters. And that dumb bastard, Wickham.”

  Smith’s blank look and fixed semi-smile told Baldocchi he had never read the book himself and had no idea who those characters were.

  Baldocchi sighed.

  The doctor stood. “Well, your physical health seems as good as could be expected,” he said. “Except for your liver, anyway. You really need to stop drinking.”

  “Yeah, I know. You keep telling me so. But you don’t tell me how I’m supposed to deal with getting up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing a monster stare back at me. How am I supposed to get used to that?”

  Smith looked at him and shook his head. “There were nine men in that carrier and you’re the only one who survived. A lot of people would look at you and call you a miracle. They’d say God saved you for a reason.”

  “Yeah?” Baldocchi snorted. “A lot more people would look at me and scream. I almost gave some young woman a heart attack coming up the stairs at the apartment house yesterday. I doubt she looks at me and sees a miracle. I’ll bet what she sees is a walking horror show. Why not? It’s how I see myself.”

  Baldocchi finished putting on his coat and picked up his cap. He held it for a second before pulling it on. It slipped down over the misshapen lumps at the sides of his head that had once been his ears.

  “You know, God and I don’t have much contact these days, doc, “ he said. “Next time you talk to him, why don’t you ask him what he saved me for, okay?”

  He used the stubs of the fingers on his left hand to open the door, then turned back to Smith before passing through it. “I hope he tells you that it was for something other than frightening women and children.”

  ***

  Marcel was sitting at the top of the stoop with his band of stooges scattered around him when Susan got home to the Claymore after work.

  “He-e-ey, baby,” the gang leader said with a grin as she climbed the steps, fishing in her purse for her keys. He casually reached out and ran his hand down her leg from mid-thigh to just below the knee. His palm was rough and dry on Susan’s pantyhose and she shuddered at his touch.

  “How’s my best girlfriend today?” he added, leering at her.

  Susan didn’t answer. Marcel Lanslie was only 23 or 24, about six years younger than Susan. Despite his tender years he was already known to his neighbors in the Claymore as a small-time thief, drug dealer, car booster, purse-snatcher and general purpose thug. His “posse,” as he liked to call them, was a gang of juvenile delinquents. Marcel controlled them because he was smart, fearless and tough.

  Not that he actually made much effort to control them.

  He was also the leader of the pack because he was good-looking: until he got sent away to the juvenile prison for a couple of years he was the neighborhood heartbreaker, a movie-star handsome kid whose charisma surrounded him with young women trying to catch his eye. But at juvie he had mobbed up with the 14th Avenue Crips and by the time he paid his second visit to the place he was a full-blown ’banger.

  Susan didn’t know any of this, of course. When you moved into the Claymore, the super didn’t give you copies of the other tenants’ rap sheets. If he did, decent people would go someplace else and there wouldn’t be anybody living there except parolees and prostitutes.

  She found out some of Marcel’s history from neighbors, primarily Mrs. Riley, the apartment’s gossip-in-chief. Susan had been inclined to give Marcel the benefit of the doubt when she first moved in—misunderstood kid, father absent from the home, mother a junkie and part-time streetwalker, etc. She tolerated his innuendo and pretended she thought he was playing for laughs. But being nice to him had only encouraged him to be more brazen an
d aggressive. After a while, she began ignoring him entirely. It didn’t make him stop, however.

  “Hey, don’t be so stuck up,” he said when she didn’t answer, giving her calf a squeeze with his hand. “A guy’s friendly to you, you’re supposed to be friendly back.”

  She continued to dig in her hand bag as Marcel climbed to his feet and began walking alongside her. It was a terrible time to have trouble finding her keys: Marcel had been escalating his crude comments for the past couple of months, and last week he had touched her for the first time, putting his arm around her shoulder as she walked up the stairs.

  Having to pass by him and his gang when she got off work had become a daily ordeal. Two days ago he had put his hand on her hip and leaned against the door while she tried to open it, whispering a crude suggestion in her ear then turning to grin at his underlings as they laughed at her discomfort.

  He seemed to be working up to some sort of sexual confrontation. Whatever he had in mind wouldn’t happen today, though.

  “Hey, check it out,” one of Marcel’s minions said suddenly, gesturing down the street. “It’s Freddy fucking Krueger himself!”

  Susan looked up and saw the big man who lived above her moving slowly toward the apartment building.

  “Hey, Freddy!” Marcel said, turning toward the scarred man with a grin. “Haunt anybody’s dreams lately?”

  She was glad the stoop boys had stopped tormenting her to pick on the burned man, but her relief also made her feel guilty. Susan found her keys and unlocked the door, but hesitated as the gang of neighborhood toughs taunted the man with the scars.

  “Where’s your hand with the blades, Freddy?” said one of them she knew as Sonny, grinning at his companions. “You forget and leave it on the bus or something?”

  The big man said nothing as he climbed the stairs.

  Marcel stepped onto the step above him, blocking his way, but the man with the scars still was tall enough to look directly in the gang leader’s eyes.

  “You should try to be a little friendlier, Freddy,” Marcel said. “Get to know us better. We’re just like family here.”

  He turned to Susan and winked. “Aren’t we, gorgeous?”

  The big man cleared his throat and murmured something to Marcel.

  “What?” the hoodlum said. “Speak up, Freddy. I couldn’t hear you.”

  The big man leaned toward Marcel until their faces were only inches apart.

  “I said, ‘stand aside before I hurt you,’” he replied in a voice that was scarcely more than a hoarse whisper.

  There was no bravado to his comment, no false menace. It was simply a statement of fact, as if he’d said the front steps needed sweeping, or someone should pick up the trash in the street. The big man looked into Marcel’s eyes; his stare as empty as a grave.

  Marcel’s smile disappeared, replaced by a look of shocked disbelief. Somehow, the big man’s quiet words were as menacing as a declaration of war. Marcel moved back involuntarily and the man with the scars walked past without giving him a second look.

  Susan stepped inside and held the door for the big man, who touched the bill of his cap in acknowledgement and rasped, “Thank you, miss.”

  As the scarred man entered, Marcel found his voice.

  “Fucking creep,” he sputtered in an angry squeak. “You better watch your ass, Freddy. Ima fuck you the hell up.”

  ***

  Susan woke up with a start, sitting straight up in her bed. She glanced at the clock on her side table and saw it was a few minutes after three in the morning. Then she heard the sound that had awakened her again: a low groan that oozed through the ceiling of her apartment.

  The sound stopped abruptly and a hollow click a second later told her the man who lived upstairs had turned on a light. There was the sound of labored breathing, then she heard his low rasping voice, almost as if he was in her room.

  “No, Commander, not the left branch, I said. Take the right. The right. The right. No—the right fork; there’s something wrong with the road up there.

  “Why won’t you listen? I told you, there’s something wrong, can’t you see it? It’s on the left, like, right there. Dirt piled up. It’s on the left, damn it. Turn right. Turn right, damn you!

  “Damn you!”

  The last two words were more of a cry of anguish than actual speech, the guttural scream of a terrified man facing something much worse than death—something he had faced countless times before.

  Silence followed. Eventually she heard the creak of springs as the man upstairs climbed out of bed, then a thump and a muffled curse as he banged into something in the dark. The clink of a bottle against a glass followed by the noisy glug, glug, glug of drinking. The man upstairs groaned again, apparently not conscious of making the sound, then poured and drank a second time. The liquid sound was easy for Susan to make out in the darkness of her flat.

  He drained the glass a third time and bumped it on wood as he put it down. It scraped against the edge of the table then fell onto the floor with a clunk.

  “The stupid bastards,“ he muttered. Then he began to cry with a racking sob that rattled deep inside his chest.

  Susan lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening until his sobs turned into a fitful snoring. Her own eyes were filled with tears when he finally drifted off. She couldn’t get back to sleep herself for a long time afterward.

  ***

  “Hey, I’ve been checking up on that guy with the scars,” Susan told Millie over coffee in St. Bart’s cafeteria. “His name is Alan Baldocchi.”

  “How’d you find that out?” Millie asked.

  “I asked the Claymore’s super this morning when I saw him in the hall. He told me that Mr. Baldocchi was an Army sergeant in Afghanistan. He got a medical discharge the last time he was wounded over there.”

  “Did the super know how it happened?”

  “No, just that it was a combat thing. He said he only talked to the guy briefly. A rental agency sent him over to the apartment house. All he needed from the super was the key to his flat.”

  Millie smiled. “See? The other day you just thought he was some creep out of a horror picture. Now you know he’s a vet. Maybe even a war hero.”

  Susan blushed. “I don’t know about any heroics, but I was wrong about the creep thing, that’s for sure. Actually, he seems to be really nice. I feel sorry for him. I heard him talking to himself in his room in the middle of the night. Something about a Captain and staying on the right. I don’t know what it was about, but it really seemed to bother him.”

  She didn’t mention that her neighbor cried himself to sleep. She was a little ashamed to have been listening, even though there was no way to avoid it since the Claymore had walls like tissue paper.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Millie said.

  Susan frowned. “What?”

  “Why don’t you ask him how he got so scarred?”

  Susan bit her lower lip. “God, Mill,” she said. “I don’t really know the guy. I can’t ask him something like that.”

  “Why not?” Millie asked. “You know his name, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I found out what it was by snooping, not because he told me or somebody introduced us.”

  Millie gave her a puzzled look. “So it’s better somehow to sneak around behind his back than it is to just say ‘Hi’ and ask how he got injured? You tell me he seems to be a nice guy, so treat him like one. He’s your neighbor, for Pete’s sake. Maybe he’d enjoy having somebody to talk to.”

  That was Millie: blunt and to the point. Probably right, too, Susan thought.

  “But what if he’s one of those people who won’t let you be once he finds out you’re friendly?” Susan asked. “That guy I went out with a year ago turned out to be one of those—he spent all his time calling me after, dropping by the hospital to walk me home and stuff. He was like a damned stalker; I couldn’t get shut of him.”

  “I guess you won’t know what kind of person this Baldocc
hi is unless you talk to him, will you? So you end up spending some time being friendly with the guy? Big deal. It’s not like you got much else going on in your life right now, anyway. You got nursing classes twice a week. You aren’t dating anybody. You go to work and go home, watch a little TV and go to bed. What’s it going to cost you to fit a couple of hours of being nice to an ex-G.I. into that busy schedule?

  “Besides, you’re supposed to be in the helping profession,” Millie added with a crooked grin. “That doesn’t mean you stop helping when you clock out of St. Bart’s.”

  The way Millie put it made Susan feel ashamed.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll think about it. Now let’s get back to work before the Ward Chief comes looking for us.”

  ***

  The timer went off 45 minutes after Susan put the macaroni and cheese into the oven. The recipe she used called for an hour of baking time but she took the enameled iron pan out early anyway. The gas range in her apartment was so old that the company that made it no longer existed; it never hurt to check something before it was supposed to be done. The oven was inclined to overcook things. When it wasn’t undercooking them instead.

  Tonight was a good example. When she put the casserole in the middle of the table in the kitchen to cool, she noticed that its edges had browned more than she intended. She sighed. It wasn’t the kind of first impression she had hoped to make.

  “He’ll probably think I’m one of those women who can’t boil water,” she said to herself as she checked the dish for other flaws. She was pleased to note that the buttered bread crumbs on top were a golden brown and the cheesy sauce was bubbling the way it should.

  “Well, it’s just gonna have to do.” She took off her apron and used hot mitts to place the casserole on a pair of plates that held a large serving spoon and two forks. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves, then picked up her offering and climbed the stairs to the next floor.

  With her hands full, Susan had to use the toe of her shoe to knock on the door to Baldocchi’s apartment.

  “Yeah?” came the big man’s hollow-sounding voice, followed by a dry cough that rattled inside his chest.

  “Hi,” she said through the closed door, blushing as she realized she really didn’t know what to say. “It’s Susan Carnes, the woman who lives downstairs. I’m the one who held the door for you yesterday—the one who almost ran you down on the stairs.”