Buffalo Jump

by Howard Shrier

  Marco thrust the knife again, this time straight at my heart. Fuck him. Fuck his gunman too. I caught his hand in my right, locked his arm straight and drove my left palm hard into his elbow. There was a cracking sound like a twig snapping. The knife fell to the ground, followed closely by Marco, who screamed and rolled onto his back, clutching his arm. I ran toward the clutch of ballplayers, looking back over my shoulder. Phil was kneeling at Marco’s side as he writhed and moaned in the grass. Ryan was staring at the ground like he wished it would swallow him.

  I realized then it wasn’t a ballplayer who had yelled the warning. It had been Ryan. And once the pain subsided, Marco Di Pietra would realize it too.

  CHAPTER 19

  Not long after midnight, I eased myself out of a cab and walked gingerly into the lobby of my building. I had sixteen stitches in my side but was feeling no pain. I was happy as a clam, in fact, or at least as happy as a clam who has taken two Percocets and has plenty more in his shell.

  All things considered, my brush with death—and I speak here not of being slashed by a psychopath but of dealing with the Canadian medical system—went as well as could be expected. The bearded ballplayer drove me to Beth Israel on the condition that I not bleed on the seat of his Taurus. “It’s a burgundy interior,” he said, “but not the same shade.” Ed had wanted to come too but I told him to do himself a favour and go back to his apartment and not let anyone see him with me.

  “I got pictures of them, the bastards,” Ed said. “What should I do with them?”

  “Nothing, Ed. Don’t even develop the film till we talk.”

  The ballplayer, whose name was Mark, gave me a spare T-shirt from his duffle bag to press against the wound while he drove. When we pulled up to Emerg, I thanked him and his friends for not looking away from trouble.

  “I’d recognize the guy,” he said. “If it came down to a lineup.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you’re smart enough to play centre field. Feel no obligation to provide descriptions to the police, either. None of you. Let it fade. And thanks again.”

  On entering the ER, I was required to scour my hands with antiseptic lotion. Personally, I thought the blood leaking out of me posed more of a health hazard than my hands, but as my mother never tires of reminding me, I never went to medical school. Once sanitized, I presented myself, along with my health card, to a nurse behind a counter piled high with files.

  She was a tall black woman with regal features and close-cropped hair dyed a ginger blonde. At the sight of my bloody side, she might have raised one eyebrow slightly.

  “Take a seat,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “They’re not exactly burgundy.”

  “I didn’t say take one home. Just take one.”

  I sat down and started flipping through two-year-old magazines, keeping the T-shirt tight to my side with my elbow. Thankfully, the waiting room was not as full as it would have been during flu season, when anyone with a sniffle heads straight to the nearest ER, instead of taking to their bed and watching daytime TV like normal people. Still, I worked my way through half a dozen magazines before my name was called. A second nurse with twinkling blue eyes and a mop of red curls led me to a curtained-off examination area. She gloved her hands and placed a thick gauze pad on a bed with pale yellow sheets, gripped my hand and eased me down onto my back so the pad was under the wound. She wiped away the blood that had dried on my skin and peered at the slash. I could feel fresh rivulets of blood run down my side like raindrops down a window. “Mm-hmm,” she said.

  The dreaded Mm-hmm.

  She told me the surgical resident on call would be in shortly and left. It didn’t seem short to me. The pain in my side was growing more intense, as was my fear of Marco Di Pietra. Whatever hate he’d had on for me before was nothing compared to what would be building inside him now. He was one sick man, and he had the men and money to move against me in ways I couldn’t hope to defend.

  Some time later—measured in throbs per second—a gloved and gowned doctor pushed aside the curtain. His photo ID said he was Dr. Klein. His mother probably didn’t worry when he didn’t answer his phone.

  Klein wiped the gash clean of blood, then spread it apart with his fingers. I gasped loudly. “The laceration appears superficial,” he said. “You’re lucky your assailant slashed you instead of stabbing you.”

  “I wasn’t assailed,” I said. “I mean, assaulted. I fell on a wineglass.”

  His look was withering in its skepticism. “You got this from a wineglass? I suppose it bounced up and cut you front to back with a slashing motion?”

  “Wow. It’s like you were there when it happened.”

  “Mr. Geller—”

  “David Wells told the same story when he was pitching for the Padres and everyone believed him.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Klein said. “They just couldn’t prove otherwise.”

  “Precisely.”

  “All right, Mr. Geller. If you want to insult someone’s intelligence, do it on your own time. You’ll need some blood work and imaging. Then I’ll see you in the operating theatre.”

  “You can’t stitch it here?”

  “We don’t do glass cuts in ER,” he said with a thin smile.

  An orderly wheeled my gurney down a hallway and left me staring at the ceiling. I was trying hard not to remember the last time I’d been there: the aftermath of the Ensign case. I focused instead on a damp stain on the ceiling, trying to decide whether it looked more like Africa or a broken heart. Another orderly returned to wheel me into an imaging centre where a technician did an ultrasound test on my abdomen and ribs. I felt like a purchase being scanned at a checkout. About twenty minutes later, the first orderly wheeled me into an operating theatre where Dr. Klein waited with a surgical nurse.

  “Your good fortune continues, Mr. Geller,” he said. “The knife—”

  “Wineglass,” I insisted.

  “The knife cut no deeper than the subcutaneous tissue. There’s no damage to the muscle or abdomen. No organ pathology. Spleen and liver intact. We can patch you up here without putting you under.”

  Jonah Geller: unlucky in love, but freakishly lucky when shot or stabbed.

  The nurse turned me onto my side, sterilized the area around the wound and draped it off. She wheeled over a tray on which rested scalpels, retractors and suturing equipment. Klein irrigated the wound, then picked a retractor from the tray and used it to spread the gash even farther than he had in the ER. I tried not to gasp and failed miserably. “No debris or contamination,” Klein said. “He must have washed the wineglass first.”

  He asked the nurse for five cc’s of one per cent xylocaine. Given the pain I was in, it didn’t sound nearly enough. He injected some of the contents under the skin just above the wound, then did the same just below it. While we waited for the local to take effect, Dr. Klein told me that new legislation required him to report stab wounds to police.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “That legislation hasn’t been proclaimed. Hasn’t even passed third reading.”

  “You a lawyer?”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear. Anyway, you said yourself I wasn’t stabbed. I was slashed.”

  “You’re going to split hairs on this?”

  “Two Jews arguing, Doctor, we could be here all night. Don’t you have other patients?”

  He admitted that he did. Then picked up a scalpel.

  “Aren’t I already cut enough?”

  “Not nearly enough,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “The doctor just has to extend the laceration on either side to ensure a tight closure.”

  “If I didn’t want him to worry, I would have said so myself,” Klein muttered. For the next few minutes he sewed quietly. I knew the routine: catgut to close the deeper layers of the wound, silk to close the skin. When he was done, he wrote a prescription for my old friend Percocet and told me to take it easy for a few days. “No heavy
lifting. No running. Come back if there’s any sign of infection, such as redness, swelling or extreme pain. And you might want to pick up a stool softener. Most people experience constipation from Percocet. It’s up to you to decide which is worse, that or the pain. Also, please remember that Percocet is a narcotic and that you may feel giddy—or in your case, giddier—after taking it. You might want to avoid driving.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “And Mr. Geller?”

  “Yes?”

  “Stay away from stemware for a while.”

  I got off the elevator at 18 and walked slowly toward my apartment. I listened at my door and heard nothing. Checked the lock and jamb for signs of forced entry. Also nothing. I unlocked the door and pushed it open, then stood back against the outside wall and waited. I reached in and flipped on the light switch, then withdrew my hand and waited some more. If someone was in there lying in wait, maybe they’d get bored to death.

  When I felt too tired to stand in the hall anymore, I stepped inside. There was no one in the living room or dining room. No one in the galley kitchen. I went in there and got my big chopping knife and made my way through the rest of the apartment. There was no one in my bedroom, bathroom or closets. No one on the balcony.

  I was alone. As usual.

  I went back to the front door and was locking the dead-bolt when the phone rang. I almost stabbed myself with the knife at the sound; that would have been fun to explain to Dr. Klein. I set down the knife on the coffee table and answered my phone. Dial tone. Somewhere else a phone kept ringing—the cell Dante Ryan had given me. I found it on a chair in the bedroom where I’d left it while showering.

  “Jonah Geller’s armed guard speaking. How may I direct your call?”

  “It’s me,” Ryan said. “How’d you make out?”

  I gave him the stitch count. “It would have been worse if you hadn’t warned me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well. I got caught up in the moment.”

  “I’m trying to say thank you,” I said.

  “I’m the one who should thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “You made him cry,” Ryan said. “He cried all the way home. Whatever else happens, I saw the man cry. The man. Big fucking baby, more like it.”

  “His elbow dislocated?”

  “Fractured in two places. One of them the funny-sounding one.”

  “The humerus.”

  “Yeah. The other one I forget. Doctor said he was lucky he didn’t need traction.”

  “He’s in a cast?”

  “From his wrist to above the elbow. Looks like a fucking salesman, wants to shake hands with everyone.”

  “I guess I’ve moved up on his shit list.”

  “You are his shit list.”

  “He’s lucky that’s all I did to him. Tell me something. If Phil hadn’t been there—”

  “No names, I said”

  “Okay. If it had been me and the big baby one on one, what would you have done?”

  “Given you a standing ovation.”

  “Seriously, would you have stopped me?”

  “From what, killing him? Can you do that with your kung fu shit?”

  “I practise karate, not kung fu, but yes, I could have killed him. You’d be surprised how easy it is.”

  “No,” Ryan drawled. “I don’t think I would.” I heard him suck in air and guessed he’d just lit up. “I got to get away from these people. They’re poisoning me. I got to spend more time with my kid. I miss him so much—Christ, I even miss my wife. I want to do things normal people do. Take my boy fishing. To a ball game. Run a hose in the sun so he can see how rainbows are made. But my wife won’t even let him leave the house with me. All this talk of war between the brothers, she’s afraid someone will take a crack at me when I’m with our son. Or maybe I’ll corrupt him just by being with him, like something’ll leach out of me straight into him. All the kids his age, they play with water guns and shit? First time he picked one up, I swear, my wife turned white and ragged on me for fucking hours, how he’s going to end up like me.”

  “She should talk to my mother,” I said. “Ever since I got shot, she freaks if I don’t answer the phone on the first ring. Nice Jewish boys aren’t supposed to get shot, unless maybe they own a jewellery store.”

  “I’m a little curious about that myself,” Ryan said. “I mean, I’m not generalizing or anything, but growing up in Hamilton, every Jew I ever knew, besides the few that got into our thing, they became doctors or lawyers or dentists or went into the family business. Scrap metal, shit like that.”

  “Did my mother put you up to this?”

  “Come on. How’d you get to be a PI?”

  “It’s way too long a story,” I told him. “The Percocet is kicking in.”

  “And I’m in the Aerosuites Hotel with nothing to do but listen to the elevators.”

  “All right. Let’s just say school never clicked for me. I could follow what the teachers said on any given day, but I could never put it together like my brother.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a lawyer, like a good Jew is supposed to be. Very successful. Very responsible. Rarely gets shot on the job. The apple of his mother’s eye.”

  “Not your father’s?”

  “He died when I was a kid.”

  Dante Ryan said nothing. I remembered how his father, Sid Ryan, had been killed by the Hamilton mob when Dante was an infant. I was debating whether to ask him about this when a rather large yawn escaped my lips.

  “All right,” Ryan said, “I can take a hint. Anyway, given what happened tonight, I’d be careful if I was you. Get a professional in and change the piece-of-shit lock on your door. Check your car before you start it. Watch your back.”

  “I can barely watch my side,” I said. “What about your boss? He figure out yet who warned me on the field?”

  “Oh yeah. I told him I was warning him, not you. That a ballplayer was getting too close with a bat.”

  “Phil say otherwise?”

  “Phil never says more than he has to. Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck he saw.”

  “He Marco’s regular bodyguard?”

  “One in a series.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “Me? No. I don’t guard bodies, I generate them.”

  “All right. I’m saying good night now. With the cavalry on speed-dial.”

  “More likely you’ll need the bomb squad,” he said.

  CHAPTER 20

  Buffalo: the previous March

  Rich Leckie sagged down onto a bench beside Marty Oliver, raising his T-shirt off his belly to wipe the sweat pouring off his bald head. His stomach was white and soft, rolling out over the band of his shorts.

  “It’s official,” he gasped. “I’m dying.”

  “You’re not dying,” Marty said.

  “You’re right. I’m dead already.”

  “That might explain your game tonight.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Come on, I’m kidding. You’re just out of shape.”

  “It’s only a matter of time now.”

  “It’s only a matter of time for us all, Tallulah. There’s nothing wrong with you a little more exercise and a better diet wouldn’t cure.”

  “Thank you and fuck you,” Rich panted.

  Rich and Marty played racquetball every Thursday evening, seven to eight, at the Delaware Avenue Y, a short walk from Marty’s downtown office. But racquetball with Marty was the only exercise Rich got. Marty played racquetball with at least four other guys at the Y, played basketball Sundays in a fifty-plus league, and used the stairclimber and elliptical cross-trainer, sweating it out next to the buff women, chatting up any that didn’t wear iPods.

  They had known each other for nearly forty years— though both would probably reel at the thought—meeting in high school and staying friends through college, marriages, children and careers. Well, Marty’s career anyway. Rich wasn�
�t sure the dogged yet unfulfilling path he had pursued since earning his journalism degree could properly be called a career. Rich and Marty had discovered rock music together in the early sixties, when the potent Buffalo scene was presided over by legendary DJs like Tom James and George Brand, a generation of mesmerized teens following them like rats after plugged-in pipers. Rich and Marty formed their own group in high school—Contraband—with Marty on guitar and vocals and Rich on keyboards, trying to work his long-ignored classical piano training into some sort of blues-based attack. They discovered drugs together, beginning with pot, for which a lifelong affinity would develop, as well as acid, the latter experiment ending abruptly, and almost fatally, when the boys discovered that tripping on blotter was fundamentally incompatible with swimming in the Buffalo River. They had gone on road trips to Manhattan together, spiralling through the Adirondacks in the dark with Dylan’s new electric sound blasting out the speakers and thick smoke trailing out the window. They had tried dealing dope briefly. Extremely briefly, it turned out, as the first toes they stepped on belonged to big, hairy-assed motherfuckers who could rip out their throats with one hand. And those were just the girlfriends.

  Asked who his best friend was, Rich would say Marty without hesitation. But he wasn’t sure Marty would say the same. He knew Marty had a lot more friends than he did, a lot more going on in his life, and felt sometimes that Marty looked at him more as a sidekick than an equal. He had to admit Marty was the more accomplished of the two: he hadn’t worked any harder than Rich had in school, but did well enough to get into law school. Back then, Marty’s intention (at least his stated intention) was to practise storefront law, help the underprivileged stick it to the man. Now billboards and bus-stop ads hawked his firm’s personal injury services. Helping people stick it to the man’s insurance company was more like it.

  Rich took pride in the fact that he earned his living by writing, even if most of the work was corporate and catalogue copy, and the odd ghost-writing job for local luminaries who thought their lives worth documenting. He did well enough to keep his first and only wife, Leora, and daughter Leigh-Anne in a detached brick house south of East Ferry, but had never kept pace financially with Marty. Rich drove a sensible car that got good mileage, an Acura he’d found in the News, three years old with barely thirty thousand miles on the clock. The Leckies took car trips to visit family and the occasional all-inclusive at a beach resort, thanks mainly to his father-in-law, who was determined that his daughter and granddaughter should have a decent vacation whether or not Rich could provide one.