Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  Ruthie walked to the window and looked out. “Going to miss that chunky bastard.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Sometimes it seemed like the only one in the world who made sense was Sleet.”

  “Lots of times,” I agreed.

  “He didn’t buy into the nonsense, know what I mean? Cut straight to the chase. Ever damn time.”

  “That he did.”

  “Remember once I asked if he’d seen some big-assed Hollywood movie and he said, ‘Why would I want to pay good money to watch people slaughter each other?’ “Ruthie turned to face me. “The sumbitch went out with a bang, though, didn’t he?”

  I tried to grin. “Tell me about it.”

  “Papers are full of crapola about the cops he took down. Public servants risking their lives for the city—usual bleeding heart bullshit. From what I hear, they stole everything in town that wasn’t nailed down.”

  I nodded. “They were pretty bad apples according to Charley.”

  She cocked her head. “You’re not in any trouble yourself, are you? For capping Sleet, I mean?”

  “Don’t know yet, Ruthie. Someone from the D.A.’s office is coming by later. Been trying to see me for three weeks.”

  “Maybe you better have Hattie on hand when they get here.”

  The reference was to the best criminal lawyer in the city, a friend of mine for a lot of years, a man even the D.A. himself held in awe. I couldn’t afford a tenth of Jake Hattie’s normal rate, but since I’d done him some favors, usually I didn’t have to. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Ruthie waved toward the trappings of the room, the ungodly gadgets that were going to keep me alive come hell or high water or any inclinations to the contrary should they arise, provided I could pay the tab. “You’re insured for this shit, right, Marsh? It ain’t coming out of your hide?”

  “I’m covered for most of it, I think. Deductible and co-payments will add up to something, I imagine; I’m not sure how much.”

  “Let me know when you find out.”

  I smiled. “I can handle it, Ruthie.”

  “I know you can. But Conrad has more money than anyone but that goofy Gates boy and all he’s doing with it is buying a bunch of expensive toys.”

  I laughed. “What’s the most expensive thing he’s got?”

  She raised her arms in a model’s preen. “Why that would be me, Sugar Bear. Sayonara, or whatever it is the dagoes say.”

  “I think that’s ciao.”

  “Speaking of which, think I’ll go get me a double bacon cheeseburger, seeing as how Conrad ain’t around to hassle me about cholesterol. Last thing I want to do is live forever, know what I’m saying, Sugar Bear?”

  After I told her I knew what she meant, Ruthie flounced out of the room as dramatically as she’d entered it, leaving behind several eddies of air and the strong scent of lavender and a warm spot at the precise coordinates of my heart.

  An hour later, the poker gang arrived en masse. Clay Oerter, the stockbroker, was in the lead, followed by Al Goldsberry, the pathologist, and Tommy Milano, the restaurateur. Clay was dressed for the office, which meant a three-piece suit cut and sewn in London. Al was dressed for the office as well, which was in the basement of a different hospital than the one I was lying in, which meant chinos and polo shirt and Nikes. Tommy was dressed like Tommy, which was an eclectic blend of longshoreman and litigator—the shoes on his feet were straight from Milan and the shirt on his back was from Indonesia by way of Kmart.

  “Hey, Marsh,” Clay began as the others fidgeted nervously behind him. “You look great, man.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yeah, but you will. Right? Hundred percent in a few more weeks.”

  “On the outside, at least. Hi, Al. Hi, Tommy.”

  “Good to see you, Marsh,” said Al.

  “Me, too,” said Tommy. “I brought some of that bread you like, I don’t know if you want it or nothing, but I thought …” He reached under his coat and hauled out a two-foot baguette.

  I felt like the godfather accepting tribute from the neighborhood. “Put it in the closet next to the scotch,” I said. “And thanks.”

  “I didn’t bring anything,” Al said sheepishly.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  And suddenly there was a silence that encompassed all of us, because the fifth member of the poker group had been Charley and our thoughts traveled toward him like metal toward a magnet.

  “I miss the dumb galoot,” Clay said finally, getting it out on the table where it belonged. “Even his stinking cigars.”

  “Me, too,” Tommy said.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “We know there was nothing you could do, Marsh,” Al said. “We know he forced your hand.”

  “Yeah,” said Clay.

  “Yeah,” said Tommy.

  “So don’t go feeling guilty. Okay?”

  When I shrugged, it hurt from my groin to my Adam’s apple. “Easier said than done.”

  “Look at it this way,” Al advised. “If Charley didn’t want it done, it wouldn’t have gotten done. What I mean is, you’re good, but you’re not Charley.”

  “I’m not Charley,” I agreed.

  “Charley wasn’t Charley, either,” Clay said. “He killed all those people, I guess—the cops; the guy in the courtroom. But that wasn’t him. That was the tumor.”

  “Yeah,” said Tommy. “That was the fucking brain tumor.”

  Then, involuntarily and unconsciously, they all looked at me as if I suffered from some of the same, a growth in my skull that had made me a monster, loosed demons no one knew I had, made me a man to beware. I must have looked like shit.

  “Any of you guys go to the funeral?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” they all said.

  “It was nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice music.”

  “And lots of flowers.”

  “Lots of cops, too, I imagine,” I said.

  They looked at each other and fidgeted. “Not all that many,” Clay muttered.

  “Not enough,” Al added.

  “Some guys in plain clothes. A few uniforms. But no cycles and no white gloves.”

  “So nothing official,” I said.

  Clay nodded. “Nothing official.”

  “Assholes.”

  “He killed those two cops,” Tommy offered in explanation, ever the mediator.

  “Three,” Clay corrected. “The one before, then the two the night he died. According to the papers, the inquiry’s still open. They must have figured they couldn’t honor him since he might be a cop killer.”

  “Is that bureaucratic bullshit or what?” Al said angrily. “Charley wouldn’t have killed those guys unless they were scum.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “Scum.”

  “They talk to you yet?” Al asked. “The cops?”

  “Docs wouldn’t let them in. But some assistant D.A.’s been trying to get in to see me.”

  “You’ll tell them how it was.”

  “Yeah. Tell them Charley was just doing what had to be done.”

  The silence returned. I didn’t know how to break it without starting to cry.

  “I looked at your chart at the desk,” Al said finally. “You’re doing great. In case you don’t believe what they’re telling you.”

  “Thanks, Al.”

  “So when you getting out?” Tommy asked.

  “End of the week, if nothing goes wrong.”

  “That’s great,” Clay said. “Maybe we’ll stop by over the weekend. Deal a few hands of stud if you’re up to it.”

  Clay was always ready for a game. “That’d be great,” I said, then inadvertently glanced at the clock.

  Clay took the hint even though I wasn’t sure it was one. “Well, we better hit the road. Good to see you, Marsh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,”

  “Don’t be a hero,” Al said. “Take it easy till you’re back all the way.”


  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You did what you had to do. No reason to get down about it.”

  “No.”

  “Hell, no.”

  “So take care.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys, too,” I said.

  “We will,” Clay said. “And maybe we’ll catch you on Sunday.”

  They filed out of the room, friends who would do anything they could do for me as I would have for them, but nonetheless as relieved as I would have been to have done their duty by their fallen comrade and be on their way to less unnerving environments.

  After they were gone, my day nurse peeked in. Her name was Gertie. She was tall and gruff, as stiff and as pointed as jackstraw. “How you holding up?”

  “Fine.”

  “Want me to call off the parade?”

  I shook my head.

  “That district attorney said she’d be here at four unless someone told her she couldn’t. Said it was important,” Gertie added, then looked at me more closely. “I can head her off if you want me to.”

  I shook my head. “If they’re going to try to lock me up, I might as well know it now.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the meantime, they wanted me to walk, so I walked. Four times a day if I could; less if I was too worn out to keep to that schedule. I was supposed to be walking for therapy, to tone my muscles and to head off complications like adhesions and pneumonia. But the real reason I was walking was Rita.

  Rita Lombardi was her name. She was twenty-five years old, of Italian descent, and hailed from a town I’d never heard of named Haciendas, somewhere between Watsonville and Salinas. Her hair and eyes were soft brown, her nose and chin were as pointed as awls, her skin was the color of sole, and her spirits were as rampant as wind. She was engaged to be married to a man named Carlos Reyna and she was the most delightful young woman I’d ever met with the exception of my daughter Eleanor. Although I’d had major surgery, and was taking half a dozen potent pharmaceuticals a day, Rita Lombardi was by far my best therapy.

  We’d encountered each other for the first time two weeks earlier, in the corridor outside my room. We were each walking with help, supported by nurse’s aides and by the transparent juices dripping out of the IVs we towed in our wakes. We’d smiled as we passed each other in the hall, one day and then the next, walking in opposite directions, wishing we were anywhere but where we were. On the third day we’d met yet again, this time navigating on our own with the aid only of our walkers and our determination. Rita stopped to talk the usual hospital talk about the food and the nurses and the smells, but her manic energy and her oddly genuine interest in my welfare made the usual somehow remarkable. Her eyes pierced the shields that shutter my soul, laying bare my inner secrets, making it impossible to be other than candid with her. The third day we walked together, I told her about Charley and me and how he’d died, told her more than I’d told anyone else before or since.

  After that, we got together twice a day, at ten and two sharp, and walked in tandem for a full hour each time, an hour that seemed more like a minute. I don’t know what Rita imagined during these moments, but my own private fantasy was that we were on board a ship to the Caribbean, taking a turn on deck before we retired for the evening, elegant and aristocratic and in love with ourselves and our lives and each other. That’s what medication can do to you, I guess—I’d never had that sort of silk stocking fantasy in the previous forty years.

  Rita was in the hospital because of two birth defects that, now that her body had fully matured, could finally be surgically remedied. Her legs were the main problem—she’d been club-footed at birth, in both limbs, to the point that she couldn’t walk any distance without the aid of crutches. Her face needed attention as well. She’d had a large birthmark on her right cheek that made her look, in her words, like she’d slid into third base on her face. She’d had several plastic surgeries to remedy the facial flaw and now they’d taken care of the feet, and her new look and new alignment had made her ecstatic—from time to time I was certain she would start flying around the ward like a wren. Regarding her now, with her complexion free of blemish and her feet straight and true in their flexible soft casts, it was hard to imagine she had ever been other than perfect.

  I took a quick nap, then strolled into the hall. It still hurt in the gut when I walked, and my legs still moved as if someone other than me was the puppeteer, but it was lots better than the first time I tried it, when I was certain with every step that I was going to split wide open and spill my viscera over the floor, an embarrassment to myself and to the doctor who concluded I was ready to promenade, and a nuisance to the aides who would have to mop up after me. But now I was a veritable sprite, tripping through the tulips or at least the vinyl tile, feeling like jumping for joy when I saw Rita Lombardi shuffling toward me with a smile on her narrow face that made Meg Ryan seem like a grump.

  She wore powder blue pajamas with daisies blooming all over them and carried a little brown bear. The bear looked more in need of medical attention than either of us—Rita told me his name was Brownie and he had been given to her by her father when she turned two. Her father had died shortly afterward, so the bear had become both sentimental and symbolic; even now she refused to sleep a single night without it. I have some things in my life that serve the same function and given what happened to Charley, I expect to have a few more.

  “Good afternoon, John Marshall Tanner.”

  “Hi, Rita Maria Lombardi.”

  “You look like a man who’s ready to travel.”

  “Friday morning, they say.”

  She wriggled like a rabbit. “That’s so cool. I’m really happy for you.”

  “How about you?” I asked, with an odd tic of trepidation at the thought of life in the ward without her.

  She sobered. “This afternoon, I think.”

  My stomach knotted and my voice took on an artificial echo. “Really? That’s wonderful. But I thought they wanted to wait till next week.”

  “I guess I’m coming along better than they thought I would.” She touched her cheek where the birthmark had been replaced by a slice of fresh flesh. The graft had come from her hip. She’d made a bawdy joke the first time she told me about it.

  Rita put her cane in her left hand and gripped my arm with her right. “You remember your promise, I hope.”

  “What promise was that?”

  She squeezed. “You promised to visit Haciendas as soon as you get back to normal. Four fourteen Fremont Street. I wrote our address and phone number on your pad two days ago.”

  “I know; I’ve got it in my wallet.”

  “So that means you’ll come, right?”

  For some reason, it was important to Rita that I see her in her home environment, maybe to prove to both of us that she was fully healed in the eyes of the world and not just the hospital, so I said what I had to say: “I’ll be there.”

  “By the end of the month?”

  “If I can.”

  She nodded as though my promise had been etched in stone, as I guess it was. “Shall we stroll, Mr. Tanner?” she asked.

  “We shall, Ms. Lombardi.”

  We walked the halls as though we were flanked by the trees and bistros of the Champs-Élysées rather than the recovery rooms of sick people. Rita told me about the book she’d been reading—Julia Alvarez, whom she loved. I told her some stories about Ruthie Spring and the boys in the poker group. Then I asked what she was going to do the first thing when she got home.

  Her voice soared and her hand tightened on my forearm. “I’m going to go dancing. At a bar called the Cantina. I’m going to play every record on the jukebox and dance with Carlos till they make us go home. It’ll be the first time I’ve danced in my life.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “You can come, too, when you visit. In fact, I know just the woman to fix you up with. Sal Delder. She works as a receptionist at the poli
ce station.”

  I tried to stem my shudder. “That’s nice, but I’m not much of a dancer.”

  Rita elbowed me in the ribs, which sent a spur of pain scraping down my torso as though someone were chiseling a notch in my spine.

  “You never say anything good about yourself, do you know that?” Rita chided as I tried not to convulse from the pain.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I want you to say something good about yourself. Right now. Just one thing. What’s the best thing to know about the man named Marsh Tanner?”

  I smiled at her homegrown psychotherapy. “The best thing about me is I have friends like you.”

  “That means you must be a good person, right?”

  The therapy was going in the wrong direction. Before I could say anything to reverse it, Rita poked my ribs once again. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Blaming yourself for what happened.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  She tugged me to a stop and turned me so I faced her. “I get so mad when you do that. He did it; not you.”

  “But I helped.”

  “How?”

  “I didn’t stop him.”

  “He had a gun. He’d already shot two men. How were you supposed to stop him?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to stop him,” I said. “I was just supposed to try.”

  Rita shook her head with elaborate exasperation, as if I were an obstreperous school kid. “You were no more responsible for what happened to Mr. Sleet than I was for what happened to my legs and my face.”

  “Your legs and your face are lovely.”

  She abandoned her burlesque of the angry schoolmarm and looked at something down the hall, then told me what she had probably needed to tell me ever since we met. “You didn’t see me before, so you don’t know,” she said softly, as though uttering a furtive confession. “My feet were twisted like someone had ripped them off and glued them back on sideways. Even with crutches, the only way I could keep my balance was to shuffle along all hunched over so it was impossible to look at anything but the ground in front of me. Hermie, is what they called me. For hermit crab. I was forever bumping into things. Things and people. They acted like they’d touched a toad when I bumped them. Some of them. Most of them, in fact.”