“She got hung up,” the girl replied softly. “She’s been working a convention in Atlanta, and she got busier than she thought she’d be. She told me she couldn’t get away for at least another day or two. But she didn’t want to cancel you so she asked me if I could fit you in. She said you were a really nice guy.”
O’Keefe backed away from the door to allow her entry but ignored the compliment. “You girls ever hear of telephones?” he asked, not bothering to hide his vexation.
Julie stepped through the doorway and answered with more confidence now that she had gained admittance. “Of course,” she said lightly, digging out a cell phone from within her bag and waving it around for him to see. “But most guys really don’t want us calling them at home. It tends to cause problems. Wives answer phones too, you know. So I never call clients unless they specifically ask me to.” She stepped past him into the foyer as he closed the door behind her. “This is like a really great house,” she said, her head on a swivel. “What do you do? To make money I mean?”
O’Keefe hesitated. He generally did not like the idea of telling strangers anything about himself, and he most certainly did not want to discuss his finances with a hooker. But he had to make some kind of conversation.
“I’m an investor,” he finally replied. Without waiting for a response, he pushed himself past her over the expensive tiles of the foyer floor, around the corner and down into the sunken den. “Would you like a drink,” he called back to her.
“Maybe some white wine, if you have it,” she answered.
“I have plenty,” he said, as he pushed his way toward the kitchen. The pile of the carpet again grabbed at the wheels of his chair as he moved. O’Keefe was not entirely sure why he had decided to floor one room with the stuff, because it was a nuisance every time he entered. But everyone else had carpet in their homes, and it would have felt to O’Keefe like something akin to surrender to have none in his own. And that feeling, that sense of giving in that the bare wood, stone, and tile that floored the rest of his home evoked in him was enough to make it mandatory that he have at least one room covered with this ridiculous mat of dirt-attracting fibers. Besides, his arms; unlike his shriveled and useless legs, were thick and muscular, and powered him handily over the woven strands despite their impedance. Fuck you, carpet, he thought.
The countertops in his kitchen were lined with sturdy, stainless steel rails mounted several inches above their peripheries. He rolled up to one and locked the wheels of his chair, grasped the rail firmly with both hands, and pulled himself erect. Steadying his swaying body with one fist still latched onto the railing, he used his other hand to open a cabinet and retrieve a wine glass. He carefully placed it on the counter before again grasping the rail with both hands and lowering himself back to his seat. From that point it was a simple enough exercise to get the wine, open the bottle, and fill the glass. But getting the fragile and now liquid filled crystal back to the girl was an altogether different proposition.
His first thought was to call her up to the kitchen and have her carry the wine herself. After all, he was paying her enough. But that was quite impossible as it would have been an admission that he needed help, and that was an admission he was unprepared to make. Damning his unfeeling legs for the millionth time, O’Keefe searched his mind for the memory of where he had left the motorized chair. The garage? No. He had brought it in after unloading the groceries; it was in the dining room. Relieved that it was close at hand, he rolled out of the kitchen; around the long, exquisitely finished, and utterly unused solid cherry table with its eight attendant chairs; to the far corner of the room where he positioned himself directly in front of and facing his powered wheelchair.
After making sure every wheel was tightly locked, he rotated both sets of footrests to either side, and then with his hands he crossed his numb feet at the ankles and placed them on the floor before him. Leaning forward, he seized the armrests of the motorized chair with both hands and pulled himself up and over it. He paused for a moment in that position, his torso supported over the chair’s seat by locked arms that stood perpendicular to the armrests on which his hands were placed. Then slowly he bent one arm at the elbow, causing his body to rotate slightly to that side. Then with a perfection born of countless repetitions, he collapsed his bent arm and pushed off with the other, flipping his body neatly into the chair’s seat while untangling his feet with the same motion.
It was not, however, a quiet procedure. One could not drop a two hundred and twenty pound weight into the seat of a wheelchair from a height of two feet without causing the familiar thud of dead weight impacting an unmoving object. No sooner was he seated than the girl’s voice curled around through the kitchen, softly reaching his ears, at once both concerned and afraid. “Are you okay in there?” she asked.
“Just fine,” he half shouted back, the hotness of uncalled for shame rising into his cheeks. “I’ll be down in a minute.” You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, he thought, castigating himself. You’re a wounded veteran; a proud, decorated wounded veteran. No one’s got anything on you. But nevertheless red heat still radiated from his face.
Quickly he took one leg in both hands and moved it out of the arcing path the footrest would take on the way to its latching point. He repeated the procedure with the other leg as he cursed their unfeeling recalcitrance. Then he swung both the rests into position and secured them. Again he reached for each leg in turn and lifted them up, setting his feet carefully on the footpads and adjusting their placement. Leaning back into the chair, he took a moment for a few deep breaths before beginning the most difficult part of the endeavor, that of stowing the other chair.
He reached out and grabbed the two handle-like straps that were attached to the inside of it just below the armrests, and with his arms fully extended, lifted the chair up, grunting from the strain as he did so. As its wheels left the floor, the two armrests pulled together, collapsing the chair into a package that was less than a third of its former width. He wrestled the unwieldy appurtenance to one side and placed it parallel to the wall.
After unplugging the chair he now occupied from its charger, he released the locks on the wheels and he was free to roll. He skillfully used a small joy stick that rose from the machine just in front of the right arm rest to guide the chair into the kitchen, where he was at last able to hold the wine glass and move about at the same time. And it only took me about five minutes, he thought sourly.
As he rolled back through the kitchen he could see Ajay, apparently satisfied now that all was well, trot across the decking behind the house and disappear down the stairs that led to the side of the mountain.
Seconds later O’Keefe was back down in the den; next to the brown, overstuffed leather sofa where Julie was currently making herself at home. She sat with her legs curled beneath her, almost lying rather than sitting, her elbow atop the sofa arm, that hand supporting her head. She reached for the glass and thanked him.
As she sipped at the wine, O’Keefe backed his chair away several feet. He had grown accustomed to the monthly tarriance that Melissa inflicted upon him in return for her charms. He had over time even come to enjoy their conversations. But now the stranger made him nervous and brittle.
“I’m going to get a beer,” he said stiffly, desperately wanting to get out of the room, if only for a moment. Back in the kitchen, he poured a foamy black stout into a frosted mug, then fumbled clumsily with a pack of Marlboros before finally lighting one and inhaling the nicotine-laden smoke deeply into his lungs. The drug took the edge off his unease, while manipulating the cigarette gave his overwrought hands something to keep them busy. In a moment he felt steady enough to return to the girl’s presence.
“Oh, I am sooo glad you smoke,” she said earnestly as he rolled back into the room. “I forgot to ask Melissa about it, and I was about to die for a cigarette.” She pulled herself more erect to rummage through her voluminous bag until at last she produced a pack of Virginia Slims. She pulled one ou
t and lit it, a look of pure pleasure filling her features as she inhaled the first of the smoke. O’Keefe produced an ashtray from a drawer and slid it across the coffee table toward her as she resumed her languid pose on the sofa. “Melissa did say you like to talk first,” she said, before taking another deep drag. Without waiting for him to respond, she went on even as she exhaled. “So how did you get to be an investor and make all this money?”
O’Keefe, as loathe as he was to discuss practically any aspect of his life with anyone, was under the circumstances more than ready for an excuse to speak as opposed to enduring any more uncomfortable silence. He needed no further prompting to become what was for him positively loquacious.
“My folks owned a big farm just outside the city,” he began. “They were killed in an automobile accident a few years after I was discharged from the Marines, and I couldn’t take care of the place being a—” he paused for a moment, searching for a word other than cripple and finally settling on the phrase “with my disabilities. And it had to make money. I had some income from my veteran’s benefits, and my parents left me a little more, but that was hardly enough to pay the taxes on the land. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to live on what was left.”
O’Keefe was silent for long enough to knock the ash off his cigarette and take a slug of beer before continuing. “I’d never been much for farming anyway, and I didn’t want someone else doing it for me, so I took some courses at the community college on real estate, passed the exam, and got a broker’s license.
“The city was growing out toward the farm pretty quickly; it had been for a long time. There were neighborhoods, expensive neighborhoods, springing up around us even before I left for Nam, so the land was plenty valuable. I made it a point to learn how to subdivide it, get financing, and develop it. Then I got a few builders in there and sold the individual lots to them, contingent of course on them listing the homes that they built with me. I started with a small plot and worked my way up to larger parcels until the farm was all gone. I made a ton of money in the process, and I never spent much.”
What did I have to spend it on? he asked himself. A bucolic, ex-Marine confined to a wheelchair wasn’t exactly the type to have a glittering social life.
“So I had a lot of money sitting around in the bank,” he continued. “That’s when I started investing. At first it was just a few stocks and some rental properties. But as you might imagine, I didn’t have much else to do with my time, so I started to learn about options and futures and short selling and commodities and all that, and I just kept making more and more money. Eventually I bought this land up here and had the house built and now investing is all I do. With the computer here and the internet everywhere I hardly even need the phone anymore.”
“Wow,” Julie said, drawing out the word as if thunderstruck. “That’s like amazing.”
She had abandoned her recumbent position and now sat on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward toward him as he had told his tale, her elbows resting on her knees and the wine glass held between both hands, the cigarette dangling from between two slender fingers.
“I wish I could do that. But I’m not real smart about money, at least not yet. What else do you do?” she asked, now seeming to be genuinely interested. “Do you travel? I have some clients, a married couple that have a lot of money, and they like fly all over the world, just to go to parties and shop and stuff like that. I’m supposed to go with them someday. Do you do anything like that?”
O’Keefe felt a pang of bitter sadness, anger, and more than a little envy as he wondered exactly what abasements this married couple wanted from the girl, all the while knowing full well that he was about to ask for something very much along the same lines. But he had the right; he raged inwardly; they didn’t. They were married, for Christ’s sake. They had their whole and healthy bodies and they had each other. They weren’t trapped in a useless shell with a mind still overflowing with desires that could never be fulfilled. There was no other way for him, but they had no right to abuse her simply for pleasures they could readily attain from each other.
Abruptly he realized he was grinding his teeth. He took another sip of beer and forced himself to relax. Take it easy, Hill, he told himself. She’s just a hooker, and no one is forcing her to do anything. She does what she does because she chooses to.
“No, I don’t,” he finally answered. “I don’t—” he paused again, wanting to say that he despised crowds, or maybe even just people in general. Rolling along through airports trying desperately to ignore the look of pity on the faces of people who were trying without much success to make eye contact with him without staring, having to be polite to well intentioned individuals who simply would not stop trying to assist him, negotiating obstacles that everyone else traipsed by without a second thought, and feeling a thousand eyes burning into him as he did so. He hated it. He hated all of it. If he didn’t have to eat he wouldn’t even go to the market. But he would never admit any of that to anyone. “I don’t like to fly,” he said at last. Besides, where could he go to have fun all by himself?
“They have courses for that now,” Julie said helpfully. “I had a friend who was like terrified to fly, and she…”
“Look,” O’Keefe said rudely, interrupting her, “I don’t want to fly. I don’t want to travel. I’m a country boy. I like to stay home, go out on my lake, and go fishing, okay?” O’Keefe immediately regretted his blunt and boorish response, but if it bothered the girl she gave no sign.
“You have your own lake?” she asked incredulously, her eyes suddenly sparkling.
“Well, yeah,” O’Keefe answered patiently.
“Where?” she demanded to know, speaking the word in two syllables, pronouncing it “wear-air.”
“It’s at the base of the mountain, on the other side. There’s a boardwalk that leads around there if you’d like to have a look at it.” He gestured toward the French doors that led outside, hoping that she would indeed want to see. He thought maybe he would feel more comfortable outside and besides, maybe something out there would keep her mind preoccupied enough to stop her asking so damn many questions.
He needn’t have worried about her reaction. “Show me,” she implored, springing to her feet like an excited child.
“All right,” O’Keefe muttered as he maneuvered the chair toward the doors. In seconds he was through them, rolling over the weathered boards of his deck with Julie walking along at his side. He steered the chair off the deck and onto the wide promenade of the boardwalk, the sturdy walkway that had been constructed for no other reason than to allow a person bound to a wheelchair to roll out and around the mountain to an overlook and gaze down upon his private lake. The boardwalk hugged the contour of the slope; supported by thick, cantilevered timbers; and not far from the house it entered a thick stand of evergreen trees, trees that they were now approaching.
This far up in the highlands it was comfortable outdoors, even at mid-afternoon and at the height of summer. The day became suddenly even more agreeable as they entered the shade under the tightly packed firs. This particular portion of his property had been a Christmas tree farm under its former owner and O’Keefe, not needing the money, had simply let them grow. The trees were well over thirty feet tall now and had to be trimmed back occasionally lest their limbs become impediments to traversing the walkway. As he and the girl passed through them, the coniferous fragrance engulfed them, the sweet smell protected from what little breeze there was by the thickly needled and naturally pleached branches that surrounded them.
Over the years, O’Keefe had become accustomed to and later very nearly blind to the charms of his winding walkway, but Julie was entranced. She walked beside him, her eyes sweeping left and right and up and down as she tried to take in every detail of their passage. And thankfully, she was utterly silent while doing so. The only sounds that marked their passage were the avian arias of the birds that inhabited the conifers, the clicking of Julie’s heels on the rough lumber of the
boardwalk, and the crackling fracture of dry debris under the wheels of O’Keefe’s chair.
At length the walkway exited the trees and crossed into an area of boulder strewn slope where patches of high grass and twisted scrub pines covered the spaces between outcroppings. Beyond this was the overlook, just past where the back of the mountain fell away much more steeply than on its other faces. The platform was a wide expanse of oak planks that, although of even sturdier construction than the boardwalk itself, still looked to be perched precariously over a near vertical cliff face that fell several hundred feet to a more gentle, pine covered slope. Beyond and below the pines crouched the large, kidney shaped basin of cold, clear water that was O’Keefe’s private fishing retreat. They reached the overlook, and O’Keefe rolled up as closely as he was able to the railing and looked down over the lake. The sky and the scattering of fluffy white cumulus clouds reflected perfectly on its pristine and quiescent surface.
To the south his lake was bordered by the base of the mountain on which they stood, while two other green clad giants checked its expanse to the north and west. To the east an earthen dam held back the water, rising to some thirty feet above the level of its surface, except for a short expanse on the northern end where its top had been shorn away to form a wide, level spillway; populated only by a short cropped stand of ordinary grass; which sloped gently down to the water’s edge. O’Keefe paid a local with a tractor mower to keep it cut back, fearing that any denser vegetation would interfere with the spillway’s function should the lake ever flood.
And all he surveyed from where he sat he held title to; the whole of the vista spread out before them was his. Even expanses of acreage on the far side of the surrounding mountains belonged to him. It had taken him some time, and more money than he should have spent, but he had wanted the lake private, and now it was.
“It’s beautiful,” Julie cooed. She leaned forward against the thick timbers of the railing and gazed at the haze shrouded mountains in the distance, while the breeze that seemed to always flow upward from the lake blew the hair back from her face. “What’s that?’ she asked, pointing downward at a tin roofed structure on the edge of the southwest shore.
The Empty Warrior Page 7
