by Con Lehane
Wilson pulled into a semicircular driveway that might have been in front of a suburban hospital, except that here weeds and a few scraggly shrubs fought for life in a patch of dirt on an island where there might have been lawn. He stopped at the Emergency Room entrance, which had a glass and chrome entranceway tacked onto the ancient brick building. A hospital cop helped him get me out of the car; someone dressed in white brought out a black vinyl—covered stretcher.
I was wheeled through the self-opening door into a room stuffed to the gills with life’s unfortunates of every size, shape, and color: folks with bandaged heads and bruised faces; drooling, yellow-eyed old men; fat girls with tiny babies; old women in housecoats; teenage boys in dungaree overalls laid out on stretchers like mine. One young black guy, who had a white bandage soaked with blood on his forehead, was handcuffed to his stretcher. Next to him, in the line of stretchers against the wall, an ageless black man, his face sunken in around the area where his teeth would be, stared blankly into the hallway. Those not lying on stretchers and staring at the ceiling sat vacant-eyed on pink-and-yellow plastic bowl-shaped chairs, their expressions blaring out misery and interminable waiting.
The orderlies wheeled me briskly through the waiting room into a large space that had been subdivided by doors and curtains into cubicles. Here, too, the hallway was teeming, like a city street. The walls were an unhealthy shade of green; the people moving about were dressed in anemic green scrub suits, white nurse’s uniforms, or blue police uniforms. A few of the young black guys, here, too, were handcuffed.
I was wheeled past a door marked WOMEN and another door marked MEN into a small examining room marked TRAUMA. One of the scrub-suited people—an orderly, I guess—looked me over, pulled off the top level of gauze, and said, “The surgeon will be right in.” The orderly was young and big, and strong. I expected him to be gruff and unsympathetic, but his hands were gentle and his voice kind. He looked into my eyes. “Do you feel weak, like you’ll pass out?”
I said yes.
“You’ve lost some blood, but it looks like a flesh wound. The surgeon will have you fixed up in no time.” His gentleness stunned me into peace. Instead of being terrified, as I had been on the trip through the waiting room, I felt like a child, drifting into the perfect human kindness around me—it wasn’t only my eyes; I needed my head examined. But I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I looked into the bemused brown eyes of a very pretty woman. Her skin was a stunning color between olive and reddish brown, and there was a faint blush of pink on her cheeks. Her hair was close-cropped and curly. I couldn’t stop looking into her eyes, and she kept smiling. Then she moved to the end of the table, where she cut and peeled the remaining gauze from my leg. It hurt a lot and I yelped.
She said, “Sorry,” as if she really meant it.
“I’m going to stick a needle in your leg,” she said with a bemused, almost secret half smile, while her eyes kind of danced. So I smiled, too. Then she jabbed me with the needle, and I yelped again. “That was to numb your leg,” she said. “I’m going to have to dig out that bullet, which will cause you more harm than the bullet did going in.”
She seemed competent and sure of herself. But I kept wondering if she was doing all this, what exactly would the doctor do? It wasn’t until a middle-aged black woman in a white uniform joined her and began putting pads around my leg and washing it with various things, and this beautiful woman came back, wearing a green surgical gown, holding her hands in front of her, and the nurse put gloves on her hands that I realized she was running the show. While she was fishing around on a tray through an array of silver-bladed instruments, I said, “Hi, Doctor.”
She looked at me with that amused smile again. “Hi yourself,” she said. Then she began working on my leg, and it hurt. She struggled also, leaning hard against my leg, her face down close to the wound. After a few moments, she held up a long tweezers and plunked something onto a metal tray. Various instruments were exchanged and she began stitching me up. In another few minutes, she had finished and walked out of the room.
“Where’d she go? I asked the nurse. I couldn’t believe she was gone. I wanted her to be with me always.
“Another patient,” the woman said in a tone of absolute disinterest.
“Am I finished?”
“Yes.”
“Can I go?” I began to sit up, but she pushed me back.
“You might have a little trouble walking when that anesthetic wears off,” she said. “Stay put.”
“Will the doctor come back?” I could hear the whining in my voice.
“What for?” the nurse scolded.
Embarrassed because the rebuke suggested I was being a baby, I said in as dignified a tone as I could muster, “I thought there might be something else to do,” and tried to look pathetic.
“Not unless you get yourself shot again,” the nurse said in the same tone she probably used with her grandchildren.
Dr. Parker did come back to give me a prescription and tell me to see her at her clinic in three days. Nothing could have made me happier.
“Are you okay?” she asked, helping me off the examining table. “You’re going to be in some pain. I’m giving you painkillers and a prescription for an antibiotic. Also, you’ve lost some blood, so if you try to do anything, you’ll probably pass out and fall down.”
“Great!”
She looked at me, still bemused, her eyes dancing.
“You must really like your work,” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“You did a really good job. I’m glad you were my doctor.” She didn’t respond, so I said, “I’m really glad I get to see you again.”
Still with her secret smile, she turned away. I stared after her until the nurse interrupted my reverie. “The police want to see you,” she said.
The police interrogation, if that’s what it was, consisted of ten minutes with a round-faced cop, who took as much interest in my answers as a census taker. I told him I was shot on Prospect Park West around noon. No witnesses; no description of the assailant, except that he was young and white. The guy asked for my money; I said I had none, so he shot me. Would I come to the precinct and look at some pictures? the cop asked. I told him I was too weak at the moment. Would I attend a lineup if called? I said I would. That was it. Before I sat down with the cop, I’d found the card Ntango had given me that morning in my pocket and called to have him pick me up at the Kings County ER. I had no idea how long he would be, but he turned up right as I finished talking to the cop.
“How were my directions this morning?” he asked after watching me thump out the door on my crutches. “Did you have an accident?”
“Brooklyn has not been good to me lately,” I said.
chapter eight
I asked Ntango to drop me at Pop’s apartment, which was only a few blocks from Kings County, and tried to give him fifty bucks from the money Big John had given me.
He refused to take it. “This is not a fare, Mr. Brian. This is helping my friend.” He called me Mr. Brian in a joking way, that was friendly and mocking without being either diffident or disrespectful. He finally settled for twenty bucks because it was Big John’s money and I said I would claim it as a business expense.
When Pop answered his bell, I said, “I’ve been shot.” Realizing too late I’d phrased that badly, I heard the clatter of his footsteps on the stairs and saw his pale, worried face in the front door’s window before I had a chance to explain. New Yorkers have grown accustomed to a son’s body on the doorstep.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Thank God.”
“You don’t believe in God,” I reminded him.
He frowned. I noticed more wrinkles in his brow and that his hair was changing from gray to white. “Your mother’s influence.”
When we got back upstairs to his apartment, I smelled the coffee boiling on the stove and told him so.
Spewing curses and blasphemies, he dashed for the kitchen. When
he came back carrying the glass pot in front of him like a cat he was about to heave out the door, he said, “It’s your fault this time.”
“You would have burned it anyway. You always do. Besides, I thought you were off the stuff.”
He grumbled while he got me a cup, then grumbled some more while we drank the scorched coffee. As I told him about the shooting, he listened, his lips compressed, his eyes searching the ceiling in this thoughtful Solomon-like pose he’d developed over the years.
“This city,” he said bitterly. Years of fruitless struggle echoed in his voice. My father loved New York, and he loved people. For a lifetime, he’d fought the good fight: the workers against the bosses, the poor against the rich, the peacemakers against the warmongers. Now his own street was home to teenage thugs who carried guns as an emblem of manhood and peddled drugs to buy gold chains, sheepskin coats, and ridiculously priced sneakers manufactured by poverty-stricken children. Neighbors were mugged in his doorway. Although he wouldn’t admit it, he was afraid of his own block. However much longer he lived now—ten, fifteen years—it would be a sorry exit. A life of battles in vain.
I wouldn’t say this to him. Despite these momentary lapses, Pop’s optimism barreled on toward the New Day. Every time six people got together to complain to the landlord, he saw the coming of the revolution.
I used his phone to try to reach John at his office. He wasn’t there, and the saccharine-voiced receptionist wouldn’t tell me where he was.
“You got shot by a gangster?” Pop asked when I hung up.
“And I got stitched up by a beautiful surgeon. There is a bright side.”
Pop lowered his bushy eyebrows like a bull lowering his head. “What now?”
“I’ll go home and wait for someone to call me.”
“Who will call?” asked Pop, still looking ferocious.
“The surgeon, I hope.” I went over to lie on the couch because my leg started to throb.
His expression a mixture of sympathy and exasperation, Pop looked me over. “You’re pale. Sleep. You need iron; I’ll go get a steak.”
I woke to the smell of steak broiling and heard my father in the kitchen. Now I really did feel like a kid again. I thought about my mother and wished with all my heart she were alive. I felt a craving for all of us to be together and longed for something I’d felt when I was young that I couldn’t now name. It wasn’t any great memory of youth, just nostalgia for calmness and predictability and a sense that everything would always be as it was.
Pop and I drank Pilsner Urquells and ate steak, french fries, and salad. Over dinner, I mentioned Big John and our meeting with Frank Carlucci. Pop’s pace of eating slowed, but he didn’t say anything.
“He remembered you,” I said. “He offered you a job and you wouldn’t take it.”
Pop put down his fork and rubbed his temples as if they pained him. “After World War Two, the Left fought the gangsters for control of the unions on the docks. Some good men got killed. I don’t say Carlucci killed them. He wasn’t one of the gangsters; he was a strong union man in the beginning. Later, he went with the winning team. Thanks to the bosses, the government, and the witch hunts, the gangsters won. Carlucci offered me a job later on because he knew which side he should have been on.”
“Does he still know the gangsters?”
“I would imagine.”
“John said he kept the bartenders union from leaning on me.”
“Frank Carlucci likes to do favors that don’t cost him anything.” Pop picked up his fork, but he ate lethargically. Before I could say anything, he went on. “Union leaders wearing suits and shooting their cuffs. Tough hoods. Bah!” I thought he would spit on the plate in front of him. “They rolled over in front of the bosses.”
After a long swallow of beer, he said angrily. “You’re not thinking clearly.” The anger came on suddenly and curled his lips at the corners, so it looked like he was baring his teeth at me. “John drove you to that doctor’s office—and left you there. Why?”
I felt weak in the knees, the way I did as a kid when my father yelled at me. He didn’t mean to this time, either, but he made me feel dumb and humiliated because I didn’t know the answer.
I tried to call John again, but he still wasn’t in. The receptionist was no more helpful this time than the last. “Look, lady,” I said. “This is important. I’ve just been shot.”
“I’m very sorry, sir. Maybe you should see a doctor, sir,” she said sweetly, and then added in a cheerful, reassuring tone, “I’ll give Mr. Wolinski the message just as soon as he comes in, sir.”
I called my service, too, which I might have thought of before if I hadn’t been popping the Percocet pills twice as often as I was supposed to. There was a message from Big John telling me to sit tight and he’d call me. The last part of the message was, “Tell him I got a line on the guy we’re looking for.”
Back on the couch, I stared at the ceiling, which was a dusky brown now, not having been painted in many years. I doubted my father would ever think to paint it without my mother nagging him. I tried to make sense of why I’d been shot. Someone wanted to scare me. And it worked. They probably wanted me to stop doing something. And that might work, too. But I didn’t know what to stop doing.
A thought came to me from far away in my unconscious: Bosses get shot by disgruntled former employees. Now, it’s true I didn’t work for the Post Office, but I was a boss now, and I did have a former employee who had every reason to be disgruntled.
“I wonder if Ernesto had something to do with this,” I said out loud, even though I didn’t really believe it.
“Who?” asked Pop.
“The bar back …” I said tentatively. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened with Greg. Then he didn’t come back to work after—” Here, I lost my nerve.
Pop wasn’t having any of it. “After what?”
“After I fired him,” I mumbled.
“You what?” Pop bellowed. “How could you fire the man?” Suspicion clouded his eyes, then the dawning of understanding. The other shoe had fallen.
“I’d been meaning to tell you. It’s a long story. John made me a bar manager—to cover for Greg—before all this crazy stuff started happening.”
“You’ve been meaning to tell me?” roared Pop. “You mean you’ve been meaning not to tell me—but it slipped out.”
“It’s temporary, I’m telling you … a favor to John … . And I didn’t mean to fire Ernesto. I tried to hire him back. It was an accident … . I was trying to get him to talk.”
“You were a boss for how long?”
“It was an accident, I tell you … a mistake.”
That night, I stayed at Pop’s, despite the chill brought about by my class treason. Then early the next morning, at his prodding, I called John’s office again and was told by the tight-assed secretary that he was out of town.
“I thought you were going to tell him to call me.”
“I gave him your message, sir.” Her tone implied that if I had any standing in the world, he would have called.
“So now what?” I asked Pop over coffee and bagels at his ancient wooden dining room table. “Should I look for the guys who shot me?”
My father stopped, his coffee cup to his lips. “Why would you look for them? If you found them, they’d shoot you again.”
“Good point.”
“Where does John live?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait,” my father grumbled; his mouth half-full of bagel, he went for the Manhattan phone book. In a minute, he was flapping it in front of me, pointing to John’s address and phone number. “Try that, Sherlock.”
I called and got the same recording as the other night: John would return all calls within an hour. I left my number. Then I wrote down his address: Ninth Street in the Village.
I went home on the subway, seated all the way, thanks to the compassion of my fellow New Yorkers. The only difficulty came when I switched to the local at Ninety-
sixth Street and had to stand for a few minutes of debate between an elderly man and his wife as to whether I was faking or not. While they debated, a woman wearing a nurse’s uniform and speaking in a West Indian accent called me from across the car to give me her seat. I sat down heavily and tried to concentrate on the pain in my leg to make the couple feel guilty. I had years of expensive training as an actor that I didn’t want to go to waste.
When I got home, I decided to rest and then go down to the Ocean Club and pretend I was working. Maybe Big John would turn up. I called and left a message with Ntango’s dispatcher, asking him to pick me up around four. After reading for a half hour or so, I fell asleep. When the doorbell woke me, I expected Ntango; instead, I found Detective Sergeant Sheehan. As usual, I opened the door in a daze, while he looked alert, his face clean-shaven, his blue eyes bright and inquisitive. I quickly thought over a few explanations for my leg before realizing he already knew.
“How you feelin’?” He sounded sympathetic.
“I have a sore leg.”
“So I hear.” He walked into my living room, not really sniffing as he went but giving that impression.
“Who shot you?”
“I don’t know.”
“In Prospect Park … What were you doing there?” Sheehan looked over the books in my bookcase, then walked over to look out the window.
“I don’t remember.”
“McNulty, people get shot in the leg as a warning. They stray into someone else’s territory; they owe money to a supplier; they’re suspected of freelancing. It’s a trick of the trade.” He pulled himself away from the window, stood up straight, and looked down at me, even though I was still standing. “And the trade ain’t bartending, McNulty.”
Once again, I was sure Sheehan knew the answers before he asked the questions, so it was foolish to lie to him. I told myself he couldn’t know all the answers and that, whatever he knew or thought he knew, I didn’t have to tell him anything. Since his eyes bored into mine like a drill, I really had to brace myself. I was sure people confessed to him all the time because of this penetrating look and his complete self-assurance that made you think he already knew anyway.
