If she’d have only paid attention to a word I was saying, she’d have been able to understand the truth. It shouldn’t have taken Dr. Jamison threatening her for her to understand how out of line she was being. She should’ve known better than to do that. It’s a professional workplace for Christ’s sake, not a knockoff motel, not a knockoff convenience store in the middle of nowhere. It’s a place in which how you treat a person matters. I could file a lawsuit. I could press the dispute a step further, inquire to speak with a chief administrator or director to file a complaint, which leads to automatic termination. Establishments like hospitals dole out the harshest sentences for profiling, racial profiling in particular. But I am not going to do that, because in due time, before all is said and done, her harvest from the seeds planted here this afternoon will be reaped.
*
Sauntering down the sidewalk home with a broad smile and jubilant frame of mind, I lift my expression of rejoicing to look ahead – having embraced in the middle of my day the person I embrace more than I do me. I glance across the street. I halt in suspense, immediately ridding myself of jubilance and rejoicing. I see Mr. Louis peeking out from behind the front-left corner of the convenience store, stealing snoops of the men standing close by the backend of a parked luxury sports automobile of unmatched design. The men are conversing, joshing about a particular interest. One is a massively-built, young, bright-hued male sporting long, ropelike locks, a black tank, and sagging designer shorts; the other is a thin Hispanic male with tattoos inked over his face.
Mr. Louis lurks from concealing his peek-outs from behind the corner, zeroing in on the backside of the bright-hued male. He glances in all directions of the vicinity and upon noticing me raises a vertical index finger to the tight mouth of his face. Forefeeling a grave consequence, I throw up a gesture intending to wave him from the offense I assume he is about to attempt to perform, but I am disregarded through his breakneck attention shift as though I am not standing here, as though he refuses to budge from his set mind – a stubbornness he and I both share, except mine tends to flash in circumstances that seldom provoke danger.
Mr. Louis all of a sudden jumps the bright male, snatching from a rear pocket. He shoves the male into the backend of the automobile. The man’s Hispanic associate lunges to capture Mr. Louis, grabbing and clutching and snatching for whatever he can land hands on. But Mr. Louis gives a fake lunge in a direction, jump-spins in the opposite direction, and takes off running, racing as I witnessed him do a long while back from that convenience store. I shift attention for a look at the bright male, my eyes slamming wide and my jaw collapsing at the sidewalk at the sight of him pulling a firearm with a banana clip from the trunk of the automobile to fix aim at the homeless man who snatched a lump sum of cash from his cargo shorts’ pocket.
I tear from the sidewalk into traffic, slicing through a tight space between the bumper of an outdated Oldsmobile and nicked fender of a charcoal-gray sedan, the bright male letting the firearm rip on the person I consider a father figure, and I’m petrified at the blood that gushes and spatters and spurts, exploding from the backside of Mr. Louis as he collapses onto the cement lot of the convenience store.
Tears leak from my eyes. All I can command myself to do is stand here and watch because complete control of myself vamoosed in disbelief of what my eyes perceived to be real – I cannot feel my face or physical self, cannot blink, cannot hear, cannot inhale, cannot look elsewhere. The bright male releases the trigger in my peripheral vision to return the firearm to the trunk, jump behind the wheel of the automobile, and smash from the scene, leaving the Hispanic male with no choice but to flee on foot.
I can’t believe my eyes. I keep telling myself to move, help, shout for someone to call nine-one-one. But each muscle, bone, and tendon shuts down on me. As heartbreaking as the sight of Mr. Louis sprawled helplessly on his back, motionless, is, I can only stand here with drowning eyes and deep thoughts. Through the knowledge he has instilled in me – how to embrace being without a legal home, how to crack open a Bible and find the solution for a doubt, how not to let being with little to nothing dictate your joy or peace or your faith – I have matured more as a homeless man in the time we have known each other than I had in the initial eighteen years of my life. With due respect to the woman who raised me, there was just something about learning from an individual who resembles me, another man, that made words become like skin to me.
In spite of the demons that influence him during famished and medical circumstances, I consider him to be the greatest person I have ever met. I feel horrible for not having command of myself to dart and kneel at his side to encourage him to remain with me until help arrives. I’m supposed to be there. Not here. I’m supposed to be engaging his spirit. I’m supposed to be inspiring a smile or laugh. Not just standing here petrified, praying, hoping the redheaded convenience store clerk called nine-one-one the instant gunshots rang out. I notice Mr. Louis beginning to shiver – like bleeding-out flesh in nippy weather – although a temperature in the mid-seventies makes this an ideal spring afternoon. Mr. Louis deserves to have someone there he can speak to – to bear witness to his final breath or share a laugh with as a brief statement of faith and courage until paramedics arrive on the scene to transport him stably into the hands of medical practitioners who will be able to help extend him past being gunned down.
The arrival of investigators to process the scene ensuing, I turn. I lower myself to sit on the corner of the sidewalk, a diminutive investigator with the body fat of a crowbar asking me questions I intend to leave unanswered. I’m not about to end up below the cloth of a murder scene, because, from what I was taught, loose lips are the shortest cut to death. I’m not going to end up like the young girl Satan burned alive for speaking to police about what she witnessed him do to Romulus – who had somehow, some way, survived what had happened to him that day in the alley; or at least that’s what I heard a prostitute tell someone yesterday at the Point. Therefore, for that reason alone, although Satan had nothing to do with Mr. Louis’s murder, I, engrossed in an undemonstrative gaze, keep silent with my face lowered at the street. Neighborhood spectators assemble behind caution tape, marking each move I make, a number of expressions telling me who straddles the fence about whether or not I should loosen my lips.
I know I should’ve let Mr. Louis join me. Before leaving home, he sought permission to accompany me to the hospital so he could meet Jen. I gave him a firm headshake because I wanted the introduction to be right. I, believing the future would present the perfect chance, wanted the introduction to be old-fashioned, after me and him had risen from being homeless, after Jennifer woke. I would have liked to have been able to extend him an invitation to our home. I would have liked to have been able to sit and talk and smile and laugh over dinner, she and I, he and his better half, whoever she would’ve been – as it should be. But now, it’s something that’ll never be. Just as nothing ever will be if Jen never wakes, a devastating loss I hope never to face, particularly after witnessing what I have here, in the prime of an afternoon such as this, an afternoon I wish would rewind and let me replace my headshake for a bob that would’ve been the rescuer of Mr. Louis’s life.
Nine
Standing deathly still beside the window, with my gaze fixed on lightning and clashes of thunder ripping through the darkened upper atmosphere, I let my eyes pour like the ominous huddles of clouds punishing downtown Chicago with their relentless downpour of rain pounding the tops of skyscrapers and far-below ground with automobile and foot travelers outside.
I am not certain how I am to break the news to Jennifer, not certain how I am to be without Mr. Louis, my friend and father figure, not certain how I am to remain in a home that awakens memories of his benevolence and enlightening wisdom. And to think, all the while before we crossed paths, I hadn’t known the kind of influence I lacked. I was incredible but not as incredible as I am this morning. I was brave but am now braver. I was filled with faith and hope but not
as filled as I became when life introduced me to a man who possessed the faith and hope of all nunneries put together; I had never seen a person with nothing to his name be so joyful. He hadn’t a legal home. He hadn’t an automobile. He hadn’t a dime, yet he still carried himself as the richest-hearted person on earth; and I am grateful to have known a person like him and been a part of that.
An unexpected knock strikes softly against the hospital room door window. I turn, raising a hand to perform a quick wipe across my face, wondering who thought enough of me and Jen to make an appearance. Dr. Jamison is off for the morning. I make the identification, and I give a headshake at the woman’s impromptu appearance. Instead of hand-gesturing her in through the door, I neglectfully give my attention back to the window that overlooks the city, not interested in involving myself with her, not interested in giving my consent for her to enter the room she refused to let me up to yesterday afternoon. I pleaded like a servant and still was denied. Against my negligent response at the sight of her, she goes against what is expected. She lets herself in.
She comes near and around the foot of the bed over to me, her footfalls as soft as those of a church mouse in gumshoes. She breathes into the back of her throat – like she came from lamenting the loss of a person or thing.
“I know I’m the last person you’d like to see or talk to. And I don’t blame you. But, I thought it was only right that I come apologize.” Kaydence ponders how she mistreated me. “I could ramble about how bad I feel for yesterday, but I’m not going to. I’m sure you wouldn’t care, as you shouldn’t. I know I wouldn’t if it’d been me. It’s just, I got so caught up in protocol that I forgot to care. Smarting off didn’t help either, when, if truth be told, I admire what you’re doing, sacrificing yourself, walking here each morning to see her. When most men’d see this as an excuse to sleep with other women.” I hear her set something on the couch. She comes closer with a mind that seems to brim with concern, and she just stands for a period of time. “I hope everything works out the way you want. I mean that. And I hope you enjoy the breakfast I brought you. Goodbye, Mr. Clevenger.”
I forgive but will not forget the way she treated me. I traveled miles to be let through to here, up to this hospital room, and she gave me the thorniest time. She was negligent. She was impolite and dramatic, about to have me thrown out over a profile that did not pertain to me, without a fleck of remorse in her. Where was the remorse when I needed it? I’m not the kind to treat a person based on what another person thinks. Notwithstanding, after hearing Dr. Jamison speak about Kaydence having stole her husband, I’m uncertain about her. Her remorse could be sincere, but how am I to believe a person who vaunts about tearing apart marriages?
Now that it dawns me, I walked past her when she had been dressed in a blouse, slacks, heels, with an earth-brown woman who had on an azure scrub. They were standing on the deck with her vaunting about a “dark-chocolate hunk” she seduced from a renowned female doctor. At the time, I cared not to decipher her words because the matter she was speaking vaingloriously on didn’t concern me or the predetermined end of my journey. If not for me having stood there, along with Dr. Jamison and her, I wouldn’t have known Dr. Jamison was the woman Kaydence was speaking about that late morning about three weeks ago. I assume it was the morning she had been interviewed for the position. I’d like to give Kaydence the benefit of the doubt, but out of respect for me, Jennifer, our relationship, and her proven track record of pursuing unavailable men, I think it’s sensible that I not – frankly, it’s sensible that I keep at a distance from her in general because there may be provocative intentions up her sleeve – and I refuse to let a circumstance that involves anyone other than the beautiful person lying in the universal bed behind me to make advances at me. With all due homage, I’m not Dr. Jamison’s husband. If it’s not obvious from my appearance, I’m not a gentleman for her to ponder and scheme about making an advance at. I’m not naïve or feebleminded. I’m simply a gentle, imaginative man who pictures one woman as the sole star in his universe.
Ten
The sky dims from bright to dark with the horizon turning red and orange as the sun settles into its set, when I sit up from having napped on the park bench me and Mr. Louis sat on a number of times in the past. It’s the single place, other than the obvious one, where I am able to exist and be at peace without tormenting flashbacks and hallucinations of the brutal murder puppetizing me. The rich expanse of open and treed ground seems as forlorn as the pump organ beating inside of me. A frail breeze channels earthy greenery and wildflowers as I attempt to reflect back over where the previous six months have gone since the afternoon of the murder. It’s been six months since my friend was gunned down in front of a fuel station.
I haven’t been home since the afternoon of the murder. I was livid. I was bent out of shape about the manner in which it’d happened. I went there, but the moment I reached the place, I became heated with unbearable anger, recollections of his generous temperament cleaving at my sanity. I grabbed empty draft bottles, along with whatever else I could get hands on from the street and front yard and a neighbor’s trashcan that was parked at the edge of the street for pickup. I pitched and launched and hurled them all at the small brick home until I exhausted my tears, sprained an ankle in the process of taking to heart the loss of my friend. The last time I remember being in tears like that was when I was sitting in the back of an ambulance, holding my breath while an emergency technician performed operations on Jen, her pupils dulling and losing sparkle, like my mother’s. I thought her passing would be the most heartbreaking loss I would face, ever. But then the seizure happened to Jennifer and murder to Mr. Louis.
Loneliness hurting me like an empty hole in my heart, I look high. I look low. I look around and behind me, unable to trace the barely-audible voice that keeps calling my name, frequently, as if the female person calling my name presses to secure me from engrossment. I lay the park bench hoping to nap more than half an hour, but the thorn in a side mystery of who is calling my name, along with the sound of intermittent footsteps nearing and passing, which is indistinct yet too detectable to turn a deaf ear to. And to think, not a soul sits here but me. Not a soul strolls on the concrete footpath that passes by the durable bench with steel ends. And there exists not a soul enjoying leisure or picnicking about the neat expanse of vibrant flowerbeds and fragrant magnolias, which the footpath distinctively bounds to its inside.
I believe I heard the voice someplace but am not quite sure how to determine without a doubt what it is. It’s feminine. It’s mature. It’s educated. It’s familiar but not adequately loud and distinct enough to individualize. It could be my mother Adeline. It could be Jennifer. It could be Dr. Jamison or some nurse. The voice could belong to one of the four; because each of them fits the defining descriptions.
I recall the biblical readings my mother read to me in the presence of her busted nose, swollen discolorations on her face, but I am not able to grasp the actual sound of her voice. I precisely reflect on spoken discourses I had with Jennifer – subject matters she and I discoursed about – but her actual sound is a fog as well. In regard to Dr. Jamison, I’m certain but not certain enough. Each time I spoke with her I concentrated rather heedfully on her facial expressions and the content of her words that mastering her voice slipped my ears; content was the most crucial thing – because my girlfriend Jennifer hadn’t flashed a fragment of voluntary movement. Unable to distinguish the voice has me frustrated like an unwonted occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease.
I should be able to match the voice to a name.
I should be able to differentiate one from another, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Nevertheless, my incompetence to mark the difference became a hemorrhoid in the ass. I’m downhearted. I’m disappointed. I’m shamefaced. A fraction of me understands I’ve never been in a situation like this, the other half not so much. It’s rather frustrating. Like every man in life, I have at some point in time lacked confidence about several thi
ngs but never anything on as large a scale as not being able to differentiate my mother from Jennifer or them both from a medical practitioner. My mother has to be monkey-fitting in her grave – disappointed at the fact her only child cannot remember the sound of her voice. The same goes for Jen, wherever her spirit roams.
Nearing my snapping point, the voice cuts to silence, allotting the soothingly peaceful atmosphere needed for me to retry for my nap. My mouth opens involuntarily for a prolonged and deep inhalation – wide, like the mouth of a cavern – and exhales shut, due to exhaustion. I lean back to lie on the bench. I look straight at the sky. I look around to make sure all appears clear and legitimate before I retire my throbbing eyes. After taking a deep breath to relieve tension, I suddenly hear the voice speak my name. I slam my lids open for a peek but see no one. I give a headshake at my mind tricking me, and I return back to what I’m trying to do. The minute I fasten shut my lids, I hear the voice again – except it’s louder this time than before. An aggravated madhouse happening in my mind, I open my eyes once again to dissect the surroundings. There still exists not a soul here but me. I blink once. I blink twice. A third time.
I jerk, rising to Dr. Jamison standing with a straight gesture on her face and a standing bend at her waist, in front of me. What? I cannot believe this. In my most recent memory to my knowledge, I was seated upright on a park bench, and now I’m seated on a deck’s bench a distance from the automated double-door entrance to the hospital. Hers must’ve been the voice I remember calling my name at the park, in a dream that refreshed me about the declines and increases – the timeline of actions – that built to the moment here. And the footsteps must’ve been from a passersby or few to the bench I now recall dozing asleep on unintentionally.
My Bridge To Forever Page 14
