by Ed Gorman
Tries to pretend he doesn't hear.
Tries to pretend he doesn't know what's really going on.
But he does know.
This sorta pretty kid got passed around among all the important cons and now—
Well, you can bet there are a lot of important cons lying awake tonight, too, wondering if they're soon going to get the word from the infirmary that . . .
"You awake?"
"Yeah."
"Sorry for crying," the kid says.
"It's all right."
"It's just I'm scared."
"I know."
"You ball anybody since you been in here?"
"Huh-uh. I don't like men. I like women."
"You're probably all right, then."
"Unless I pick it up some other way, " he says. He's a real hypochondriac. He wishes he had a different guy living on the bunk below.
"Don't you watch TV?"
"Yeah."
"Well they explain that. You can't get it from drinking out of the same glass or just touching somebody or anything like that."
"That's what they say, anyway."
"You don't believe them?"
"Huh-uh."
"How come?"
"They're just trying to keep everybody calm. They don't want people rioting in the streets and stuff like that."
"You ever seen anybody with it in the later stages?"
"Yeah."
"Pretty terrible."
"Yeah."
"I hope I die before I get that bad off, " the kid says. "Except I'm scared to die."
Neither speaks for a long time.
Just listen to the prison night.
"How about you?" the kid says.
"How about me what?"
"You afraid to die?"
"Sure. Especially from some faggot disease."
"I guess I don't like that."
"Don't like what?"
"Being called a faggot."
"Oh."
"We're human beings, too, you know."
"Just give it a rest, kid, all right?"
"I resent it, man. I mean if you really want to know. I don't call you names, why should you call me names?"
"You don't call me names because I'm not a faggot."
"That's it, you sonofabitch."
And the kid jumps off his bed and puts his fists up like he's in some kind of bad-ass fight with an invisible opponent and then he starts coming closer and closer to the top bunk and—
He lashes his foot out and kicks the kid real hard in the mouth. The kid starts wailing and weeping right away.
All the cons who've been listening in are laughing their asses off.
Some fairy boy with AIDS, this is exactly what he's got coming.
The kid cries himself out, just the way little babies do, and then finally crawls back up on his bunk and goes to sleep.
Sixteen months later, the kid is down to eighty-one pounds and can't hold any kind of food they try to feed him in the infirmary.
He's losing a pound a day.
The story is all over the prison.
God, eighty-one pounds.
Sure glad I never screwed him.
Benny screwed him. Benny won't admit it. But Benny screwed him.
During the time it takes the kid to die, eight more HIV-positive cases are reported in the prison.
His hypochondria is getting real bad. Even though he's extremely careful never to touch anybody in any way, he's terrified that he's going to get it anyway.
He's convinced that the government is lying. He's convinced that he's never going to leave this prison alive.
No two-thousand-dollar-per-month retainer is going to help him now.
For the first time, he starts daydreaming about escaping from here.
4
St. Mark's Hospital was a four-story red-brick structure with no flourishes or pretensions whatsoever. It had windows, doors, ledges and corners and that was it. Presumably it also had indoor plumbing.
I found the back door, then the back stairs and proceeded to go up. Earlier I'd talked to the hospital operator, pretending I was calling long distance about my brother Karl, and she told me he was in Room 408, intensive care.
I moved as quickly and quietly as possible up the echoing concrete stairwell. At the fourth floor, I opened the heavy green fire door and peeked down the hall, expecting to see the flash of white uniforms and hear the squeak of rubber soles.
The hall was empty.
I eased the door closed and started my search of the corridor. A hand-lettered sign taped to the wall said:
I followed the arrow and ended up in another short hallway with four doors to it, two on either side.
The second left, a nurse with an ample bottom was backing out of the room. The first right, a young female doctor looking brisk and earnest was just saying a loud "good morning" to the patient inside.
The door I wanted was first left. I had to reach it before the nurse just leaving 410 saw me.
I took five giant steps, pushed the door open and lunged inside.
I was all cold sweat and ragged breathing for two long minutes.
Vic—or Karl—was in bed, unconscious, a pale corpselike man who had so many tubes running out of his nostrils, his mouth and his arms, he looked like a creepy-crawly alien from a science-fiction movie. His breath came in gasps. The room smelled oppressively of decay. There were no flowers or cute greeting cards or balloons in the shape of puppies.
I waited until my breathing was normal again and then I crossed over to the side of his bed and peered down.
He looked dead. There was no other way to say it. Waxen, still. Some part of his soul had already crossed over.
He was all clean bandages, their heaviest concentration being across his throat. Across his middle were more bandages. Neither the slashed throat nor the two bullets to the stomach had killed him. Not yet.
I touched his shoulder.
His eyes flew open instantly.
He stared straight up at the ceiling, completely unaware of me.
"Who did this to you, Karl?"
Not even a flicker of recognition in his gaze.
"Who did this to you, Karl?"
A faint glimmer of awareness.
"Karl. I'm trying to help you."
He seemed to hear me as if from a long way off, and then he turned his head no more than a quarter-inch and looked up at me.
He started crying. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, his entire body began to shake, and tears began rolling down his cheeks.
He raised a trembling hand—a drowning man reaching up frantically for the final time—and I took it and held it.
"I'm sorry, Karl. But you're going to a better place."
"Scared," he said. And for the first time, some recognition of me shone in his eyes.
"I know, Karl. But you won't be scared for long. I promise."
He fell to crying, then, soft, almost-silent crying, his lower lip twitching as he did so.
"Who did this to you?"
But he wasn't listening to my words, only to the sounds I made.
"Scared," he said again. "Scared."
"I want to make this right for you, Karl. I want you to tell me who did this to you."
"Conmarck," he said messily, dribble and some blood glistening on the corner of his mouth.
"What?" I said.
He was looking at me but not seeing me. Just staring, the way a dead man would. He was going. Fast.
"Conmarck."
I was about to ask him what that meant when the door opened behind me and a nurse said, "This man is not allowed any visitors."
Just as I started to turn away from Karl, he said it again, as if he had been programmed with only one word, "Conmarck."
I knew I had to do it quickly, and without giving her much of a look at me.
I put my head down, squared my shoulders, and plowed my way out of the room, the nurse chittering angry words at me as I did so.
I f
ound the door, and the rear stairwell, and got out of the hospital.
Having no idea, of course, what "Conmarck" meant.
I thought of Karl back there, his ragged frightened tears, crossing over now, crossing over.
I really did hope it would be better for him on the other side. Because then it might be better for me, too, when my time came.
5
The town had two sections—an older one where the blue-collar workers lived, and the newer one where the suburbanites nestled into their expensive homes. In the middle of the town was an aloof, impressive, French Second Empire courthouse and a wide Main Street that ran to small businesses that were likely here back when Frank Capra made all his wonderful movies about small-town America. On the south and east edges of town, you see the official imposition of Progress, the strip malls and the franchise food places and the video stores with posters of half-naked ladies carrying Uzis. I stayed downtown. The older I get, the less I'm impressed with Progress.
For twenty minutes I forgot all about Nora and how she'd lied to me; and Vic, whose real name was Karl, and how he was nearby desperately clinging to life, and how disturbed Tolliver had sounded when I'd told him about the death of his "daughter."
I forgot it all. I bought myself a newspaper, just the way the businessmen did, and I strode around a little more, and then I bought myself a cup of coffee from the old-fashioned pharmacy with the big wooden fan in the ceiling and a chipped and cracked but still-honorable old soda fountain, and I sat down on a park bench where a pigeon perched, and I spent the next ten minutes engrossed in reading, while warm spring sunlight dappled the bandstand and the smell of apple blossoms floated on the breeze.
I probably wouldn't have noticed him, except somebody honked at him. When I looked up, he was waving and about to get into a new station wagon.
There were some questions I wanted to ask him so I hurried across the street just as he was starting the engine.
"Morning, Kenny."
He looked up, boyish in his black cowboy shirt with white piping. His gaze was anything but Christian or charitable. He rolled down the window. "The reverend told me not to talk to you."
"Why's that, I wonder?"
"Said I'd just get us all in trouble."
"Not if you don't have anything to hide."
He shook his blond Irish head. "We argue enough as it is, the reverend and me. No reason to make it any worse."
He started to put the station wagon into gear.
"You want a cup of coffee?"
"No, thanks. I just need to get going."
"Is Mindy having an affair with the reverend?"
Kenny just looked at me. "I gotta go."
I reached in the window and put a hand on his shoulder. "When you travel with the reverend to different towns, does he ever go off on his own?"
"The reverend was right."
"Oh?"
"You're no magazine writer."
"What's he afraid I'll find out?"
Kenny sighed. "I haven't hit anybody in a long time, mister. I used to have this real bad temper and hit people pretty much when I felt like it. I don't want to have to hit you."
"Does he go off by himself when you travel?"
Kenny sighed. "Yes. Now, is that going to shut you up? Yes, the reverend goes off by himself."
"You have any idea where he goes or what he does?"
"I don't follow him, if that's what you mean. So how would I know what he does?"
"I guess that's fair enough."
He watched my face carefully. "Who are you?"
"A lot of people seem real curious about that."
"Does your reporter bit usually work a little better than it has in New Hope?"
I smiled. "Yes—a little better, anyway."
"You don't want to get the reverend mad at you."
"No?"
"He's got this mean lawyer in Cedar Rapids. The guy sues anybody the reverend tells him to. And the reverend tells him to sue a lot of people."
I stood back from the station wagon and looked it over. Chrysler. This year's model. White walls. Leather seats. Big tape deck. I thought of the two matching white Lincolns. "He sure must make a lot of money."
"Our radio shows hit a lot of towns."
"Enough to support everything the reverend owns?" I looked at him directly. "Where's the reverend get all his money?"
"I told you. His radio shows."
"Afraid you can't sell me on that. Lincolns don't come cheap. Especially not those models. And neither does a big boat like this one."
"What're you saying?"
"I'm saying that the good reverend must have some other source of income."
"I'm going to tell him all this, you know. Everything you said."
"I want you to."
"You do?"
"Sure. Because then he'll get nervous, and when people get nervous, they make mistakes."
"Why're you so interested in him?"
I laughed. "Because I'm a reporter, remember? And reporters are always interested in people."
Kenny Deihl stared out the windshield a moment, then sighed. "He isn't so bad, really."
"He isn't, huh?"
"He's a hypocrite. I mean, if he believes all that religious stuff he says, you sure couldn't prove it by me. But he's been good to me. And good to Mindy. Neither one of us are exactly what you'd call a prize."
"Oh?"
He shrugged. "I was in a halfway house when he found me. I'm a drunk—alcoholic, I guess you'd say. And Mindy—"
He shrugged.
"What about Mindy?"
"She'd gotten all beat up by this bar owner where she sang. The reverend found her wandering around on the street. She's a cokehead. At least with the reverend we have some kind of life. We've each got rooms in the basement of the church, and he pays us enough to live on."
"When you're traveling, you ever see anything strange happen?"
"Strange? Like what?"
"Nothing special. Just anything strange."
"Not really."
"He comes in real late, I suppose?"
"Sometimes."
"You ever notice any kind of blood or anything on his clothes?"
"Blood? Hell, no. What the hell kind of man do you think he is?"
"That's what I want you to tell me."
"Well, like I say, he's a hypocrite and that's for sure—but hey, we're all hypocrites in some way. And you wouldn't believe the hope the reverend gives to people. You should see the mail he gets from people who're sick and dying. They love that man. They put him right next to Jesus Christ. They really do."
This time he did put the car in gear.
"I've said enough." He squinted up into the sunlight. I really am going to tell the reverend everything I said. Otherwise I'd feel guilty."
I nodded and stood back from the car so he could pull out of the parking place.
Just as he was ready to swing out into the street, he stopped the station wagon and said, "You've got him wrong. You really do. He isn't perfect, maybe, but he's basically a decent guy. He really is."
And with that, he pulled away from the curb, finding his place in the lazy morning traffic.
I stood there watching him fade down the street.
A little old lady in a little old Ford gently tapped her little old horn to remind me that I was blocking her way.
I gave her my best boyish grin and stepped out of her way.
6
There were five of them, women between the ages of forty and sixty I guessed, and they sat in a worshipful circle around him, laughing when his inflection said he was being witty, asking questions when his inflection said he was being profound. He ran to type, a sort you see in university towns, the handsome professor in his post-hippie phase, striped button-down shirts and $150 chinos out of GQ, graying hair caught up in a sweet little ponytail. It went well with his sweet little earring. You don't have to listen long to hear the sneer in the voice or see the arrogance in the gaze. Fifty years
ago he would have been in Montmarte, seducing the frail daughters of European wealth while proclaiming himself a most serious artist. He was the sort of man Hemingway used to slap around when he was in his cups.
When he saw me, he looked as if he planned to have me arrested.
He had been standing in the middle of his front yard, right next to his easel and canvas, on the edge of which sat a huge monarch butterfly, demonstrating to the ladies the basic techniques of painting, when he heard me and looked around.
He frowned. "You're Hokanson, aren't you?"
I nodded.
"I don't have anything to say to you. But I do want you off my property and right now."
"Maybe I came to see your wife."
"Off. And right now. Do you hear me? Off!"
As one, the students turned to scowl at me.
Just then I saw Joanna coming down the stairs, looking thin and pretty in her designer denim shirt and designer denim jeans.
"I'll handle it, Sam. You go on with your class."
"I forbid you to talk to him," Sam said, sounding very silly.
She waved him away, swooped over by me and said, in little more than a whisper, "The word's out about you."
"The word?"
"Everybody knows you're not really a reporter. Even if you do have that business card saying otherwise."
She slid her arm through mine, started steering me toward my car in the gravel drive, away from the Queen Anne Victorian and the students, most of whom were still glaring at me.
"They don't like me."
She giggled. "Of course not. They all have crushes on him. He doesn't like you, therefore they don't like you."
"What's he so angry about?"
"I wish I knew."
"You really don't know?"
She shook her head. "It's strange. For the first time, I think he's really hiding something from me. And I think it's a lot more serious than just one of his little affairs."
"But you don't have any idea what?"
She shook her head again.
We stood by my car.
She was about to say something when Sam erupted again. "Get away from that car, Joanna, and go back in the house! Get away from there right now!"
