The door was open, and I could use the running board, I thought. I did my little trick about compressing and holding a breath, but my breaths were shallow little gaggings, anyway, and there wasn’t enough air on all of the campus to reinforce whatever was broken in there. I hadn’t read a lot of detective stories, but I’d seen some movies on TV, especially the old ones in black and white. First thing that happens, I thought, the tough-ass, wisecracking, lone-wolf detective smacks a hood. He calls him a cheap hood so everybody understands. Then the hood gets a hundred armed men to absolutely beat the smirking detective’s ass into paste. They start by hitting him on the back of the head with the butt of a gun and then they take him apart. But I hadn’t seen how the guy gets up into his car when his body doesn’t work and the bad guys are gone.
I apparently went off to sleep. Why not call it going to sleep? When I came back, or awake, or whatever you might say, I was on a hip on the running board. I said, “Reach up for the wheel.”
Not for two years’ salary and the Land Cruiser and one of the squat guys thrown in as chauffeur.
“Please reach up for the wheel,” I said.
I understood the urgency. Shock was a problem. And I had lost too much body heat, so there was hypothermia, and then there seemed to be some bleeding, maybe internal, and a number of body parts and mechanical items didn’t work. I thought of kidney and spleen and liver. Kidneys sounded likely, I thought. There had been a couple of hands to that region and more than a couple of feet. I really ought to reach for the wheel, I thought.
It was his whimpering that woke me up. It was my whimpering. I was on the front seat, lying down, and making a hell of a noise. It took me the rest of that week to sit up and then make myself lean far enough out to pull on the door. I was very noisy, and I vowed to stop acting out of character. Jack, I reminded myself, was the quiet one with the jumpy cheek muscles and all of that reserve that puts people off.
The parking brake was on. I released it after a while and then I was able to steer with my elbows clamped to my sides and my fingers doing most of the motion. I got it into first and I left it there. I didn’t want to move my arm to shift or my foot for the clutch. I kept my foot on the gas. I was able to turn the bubble light on, and I drove. A few times, I rolled into things. I refused to shift to back up, and that seemed to work. I’d hit something and make that noise again and then I’d step a little harder on the gas and the Jeep would slide away or the object would slide away and I’d go forward. That was how I went, forward and down, forward and down.
I thought I was past the library. It was hard to tell because there was no traffic on the street below the campus, but I thought I’d passed the library. “Left,” I said.
I choked a little and I spat a lot, and I tried to aim the Jeep straight. I saw the shape of the dormitories to my left, and then came the athletic buildings, then the hospital. I was a quarter of a mile away from it. All of its parking lot lights were on and the ambulance portico was bright. I almost got parked beneath it. I missed by a few feet and bent some of the fender and grille around the brick-veneer post at its right-hand side. I hit the horn and tried to open the door without moving my left arm from where it was clamped at my side. I couldn’t get the door released. I moved my right hand again and pressed at the horn. I kept it there, and soon they came out.
I thought it was so lovely. The big metal door swung out and Fanny in white uniform trousers and shirt and white sweater came running. The door swung in, then out again, and she was followed by another nurse pushing a gurney. Fanny pulled the car door open, and she looked so tough, so used to finding someone like me who came spilling out of a car and almost through her arms. I waited to feel the snow again, and the ground, but I didn’t because she caught me. I remember thinking how with those big shoulders and strong legs of course she would.
She said, “Jack dear god Christ Jesus Jack. What? What?”
Before the other nurse finished helping her move me onto the gurney, I remember saying, or gargling it like somebody in the shower with an open, filling mouth, “Fanny. Fanny. Nobody fed the dog.”
The sleep, or whatever you want to call it, was fine. I woke and it hurt and fairly soon I went under or somebody put me there again. It went like that quite a few times. Then I came around for a longer stretch and I howled and a doctor put me under for a really wonderfully long time. Then I was awake and not enjoying it.
My nurse was named Virginia. She told me I couldn’t breathe because of the cracked ribs, the torn rib cartilage, and the hematomas to my thorax. I said I thought bugs had thoraxes. Not as bad as this one, she told me. I had a catheter because I’d been pissing blood. I told her I knew my kidneys were bad and she said, yes, a kidney was bruised and bleeding. The rest of it was cuts inside the mouth from my own teeth, and the swelling of the cheekbone and nose were bruises, not breaks. I had two splinted fingers and my hands were swollen. That pleased me. When you take a beating, it’s always good to have proof you gave a little back. On the whole, however, I was physically useless, and they had gotten the message across.
“They used the kid as a finger,” I told the audience. It was Elmo St. John, a trooper I didn’t know, and a plainclothes investigator from the sheriff’s office. “I heard him say something about ‘There he is,’ or ‘That’s him,’ something like that. I remember the noise, not the words. I knew he was telling them I was the guy who roughed him up.”
“And the reason again?” This was the trooper. He sat rigidly, he held his hat on his lap, and he all but lifted a poster into the air that told me how much the state police appreciated rental cops like me.
The sheriff’s investigator was a big, skinny man with a tan. He had long straw-colored hair that looked streaked, like a dye job or the kind of bleaching that happens in the sun on a beach eight hundred miles from us in a different season. He said, “He ran the kid for peddling drugs. He said that already.”
“No,” the trooper said, “he told us the kid sold drugs or delivered them. He didn’t tell us why he had to knock the kid around.”
I didn’t say anything because my mouth and throat and face and cock and balls and kidney and back and legs and hand and arms and ribs hurt a lot.
Elmo said, “I can understand the temptation to kick someone’s ass for that. If you’re supposed to be protecting these kids and someone’s bringing them marijuana and who knows what else.”
“Pills,” I whispered.
“Pills,” Elmo said.
“No,” the trooper said again. “I understand the temptation. I’m asking why do it.”
I didn’t have an answer for him. I was thinking of the coeds on campus when they came in complaining about the war against girls conducted by fellows full of beer and feeling extremely entitled. They’d be in a fraternity house or some kid’s apartment and everyone would get liquored up. The girls would half pass out and feel a little horny or stimulated or happy and they’d wake up in midscrew or wake up after it and realize they’d never quite consented to getting laid. And the officer in charge, one of my people, would act like it was their fault. Why were you there with him? What were you wearing? What did you say? All the wrong questions. I remember our being told by Archie Halpern: It isn’t her fault. Assume that. It isn’t her fault. Some of us got confused by that. But it was our rule. I was wishing somebody was here in this hot mint green hospital room to say that about me. I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t about to try to figure out what blew up inside me when I beat on William Franklin. I wasn’t about to drag my life out of me like a rope of intestines and tell this manly law-enforcement person, “Here.”
Elmo said, “What, Jack?”
I rolled my head a little to show him Nothing.
He nodded. He told them, “He’s tired. He hurts.”
The sheriff’s man said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Except for the way he had his hair, there wasn’t anything?”
“Gloves,” I said.
“Terrific,” the trooper said.
&nbs
p; “Speed gloves. He’s maybe a fighter.”
They wrote it down, the sheriff’s man nodding.
Fanny came in. Her face was pale and pinched, her nostrils wide. She said very curtly, “Please come back later.”
“We’re almost done,” the trooper said.
“Wrong by an almost,” she told him. She moved between them and me, standing with her hip against the bed, facing them down, until I heard the half sigh, half wince Elmo always makes when he stands on his sore knees. He went to the door, and they followed.
I felt her lean her weight against the bed. Then she turned, looking at the tubes that ran to me and the IV drip, and then my face. She closed her eyes. Because I am a bad person, I thought of Rosalie Piri.
Opening them, she said, “What?”
“You okay?”
“You should have seen yourself, you bastard.”
“You were incredible.”
“Yeah? So were you. I thought you were dead when you came falling out of the truck like that.”
“I did, too.”
“Nothing like this ever happened in the war to you,” she said.
“I didn’t work alone. I carried a sidearm. And I was a mean motherfucker in the war, Fanny, because I wasn’t in combat. I arrested the kids who went into it and I stayed in an office in Saigon and drank real French coffee. Now I’m soft. I go around changing diapers. Well. You know.”
Her face shut down when I mentioned diapers.
I said, “You know.”
She went on staring at me. “Yes,” she said. “Except you aren’t that out of shape for a man your age.”
“A hundred.”
“And it was four men?”
“Mostly only three. I think the kid got in a couple of kicks to the body at the end.”
“Your poor ribs.”
“It only hurts when I—”
“Laugh.”
“No,” I said “Breathe. When I breathe or talk or yawn or fart.”
“You want the bedpan?”
“I will be dead and half a teaspoon of ashes before anyone in this building delivers or takes away a bedpan. You can announce that if you like.”
“You’re tough.”
“With doctors and nurses and amateurs, I am the toughest. I am a little less of a challenge to the semiprofessional ranks.”
“They were warning you to let them sell drugs?”
“I don’t think they were avenging the boy I pushed around. So, yes: I think it was a business memorandum. It didn’t, of course, have anything to do with Janice Tanner, and she’s the reason I rousted the kid. Someone in Chenango Flats said they saw a car that I thought might be his on the day Janice went missing. Ouch. Goddamn it.”
“It wasn’t about the drugs, then.”
“No.”
“The missing girls? You worry about a missing girl and they beat you up over drugs?”
“You worry a drug dealer about the missing girl, then yes. They decide it’s only the drugs part, and then you get this.”
“Idiot,” she said.
I tried to smirk, but my mouth hurt too much. I decided simply to lie there.
“Bastard idiot. Son of a bitch bastard idiot fool,” she said. She was crying, and I waited to hear the thump of a tail. “It’s because of Hannah.”
“You been talking to Archie?” I finally said.
“Bastard son of a bitch. If you die because of her, then it’s me and a dog left in the house.”
I reached to take her hand and I yipped. But I got hold of her, and I hung on. Her hand was hot and dry.
“Everything’s because of Hannah,” she said.
“We didn’t start out because of her,” I said. “We didn’t have her because of her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I rolled my head on the flat pillow. I didn’t know.
She said, “I have to go.”
“What shift is this?”
“I didn’t go home,” she said. “Nobody went home. It’s all right—I called the farm and they sent two of the kids over on a snowmobile. They brought him home and fed him and they’ll keep him until we get there.”
“I bet you he liked the ride.”
“We have outages,” she said. “Trees went down; power lines are broken.”
“Which means the furnace went off. Which means it won’t go on. You have to push the reset to make it go on again. Which means frozen pipes, maybe. It’s still cold?”
“Still cold,” she said. “Burst pipes for sure.”
“That’s upstate,” I said.
She nodded.
“I’ll be all right, Fanny. I’m sorry about this.”
“It’s the this,” she said. “It’s gotten to be so much of everything.”
I swallowed a few times and she saw I was dry, and she held a glass with a bent straw to my mouth. I swallowed too fast and began to cough and it became very interesting along the right side of my body. I watched her tighten her face until I was done and lying flat again.
The door opened in and Rosalie Piri said to Fanny, “Can I see him?”
Her smile was not as broad as usual, and she looked frightened, or maybe embarrassed. She certainly was flushed. Fanny stayed pale. I closed my eyes. “He’s tired,” Fanny said. Then she said, “You are …”
Instead of naming herself, Rosalie used a pugnacious tone I thought of as New York City, and she said, “Yes, I’m a little tired, too, thank you. Can I visit him?”
Fanny looked down at me. I looked back up. My eyes were so wide, they hurt. I made a little throat-clearing noise, and I said, “Professor Piri, this is my wife, Fanny. Fanny, this is Professor Piri.”
Fanny said, “How do you do.”
Rosalie nodded. She said, “Hello” in a hard, cold voice I hadn’t heard. Her face was as red as the head of a stick match.
Fanny said to me, “Bye, Jack.” She went out the door with a very stiff back.
Rosalie came to the side of the bed. “Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t handle that well.” She smiled, she stopped smiling, and then she said, “Jack, is there anything to handle? Your wife’s remarkable. She’s so tall, she looks like a dancer.”
“Can’t dance,” I said.
“No, she looks, I don’t know, powerful. She has wonderful bones in her face.”
I thought, She has shadows in her face. I helped set them there. I did my share.
“I’m too short for you,” she said.
“No,” I said. I thought then that I was at least one word, that last one, into someplace I shouldn’t be.
“Your sad mouth,” she said, touching my lip. I hissed, and she drew her hand away. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’re making my catheter uncomfortable,” I said.
She blushed again. She shook her head. “This is insane,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I have to get out of here.”
“Yes.”
I waited for her to make me a promise, or to say something about her and me. She compressed her lips and took a breath. She said, “Right,” and she turned toward the door and walked out.
I waited for Fanny to march in and make comments. She didn’t come. About half an hour later, Virginia brought a bedpan. All right, I thought, she sent a messenger instead.
My doctor, who was very fat and extremely careful about hurting me, told me I was going to be all right. The kidney was bruised, but the blood in my urine was diminished. They removed the catheter, they rebound my ribs, and they told me that I should take it easy. I was to stay there another night because, although my skull X rays were negative, I was probably mildly concussed, and anyway, most of the smaller county roads were unplowed. I could sit up, the doctor told me, smiling, if I could sit up.
I was in the room’s lounge chair, reading a Syracuse newspaper several days old and enjoying it. There was a lot of information about zoo animals and corruption in the county council. They didn’t bother you a lot with material about ine
pt Presidents or endangered Vice Presidents or the Senate of the United States. There were a lot of comic strips, and a crossword puzzle even I could do. I was a not unintelligent crossword puzzler.
Strodemaster came in puffing. He was dressed in ski clothes of the sort I saw the students wear, very expensive stuff in black and iridescent yellow that looked like spangles were woven into the skintight cloth. His goggles hung around his neck.
“Jack!” he called. “You all right, man?”
I said, “Hi, Randy, did you ski all the way in?”
“Good exercise,” he said. “And I qot a lift from the snowplow for the last three miles. Jack, holy hat. This happened to you because of me, according to your wife.”
“My wife said that? How is she?”
“Been busy here for her, I guess. One big emergency.”
“One big emergency,” I said.
He walked back and forth too fast to call it pacing. I could see his leg muscles jumping in his tight outfit. He swung his arms and didn’t look at me. He moved back and forth, wall to wall, and he looked straight ahead. I couldn’t figure out how he kept his hair so carefully combed under his ski hat. From the side, he looked a little bit like a movie star whose name I almost remembered. He walked, he swung his arms, and then he suddenly stopped. He faced the bed and looked at me like I was precious to him. It was something that went over his oaky-looking face.
“Listen,” he said, “I know I talked you into this. I got you involved in the first place when I went to Archie. I got you involved in the second place when I came to you. You aren’t a cop anymore. You don’t need this kind of shit, getting mugged by hoodlums. What kind of world is this?”
“You know, I have very little idea,” I said.
“I can tell you this much—it’s scary. When a good man gets hurt this much on account of some blabbermouth buttinsky like me … Well, we were just trying to help, weren’t we? Just trying to do a little good.”
I had the feeling I was missing what he wanted me to hear. I folded the newspaper and blinked a lot and focused hard.
Girls Page 16
