by Jake Hinkson
One guy rubbed his enormous gut thoughtfully. He wore wide blue suspenders to hold up his jeans, and when he was done rubbing his gut, he moved his hand up to one of the straps on his suspenders and tugged at it.
His friend, a craggy-faced man with thick sideburns, was slouched over, his elbows on his knees. He smoked a cigarette and stared at the parking lot like it was a mystery.
"All we can do is wait," the fat guy said.
The smoker rubbed his eyes with his thumb, and smoke wafted into his hair. "It's harder for me. I know she's your sister, but ..." He stopped and took a drag off his cigarette.
"All we can do is wait," the fat guy said again. "That's all we can do."
The smoker wore a wedding ring. He fondled it with his thumb. "I reckon that's true."
I closed my eyes and rubbed my sinuses.
A truck passed us going a little too fast for the hospital parking lot. The smoker finished his cigarette and said again, "I reckon that's true," and flipped the burning filter into the truck's cloud of exhaust. With a deep breath, he stood up. "Well, let's do this."
"You ready?" the fat guy asked.
"No," the smoker grunted, and he turned and started for the hospital. The fat guy hoisted himself off the bench and started after his brother-in-law.
I just sat there feeling the sun on my face. Though the air sweltered, I still felt cold. Sweat rolled down my clammy face.
Off to my right, the front doors of the hospital slid open and Felicia walked out. Sunlight glinted off her hair, and she lifted her hand to her eyes. I watched her dig a pack of cigarettes out of a large handbag, stick a cigarette in her mouth, and cup her hand over a lighter. She had trouble getting it to work.
She was still trying to light her cigarette when a shiny new silver Zephyr rolled up to the curb about twenty feet away from me. The passenger side door opened and suddenly there was Carrie.
She didn't see me. She put one foot out the door and leaned back to gather her purse.
I turned on my hip, away from her. I couldn't face her.
To someone in the car she asked, "Do you want me to wait for you?"
"If you want to," a man said. His voice was deep.
Carrie said, "Okay," and closed the door.
"Do you, Elliot, take this woman to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?"
A ringlet of hay-colored hair against her forehead. Her smile as I say "I do."
Carrie's new friend drove off. The bumper sticker on his car had a picture of Robert E. Lee and the words: AMERICA NEEDS A HERO.
Carrie walked up to the sliding doors but stopped and waited, pulling out her cell phone to text. The man with her must have nabbed a great parking spot because he made it to the doors not long after she did. He was a little older, maybe ten or fifteen years her senior, with salt-and-pepper hair and a small paunch. She put away her phone and took his hand. I'd never seen her with another man. They went in together. Supportive. Nice.
I stood up and walked across the parking lot. Felicia was gone. I'd missed my chance to catch her. At the edge of the parking lot, with no one to talk to, I just kept moving.
* * *
As I drifted up West Markham, past a dry cleaners and a Domino's Pizza, I thought about Carrie and her new friend moseying into my hospital room. Who was he? Where had they met? Some kind of support group? Online dating? At church?
Was he helping her get over what I had done to her?
No!
I would not think of it. I would consign that to the past, to the life I ended yesterday.
I thought about him instead. Would he go into the hospital room with her? Probably not. Maybe he'd kiss her worried brow and wait outside. I'll be here if you need me, he'd say. He'd stand there, arms folded, nodding at the orderlies, maybe checking out the asses of the nursing staff. After a few minutes Carrie would walk out, dazed, He's gone. They lost him. Can you believe it? Then he would put his arms around her and whisper, Shh, it's okay, as she cried, but he'd be thinking to himself, This ex-husband is a real piece of work.
At the intersection at the bottom of the road, I walked to the street corner, leaned on a wet trashcan at the edge of a Walgreens parking lot and waited for the light to change. As I waited, Felicia walked out of the store with a new cigarette lighter.
I thought about calling to her, but she saw me first.
"Elliot."
She seemed surprisingly unsurprised, as if we were old friends who'd bumped into each other.
"Hi," I said. I walked over to her.
"What are you doing?"
"Walking."
"You should be in bed."
"Yeah."
"Did you ... follow me?"
"Yes." What the hell. There was no point in lying.
"What was your plan exactly?"
"Do I look like a man with a plan?"
She laughed. "No, Elliot, you don't." She smiled now at her own craziness. Resigned to it, she said, "Well, can I give you a lift somewhere?"
"Should you really do that?"
"Hell no, I shouldn't, but I'm a congenital pushover for sad sacks and deadbeats."
"Is that what I am?"
"If you're not, then no one is."
I gestured down the road. "I don't ... I don't actually have anywhere to go. I wouldn't know where to ask you to take me."
She twirled her keys around her finger. "Do you want to get a drink?"
I almost laughed at that. "That what I need five minutes after walking out of a hospital? Alcohol?"
"No. You need plenty of rest and fluids. Preferably lots of water. But what I asked you was if you wanted alcohol."
"Yes."
"Then get in."
I walked over to her car and got inside.
We pulled out of the parking lot and when the light changed, she crossed West Markham. She went uphill into the neighborhoods, but neither of us said anything for a while. Felicia kept the windows down, either to smoke or because the AC didn't work. Either way the summer humidity hung on everything: me, her, the sagging trees, the damp lawns and sidewalks. The car was an older Ford Escort cluttered with trash and smelling of cigarettes and fast food. She wouldn't be thin for too much longer if this was the way she lived.
Then it occurred to me that I needed money for booze. I reached for my pocket. My wallet wasn't there. Hell of a day.
We passed some nice old houses—not mansions by any means, but spacious enough and old enough to be classy, with small verandas and tiny patches of green grass giving off the faint impression of property. On a couple of those verandas people sat fanning themselves in the late afternoon heat, sipping store-bought lemonade and pretending they were real Southerners. At the end of the day, I felt certain they would just go back inside and turn on the TV and crank up the AC like everybody else.
"I live just up the road a bit," she said. "You don't mind if we stop so I can change out of my work clothes, do you?"
"No. That's fine. You're the one driving."
She lit up a cigarette while using her elbows to steer the car.
"This is a nice neighborhood," I said.
"Yeah, it is. I live in my dad's old house." She took a drag and flicked ashes out the window. "It's all he left me with."
"He died?"
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She shrugged. As she steered the car, smoke curled off her cigarette and dissipated against the windshield. "He couldn't afford the house. He couldn't afford half the crap he ever bought. I don't want to speak ill of him, you know. I loved him, but he had money problems and then ..."
"He died."
She stopped at a crosswalk to let an elderly couple walk by.
"He killed himself, actually."
"Oh, God."
I felt a sudden rush of guilt.
"I'm so sorry," I told her, more in the way of an apology than a condolence.
"No, I'm sorry," she said.
"For what?"<
br />
"Well, I don't know how sensitive you are about the, uh ..."
"The whole suicide thing?"
She grinned. "Yeah. I guess."
"I admire bluntness."
"Good. Me too. I guess that's why we hit it off back at the hospital." She flicked ashes that sucked back through the window and scattered over the trash in the backseat. "I don't really tiptoe around things. I've always been like that, and I guess nursing's only made me more that way. Hell, I guess life has made me more that way. I mean, after Dad killed himself, I got saddled with a heap of debts and an old house." She flicked more ashes. "Thanks, Dad."
Guilt pulled my face down. I examined my palms. "I really am so sorry to hear that, Felicia. That's an awful thing to have to go through."
"Yeah. It is. And I'm not just trying to make you feel bad. I hope you know that."
"I know."
"That's why I got the star." She held up her wrist as if I hadn't seen it before. "To remind me."
I stared out the window at the cars parked along the sun-dappled street. They all belonged to people. Those people all had lives. Those lives were going on in those houses. Just one neighborhood in a little corner of Little Rock, but at that moment it seemed like the vastness of all the world.
"You try selling your dad's house?" I asked. "To get out from under everything, maybe start over fresh?"
"Sure, for the last two years I've tried to sell it. It's a pretty house—you'll see it—but the housing market dropped out right about the time I started trying to unload it."
We slowed near the top of the hill. Felicia frowned at something ahead of us.
I saw only a tree lined street. Some cars parked along the side of road.
At the bottom of the hill below us, a garbage truck rumbled by. Somewhere in the trees a woodpecker hammered away. But Felicia kept looking at whatever she was looking at.
I was about to ask her if something was wrong when she said, "Shit."
"What is it?" I asked.
She didn't answer me, but I saw that she was staring at a dark blue Nissan Armada SUV parked on the side of the road at the end of a long rising driveway. "That son of a bitch," she said.
She threw the car in reverse, but as she did a police cruiser sped up the street. It whipped up to us and stopped just short of her bumper. Felicia grunted and slammed the car in park.
A cop jumped out and ran up to her. Crew cut and barrel-chested, he had arms like tree trunks. He thrust his head in her window and snapped, "Who the fuck is this guy, Felicia?"
-CHAPTER FOUR-
The Twins
"Goddamn it, DB—" she started.
"C'mon," he said. "Let's go. Out of the car." He opened her door and jerked his cleft chin at me. "You too, asshole. Out of the car."
As she stepped out of the car, he took her elbow like she was a senile old woman who'd slipped away from the house.
"Get your fucking hands off me," she said, jerking her arm back.
I got out of the car, and the cop kept his eyes on me. He rested his thumb on the handle of his gun.
He jerked his chin at me. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Just another taxpayer."
"Don't smart off to me, dipshit. I asked you for your name."
I just stared at him.
He pointed at Felicia and demanded, "Who is this?"
"He's a guy I met at the hospital. What the fuck's your problem, DB? And why is the Armada parked outside my house?"
"I asked you who this guy is."
"I just told you. We met at the hospital. I was his nurse. And now we were going to get drinks. That's the whole story of me and this guy."
"Drinks at your house?"
"I was coming home to change, asshole. Then we were going to get drinks."
"Drinks with a patient. That a new service the hospital is providing?"
"I—"
"Shut up," he told her.
"He doesn't know anything about ... our stuff," Felicia said.
The cop had small, stupid eyes sunk deep into aggressive bone structure. He moved toward me with his right hand never more than an inch from his black handgun. His eyes leveled on me with simple-minded intensity. He was not the kind of man you want to meet under any circumstances, but especially not the kind of man you want to meet when he's wearing a badge.
"That true?" he asked.
I shrugged.
He asked, "How'd you like to go to jail today?"
"For what?"
He stepped toward me and leaned close enough to my face that I could smell the coffee on his breath. "You watch your tone with me, asshole."
"Yes, sir."
"You want to go to jail?"
"No, sir."
"Then beat it. If you really were about to hook up with Felicia here, word around town is you ain't missing much."
Felicia crossed her arms and stayed silent.
DB took a step back to let me move. "Beat it," he said.
When I didn't move, he said, "You got a problem?"
I didn't budge. I could've left, but I didn't want to. I've always been a physical coward, and I've always been afraid of cops. But I did not move. It was as if I'd been asked a much larger question. For a spilt second it seemed as if I might be able to walk away from whatever was going on between them, but just as quickly I knew that I couldn't just walk off. Something bad was happening here, and even if I ran away as fast as I could I knew I wouldn't be able to go far enough or fast enough to shake the feeling that I'd made a horrible choice.
I said, "I guess I can't just leave her like this."
DB laughed and turned to Felicia. "What, this dude is like your bodyguard?"
She said, "He's my friend, DB. My new friend. That good enough for you?"
DB turned back to me and his demeanor thawed a bit. "Look, pal. I ain't her boyfriend. Okay? We're just business acquaintances who need to talk, that's all. Why don't you take a hike? Go get yourself another skank."
I gestured at his badge number and said, "If I leave, I just might have to report this incident, Officer 16781."
DB smiled at me contemptuously. "Well, that was a stupid thing to say."
* * *
He loaded me into the backseat of his patrol car, without handcuffs or any sense that I was being arrested but also without any sense that I had a say in the matter, and we followed Felicia up the long driveway to her house. We didn't speak to each other, and I watched the back of Felicia's head.
The long narrow drive hedged on one side by long row of Chokeberry bushes and on the other side by a tall wooden fence. At the top of the drive, Felicia parked at the end of the wide veranda of a white, two-story house. DB pulled up behind her.
"Get out," he said.
We walked through the front yard toward the side of the house where Felicia had parked. Sunlight shimmered on the windows, and raindrops beaded the awnings like sweat. The shades were all lifted in the front rooms, and through floor-length windows I saw a dining room with polished hardwood floors, a long table with a full set of chairs, and an antique chandelier hanging from a steepled ceiling. Beyond the dining room, an open door led into a sitting room filled with bookshelves. At the other end of the dining room, through another open door, I saw the end of a kitchen island.
"Hey," DB snapped at me, "let's go."
He steered me around to the back of the house. A few paces ahead of us Felicia opened the screen door and stepped inside.
As we rounded a dying rose bush hugging the edge of the house, DB followed me so closely I could hear his breathing. He gestured to the narrow back steps leading into the kitchen. When I got to the door he reached in front of me and blocked my entry. Though he was shorter than I'd first noticed, he seemed composed purely of muscle and bone.
He pushed his face up to mine like fierce dog. "I don't know what the fuck you think you're doing, but you just dropped into a whole sewer full of shit."
I tilted away from him. "Okay," I said.
He opened th
e door and allowed me to go in first.
It was an old house. The screen door groaned, and the plate glass window in the heavy kitchen door rattled as DB closed it behind us. The kitchen had high ceilings, a green-tiled backsplash, and a long island. Over a sink filled with dirty dishes hung a suncatcher in the shape of a cross. DB nodded toward the book-lined den.
"What the hell?" Felicia exclaimed.
Standing in the den, his fists lifted to his hips, was another man. It took me a moment to accept what I was seeing: he was another version of DB. He wasn't wearing a cop's uniform, but he was clearly DB's twin brother, right down to his cleft chin and the beady meanness in his close-set eyes. The only difference seemed to be the cochlear implants over his ears.
The twin signed something to his brother.
"Found him with her," DB said.
Felicia turned to DB and demanded, "What the hell is Tom doing in my house?"
"We're just a little concerned about you is all," DB explained.
The twin resembled a bank teller who'd spent the night sleeping in a gutter. He wore a rumpled dress shirt with a loosened green tie and grimy slacks. He cocked his head at his brother and glanced down at Felicia and signed something. Without knowing sign language, I was still pretty sure he'd said, What the fuck? Why'd you bring him here?
"I saw them together," DB said. "He was with her in the car."
"Wait a second," Felicia said. "Were you following me? Did you tail me home from work?"
"It's an important day," he said by way of an explanation. "Plus, we don't really trust you."
"You two don't have to trust me," she said. "Stan trusts me. That's enough."
"Maybe Stan trusts you. But that don't matter to me and Tom if our asses are on the line."
Quiet Tom operated like his brother's shadow. Silent but wholly in synch, he seemed tuned to DB's every move. I got the distinct impression that if DB ordered Tom to kill me, he would do it without hesitating.
