Spawn of Hell (2 page)

The walls, too, were yellow. Painted only a year or so ago. They would have captured the sunlight from the big long windows over the radiator had any managed to cut through the billowing clouds outside. There were no paintings or posters of pictures on the walls. Nothing.

Next to the bed was a night table within which was the usual assortment of hospital giveaways. A small container of mouthwash, a small tube of toothpaste, a tiny little toothbrush, some deodorant and extra soap. Things like that. David stuffed it all in his jacket pocket; he could use it.

There were some old papers, magazines and dogeared paperbacks lying on top of the table. He looked through them but saw nothing he wanted to keep, nothing he’d need to read again. He picked up a large white cup full of water and drained it. It was warm and tasteless, but he was thirsty.

He stepped into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. His blue eyes were still the same. He still had that waif-like look, that quiet despondency in his eyes, intensified by his loss of weight and the other debilitating effects of a hospital stay; the after-effects of the accident. His face was somewhat pale and gaunt. He didn’t look healthy, but they said he was. He needed to get out in the sun.

His thick black hair needed a good combing. If he was the type he would have planned on getting it attractively styled, but he couldn’t afford it even if he wanted to. Besides, keeping it short the way he usually did (although it needed trimming now) left it looking nice enough for him. Cheap, too.

His deep-set eyes, strong nose and chin, not-quite-full lips made a nice-looking face, if not a handsome one. Thirty-three. Thirty-three years old. God—he couldn’t believe it. Just yesterday he was fresh out of college, looking for work, planning a career. He had worked out his whole life ahead of time, each tomorrow building into an even better one, a fabulous future full of enough money, some fame, lots of friends.

Instead he was broke, struggling along, virtually friendless, his career going nowhere. The accident had been the topper. What a way to begin the Eighties. Everything had been bruised and battered, except, luckily, his face, which wouldn’t have mattered that much as he wasn’t a beauty to begin with—no modeling or movie career for him. Yet he was still relieved. There was already enough stress in his life.

Perhaps this depressing stay in the hospital was exactly what he’d needed. Lots of rest. Fairly good food, three times a day. (Did people still eat three meals a day?) A healthy doctor-approved diet instead of one forced on him by poverty. Time off from his worries and woes. Except that worrying about his legs kept him from relaxing very much, aside from when they gave him medication, in which case sleep would come no matter what. He had substituted the tension of surviving day to day with the strain of wondering if he would walk like everyone else did, or come out of the accident with a permanent disorder.

Well, now he knew. He would limp the rest of his days. Noticeably. His right leg just wouldn’t do what it should. Oh, it got by. He didn’t need crutches; nothing like that. An operation—a costly one—might improve it a bit, but not much, and it wasn’t all that bad to begin with. He had practiced walking up and down the hospital halls, and discovered that if he put his mind to it and walked fast enough, people might not even realize that he was mildly crippled. Dancing? Out of the question. Running? Not for long. Swimming? No problem. Standing? Not for lengthy periods if it could be avoided. He had a right to those subway seats marked:
PLEASE SAVE FOR THE HANDICAPPED.

He kept telling himself that he was lucky. It hadn’t been worse. It could have been. He could have been dead, like . . . like . . . no, he couldn’t say the name, couldn’t think of—of her—just now. Too early for that. Much too early.

He put his hair in place with a little institutional comb, pocketed it and left the bathroom. He sat back down on the bed.

He should consider himself lucky.

But one he left the hospital, it would be back to the same desperate life of trying to get ahead while getting nowhere. Spaghetti six days a week, chicken on Sundays. One meal a day. Lots of old pictures on TV instead of going to the movies. No luxuries—what most people considered necessities. Struggling, struggling, struggling. No sex, no romance. Back to that? He’d rather stay in the hospital. Put it off awhile. Once he was out he’d have to think about the bill. Not that it mattered. He had lots of bills, none of them paid. It was a good thing debtors weren’t jailed these days. He would have declared bankruptcy if he could have afforded it.

The nurse came in.

“How are you today, Mr. Hammond? Glad to be getting out?” A burly elderly wheeled a chair into the room. David smiled but did not reply.

“Is this necessary. I can walk.”

“Rules are rules,” she said. Small face, stringy hair. About forty-five. He had liked her. She was motherly.

They helped him into the wheelchair and rolled him out of the room and onto the elevator. In a few minutes, he would be free.

And trapped again.

Home looked the same as when he had left it. He hadn’t been here since before the accident, before he took that fateful ride with . . . it all came back to him in a flood as soon as he opened the door to his apartment and saw the pad lying on the floor next to the couch which served as his bed.
Not now! Not yet!

He had been sketching a drawing of her when the call came. He’d been down on his knees working on the floor as he preferred, busy shaping her mouth, her eyes, her lovely cheeks, trying to capture her just so. He didn’t want to look at that sketch. Not now. He bent down, picked it up, flipped it over and threw it onto the kitchen table. The “kitchen” was really just a corner with a refrigerator, small stove and sink.

For ten years he had lived in this studio in a brown-stone near Riverside Drive. During that time he had worked at dozens of odd jobs, trying to feed himself and pay the rent, which was low once and higher now, while building a career as a commercial artist and cartoonist. He had once come close to getting a deal with a syndicate for a series in a daily paper, many papers around the country. But it fell through. That was another thing he didn’t want to think about. It had been tough going ever since.

He went over to his file cabinet, actually a box on top of a chair at the table. Full of thousands of papers full of sketches, rejected drawings, ideas, concepts, doodles. He had sold a few things over the years, but not enough to support himself. His last odd job as a clerk in a greeting-card firm (he’d tried countless times to show someone his drawings, to no avail) had ended with him being laid off and going on unemployment. He’d made up his mind that he would “make it” during those few months when he got those small, but functional checks from the city. But by the time his unemployment was up, he was still nowhere. He’d done a lot of work without reward.

He’d lived on his savings, watching them dwindle dangerously. Still working, working, working, pursuing the odd job now and then without conviction. Then came the accident.

It changed everything. It changed nothing.

Now he was back to square one. Minus one friend.
Friend?
She’s been much more than a friend. And now she was dead. He began to wonder if he had really been the lucky one.

He could still hear her voice. Light. Musical. Perfect diction. Her lips crafting words instead of speaking them. “Let’s go out to the country this afternoon, okay?”

“I can’t. I’m busy,” he had said.

“I know I promised never to disturb you when you were working. But it’s such a beautiful day. Are you sure you want to be cooped up like that? It’s so hot and stuffy in that apartment.”

Oh, how she could work on him. So hard to resist. He was naturally lazy. “It’s not that bad. I’ve got the window open. There’s a breeze from the river.”

“Watch out some burglar doesn’t come up the fire escape and crawl into your window.” A persistent fear.

“What would he get?” A dollar in change?

“Look, I’ll leave you alone. I don’t want to be selfish. But if you change your mind I’ll be home until three.”

“What’s happening at three?”

“If you don’t want to go for a drive,
I’m
going to the movies.”

“What’s playing?”

He didn’t remember what her answer had been. Had she answered? Maybe she had not had a specific picture in mind. Then he had said:

“Give me half an hour to finish.”

“I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

He
had
finished in half an hour. Then, while waiting for her to buzz him over the intercom in the downstairs hallway, he had idly doodled, then worked seriously on a sketch of her.
That
sketch of her, on the table. The last thing he had ever done. Before . . .

But why think of it? Time to wipe away the cobwebs.

Time to get what was left of his life back in order.

He wondered: Did anyone know he was alive? A few people—
her
friends—had wanted to see him in the hospital, but he had instructed the nurse to tell the front desk that he wanted no visitors. In time they gave up trying. Of course, his father was sick himself and couldn’t make it, and David had told him not to worry. His father was lots worse off than he was, recovering from a stroke; the man would probably never be the same. David would have to call him later, tell him he was out of the hospital.

His legs started throbbing as he went around the small studio apartment looking things over. They had said that that would happen occasionally; he would get used to it. But it made it hard to concentrate.

The bed was a mess, just as he’d left it. One of the cupboard doors above the sink was wide open, revealing a few supplies of canned goods and detergent. The tattered blue rug that covered only half the floor looked worse than ever. The plaster on the walls was peeling.

It was worse in the bathroom, which was so small he could barely turn around without bumping into something. Mildew had conquered and crowned itself king, and some of the tiles in the shower had fallen out of the wall and into the tub. It was impossible to see out of the grimy yellow window set high in the wall. He splashed some cold water on his face. He looked different in this mirror, because of its oddly curved and cracked glass which distorted his image, and the low light in the room, which created attractive shadows on his features. He didn’t look so pale.

The phone rang. He went to the night table next to the sofa-bed and picked up the receiver in the middle of the third ring. He recognized the craggy voice on the other end of the line immediately. It was his father. He could picture him sitting up in bed, one of those cigars of his in his mouth—of course they wouldn’t let him smoke in the hospital—jowly and red-faced, with small black eyes peering out intensely from a field of flesh. How old now —sixty? Sixty-one? Forcibly retired from his job with a pharmaceutical company by illness.

“I called the hospital,” his father said. “They told me you had been released.”

“Ah, so that’s how you knew.” David sat down on the bed, wondering what they’d say to each other. Five minutes at least.

“How are you feeling? I’m glad you’re out.”

“Yeah—me, too. I’m okay. My leg hurts, but that’s life.”

“Is it very bad?”

“No. I won’t be able to jitterbug, but I was never much for that.” He let out a feeble laugh. His father did not respond. He sounded worried. Very worried.

“You must need money.”

“No, no,” David said quickly. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t have much, but if you need—”

“No. No really. That’s okay. Now that I’m out of the hospital, I should be able to find work in a few days. And I’ve still got money in the bank.” He knew his father didn’t have much money. And his
own
hospital bills were tremendous.

“Well, if you’re sure. Look, did you ever think about coming up here to live? The house is empty now, you could stay there. You could look for work in Hillsboro. Did you ever think about that? “

“Dad, there are very few opportunities for artists in Hillsboro;
this
is the place—”

“Are you still on that ‘artist’ kick?” Kick. It would always be a “kick” to his father, even when David was fifty years old. A kick.

“I’m talking about real work,” the old man continued. “There are jobs up here. Hell, maybe you could even get work as an artist. There’s a lot less competition up in this neck of the woods for that sort of thing, y’know.”

“Yes, I’m sure there is.” Oh boy, how he didn’t want the conversation to go in this direction.

“It’s just a thought, y’know. If you have problems, you know you can come home.”

“I know that, Dad. Thanks. But I’d rather take my chances down here; at least for a while.” Now it was coming, David thought in an instant, now he’d say:
You’ve had ten years already.

But he didn’t. Instead he said. “So, how was it in the hospital? Did they feed you properly?”

They talked for several minutes on David’s stay in the sick ward, the food, the nurses, the care he’d received. And so on.
Her
name was never mentioned. David realized how much he needed someone to talk to, about her, about himself, about everything. But his father wasn’t the one. His father had his own worries, his own humiliations and defeats to nurse. Near the end of his life, he couldn’t worry that much about David’s, which was just beginning in comparison.

“Well, time for me to take my medicine.” His father ended every conversation by saying “time to take my medicine,” regardless of the hour.

“Thanks for calling, Dad.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Yeah. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

“Okay then. I’ll speak to you again next week some time.” His father started to say something else, then paused, leaving the words hanging in the gap between them. David waited for him to continue. A few seconds later, the old man said, “I’m glad you’re going to stick it out down there. Y’know you’re always welcome, but— well, things are going kinda funny up here.”