City Boy (37 page)

“Shut up, Rich. Did you call, huh? Let’s focus here.”

Brezak muttered that of course he had called. One side of his face
looked crumpled, as if he’d been sleeping on it. His hair had been newly electrified into a halo of fuzz.

Ivory said, “I’ll go watch for the ambulance,” and limped and hobbled to the front door. Jack and Brezak crouched uselessly over Mr. Dandy. There was quiet now, and a sense that something more ought to be happening. Mr. Dandy hiccuped, swallowed, and his tongue righted itself.

“So he’s not dead,” said Brezak. “That’s good.”

“You’re a sensitive guy. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“No, I meant, if he was dead, his last words would’ve been
pervert
and
queer
.”

A little while later the paramedic unit arrived with their sirens and crackling radios, latex gloves, and matter-of-fact urgencies. Jack and the others watched as Mr. Dandy was extracted from the banister, stabilized, righted, and packaged for transport. Jack was shocked by how dead the old man looked even though he might, technically, be alive. The paramedics had opened his shirt and hiked up one pants leg and displayed queasy amounts of Mr. Dandy. He hadn’t opened his eyes again, nor shown any signs of coming around. The paramedics were almost too efficient. Jack thought there ought to be more tragedy and mess involved, an old railroader or two to mourn, an old Irish wife to throw a shawl over her head and wail.

They were taking Mr. Dandy to the closest trauma center. Jack fetched his wallet and keys. Brezak and Ivory had disappeared upstairs, but once Jack reached the sidewalk, Ivory came out after him. “Where are you going?”

“The hospital.”

“I want to come too.”

He couldn’t think of any reason to tell her no, except that his shame made him uncomfortable around her. He waited for her to catch up. When they reached the car he opened the door for her and she bundled herself inside.

It was still raining, scattered drops that smeared the windshield when Jack ran the wipers. He had to switch over from air-conditioning
to defrost. The vent filled the car with stale metallic heat and he quickly turned it down. They didn’t speak until Jack had pulled out into traffic. Ivory said, “I didn’t think you were friends with him.”

“I’m not. I just think somebody ought to be there.”

She considered this. Without looking directly at her Jack was aware of her profile, the slight bulge of her forehead, unemphatic eyebrows, chapped and bitten lips. She said, “Do you think he’s going to die?”

“I don’t think he looked very good.” The car ahead of him braked and its taillights flared in the damp air. Red light refracted through the blurred windshield. The ambulance was long out of sight. Jack thought he heard its siren up ahead, but that could have been some other ambulance carrying some other used-up old man.

Ivory said, “He isn’t a nice person. Even if he’s dead.”

“Maybe he used to be nicer. Maybe he just lived too long unhappy.”

Ivory didn’t answer and they drove the rest of the way in silence.

At the ER desk Jack asked about Mr. Dandy. The clerk waved a clipboard at him and asked about insurance. Jack said he didn’t know, he wasn’t family. He didn’t think there was any family. “He was a veteran,” Jack added. As if that might help explain anything. The clerk told him to take a seat. She was the kind of clerk who would tell you to take a seat even if you presented yourself with a detached limb or flesh-eating bacteria.

Ivory was already sitting on one of the molded plastic chairs, looking through a magazine. The chairs were bolted together in a kind of pod, so that you couldn’t move them closer together or farther apart. Jack thought they communicated something about the state of modern American health care. He sat down next to Ivory, who must have seen it in his face that there was nothing to report. Jack craned to see the magazine. It was called
Family Practice,
and featured a cover story on pediatric eczema. He looked around him. Like most emergency rooms, there didn’t seem to be any real sense of emergency. A troop of children ran shrieking laps around the chairs. An elderly couple dozed next to a thin mother nursing a thin baby. A man dabbed a handkerchief to his ulcerated neck. Jack felt his throat begin to ache and his head thicken.
There was a sense of contagion in the place, of germs wafting through ventilation ducts, viruses mutating beneath the stink of pine cleaner. He thought briefly of Reg and his purified air.

Jack stood and walked to the corridor, which led back to the treatment rooms, trying to see what was happening. Nothing was visible except a row of gurneys, and a woman in peach-colored scrubs moving unhurriedly down the hall. Mr. Dandy was back there somewhere, being inflated with oxygen, injected, rewired. Jack crossed the room to the lobby, used his cell phone to dial Chloe’s and then the apartment. He left messages at both numbers explaining what had happened. She was supposed to call him after her appointment. He didn’t want to hear about the baby with any taint of Mr. Dandy to mar things. It wasn’t so much selfishness, although there was some of that. It would simply feel like bad luck.

He sat down again next to Ivory and set himself to wait. It was a long stretch of waiting. They seemed to have joined some doleful class of people whose job it was to be ignored by institutions. Ivory put down her magazine. “Did you tell your wife?”

“What?”

“Tell her about the old man. That’s who you called, right?”

Jack made some halfhearted noise. Ivory’s face kindled. “Oh wow. You thought I meant—”

“Yeah.”

“Relax.”

“Relaxing it up here, boss.”

“Sure you are. Hey, I know you worked things out with her. I know you’re back in the house. That’s great. True love winning out and all.”

He couldn’t tell if she was mocking him. “Thank you.”

“Because once in a while life ought to have a big fat happy ending. Somebody’s life. I’ve read books.”

“I’m sorry if you’re angry.”

“I’m not angry. I’m providing analysis. Color commentary.”

Although no one seemed to be paying attention to them, Jack lowered his head and bent toward her to try and keep things private. “I want you to be happy too. There’s no reason you can’t.”

She waved this away. “Girls like me are in some other book. That’s why we have to specialize in fucking. It’s like, the coin of the realm for us. Isn’t this an interesting conversation to be having in an emergency room?”

“It is.”

“Oh don’t look that way, what are you, scared? Of me? Well maybe you should be. Or somebody should. I’m a little crazy, don’t you think?”

She was beaming at him, nodding, as if impatient for him to get a really good joke. Jack said, “Sure. You’re crazy.”

“More than a little.”

“As a bedbug.”

“A giant bedbug. With superpowers.”

“Whatever makes you happy.”

But that fast, her mood changed. “Ecstatic,” she said flatly.

“A giant, mutant, radioactive bedbug,” Jack said, trying to play along, jolly her up again. But Ivory bent toward him, close enough to whisper. Her breath tickled his ear, hot, like the car heater.

“Remind me to show you something.”

Flick of warm wet tongue, and then she was back to her magazine.

“Anyone here for Dandy?”

Jack got to his feet. A short man in blue scrubs and tennis shoes beckoned. His ID badge said Dr. Gold. Dr. Gold had a cautious look. He began by saying, “I’m sorry.” Jack thought it was likely that Dr. Gold had experience with people who did not respond to bad news in a rational manner.

Jack said, “I was kind of expecting it.” He amended himself, tried to sound less goddamn casual. “He fell really hard.”

“It was a massive brain event. I expect that’s what made him fall.”

“Brain event?”

“Stroke. For all practical purposes, he was probably dead before he hit the ground.”

Jack said nothing. Dr. Gold went on to talk about clots, and the medications used to break up clots, and the medications for relieving intercranial swelling. About ventilation. All the thorough and heroic
measures that had been applied to Mr. Dandy, to no avail. The doctor was a youngish man, not much older than Jack himself, although his hair was thinning and his skin had a damp, crumbly texture from too many long hours spent in the hospital pesthouse. Dr. Gold stopped himself in midsymptom. “I’m sorry, I just assumed … Was he your fa-ther?”

“No. He lived next door.”

“Oh, is there someone we ought to call? Wife?”

“He was a lifelong bachelor.” Jack thought back to the first time they’d met Mr. Dandy, he and Chloe, that day in the lobby. A dozen feet from the bottom of the staircase where, for all practical purposes, the old man had washed up dead.

“Are there family members?”

Jack said he didn’t think so, at least, he didn’t know of anyone. Dr. Gold’s eyebrows drew themselves together, considering this. Jack understood that this was a new problem. He said, “What do you do if there’s nobody?”

“The coroner’s office takes over. There’s an investigation. To find any assets, insurance, prepaid burial, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, we keep him here.”

“Maybe I could take a look around. See if there’s anything, you know, papers …”

Dr. Gold nodded encouragingly. Jack was beginning to realize he might not yet be done with Mr. Dandy, that he was in danger of inheriting him as you might inherit a truckload of water-damaged furniture. He asked, “Did he ever wake up?”

Dr. Gold shook his head. “Lights out. Never knew what hit him.” Jack knew that this was meant to be reassuring. Pervert. Queer.

Jack thanked him. For your time, Doctor. For giving it the old college try. For providing Mr. Dandy shelf space. They shook hands. Dr. Gold gave Jack a card, a coroner’s office he could call in case he came up with anything. Jack thanked him again and made his way back to Ivory.

She was still poring over her ratty magazine, though by now it
hardly seemed worth pretending she was reading it. Without looking up she asked, “So is he dead, or what?”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

She put the magazine down, stood up, and limped her way to the exit. Jack followed. When they reached the car, she said, “He was Catholic, wasn’t he?”

“Well he was Irish. Sure. I guess.”

“Somebody should light a candle for him. Have a mass said. That’s what you do. I could go back to my folks’ old church.”

He didn’t know what to make of this. “If you want to.”

“Because it’s like you said, somebody should do something.” She had to wait for Jack to unlock the door, then for both of them to get in the car. She continued. “I know you think I’m some totally horrible person, but I’m not.”

“That’s not what I think.” He maneuvered the car out of the parking lot and into the rain-clogged traffic.

“Or that I’m just some stupid kid you don’t have to take seriously.”

“Why don’t you stop trying to tell me what I think.”

“Okay, then you tell me.”

“I think … I don’t know. I can’t decide if you hate me or just hate yourself.”

She let that one hang out there for a time. Then she said, “Well. I don’t hate you.”

They were silent until they reached the recognizable boundaries of the neighborhood, the Polish bakery, the storefront that rented Hindi videos, then the newer, yupped-up enterprises that sold trendier ethnic fare (tapas, Thai) to nonethnics. Ivory started up again in a fast, animated voice. “I’m thinking about leaving town pretty soon. Yeah. I have these friends. They’re going to Florida to start a club. Tampa, Florida. They said I can go with. I’m seriously, seriously considering it.”

“A club, what do you mean? Book club? Stamp collecting?”

“A
music
club. God you are so dense.”

“I knew what you meant. It was a joke. Lighten up.”

She gave him a severe look from behind the pale fringe of her hair.
She seemed to find him not funny. “You know even in winter, you can go to the beach there? It would be very cool to be getting a tan when everybody back home was freezing their asses off. All I have to do is pack a few things.”

“Sure. Whatever would make you happy.”

“Oh, so now we’re back to happy again.”

Once they reached the building, Jack went in to check the phone messages and try Chloe again. She hadn’t called and he still couldn’t reach her. He assumed that Ivory had gone back to Brezak’s. But when he came out into the lobby, she was sitting on the stairs, a fastidious distance from where Mr. Dandy had landed. “Locked out,” she said, before Jack could ask.

“You can go home.”

She shrugged. “Raining.” Her eyes followed him as he walked past. “Whatcha doing?”

“I have to …” He didn’t feel like explaining himself to her. He stood at Mr. Dandy’s door and tried the knob. It nudged open and he stepped inside. The air was close and brown. Brown light from the brown windows. Brown carpet, brown couch, brown ghost of Mr. Dandy.

“You ripping him off?”

Ivory had come up behind him. Jack registered the thought that she could move quietly enough when she wished to. He didn’t answer her but crossed the room to a hutch that gave some evidence of being used as a desk. There was a phone, and a laminated list of fire and emergency numbers provided by a drugstore. Crossword puzzle book, receipts, bills, pizza flyers, coupons, nothing you’d mistake for an asset. A box of Fannie Mae turtles, half full of their empty paper shells, last touched by a dead man’s hand.

Ivory walked a little way into the room. “This place is a total dump.”

Jack opened the hall closet. A collection of old-man coats, bulky plaids and wools. A pair of insulated coveralls, ancient galoshes, and winter hats. And propped up in the back, a blue steel, double-barrelled shotgun.

“Jesus Christ.”

Ivory came to stand next to him. “Is that thing real?”

With caution, Jack drew it out of the surrounding skirts of the coats. There was a red box of shells set next to it on the closet floor. Jack broke the barrel, peered through it. The shell chamber was empty but still he kept his hands a respectful distance from the trigger. “Yeah, it’s real.”

“Where does an old coot like him get a
shotgun
?”