First Avenue (28 page)
“Are you kidding me? The lieutenant? Well, if he wants to know what I’m doing, he can get off his fat ass and come out in the street and see.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I’m just passing this along.”
“You were there. You saw that kid. If I want to spend a little time on this instead of rousting the goddamn drunks, I don’t think anybody’s got a bitch. If
“Fine. Okay. Since when did you get so thin-skinned? I just want to let you know all your fine effort has attracted the brass’s attention.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Use good judgment, that’s all.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s it,” the sergeant said, frowning. He had not expected Sam’s aggressive response and was not happy with it. But that was too damn bad,
Statistics. That’s all they wanted. Number of calls, contacts, arrests. All of it amounting to nothing. You moved ahead by writing traffic tickets, generating revenue.
Alberta
. She wasn’t the mayor’s kid. Old
Who was he kidding? he wondered, knowing as he framed the question that he was the only one around. The speechmaker, the audience, the critic. All things to all of himself. The sergeant was right after all. When had he gotten so thin-skinned?
“Start the car,” he muttered aloud.
He started the car but didn’t move. He looked at the blank concrete wall and saw one of the ghosts
The morning had begun without him. Cherry Street, running east to the sun, was awash with light. While he waited for the red light on
Fourth Avenue
, he picked up his clipboard and began filling in the log sheet. He looked up in time to see the light change. A car ran through it from the south, and he saw clearly the driver’s dismayed face as it passed in front of him. Great place to run a light,
“Your lucky day,”
He need not have worried about twisting calls. It was Sunday morning. The office buildings were empty and few stores were open. Silve was closed, too, and the Donut Shop—balancing good and bad.
Sunday mornings at the end of summer were an easy time on
First Avenue
. Its residents came out slowly, blinking in the sunshine, stretching, looking to the sky as if after a storm. They could not quite believe the silence. They had it to themselves, finally—the way it was supposed to be.
Midway through his Sunday shift he drove up to
His father’s white hair reflected in the sunshine where he sat in his wheelchair beside the window. His head was bent as he earnestly picked imaginary objects from the air in front of him. It seemed he didn’t want an imaginary object after all and shook his fingers to free them from it.
“Hello, Dad,”
His father, once a tall man, taller than his son, answered, but it was not an answer to the son’s question.
His father’s feet worked vainly against the wheelchair brake. Perhaps not vainly, for inch by inch, he moved the chair away.
“It’s
Again his father spoke his own peculiar language and
His father had once been meticulous with grooming. He had fine hands, and he had cared for them diligently. It was an odd trait for a cabi
Now his father’s fingernails were too long, and there were black streaks beneath them. Unruly hairs poked out from his eyebrows and nostrils and earlobes. If his mother had been alive, she would have trimmed them, but his father had only a son to look after him. Indirectly, the disease that was taking his father had taken her, too. It had been more than her heart could stand.
His visits, now farther apart, had become mostly technical. He made sure that the bills were paid, that the insurance was in order, that the doctor had been there. He could not yet bring himself to trim his father’s fingernails as his mother had done.
He had worked every holiday since his mother’s death the year before—Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s—volunteering even if the holiday fell on his day off. He wondered if he was destined to be like his great-uncle Nels, the old bachelor who had sat discreetly at the edges of all family gatherings. He was a quiet, generous man accustomed to solitude, speaking only when addressed and then with a trace of surprise.
His father stirred and his wrist and forearm formed an arc as though casting a fishing line. Was he fishing now? He never liked to fish.
“I remember the time you took me fishing,”
His father would not be disturbed and continued to cast his line.
“I got the fishhook stuck in my cheek,”
He had been fooling around with his fishing pole contrary to his father’s instructions, and when the hook caught his cheek, he dropped the pole into the water and as he lunged to catch it came close to capsizing the boat and both of them with it. The hook came out as the pole went down, and he remembered seeing his father holding the sides of their little rented boat. His father’s big hands steadied the boat, and the boy assumed that the lecture would begin. Why couldn’t he use sensible caution, just sensible caution for once, instead of practically losing an eye, not to mention the fishing pole that wasn’t free either. Instead his father spoke words of concern that caught him off guard. His father tended the wound below
“That was a good day,” the son told his father, who had ceased casting his line. “We never caught a thing.”
The old man looked at him, and his eyes quieted a bit as they often did with
“I wrote something this morning,”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the many-times-folded information bulletin he had used as scratch paper.
“I call it ‘Sunday Morning.’ It goes like this.”
In the distance, a faint chant from the Viaduct
mumbles its way to us as we sit
silently in a market pew.
Old John is here, his face lifted in ecstasy,
spit flowing down his chin, onto his coat of all seasons.
I am beside him,
as far as the bench permits,
looking skyward as he looks with closed eyes,
waiting for sunrise.
It has been a time, he tells me if I listen
to wordless voices and recreate
the night with empty bottles still sacked at his feet.
Penance will soon begin. The red-eyed devils who just now peer
over the tops of buildings will join us on the bench.
I will leave then,
and old John will meet them alone,
wide-eyed with solitary horror
this Sunday morning.
With glove removed, I feel for pulse beneath his collar and
indifferently but not cruelly,
I hope, poke for morning life with my nightstick.
If any is there, I will not find it
and now sit in perplexed and concrete silence.
The street mass from the Viaduct
rises in volume,
and beckons us on the bench to join in, but we remain
waiting for sunrise.
Sam often wondered what the poems were for, but this time he knew. He hoped this poem would create a miracle. He hoped his father might look at him again, his only begotten son, and smile one time more.
The old man closed his eyes, and his head sank to his chest.
Sam sat in the patrol car parked on the north side of Pike Street with his window down. There were no cars between him and
Second Avenue
, and on all four corners the few early-morning pedestrians self-consciously stood and waited for the walk signals. He watched the buses cross on
Third Avenue
, a block to the east. From the way he parked, he looked as if he were watching for cars to run the red light. He would have left his car engine running if that were his plan.
A small man in white tennis shoes crossed the street in front of him. He walked more slowly than others heading for work and seemed particularly interested in the cop inside the car. When the man approached on the sidewalk,
“How you doing, Henry? Still have those shoes, I see.”
Behind