Lieberman's Day (2 page)

Carol had laughed.

“What's so funny?”

She had taken to laughing, crying at odd times for no reason that made sense to David. And it had gotten worse as Carol grew more and more obviously pregnant. David's mother had assured him that this was not abnormal. His aunt Esther had assured him. Doctor Saper had assured him, but it made David feel no better.

The elevator eased to a halt and the doors opened.

“We had a great time,” David said, shaking Bernie's hand. “I won't forget all you've done for me and taught me.”

“And I know you'll make me proud of you,” Bernie said.

“Come on, guys,” Charlotte said. “The lady's tired.”

David joined his wife in the elevator, faced forward with a smile, and watched the doors close on Charlotte and Bernie, whose arm was around his wife's shoulder, hugging her close to him.

“What a man,” David said. “Everyone knows he's
shtupping
Betty the receptionist, who's young enough to be his granddaughter. And there he stands. Big-city Gothic.”

“Maybe he needs to be appreciated as a man,” Carol said.

“Carol. Wrong is wrong. Family is family.”

“Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant?” Carol said.

“You O.K., Carol?” David asked, taking his wife's arm as she tottered backward a step as the elevator dropped.

“I'll be fine,” she said as the elevator bounced to a stop and the doors opened to the lobby.

“We don't need stoicism here, honey,” David said, holding her. “The baby …”

“The baby will be fine, David,” she said. “The baby will be fine.”

Raymond had known from the start that George was stupid. He was beginning to think that George might actually be feeble-minded like Jack-Jack Shorely's sister back on the island. She babble-babbled like George, sounded like she was making sense from a distance, but if you listened long enough you could start getting feeble-minded like her.

“Quiet,” said Raymond.

“Got to keep everything working, mouth, feets, knees, neck or it gonna freeze,” whined George. “Cold gonna kill me dead. Cold is no good for a big man. You ever see any fat Eskeemos?”

“I never see any Eskimos,” said Raymond.

Inside the building he was watching, beyond the frosted windows, the doorman stood up and moved to the inside door. Two shapes inside, another couple.

“Eskimos look like Chinese,” said George, squinting. “Like this. Only not.”

The doorman opened the inner door and the couple stepped into the outer lobby, little more than a glassed-in square with a desk and phone for the doorman.

“Them,” said Raymond.

George stopped shuffling and stepped to Raymond's side.

The couple was in their thirties, maybe. The man was not big, but he was bigger than the old man they had let pass and a lot younger.

“Why?” asked George.

“Look like he has got money,” said Raymond, letting himself slide into the Islands patois he had struggled to lose. He wondered why he was doing it. To make George more comfortable? To make himself more comfortable with what he was about to do. “I know these things. Look at those coats. That's a fur she's wearing. You want to stand here all night? Maybe no one else come out for hours.”

“No,” said George, rocking as the doorman opened the outer door for the couple.

Raymond and George could hear the couple thanking the doorman as a gasp of driving air hit the man and woman and pushed at the open door. The doorman put his shoulder to the door from the inside and closed it as the couple moved past the empty stone fountain in the circular driveway.

Boom-boom-boom. The gray-green dumpster clanged next to George's ears. Behind him waves hurled grating ice chunks and rage.

“Let's go,” said Raymond.

Happy to be moving, thinking of someplace, anyplace warm, George almost knocked Raymond over as they stepped out of the rattling protective shadows of the dumpster.

Raymond looked back at the condo lobby. The doorman was sitting at his desk, a magazine open in front of him, one leg folded over the other.

“Slow,” whispered Raymond. “Slow.”

“I remember,” George grunted.

The couple talked, but the two men could not hear what they were saying. The man said something and held the woman's hand. The woman sounded nervous. The man wore a jacket much like Raymond's, but this Eddie Bauer was new, clean, not a hand-me-down from who-knows-where. The jacket was nice, but it was the man's hat, one of those Russian fur hats, that fascinated George. The woman's head was uncovered except for fuzzy white earmuffs. In the blue-white streetlights and the cold gray of the building windows, her hair looked like silver frost.

George looked down the street in both directions as Raymond held him back with a hand on his sleeve, giving the couple a twenty-yard lead. Raymond checked the doorman again. He was still looking at his magazine.

No one on the street now but the four of them and a slow sea of cars, see-no-evil cars moving past through the river of slush.

“They gettin' away,” George whispered, trying to move ahead.

Raymond held the bigger man's sleeve.

“They goin' for their car, looks like,” he said.

The couple, still talking, moved ahead slowly, the man's arm supporting the woman. The distance between the couple and the two men narrowed.

“Now, now, now,” Raymond suddenly urged, and both men hurried forward.

George almost fell. He reached for the chill branches of a bare bush next to the building and kept himself erect.

Now the couple was next to the black metal gate of a fence around an old gray house, a holdout family home in the forest of high-rises. A brass plaque against the house identified it as the offices of J.W.R. Ranpur, M.D., Cardiologist. There were no lights on in the home and office of Dr. Ranpur. Raymond had checked this only half an hour earlier. He had also checked to be sure the metal gate was open.

“Stop,” Raymond said, stepping in front of the couple.

As he had been told to do, George moved close behind the man and woman, hovering over them.

The couple stopped.

Now Raymond, by the hazy light of the nearby streetlamp, could see the faces of his victims. The woman was pale, pretty, with a rough, frightened face whose cheeks were chilled pink. The man, who seemed curious but not frightened, was short, a bit on the pudgy side. He wore glasses that were partly frosted along the upper rim.

“In here,” said Raymond, opening the gate, watching to be sure no cars stopped.

It would, he hoped, look like nothing more than four people chatting in front of a house.

“What's going on?” asked the man.

Raymond removed his hand from his pocket and showed the pudgy man his gun, a gun he had bought only the day before for fifteen dollars and which he was not at all sure would fire.

“Step in there, man,” he said, nodding through the gate. “You lose a few dollars and you and the lady go on.”

“I don't …” the man started.

“Come on, come on here,” George said, pulling out his own gun and shoving it into the back of the man with the Russian fur hat. George wanted that hat. But more than the hat he wanted to be out of there.

“David,” the woman said, “do it. Give them your wallet.”

“Not out here,” Raymond hissed, looking back over his shoulder. “Get through the gate, man.”

With George following close behind, the woman pulled at the arm of the man with the hat, and they edged through the gate.

Frozen grass crunched under George's feet as he pushed the man and woman toward the shadows of Dr. Ranpur's house.

“I'll give it to you,” said David. “Let's not panic here.”

“No one is panicking, man,” said Raymond, looking toward the house and then the street. “Just don't give trouble.”

“Come on, come on,” George said, reaching up to remove his hat and shoving it in his pocket before yanking the man's hat from his head and putting it on his own. The hat was just a little too small and gave him an instant headache. But it was warm.

Without a hat the white man in front of him looked younger than George had thought him, even though the man's hair was getting thin. He reminded George of some actor.

“Take what you want,” David said, holding one hand protectively in front of Carol and reaching into the pocket under his jacket with the other. “Just don't touch her. She's going to …”

“Touch …? What you think we are?” asked George indignantly. “You think we gonna rape your woman out here like on an iceberg? What you think we are?”

Raymond took the wallet from David and shoved it into the frayed pocket of his blue ski jacket.

“Shut up,” he said.

Carol let out a small sound like an island dove and her bareheaded husband took her in his arms.

“David,” she said softly. “Please …”

“Don't you be saying that in front of these people,” said George, facing Raymond. “Don't you be putting me down like you some kind of boss man.”

“Fur,” said Raymond, pointing his gun at the woman.

“She'll …” David began.

“Then you just give her your Eddie Bauer,” said Raymond. “Better yet: I give her my Eddie Bauer and take yours.”

Carol was whimpering now as she pulled away from David and began to take off the fur.

“No,” said David.

George stepped forward, pushed David back, and pulled the fur coat to his chest the instant Carol had taken it off. Soft, cool fur brushed gently against his cheek.

“We got no time for this,” said Raymond.

David took a step toward his wife, lost his footing, and crashed into the front steps of the office-home of J.W.R. Ranpur. His knee hit wood with a chill thump and crack.

Carol screamed. Without her fur, she looked pitiful, not cold, in a blue-and-white dress that hung on her like one of George's mother's shifts.

“Shit,” said George. “She gonna have a baby.”

And then, as David pulled himself up from the steps, George heard the snap of a hammer against rock. Carol screamed again as David staggered back and sat spread-legged on the stairs.

Cars rushed by. Lake waves battered the shore behind the house. George thought he heard the clang-boom of the rusting green Dumpster and then the sound of hammer and rock again. The man called David was sprawled on the steps now, his Eddie Bauer stained with black splotches, and George understood. Raymond had shot the man.

George felt a rush of warm imagined air from the beach of his childhood and the pain of the hat's tightness on his head. His eyes met Raymond's, and George was afraid of what he saw.

“Let's go,” said Raymond. “George, you hear, let's go.”

George didn't move. He turned to the woman, whose eyes were wide with terror. Her mouth was open and she couldn't catch her breath. The way she looked at him. Oh, the way she looked. She would haunt him. He knew that. She would haunt them both.

Raymond pulled at the big man's sleeve.

“Let's go,” he commanded.

George looked at the man sprawled on the steps and then at the crying woman in the blue dress, her head moving from side to side with fear in the winter chill. He could not live with that look.

George was not fully aware of what he did next. His body, his arms, his hands did what they were commanded, but the orders came from something slithering beneath his skin in the blood red caverns of his skull.

George fired at the accusing woman. His gun was bigger than Raymond's, much bigger. He fired only once, but it sat the woman down, open-mouthed, surprised. She looked up, not at George who had shot her, but at Raymond, who turned suddenly on George, his gun leveled at the bigger man's chest.

“You crazy bastard,” Raymond screamed. “The baby.” The two men stood over the bodies in the chill of Dr. Ranpur's ice-covered yard, their weapons raised at each other's chest for heartbeats upon heartbeats. And then Raymond pocketed his gun, looked at the woman, and took a step toward her, gun leveled in her direction. He let out a small, tortured cry as her bloody hands reached toward him and she spoke. Raymond turned and leaped over the black iron gate, almost losing his glasses. George didn't want to look back, but he couldn't stop himself. A light went on in the house, a light that seemed to drench the front yard. And George saw clearly what they had done. The man called David, looking bewildered, wisps of yellow-white hair quivering in the night wind, sat there, dead. The woman just sat looking up at him in her blue-and-white dress.

Perhaps she screamed or spoke, but George could hear nothing but the senseless steel-drum sound of the winter night. Hugging the fur to his face, he pushed open the gate and ran after Raymond, who was a gray running ghost far ahead of him in the mist.

A
BRAHAM LIEBERMAN PLACED HIS
sandwich—radish, sliced chicken, and cholesterol-free, fat-free Kraft salad dressing on white bread—carefully on the folded paper towel on his knees. This had been his favorite comfort sandwich as a kid on the West Side. Now, at best, it captured only a hint of the satisfaction at that first bite.

The only light in the living room came from the hall just outside Abe and Bess's bedroom. Bess, when she caught him, insisted that Abe turn on a light in the living room when he was watching television.

It did Lieberman little good to point out to his wife that one of the few working parts of his frail sixty-two-year-old anatomy that seemed to be working at a reasonable level, well above rapid deterioration, were his eyes. Granted, Abe wore glasses, but only to read. Besides, there was something comforting about watching television in the dark with a white-bread sandwich on his lap, just as he had done back when he came home from night school and watched
Rocky King, Detective,
with Roscoe Karnes, who used to make up his own lines, or Jim Moran's Courtesy Motors variety show in his parents' living room in the apartment on Troy Street.