Eureka Man: A Novel

by Patrick Middleton

  No sooner did Donnie stretch his arms out in front of him and bend over the table than Handsome Johnny appeared in front of him and threw an extension cord tied into a noose around Donnie's wrists. After securing the cord to a brace under the table, Handsome Johnny said, “Now pay me, Fats, so I can go get mines.”

  Fat Daddy was so tricked up over what Handsome Johnny had brought him that he told Johnny to take five instead of two packs of Kools out of his gym bag that was sitting on the countertop. Handsome Johnny stuffed the cigarettes into his pockets, then be-bopped out of the room just as Fat Daddy pulled Donnie's ass cheeks apart and told him to buck back.

  Later that day, a faulty elevator brake ended Handsome Johnny's career as well as his own love life. Whereas Fat Daddy could mop and shine floors like nobody else, Handsome Johnny had been a highly skilled orderly with certification to prove it. He could feed a needle into a collapsed vein quicker than any nurse and his fists were more adroit than any defibrillator. A fine black nurse named Veronica had depended on Johnny for everything: coffee, gossip, hot sandwiches, the daily newspaper, clean bedpans, Kools, monitoring her patients, good conversation and a heads-up whenever her supervisor was on the prowl. He had asked for only one thing in return: to be the only Handsome Johnny to ride in her elevator. And he was. For four years, twice a week at about the same time (seven-thirty pm), the hospital elevator shook and trembled to a stop between the first and second floors long enough for them to beat out a rhythm on all fours or standing up against the back wall. Rumors and gossip abounded. “He got it made, don't he?” “She carrying his baby?” “Takin' a big chance, ain't she?” Rumors and gossip, that's all it was until that evening when the elevator brake slipped and that steamy hot box descended all the way to the first floor lobby. Veronica heard the ring-a-ling of the elevator door as it slid open, and then she looked right up into the eyes of Captain Ned Twyman who was staring at her pretty black buttocks.

  “Help me, sir! Help me!” Veronica unlocked herself from Handsome Johnny, got to her feet and threw her arms around the captain's waist. “He forced me down there, sir!” She cried like a little girl.

  Captain Ned Twyman consoled her.

  Handsome Johnny cried too. Then he laughed. But the laughter was serious. Astonished, he got to his feet, pulled his pants up and sighed before his laughter broke out again. He had to lean against the elevator door to keep the laughter from pulling him down to the floor.

  “Look how he bruised my breast,” Veronica cried. She showed Captain Ned Twyman the martialed nipple of her left breast.

  Handsome Johnny should have hated the woman, rose to his feet and hated her, but what he felt was just as relevant. Guilty and beaten.

  And he was. The guards came and hauled him off to the redbrick Home Block. When they were finished beating him late into the night, there was nothing left unbruised or unbroken. They broke and scattered him into pieces and hurled him back together in a meaty ball of pain. His mind was gone, too, shattered into a thousand halls, each with its own echo.

  The next morning the prison ambulance carried Handsome Johnny away, and that evening his name appeared on the most-dangerous-patients ledger at the hospital for the criminally insane.

  Now the doctors had declared Johnny harmless and returned him to the same prison hospital where he had once been the best orderly they ever had. Fat Daddy wanted to see how far his friend was gone so he said, “You want to know what happened to her, Johnny? Want me to tell you what happened to Veronica?” Handsome Johnny frowned before his eyes got wide and he turned and stared at Fat Daddy, who took it as a gesture of sanity. “A bullet from a drive-by shooting sliced her jugular vein in half while she was standing on the corner of Hamilton and Homewood Avenue. Happened about a year after you was gone, man. It was in the paper. I cut the story out. I'll bring it to you if you want. Oh, here, look. There's somebody I want you to say hello to. Come here, Donnie. You remember this boy, don't you, Johnny?”

  Handsome Johnny swiveled his head in the direction of the rooftop door. “I-I-I…re-memm-berrr…yeah, I dooo.” Handsome Johnny's smile was twisted.

  “Hello, Mr. Johnny. Nice to see you.”

  “Yeahhh.” Handsome Johnny maintained his twisted smile while he looked up in the sky.

  “I've got to get you right, Johnny boy,” Fat Daddy said. “We got to get you off that shit, man. You going to let me help you, Brother?”

  This time Handsome Johnny laughed like a house on fire. “Yeahhh, yeahhh, yeahhh! Help meeee!”

  WHEN HE STARTED receiving three sticks of reefer every morning in exchange for his daily dose of Thorazine, Johnny's mind was grateful but his body was confused. The joints in his knees locked up and his tongue shot out of the side of his mouth uncontrollably. Fat Daddy stayed with him day and night for an entire year, altering his treatment as he saw fit. He fed him valium and Percodan he purchased on the black market and increased the reefer from three sticks a day to five. After a year, Johnny started picking up his feet again instead of shuffling them and his sentences contained both a subject and verb.

  Handsome Johnny was grateful for having been saved. Except occasionally. Occasionally, when he smelled perfume in the hallways or heard the pulleys turning on the nurse's elevator, or when he watched Fat Daddy bartering for rouge, lipstick and bobby pins-he wondered if it would have been just as well to have died in a psychotropic stupor than to feel so much loneliness.

  He had a solid year of school in Rhoda Cherry's special needs class, a bed in the big St. Regis, and a job as a groundskeeper before he got the courage to whistle again, and when he did, it all came back to him. Once again he started shining his shoes and polishing his nails with clear coat floor wax. He went to the barbershop and told Chinaman to give him the works-shampoo, shave and a high fade. Now he was ready. Now when the secretary with the bright colored skirts swished by him in the mornings as he squatted to pull weeds from the cracks in the sidewalks, he stopped and squeezed his groin.

  With his groove back, Handsome Johnny started a friendly garden rivalry with Early. The front and side yards of the hospital grounds, for which Johnny was the official keeper, were given over completely to growing flowers. Irises, poppies, daffodils and peonies took up his time.

  Though he wouldn't take credit for the buckwheat and clover patches that had been flourishing there for years, he laid claim to them just the same. Early gave him tips on mulching and showed him where to find soil so rich it made Early's biennial foxgloves grow six feet high. Early even brought Johnny jewel flowers and nasturtiums from his own garden and showed Johnny how to replant them.

  Handsome Johnny was completely content with his multicolored poppies and peonies until the morning he visited Early's flower beds that surrounded the prison chapel. He was amazed at the sight of the orange wing butterflies etched with black lace hovering in Early's pansies and violets. And why, he wondered, why didn't those blues and viceroys flutter and feed in his own buckwheat and clover patches? He was determined to import those giant butterflies and hummingbirds from Early's garden to his own, and he thought he knew just how to do it. Using his connections, Handsome Johnny ordered up an array of exotic plants.

  But the plan was a disaster from the start. Ignorant of certain horticulturally important specifications such as light and temperature, Handsome Johnny failed to cultivate a single new plant. He under watered the tropical slippers and over watered the begonias. When the panda ginger, string-of-hearts, and Jack-in-the-pulpit were almost parallel to the ground, Fat Daddy helped him haul in wheelbarrow loads of the rich, black soil Early swore by. In the end, though, only the peonies, pansies, poppies and two rows of pink and lavender irises survived. Fat Daddy told Johnny that the clay and rocks in the soil weren't his fault and that the plants still standing and prospering were proof of Johnny's green thumbs. Fat Daddy drew the line when Johnny asked him to help him replace the dead verbena with radishes and peppers. Fat Daddy had something else to do and told Johnny to let it go.

>   FAT DADDY WAS TOO BUSY doubling his dedication to being deviant. Every morning when the doors opened, he and Donnie Blossom found a new place to link themselves together. Standing in the one-man shower stall they moved to the frenzy of a brown-tail moth beating its wings against a 60-watt light bulb. The flickering light arched Fat Daddy's back; the water warmed Donnie's tongue.

  There was no way to mistake them if you knew where they were. In the outdoor toilet stall Donnie rode up and down on Fat Daddy's lap like he was riding a carousel. They did it easy and sometimes rough. And they never stopped. Not for droves of shit-dropping pigeons or heat hovering at 102 degrees. If you happened to spot them curled up in the ivy during one of those intermittent summer showers, you could see their bodies changing hues. And they kept right on doing it in the pure summer rain.

  Nothing could stop them. The born-agains wanted to. Over and over Tommy Lovechild told Deacon Bob how they looked and where to find them. They could have been, should have been, a sideshow, a tourist attraction, he said, except they were an embarrassment to decent Christians. A posse of born-agains plotted to lay hands on them and pray in tongues. They started to do it, but the movement died before they could go on their first stakeout. The born-agains said their objections were not aimed at sex at all, but at perversion. These two were as bad as Sodom.

  Swanee said, “It's not like they're doing it on the forty-yard line or on top of home plate. You have to go out of your way to find them.”

  The born-agains wanted to get rid of these homosexual deviants, but they wanted them to be there too. Even a bunch of repressed pedophiles, too scared to have wet dreams of their own, knew they needed these two. Even if they never went near them, they needed to know they were out there.

  The one brave soul who did approach them challenged Fat Daddy to give up his debauchery right in the middle of the act. When he should have been attending a Wednesday night prayer meeting, Barney Lee Russell III was pulling open Fat Daddy's cell door and shouting, “Heal, in the name of Jesus!” Jolted and buck naked, Fat Daddy rolled off Donny Blossom's back and ran into so much resistance that he had to kill. Those who were there said Barney Lee Russell III held his own until his body succumbed to twenty-seven puncture wounds made by a finely honed welding rod.

  The other born-agains were standing on the corner of the street with no name and Tom's Way when the gurney carrying their brethren's body rolled by. Night school had just let out and the students and their professors were being held up on the other side of the intersection. “Everybody step back!” shouted Tommy George, the schoolhouse guard.

  Dr. B.J. Dallet dropped her books and gasped at the sight of blood dripping from the gurney as it passed by. Twenty feet behind the trail of blood, two guards had Fat Daddy handcuffed and jacked up between them. Every few feet his bare feet touched the blacktop long enough for the guards to jack him back up while he pedaled his skinny ashen legs faster and faster.

  Passing by the professors and students, Fat Daddy turned his head in their direction and twisted his face into a monstrous grin. Everyone on the corner could hear Dr. B.J. Dallet exclaim, “What in the world happened? And why does that man look so evil?”

  Oliver's green eyes glinted with disgust. “Because he is,” he said. “As evil as they come.”

  AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME the coroner's van showed up the next morning for Barney Russell's dead body, every booty bandit in the little St. Regis appeared at Donnie Blossom's door to lay claim to him. Donnie looked repeatedly at the players and then told them he already had a new home. One squeezed Donnie's ass as he went by. Another didn't believe him and said he'd be back for him later that night. Donnie walked out of the little St. Regis and through the doors of the big St. Regis. The empty cell on Champ's right was clean and ready for him when he arrived.

  Three weeks later, he was shelling pistachios and popping them into his mouth when the Home Block janitor appeared at his door with a written message from Fat Daddy. The message read, “I'll see you in five years and nine months. You better stay true.”

  Donnie belched, softly, purringly, amusingly.

  chapter ten

  WAYNE ST. PIERRE TURNED the keys to the front gate of Riverview Penitentiary as if he owned the locks. A third generation turnkey, he loved his job and took great pride in seeing to it that no visitor, official or otherwise, got inside the front door of the prison after two o'clock in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, without his scrutiny.

  There were certain things about his job that irked Wayne St. Pierre more than others, like when black men showed up at his gate to visit other black men. In some form or fashion he was sure a conspiracy was in play. A drug transaction, a robbery or burglary plot, or just more conversation about how the white man ain't right, never was and never will be. For these visitors he gave extra scrutiny, turning up the sensitivity scale on the metal detector, double-checking identification cards.

  Black women-mothers, wives, sisters, daughters-stood a better chance of obtaining a morsel of humanity from Wayne St. Pierre, but that was only because he was a natural born skirt-chaser and didn't discriminate when it came to the color of the skin. He had been staring into the eyes of female visitors for so long that he could spot the broken ones without a second look. The desperation came off them like a morning fog, a desperation you could almost touch. And he often did. They didn't have to turn their heads to know his eyes were searching for cleavage or that his fingers were drumming the scars on the hundred-year old oak counter, all the while anticipating the opening of buttons, clasps and zippers. His aftershave told it all. And to those he thought were desperate enough, he would whisper, “Nice tits,” “Sweet ass,” “Fine girl,” “What do you say?” More understanding than a regular John. He got his sex from the crying ones. Who needed a white man wearing a correctional uniform with a black tie pointing down to something that couldn't please a house cat, but for his few dollars.

  Working six to two overtime one overcast Saturday in June, he honed in on a high-yellow woman in her thirties as she sat in the waiting room holding her three-year-old son and dabbing her sleeve at the tears rolling down her cheeks. She was slender, with prominent cheekbones, and she was put together. She had a bad bruise, as deep as a burgundy wine stain, on her left cheek. The bruise excited Wayne St. Pierre.

  “Excuse me, ma'am. Are you all right?”

  The child slid off her lap and Wayne St. Pierre's eyes followed the woman's smooth yellow thighs all the way up to the hem of her short black skirt. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked her, offering a paper towel.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I'll be all right.” She said it with confidence, but then she lowered her head and cried some more.

  Wayne St. Pierre said, “That's a terrible bruise, ma'am. It looks fresh.”

  She nodded and looked at her son. “Ray-Ray hit Mommy with a belt buckle, didn't he?” She glanced at Wayne St. Pierre, held back her tears. “He... He slapped Johnny Boy's son here with a belt buckle, too. Look.” She snatched her son between her legs and yanked his shirt up. The welts were fresh on his back.

  “Ah, jeez,” said Wayne St. Pierre.

  “We're going to show your daddy as soon as we get inside what that no-good Ray-Ray did to you, aren't we, Ty?” The boy shrugged his shoulders.

  “I'm sorry, ma'am. Ray-Ray's the man you live with?”

  She nodded and then said, “Not anymore. I'm leaving him. He took my money. I … I got but two dollars to buy Johnny Boy a soda and a bag of potato chips, and a bus pass to get across town with. That bad ass Ray-Ray took my money.”

  Wayne St. Pierre looked down at the sign-in sheet, then up at the clock, then at her. “Jasmine? Jasmine Teal? That's a pretty name.” He lowered his voice. “My name's Wayne, Jasmine, and this shift I'm working ends in an hour and a half. If you're out front on the Ohio River Boulevard when I'm leaving work, I'll be more than happy to drive you across town and buy you some groceries.”

  Jasmine Teal dabbed away
at her tears.

  The child watched him as he looked around the room and then took out his wallet and removed a bill.

  “Here's five dollars. Get you and your Johnny Boy and son here a sandwich when you get inside. Now mind you, I could lose my job for helping you so it's best you don't tell anyone.”

  She took the five dollar bill and looked him up and down. He was a tall, heavily built man in his forties, with thinning gray hair and a tanned face scored with lines. He would be considered attractive even with the wrinkles and extra pounds. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “That's very kind of you.” She smiled. Her teeth were white and straight.

  “Call me Wayne,” he said. “We know each other now.”

  The top button of her blouse had come undone and she leaned forward, crossing her legs slowly.

  Later that afternoon, while the child soared higher and higher in a park swing, Wayne St. Pierre locked Jasmine Teal's leg around his waist, leaned her against a great white oak tree and entered her. When he was finished, he let go of her breasts at the same time the child let go of the swing and shouted, “Whee! I'm flying!” The boy smacked into the tree twenty feet above the ground and dropped like a duck riddled with buckshot.

  Jasmine Teal dropped her leg to the ground, sighed and walked around the tree where her child lay unconscious and bleeding profusely from his nose and ears. There was a six-inch gash across his forehead. Wayne St. Pierre came to look, too, and frowned when Jasmine fainted in his arms. He threw her over his shoulder and carried her to the bed of his navy blue Chevy pickup. Then he retrieved the child and laid him at her side.

  By the time the truck screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room of the Allegheny General Hospital, Jasmine Teal had revived herself and was cradling her child in her blood soaked arms. She handed the boy to Wayne St. Pierre and jumped over the tailgate. He handed the child back to her. “I'll be waiting for you.”