Her voice was stretched and thin. “Annie Jackson.”
Hughes leaned over heavily. “Okay, Annie, where do you live?”
Patrick smoothed a stiff lock of gray hair from her lined forehead and bent his face close to hers. “Hey, Miz Jackson, don’t cry.” The woman tried to say something. Patrick turned toward the black man nearest him. “You catch that? What’d she say?”
The black man, young, about Patrick’s age, with a scarred fighter’s face, leaned over the woman and his tough face went soft. He whispered to Patrick, “She all upset ’cause she messed herself up. She ashamed somebody might know about that.”
Patrick realized now, suddenly, why Hughes hadn’t brought the blanket from the car. He had assumed it was an oversight “Hey, Jimmy, get the blanket.”
Hughes said, “Look, the ambulance will be here in a minute.”
Patrick turned abruptly to the black man who held the old woman’s shoes. Tersely, he said, “There’s a plaid blanket in the back of the squad car. Get it for me, okay?”
Carefully, without moving her, they covered her and Patrick whispered into her ear, “Don’t you worry about a thing now, you hear?”
She nodded and he could see she was in grave pain. He heard Hughes’s voice, taut and demanding.
“Anyone seen what happened? Anyone seen the old lady get hit?”
“I seen it,” the man beside Patrick said. “Some punk kids out joy riding in a blue Ford, but you never catch up with them. They probably dumped it by now. Man, this poor old woman, she went ten feet in the air, didn’t you, Mama?” There was a sudden edge of panic in the man’s voice. “Hey, officer, she done gone out like a light. Hey, she okay or what?”
Patrick reached for her wrist, then his hand went inside the coat to her bony chest. Nothing. He leaned his hand on her chest, applied pressure, released. Again. Again. Again. There was a flutter, a quiver, a rasping sound from between her parted lips, but it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Patrick pulled off his jacket, which was hampering him, bent to the woman and began breathing into her mouth, pressing her diaphragm: forced breath in, forced it out Again, the faint soft sigh, the attempt to breathe, to live. And all the time, inside his head, Patrick could hear his own voice saying, “Gonna he just fine there, Mama. You gonna be just fine.”
By the time the ambulance arrived she was breathing, painfully, raspingly, but breathing. The attendants lifted her carefully and Patrick watched as they put an oxygen mask over her face. He turned at a touch on his shoulder.
It was the fighter: face ugly, thick-lipped, face of a loser, brown eyes reddened and watery. “Here’s your jacket, officer.”
“Oh, gee, thanks.” Patrick put it on, brushed vaguely, buttoned it. The man picked up Patrick’s hat from the curb and handed it to him. Patrick wasn’t even aware that he’d dropped it. “Thanks.” He put it lightly on the crown of his head, then pulled it forward into place.
“Hey, officer,” the man said thickly, then couldn’t find words. He reached out and took Patrick’s hand in a tight grasp. “You a real man, baby,” he said and then he walked away.
Hughes revved the motor the minute Patrick got into the car beside him. For once, he was quiet. Patrick caught the tense stiff set of Hughes’s jaw, the throbbing along the temple, but he didn’t say anything.
At the precinct, they gave the information to the desk and details to the detectives, who weren’t very impressed but had to look into the matter whether it impressed them or not.
Patrick went into the men’s room to wash up and was surprised at the blood on his face. He washed it away, rinsed his mouth, remembered the blood taste of the woman, the death he tasted inside of her, sucked out of her, the life he breathed into her.
She’d gone into shock; if he hadn’t breathed for her, she’d have died. Right then, there, in the gutter, she’d have died. Jesus, he had actually tasted death and he’d blown and breathed it away. He felt an elation and joy he couldn’t quite contain.
“Hey, listen you,” Hughes said. His eyes surveyed the area, made certain they were alone.
Patrick blotted his face with rough brown paper towels, rubbed his hands and tossed the wad of paper into the wastebasket. Hughes’s face was quivering and his lips were dry.
“What’s your problem?” Patrick asked quietly.
“Listen, don’t you never pull that kind of shit on me again, you got that?”
The taste of death was still in his mouth and he regarded Hughes coldly and dispassionately, watched him work up to voice-stretching tension, watched it all come bursting out of the man, growing fuller and larger because he refused to act.
Hughes’s face was a deep, dangerous red. The heavy folds of his cheeks shook and his eyes went from Patrick’s face to the mirror directly behind him, back and forth.
“Don’t you never send no fucking nigger into my squad car. Don’t you never go right past me, right over my head, and send one a’ them apes into my car or so help me Christ, I’ll break your ass!”
In his passion, he miscalculated or misread Patrick’s reaction, and carried along by the momentum of his rage, which instead of subsiding swelled, he shoved his index finger into Patrick’s chest and when that brought forth no reaction, verbal, physical, nothing, Hughes, for emphasis, just to be sure he was properly understood, shoved Patrick against the washbowl.
“Any decent man’d be in here vomiting his guts out right now, he put his mouth on that old nigger woman’s,” Hughes told him.
The taste of death ran down his throat, deep into his gut, into the center of himself, where all the dead and dying kept their counsel, from where they all accused him.
This once, he had defeated it. There had been nothing but a feeling of triumph and this man Hughes had been repulsed by his act, without having even the slightest understanding, conception of what that act involved: the defeating of death.
There were no words, none that could define his act or explain. There was only a powerful impulse, which he followed. With his two hands locked together he swung and smashed Hughes in the face with a force that stunned the larger man, sent him reeling backwards into feet-sliding, skull-crashing helplessness.
Patrick didn’t move in on him, just stood, hands at his sides, watched dispassionately, calmly, remotely as the sergeant burst in, looked from one to the other.
“Hey, what the fuck?”
Two uniformed men came, pulled Hughes to his feet; a couple of detectives came, offered Patrick a cigarette, told him to calm down, take it easy, which was funny because he was the calmest one of everybody. They all seemed shaken as hell, as though something really important, really serious had occurred when it was all really so completely insignificant when measured against the fact that he had tasted death and spit it out.
THIRTY-FOUR
BRIAN WISHED MARY ELLEN would skip the once-a-month, if-we-can-all-get-together Sunday-dinner ritual. She acted as though she didn’t catch any tension between Maureen and her husband, Tim Logan. Christ, even their two kids were practically rigid, could hardly lift their faces from their plates.
“Well, why don’t you two kids go outside and play on the swings I put up for you?” Brian asked his grandchildren. They turned worried faces toward their mother and she nodded and rose quickly to help clear the table.
He and Tim and Patrick went across the hall into the study for the customary after-Sunday-dinner drink.
“This is a fine old room,” Tim Logan mused, exactly as he did every time he entered the study. He was a pompous, fine-cut little bastard and Brian had the feeling he was calculating the worth of every stone in the house, counting and evaluating. He never did understand why his daughter had married him. A computer salesman, for Christ’s sake.
“Well, Pat, how’s life in the Police Department?” Logan asked his brother-in-law. “Hey, they let you get away with that stuff, kid? Hair’s a little on the long side, isn’t it?” He gave a short, unpleasant laugh. They wouldn’t let you
get away with that in the company.”
Though Brian agreed about Patrick’s hair, there was something so irritating, snide, brittle, condescending about Logan that to his own surprise, Brian said, “I think he looks pretty good. You must be getting old, Tim. You sound like a real old company man.”
They all turned toward the door, toward the loud shriek and Mary Ellen’s worried voice and Maureen’s commotion.
Tim stubbed out his cigarette and said tersely, “Oh, shit, here we go again,” and he rushed to see what Patricia, his youngest, had gotten into this time.
“He’s a real beaut, isn’t he?” Brian said to his son. It was at least one thing he knew they agreed on. He didn’t feel there was much safe ground lately. “Well, we haven’t seen you for quite a while, Pat. How’s it going?”
“Okay. You know.”
The steel-gray eyes veiled over, looked right through him, as though he were a shadow. The heavy blond hair suddenly irritated Brian. Maybe it was the way the kid casually brushed it off his forehead.
“What are you doing, letting your hair grow so you’ll fit in with the hippies down at the Ninth?”
His son’s hand touched the hair along his collar. He shrugged, let his hand fall to the arm of the chair. Of course, his father had been informed of his transfer. They just never mentioned it to each other.
“A lot of the younger guys are wearing their hair longer, Dad. Couple of ’em have real handlebars, too. It’s funny, some of them look like pictures of the old-timers. You know, right out of the gay nineties.”
“Yeah, but these are the swinging seventies, right?” Brian waited for his son to argue, debate, dispute. The damn kid just shrugged, moved his broad thin shoulders easily, pushed at the hair again, dragged on his cigarette. Okay. He’d take his cue from his son. “Oh, well, what the hell, hair is hair. Fads come and go. You look like you’ve lost a little weight, Patrick.”
“I’m a lousy cook, but really, I’m fine.”
“You still going to school?” It was a stupid question; he knew Patrick was enrolled in the John Marshall College of Criminal Justice and that he was carrying a heavy load of courses toward his degree.
“Well, yeah, sure. New semester starts in a couple of weeks.”
With an inexplicably urgent need to impress his son, Brian said, “You know, I’m gonna give a couple of lectures at the college in the spring semester. I’m preparing a few talks on how to deal with the news media. If we like the way it goes, I might schedule a regular course as part of the curriculum at the Police Academy for the next class.”
“Well, that’s fine, Dad.”
They ran out of small talk, empty words, statements, vague questions. Brian put his glass down and leaned forward and held his son’s eye. “Pat, how’s it going? Really?”
“Okay.”
The cool remote gray eyes focused on him with a familiar year-spanning challenge; the pale face sharpened his memory of a child who had confronted him, feared him but confronted him. It would always be between them, preventing them from talking the way other men could talk. For them, it had to be question and answer: father and son. He didn’t want it to be that way, didn’t think his son wanted it to be that way, yet he felt helpless to do anything to change it. In a sudden burst of anger, explosive, too long held in, he abandoned resolve that he would be careful.
“What do you mean ‘okay’? What the hell happened at the Twenty-fifth?”
“You were told about it, weren’t you? Why ask me?”
“I am asking you.”
Absolute circle. Complete. Cut the shit. Father and son.
“Okay,” Patrick said. “Some guy pushed me too hard, so I decked him.” He said it in a tough, casual, offhand way. “That’s it. That’s all.”
Brian jammed his hands in his pockets, moved his fingers among keys and coins to keep from smacking his son, this steely-eyed kid, this baby-faced, cold-voiced, closed-up stranger. This was who the kid had always been; he’d lived here with him, seen him every day. But he’d just seen his surface, had never been able to get more than a quick fleeting glimpse of what was inside. He wanted to ask Patrick the circumstances, wanted a chance to understand. But the mask was rigid and impenetrable.
“You don’t want to screw up, Pat,” Brian said softly, surprised by his own sound. It was almost a plea.
“No. I don’t want to screw up, Dad.”
Impulsively, Brian asked, “What do you want, Pat?”
The kid blinked, looked away, bit his lip. His face changed. Unguarded for just a moment, he had that pale weary boy’s look of realization that no matter how hard he tried, how much he struggled against it, the two long hot streams of tears would slide down his face and betray him. But there were no boyhood tears; there was a man’s quick adjusting of his features. He exhaled through his teeth in a thin whistling sound, stood up, shrugged.
“Maybe just to be left alone.”
“Okay,” Brian said.
“Hey look, Dad, I hate to eat and run, but I’ve got a date.”
“Yeah, okay. Well, look, make sure you tell your mother good-by. And...don’t be such a stranger.”
“Yeah, well, with the job and school and all...”
“Yeah, right, sure.”
A brief, mutual but unconnecting shoulder slap, hands quickly withdrawn before they might demand something from each other. He walked into the hallway with his son.
“Pat, listen...”
The familiar face set into a resigned neutral pleasantness, a remote polite smile, the dark-blond brows rose patiently, waiting. “Look, Pat, if there’s anything I can do, I mean, at any time...”
“Right, Dad, thanks.”
He tried to draw something from the fact that the kid hadn’t come to him. Had handled it himself, even if that meant messing it up, screwing it, blowing it. He’d done it by himself, on his own.
But Christ, Brian couldn’t understand why his son was digging his heels in at all the wrong places.
The two kids sat at the kitchen table working carefully with crayons in their coloring books. Mary Ellen and Maureen were doing the dishes, and when he came into the room, mother and daughter exchanged worried glances. He could tell that his daughter had been crying.
“Any coffee left?”
Mary Ellen prepared the coffee for him. She cleared the children from the table. “Come on Patty and Timmy, let’s you and Grandma go inside and I’ll read you stories from that new storybook I got you.”
“Gonna have some coffee with me?” he asked his daughter. Her hands trembled as she folded the dish towel neatly, matching corner to corner. It was funny how he could see himself in her face; she had his features, smaller, finer, modified. She reminded him of a photograph of himself when he was a child. “Okay. Wanna talk?”
She suddenly pressed the damp towel against her face tightly, held it for a moment and when her face emerged it was red and distorted.
She sat across from him and her small hands twisted the towel as though she didn’t know she was doing it.
“Daddy, I want to leave him. I can’t live with him anymore.”
He knew they’d been fighting; he’d heard the car drive off. The little bastard would probably drive around for a while to cool off.
“Come on, honey, everybody has a blowup now and then. It’ll pass.”
He wasn’t prepared for her passion. Her small hand clenched into a fist and she pounded the table. “No, Daddy, it’s not just that, not just a blowup. It’s...it’s become a whole way of life. It’s become all there is and it just isn’t enough. There just isn’t anything, not anything anymore.”
“There are two kids, Maureen,” he pointed out quietly.
“Oh, Daddy, it’s all turned into a great big blank zero, everything, my whole life. It’s as though I’m dead. I’m nobody. I’m not a person anymore; I don’t even know who I am or who I was supposed to be.”
There was a note of rising hysteria, a glimpse of the stranger who was his daughter,
who had been hiding all this time behind a well-known, well-loved, familiar, safe and reliable girl. If his son had shown him too little, his daughter was offering too much.
“You don’t know who you are? You’re Maureen O’Malley Logan, that’s who the hell you are.” He pointed at her, then jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “You’re the mother of those two kids in there and the wife of the man who went storming out of here a while ago. You’ve got a beautiful home in Westchester and your husband has a damn good income and you’ve all got your health and you don’t know what the hell trouble is, Maureen. I mean, you’d really have to go out looking for it because you don’t really know.”
“Can’t you understand?” she asked vehemently. “Can’t you see? I’m just, just...I cook and clean and I wipe up and I chauffeur those kids back and forth, back and forth. And I keep my figure”—she lightly touched her tiny neat waist—“and I entertain beautifully. I say all the right things to his friends and he’s very proud of me. I do him justice and it’s all like being a shadow, like not being a real person. Like being without any substance, it’s...it’s all him and Daddy,” she bit her lip, shook her head, whispered to the table, “there’s really nothing to him. Just talk and brag and he doesn’t come near me. I mean, I just can’t take it anymore.” She rubbed her fists into her eyes, then looked at her father. “I’m still young. God, I’m only twenty-eight. It doesn’t all have to be over for me, does it?”
“What the hell did you expect it to be?” Brian said bitterly, then aware of what he’d said from the shocked, injured look on his daughter’s face, he reached for her hands and softened, as he always did where Maureen was concerned. “Oh, look, honey, we all have ups and downs, good days, bad days. Come on, you’re a big girl now. Ride it out. It’ll be okay.” Then firmly, “Maureen, you’ve got two kids. You don’t break up a home because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. You have to think of them before yourself.”
In a cold and unexpected voice, she said, “Yes, I guess that’s the way you always figured it, Dad.” She withdrew her hands, clenched the dish towel.
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