South Street

by David Bradley

“I ain’t gonna be worryin’. I ain’t got time to sweat over every damn fool buys a beer in here,” Leo said. He sniffed, shifted his weight. Brown turned back to the door. “You need any help …” Leo’s voice trailed off. Brown smiled over his shoulder, nodded, waved, and stepped out into the night.

  The rain ran down over the windshield, distorting his view of South Street’s lights, which glimmered dimly against the dark and troubled sky. Inside the car the lights glowed undistorted: the red lights for OIL and TEMP, the single green bulb on the tape player that blinked conspiratorially each time the channel switched. Loud music rocked through the padded interior, was soaked up by the deep pile carpet, the heavy leather seats. The Isley Brothers. Leroy tapped time on the leather-sheathed steering wheel with the silencer on the end of his Colt .45.

  The rain banged and rattled on the roof, making him feel cold. He considered starting the engine to warm the car but discarded the notion—the sight of a big pink Caddy standing across the street with the engine running might excite the interest of someone in Lightnin’ Ed’s. It might tip Brown off. Leroy pushed the button to recline the seat, turned up the music, and resigned himself to the hardships of a stakeout. Absorbed in the music, he almost missed the opening of the door across the street. Almost, but not quite. He reacted swiftly, stabbing at the button that brought the seat to its fully erect position and at the same time punching the button that opened the window on the passenger’s side. The unmistakable form of Big Betsy the whore squeezed through the door of Lightnin’ Ed’s and out onto the sidewalk. Leroy relaxed. Big Betsy extracted a wad of newspaper from beneath the folds of her raincoat, opened it out, and held it over her head. She peered across the street. “Y’all quit that hosin’ over there,” Big Betsy bellowed. “Haw, haw, haw.” Leroy shoved the button, and the seat lowered him out of sight. “I can’t see you, but I know what you’re doin’,” yelled Big Betsy. “You drinkin’ an’ listenin’ to that there music an’ hosin’, that’s what.” The seat reached its lowest position. Leroy tried to push himself further. “You best close that window, or your goddamn prick’ll freeze solid, an’ her cunt’s gonna be drippin’ icicles.” Leroy pushed a button and closed the window, cutting off Big Betsy’s cackle. She turned and waddled away down the street, splashing through the puddles like a raincoated duck. Leroy switched tracks on the tape player and tried to forget it. He watched the few cars that moved past him, noting the license numbers of the ones that splashed water on his car. He wrote the numbers down in a small red book. There were a lot of names in Leroy’s little red book, and he had crossed off quite a few of them. The next one on the list, in bold letters, was BROWN. Leroy said the name softly, caressing the single complex syllable with his thick lips. He regretted not being a better shot, not being able to shoot Brown in the kneecap or in the testicles to make him suffer a while before he bled to death. Still, Leroy’s plan, though lacking in artistic perfection, had a certain amount of elegance. It was, Leroy thought, worthy of him. He would follow Brown to his apartment, shoot him from the car window, leave him lying in the hallway, where Vanessa would have to step over him. Leroy considered the minor details of his plan, regretted the restrictions of time and space. But it would be enough—shooting the heavy gun in complete silence, then rolling away into the darkness, not speeding, moving slowly and steadily, the window powering quietly closed, the tape deck playing, while Brown lay twitching in a whirlpool of red. Leroy smiled.

  The rain had subsided to mist and drizzle, and looking out at it, Leroy shivered. It was better cold, for if by some mistake Brown had time to cry out, he would shout into sound-deadening mist, to doors barred against the wetness, windows locked against the chill. The street would be empty; Brown would die alone. Across the street a rectangle of dim light showed and Leroy brought the seat up, switched off the tape player. A man’s figure emerged from Lightnin’ Ed’s. Leroy lowered the window for a better view, waited tensely. The figure staggered heavily against a wall, and Leroy cursed. He did not want Brown to be so drunk he would not know what was happening, just mildly high so that it might take him a minute to realize he was dying. Just high enough that, for a second, he might get off on the sight of his own blood. Leroy sighed, but then he saw that the drunken man across the street was not Brown, but Rayburn Wallace. Leroy grinned, changed the tape to The Temptations doing “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” while he watched Rayburn stagger down South Street, bouncing off the walls like a piece of driftwood in a flooded river.

  The chill was getting to him. He reached down beneath the seat and pulled out a bottle, took a swig. He hoped Brown would not die before he had had a taste of the cold. He replaced the bottle just as the door of Lightnin’ Ed’s opened for a third time.

  The night was quiet, cold, lonely, wet. Brown stepped out onto the street, shocked and shivering from the sudden chill. Strange weather, Brown thought, Philadelphia weather—heat for Christmas, snow in July. He peered guiltily down the shining asphalt corridor, but there was no sign of Rayburn and his load of troubles. There was no sign of anyone. There was only the mist-shrouded shape of a long car, dark and dead, parked across the street, the hum and blink of changing traffic lights, and Brown. He shivered, buttoned his collar to the top, and started home, moving quickly, in short tight steps, peering into the shadows, listening to the dripping of water, the congested gurgle of clogged sewers. Behind him a powerful engine ground and caught, settling into a restrained hum. Brown walked on, crossing streets quickly, noticing the spaces between the streets not as distance but as time, time left in the swelling drizzle, time before he could sink into bed. He paused at the last corner while the light cycled, then a car rolled past him, stopped across the street from his door. Brown, head down, half-asleep, paid no attention. Yawning, he moved along the sidewalk, stepped down onto the cobblestones of the alley beside the deserted store. He stumbled on the slick surface, cursed, and stopped. From the dark depths of the alley came a low moan.

  Brown came wide awake. He stopped, shivering. Leo’s warning echoed in his mind. He had a sudden vision of Rayburn’s razor slicing through the darkness, too quick to be seen. Brown turned away from the alley and stepped toward his own door. The moaning sounded again. Brown stopped, hesitated, cursed, and plunged into the darkness. Ten or fifteen feet into the alley he stumbled over a garbage can and sprawled on the cold cobblestones, fell against something warm, stinking, wet. Brown recoiled, gagging. The something moaned. Brown held his breath, brought his face close.

  “Jake?”

  Jake gurgled as if his throat had been cut, writhed, coughed, spewed phlegmy blood. Brown stared down in shocked disbelief at the sudden darkness against his white shirt. Jake gurgled again. Brown stepped back. “Don’t worry, Jake, I’ma get help. You stay right there.” Brown backed a few more paces, fighting for his footing. Then he whirled and charged out of the alley, slipping and sliding on the cobblestones. As he emerged he spotted the car parked across the street, silver exhaust streaming from the tail pipe. “Hey!” Brown shouted, charging across the street straight toward the car’s open window. “Help!” With a heavy clunk of engaging gears the car shot away from the curb, fishtailing on the wet pavement. Brown stood in the middle of South Street staring after it. “Paranoid bastard,” Brown muttered. He looked around. The street was empty. Brown went back into the alley. He bent over Jake, wrapped his arms around Jake’s body, lifted him, carried him out to the street. He looked around again, for a phone, a cop, a passing car. There were no phones. There were no cops. There were no cars. Brown felt his mind waver like the ghostly mist that surrounded him. In his arms the wino moaned. Brown turned east and started walking. For two blocks he hurried, but then his feet slipped into a slower rhythm in time with the dripping drizzle, the changing traffic lights, the rasp of Jake’s breathing.

  Brown walked on toward the eastern river, his wet shoes squeaking a weird lament, holding Jake’s body tight against him, smelling Jake’s odor, breathing his breath. Cross streets passed in the shi
ning mist and Brown’s teeth chattered with the cold, the effort, the stench of wine and soured blood. Brown, unthinking, ignored the phone booths that stood a block north on each cross street like shining sentinels. He reached Eighth Street, turned north, realizing, when he got to Pine Street, that he had gone too far. He struggled west again, past the manicured lawns sequestered behind iron fences, past the historical marker that said that the Pennsylvania Hospital had been founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin. He rounded a corner, saw a red sign that said EMERGENCY. He entered an alleyway, found a covered walk. Automatic doors opened inward, slamming back against his arm as he maneuvered Jake inside. Brown cursed. A nurse in a starched white uniform looked up, picked up a phone, and spoke into it before coming out from behind her desk. She pulled a long wheeled cart, draped in white, away from the wall. “Put him here.” Brown lowered Jake onto the cart. An annunciator whispered softly. White-coated attendants materialized and whisked Jake away into the hospital’s gleaming bowels. Brown stood, wet, bloody, confused. “Are you the next of kin?” asked the nurse.

  “What?” Brown said.

  “Are you the next of kin?” The nurse stood in front of him holding a clipboard.

  Brown looked at her. “Yes,” he said.

  “What’s your relationship to the patient?”

  “We drink beer together.”

  The nurse sighed. “Where—”

  “In an alley. He spit blood.” Brown looked down at his clothes. “He spit blood.”

  “His name?”

  “Jake,” Brown said.

  “Jake what?”

  “That’s all I know,” Brown said.

  The nurse sighed. “Does he have an address?”

  “Is there a doctor in there?”

  “The doctors are doing everything they can. Now, do you know your friend’s address?”

  “South Street,” Brown said.

  “Where on South Street?”

  Brown shook his head as if trying to clear it, looked at the nurse as if he had never seen one before. “What?”

  “Where does your friend live on South Street?” the nurse said with professional patience.

  “He lives in an alley. Beside a garbage can.” Brown’s eyes were hard and angry. The nurse looked at him uneasily. Brown smiled sadly. “The alley is between Fifteenth and Sixteenth.”

  “Is it closer to Fifteenth or Sixteenth?”

  “It’s closer to Fifteenth,” Brown said.

  “Then,” the nurse said precisely, “he lives at Fifteenth and South.” She wrote it down.

  “Fine,” Brown said. “That’s fine.”

  “You can have a seat in the waiting room,” the nurse said.

  “Is there someplace I can clean up?” Brown said, looking down at his chest.

  “Down the hall,” the nurse said briskly. “Would you like a towel?”

  “Yes,” Brown said, “I would like a towel.” The nurse smiled nervously, took a towel from a shelf, and handed it to him. “Thank you,” Brown said. He went down the hall.

  The men’s room was a hard, intense, shiny white, smelling of disinfectant. Brown stared at himself in the mirror above the spotless bowl. Drops of moisture in his hair sparkled like diamonds. Ruby flecks dusted his forehead. His shirtfront was a soggy crimson mass. Brown walked calmly into a toilet stall, knelt before the bowl like a penitent at an altar, and vomited his stomach dry. He stood up and flushed the toilet, went back and bent over the sink, placed his mouth around the spigot, and gulped cold water until he thought he would burst. Then he went back to kneel at the toilet. This time the vomit was almost as clear as water. Brown stood up, opened his pants, and urinated. He waited until the waves raised by the stream of urine had banged themselves to death against the white porcelain before he pulled the flush lever. He stepped back to the sink, stripped off his shirt, washed himself, dried, draped the towel around his shoulders, and went out.

  The nurse was waiting for him, clipboard loaded, ball-point leveled. “I forgot to get your name.”

  “Brown. Adlai Stevenson Brown.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “B, R, O, W, N,” Brown said.

  “I know how to spell Brown,” the nurse snapped.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Brown told her. “Some folks spells it with an E on the end. Just like some spells fuck P, H, U, Q, U, E, an’ just like—”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar,” the nurse said.

  “Just like some people,” Brown continued grimly, “insist on dotting the i and crossing the t in shit.”

  “I meant your first name,” the nurse said coldly. Brown ignored her and stared toward the gleaming doors through which Jake had been wheeled. “We’ll let you know when there’s any news,” the nurse said.

  “J, O, H, N,” Brown said.

  “What?”

  “That’s how you spell my first name.”

  “But you said your name was Adlai.”

  “I just changed it. I don’t know how to spell Adlai. It was my old man’s idea, not mine. He felt guilty because he voted for Eisenhower.” The nurse, clutching her ball-point at port arms, began to edge away from him. “Eisenhower was a prick,” Brown said. The nurse turned ashy. Brown turned and stepped toward the doors marked NO ADMITTANCE.

  “You can’t go in there,” the nurse said.

  Brown smiled at her. “Then you don’t have anything to worry about.” He stepped through the white doors into a long corridor, walked down it, peering through the doorways over the tops of flimsy gates that looked like they came from the saloons in TV westerns. Inside the third door he saw Jake stretched out on a table, connected by tubes to bottles of blood, surrounded by white-clad doctors and nurses.

  “Perforated?” one of the doctors said.

  “Perforated, hell. This one’s guts must look like Swiss cheese.”

  A nurse giggled.

  From a speaker on the wall a woman’s voice spoke, calm and soothing. “Doctor Warden, Doctor Warden, you are wanted in emergency. Doctor Warden to emergency, stat.”

  “Oh, God,” said one of the nurses, “some nut with a carving knife probably wants to hijack us to Cuba.”

  “How’s his pressure?”

  “Falling slowly.”

  “Order more blood.”

  “Ulcus veneria, do you think, doctor?”

  “In this old geezer? He hasn’t got it up in years. Ulcus rodens, I’d say. Where’s he from?”

  “Fifteenth and South,” said a nurse, reading from a chart.

  “Fifteenth and South. Definitely a rodent ulcer.”

  A nurse giggled.

  “Any word from the O.R.?”

  “They said it would be a while.”

  “We haven’t got a while. How’s the pressure?”

  “Falling.”

  “Blood?”

  “On the way.”

  “Must be bleeding like a fountain in there.”

  Two men in uniform appeared behind Brown, grasped him by his upper arms. “You’ll have to leave this area, sir,” one of them said.

  “How’s his pressure?”

  “Ski slope.”

  “That’s my friend,” Brown said.

  “Yes, sir, we know. But you’ll have to leave.”

  “He’s dying,” Brown said. “And they’re making jokes.”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  “All right,” Brown said dully. They led him back to the reception area and sat him down in a chair. The nurse regarded him reproachfully.

  “I told you you couldn’t go back there.” She looked at the guards. “I think he’ll be all right.”

  “Are you sure? He looks pretty weird.”

  The nurse looked at Brown sitting braced against the shiny white wall, a white towel draped around his shoulders, a bloody shirt clutched in his hand. “Weird,” the nurse agreed, “but harmless.” The guards went away. Brown started to shiver. “Would you like a blanket?” the nurse asked. Brown said nothing. The nurse took a t
hin blanket, worn gray and smooth from many washings, and placed it around his shoulders.

  Brown looked up at the touch of her hands. “Thank you,” Brown said. The nurse nodded. “They were making jokes,” Brown said. “Sick jokes in lousy Latin.”

  “That’s why you’re not supposed to go back there,” the nurse said. She finished wrapping him up. “You speak Latin?”

  “No,” Brown said, “but I once played Marc Antony in Julius Caesar.” The nurse looked at him sharply. “Friends,” Brown said, “Romans, and countrymen. Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. So let it be with Caesar. I forgot some.” The nurse swallowed heavily. “Don’t worry,” Brown assured her. “It’s just that I’ve been under a strain. I got blood all over a perfectly good shirt.”

  The nurse looked down at him. “You carried him from Fifteenth Street?”

  Brown nodded.

  “You should have taken him to Graduate Hospital,” she said gently. “It’s closer.”

  “Didn’t you know?” Brown said. “South Street’s one way downtown.” The nurse gave him a wary look and left him propped against the wall, shivering.

  Vanessa woke from a light doze when Brown opened the door. She stepped into the kitchen, looked at him. “Oh my God!”

  “Don’t you like pizza?” Brown said. He closed the door, stripped off his bloody shirt, and threw it in the corner.

  “Leroy’s?” Vanessa said calmly.

  “What?”

  “Whose blood is it?”

  “Jake’s,” Brown said. “I found him in the alley. He bled to death.”

  “Somebody knife him?”

  “No,” Brown said bitterly. “His guts turned to—Swiss cheese.” He walked over and set a bottle of wine on the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “A bottle of wine. His last bottle. He told the doctor to tell me where to find it. In the alley.”

  Vanessa regarded the bottle with distaste. “It’s all yucky.” Brown took the bottle over to the sink and began washing it. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’ma drink it,” Brown snapped. “What the fuck you think I’ma be doin’ with it?”