Dead Heat with the Reaper

by William E. Wallace

  “Good for you!” Smith said. “What does she do for a living?”

  Baldocchi wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t know, to be honest,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “I mean, she told me she’s a nurse and works at a hospital like this one—St. Bart’s, over on 31st and Jay. But I don’t know her area of specialization.”

  The fact is that he hadn’t really had an opportunity to find out while they shared the macaroni and cheese a couple of nights earlier. She had asked most of the questions during the meal and he did the answering. She seemed genuinely interested in where he came from, where he had gone to school, how he’d come to be in the Army, serving in Afghanistan. When he finished answering one of her questions, she would ask him another. She seemed nervous about filling any lapses. And despite her obvious curiosity she hadn’t asked him how he’d been injured.

  “So is this a serious relationship?” Smith asked.

  Baldocchi shrugged. “It’s a friendship,” he said. “Nothing more. But at this point, even a routine friendship is serious to me. The only friends I had were in the Bradley when that IED went off and they’re all dead. I’ve been a little reluctant to get too close to anybody since.”

  “Understandable,” Smith said. “Still, having somebody else to think about has to be good for you. Maybe it will get you out of this funk you’ve been in. It might even give you a reason to stop drinking so much.”

  Baldocchi’s smile looked more like a rictus than a grin. Regardless, he turned it loose on Smith now.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time,” he told the doctor. “I’d like to see how our friendship shapes up before I start rearranging the rest of my life around it. I’ll stop drinking when I decide I don’t need something to fall back on. I haven’t reached that point yet. I’m nowhere near it.”

  ***

  Oscar One-Eye had only been old enough to legally enter Gloria’s Tavern for the last eight months, though he’d been hanging out at the place since his junior year at Benjamin Harrison high.

  Marcel’s entire posse frequented the joint, even though the owner, Gloria DeSanto, had started carding and 86ing them and their friends in an effort to discourage them from making it their headquarters. The Eastland Avenue Bloods a block away were the local top dogs and Gloria didn’t want her joint to get the rep of favoring one group of ‘bangers over the other. When a gang took over a bar, locals avoided it and their rivals tagged hell out of it in an effort to gain a foothold in the territory.

  Oscar was too broke for anything but bottled beer and he had to make that last, so he had learned how to spend more than an hour using his fingernails to scrape the label off a bottle of Pabst in one complete piece. His pastime gave him lots of time to watch the other customers. Occasionally one who had money in his pocket would get up and stagger home. When he did, Oscar would follow him and lighten his wallet when he reached a spot that was dark enough.

  Tonight looked like it was going to be a big night, Oscar thought.

  The ex-soldier Sonny Jackson had dubbed “Freddie Krueger,” was at the bar, knocking back Jim Beam Rye like he had stock in the company. The big man had already chased four shots with Miller draft, and he was scraping his change together and counting out a number of bills to leave on the counter as a tip.

  Oscar got up, leaving his empty on the corner table where he’d been sitting. He walked out of Gloria’s, crossed the street, stood in the dry cleaner’s doorway so he could clock the big man when he left.

  ***

  “You okay, mister?” Gloria said as Baldocchi stood up, stumbled a half step backward and drew himself up.

  The big man belched involuntarily. “’Scuse me,” he said. “I think I may have had a little too much to drunk.”

  He sounded pretty wasted. He had a scarf swathed around the lower half of his face and a cap pulled down so all she could see were his bloodshot eyes.

  He hiccuped and spread his tip money out on the bar top. “’Sfor you, ma’am,” he slurred. “Thanks very much.”

  “You want me to call you a cab, mister?”

  The big man waved a hand dismissively. “Not necessary,” he said, hiccuping. “I live up the street in the Claymore. I can walk it myself. The fresh air will clear my head.”

  He gave her a salute, swung in a half circle and lurched to the doorway, leaving DeSanto shaking her head behind the bar.

  ***

  Oscar was sure that the big man was shitfaced as soon as he walked through the bar’s door, stepped off the curb and nearly fell into the street. G.I. Joe was heading for the Claymore, but he was using a lot more steps than were necessary to cover the distance.

  The stoop boy wrapped his hand around the black jack stuffed in his coat pocket. The feel of the hard, smooth surface pumped up his nerve.

  There was an alley in the middle of the next block that would be as good a spot as any to make his move: somebody had chucked a rock through the lone street lamp and the only doorway in the alley was dark.

  ***

  Baldocchi stepped gingerly, his head fogged by whisky and beer. He had both hands jammed in the pockets of his olive drab trench coat and hummed a snatch of Round Midnight tunelessly as he plunged forward, repeating the passage over and over because it was the only part of the song he could remember.

  He was drunk, but not so drunk he hadn’t spotted the kid from the Claymore’s front stoop back in Gloria’s, eyeballing him from the corner table. Didn’t require much sobriety to know the kid was sizing him up for a mugging. When he spotted the darkened alley a half block ahead, instincts he had honed in combat during one and a half Army tours told him that was where the kid would try to take him. Adrenaline pumped into his bloodstream, clearing his head and setting his nerves on edge exactly as it had on patrol in Afghanistan.

  Baldocchi stopped for a moment to lean against a street lamp. He didn’t really need to make the stop, but he wanted the kid who was dogging his steps to think he did. He pushed away, taking two steps sideways toward the alley—he figured if he was off-balance and already seemed to be aimed in that direction, the kid would make his move.

  He was right.

  Oscar One-eye took three steps to close the distance and slammed into Baldocchi’s left shoulder from behind, shoving him into the darkness. The stoop boy pulled the blackjack out of his pocket and swung it back, setting himself up to fracture the big man’s skull.

  He never had the chance.

  Back in the bar, Baldocchi had slipped a molded glass ashtray into his jacket pocket as soon as Gloria wiped it and put it down in front of him. One-eye spotted the ashtray an instant before Baldocchi slammed its corner into his temple.

  The thick glass shattered from the impact with the ’banger’s skull, fracturing his cranium and rolling his eyes up like a pair of window shades. The force of the blow swept Oscar to the ground. He reached out with his right arm in an effort to break the fall. His humerus snapped as it contacted the ground, punching the ragged end of the bone through Oscar’s biceps.

  Baldocchi stood over the unconscious mugger, panting. The rush from the brief struggle had flushed the rest of the alcohol from his system. Something wet dripped onto his shoe and he raised his hand to see where it had come from. A torrent of blood ran down his arm, soaking his long-sleeved shirt and flooding the inside of his trench coat’s sleeve.

  He opened the burned stumps of his fingers. What was left of the ashtray clattered to the ground in a spray of red.

  ***

  After the cops took his statement, two paramedics drove Baldocchi to St. Bart’s for stitches to close the rips in his hand. A second ambulance had already rushed Oscar One-eye to the county trauma center; Baldocchi overheard one of the cops say the gangbanger needed emergency surgery because the broken bone in his arm had opened an artery and he was going into shock.

  ***

  There were 18 other people waiting to be seen when Baldocchi arrived at St. Bart’s emergency room. The paramedics swaddled his stumpy hand i
n gauze but the fabric was immediately dyed red by blood seeping from his wounds. He sat in silence, his head down, still dazed by the fight with Oscar One-eye.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He looked up. It was Susan Carnes, dressed in greens with a stethoscope hanging around her neck, its business end in her breast pocket.

  The light from the hospital’s fluorescent fixtures gave everything and everybody in the hallway a flat, washed-out look, but it also let Baldocchi get his first clear look at the nurse. Even in the shapeless medical uniform and a hairnet she was remarkably attractive.

  “I could ask you the same question,” he said. “I thought you worked days at the hospital.”

  To his surprise, she slid onto the seat next to him on the bench. There was plenty of room because the people on either side of Baldocchi had moved as far as they could from the scarred man, almost as if they feared his disfigurement had been caused by some highly infectious disease rather than a Taliban bomb.

  “Just getting off shift,” she said. “I swapped with another nurse who needed the evening off. My question still stands, though.”

  She gently lifted his arm with the bandaged hand. “Cut yourself shaving?”

  He shrugged and made the face that substituted for a smile. “I stopped at the bar, Gloria’s, for a few drinks,” he said. “One of those gang kids that hang out on the apartment steps was there. He must have thought I looked like I’d be easy to rob.”

  She frowned. “Did you file a complaint against him?” she asked.

  “I didn’t have to. They took him to the county hospital’s ICU unit.” He made the face again, though it clearly hurt. “His head got in the way of a big glass ashtray. They told me I fractured his skull.”

  “This was in Gloria’s?” she asked, shocked at his seemingly casual attitude about what to her sounded like a grotesque act of violence.

  He shook his head. “Outside. He tried to steer me into an alley but I was ready for him.” He raised his bandaged hand. “I was holding the ashtray like this. He tried to club me with a blackjack, so I hit him. The sharp pieces of glass cut my hand.”

  She looked at him the way she had in his apartment—directly, without blinking. “You knew he was going to try it.” She shook her head with disbelief. “You deliberately took him on. It almost sounds like you were trying to get attacked.”

  “Let’s say I had a hunch it would happen,” he said. “A shrink would probably say I have a death wish or something.”

  She sneered. “So would I.” She got up and gave his arm a tug. “Come with me. You’ll be sitting here in the passageway all night, otherwise.”

  She led him into a room next to the receptionist and told him to sit down on a gurney pushed up against the wall.

  “Take off your hat and shirt,” she said, crossing her arms under her small breasts.

  “Why?” he said. “I only hurt my hand.”

  “Just do it,” she said, sticking a thermometer under his tongue. Baldocchi did as she told him. He thought she sounded more like a doctor than most doctors do.

  She used a stethoscope to listen to his heart and lungs, took his pulse and checked his blood pressure with the Judas cuff before she turned her attention to his cuts. It took her a few minutes to unwind the gauze and examine his hand. Three wounds—two in the palm and a shorter one in the web between his thumb and fingers.

  “You were lucky,” she said as she used a forceps to pick little bits of glass out of the openings and swabbed the cuts with antiseptic. “This one on your thumb: if it had been a little deeper, it would have severed the tendon. You’d have needed surgery.”

  “People keep telling me how lucky I am,” he said. “Maybe I should buy some lottery tickets or enter that Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes. I’d clean up.”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “You’re one of the most sarcastic people I’ve ever met.”

  He grunted a sort of laugh. “I just happen to think life’s a bitch, that’s all.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative,” she said, using butterfly sutures to close his cuts.

  “Not with these,” he said, using one of his stumpy hands to wave at the extensive scar tissue that covered his upper body from the crown of his head to his belt line. “I feel like Frankenstein’s monster and that’s how most people treat me.”

  She applied another butterfly closure. “How did you get those?” she asked. “I wanted to ask you the other night when we had dinner together, but I couldn’t think of a good way to raise the subject.”

  “It was random, really,” he said, “just one of those damned things that happen to people during wars. My unit ran into a homemade bomb alongside the road in Afghanistan.”

  He glanced at her to see how she reacted and was surprised to see she was still looking directly at him. He’d expected she would turn her eyes away from his waxy skin; even his doctor did.

  “Were you on foot?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I was in an armored personnel carrier. Unfortunately, most of the armor was stuff we tacked on when we got to Kabul. It was typical Army junk—not really set up for the job it was supposed to do. They say we always prepare for the last war we fought. In this case, it’s true. Our vehicle was supposed to be combat ready, but it was really only fit for little runs around the base in the U.S.”

  “You were—inside it, then?”

  He nodded. “Sort of. I was the gunner, in a little turret on top. The explosion blew me out of the thing and broke both my shoulders.”

  “What happened to the rest of your unit?”

  “All killed,” he replied. “I was the only one who got out alive—and you can see what kind of shape I’m in. The other guys burned to a crisp.”

  She shook her head, imagining what it must have been like. “I still don’t understand how the scarring happened.”

  “The fuel in the Bradley’s tank exploded from the bomb. The blast shot me out the top, but sprayed me with burning diesel fuel. There were some English guys from another unit up ahead of us who missed the bomb and a police jeep going by the other direction when it went off—Afghans, not American G.I.s. The cops and the Brits used fire extinguishers to smother the fire.”

  “Wow!” she said. “It must have been awful!”

  “I still have dreams about it They’re the kind of dreams you’re happy to wake up from.”

  “Well,” she said, smiling at him. “If the police hadn’t put out the flames, you never would have met me. And if you’d been killed by that little bastard tonight, you wouldn’t be sitting here with me holding your hand like this.”

  He realized that she hadn’t released it when she finished putting the sutures on. Her hands were soft and warm and she smiled. Her gentle way of showing him that, though she was kidding, she wasn’t really kidding.

  “One of the ER surgeons would have kept you waiting another hour or so before sewing you up and sending you a bill,” she said. “But those wounds are really superficial and should heal fine by themselves so long as you keep them dry for the next 24 hours and put fresh Band-Aids on them when these come loose. Have you had a tetanus vaccination in the last couple of years?”

  He nodded. “Yeah—when I got myself fried in Afghanistan the explosion peppered me with shrapnel. They dug out 124 pieces of it at the field hospital and another 43 when I got back stateside.”

  His tone was defiant. He was trying to shock her, but it didn’t work.

  “You shouldn’t need any other treatment, then,” she said matter-of-factly, as if most of her patients had been blown up by bombs.

  She looked him straight in the eye the way she had when she brought the macaroni and cheese over. It was different from her reaction on the staircase the first time they’d met; then she’d seemed to find him frightening, disgusting. Now when she stared at him it was like she didn’t really notice his waxy, gooey-looking skin; it was more as if she couldn’t understand why he had such a bad attit
ude.

  “Look. I understand the bomb left you a physical mess, but it seems to me you spend an awful lot of your time dwelling on it.” She held his injured hand gently in both of hers. “You’ve got it tough, no doubt about it. I can see how much you’ve suffered every time I look at those scars.

  “But you’re not the only person in the world who’s had bad luck. You can still walk, you can hear and you can see. Why don’t you try using your eyes to look on the positive side for a change? The world is drowning in shit, but manure grows roses, too. If I were you, I’d ignore the crap and spend more time concentrating on the flowers.”

  Without thinking she leaned forward and planted a soft kiss in the middle of his forehead. If someone had asked her why, she wouldn’t have been able to explain.

  Baldocchi hadn’t been kissed by a woman since he left the U.S. for his second tour in Afghanistan. He touched the spot where her lips had pressed. He could feel the blood rush to his head and his mouth went as dry as it did when he was on recon outside Kandahar in the middle of the summer.

  Most people tippy-toed around instead of saying what was on their minds; it was refreshing to meet somebody as blunt as he was for a change.

  “How are you getting home?” she asked him.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “Bus, I guess. I hadn’t given it any thought.”

  She smiled. “Let’s share a cab. I’m officially finished with my shift. I was leaving when I saw you in the ER. You take the bus, you’ll be waiting all night.”

  She cocked her head to one side and took a long look at the glassy skin that covered his torso. “It’s not as bad as you think, you know?” she said, gazing into his eyes again.

  “What isn’t?”

  She gestured loosely at his chest. “Your disfigurement. You aren’t going to win any beauty contests, but it isn’t your scarred skin that makes people look away from you.”

  “It’s not?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s the toxic attitude you’re carrying around inside it.”

  He stood and grabbed his shirt with the grimace that substituted for a smile. “Whatever,” he said. “But if we’re going to leave through the ER waiting room, I better put some clothes on. I wouldn’t want anybody fainting because of my bad attitude.”