The Ashes of an Oak

by Bradbury, Chris

  Emmet completely failed to hide his surprise. ‘You and Milt?’

  Kelly nodded and winked seductively. ‘Keep it under your hat.’

  ‘Wow!’ Emmet poured them another drink. ‘If you don’t mind me saying Kelly, and with all due respect, Milt is one lucky bastard.’

  Kelly sipped at her whisky. ‘Ain’t he though?’

  Tuesday

  Chapter 16

  Frank had slept on and off for the better part of two days. Today was the first day his head felt clear; more crystal, less sand.

  He had woken to the distant sound of a floor polisher as it danced across the landing outside his room. He had heard the cleaner’s feet keep step with it, pull it back into the routine when it skipped against the skirting.

  Then came the sound of hospital business - ward phones, high heels, trolleys carrying patients, drinks and candy, that rolled by on wobbly wheels, that bumped unevenly along or squeaked shrilly against the newly polished floor. Conversations, muffled by the door, rumbled past his room like thunder clouds, to be replaced by a breezy lightness or the earnest whisper of approaching storms.

  He looked around the room. It hadn’t changed. Milt had been right. There was no better way to pass time in hospital than in a coma. He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. He sighed at the thought of the long day to come. How was he going to fill those hours?

  Gingerly, he put a hand up to his head. He had expected to find himself mummified, swathed in the livery of the sick, but there was little more than what amounted to a big plaster stuck to his head. He could feel stubble. He pined for his lost hair. Gently, he ran his fingers over the wound and felt the clips that ran along it. He pushed down and was impressed to find that it didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would.

  He gave his head the gentlest of shakes. It didn’t fall off. That, he thought, was a positive thing. More importantly, the dizziness that he had felt leading up to the operation had gone, though his neck and shoulders felt stiff and a headache ran up the back of his neck, through the vertebrae, from where it beat mercilessly at the front of his head.

  Impulsively, he threw back the bedclothes and lifted his right leg. It worked. He chuckled to himself and thanked God. So did the left. He tested both his arms. They moved freely. The right one still had a drip in the back of his hand. He looked up and saw a bag of saline hanging loosely from a hook on a stand. It dripped with the regularity of a heartbeat. There were still some pins and needles in his right hand, but nothing like there had been before surgery.

  With trepidation and eager excitement, he rolled into his side and dropped his legs over the edge of the bed, then straightened himself up. His feet touched the floor. His toes curled away from the cold. He pressed them down, then his soles and his heels, until they were flat upon the cold surface. It felt good.

  With tight lips and taut muscles, he slid himself forward until he was standing, albeit with one white-knuckled hand on the drip stand. He let his blood pressure catch up and tested his balance.

  ‘Right,’ he said to himself. ‘To the bathroom.’

  The door opened.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  Mary Matto’s face was thunderous.

  ‘I’m going to the john.’

  ‘Get back into bed you crazy bastard! You’re not supposed to be walking yet.’

  Frank beheld his legs in mocking wonder. ‘And yet, I am.’

  ‘Well, stop it.’

  ‘No.’ Frank took tentative steps towards the bathroom. ‘You try to stop me, I’ll fight you, woman.’

  Mary took his arm to support him. ‘They must have taken your brain out and stuck it up your ass, you stubborn son of a bitch.’

  ‘Would you just help me?’

  ‘I’m helping. I’m helping.’

  Suddenly she stopped and held him back. She turned his face towards her and kissed him. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I missed you.’ Her hands shook and her eyes were tenderly moist.

  ‘Hi.’ He ran the back of his hand across her soft cheek. ‘I missed you too.’

  She walked on with him some more. ‘You stink like a badger you know.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ he said. He got into the bathroom and closed the door. ‘One thing at a time.’

  Steve Wayt and Jim Baker were invited into the house of Thomas and Tamara Astle without hesitation. They invited them into the living room and offered them cold lemonade.

  They sat on the sofa. Between them was a little girl, no more than eight or nine.

  She looked like her dead mother.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Steve.

  The girl moved in close to her grandad and wrapped his arm around her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Thomas. ‘You can answer the man.’

  The girl pulled herself in closer to him and turned her face away.

  ‘She’s shy,’ said Thomas. ‘Her name is Angelica.’

  ‘She knows?’ asked Steve.

  ‘She knows.’

  ‘Is she okay being here?’

  ‘Yes. Some things you have to learn young. Some things they already know. Either way, the world invades.’

  Jim moved behind Steve and tried to make his large frame unobtrusive. Thomas got up and got him a spare chair from the kitchen. Jim thanked him and sat down.

  Steve looked at the little girl. She wore her hair long, straightened, in a ponytail. She had the smooth skin of youth and the wide eyes that hadn’t quite yet learned to narrow in anticipation or cynicism. They were nut brown eyes. They shone in the way that only the eyes of children could shine, with a healthy clarity, as yet unblemished by illness or age.

  Steve cleared his throat. ‘Are you aware of what your daughter did for a living?’

  ‘We are now,’ said Thomas. He sat with staunch pride, the kind of pride that only a father could have, especially a father full of regrets.

  ‘You had no idea?’

  ‘She told us she worked in a factory on nights. We had no reason to doubt her.’

  ‘Do you happen to know anybody that she may have hung around with? Anybody that she didn’t get on with? Somebody that may have had reason to hurt her?’

  Tamara Astle tutted and shifted agitatedly in her seat. She put a hand on Angelica’s head and ran it across her hair.

  ‘The girl fell in with a bad crowd a long time ago. My granddaughter here was the result of a union between herself and a man named Johnson Degat.’ She closed her mouth and her lips curled as if she was stifling nausea. ‘He got her onto drugs, got her with child, then got himself killed.’ She kissed Angelica on the head. ‘He managed to ruin three lives. Five if you count me and her father.’

  ‘So who was running her now?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Running her?’

  ‘Who did she work for?’

  ‘We’re not aware of her dealings,’ said Thomas. ‘We kept in touch with her for the sake of the child. We still loved her, you understand, she was our daughter, but we lost her long ago. Angelica was our link with her. There was always that hope…you know?’

  ‘So you didn’t know of any associates…?’

  Tamara pulled the girl closer until her ears were covered. ‘Is that what they call themselves nowadays?’ she whispered harshly. ‘Associates? Not whoremongers and whores? Not criminals? Not merchants of misery and pain?’ She took a deep breath. Her nose wrinkled. ‘Colleagues? Associates? They weren’t lawyers, sir. They were lawbreakers, criminals, scum. You understand that?’

  ‘Very much,’ said Steve.

  The old lady was beginning to annoy him. She was the one who let the girl slip away from her, she and her holier-than-thou husband. Did they think he came there as some sort of police virgin? That he had never had his nose rubbed in this shit before? It was their fuck up, not his.

  ‘How long since you saw her?’

  ‘Last night, around seven.’

  ‘How was she dressed?’

  ‘Blue jeans and an old green shirt,’ said her mother. ‘Sam
e way she always did before she went to work. To the factory, that is,’ she added quickly.

  ‘There was nothing different in her behaviour?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘She didn’t seem upset?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In a hurry? Reluctant to leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So everything was normal, so to say?’

  ‘Normal?’ asked Charlene’s father. ‘Well, that would depend on what you call normal, would it not?’

  ‘Within the bounds of your lives.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thomas. ‘Within the bounds of our lives, it was about as normal as it could be.’

  Steve got into the car. His face was severe, brooding.

  ‘Well that was a waste of time.’

  Jim Baker took of his hat and wound down the window. He took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his bald head.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that was so bad.’

  ‘Really? What did we learn?’

  Jim wiped the handkerchief down his neck and the top of his chest. ‘No more than any other white cop in a black neighbourhood, walking into the house of a black man whose daughter has just been killed. I’d say you did pretty well to get through the door. They’re good people.’

  ‘So good they let their daughter go on the game. How long before the kid’s out there too? Another four, five years?’

  Jim put his hat back on and put his handkerchief back into his pocket.

  ‘Twenty-five years ago, the Astles were my neighbours and they were beautiful, kind people. I can remember them bringing Charlene home from the hospital, him a janitor at the hospital, his wife doing clothes repairs and laundry on the side. They sent Charlene to school, gave her good Christmases and birthdays, invested themselves in her. Then some dope-headed son of a bitch comes along and whispers pretty nothings in her ear and steals her out from under their nose.

  Does lightning strike twice? It does around here. Look at this place. Needles on the floor, pregnant kids, a crime rate so high that there ain’t numbers big enough to describe it. If you aren’t in a gang by the time you’re nine, it’s probably because you’re dead. Is that how it was for you, Steve? Did you have gangs in your college? No, you probably had a capella groups and chess clubs.

  At the end of the day, you wipe this shit off your shoes and go back to your nice house with a nice lawn and your neighbourhood watch. All it takes for you to get rid of this is a long shower. These poor bastards never get rid of it, not until they’re dead or in jail. And you stick your white nose in here and think you have the right to judge? The fuck you do.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Steve.

  ‘Well, that’s how I heard it.’

  Steve bit his tongue, but he was hot and impatient and fed up with trying to win in a system that was already doomed to failure. Look at Frank; the guy was a day from death and all they cared about was why he woke up next to a dead woman after going it alone in the dark against a dangerous man.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘maybe you need to take a step back and see it how it really is, Jim. It’s a cesspool and it leaks. It carries its germs and its stench all the way though the city. There are decent people being mugged and murdered and robbed every day by someone who crawls out of here with nothing but the intention to terrorise.’

  Jim prodded himself firmly in the chest. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘And for every one of you, there’s a hundred of them. You know that.’

  ‘I know it and I know why. Because if you’re black, you’re more likely to get a poor education. If you get a poor education, you don’t get a decent job. If you can’t get a good job, you do what you can to get by. No money leads to poverty, which leads to ghettos, which leads to trapped and angry people banging their heads against a wall or finding any way they can to get out.’ He turned in his seat to face Steve. ‘Do you know that the proportion of blacks to whites in prison is over six to one? Jurors are three times more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black man than for a white man. Did you know that? So maybe we should be defending these people instead of feeding the myths and exploiting their weaknesses.’

  Steve thumped the steering wheel. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jim. Get off your soapbox. I’m not a social worker and neither are you.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘All I know is that in five years some poor fool like me is going to have to come down here and scrape that little girl off the sidewalk. I see it coming. I’m a goddam futurologist when it comes to Brownsville. All I do is clean up the shit that others leave behind.’

  Jim pointed through the window at the corpse of his hometown. ‘And who left that behind?’

  Steve turned on the engine and slammed the car into gear. ‘Well, it sure as hell wasn’t me.’

  He accelerated away. He’d had enough of this bullshit. Every day they had to clean up the filthy detritus that the night-time tide had puked up, while people like Frank Matto got sucked under as the current caught their legs and pulled them out to sea.

  Mary left Frank asleep. He had exhausted himself trying to persuade all those around him of his miraculous recovery.

  At five, he had thrown up from one side of the room to the other and crawled back into bed like a scolded cat. The nurse had given him an anti-emetic. He had nodded off for a quarter of an hour and then woke up ready for the fight. Mary had forbidden him to move.

  He didn’t care. He was on the mend; his legs worked, his arms worked and his brain worked. There was hope.

  Mary stayed with him through a light meal (the hospital had provided her with a meal too. It was a relief not to have to root through the cupboards when she got home). Frank tolerated it well and followed it down with some water. He was pale and shattered but, as he had fallen asleep at seven-thirty, he held Mary’s hand and said what a great day it had been and slipped into sleep mumbling about the lake and the house and the school upstate.

  She left at eight, confident that he would be out for the night.

  For the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, she felt at ease when she left.

  On the way home, Mary stopped off at the all-nighter and picked up a bottle of wine. Tonight she would celebrate and watch a good movie – no, a really bad movie. A really bad movie was just what was needed to complement the cheap wine and the tingle of excitement, the joy, which ran through her at the thought that her Frank was doing okay.

  She pulled up outside the apartment and looked up at the row of black windows that were sandwiched between the pale yellow comfort of those who were already home.

  She locked up the car and went to the main door of the apartment block. Night was crawling in. Shadows haunted the corners and dissected the street, growing as they gorged upon the remnants of daylight, as the sun dipped below the concrete canvas.

  Where the fading day was able to squeeze a last few seconds out of its short life, orange light streaked the sides of buildings and glinted ferociously from any small object willing to suspend the execution of the day.

  Mary turned the key and stepped inside. She turned to close the door and, as she did, she felt a sting at the back of her neck.

  Her hand went up automatically, but it was blocked as another hand snaked around her and covered her mouth.

  After that, there was nothing.

  Wednesday

  Chapter 17

  On his way to work, Steve called into King’s Memorial. He had been in only once since Frank’s operation and he felt bad about that. Val was due back from her mother’s today, so she would be expecting him home, expecting them to spend the few hours of time together that the job allowed.

  When he got there at eight, he was surprised to find Frank sitting at the side of his bed with a bowl of water on a table in front of him, a towel on the bed next to him and beads of water rolling from his closely cropped hair down his face.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ he said. ‘Risen from the dead. Damn, you look good.’

  Frank ran the towe
l over his clipped head. ‘I feel good, if slightly short-changed in the hair department.’ The two men shook hands. ‘How are you, Steve?’

  ‘I’m fine. Missing you being next to me at work.’

  ‘So what will you do when I retire?’

  Steve sat down. ‘You’re still going through with that?’

  ‘Sure. Especially now. I’m doing okay, but I don’t know if I’m going to be fit for cop work ever again. I may have worked my last shift.’

  Steve laughed uneasily. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  Frank rinsed off his washcloth then pushed the table aside and put his feet up on the bed. Even something as simple as washing his face was a killer.

  ‘No. Why would I kid about that? You know Emmet was going to put the paperwork through. This has just delayed it a little is all.’

  Steve sat broodily taking it in. ‘I just thought you might change your mind.’

  ‘I feel the same way now as I did before the operation. Maybe more so. I’ve done my time, earned my pay and now want to go fishing. I miss my wife. She deserves more of me and more from life.’ He picked up a glass of water and took a sip. His hands shook from the effort of getting dressed.

  ‘I see,’ said Steve. He tried to hide his disappointment. After all Frank had been through, who could blame him? ‘You’re really going for the house by the lake?’ he asked with forced joviality. ‘All those fish and all that fresh air? Your lungs’ll jump out and run back to the smog. Us city folk can’t take all that clean air and see-through water.’

  ‘I’ll give it a go,’ said Frank. At this moment, he couldn’t think of anything better. ‘So what’s the news? You caught any bad guys?’

  ‘Not yet. Do you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Go ahead. Just open the window for me. It gets so you can’t breathe in these cages.’

  Steve went over to the window and opened it wide. The room was still in shadow, but outside it looked like the city had been layered in gold overnight.