The Empty Warrior

by J. D. McCartney

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Because I had a really good time. Maybe we can get together again. I mean, like, if you want some variety instead of just Melissa all the time. I don’t generally, like, try to steal other girl’s customers, but…” She never finished the sentence. Instead she reached into her bag, the bag that seemingly held anything and everything, and produced a rumpled business card. She handed it to him. It was pink with blue writing, but there was nothing on it but a phone number, not even a name. “You can call me if you want.”

  O’Keefe nodded, grunting impassively. Julie rose from the sofa, reached for her panties and stepped back into them, then wriggled back into her dress before picking up her purse and pulling it over her shoulder.

  “I hate to run,” she said, “but it’s hours back to the city, and I have another appointment later tonight.” O’Keefe cringed at the thought, wondering briefly, and painfully, what acts she would be performing for whom that evening, but the only betrayal he gave to his feelings was a slight nod of his head and a momentary clinching shut of his eyelids. “Well, I have to go.” She was standing awkwardly, unsure of herself once more now that her job was done. “Bye,” she said tremulously.

  “Wait,” O’Keefe said, crushing his cigarette in an ashtray. “I’ll see you to the door.”

  He rolled behind her out into the foyer and to the front entry, which she opened. She stood framed in the doorway for a moment before bending to kiss him softly. “Call me,” she said, then turned and walked away. She looked back and waved on the way out to her car. In return, O’Keefe absently threw up a hand in her direction, then closed the door and latched the deadbolt, hating himself more than he had ever hated himself before. He wanted to sob but could not. Instead he merely thought to himself, I’m going to get extremely drunk tonight.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  Empyreal Trespassers

  O’Keefe knew better than to drink too much beer; or more precisely, he was aware that he shouldn’t be drinking so much even as he did it anyway. It wasn’t the history of next day hangovers that had created this awareness, nor was it the cirrhosis that was in all probability scarring his liver; it was the bathroom breaks he was forced to endure. It was difficult enough to relieve himself under normal circumstances, but to have to do it repeatedly and while drunk became nothing short of a tribulation. He was now using the time sitting over the bowl to ponder the question of whether he was an alcohol addict or if he simply enjoyed drunkenness to the degree that made it all worthwhile. He wasn’t even entirely certain that he still needed to be sitting there, but he was afraid to rise prematurely as he was generally unsure for a minute or so after the last droplets hit the water if he was genuinely finished. Over the years, his shredded ganglia had found enough new pathways to give him back a good deal of his former bladder control and he no longer used a catheter while at home. But the sensation of utter relief that had at one time accompanied a visit to the privy had long since become merely a faded memory, as had the sensation that told him when his bladder was truly empty. So he always spent a little extra time on the seat to be certain that he was truly finished.

  When finally convinced that he was indeed done with this urinary session he reached around to depress the tank lever and the tainted water swirled away beneath him. Then he grabbed the top of his pants and undershorts with both hands and began to slowly wrestle them over his knees, making sure that he had the upper half of each trouser leg bunched up around his thighs. That was the easy part.

  Next, despite his somewhat besotted condition, he had to pull himself erect without his pants falling back down in the process. With his hands, he forced his feet and knees as far apart as possible, and then took hold of the sturdy bars that ran at forty-five degree angles away from him and were bolted into the wall to his left and right, using them to pull himself erect. Once he was certain that he was not on the verge of keeling either back onto the toilet or forward across the wheelchair in front of him, he placed his right arm, from wrist to elbow, between the bar and the wall and gripped it tightly with his right hand. Gingerly, he released the grip of his left hand until he was sure that he would be able to keep his balance while reaching behind his back to pull the toilet lid closed. It slammed shut with a crash that reverberated loudly against the tiled floor of the small enclosure where the toilet sat. Then, tugging at one side and then the other of the waistband, he used his free hand to inch his boxer shorts up his legs until the elastic top was snugly positioned about his midsection. He then repeated the procedure with his pants. At last, still holding his pants up by the middle belt loop in the back, he carefully lowered himself down on the lidded seat where he was finally able to use both his hands to tuck in his shirt before buttoning and zipping his trousers and tightening and buckling his belt.

  He could have worn clothing that was easier to manipulate; such as pants with just a clasp or an elastic waistband, but he was characteristically too stubborn to do so. He was no less a man than any other and, by God, he would wear what every other man wore.

  Once again he pulled himself erect with both arms and, using the chromium support bars around him, laboriously turned his body until he was facing the wall behind the toilet. Finally he was able to flop back down into his chair. Another successful ten-minute bathroom trek, he thought to himself ruefully. He sat for a while, breathing heavily and feeling grateful that, for the time being at least, the ordeal of urination was over. It was nearly a minute later before he began carefully maneuvering his chair out of the bathroom.

  Tipsy as he was, he was still aware of the damage a recklessly propelled wheelchair could do to furniture, walls, and wood trim. Even the smallest scars he inflicted around the house were unwelcome reminders of his handicap and over the years he had spent uncounted hours filling, sanding, staining, and painting to hide the trail of his failings from people who never visited and would not have noticed the marks had they done so.

  In fact, the few visitors that he did receive—mainly old war buddies who stopped in from time to time—were quietly amazed at the condition of his home. His refusal to accept any and all indications that he was in fact disabled had made him into a near obsessive compulsive; O’Keefe straightened and cleaned and decorated relentlessly. Though he had no use for upholstered furniture, the house was splendidly arrayed with it. Sofas, chairs, settees, and ottomans adorned the rooms, and all were utterly pristine. The floor beneath them did not escape O’Keefe’s near maniacal quest for perfection either, as he swept and dusted daily. Even the areas of the house covered by vaulted ceilings were free from any telltale cobwebs as he kept a small arsenal of brooms, whisks, and feather dusters that he attached to various extensions, enabling him to clean even the most out of the way corners and crevices. No mote of dust could long escape his obdurate passion for cleanliness, even though aesthetically speaking he could not have cared less if the floors of the house were dirt. His quest for clean was all done in the name of his intractable declination to concede to any lack of independence due to his paralysis.

  Once he had backed his chair out into the bathroom proper and turned it toward the exit without damaging anything, he stopped and turned his head to look in the mirror, running a hand over his balding head as he did so. He didn’t have a whole lot of hair left up top, and even the strands of it that still held stubbornly fast to his head were more likely to be gray than the jet black he had been born with.

  Damn, he thought, and I’m only sixty-five. I might have to put up with this bullshit for another fifteen years. He sighed heavily and resignedly guided his chair out into the hallway and toward the kitchen. Despite the bladder filling drawbacks of stout induced drunkenness, he wanted another beer, and soon enough he had one. He clutched the mug of dark, foamy libation tightly as he made his way out onto the deck and into the summer night. If I live to be too old to get off the can plastered, he thought, that’s when I’ll stop drinking beer. Then I’ll switch to whiskey.

  He hardly noticed that it was an exqui
site evening. The temperature hovered in the mid-seventies while a light but steady breeze had pushed aside the haze that was pumped into the sky from the coal-fired power plants that dotted the region, leaving the heavens brilliant with the light of a billion stars and a tiny sliver of rising moon. The stridulation of cicadas fell and then rose steadily to a crescendo before abating once again; a homophonic symphony that droned on throughout the early evening, so precise the rhythm that the sound seemed more akin to that of a perfectly crafted machine than thousands of individual insects. From his acres of never cut Christmas trees the breeze brought the sweet redolence of evergreens sweeping over his deck and by his olfactory nerves, and would have reminded him of long ago holidays from his youth had he been in a different state of mind.

  But on this night, a howling winter wind could have been hurling sleet at his heart and he would not have felt any more piteously vile. Why do I do it? he asked himself. Why do I pay these women to come up the mountain to amuse me? He received no physical enjoyment from it, and once the deed was done he invariably felt as if his soul had rolled in a spiritual midden. And yet that never stopped him from repeating the behavior. He had earlier tried to throw away Julie’s number, but found he could not. Instead he filed it away where he knew he would not lose it.

  And that despite the fact that his experience with her had been an especially bitter pill to swallow. At the height of her climaxes he had found himself believing in a small flicker of hope that had ignited deep in his breast, a sensation he had fervently tried to deny but could not, that the encounter with Julie had been more than merely a business transaction between a man and a woman. But now, a few hours divorced from the event, pristine clarity had returned to his mind. She had been very attentive and very sweet, but the cold, hard reality was that without his affluence she would have been a forbidden fruit from which he would never have been allowed even the most insignificant taste. Had she not been a hooker her kindness would have perhaps obliged her to awkwardly hold a door for his passage during a brief, random encounter, but nothing more.

  He had wealth and a home that would be the envy of the vast majority of the human population. He could drive, he could boat, and he could fish. He could do nearly anything that a man with two good legs could do. He also could do a great many things that most men had not the wherewithal to effect; but the simplest pleasures would always be denied him. It seemed that time was all this life had left to offer him.

  For years he had hoped that, just as he had regained bladder control, his nerves would seek out pathways that would enervate his long numb tissues and restore potency to his loins. There had been many nights that he could feel the passion rise in his mind, nights when he was sure that the resurrection of his manhood was nearly within his grasp. But now, on a night when only a few hours before he had held a naked, nubile young woman while she writhed in—or feigned, he thought bitterly—orgasmic delight, that resurrection may as well have been on the far side of the moon. With Julie on his lap he had felt nothing more than frustration. He had remained as limp as a drifting strand of thread in a boiling sea of apathy. On this night there was no gainsaying the fact that he was completely and utterly impotent.

  He felt wet heat in the pits of his eye sockets and cursed. Don’t cry, damn you, he thought to himself. This is the way it is. Deal with it. Get on with life. There are people in this world a lot worse off than you. He gritted his teeth, inhaled mightily through his nose to pull the runny mucus back into his throat, and then wiped the moisture from around his eyes. Disgusted with himself, he reached for a cigarette. His pupils momentarily narrowed as he ignited the flame of his windproof Zippo and applied it to the end of the Marlboro.

  It was as his night vision slowly returned that he saw it. Light, man made light; light that had formed a slight and momentary corona along the side of his mountain. At first he was not sure that he had seen anything at all, so he stared intently down the boardwalk toward the overlook hoping to see it a second time. There. There it was again; a tiny aurora that appeared for only a moment over the trees. Headlights, he thought. It was those damn kids again. They had gotten some 4x4s up to the far eastern end of the lake, probably using the rutted old logging trail that Billy Steinbeck kept clear so he could get his tractor up to the spillway to do his mowing.

  O’Keefe had never seen the trespassers with his own eyes, but the little bastards invariably left plenty of evidence behind. He had found beer cans, pizza boxes, and used condoms floating near the far shore on several occasions when he had gone out to fish in the early morning. Each time it had happened he ended up trolling around netting trash rather than casting a line. That made him angry enough, but on this night, a night when his impotence laid like an anvil in his heart, the thought of young couples rutting down by the shore of his lake while casting their garbage aside for him to collect raised his ire to a fever pitch. Tonight, he promised himself, he would put an end to it once and for all.

  He tossed down the last few swallows of his beer and drove the chair, which now seemed to move with agonizing slowness, back to the dining room. There, he switched back to the sports chair, checking to make sure the Colt was still in the side pocket before moving quickly into the laundry room where he retrieved a long steel flashlight and a pair of night vision binoculars from their designated spots on a low hanging shelf. Neatly stuffing them into the other side pocket, he raced—as nimbly as his somewhat inebriated condition would allow—out of the house and down the concrete ramp into the garage, grabbing his keys from a hook by the kitchen door as he passed.

  He punched the combination into the keypad on the side of his van and waited as the door slid aside and the ramp slowly swung down from inside the vehicle.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” he breathed impatiently, his arms tight and tingly with anticipation. At last the ramp thudded onto the concrete floor, and O’Keefe pushed his chair up it and into the vehicle. He locked the chair in its passenger-side bay, dropped the left armrest, and pulled his body almost viciously into the driver’s seat.

  He was at the wheel with the engine running and the garage door rolling upward before the accessibility ramp was entirely stowed back inside. The van was moving before its sliding side door had powered completely shut. However, he forced himself not to speed off down the drive. His military training had instilled in him a great respect for stealth, even at the expense of speed, particularly when the enemy had no idea someone was approaching. So instead of flying noisily toward his goal, he drove deliberately down the mountain with only the orange glow of parking lights illuminating his path.

  The boathouse, from a straight line perspective, was less than a mile from his home, but it was a much longer drive to get there. It was necessary to take the twisting drive down almost to the highway before taking a right through a set of remotely activated steel gates onto a curvy gravel road that led up between the shoulders of two mountains and then back down to the lake. It was even more winding than the driveway and had severe cut backs every 200 yards or so of the descent. Nearer to the lake the road straightened to a degree before emerging from the forest directly in front of the boathouse.

  He had driven the route hundreds of times before, but rarely after dusk, and in the darkness the road seemed strangely alien. The glow from his parking lights cast a sickly pall on the forest as he passed while the gravel crunching beneath his tires sounded as loud as a rockslide rolling down the mountain. In the half-light, the trees seemed to lean in over the road, leaving O’Keefe to feel as if he were traversing a leafy tunnel that became more constricted with every revolution of his wheels. Had he not needed both hands, one to steer and one to manipulate the brake and accelerator stick that jutted from the side of the steering column, he would have reached over into the pocket of his chair to touch the cold steel of the Colt that rested there.

  But even without a physical reminder of its presence, the thought of it so close by reassured him. He had no intention of using it on a gaggle of partying high sch
ool students other than to terrify them, but as he drove there had been time for him to consider a little more carefully the possibilities of what he might be up against. Although the odds were that he would be facing only kids out to have a good time in a place where they had no right to do it, there was no way he could be absolutely certain of who was on his land before actually seeing them. It was hardly unknown for drug smugglers to use remote Appalachian drop sites to bring in their wares, and they were famous for not taking interruptions lightly. If he ran into something like that, he would need the sidearm more than he wished to think about.

  At last he emerged from the trees and, cutting the lights, rolled into the open area that surrounded the boathouse and pier. He brought the van up as close beside the structure as he was able, shut it down, and pulled himself once again into the sports chair. He loosed it from the locks and rolled it backward, punching the exit button on the ramp’s control box as he did so. Again, it seemed to take a noisy eternity for it to swing down to the ground. At last it was in position, and he was able to roll out onto the short grass surrounding the truck.

  Immediately he was off toward the rough planks of the pier, not pausing even to close up the van. The door to the boathouse was on the left, about a third of the way down the pier. He halted before it, fumbling with the keys in the darkness before finally finding the one that matched the deadbolt on the entry. He unlocked the door and then was inside. With a quick flick of his right wrist, he slapped a switch into the on position, bathing the interior with bright light. He reached for one of the orange life preservers that hung from a rack to his left and clumsily donned it, his alcohol-laden fingers fumbling somewhat with the fastenings before the vest was securely strapped around his ribs.