know the definition, smart-ass. Only Lou’s never mentioned a girlfriend. I’ve never even heard of this lady.”
“You keep calling her ‘this lady.’ She has a name, doesn’t she?”
I stopped tying my sneaks and glanced up. “Lauren. Her name is Lauren. Where’s the dope?”
Boots frowned, raising slight ridges on her forehead. “You’ve been pretty good, Matt. Why not wait until you get back?”
“I don’t know if I’m coming back. I might have to take Lou home or something.”
“You don’t have weed at your apartment?”
I returned her smile with a quick, worried grin of my own. “Then light me another cigarette, okay?”
The ride across town was a smooth sail—no post 9/11 twenty-four, seven patrol cars, detours, or potholes..—Other than the cops, much like the past years. Boots and I met after Chana, my wife, and Rebecca, my daughter died; a period in my life when I could barely collect rent in the building Lou had bought just to keep me busy and out of trouble. Though depression wasn’t Boots’s vice, during those years she had her own form of protection—Hal. Old enough to be her father, vaguely married, always on time. Therapy and years had eased some of my gloom, and Boots had long since shed Hal. Now things were going so well that, for the first time in what seemed like forever, I’d been thinking our longtime, on again, off again relationship was gonna keep. Neither of us was direct, but lately conversations were sprinkled with veiled references and humorous quips about our stability.
And I’d still managed to tamp down my drug use, though it cost me a small fortune for cigarettes. Who’d a thunk I’d been able to become somewhat straight—though very somewhat. From the jump I didn’t do intimate alliances all that well, and the closer they veered into “family,” the further I usually leaped in the opposite direction.
No real surprise. The only fond memories from my own original family were stories about my grandfather’s rabid love affair with baseball. How he’d sit in the darkened front room smoking his pipe, head cocked toward his tubed radio inning after inning, game after game.
Hell, I was even a little like him. I collected old-fashioned Bakelite radios and followed baseball. But I usually sat across from a television and filled my pipe with marijuana. Tobacco I bought pre-rolled.
Lou was the nearest thing to family since the accident. We’d always liked each other, our relationship bound by mutual love for Chana, my second wife. But our friendship hadn’t blossomed until the death of his wife Martha, his move to the building from Chicago, and a serious boundary war which ended after Mrs. S.’s surprise death. She’d been Lou’s closest friend in town and though almost a year had passed, I thought he was still mourning. I guess I was wrong. So here I was, hard into the night, driving to some godforsaken gin mill to fetch a failed suicide—a failed suicide who was talking on the phone with his mother. My father-in-law’s secret squeeze.
Lou said the bar was close to Forest Hill Station, but it wasn’t close enough. When the city moved the overhead El ten blocks north into a neatly coifed, middle class trench, it promised the working people, working people who now had to trudge an extra ten blocks, they would dismantle the useless metal girders that kept Washington Street in perpetual dusk. The Pols also promised an end-to-end refurbishing of the dilapidated buildings that lined much of the boulevard. They did remove the hulking overhead, but only partially kept the rest of their rehabilitation promise; the half that gentrified in the frenzied speculation that follows any large urban development project.
I was cruising the city’s unkempt half looking for Jimmy’s among carwashes, warehouses, and the Transit Authority’s bus barn. It took two passes before I finally spotted the hole-in-the-wall tavern nestled on a small side street. Somehow, I didn’t think the bar attracted too many first-timers.
My hunch was confirmed when I opened the door, caught a couple of quick looks from the human barstools, then was immediately ignored as soon as it became apparent I wasn’t a member of the tribe. I had wondered how the kid had gotten to a telephone booth without attracting attention. Now I knew; if you weren’t a regular you weren’t there.
It took a couple of seconds to see through the smoke filled haze, a couple more to fight a sharp urge for a double Wild Turkey when the heartwarming smell of booze and tobacco hit my nose. Then I reminded myself there wasn’t a chance in hell the joint served my beast. No matter what the label promised. Whoever owned this dump was paying serious scratch to let the barstools light up wasn’t gonna serve the real deal.
I don’t know what I expected when I pulled on the flimsy, folding telephone door, but it wasn’t the well-built long-hair wearing a blood soaked karate outfit and open-toe sandals. His age also threw me. I’d imagined Lou’s “kid” as a sixteen year old. This robed Schwarzenegger was in his late twenties..
He looked at me with zonked-out eyes and tried to close the door with trembling fingers, but I kept my foot flush to the cheap slatted wood. The receiver dangled at the end of its coiled metal cord and I heard a woman’s firm, controlled, “Ian, Ian, are you still there? Stay with me, Ian!”
I reached past the swaying Ian and grabbed the phone. “This is Matt Jacob. Your son is conscious, but he’s in pretty bad shape. There’s a lot of blood on his... his...”
“Gi, the robe he wears,” the woman interrupted impatiently. “Could you see if the knife is in his stomach? He told me he threw it away, but I’m not sure he really knows what he’s saying.”
I carefully opened the “gi” and peered at his bloody body. Knife marks scored his muscular abdomen as if he had used his belly for a game of tic-tac-toe. Although the scratches oozed, most of the wounds appeared superficial. Two gashes didn’t. They looked ugly and deep. I pulled my first-aid kit—a dishtowel from Boots’s apartment—out of my back pocket and pressed it against his belly. Then I tried to get him to hold the towel in place. Ian’s grip was ineffectual so I wedged part of my body into the booth, held his hand on the towel with one of my own, and grasped the receiver with the other.
“The knife is out but a couple punctures look pretty serious. Shattuck Hospital is a lot closer than Beth Israel.”
“No, please! Ian wants to go to B.I. He trusts their emergency room.”
I looked at the bleeding Jesus and decided not to waste time arguing. “Beth Israel it is, lady.”
“Thank you, Matthew. Ian can be volatile, and I’m afraid if you take him where he doesn’t want to go...”
I looked at the swaying boy. It’s tough to raise a stink if you’re out on your feet, but I swallowed my caustic rejoinder. She was his mother. “Okay,” I replied defeated, “we’ll meet you at the hospital.”
“Thank you. You’re as kind as Lou said.”
I jammed the receiver back into its cradle. Right then I wasn’t feeling all that kind; I was worried the kid would die in my car.
I draped Ian’s arm around my shoulders, placed mine around his muscular waist, and half dragged him through the dingy joint while its customers kept their eyes fixed on their boilermakers. They had their own empty lives to wash away, let the barkeep scour a stranger’s blood.
I
