Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  I said, “They knew we could tie them to Meany, so killing me would have been foolish if they didn’t also kill Jake. To tell you the truth, I’m flummoxed. I think they were sleep deprived and when they saw Jake with the gun they reacted badly.”

  Suzanne said” “You mean, they put the car in the garage to get a nap? Didn’t expect you back so soon?”

  “Or they were hoping for something to turn up before they had to report back to Meany.”

  She said, “And you know it’s Meany because . . . ?”

  “He’s the only man who’s got the money to fund a couple of private detectives or whatever they are.”

  She said, “I don’t want to introduce a red herring, but didn’t I gather that Mary Clare’s father is also rich and overly protective?”

  “They’ve been out of touch since before she came to the Bay Area.”

  She moved on to the knowable, asking me the kind of questions reporters ask, and I answered them as straight as I could, trusting that she would report them as straight as she could—we had a mutual trust thing going. A man who looked like he’d been working the third shift all his life placed a yellow sandwich board sign in the passageway behind us and applied a wet mop to the floor methodically and quietly, so as not to break in on the waiting for death or recovery, or perhaps birth. My kind of janitor.

  She said, closing her notebook, “Do you realize, Mr. Gattling, you and your gang have provided more juicy press for the Courier than anyone since I’ve been there?”

  “That’s going to change,” I said.

  “Are you about to become respectable?” I saw interest in her eyes.

  “I’m about to rescue my old career; I have a new job.”

  “Were you really an ‘official?’”

  “I was a capital B bureaucrat,” I said.

  “You?” she let out a chuckle. Her eyes got a little bigger and she smiled, and the chuckle turned into a giggle.

  “You know,” I said to her, “you are a complex little piece.”

  She smirked and said, “Let’s stick to business,” but it was a theatrical smirk and she knew what I meant and liked it.

  “No, really, I thought you were a dry stick the first time you came to see me. Now, I realize, you’re rather sexy.”

  “I was royally pissed the first time I came to see you. And right now you’re completely bonkers. Shouldn’t you go home and get some sleep before you completely lapse into sleep deprivation psychosis?”

  “You say what?”

  “Tell me about what you’re going to be doing—your new job.”

  I said, “I’m going to run a study to estimate the need for physicians in the Bay Area for the next few years.”

  “And what will Mr. Pritchett do, assuming he survives?”

  I didn’t repeat that question to Jake. I didn’t tell him about the guilt and fear rattling around inside and how I’d been working mightily, since the Buick roared out of the garage at me, to suppress terror. Sleep deprivation psychosis sounded like a great way to combat terror, which was opening the sluice gate of hydrochloric acid in my stomach, causing it to growl loudly in the quiet lobby.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “one of the nurses intimated it was no certainty.”

  “You thought you were being upbeat and positive.”

  “Yes,” she said, “so cancel that last. May your friend have a long and prosperous life.”

  “I’d be satisfied with a leisurely convalescence and lots of productive writing.”

  “Tell him for me,” she said, “I will envy him his writing—if not the excuse for it. —What’s his novel about?”

  “It’s about a man who falls in love with a witch. Only I’m trying to talk him out of it.”

  “Where’d he get the idea?”

  I said, “From a dream.”

  “Then the witch is a stand-in for someone real—his wife, do you suppose?”

  I laughed and scratched my head. “She is certainly bewitching.” I patted my pockets, searching for a smoke. “I seem to have lost my cigarettes.”

  “That’s what you get for leaping over automobiles.” She took a pack of Virginia Slims out of her purse and offered me one.

  “This won’t turn me into a soprano, will it?”

  “Cut the crap, Mr. Gattling, you’re as liberated as they get.”

  “Me?”

  She said, “I don’t know how I knew, but I got the feeling the minute I met you I couldn’t do my little girl scout routine on you; you don’t condescend.”

  “I don’t?” I tried to sound ingenuous.

  “But you’re a flirt. I can tell that, you’re a terrible flirt.”

  “Am I? I just thought I liked doing things with women I can’t do with men. Not with any hope of reward beyond the moment.”

  “Oh, for sure.” She paused a couple of beats. “You’re all right, Gattling.”

  “Is this part of the interview?”

  “No, but don’t rush off. You might even lighten up a bit.”

  “I ought to go talk to Amanda.”

  “Mrs. Pritchett.”

  I said, “She goes by Dr. Wirth.”

  Suzanne wrote the name in her notebook, spelling it back to me. “I wonder how she’s taking this.”

  “She’s going to rip my heart out. She will blame Mary Clare and me for what’s happened.”

  “That surprises you?”

  “Don’t let’s get into it. I feel badly enough he’s shot up.”

  “Look,” she said, “You can’t get it back, you can’t mend it, you better just accept it.”

  I stood and stretched, weary as a rag picker’s nag. She rose too, the notebook going back into the perennial car coat. “One last thing,” she said. “Is it still so serious between you and Mary Clare?”

  “What would change that?”

  She said, “Crises. Crises have a way of changing things. And I was just checking.”

  I knew what she was getting at. “I assumed you had a man in your life.”

  “I do a good imitation. It’s a pose, to hide my heart from a lot of aridity.”

  “So why don’t we be friends?”

  “I need a little more than that.”

  “You mean sex? Sex can be a very friendly thing, between friends.”

  “There’s that sleep deprivation talking again.”

  “I know. Every time I get that notion I forget it doesn’t work. I have to learn it all over again.”

  She said, “It’s a nice fantasy, though, isn’t it?”

  I said, “You must think I’m vile.”

  She rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Some might say you’re a libertine. I think you’re a man of steel. Doesn’t need any comfort. Oh brother.” She took the arm that didn’t hurt and shook it.

  “Thanks for understanding.”

  She said, “Hey, I’m giving myself forty lashes for letting you know I’m available.”

  “Don’t do that, Suzanne.”

  We were standing very close together. She leaned her head against my shoulder and I felt a spark jump between us. “Suzanne. That’s such a lovely name.”

  She waved without saying goodbye, a sad look on her face.

  *****

  Jake had had his eyes closed through much of my recitation, though not sleeping, but now his eyelids fluttered and when they opened his look was lackluster. “Come back and tell me the rest tomorrow, will you?”

  I agreed to, forgetting that ‘the rest’ never rested, it kept coming at us.

  five

  The world wouldn’t stop the night I put my friend, Jake, in intensive care. It gave no mind to the complication of the aneurism that had skulked, silently, in his chest God knows how long. It circled the sun at some incredible speed, in turn circled by a growing number of artificial satellites put there by the United States, the USSR, Britain, even China. Enter Uncle Irish’s third question: so what?

  I merely mean to say I couldn’t take time out to decry my fate, it continued to
evolve as the minutes ticked away and the satellites circled. I had to report to work Monday—shit, by that time Monday was tomorrow—I had to exit the Pritchett household as soon as possible, I had to connect with Mary Clare and tell her the news. But before any of that I had to confront Amanda and take what was coming to me.

  No, I had to take what she thought I had coming to me, and I dare not fight back. I had to throw the fight, because, time and finances being what they were, I had to spend at least one more night in Moraga, to do those mindless, mundane things like shower, shave, dress for work, dial the phone, wait for calls back. All that shit.

  But first I had to wait. Boxers learn to do that. Your bout is fourth on the card. Will there be four first round kayos or four decisions? So you try to warm up and maintain a level of warmth while psyching yourself up for the fight ahead. I don’t know how many jigs I’ve danced, how many times I’ve smacked my gloves together, hitched my shoulders, circled my head on the swivel of my spine, breathed out my nose in bursts. But hell, you can’t do that in a hospital.

  Suzanne walked Amanda back to the lobby from wherever she’d found her and they sat in an island of chairs running perpendicular to the couch I sat on, so that they could see me but I couldn’t see them without being obvious. But I could hear them if I concentrated. And I did.

  It sounded like it could be the beginning of their conversation, but probably Suzanne had already got the Amanda particulars and those of the kids when she asked, “How is he?”

  Amanda said, “Well, the gunshot wound hasn’t killed him. He’ll be okay if he stays away from all the things that can happen afterwards.”

  “And those are?” Suzanne asked.

  Amanda moved, to the island of chairs opposite Suzanne, so that her back was now to me, but she was closer, so I could still hear her, flinching at each item in her recitation. She said, “Septicemia. Pneumonia. Thrombosis. Anaphylaxis. Cardiac arrest. Those are the kinds of things we know about and try to anticipate.”

  Ah, but it’s the blow you don’t see coming that drops you, Amanda.

  Suzanne said, “Would you say he’s in guarded condition?”

  “That’s a judgment his surgery team wouldn’t want me to make for them,” intoned the doctor.

  “Of course. I’ll call the hospital before I file my story. I’m very sorry, Dr. Wirth.”

  I turned to watch her cross the aisle and shake Amanda’s hand. She was leaving. Time to head for the ring. There would be no referee, no judges and no audience.

  But I didn’t have to make the move. While I was gathering courage, Amanda came over and stood with her knee almost touching mine, looking down as she had when she first came to see about my torn scalp so long ago.

  “I bet you thought you were doing him a big favor, didn’t you? Poor Jake, marrying a doctor instead of a bimbo, he could never get a handle on her, so he devotes his life to explaining her profession—her milieu, as he’d say—to give her some context.

  “But you know about context, don’t you, Mr. Gattling. You’re one of those explainers, too. Medicine’s dull and tedious and Jake needed some diversion from his mid-life crisis, before he faded away entirely.”

  Take it, Robert, cover up and duck and weave.

  Amanda moved her left foot forward, unconsciously assuming a boxer’s stance. Arms folded, foot tapping, angry, finally, to realize how dull and tedious a twenty year truce had been, too busy or proud to change it, children always too tense to bear their parents’ having it out, the world whirling away, time passing and the circuit incomplete, the schedule forever tentative, nothing firm.

  “I wish to God I’d never met you,” she said between gritted teeth, “I truly mean it.”

  Fuck taking it . . . fuck no.

  I started swinging from the deck. I said, “Why don’t you go off somewhere, Amanda, and have a good cry? Drop that bullshit doctor act and cry like you have a husband in there who needs some luck or even a prayer, if you’re inclined that way. Because bum-rapping me and Mary Clare won’t change what it was. You know it was more than a diversion, that’s what bugs you so much, isn’t it? You haven’t connected—really connected—with Jake like Clare and I have for so long you can’t remember.”

  Too stunned to go on the offensive, Amanda waited for me to take a wild swing that left me open. So I obliged. “If he lives he won’t recant, either, you’ll never get him to regret that decision.”

  The first counterpunch was a probing jab. “You heartless bastard.”

  I was too tired to see the right cross coming. I said, “Sure, call me names.”

  “Murderer! How’s that, you worthless little twerp?”

  I whispered the word, knowing, without seeing the blood flow, she’d opened up an old wound. If there were a ref he’d be watching to stop the fight, but there was none, and, weakened, I brought my gloves up to ward off the follow-up. “I’ve been called that before, lady, you can’t hurt me any more than I’ve been hurt, calling me that.”

  “Then how about fool?” she said, stamping her foot. “Fools, you and Jake both, playing hero when there are police who make their living that way, and they don’t get shot in the process.”

  There, her glaring eyes said, take that. But she hadn’t knocked me cold, not quite. She said, “If you were the one who’d carried the shotgun into the garage and got shot, I’d have said you had it coming, I’d have been glad.”

  She walked away. In the corridor I heard a booming baritone but couldn’t quite make out the words. Another colleague giving the lovely Dr. Wirth further word on the husband laid out on an operating table.

  I walked out through the ER waiting room to take a breath of air. The woman with the handkerchief was now the woman with the bandage over her eye, standing at the admitting clerk’s station, looking amazingly fresh, considering the true dawn was imminent. Outside I patted my pockets again, with no Suzanne around to offer me a cig. I watched stringy, unkempt mockingbirds feeding offspring bigger and sleeker than they, who still knew how to hit the right buttons, with fluttery wings and piteous cries. The older birds were as testy as Amanda, swooping from tree to tree. Towhees ignored them, grazing like tiny winged cattle, and robins, hopping imperiously about listening for worms, ignored them too. A squirrel ran along an electrical wire, chased by a mockingbird couple who mistook him for a cat or a weasel.

  An ocean breeze blew in across the Bay from the ocean, pushing high clouds. I watched life in the urban forest until nurses started to come in for the first shift. I didn’t see any of the ones who’d tended me. Then a nondescript gray car pulled up, Sergeant Rutledge stepping out, a man who obviously never slept. He came up to me and said, “Still waiting?” He seemed to know what I needed, retrieving a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  After we lit up he remarked how any other kind of animal you shot like that, you could have the world’s best surgeons work on it, it would still die.

  “Why do you suppose that is?” I asked.

  Rutledge said, “I dunno. I’ve seen guys shot up lots worse than your Jake, even, doctors poking around in ‘em all night, and still pull through. That’s not a bad wound—you know what I mean?”

  “Except,” I said.

  “Except what?”

  “They found an aneurism the size of a tennis ball when they were chasing down fragments.”

  “No shit.”

  “They’re repairing it. The only nice thing his wife said to me was, ‘The bullet may have saved his life.’”

  “For sure an animal wouldn’t survive that kind of pruning,” Rutledge said.

  “Maybe,” I said, “the animal would take the surgery as just more insult. He doesn’t know it’s to make him better.”

  “That’s a good theory,” Rutledge said.

  I said, “Maybe that’s the thing we have, the understanding that the cutting and stitching is for our good. It makes up for knowing we’re going to die someday.”

  We smoked the cigs down to the butt and ground them out. r />
  Rutledge said, looking up at a meager sunrise, “Meany’s skipped. The guy that got away from the Buick tipped him off.”

  “He what? He can’t get away, goddam it.”

  My mind went two ways at once. Cheering him, yes, for a final burst of spunk; yet wanting to get my hands on him, to choke the fucking life out of him.

  six

  Rutledge said, “He’s not at his house, his family don’t know where he is.”

  I said, “Are they lying?”

  “I doubt it. They’re so strung out right now they’d botch it if they lied.”

  “Lost without Papa Bear.”

  “Papa Moose,” Rutledge corrected. “You know, he was a nice guy, once. He drank a lot of beer, when we were boys, and never got tight, he just got funny. You’d never know it now, but when he was a kid he’d come out with the drollest stuff. —I just came over to let you know. I don’t think he’ll try anything else, but you never know.”

  “Who was the guy Jake shot?”

  “You guessed right, a private dick. Got all his ideas watching Burt Reynolds movies. We’re gonna give him lots of time for movies.”

  “Got you guys riled, did he?”

  “My Moraga colleagues will be in touch with you. Don’t be surprised if they don’t want to do a count of aggravated assault, coming out of the garage at you with that Buick.”

  “What about the shooting itself?”

  “That’s tricky, Gattling, that’s tricky.”

  I said, “Jake walks towards them with a shotgun, the guy thinks he’s in danger.”

  “Exactly. And Jake gave him good evidence he wasn’t wide of the mark. Still, if they can prove burglary, the shooting’s kicked up to a class A or class B felony. And if your friend dies, it’s murder one for both of them. —Now now, it’s academic; don’t look so upset.

  “—Which reminds me,” Rutledge continued, “you have any idea where Meany might have gone?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine: Boston? I gather from Mary Clare he’s been as far away as Paris and Tahiti since she’s known him—both on a whim. And he has a hideaway at Lake Tahoe.”

  “What you’re telling me,” Rutledge said, “I could look the wide world over for him.”

  “I’d bet on Mary Clare,” I said.

  Rutledge shook his head and said, “All for a skirt.”

  “You said that before. Besides, ‘skirt’ dates you.”