Then, six months ago, Ray Cowles finally understood what life was all about. He fell in love. The paradox was that real love, the kind that smacked into one so hard it turned a person all the way around, didn’t always happen as it should. The great passion of Raymond Cowles’s life came too late and was spiritually messy. Even though he was a man experienced at battling demons, Ray’s new demon was the worst he’d encountered.
With Dr. Treadwell’s help he’d conquered all the others. First the demons that told him he was a bad child. Then the ones that told him he was stupid, not up to his studies. The big ones that said he was incompetent at his jobs. And always in the background there were those demons that told him he could never attract a girl, never satisfy a woman. These particular demons continued to torture him after he met Lorna, the endlessly sweet and understanding girl he married.
The killer demon told him he was a failure at everything, even the years of psychoanalysis to which he had resorted half a lifetime ago for a cure. This was the demon that whispered to him in his sleep that his sudden and overwhelming passion at age thirty-seven was beyond disgusting and immoral. Love, for Raymond Cowles, was a fall from grace into the deepest pit of depravity from which abyss he was bound to fall even further into the very fires of Hell.
In the months prior to his death, as Raymond fell deeper from grace into lust and corruption, he wanted nothing more than to surrender at last to the first real feeling of contentment and joy he had ever experienced. But he wanted to fall and be saved with his love absolved. Surely everyone had the right to surrender to passion and be released from the excruciating anguish of sin. He had that right, didn’t he?
But absolution didn’t come, and once again Raymond Cowles’s dreams were full of far-off women—high on cliffs when he was on the ground, or on shore when he was way out at sea. In dream after dream, these women waved their arms at him and told him, “Watch out, watch out.” And each time he awoke in a panic because he didn’t know what to watch out for.
Then on October 31, at the very start of his new life, Raymond’s world collapsed. He felt he had no warning. He was cornered. For a few moments he was alone. And then he wasn’t alone. He was trapped with a person who wanted to kill him.
“Save me, save me.” He tried to scream into the phone, into the hall, into the lobby of the building, out on the noisy street.
He longed to reach for a life preserver, but there wasn’t one. Where was one? Where was a lifeboat? Where was safety?
At the end he was mute. He couldn’t cry out for help or make the move to save himself. In his last moments of panic, when Raymond Cowles was too frantic and distraught to make a sound, the very thing he had never been able to watch out for slipped out of the noisy Halloween night of dress-up and reveling on Columbus Avenue and took his breath away.
At midnight on Halloween, two hours after Raymond Cowles died, Bobbie Boudreau slouched into the French Quarter. His mood matched the atmosphere of the seedy bar perfectly. To a Cajun from Louisiana, this was as far from the real French Quarter as a place could get. The old jukebox was a poor stand-in for even the worst live band and there was no compensation for the lack of a weary stripper migrating slowly back and forth across the bar. Charlie McGeoghan liked to tell Bobbie he’d named his dump the French Quarter because he’d heard New Orleans was a wild place, and even the word
The old Mick got only two things right. It was too dark to see the menu, and newcomers’ drinks were always watered. Bottom line was, Charlie hated anything wild, and his hole was nothing more than an advertisement for missed chances. Which was pretty much how Bobbie himself felt tonight. He didn’t like basic principles like justice, wisdom, and truth getting all fucked up.
Bobbie had been told a long, long time ago that the Lord always evened things out in the end. But sometimes it just didn’t seem that way. The Lord’s mysterious ways were awful slow, too slow for Bobbie Boudreau. Bobbie liked to hum a little tune to the words “The Lord’s too slow for Bobbie Boudreau.” When he got tired of the wait, Bobbie had to step in as the Lord’s agent and speed things up. He was working such a case now. In just a few days the coin would drop in the slot, the wicked would slide down the tubes, and the meek would inherit the earth. He was looking forward to it, banged the door of the bar going in.
“Hey, Bobbie.” Charlie’s skinny wuss of a nephew glanced up from mopping the counter. “How’s the war going?”
Bobbie grabbed a stool. “We lost,
“Well, as they say, time heals all wounds. What can I get you?”
Bobbie shook his head. “No, Mick. It don’t. Fact is, time makes it worse and worse.”
“Oh, come on, Bobbie, don’t start that Mick stuff. You know how my uncle feels about that.”
“Fuck your uncle.”
Brian McGeoghan’s nervous eyes raked the murky, nearly empty room. “Good thing Charlie ain’t here, Bobbie. He told me to throw you out when you get like this. He can’t afford any more insurance.”
Bobbie jerked his head at the vacant bar stools around him, his sullen mouth softening at the happy reminder of those occasional, teensy-weensy scuffles that occurred when he was forced to avenge some asshole provocation. “Throw me out with not one soul here to bother me? That’s a good one. Give me a beer. Just one, I’m working tonight.”
“Okay … One’s fine as long as you don’t make trouble.” Brian McGeoghan smiled suddenly. “Wouldn’t want you drunk in the operating room either, would we?” He pushed a frothy draft across the battered surface.
“Hey,
The beer tasted like shit. Bobbie drank it down quickly, then had another. Then two assholes came in, sat a few stools down from him at the bar, and began talking softly. One was bigger than Bobbie was, a mean-looking white with fleshy pockmarked cheeks and a drunk’s red-veined nose. The other looked like an Irish mole. Bobbie didn’t feel like breaking any bones tonight, so he paid up and went outside.
At one A.M. the streets were finally quieter. No more parents hustling along clumps of kids in costumes. Not so many dressed-up faggots. A few here and there. Faggots never bothered him. Anyway, Bobbie had things on his mind. He was working a case, wasn’t looking for trouble. He wandered over to Riverside across the stretch of dead grass to the Henry Hudson Parkway. He liked watching the cars speed along next to the Hudson River, the mile- wide slash of black water that separated New York from the rest of the country. In Riverside Park he would sit on the grass or a bench and tell himself the stories of his life exactly the same way, over and over—all the horrors right up to the day the bastard Harold Dickey and the bitch Clara Treadwell unjustly cut off his balls and destroyed his life after a thirty-year career in nursing. Because of them Bobbie Boudreau was no longer a nurse, not a nurse of any kind. For almost a year he’d been a cleaner, floor polisher, garbage collector, lightbulb changer—not even a plumber, electrical engineer, or handyman. His asshole boss said he had to work his way up for even that kind of work.
When he wandered along the labyrinth of underground passages that connected the six buildings in the huge hospital complex dressed as a janitor—a fat clip of official keys banging against his hip—Bobbie looked as if that seniority was already his. He was both big and broad, still hard enough in his spreading midsection to look disciplined. There was an air of authority in his movements. His face was solid with concentration and purpose. He had the belligerence of someone in charge. Seldom did anyone stop him. When they did, it was usually for directions. Doctors, nurses, administrators, maintenance, even security intent on their own troubles rushed past him every day. Those who took the briefest second to glance his way felt immediately reassured that he was just your average good-guy hospital worker, like they were—honest, trustworthy, caring. A person who would not waste a second before fixing something gone wrong. And he did fix things gone wrong.
He was about to cross the viaduct that formed a bridge over the Ninety-sixth Street entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway, when a powerful stench of excrement startled him. He was filled with disgust even before the bum shambled from behind a bush. The bum was muttering to himself; his sorry-looking penis still hung out of pants not yet buttoned and zipped.
Bobbie swerved to avoid him, but the bundle of rags figured he’d found a mark and didn’t want to let him go. “Hey, pal,” he called, forgetting to zip his fly as he hurried after Bobbie.
