“I’m probably going to close up here, Mr. Rawlins,” Theodore said. “It’s too much. My insurance agent says that my policy doesn’t cover riots and the city refuses to help.”
“What about the federal government?” I asked.
He shook his head and Sylvie laid an ethereal hand upon the nape of his neck. The love between them always surprised me. It was like a fairy tale that you one day realized was true.
“You need help moving?” I asked.
It was Theodore’s turn to smile.
“You know,” I continued, “there’s a corner store not far from my house that might be a good place to open a shoe repair shop. It’s been vacant a couple’a months. Maybe I could introduce you to the owner.”
Sylvie took two steps and kissed me. Her lips formed the words “thank you,” and she might have made some sound.
We set up a day for the move and a time to talk with the owner at the empty corner store near my house. It was once a clothes store near Stanley and Pico. It was a space and he was a cobbler and people wore shoes everywhere in the world.
Theodore took the leather saddle from the ruined table and pushed it on me.
“Take this, Mr. Rawlins—Easy,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything, Theodore,” I said. “This is yours.”
“But you are helping us,” he argued. “You are always trying to help. This is just a, what you call it, a token for our friendship.”
I didn’t want to take it but Theodore held it out and Sylvie kept smiling. Finally I nodded in defeat and took the ancient riding gear.
I CARRIED MY prize up the southern stairwell to the fourth floor. I walked down the long hall thinking that it was all over. Suggs would take Harold and somehow prove that he was the killer of Nola Payne. Theodore would move to West L.A. and Jackson Blue would become a computer expert for Cross County Fidelity Bank. I didn’t know what to do about Juanda but that was for another day.
I decided to take Benita and Bonnie and the kids for a picnic at Pismo Beach. We could cook and Jesus could take us out fishing one at a time.
I put the key in the lock, thinking that I had done fine. I’d done my job and broke it off before things could go bad. People had died but that wasn’t my fault. The city had gone up in flames but maybe that was like a forest fire, cleansing the underbrush, making room for new growth.
When the wood of the doorjamb above my head shattered I thought that it must have been something that fell. But from where? Then the child’s cap gun exploding and more shattered wood and a quick pain in my left biceps.
I turned toward the doorway at the far end of the hall, shouting and holding the thick leather saddle in front of my head and chest. I ran as hard as I could toward the door, screaming like a berserker in an ancient war. More shots were fired. One grazed the big knuckle of my left hand. I slammed into the stairwell door, hitting someone who grunted and fell back. The pistol clattered to the floor and I caught a glimpse of the man’s shoulder.
As he lunged down the stairs I threw the saddle at him but it missed.
I put a foot down the stairs, not realizing that I had been shot in the calf. The blood dripped down and made a slick on the step. I tumbled for a full flight before coming to a halt and losing consciousness.
46
I must’ve hit my head pretty hard because even though I thought I was conscious my mind wasn’t making the right connections in the ambulance.
“Where did the Germans go?” I asked the medic from my litter.
“What Germans?”
“The ones that killed all those women,” I said. “The ones who tried to fool the Allies and killed the women with the white ribbons in their hair.”
I remember saying these words. I can still feel the frustration when the attendant said, “You’ve been hurt but you’re going to be okay. Do you know the man who shot you?”
“Must have been the Nazis,” I said. I knew that there was something wrong with that statement because of the look on the white kid’s face.
“Hand me the hypo, Nick,” the attendant said to the man sitting next to the driver.
For a while I was looking out of the window listening to the siren that I took for an air-raid warning. I could almost hear the booming of the Allied cannon.
There was pain in my arm and leg and hand so I didn’t feel the morphine while he was injecting it. But soon the blue funk of war gave way to a sunlit yellow world that had never known of battle. The siren became the cry of a huge wild bird and the ambulance was a Greek chariot bringing me home after all those years in hell. I started crying. I asked the attendant if my mother was there.
“What’s her phone number?” he asked me.
That was the last thing I remembered for some time.
I AWOKE IN darkness. There was the smell of alcohol and other acrid chemicals in the air. I was between crisp sheets on a bulging mattress in a too-warm room. There were small lights at odd places hovering here and there. The lights illuminated nothing. They merely glistened, like stars in the void.
I had no idea where I was at first. My mind was fuzzy and there were dull aches somewhere on my person. I concentrated very hard and recalled the shots exploding around me. But at first my mind went all the way back to World War II, twenty years earlier, when I was a young man fighting for someone else’s freedom.
