Every second I expected hospital staff to call out ‘stop;’ every room I passed, I expected paparazzi to leap out with cameras blazing. But I reached the exit door without event and pushed it open to see a flight of stairs wending downward.
It would have been entertaining for a second party to watch my progress down to the first floor, but for me it wasn’t quite so amusing. I got a death grip on the railing and leaned my forehead against it with my eye closed. It was a drunken, slow-motion scramble, often head first, with only my sliding grip on the rail preventing a total nose dive down the stairwell.
I was proud of how neatly I negotiated the reverse at the landing; felt like I was doing some complicated gymnastics move. I followed the next rail to the bottom, then straightened up, opened my eye, and reeled across to the exit.
I opened the door a crack. I was at the corner of one arm of the hospital. The parking lot was to my right, well lit despite the hour; to my left was a barrier of blackberry thickets.
The news trucks still dominated the parking lot. If anything, there were more of them than before. Satellite antennas aimed at the sky, pumping live broadcasts to viewers around the globe. Newshounds stood around in clumps, sucking on coffee and staring at the front of the hospital like a dog pack eying treed prey. Freelance photographers prowled the outskirts, scavengers awaiting the crumbs dropped by their betters in this digital Serengeti.
I slunk away to the blackberry thicket, squeezed through an opening and through the clawed, grasping branches until I reached a wide open space on the far side. The edge of a marsh was at my feet.
I knew this spot well from before prison. A large creek came down from the foothills and delta-ed into this marsh before finally draining to the southern wetlands of the Bay. It was a soggy low-lying area dotted with raised tussocks of mud, swamp grass, assorted shrubbery, and carnivorous plants. The air was moist and pungent with the smells of life and decay; the only native sounds were those of birds and frogs, insects and slow-moving water.
When Sam was a boy we’d ridden our bikes here for nature hikes on numberless occasions. There were tadpoles in season, and the big predatory water beetles they called electric light bugs, because of their habit of flopping across the ground toward any source of artificial illumination. The beetles were huge things that looked like they’d be better suited to co-starring in a Japanese horror movie than haunting a backwoods swamp.
There were crows and snakes and possums here too, as well as skunks and lots of mud. It was a little boy’s paradise and Sam always loved it. Tell the truth, I hadn’t minded it too much myself, being a big-city boy who’d never come closer to Wild Kingdom than on the picture tube of my TV.
Frogs throbbed out their mating song, the shrill chorus seeming to mock me and my current situation. Once, with Sam, this had been one of my favorite places on earth. Now it seemed eldritch and menacing in the moonlight.
Weakness overcame me and I sank to lie on my side in the mud at the edge of the water, staring into the dimness of that inhuman swamp. I closed my eye and fell asleep to the frogs’ malevolent piping and the rustlings of all the little swamp creatures going about their nocturnal business.
Chapter 17
I woke at dawn and the air was clammy; I was engulfed by a white fog that had risen off the swamp to hide the world in a numb blank swath. Despite the chill I was sweating.
I was on fire; I had a fever, bad. To add to the fun the dope they’d been pumping into me at the hospital had worn off, and my missing eye was really kicking up a fuss; the pain was the worst I’d felt since it had been blown out my skull.
I rose to hands and knees, swaying like a sickly dog as I coughed again and again, each cough a deep, gluey, rattling boom. I finally convulsed up a thick wad of chunky green phlegm, spat it onto the ground in front of me, and studied the gross little puddle clinically from a few inches above. I was in bad shape here.
I got to my feet and commenced shambling slowly through the fog, the swamp water slopping up next to the muddy path I followed. Behind me the hospital bulked up to darken the haze. As long as I was headed away from it, I was going in the right direction.
I hit a path leading uphill away from the marsh and turned that way, toiling up a slight incline that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to in better circumstances. Right then it felt like Mount Everest, and I found it harder and harder to breathe with every step. I felt like I was drowning with each labored rattling breath. My legs were rubbery stilts, stretching an infinite distance from my whirling head to the teetering ground below.
At the top of the path was a sidewalk on an empty street. The fog was thinner here but it still prevented me from seeing more than maybe twenty-five yards in any direction.
Memory failed me; my thoughts were less and less coherent. I had no idea where in Stagger Bay I was.
At random, I turned left and continued slumping along. The further I got from the marsh the thinner the fog got, until it finally disappeared.
I was on a wide street, brand new – an avenue, really. It looked out of place in this uninhabited corner. Both sides of the road were bulldozed and graded flat in preparation for construction, the lots all laid out. Surveyor’s stakes were everywhere, connected by string and fluttering with orange plastic ribbons. Cement sidewalks and curbs were poured and cured – inlets to what would be courts and cul-de-sacs broke the lonely curbing at architecturally appropriate intervals; concrete curves and spirals led off to ghost houses yet to be constructed.
I passed a bulldozer and grader parked next to a prefab contractor’s hut on concrete blocks. The wide avenue teed into a pot-holed cross street leading to my left, into a lurking cluster of identical bungalows, all of them in need of a paint job.
Now I recognized where I was: I’d stumbled my way straight to the Gardens. It was a jarring contrast between those run-down hovels and the pristine blank area I was passing through.
This was the erstwhile home of a man I’d gotten murdered at the school. Wayne, I recalled the Chief saying – his name had been Wayne. I always figured that, at a minimum, you should at least remember the names of people who die because of you.
Chapter 18
I’d always felt calling this neighborhood the Gardens had been somebody’s idea of a bad joke: a ramshackle cluster of one-bedrooms situated in a lowlands next to a swamp behind the ass-end of a hospital was not my idea of a scenic locale.
The Gardens weren’t projects; they weren’t part of any official government housing authority. They were originally little shacks built by some timber baron to house his bachelor loggers. Over time, one slum lord or another had pimped the Gardens’ hovels to whatever people were currently too poor to afford living anywhere else.
The Gardens had always been home for the few black families in Stagger Bay – people who’d been living in this white bread rural community for generations without attaining jobs paying enough to buy property of their own. While the Gardens couldn’t hold a candle to the strife and violence of any Bay Area housing project, it was like a small unofficial hick replica of one.
The Gardens also housed several extended Hmong and Lao clans out of Southeast Asia brought over to the U.S. for services rendered in Viet Nam, and then relocated from the bigger cities to a place where their government sponsors hoped they’d be better able to assimilate. Despite the Hmong being mountain folk themselves, I’d always figured the philosophy behind the move had probably been more ‘out of sight, out of mind.’
Because of the welfare influx, however, the people of the Gardens were all races: black, white, Mexican, Asian -a low-rent Rainbow Coalition. It was still the kind of neighborhood where strangers stick out and residents take immediate note of them, though – you needed a Pass here.
I staggered into the Gardens proper, walking molasses-slow down the middle of the street that was the only way in or out for vehicles. Women were cleaning their narrow porches, and folks sat on what passed for stoops.
