Strong Motion (62 page)

She was lying on her side at the bottom of the stoop of number 7. Her legs were tucked up and her wrists were crossed across her chest and there was blood soaking through her jeans above one knee and blood covering the forearm she had pressed to her stomach. The kids across the street had already called 911 and were standing right behind Howard, giving him conflicting and specious pieces of advice. Renée was producing the lonely, high-pitched, unaffected moans of a really sick child. Her face was the color of cold bacon grease sweating in a humid room. She said
Howard
and
Get somebody
and
It hurts, it hurts
. Then she stopped speaking and her breath rasped loudly in her windpipe and the paramedics came and dislodged Howard, the broad male backs in white shirts dwarfing the little package of dwindling female life as they tried to sort her out. They gave her oxygen through her nose and attached her to a portable monitor. They exchanged data orally, blood pressure 80/50, pulse 120, respirations 36. A lobed tide of blood was spreading across the concrete, seeming to boil as the raindrops fell. Questions: Could she breathe? Did she have feeling in her legs? Where did it hurt? She blinked and winced as the rain fell in her eyes. In a timid voice, as if daring to disturb them only because it seemed important, she asked them if she was going to die. A white shirt said, “You’ll be OK.” He said, “You got the Ringer’s?” While the police took names and addresses from Howard, Renée was strapped into the ambulance with wide-bore IVs in both her arms. Her T-shirt and bra and one pants leg had been cut away, and a thick square of gauze beneath her right breast was soaking up her blood. Howard sat with his knees nearly in his face and his hand on her chilled wet forehead as the siren came on and surged hopefully upward in pitch and volume. The clear plastic tubes wagged with the undulations and irregularities in Highland Avenue. A white shirt said, “Renée, you’re doing great.” But her teeth were chattering and she didn’t answer.

“You know what they do?” Howard said. He rebounded from a blue oblong and checked Louis for a reaction. “They take a tube, got a sharp point. They stab it through the ribs. She’s awake, they stab it right through. Then they start putting suction. I heard her when they did it. Police was there, we heard it.”

He checked again for Louis’s reaction. Louis’s face was no longer flushed from the run, but he was sweatier than ever. He panted and followed Howard fearfully with his eyes as if Howard had been physically torturing him. He said, “Do you hate her?”

“They take her surgery,” Howard said.

“I asked: Do you hate her?”

Howard scrunched up his face. “What you think?”

Louis couldn’t bear to look at him, couldn’t bear to hear another of his short, croaking sentences. “I wish you didn’t exist,” he said.

“They started six-thirty,” Howard said.

Louis put his fingers behind his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A repulsive field drove him toward the automatic doors, but when he passed Howard he swung around and shoved both his fists into his ribs, giving him a shove intended to land him on his back. But there was a lot of inertia to Howard. He staggered and caught himself from falling just as Louis charged in and met, quite unexpectedly, a wicked slap across his left cheek followed by another across his right. “Uh!” he said, swinging blindly as his glasses sailed away. Howard had a height advantage. He was able to keep shoving Louis in the head and collarbone and shoulders, knocking him back each time he charged, retreating in a circle around a cluster of blue oblongs. “Stop fighting me,” he said in a crabby, priggish bark. “Stop fighting me.” Louis grabbed his shirt and landed several solid jabs to his gut. Howard whaled away at his cheeks with his open hands, but here Louis’s superior tolerance of pain came into play, as he withstood the increasingly earnest slaps and managed to topple Howard into an oblong and then onto his back and, grunting with exertion, pinned Howard’s arms with his knees and began to pummel his cheeks and nose and ears and eyes but did not pay enough attention to the pinned arms, one of which worked free and delivered a ringing blow to the side of his head, which was followed by a frightening and irresistible loss of breath as a third party, shouting “What the
hell
are you doing?” got a choke hold on him and dragged him off Howard, raising him onto his toes and threatening to raise him higher before he finally went limp.

“What the
hell
are you doing? There’s sick people here, there’s hurt people here. Look what you done to this fella. You oughtta die with shame doing a thing like that here.”

Howard’s nose was like a decanter, well behaved while he was on his back but pouring a stream of blood onto the carpeting as soon as he sat up.

“You still got that devil in you? Or you gonna leave off now?”

“It’s OK,” Louis gasped, limp.

“Sheesh,” said his captor, releasing him and dropping to his knees by Howard. He shook open a handkerchief and applied it to the bleeding nose. “Pinch it, pinch it.”

Louis straightened the frames of his glasses, which were brand-new and had cost him most of the cash his father had given him when he left Evanston. Putting them on, he confirmed that the man who’d been choking him was Philip Stites. Drops of Howard’s blood had fallen on the minister’s khaki pants. He looked up at Louis reproachfully and then he did a double take, his expression softening as he squinted through his tortoiseshells, trying to place him.

“News with a Twist?” Louis said.

“Ah. The Antichrist. You find yourself another job?”

“Nope.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that,” Stites said glibly, losing interest. He stood up and smoothed back his corn-silk hair. “Neither of you wouldn’t happen to be here to see how Renée Seitchek’s doing?”

Neither Louis nor Howard answered. Howard was reclining against an oblong and squeezing his nose as if something stank here. He raised his narrowed, red eyes and looked at Louis with the intimacy shared by lovers and others who grapple on the floor.

“What’s it to you?” Louis said to Stites.

“I take it that’s a yes?”

“Take it however you want,” Louis said. “What’s it to you?”

“Well. I guess that’s a fair enough question. I can tell you I saw Renée a couple nights back, and I saw her today, and I think it’s a terrible thing what’s happened. And I want to pray for her. And I want to know she’s alive.”

“Ask at the desk.”

“Well now.” Like a bully who’d scented a weakling, Stites awakened fully to Louis’s presence. He approached him with the same prowling, intent, and possibly myopic tilting of head that Louis himself assumed when he felt he had a moral edge on someone. “You must be the boyfriend.”

“You can talk,” Louis said. “But I don’t have to listen.”

“You must be the boyfriend she told me about on Monday, and the one she told the world about today.”

Louis blanched a little, but held his ground. “Today,” he said. “You mean—when you guys were calling her a murderer.”

“On Monday,” Stites raising his voice, “when she told me there was a man who’d hurt her so bad she didn’t want to live anymore. And today when she said there was a man she was in love with and wanted to marry and have children with, and I didn’t see any man there with her. And I reckon you’re the so-called man. Aren’t you.”

Louis looked into the minister’s light-soaped, accusing tortoiseshells. “You can’t make me feel guiltier than I already do.”

“Your guilt is your business, Mr. Antichrist. I’m just telling you why I’m here.”

The so-called man whom Renée had been in love with and had wanted to have children with turned away from Stites. Conscious of an impulse to redeem himself in the minister’s eyes, he crouched by Howard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Howard gave him another red, intimate look and said nothing. Stites had disappeared up the corridor. Louis found him sitting on a sofa in a tiny ICU waiting room with a television mounted on the ceiling. “What did she say about me?” he said from the doorway.

Stites didn’t take his eyes off the television. “I told you what she said.”

“Where’d you see her?”

“Chelsea.”

“She wanted you to call your people off her.”

“That’s what she came for, sure. But that’s not why she stayed.”

“She stayed?”

Stites smiled at the television. “What’s it to you?”

Louis looked at the floor. Not for the first time, he felt he was out of his depth in loving Renée.

“Jody batting .355 over the last eight games,” said the television. “He’s four for his last nine.”

“She stayed, we talked,” Stites said. “Then she left. Where were you?”

“I left her. I hurt her.”

“And now she’s shot and you decide you feel bad about it.”

“That’s not true.”

“What’s your name?”

“Louis.”

“Louis,” Stites spread his arms out on the top of the sofa and put his feet up on a coffee table, “I ain’t your rival. I’ll tell you frankly, I thought a lot of her. But she wasn’t interested in me as a man. She was totally faithful to you. I don’t know about if you didn’t exist. But you do exist, so.”

“If I didn’t exist you’d have to explain to her why one of your people shot her in the back because she had an abortion.”

“That was not a pro-life person,” Stites said positively, to the television screen, where the Red Sox batter was trying to lay down a bunt.

“‘An eye for an eye’?”

“I don’t believe it,” Stites said. “I flat-out don’t believe it. That’s not how we work, even the worst of us. I’d frankly sooner believe it was you.”

“Appreciate it.”

“The only question is, who else is gonna do a thing like that? You got any idea at all?”

Louis didn’t answer. On the TV screen a Volvo sedan was crashing into a cinder-block wall, and a plastic married couple and their bald plastic children, not dead, not even scratched, were settling back comfortably into their seats.

“What’s she like?” Stites asked him. “Day to day?”

“I don’t know. Neurotic, self-absorbed, insecure. Kind of mean. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor.” He frowned. “She’s a good scientist. A good cook. She doesn’t do anything without thinking about it. She’s very sexy too, somehow.”

“A good cook, huh? What kinds of things she cook?”

“Vegetables. Pasta. Fish. She doesn’t eat the higher vertebrates.”

Out in the Sahara, two young men dying of thirst were rescued by a Budweiser truck carrying beautiful girls in swimsuits and tight cutoffs and halter tops. Everybody was drinking product. The girls’ breasts were firm and round and their stomachs flat and hard and their waists narrow in their Silera maillots. Their limbs sweated like cool, intoxicating beer cans. The men flooded sundry cleavages with a fire hose, spanked asses with the hose’s white spray. The cheesecake, drinking product, was losing inhibitions. Forty feet away, on the table in OR #1, a urologist named Dr. Ishimura was sewing up the place in Renée’s body where her right kidney had been, and a surgeon named Dr. Das was vacuuming up her blood.

15

H
E WAS AWAKENED
in the morning by the machine by his bed. His amplified mother was shouting at Eileen about some State Farm policy:
AND I NEED YOUR WORK NUMBER SO
—

“Hello Mom,” he said over a squawk of feedback as he deactivated the machine.

“Louis? Where are you?”

He coughed. “Where do you think?”

“Goodness, yes, that’s a silly question. How—how are you?”

“Well. Apart from the fact that my girlfriend was shot in the back last night and almost died, uh.”

There was a silence. He could hear mid-morning birds chirping on Argilla Road.

“Your girlfriend,” Melanie said.

“You probably saw it on the news. Her name’s Renée. Seitchek. Remember you met her?”

“Your girlfriend. I see.”

“She had an abortion, and somebody shot her. And you know who the father was?”

“Louis, I—”

“It was me.”

“Well, Louis, that’s—that’s very interesting. For you to tell me that. Although according to what I read in the paper she had some uncertainty—”

“She only said that to take all the responsibility.”

“I suppose that could be the case, Louis, although you shouldn’t—”

“She said it because she’s a conscientious person who takes responsibility for everything she does.”

“Yes, I’m quite familiar with Renée’s conscientiousness.”

He sat up. He swung his bandaged feet to the floor. “What do you mean? Have you been talking to her?”

“As a matter of fact,” Melanie said, “I saw her the weekend before last, and then again last week. But that’s not what’s important now.”

“You saw her?”

“What’s important is that she recover. That’s what you have to think about.”

“You saw her?”

“Yes, but it is
not important
.”

“My girlfriend is in the hospital and she almost died and you won’t tell me what’s going on?”

“Louis, she gave me some advice.”

“Advice. Advice. She told you to sell your stock.”

There was no reply except for birdsong. The birds might have been perched on his mother’s shoulder, they sounded so close. “She told you to sell your stock,” Louis said. “Right?”