Authors: Howard Owen
“You always do this,” she said, as the nurse came in and told her to keep her voice down or leave.
“You never share. You didn’t share back then, and you’re not sharing now. What’s wrong with you, Willie?”
She seemed near tears, which I partially attributed to the fact that there’s a fetus kicking field goals inside her.
“We could have been so good. We were so good.”
I note that things seem to be working out well for her. Husband, baby, a job doing real lawyering instead of helping corporations screw the rest of us.
She wipes a tear away and tells me I should walk a mile in her shoes.
I tell her I tried that at one of Clara Westbrook’s Halloween costume parties, and it did not go well.
She lets go with a grudging laugh, and we have a special moment, remembering some of the good stuff that made the rest bearable. Truth is, neither one of us was willing to be the gardener, tending to the hard stuff while the other one bloomed like a rose. If I were a better person, the gardener would have been me. I mean, Kate probably will make three times what I do by the time she quits working.
I tell her everything I’ve learned about Finlay Rand’s misadventures. By the time I’m through, she feels as certain as I do that Mr. Gatewood will be breathing the cool, clean air of Monroe Park in the not-too-distant future. Oh, they’ll probably try to hang some kind of bullshit on him, but with Kate and Marcus Green as his lawyers, they would be well-advised to just let the man go and hope he doesn’t sue the police department for too much.
I
N
THE
brief time I have after the funeral before duty calls, I see a familiar but unexpected face in the crowd. There, accompanied by Lydia, is Buck McRae, looking very uncomfortable in a suit and clip-on tie.
Lydia insisted on coming up to Richmond with Buck, probably to keep him out of trouble. Couldn’t keep him away.
I pull Buck to one side and bring him up to speed on yesterday’s festivities at The Diamond.
“So the fella, the one that you said shot me, he’s not going to be doing anybody else any harm?”
I assure Buck that Finlay Rand won’t be doing anyone any harm, now or ever. About the only harm he can impart now is if, either in his current vegetative state or in the aftermath of his much-deserved death, he causes Jimmy Deacon to serve any real jail time.
It’s difficult to see how the world could come down very hard on Jumpin’ Jimmy. Yeah, he took a few extra cuts when he was doing BP on Rand’s head, but I’m sure Marcus Green can make it look like the actions of a man driven by fear and the sight of his good friend (me) in considerable peril. By the time Marcus is through, the jury might vote to build Jimmy a statue on Monument Avenue, maybe a couple of blocks west of the one of Arthur Ashe. Instead of a tennis racket, Jimmy’s statue would be wielding a thirty-three-ounce Louisville Slugger.
Cindy breaks away from the impromptu Hill homecoming, where everybody realizes they haven’t seen each other since the last funeral, and is standing beside me. Buck and Lydia move away, and I turn, not sure what I should say.
I start to speak. She shushes me.
“You look like hell,” she says. I’m sure I do, with my noggin slightly misshapen and my raccoon eyes.
I wait. Nothing I will say right now is going to make this any better. I know Cindy Peroni well enough to understand that whatever she’s decided, she’s decided.
“You let me down,” she says. “I told you I wasn’t going to go through any more pain not of my own making. Didn’t I tell you that?”
I nod. Yes, she did.
Then I feel her take my right hand in her left one.
“I know this is a hard day for you,” she says, “but I had to say that. I didn’t want to just leave it out there and us pretend that we never met, never, well, you know …”
I know. I could promise Cindy that I’ll never let alcohol screw things up again. I could promise that I’ll try really, really hard this time to stop smoking. The other thing I could promise, that it’ll just be me and her forever, would be much easier to keep than the first two.
But I know, and she knows, what promises are worth.
“The crazy thing is, I’m still attracted to you. I still care about you. Maybe, one day when I’m weaker than I am right now, we can try it again. But I don’t know.”
Fair enough. No promises on either side, just a teaspoon of hope.
She squeezes my hand and walks away. I watch to see if she’ll look back. She doesn’t.
I walk over to where Peggy is sitting in a chair, a queen holding court. She’s taken a dope holiday and looks like she could use a hit right now. In a sane world, she’d be able to sit there, toking away, while she told everyone stories about Les. As it is, she seems to be holding up pretty well. She tells them how he was the best thing that ever happened to her (“except for this one,” she says, grabbing me and pulling me to her), how he never seemed to be in a bad mood, how despite the fact that he could have handled any of her other “pissant” husbands and boyfriends “two at a time,” he never even threatened to hurt anyone, no matter how much they provoked him.
“And, after he got, you know, kind of forgetful, he just got more sweet.”
Andi is standing by her and leans down to give her grand-mom a buss on the cheek. For some reason, one of the neighbors has brought a camera, and she wants to take our picture. Hell of a time for that, I’m thinking, but Peggy’s OK with it.
I don’t know if we should be smiling. It seems kind of inappropriate, but Peggy and Andi give it their best shot, so I do the same and hope I don’t break the camera. I wonder what this photo is going to look like and hope it doesn’t wind up on Facebook.
I’ve been carrying the picture of Frannie Fling, née Frances Flynn, around in my wallet since Jumpin’ Jimmy gave it to me. I look at it now. The photograph is getting a little worn around the edges, as if Jimmy might have taken it out once or twice or a few hundred times. Still, you can see the life there, the spark.
You can see how little Dairy Flynn might have been driven to do what he did, become the monster he became, if nature and nurture already were pointing him toward hell. I don’t really believe in pure evil, but I do believe some people fight the varying levels of evil within us a lot harder than others do. I think about how a thoughtless act almost half a century ago has led me to Les Hacker’s funeral today. As the perpetrator of a lifetime of thoughtless acts myself, it is almost too much to bear.
I lean over and give Peggy a hug. Andi walks me to the door, and I give her one, too.
I close the door on what is threatening to turn into the kind of party Les would have wanted everyone to have. I reach for a cigarette.
Silence follows me down the long hall, broken only by my own footsteps.
I have a story to write.