The phone rang. She never turned off the phone during our sessions and I guess she didn’t turn it off during anyone else’s sessions either. She had too much curiosity to turn off her connection to anyone who wanted to confess or try to sell her something.
“Yes, I’ll take it,” she told the caller after listening for a few seconds.
She hung up.
“I’m going to give you a conundrum, an ethical dilemma, a moral puzzle,” she said. “With that call, I just paid to become beneficiary of a life insurance policy for a ninety-one-year-old man. He gets paid with my cash offer immediately. I double or triple my investment when he dies, providing he dies before I do and, given my age, while the odds are in my favor, I stand some chance of losing. I have six such policies. What do you think?”
“Do you meet these people?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” she said, sitting back and folding her hands.
“Life insurance is gambling on beating or forestalling death,” I said.
“Precisely, Lewis. Still?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”
“No, it doesn’t, but why not? Does it challenge God or the gods who might decide to strike you down instead of the person from whose death you would profit?”
Her eyes were dancing. We were getting somewhere or going somewhere. She leaned forward.
“I lied, Lewis,” she said. “I didn’t buy life insurance for a dying man. I told my stockbroker to go ahead and buy pork belly futures. I’m betting on people who might profit from the slaughter of pigs.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Your opinion of me faltered for a moment,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But it’s all right if I profit from the death of pigs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We bet against death every day,” she said. “But it is taboo to bet for death. We don’t want to make those gods angry even if they exist only in our minds.”
“Someone may be trying to kill me,” I said.
“This has happened before.”
“Yes.”
“You invite it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You gamble with your life.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“And the irony is that you keep winning.”
“I don’t want to die anymore,” I said.
“I know. But you haven’t decided what to do about staying alive.”
“I don’t want anyone else I know to die.”
“But they all will,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the clock on the wall.
“Some of them have.”
“Catherine,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The world is not perpetually sad in spite of the fact that the ones we love will all die,” Ann said.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“Time to stop. Next time, I hear your first lines.”
She clapped her hands and rose. Her fingers were thin and the backs of her hands freckled with age. The wedding ring she wore looked too large, as if it would fall off.
I got up and put my Cubs cap back on my head. We faced each other for a moment. She seemed to be trying to convey some question with the tilt of her head and a few seconds of silence. I felt the answer but had no words for it. I nodded to show that I had at least a glint of understanding. I got twenty dollars out of my wallet and handed it to her.
When I stepped out into the sun, the homeless man was still on the bench squinting out at the setting sun. He had finished his coffee and biscotti, and his arms were spread out, draped over the bench. He was at home. He scratched his belly. I sat beside him and looked at the boats bobbing in the water. He didn’t acknowledge my presence.
“You have a favorite first line from a book?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What is it?”
“‘Kelsey Yarborough hated grits with salt but he ate them anyway because his mother told him it was good for him.’”
“What’s the book?” I said, writing the line on one of my cards. I had a neat little packet of them now.
“ Kelsey Plays the Blues.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Kelsey Yarborough.”
I looked at him, but he was too busy looking toward the sun. I thought I knew the answer to the unstated question, but I said nothing.
He helped me out by saying, “Me. I’m Kelsey Yarborough.” He pointed a thumb at his chest.
“You wrote a book?”
“Hell no,” he said. “I wrote the first line of a book. “The rest of the book’s in my head and it’s never gonna come out. I wrote the music for the first notes of a song. That ain’t never gonna come out either. You know why?”
“No.”
“Because,” he said, tilting his head up so he could catch the dwindling warmth of the setting sun. “Got no creative juice. Got no interest. Now I got a question for you, but I don’t want no answer. My time’s too precious to spend getting involved.”
“The question?”
“Who is in that car comin’ this way down the block. Been circling ever since you went into the doctor’s office.”
I looked down the street. There was a dark Buick of unknown age moving slowly in our direction. When it got close enough, I could see that its windows were tinted and dark.
The passenger side window facing us came down slightly and the car stopped about fifteen feet in front of us.
“Get down,” I said, going to the pavement prone and scurrying under the bench.
Kelsey didn’t move other than to look down at me. The two shots came in rapid succession. Both seemed to whiz precariously close to Kelsey.
Then the car sped away with a screech. I turned my head to catch the license plate number. I think it was one of the save-the-manatee plates, or tags, as they call them in Florida. It began with the letters C and X. The rest was obscured by dirt.
I slid out from under the bench, picked up my hat, dusted it, and then wiped away the worst of the garbage that covered the front of my shirt and jeans.
“That was for you,” he said. “Only reason anyone wanting to be shooting me is because I’m a black man and a homeless eyesore. More likely the message was for you.”
“It was,” I said, putting on my cap.
I left him sitting on the bench and moved down the street to my Saturn. There was a folded sheet of notebook paper, the kind with ragged edges and punched holes. I retrieved the note. It read:
What Part of Stop Don’t You Understand?
Would you understand a death march band?
Listen to the distant Orleans clarinet.
Turn away. There’s still time yet.
It was written in a cursive script you don’t often see anymore.
I had learned something in my session with Ann. I tried to figure it out as I drove, but I was distracted by the background voice on a talk radio station. The host, who had a New York accent, wanted callers to tell him what they thought about bombing Iran and sending troops if Iran continued to defy the United States and continued their race to build a nuclear weapon.
The car from which someone had shot at me was not the one Greg Legerman had driven to pick up Winn Graeme. The shots that had been fired at me a few minutes earlier had not come from a pellet gun, but from something with real bullets. Either Greg had another car and a more impressive gun, or this was a new shooter.
About seven or eight minutes later I was parked outside the Texas Bar and Grill on Second Street. I was calm with a this-isn’t-real calm. My hands didn’t tremble. I didn’t weep.
When I stepped through the door of the Texas, Big Ed was behind the bar. He nodded at me and adjusted his handlebar mustache. Guns of the old West hung on the walls, and the smell of beer and grilled half-pound burgers and onions perfumed the air. Around eight round wooden tables people, almost all men, were having a heavy snack before heading home for healthy dinners.
“Ames here?” I asked Big Ed.
“Back in his room,” Big Ed said, nodding over his left shoulder.
Ed was a New Englander who loved old Westerns and would have worshiped Lilly Langtree were she to return in ghostly form.
“You know Wild Bill Hickok wasn’t holding aces and eights when he died? Bartender made it up. No one knows what he had. Grown men still feel a little panic when they look down at the dead man’s hand in a game of poker.”