I put my hand over his, joints bulky as pecans beneath my palm, and bore down. When he tried to pull away, for a moment I bore down still harder, then let him withdraw.
“Maybe I could buy you a drink,” I said. “Several drinks.”
Cage door left open, free at last, free at last, his eyes came back to me.
“Okay. Tha’d be all right.”
“Canadian Club and 7-Up, right?”
“Sweet…. Don’t worry, man. I saw your posse, I ain’t going nowhere. They step back long enough to let me have a piss, you think?”
“Absolutely. Nod to Cerberus as you go by, guy in the yellow shirt. Best keep your distance, though. He recently got shot. It’s made him edgy.”
“I hear you.” He started off towards the back as Don and I exchanged glances. I snagged a CC-and-7 and a brandy at the bar, waited for Terence back at the table.
“Alouette says hello,” I told him, pushing the drink his way.
He picked it up and took a long pull. “Damn that’s good. Guess I’m screwed, huh?”
“Sure looks that way.”
“So how’d you find me?”
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged.
We’d flagged his name, along with others, on the list of employees sent us by Dr. Ball. He’d been an orderly at the psychiatric facility in Fort Worth, assigned for the most part (a call to Dr. Ball’s Miss Eddington disclosed) to back wards, when Tony Sinclair was there, and left shortly thereafter. Over the next several years, as Rick was able to track, his name showed up on rosters at half a dozen or more facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Now he worked at a geriatric hospital here in the city. Most human resources records are elliptical, Rick said, and in a kind of code, but it isn’t a hard code to read, and what it comes down to is that Terence had started getting too close to his patients, identifying with them, claiming communication and levels of interaction no one else ever witnessed.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“I’m willing to believe that.”
I’d never drunk Courvoisier from a jelly glass before. Aroma and taste of the brandy coloring my world, smoothing it, pulling things together as it always does, I told him who I was. Told him about LaVerne and our life together, how I’d gone looking for Alouette and found her up in Mississippi with her baby. How after the baby died, I brought her home. How she’d stayed around a while, left, and years later returned.
“She was on the streets, then.”
I nodded. “You didn’t know much about her.”
“No. I didn’t.” He looked off again, nothing histrionic about it this time, and for some moments grew silent. “I thought I was helping. I was trying to.”
I got us new drinks at the bar. Terence sampled his and said, “I was on the street myself till I was nineteen, twenty. Starting when I was, I don’t know, ten? eleven?”
“What happened to your parents?”
He shrugged. “They died, maybe. Or I ran off. I don’t remember much of anything before being on the streets, really. Seems like I was always out there. I learned everything I know from people I met-how to get along, how to find food, where to sleep. I’d watch them, copy what they did. Got older, I started wondering if there was a me somewhere in there. Maybe I was just this pasteup, this artificial thing. A bad copy, you know?”
All signs being that our boy wasn’t going to bolt or attack, Don and Santos came in from the field.
“You gonna be okay here, Griffin?” Santos said.
I nodded.
“Then I better get back to the work the citizens pay me for.”
“I’m grabbing breakfast. You want anything, Lew?” Don asked. He started off.
“Captain …” Santos said.
“Yeah?”
“Dinner, man. That rain check you’ve been holding has to be faded out by now. My wife’s a patient woman, but you put it off much longer she’s likely to turn up at your door. One thing you don’t want’s a pissed-off Cuban coming round. I ever tell you about the time her father ran into Lee Harvey Oswald on the street handing out communist pamphlets?”
“I’ll check with Jeanette, give you a call.”
Santos nodded to Don, then to me. He headed for the door, Red Sea of patrons parting before him.
“Every few months,” Terence went on, “I’d get scooped up off the streets and sent to some holding center, or farmed out to foster homes. I’d escape-one time, I crawled out through holes knocked in old walls to make room for air-conditioning, another time I hid in barrels of garbage-or more often I’d just walk away.
“Then late one afternoon I ran smack into a wall I couldn’t get through or around. Don’t think I didn’t try. But instead of packing me off upstate or exiling me to some godawful suburb, Judge Branning took me home with him. The house was filled with kids, three or four of them his own (I was never sure how many or which), the rest a mixture of neighborhood kids, other kids hooked up with one or the other for schoolwork or projects, and kids who’d come through his court and still dropped by from time to time.
“I wasn’t a kid, of course, and I made sure they all knew that. Way I walked, talked, way I kept myself apart from the rest. I’d been on my own a long time. Late that night, the judge found me out on the porch. Everyone else was either gone or in bed. I was sitting there with my feet hanging off. He’d had a few drinks by then-Judge loved his bourbon-and his speech was a little slurred.
“‘Don’t do what most of us do, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t get along towards the end of your life, look around you, and realize you’ve wasted it.’
“That’s all he said. We sat there, him on the big swing, me on the floor by the edge. A shooting star sliced through the sky. Cars and trucks passed by on the street, heavier traffic out on the interstate. ‘How you figure I can get ’round that?’ I asked him. ‘I been thinkin’ on it,’ he said. ‘I still am.’
“Next morning he took me down to the local hospital. Not to the employment office, but right on into the hospital administrator’s. ‘Got a good man here,’ he said after he’d introduced us, ‘who needs good work.’ Administrator looked me over. ‘Well, I don’t know about good,’ he said, ‘but we sure enough got hard work needs doing. Good might come later.’ Judge looked over at me: ‘What you think?’ ‘I reckon that should do for now,’ I told them.”
Don rejoined us bearing a plate of eggs, sausage, home fries and toast aswim in grease.
“Yum.”
“Get your own.”
“One way or another,” Terence said, “I been at it ever since. Felt like I was doing something that mattered, you know? Not just moving papers around, trying to sell people something they don’t need.” I nodded.
“Funny thing can happen to people who work health care for a long time. I don’t know, maybe they just see too much, reach some kind of limit. Or have to protect themselves. But they lose sight of what it’s all about, stop feeling anything for those they’re taking care of. Not hard to see how that might happen, but with me it was just the opposite. More time I spent doing the work, the more I felt for those I was caring for, the more I wanted to do for them. Taking care of their basic needs, medical needs, just being there, wasn’t enough anymore.”
“Danny Eskew, for instance.”
“Right. You know what it’s like to be rejected by your family, cast off like old clothing, furniture that clashes with new curtains? He was the man in the iron mask, shut away for life from everything human. Sitting there unable to feed himself, messing himself as often as not, staring at walls and waiting-with nothing to wait for. Meanwhile there’s this family elsewhere, this half-sister his father absolutely adores. Danny knew all that. How do you think it made him feel?”