“You look like you seen a ghost,” said my father.
“Well, you woke up,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Lousy. I’m hungry. Go get me a candy bar, why don’t you?”
“You’re not allowed to eat.”
“The hell with their rules.”
“You’re having your operation tomorrow.”
“The hell with their operation.”
“Your operation. How do you feel about it?”
“All of a sudden you care about my feelings? Well, this is what I’m feeling, I’m feeling hunger.”
“I heard the doctor came in and spoke to you.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you think?”
“Seems to know what goes where.”
“So you’re okay with the surgeon.”
“One can kill me as well as the next.”
“I thought you might, you know, not be thrilled that the surgeon is a woman.”
He let out a bark. “For the whole of my life, women been slicing me up and taking out pieces. Why should this be any different?”
“Well,” I said, patting his hand and starting to stand up. “You need your sleep.”
“What, you in a hurry?”
“No.”
“You look nervous, you got a date tonight?”
“No.”
“With that doctor of yours?”
“We’re just friends.”
“So where are you off to?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then don’t go so fast. I’m getting cut on tomorrow. Don’t go.”
“All right, Dad.”
“All right, then.”
“So maybe we can talk,” I said.
“Don’t get carried away.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations?”
“Screw off,” said my father.
“Okay.”
“You want to know, really?”
“Sure.”
“They’re the same they been every day of my life. To make it past tomorrow.”
I sat and thought on that for a moment. “By that standard, at least,” I said, “your life has been a roaring success.”
He laughed at that, my dad, and I laughed with him. We laughed together, laughed at the strange and wondrous fact that he was still here, sitting with his son, with enough breath in his lungs to be able to laugh. In the middle of it I thought back and wondered when was the last time I laughed with my father. I couldn’t remember. We never had anything to laugh at before, but now we did. He was still alive.
“So go on with the story,” I said, when our laughter had subsided and his disposition returned to his natural state of grump.
“I told it,” he said. “It’s over.”
“No, it isn’t. You were there, in your apartment, with the girl’s head on your chest and the box of coins sitting on the bureau. What happened the next morning?”
“She woke up,” he said.
“Go on.”
“She woke up, she stretched, she sat up in the bed.”
She wakes up, she stretches, she sits up in the bed and the blanket falls off her chest and her shoulders are smooth, her breasts are free, her smile, when she spies him sitting in the chair across the room, is iridescent. And her eyes, her wide moist eyes are as innocent as the morning. She is the very vision of loveliness, she is the very vision of perfection, she is all he ever wanted. Yet as she wakes up and stretches and sits up, as the blanket falls to reveal her proud breasts, a shiver goes through him.
Come to bed, she says, her voice still slow with sleep.
No, he says.
Then let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go first, Jesse? Anywhere but here. New York. Chicago. Hollywood. Someplace we can be somebody.
We can’t go anywhere, he says, his voice flat. There’s a man dead. He is connected to you, and through you to me. If we leave they will know it was us.
But then let’s buy something. We can sell one of the coins and buy something marvelous, something we could only dream about before.
We can’t buy anything, he says. If we buy anything they will know it was us.
She pouts, sticks out her pretty lower lip, then bites it. Okay, she says. Maybe you’re right, for now. But let’s just look at what we have.
She climbs out of the bed, naked, her legs strong, her hips, the pillow of her belly, her breasts rising as she raises her arms over her head to stretch some more.
Let’s just look at what we have and dream about the future, she says. Dream about all the things we’ll buy. She moves about the apartment with the excitement of a schoolgirl, searching. Where are they, Jesse? she says. The coins. Where are they? And why are you dressed already?
I’ve been out, he says.
Where?
Just out.
And the coins. Where are the coins?
Gone.
What did you do? she says, her voice rising. What the hell did you do?
I buried them.
Dig them up.
I can’t.
They’re mine, she shrieks.
No, they’re not. They’re his. If they link them to us they will know what we did. If they link them to us we will go to jail. Separate jails.
You had no right.
It was the only thing to do, he says. The only way.
Where are they?
I don’t know.
Dig them up.
I didn’t make a map. They could be anywhere.
Without those coins you have nothing. You are nothing. You cut lawns for a living for God’s sake.
There’s no crime in that.
Get them back.
This is the only way, he says.
Where’s the shovel?
Remember? Together forever?
Don’t threaten me, you bastard. Where’s the damn shovel?
They’re gone.
Get them back. Get them back. Get them.
“What could I say?” said my father, in his hospital bed, the night before they were going to slice open his chest and hack out pieces of his lung. “What could I do? I turned away. Closed my eyes. And what did I see? You know what I saw. I saw her, but she wasn’t naked, she wasn’t standing over me, bent in anger, shouting at me, hitting me on the shoulders, the neck, the chest. I saw her, and she was dressed in white, and she was walking down South Street, her pleated skirt swaying with every step, walking down South Street, walking to me.”
I stayed until they gave him the shot. He barely grimaced as the needle slipped into his flesh. I stayed until the shot took effect, and his eyes widened and then closed and the tremor in his hand eased and he was overtaken with blessed sleep. It was almost as good, that shot, as his Iron City, and after he fell asleep I stayed for a while longer. Visiting hours were long gone, but they didn’t disturb us as I stayed with my sleeping father the night before the operation he would most likely not survive. It was coming to a head, the whole Gordian knot Joey Parma had laid at my feet, it would all come to a head very soon, but I waited a moment more as my father lay peacefully now in his bed, his arms once again at his sides. I waited with him as the hour grew late and the night deepened and quiet fell hard over that room.
My pocket started shaking, like an electric toothbrush gone off.
“She’s on the move,” said Skink. “Caught a cab. I’m following.”
“Probably going home to patch things up with her husband.”
“I don’t think so, mate. She’s headed in the wrong direction for that.”
“Which direction?”
“East,” he said. “Toward the river.”
“Of course she is. All right, let me know.”
I stood up and started pacing back and forth in the little room, pacing back and forth until I lost track of time. All I could think about was Beth, pulled out at gunpoint, Mr. Beretta that bastard Colfax had said, pulled out at gunpoint and taken somewhere, probably tied up, probably scared. She was tough, Beth, tougher than I ever could claim to be, but still she certainly was scared. And in danger. And all because I had taken this stupid case, I had decided to find out what happened to Joey Parma, I had started taking things personally. It was my fault, she was my responsibility.