Between the Bridge and the River (28 page)

But Claudette would not back down. She was stronger and fiercer than any hostile lawyer he had faced in a Scottish courtroom; also she said the battle was not only for him, it was for her.

“Death has always snuck up on me and taken what I love in a surprise attack. This time I can see him coming and I will do battle with him. I will not ever back down from the son of a bitch!”

George fell in love with her again.

“I can’t,” he said.

“You don’t have to. I can,” she said. And she took out her cell phone.

Alain Pantelic was the preeminent cancer specialist in Europe. He had finally stopped treating individual patients about seven years ago and devoted his time to research against his hated enemy.

In quiet moments, away from work or colleagues, he gave cancer a personality. He saw it as a soulless civil servant who wouldn’t bend the rules for a child or someone who had extenuating circumstances, and he loathed it for that.

He never talked to anyone about this; his colleagues and his wife, also a doctor, would have considered it fanciful and frivolous, so he attacked his foe in his quiet, detached, methodical way. He was as fearsome a warrior as anyone had ever faced, and every now and again, he felt he had the bastard on the ropes.

But today was not one of those days.

He had agreed to talk to George as a favor to Claudette, whom he had known for years—Guillame had been one of his best friends, the two men had grown up together. He had been almost as crushed as she was when he died.

She called him from the restaurant and he was in his office, only a few blocks away, so they went straight over. He had a conversation with George, discussing the diagnosis that had been made at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. Alain said they had excellent doctors there—very up on the latest techniques and innovations. They had to be—Scotland has the highest rate of cancer per capita in Western Europe.

Alain said some of the most exciting work in the research field was being done at Glasgow University. He got the name of George’s physician and agreed to get in touch with him. He referred George to a doctor in Paris who would perform a duplicate and slightly more extensive set of tests but Alain’s prognosis was the same as George’s. He asked Claudette in French if she would ask George to leave the room.

In English, Claudette said, “Georges, he wants to talk to me alone. Is that okay with you?”

George said it was. He had actually understood the doctor anyway but didn’t want to embarrass him. He seemed very nice. George shook the doctor’s hand and said he would wait for Claudette outside.

Alain told Claudette that if the tests came back the way they had in Glasgow—and he suspected they would—then George was indeed doomed. They just weren’t at the point where they could beat this.

“If I were practicing and he were a patient, I would encourage him to enter treatment immediately, in the attempt to prolong his life. You never know, but if he were my friend, as he is yours, I would tell him to get his affairs in order.”

Claudette nodded grimly. The mad old man in the park flashed through her mind.

“Thank you for doing this,” she said.

“Of course,” said Alain, and they kissed on each cheek before she left.

Claudette got back on her cell and made an appointment for George’s further tests and then booked them two seats on a plane flying to Scotland the following day.

“Why?” said George.

“We have to put your affairs in order,” she said.

He felt a dull pain in the center of his back.

THEY MET VERMONT
at the children’s playground next to the swing bridge. It was deserted this early in the morning but soon the tired mothers would arrive with their tiny insomniacs. Vermont burned a rock and inhaled deeply on the little glass pipe, sucking down the smoke to the core of his being. The effect was wonderful, uplifting and soothing all at the same time. It was as if he had been tightly stretched on the rack and then rescued, the bindings pulling at him had been released and he could relax again.

Heaven.

T-Bo and Fraser watched him.

T-Bo felt slightly guilty. Vermont had been in a treatment center in Delray as part of a court-ordered rehab funded by the Friends of African-American Youth, a humanitarian group supported by local businesses that contributed to the treatment costs of selected young addicts and alcoholics from the projects. They couldn’t help them all; only the U.S. government had that kind of money and they certainly were not going to be spending it on young black junkies. Unless, of course, it was to lock them up.

Vermont had been caught burglarizing a pharmacy and his attorney had pled the junkie defense, although Vermont had been
trying to get cash as much as anything else he could get his hands on. The judge bought it and sent him to the sobriety holiday camp in Delray: If he completed treatment and got a certificate from the center, he would get off with probation, but as it turned out, twenty-eight days without a smoke was just too much for the young man and he had called T-Bo the previous day begging him to bring up some rock. He had lasted fifteen days and it’s not as if he was addicted like those other crazy bastards in the rehab. Just a little rock now and again, Jesus Christ, it wasn’t like he did it every day.

Goddammit, he hadn’t even had any in two weeks. Two weeks!

Shit, it was even legal somewhere in Europe—Holland or something.

Like many people, mostly politicians, Vermont confused the legality of a substance with its addictive properties, forgetting always the biggest killer of all, alcohol, was legal, white, and sanitized for your convenience.

He was a handsome young man—striking light brown eyes with whites that contrasted against his shiny black skin, but as he smoked, the whites of his eyes got redder and he seemed to disappear a little bit.

He offered the little burnt pipe to Fraser, who refused, then T-Bo, who did likewise. He got T-Bo to run through the story again.

“So you stole the ride and the money and took off with the guy you robbed?”

“Pretty much,” said T-Bo.

“Them fuckas gonna shoot you, Dawg.”

“Yeah, that’d be my guess too,” said T-Bo.

Vermont nodded. He was twenty years old but had already seen too many of his friends die.

“What you gonna do?” he said.

“Stay away,” said T-Bo. “I’m gonna drive the Rabbi here to his conference of preachers in Alabama.”

Vermont nodded. “Negro, you’re fuckin crazy.”

T-Bo smiled. So did Vermont. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “They gonna kick me out of this place now anyhow, they test my piss an’ my ass is goin to jail.”

T-Bo looked at Fraser. “That okay with you, Rabbi?”

Fraser smiled and nodded.

“You’re in,” said T-Bo.

Vermont looked at Fraser. “The crazy old Jew in the pattern dress is running things here?”

T-Bo nodded. “He’s a holyman, Vermont. He’s not a Jew. The word
rabbi
means teacher. He taught me that.”

Fraser smiled the bloody gap-tooth grin that made him look even more unhinged.

“I wouldn’t mind being a Jew,” he said. “They make great soup.”

“Whatever,” said Vermont. “You gotta drive me to the rehab, I gotta pick up my shit from my room.”

Fraser put his hand on Vermont’s shoulder, looked him in the eyes, and told him, “I think you would feel better if you didn’t smoke anymore.”

Vermont held Fraser’s stare and suddenly knew the fool was right.

What the fuck was he doing with this crap? He took the pipe and the tiny grip-lock baggy of rocks and put them in the trash can next to the swings.

“Push it right down,” said Fraser. “You don’t want any children picking it up.”

“Yeah, right,” said Vermont, doing as Fraser asked. “Fuckin drag queen has me cleaning the damn park now.”

T-Bo laughed.

Then there were three and they headed to the car.

The redness began to clear from Vermont’s eyes.

Getting out of Delray proved to be slightly more difficult than T-Bo thought it was going to be.

Miracles Treatment Center made its money from insurance companies. They accepted coke addicts, heroin addicts, alcoholics, anorexics, overeaters, degenerate gamblers, sexual deviants, and anyone else who could get their policy to cover the cost of the recovery from whatever flavor of lunacy they were suffering from. Miracles sold
the idea that all addictions were the same and that therefore they all required the same treatment. The center made no distinction between anorexics or alcoholics or addicts. This is extremely dubious medically (anorexia being an “addiction to not eating” is definitely a stretch) but makes wonderful financial sense.

One size fits all, very cost effective, and Miracles was not a charity, it was a business.

As Vermont snuck out from his room with his little backpack of belongings to meet Fraser and T-Bo, who were parked a block away, he was confronted by another patient, Cherry, a skeletal anorexic who had lost all her stripping work because she grossed out the customers.

Cherry had not slept in two days, she was high on not eating. She was starving. Her body was in an almost constant state of panic. It would not let her sleep; instead, it sent her out to look for food even though she would refuse to eat it. She demanded to know where Vermont was going. He said he was leaving and she said she wanted to go too. She hated it here, they were always talking to her about food, she wasn’t even interested in fucking food.

Vermont said no but she threatened to call the staff, who would in turn call the cops on Vermont because he was under a court order.

They would do that later anyway but if the cops knew he’d been gone for a few hours, they wouldn’t even bother looking for him. It would make everyone’s life a lot easier if he could slip out unnoticed.

He agreed to take Cherry to the car and let the others decide.

“No,” said T-Bo.

“Yes,” said Fraser.

She got in the back next to Vermont. She didn’t take up much room.

Before they could get out of town, they had to get past the road-works that are a constant fixture on I-95 in Florida. By this time, the morning rush hour had started and they got stuck sitting in traffic.

Fraser noticed a Hooters restaurant at the side of the road. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

“We should get on the road first,” said T-Bo. “We got a long way to go.”

But Fraser would have none of it. “You can buy us breakfast, T-Bo. You can use some of the money you stole from me,” he said happily.

T-Bo sheepishly turned into the parking lot.

The three men got out but Cherry sat in the car.

“I’ll wait here,” she said, hugging herself.

Fraser put his hand on her cheek. She had a soft light beard beginning to grow. Her body, in an attempt to compensate for the lack of fat, was frantically growing hair to keep her temperature stable.

“You look thin, Cherry, you must be hungry,” he said.

She looked at him for a second. Vermont waited for Fraser to receive the torrent of abuse but to his surprise Cherry suddenly said, “You know, when I think about it, I am fucking starving.”

And she got out of the car too.

Hooters girls, the waiting staff in Hooters restaurants, wear bright-orange hot pants and tight white T-shirts. It’s a great marketing tool to entice men, to suggest their food will be served to them by a sexy, scantily clad girl, but most times when a man walked into a Hooters he wished the girls were wearing more. The aesthetic requirements to be a Hooters girl who actually waited on tables as opposed to a Hooters girl who appeared in Hooters advertising were very different.

Hooters had a bit of a problem living up to its promise but many folks do and they shouldn’t be judged harshly for that. What they should be judged harshly for is their terrible food; it is both tasteless and fried, which is almost impossible. The Hooters girls are the stars and the draw of the restaurants, and the management prefer it if everyone else stay in the background.

Fraser and his disciples had been placed in an out-of-the-way corner booth by the manager, who was not a girl at all but a young Texan Reserve Marine named Chad Butterworth.

Chad was a wiry martinet who was very tough on the girls. He treated them as if they were a battalion in a combat zone, and on some nights the girls would have been inclined to agree with that perspective.

After he finished his pancake breakfast, Fraser sipped his coffee and stared out the window at a pigeon that was trying to retrieve a piece of gum that had been stuck to the sidewalk. Every time the bird thought it had a morsel, the gum snapped back cruelly and the pigeon looked around as if it didn’t want anyone to see it make a fool of itself.

Whenever the pigeon looked in Fraser’s direction he pretended to be looking at something else so as not to embarrass it.

T-Bo and Vermont watched Cherry finish her second breakfast. She wiped her toast on the plate to scoop up the remains of her fried eggs. When she was done she sat back in her chair and burped.

“I think she’s cured,” said T-Bo.

“That’s the most I’ve seen her eat. If I added up all the food I ever seen her eat—and I sit next to her in the dining hall—I still never get half of what she just ate.”

“I was hungry,” said Cherry.

“You go to the bathroom now and barf it up, that your deal?” asked T-Bo.

“Don’t be gross,” said Cherry. She let out a sigh and unbuckled her belt. It didn’t look as if she had any plans to go anywhere unless she was carried.

“It’s a miracle,” said Vermont.

“It’s the Rabbi,” said T-Bo. “That makes three.”

“How come?” Vermont asked. “What else he do?”

“He got her to eat, he got you to put down the crack pipe, and . . .” T-Bo turned and looked at Fraser.

Fraser smiled at him and nodded encouragingly.

“He got me to admit I’m gay.”

Vermont raised his eyebrows. “How’d he do that?”

“You knew?” said T-Bo.

“Nigger, everybody knew but you. I even think you knew, you just wasn’t listenin.”

When they got in the car to leave, Cherry sat in the back next to Fraser and fell asleep almost instantly. Vermont sat up front next to T-Bo to prove he wasn’t homophobic, although he was at pains to point out he was not gay himself.