Personal injuries (32 page)

"Close that door. Did I say we're done?"

"No, Judge."

"And come'ere. Right here. Come right here. Now what you mean bout my sister? Between me and my sister. What's that about?"

“Sir?"

"You heard me. Don't give me that dumb ofay look. I

know better than that. What'd you give her?"

Feaver seemed dumbstruck by the implications.

Crowthers repeated the question.

"Five, Judge." "Five dollars?"

"Five hundred. Five hundred for her and two thousand

for you."

"So she gets quarter what I get? And I'm the judge.

Somethin ain right about that."

"Well, I told you, Your Honor. That was just so I could

talk to you. Apologize. That came out of my own pocket." "Well, they any more in that pocket?" There was a discernible gurgle of surprise from Feaver,

but I thought he was in role.

"You know, Judge. I mean, I've got an office. I've got overhead."

"Aw shit. Who you think you talkin to? You think I'm just some boy off a walnut plantation?"

"Oh, God no, Judge."

"Now you come round here, bother me like this, that gotta cost you. Mmm-hmmm," the judge told himself "You go see Judith-you bring her what you brought me before. You hear me?"

"Absolutely."

"And don't ever come talkin this shit to me again. Fact, now that you got me thinkin on it, you bring her what you oughta brought her before."

"Jeez, Judge. Another eight thousand?"

"No, ten. You keep poor-mouthin, gone be twenty-five before I let you outta this damn bathroom. And don't you go whinin to anybody either. I don't want to hear any more about this. I just want this to be one of those unpleasantries everybody resolves ain gone be mentioned again. Come talk this crazy shit to me," said Crowthers to himself. He was worked up. In the outer office, Robbie passed a word with Mrs. Hawkins. Talk about a mix-up! He just called on his cell phone and the client said Carruthers, not Crowthers. Mrs. Hawkins laughed. She knew it all along.

"Judge gets up on himself," she said, "but he's a righteous individual." In a moment, there was another distinct smack, not all that different from the first one. After a momentary qualm, I realized that Evon, with her earpiece, had just given or received a high five from Robbie in the corridor. Stan had risen from his metal seat and, crouched to three-quarters height, actually danced a quick buck-and-wing at the first stoplight. "Outright extortion," he kept repeating.

Yet as the van headed back to the federal building, I couldn't share in the mood. My father was always reviled as a racial agitator because he'd attempted to integrate our county bar in 1957, but despite that, I grew up full of guilt about what had been ingrained in our way of life. I had made the vows, like many other persons of my age, to live in a better world. It had disheartened me to hear Sherman's name from Robbie. But it wasn't hard to believe. Sherm was the grimmest of cynics. And I'd been down the same road only a few years before with my pal Clifton Bering. Clifton was a classmate of Stan's and mine at Easton, the first African American ever to make the
Law Review
. He was charming and gifted, handsome and overjoyed by the great prospects he had in life. His father was a Kindle County cop, and Clifton always had his feet in both camps, at home with civil rights progressives as well as Party figures. He was the councilman from Redhook in the North End and was regarded as a serious candidate to become Mayor when Augie Bolcarro finally died. And then, not long after Sennett's induction as U.S. Attorney, an investigation of corruption in the North End started, and I began hearing Clifton's name. He fell prey to all of today's finest technology. He'd come to a wired hotel room to accept $50,000 to secure a downtown zoning change for what proved to be an FBI front, and he had, in the parlance, barfed all over himself. He had not just taken the money, not merely promised to rig the change, in just those words, but baldly stated that next time he'd appreciate it if there was a girl in the room for afterwards. Then he added the one word that sealed his fate, unpardonable to a jury of any composition: `White,' Clifton had said.

After he was convicted, he asked me to help with the appeal. I went over to the jail, and when I saw him in the orange jumpsuit, I couldn't help myself. I asked the question I had vowed not to: Why? Why, Clifton? Why with all his good fortune, why this? He looked at me solemnly and said,

`That's how it is, that's how it's always been, and it's our turn. It's our turn.'

I knew if I talked to Sherm Crowthers, I'd hear something similar. The tone would be angrier, he'd be more disparaging, telling me I was a fool for believing life would ever be any other way. But in the end his explanation would be rooted in the unfairness of being asked to behave better than the generations of white men who'd wielded the same authority he did and had used it to feather their nests.

There was a logic there, I suppose. But I couldn't believe it when Clifton had offered that answer. I couldn't believe that Clifton Bering, wise and wonderful, would turn against every other value I knew him to adhere to so that he could, almost out of duty, exercise a privilege long denied others like him. He didn't even fully understand the white men he thought he was imitating. The Brendan Tuoheys of the world had bagmen and intervenors and a thousand layers of protection; they never showed up in person so they could catch a piece on the side. They were wily and arrogant, but not brazen. How could he not recognize that his picture of white power was a grotesque cartoon? But so he saw it. Just as I had never recognized how isolated he felt-and no doubt often wasnotwithstanding all his great talents. Our true continental divide, the one bedotween black and white, fell open, leaving us, friends of thirty years, on either side, watching as Clifton and all the good he'd been destined to do disappeared inside.

And now Sherman had dived into the same chasm. He had sounded proud and happy, even as he plummeted. And most painful of all, he was entirely unaware that he'd actually been pushed over the edge, driven by the very forces he'd long boasted he alone had understood and mastered.

CHAPTER 27

DESPITE THE INTERMITTENT SUCCESSES of the Project, Robbie's mood was swinging noticeably lower, plainly out of concern over Lorraine. The day after his encounter with Crowthers, he received a distressed call from his wife in the middle of the afternoon and told Evon he was headed home. Even for this reason, she wouldn't let him out of sight, and she descended with him to the garage and the Mercedes.

Rainey's deterioration now seemed to be picking up speed. Last month, as her ability to swallow had begun to disappear, she had been hospitalized for the insertion of something called a PEG, a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, a little plastic button that allowed a liquid diet to be fed directly into her stomach four times a day. It was a simple procedure, but she had never seemed to recover the same energy. By now, many functions had gone from impaired to nonexistent. Her speech had slid to the point that neither Robbie nor Elba could make sense of it. Rainey had briefly made do with a letter board, using her right hand, in which she still had good movement, to pick out the words she was trying to say. Finally, last week, they'd made the transition to the computer voice synthesizer. Lorraine had quickly mastered the software, which spoke the words she selected from various vocabulary trees, but the hardware had been balky. The replacement module, which had arrived over the weekend, functioned well, but had a male voice. It had been an unexpected blow to find that Rainey's speech was not restored but essentially gone, transmogrified into the atonal bleat of a masculine android. The deliberate pace of the machine with its blank tone had made her feel more thwarted, not less.

"And in the middle of this shitstorm, my mother-in-law arrives," Robbie told Evon in the car.

"She flew in from Florida for the weekend, and you know, you'd think family would make it better, but we just can't wait for her to leave. Betty walks through the door and she's crying and she doesn't stop for two days. She hangs on me and says, `Robert, Robert, I want to help, but this tears me up so bad, I just can't stand to see it.' She's that kind. If she's not lookin, it'll go away. Christ." When they reached the house, Robbie turned to Evon.

"Just come inside for one second, will you? Tell her the voice box sounds good. Do you mind?

Betty went to pieces every time Rainey tried to talk to her."

Evon was less frightened than last time. But the sense of the breach between this house and the rest of the world remained appalling. Once over the threshold, you dived off the edge of a cliff. Far above, in the daylight, the healthy danced to the tune of their small delights, but down here, amid darkness and sewer smells, the base, dogged game of survival was being played out with every breath its own struggle.

"Touch her," Robbie whispered before they entered the room. "She likes to be touched. Take her hand when you say hi."

At the thought, Evon felt a stricken quiver. She was already worried that her presence might provoke another sad scene between Robbie and his wife, but he had plunged around the corner into the equipment-crowded room where Rainey was attended by her caregiver.

"Say hello, boys and girls." He kissed his wife. He was a song-and-dance man now, bright as a new penny.

These days, Rainey slept in a water bed, where she rested more comfortably. Beside it roosted a mess of pill bottles-antispasmodics, sleep aids-and an electric Barcalounger that she used as a day chair. She looked drained among her bedcovers, which remained oddly undisturbed over her. Evon approached slowly and gripped Rainey's cold hand. There was a desiccated feel to the skin. The flesh had almost no tone; she could squeeze to the bones amid the softness.

"How. Are. You?" said the boy robot who was Rainey Feaver now. Evon carried on. What a great improvement! Things would be so much easier. But there was no mistaking what had gone on here over the weekend, and it was neither machinery nor even the appearance of Rainey's inept mother that had caused the disruption. The end was beginning. When Evon had met Rainey, less than three months ago, she could not imagine how a human being could get any worse, but Lorraine had. You could somehow see vitality withdrawing from this body, as from a fallen leaf. Bobbie's increasingly frank remarks had given Evon an intimation of the hugeness of what lay ahead. Rainey's upper body was losing strength with alarming speed. She had only three fingers that moved on her left hand. Far worse, the muscles that supported her breathing would soon no longer function.

Some ALS patients let go at that point. But ventilation was an option. A machine could inflate Rainey's lungs for her; there was even a portable device that could be carried on her wheelchair so she would not be immobilized. But it remained a momentous decision. Once Rainey was ventilated, there was no logical stopping point. She could go on for quite some time, awaiting the opportunistic infection that eventually claimed most ventilated patients, living beyond the time when even the remotest voluntary impulses could stir her body. ALS patients had been known to end up entirely inert, with gauze patches over their unblinking eyes and attendants applying wetting solution every five minutes, to prevent the agony that would result if the tender membranes of the cornea became air-dried. These people existed-seeing, smelling, hearing, suffering-with no means of communication of any kind.

Rainey and Robbie had agreed to take it a step at a time. He had asked her to live;
he
wanted her life to continue and said so plainly, so emphatically that no one could imagine it as some ultimate chivalry meant to remove from her the burden of clinging selfishly to life. At some point soon she would have to decide whether she was willing to oblige him.

For the present, Robbie characteristically accentuated the positive.

"She can talk on the phone. She hasn't been able to talk the phone for more than a month. Who'd you call?" "Tired," the voice answered. "Too. Tired. My Mother. Wore Me Out."

"Yeah," Robbie said.

They spoke about the spring, now arriving. Evon leaned Rainey's way to take in the apple tree visible from her window, a pillowy mass of pinkish blooms. Yet Rainey was any exhausted. and even after a few minutes. Evon felt she'd overstayed. Rainey lifted the fingers on the one hand that freely moved as a goodbye.

"I'm going to show Evon out. Then we can do your massage, and maybe get through Act IV." On the winding stairs, Robbie explained that he rubbed down Rainey every night as a matter of ritual,then read to her, sometimes for hours. "When I pick, I like plays. You know. I get to ham it up. Read all the parts. Right now, we're nearly done with
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Then she'll choose something."

"Isn't that Shakespeare?" asked Evon.

"You don't think there's room for Shakespeare in my common little mind?"

"I didn't mean that."

"Yes you did. Hey, listen, we've done all the classic comedies in the last year.
Tartuffe. The
Importance of Being Earnest.
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
We're having a great time. You know, sometimes she likes a break, so I'll read her a novel. She likes all the law guys." He showed her the next one they'd take up,
Mitigating Circumstances
, which was on a table downstairs. His mother-in-law, with her fatal touch, had brought a number of books that neither Rainey nor he much cared for, self-help guides, even a couple of picture books of far-off places written for juveniles.

"I just wish she wasn't such a dip. I mean, I like Betty. Not a mean bone in her body. Just this poor girl from the South End who thought she'd like the fast life and married this complete loser who happens to be Lorraine's father. Now, this guy. J, e, r, k. His picture's in the dictionary next to the word. Really. He's got a boat. Supposedly, he sells real estate. But his whole life is this fucking boat. The fish he caught, the dames he screwed there, the six days straight he was drunk at sea. If it doesn't happen on water, it doesn't count with him.