The Empty Warrior (9 page)

O’Keefe almost smiled in wonder, never ceasing to be amazed by the dog’s behavior. He was touched, as much as he could be touched this late in his life, by her devotion. His heart, long since hardened by the emotional desolation of his existence, softened slightly for an instant, until he was called back to himself by the sound of a creaking car door opening and then slamming shut in front of the house.

He maneuvered his chair back up the ramp, the low knap of the carpet there seeming to claw at his wheels, and then out of the den and into the hallway, heading for the master suite. There, he rolled up to the bedside table and took out the loaded, military issue forty-five caliber he kept in the top drawer. He removed it from its holster and ejected the clip. Finding it filled, as always, with cartridges; he shoved the magazine back into the stock and pulled back the bolt, releasing it to chamber a round. Then he engaged the safety and reholstered the gun before shoving it into a pocket made into the outside of the right armrest of his chair. He whipped the conveyance around just as the doorbell rang.

Take your time
, he told himself, intentionally slowing the pumping action of his arms.
Let them wait, whoever they are.
Several long seconds later, he leisurely rolled up to the door and pulled it open.

A strikingly attractive young woman stood on his porch, standing several feet back from the door’s threshold. She was tall and slender with straight brown hair and wore a short black dress that might have been expensive. Her legs were encased in sheer black hose while on her feet were shiny black pumps that looked brand new. Under one armpit she carried a large, wide strapped, taupe colored bag that had the appearance of being constructed of a fabric only slightly more elegant than canvas. It seemed out of place, to say the least, hanging from her shoulder. O’Keefe had no idea who she was.

The two appraised each other for a moment over the threshold, the only sound being the dogs barking in the background, while O’Keefe primarily wondered why a woman so provocatively dressed who was not Melissa would be driving a rattletrap car so far up into the hills only to come knocking at his door. Something was obviously not right, but his sense of foreboding quickly vanished; now he was merely annoyed. “Well,” he finally asked brusquely, “is there something I can help you with?”

The girl fidgeted nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “I was looking for… Hill?” she asked cautiously. Her focus moved from his eyes to the floorboards at her feet to the doorjamb and back to his eyes.

“That would be me,” O’Keefe said levelly, his gaze steady on her face.

“I thought so,” she said, forcing a slight smile, all the while biting her lower lip. “But the mailbox at the road said A. A. O’Keefe. You know, no H. So I wasn’t sure.”

“My given name is Achilles Aeneas,” O’Keefe said sheepishly. “My mother had a thing for the classics.”

The girl stared at him with her lips parted and her brow slightly furrowed, with questions in her eyes, obviously having no comprehension whatsoever of what he had just said.

O’Keefe was suddenly angry at himself, not only for giving out a personal tidbit, but also for the way he had done it. He scowled without meaning to. “Look,” he almost snarled. “My name’s Hill. You’ve found who you’re looking for, now what the hell do you want?”

“I’m Julie,” the girl said, sounding wounded. “Melissa couldn’t make her appointment and she asked me if I could cover for her. I know I’m early, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get here. I mean, it’s not like I drive around way out here every day.” O’Keefe simply stared at her until the girl continued. “I’ll leave if you want me to, but it’s a long drive just to turn around and go back.” The girl again looked down at the boards of the porch floor, tracing and retracing a small semicircle in front of her with the toe of one shoe.

“What happened to Melissa?” O’Keefe demanded, still unsure of the situation.

“She got hung up,” the girl replied softly. “She’s been working a convention in Atlanta, and she got busier than she thought she’d be. She told me she couldn’t get away for at least another day or two. But she didn’t want to cancel you so she asked me if I could fit you in. She said you were a really nice guy.”

O’Keefe backed away from the door to allow her entry but ignored the compliment. “You girls ever hear of telephones?” he asked, not bothering to hide his vexation.

Julie stepped through the doorway and answered with more confidence now that she had gained admittance. “Of course,” she said lightly, digging out a cell phone from within her bag and waving it around for him to see. “But most guys really don’t want us calling them at home. It tends to cause problems. Wives answer phones too, you know. So I never call clients unless they specifically ask me to.” She stepped past him into the foyer as he closed the door behind her. “This is like a really great house,” she said, her head on a swivel. “What do you do? To make money I mean?”

O’Keefe hesitated. He generally did not like the idea of telling strangers anything about himself, and he most certainly did not want to discuss his finances with a hooker. But he had to make some kind of conversation.

“I’m an investor,” he finally replied. Without waiting for a response, he pushed himself past her over the expensive tiles of the foyer floor, around the corner and down into the sunken den. “Would you like a drink,” he called back to her.

“Maybe some white wine, if you have it,” she answered.

“I have plenty,” he said, as he pushed his way toward the kitchen. The pile of the carpet again grabbed at the wheels of his chair as he moved. O’Keefe was not entirely sure why he had decided to floor one room with the stuff, because it was a nuisance every time he entered. But everyone else had carpet in their homes, and it would have felt to O’Keefe like something akin to surrender to have none in his own. And that feeling, that sense of giving in that the bare wood, stone, and tile that floored the rest of his home evoked in him was enough to make it mandatory that he have at least one room covered with this ridiculous mat of dirt-attracting fibers. Besides, his arms; unlike his shriveled and useless legs, were thick and muscular, and powered him handily over the woven strands despite their impedance.
Fuck you, carpet
, he thought.

The countertops in his kitchen were lined with sturdy, stainless steel rails mounted several inches above their peripheries. He rolled up to one and locked the wheels of his chair, grasped the rail firmly with both hands, and pulled himself erect. Steadying his swaying body with one fist still latched onto the railing, he used his other hand to open a cabinet and retrieve a wine glass. He carefully placed it on the counter before again grasping the rail with both hands and lowering himself back to his seat. From that point it was a simple enough exercise to get the wine, open the bottle, and fill the glass. But getting the fragile and now liquid filled crystal back to the girl was an altogether different proposition.

His first thought was to call her up to the kitchen and have her carry the wine herself. After all, he was paying her enough. But that was quite impossible as it would have been an admission that he needed help, and that was an admission he was unprepared to make. Damning his unfeeling legs for the millionth time, O’Keefe searched his mind for the memory of where he had left the motorized chair. The garage? No. He had brought it in after unloading the groceries; it was in the dining room. Relieved that it was close at hand, he rolled out of the kitchen; around the long, exquisitely finished, and utterly unused solid cherry table with its eight attendant chairs; to the far corner of the room where he positioned himself directly in front of and facing his powered wheelchair.

After making sure every wheel was tightly locked, he rotated both sets of footrests to either side, and then with his hands he crossed his numb feet at the ankles and placed them on the floor before him. Leaning forward, he seized the armrests of the motorized chair with both hands and pulled himself up and over it. He paused for a moment in that position, his torso supported over the chair’s seat by locked arms that stood perpendicular to the armrests on which his hands were placed. Then slowly he bent one arm at the elbow, causing his body to rotate slightly to that side. Then with a perfection born of countless repetitions, he collapsed his bent arm and pushed off with the other, flipping his body neatly into the chair’s seat while untangling his feet with the same motion.

It was not, however, a quiet procedure. One could not drop a two hundred and twenty pound weight into the seat of a wheelchair from a height of two feet without causing the familiar thud of dead weight impacting an unmoving object. No sooner was he seated than the girl’s voice curled around through the kitchen, softly reaching his ears, at once both concerned and afraid. “Are you okay in there?” she asked.

“Just fine,” he half shouted back, the hotness of uncalled for shame rising into his cheeks. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
You’ve nothing to be ashamed of
, he thought, castigating himself.
You’re a wounded veteran; a proud, decorated wounded veteran. No one’s got anything on you.
But nevertheless red heat still radiated from his face.

Quickly he took one leg in both hands and moved it out of the arcing path the footrest would take on the way to its latching point. He repeated the procedure with the other leg as he cursed their unfeeling recalcitrance. Then he swung both the rests into position and secured them. Again he reached for each leg in turn and lifted them up, setting his feet carefully on the footpads and adjusting their placement. Leaning back into the chair, he took a moment for a few deep breaths before beginning the most difficult part of the endeavor, that of stowing the other chair.

He reached out and grabbed the two handle-like straps that were attached to the inside of it just below the armrests, and with his arms fully extended, lifted the chair up, grunting from the strain as he did so. As its wheels left the floor, the two armrests pulled together, collapsing the chair into a package that was less than a third of its former width. He wrestled the unwieldy appurtenance to one side and placed it parallel to the wall.

After unplugging the chair he now occupied from its charger, he released the locks on the wheels and he was free to roll. He skillfully used a small joy stick that rose from the machine just in front of the right arm rest to guide the chair into the kitchen, where he was at last able to hold the wine glass and move about at the same time.
And it only took me about five minutes
, he thought sourly.

As he rolled back through the kitchen he could see Ajay, apparently satisfied now that all was well, trot across the decking behind the house and disappear down the stairs that led to the side of the mountain.

Seconds later O’Keefe was back down in the den; next to the brown, overstuffed leather sofa where Julie was currently making herself at home. She sat with her legs curled beneath her, almost lying rather than sitting, her elbow atop the sofa arm, that hand supporting her head. She reached for the glass and thanked him.

As she sipped at the wine, O’Keefe backed his chair away several feet. He had grown accustomed to the monthly tarriance that Melissa inflicted upon him in return for her charms. He had over time even come to enjoy their conversations. But now the stranger made him nervous and brittle.

“I’m going to get a beer,” he said stiffly, desperately wanting to get out of the room, if only for a moment. Back in the kitchen, he poured a foamy black stout into a frosted mug, then fumbled clumsily with a pack of Marlboros before finally lighting one and inhaling the nicotine-laden smoke deeply into his lungs. The drug took the edge off his unease, while manipulating the cigarette gave his overwrought hands something to keep them busy. In a moment he felt steady enough to return to the girl’s presence.

“Oh, I am sooo glad you smoke,” she said earnestly as he rolled back into the room. “I forgot to ask Melissa about it, and I was about to die for a cigarette.” She pulled herself more erect to rummage through her voluminous bag until at last she produced a pack of Virginia Slims. She pulled one out and lit it, a look of pure pleasure filling her features as she inhaled the first of the smoke. O’Keefe produced an ashtray from a drawer and slid it across the coffee table toward her as she resumed her languid pose on the sofa. “Melissa did say you like to talk first,” she said, before taking another deep drag. Without waiting for him to respond, she went on even as she exhaled. “So how did you get to be an investor and make all this money?”

O’Keefe, as loathe as he was to discuss practically any aspect of his life with anyone, was under the circumstances more than ready for an excuse to speak as opposed to enduring any more uncomfortable silence. He needed no further prompting to become what was for him positively loquacious.

“My folks owned a big farm just outside the city,” he began. “They were killed in an automobile accident a few years after I was discharged from the Marines, and I couldn’t take care of the place being a—” he paused for a moment, searching for a word other than
cripple
and finally settling on the phrase “with my disabilities. And it had to make money. I had some income from my veteran’s benefits, and my parents left me a little more, but that was hardly enough to pay the taxes on the land. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to live on what was left.”

O’Keefe was silent for long enough to knock the ash off his cigarette and take a slug of beer before continuing. “I’d never been much for farming anyway, and I didn’t want someone else doing it for me, so I took some courses at the community college on real estate, passed the exam, and got a broker’s license.