Daddy's Gone a Hunting

60

Clyde woke up early Wednesday morning, blinking against the glare of the sun that was blinding his eyes. He felt awful, hot and cold at the same time, but mostly hot.

Where am I? Sometimes when he hadn’t had too much wine, he would ask himself another question: Where am I going?

Clyde shook his head and began to piece together everything that had been happening to him. The shelter. The hospital. His picture on the television in the room there.

Suppose Peggy and Skippy saw it? By now Peggy had probably married someone else, and Skippy had grown up thinking that guy was his father. And all those Vietnam medals were probably buried in a box in the attic. That’s if they hadn’t already been thrown out.

He forced himself to think even though his head was splitting. If they could trace that picture to him and find out who he was, then even if Peggy and Skippy decided to run for the hills, the cops would still be looking for him. What if they decided that he had set off that explosion?

That Shirley woman. Nice lady. She really was worried about him. But she thought I’d stay in that dump. Clyde pulled himself up on one elbow. He began to laugh, a raspy laugh that turned into a racking cough. Where were those pills she gave me? One hand, then the other, fumbled into the pockets of the poncho he had been given in the hospital. It had deep pockets and he guessed that was good. He could put stuff in them. But the jacket they hadn’t given back to him was the one he really wanted.

When the tourists saw that crummy old jacket, they felt sorry for him. The dollars they would drop in his cap added up. He had to get rid of the poncho and cut holes in those new warm, heavy pants. He felt like a baby seal in them, a nice, warm, contented baby seal. People liked baby seals but they didn’t feel sorry for them.

I need a drink, Clyde thought. And where did I sleep?

He looked around and grunted in surprise. Somehow he had made his way to Chelsea Piers, right off the Hudson River, close to the Village. He began to have a little more memory about yesterday. Shirley-do-good had said good-bye at the hotel.

He had waited fifteen or twenty minutes or something like that.

The woman at the desk in that excuse for a lobby had asked if he’d be coming back. And he said that he would come back for sure.

When he had coughed so hard on the street, someone had dropped ten bucks in his cap and someone else had dropped a couple of bucks and he had gotten a couple of bottles of wine. So it had been a good night. The trouble was that he couldn’t keep up the coughing so that more people would feel sorry for him. He needed to look cold and hungry and not like a baby seal.

Clyde dropped his head back onto the newspapers. Last night had worked out. He had slept with no one around him, with the good sounds of New York filling his ears. The traffic on the West Side Highway, and now and then a plane flying overhead, and the early-morning ferries beginning to cross the Hudson. He had settled down here with his newspapers around him, and the warm clothes he didn’t want had made him feel like a baby in his mama’s arms when he was falling asleep.

But now he was scared. The picture. The girl. He knew he had hurt her. He had punched her real hard. But he didn’t know what happened after that.

I started to go after her. I was mad. I was afraid she’d tell on me and I wouldn’t be able to come back to my van. And then…

He began to cough again. He pulled himself up as his body shook and trembled with the force of the deep, rattling protest from his lungs. It was harder and harder to breathe. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t stop coughing.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?”

Clyde tried to say, “Go away. Leave me alone.” He swung his fist up but it didn’t hit anything. He fell back on the newspapers and couldn’t pull himself up again even though he was clawing for breath.

Three minutes later, he did not hear the screech of the siren as a patrol car pulled off the West Side Drive to answer a 911 call from a young woman jogger pleading for help.

She pointed to the crumpled figure on the ground. “Be careful, Officer. I think that man is dying but when I asked if I could help him he tried to punch me.”

“All right, ma’am. Please stand back. I’ll send for an ambulance.” The young police officer walked over to look at Clyde. Observing his deep, frantic efforts to breathe, the officer’s first thought was that this guy would be lucky to still be alive when the ambulance arrived.