Derailed

THIRTY-EIGHT

I got the gun out from behind the radiator — it was hot to the touch. I just wanted to know it was still there, that it hadn’t disappeared, hadn’t fallen down the hole in the bathroom wall or been stolen by the maid.

I held it like a rosary — something that just might grant me my dearest wish.

I put it back into the hole.

When I exited the elevator into the lobby, I could see Dexter sitting behind the bell captain’s desk with his head in his hands. He appeared to be reading a women’s muscle magazine.

I walked slowly over to the front desk and perused an old stack of tourists brochures. “Ride the Circle Line,” one said. “Broadway Tours.” All the things New Yorkers themselves never get around to doing.

The lobby was fairly quiet this morning. There was a couple who seemed to be waiting for a cab; every minute or so, the man poked his head out the front doors and announced there were no taxis yet. His wife nodded and said they were going to be late. The man said you can say that again. When the man announced that there were still no taxis two minutes later, she did.

The man in the University of Oklahoma jacket I’d seen on the elevator was complaining to the deskman that there was no King James Bible in his room.

“Are you kidding?” the deskman said to him.

An old man stood hunched over his walker just to the left of the elevators. He might’ve actually been moving, but if he was, it was too slowly to register on the eye.

I was happy for the company. It was hard to imagine anything really bad was going to happen to you while an old man was shuffling along next to you in a walker and someone else was complaining about there being no Bibles in his room.

Dexter looked directly at me and asked if I had the time.

“Eight o’clock,” I said.

And then I tensed up and waited for Dexter to recognize me.

Wait a minute, I know you — what the fuck are you doing here?

But Dexter went back into his magazine.

The old man seemed to be suffering from some kind of emphysema in addition to his leg problems; he wheezed, gurgled, and heaved with each tiny shuffle.

A woman with six-inch heels, who wasn’t suffering from any walking problems, sashayed into the lobby with a fat little man in a bad suit. She detoured past the front desk without actually stopping and grabbed a room key the deskman had already laid down on the counter.

“Come on, sweetie,” she said to the fat man. “Come on.”

The fat man kept his face trained on the worn carpeting in the lobby. He remained that way until the elevator opened up to rescue him.

Two young couples walked in with luggage and asked how much a room was. But the two women — girls, really — spent the entire time peering around the lobby with obvious distaste. They looked at the old man as if he were walking around without any clothes on. They didn’t seem to like the sight of me, either.

I heard them whispering to their boyfriends, who seemed interested in staying — the price was right, wasn’t it? But the women won out — the guys shrugged and said no thanks, then all four of them left.

“Next month . . . is my . . . birthday,” the old man in the walker said.

He’d maneuvered his way over to me. I remembered a game I used to play as a kid. It was called red light, green light, and the object of the game was for you to sneak up on someone without ever actually being seen to move. Whoever was “it” had to close his eyes and say, Red light, green light, one, two, three, then quickly turn around and attempt to catch the pursuers in the act of advancing. It wasn’t fun being it. It was eerie — seeing someone twenty feet back, then turning and seeing them frozen not five feet from you. It was like that with the old man, who every time I’d looked had seemed stuck in place yet was suddenly there by my right shoulder.

“Eighty . . . three . . . ,” he said again. He had to pause before every word or two in an effort to get enough air in his lungs. Vegas would’ve given you attractive odds on his making it to eighty-four.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Lived here . . . twenty years,” the old man said between gasps.

I imagined that was just about the time the hotel began its precipitous decline.

“Well, good luck,” I said.

Ordinarily, I found it hard talking to old people. I resorted to hand motions and condescension, as if they were foreigners. But this morning, talking to anyone was better than not talking at all. Because I was harboring two terrible fears. One that Lucinda and Vasquez and Dexter had already robbed and beaten Mr. Griffen; the other that they hadn’t.

The old man said: “Thanks.”

I needed to go to the bathroom. Nerves. I’d needed to go for the last hour but kept telling myself I couldn’t leave my post. Now I had to. I walked to the elevator and pressed the button.

The doors opened with a loud sigh; I entered and pressed twelve. I jiggled my legs, Come on . . . come on . . . trying to will the elevator doors to shut. Finally they began to close, the hotel lobby starting to narrow by inches, less and less of it until it was just about gone, a mere sliver of a view. I’d estimate ten inches — no more.

Just wide enough to see Lucinda and Sam Griffen enter the hotel.