Little Scarlet

46

I must’ve hit my head pretty hard because even though I thought I was conscious my mind wasn’t making the right connections in the ambulance.

“Where did the Germans go?” I asked the medic from my litter.

“What Germans?”

“The ones that killed all those women,” I said. “The ones who tried to fool the Allies and killed the women with the white ribbons in their hair.”

I remember saying these words. I can still feel the frustration when the attendant said, “You’ve been hurt but you’re going to be okay. Do you know the man who shot you?”

“Must have been the Nazis,” I said. I knew that there was something wrong with that statement because of the look on the white kid’s face.

“Hand me the hypo, Nick,” the attendant said to the man sitting next to the driver.

For a while I was looking out of the window listening to the siren that I took for an air-raid warning. I could almost hear the booming of the Allied cannon.

There was pain in my arm and leg and hand so I didn’t feel the morphine while he was injecting it. But soon the blue funk of war gave way to a sunlit yellow world that had never known of battle. The siren became the cry of a huge wild bird and the ambulance was a Greek chariot bringing me home after all those years in hell. I started crying. I asked the attendant if my mother was there.

“What’s her phone number?” he asked me.

That was the last thing I remembered for some time.

I AWOKE IN darkness. There was the smell of alcohol and other acrid chemicals in the air. I was between crisp sheets on a bulging mattress in a too-warm room. There were small lights at odd places hovering here and there. The lights illuminated nothing. They merely glistened, like stars in the void.

I had no idea where I was at first. My mind was fuzzy and there were dull aches somewhere on my person. I concentrated very hard and recalled the shots exploding around me. But at first my mind went all the way back to World War II, twenty years earlier, when I was a young man fighting for someone else’s freedom.

Then I remembered the splinters from my doorjamb. The shots and Theodore’s saddle, which saved my life. It sounded like a cap gun. A .22 caliber, probably a pistol, with low velocity, not enough to rip through hard leather.

I remembered a young German woman, twenty-two if she was a day. Kissing my forehead and learning English, asking me did I have chocolate and sewing needles. I gave her both and then he shot me. No. The girl was a long time ago. I was shot and then I slipped in my own blood . . .

I sat up in the hospital bed, in the warm room. I was alone. My left biceps felt like it was ripping open every time I moved. There was a lamp on the table to my left. I had to twist around and turn it on with my right hand.

Also on the table there was a crayon drawing next to a glass of water. It was a crude green-and-blue picture of a man in a bed with three people standing beside him. My little family had been there. Feather would be in my life for many years. She would love me and I would love her long after all the pain I felt was over.

In the drawer of the table Bonnie had left me a clean change of clothes. I knew it would be there. In the pants pocket was my letter from Gerald Jordan but Bonnie had taken my wallet. She knew that no one would steal a letter but money was another thing.

Who shot me?

It was a man with a pistol who waited for me to come to my office. Somebody who knew me and was afraid of me. A killer who wasn’t used to firing a gun. No one who was serious shot at you from that far away with a small-caliber pistol. Then again, nobody with any sense ran at a man shooting at him.

I had three bandages and not too much pain except in my arm.

It had to be Harold. Harold with the same gun he had used to shoot Nola in her dead eye.

After I was dressed I lay back down and closed my eyes. I fell asleep and dreamt of a German girl sewing up my wounds. She was Sylvie, and Theodore was lurking at the bombed-out doorway with a pistol in his hand.

I jerked upright and bounced on the springy bed to get to my feet. It wasn’t bad. Somebody had shot me less than a day ago and I could already get to my feet. I was a soldier, not some citizen or bystander. I had to go out now and find Harold and make sure that he couldn’t get at anybody else ever again.

IT WAS VERY late. More than forty-eight hours had passed since Jordan had laid down his ultimatum. Nobody in the hospital hall was moving. At the nurse’s desk a small Asian woman, Japanese I think, was sitting reading a magazine. When I came up to her she jumped from her chair, gasping.

“You shouldn’t be out of your bed, sir,” she told me.

“Pay phone,” I said. “Where?”

“You have to get back to bed.”

“Got to make a call. Pay phone.”

She scurried to my side and took my arm. I pushed her away and lurched down the hall toward a door marked EXIT. I staggered down the stairs until there were no more and then I pushed open a door.

Across the street from Mercy Hospital was a phone booth. The operator gladly connected the collect call.

“Hello?” she said.

“Will you accept a collect call from Easy?” the operator asked.

“A collect . . . ? Yes, operator. I will.”

“Hey, Jewelle,” I said. I could hear the thickness in my throat.

“Is that you, Easy?”

“Yeah, baby. How you doin’?”

“Fine. It’s four in the mornin’. What’s wrong?”

“I been shot.”

“What?”

“I’m okay. I mean, not perfect but not bleedin’ no more neither.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“Uh-uh. I’m across the street from Mercy Hospital. What I need is a ride. I was wonderin’ if Jackson could come get me.”

“He’s ’sleep,” Jewelle said. “And you know he has to be at work tomorrow.”

“Already?”

“They need good computer people, Easy. They wanted him today. I’ll come get you.”

“I didn’t mean to get you outta bed, JJ,” I said. “It’s just —”

“I’ll be there, Mr. Rawlins. You just wait.”

She hung up and I sat down in the phone booth, feeling the morphine and revenge slithering under my skin.