Herbie's Game (20 page)

Like a lot of former addicts, Doc stayed up late.

Addicts, serious ones, anyway, tend to fall into two categories: people who are just one step up from being an inanimate object and are looking to close the gap, and people who live at the center of a twenty-four-hour cyclone of energy and are looking for twister control. Doc fell into the second category, and since he had spent several decades as a licensed physician, he approached the control of his personal twister with a lot of pharmaceutical expertise. By mixing and modulating various controlled substances he turned himself into a functioning medical man, apparently sober, although I’d been told his verbal diagnoses sometimes wandered into unexpected areas with roots in medieval witchcraft, and a pint of his blood could probably have cured malaria throughout the world. After he lost his license and straightened himself out, he developed an off-the-record practice with a specialty in crooks’ injuries, especially gunshot wounds, and a tolerance for being awake practically all night long.

I’d met Doc when I was trying to get a drug-addled former child star named Thistle Downing out of the hands of some people who wanted her to make what used to be referred to as a naughty movie; and, as it turned out in the long run, she’d needed Doc more than she needed me.

“Jesus,” he said as he opened the door. His string tie told me that he still encouraged his resemblance to Milburn Stone from the old
Gunsmoke
series. “You could have warned me.”

“Didn’t think it would be nesheshary.”

“It’s a popular misconception,” Doc said, “that doctors never look at an injury and heave. Come on in, unless you’re still dripping.”

“I’ve clotted.”

“Good. Get in here, air conditioner’s on.”

I stepped into his entry hall. The last time I was there I’d shot someone, and the place looked better without him.

“Who is it, dear?” the woman I knew only as Mrs. Doc called from the top of the stairs.

“Just Junior,” Doc said. “Or what’s left of Junior.”

“That nice boy,” Mrs. Doc said with the fatalism of medical spouses everywhere. “I hope he lives. Do you want some tea, Junior?”

“No shank you,” I said. My tongue felt like a loaf of bread.

“Boy howdy,” Doc said with a certain amount of admiration. “Who did this to you?”

“Filipino dansher.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard they’re dangerous. Look up.” I lifted my face toward the hanging fixture that illuminated the hall. He made a clicking sound with his tongue that wasn’t encouraging. “Where in the world am I going to start?”

“You’re ashking me?”

“Let me see that tongue.” He screwed up his face as though I had a dead rat in my mouth. “That should be stitched up.”

I said, promptly and quite clearly, “No fucking way.”

“Novocain,” he said. “Although that’ll probably hurt more than the stitches.”

“Shkip it.”

“But it’ll hurt
shorter
.”

“No. Here’sh what I want. I want to know if my noshe ish broken, I want shome pillsh, and I want a casht on my left arm.”

He took my nose between his fingers and wiggled it while I screamed, and he said, “Yup. Broken, but we just straightened it out. The pills, no problem. Now bend your arm.” I did. He said, “Flex your wrist.” I did. He said, “Rotate it.” I did. He said, “Lift the arm away from your body.” I did, and he said, “Am I missing something?”

“No,” I said. “I jusht want a casht. I want you to leave my fashe alone and put a casht on my left arm.”

Doc nodded and held his hand up. “How many fingers?”

“Five,” I said, “but you’re only holding up one of them.”

“Well, then, why don’t you tell me why you want a cast put on a perfectly good arm? You going to collect signatures?”

“I’m looking for shomeone, and I’m beginning to doubt that I have the right reshourshes to find him. Sho I’m going to get the copsh to find him for me, and firsht, I need to file a complaint.”

Back at Bitsy’s
that night—for the first time, despite wearing goggles made of painkillers—I managed to avoid most of the steps that tweeted and whistled, so I put that fact in the otherwise-empty mental column marked progress. At the door, I tapped lightly, opened it a few inches, and said, “Prepare yourshelf.”

When I stepped in, the caged birds chirped in horror and Ronnie’s face more or less fell apart. She managed to keep her smile in place, but her eyes went enormous and her eyebrows leapt halfway to her hairline. “Baby, baby,
baby
,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

I said, “Have you eaten my pashtrami shandwich?”

“Of course not. Do you want it?”

“No. I jusht want to watch you take a couple of bites sho I can pretend you’re me.”

“Do you want me to go
yum
and make noises to show you how much you’re enjoying it?”

“Oh, shkip it. I’m pretty loaded, thanksh to Doc. I think maybe what I need to do is find a position I can shleep in before I fall over.”

“Peeling back the parrots,” she said, folding the bedspread down and plumping the pillows. “Do you need help with your clothes?”

“I thought you’d never ashk.”

She managed to get me undressed, then brought over a couple of cushions from the peacock-feather couch and arranged them in the bed so I could get comfortable on my right side, which let me avoid rolling over onto the cast with my mysteriously sore ribs.

I said, “I’ve had it with the motelsh. They’re not good enough for you. Let’sh go shomewhere better tomorrow.”

“Sure,” she said. “We’ll see how you feel about it then.” She touched her nose to my cheek and whispered into my ear, “But you know what?”

“What?”

“I really don’t care where I am, if I’m with you.” She kissed me lightly, just a breeze of a kiss. “Now count backwards from ten.”

I was out before I got to seven. I found myself in a dark room of indefinite size, although it seemed to be enormous and also roofless. One corner, far, far away, was brightly lighted, and I waded through something thick and viscous to get to it, and when I was finally there it turned out to be Herbie’s bedroom, where I spent what seemed like a very long time trying to turn off the whistling kettle until it all rippled and went away.

“The
criminal world
,” I said. “They make it sound like it’s somewhere else.”

“Those could get kind of hairy,” Ms. deWoskin said. “They’d get to arguing and like that. Sometimes stuff would get thrown.”

“Group sessions of the dead?” Ronnie said. “He seems like someone I would have liked.” She sipped her coffee, the smell of which was tying me in knots. I’d let one mouthful pass over my shredded tongue, which felt a little like gargling fire ants. My cup was sitting on the table, mocking me as it cooled. The table had a little ceramic birdcage wired to it, the circular front opening of which had been used as an ashtray by many a weary traveler, with the expected fragrant result. I’d noticed when we moved in that one of the caged birds had a cough, and now I knew why.

I stuck my finger in the coffee. Still too hot. “I probably didn’t like him as much as I should have,” I said. “But he just
never
told the truth.”

“He and I would have gotten along fine, then,” Ronnie said.

I said, “Beaten to death. I wasn’t all that fond of Handkerchief, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“It seems to be a theme,” Ronnie said. She’d been reading the paper over my shoulder. “First your friend Herbie and now, uh, Handkerchief.”

“Somebody wants really badly to know something,” I said. “Maybe you ought to get out of Los Angeles.”

“Maybe you got your brains addled. How’s the tongue?”

“It hurts,” I said. “But at least I don’t sound like a bad ventriloquist.”

“You look awful.”

I said, “Good. That’s exactly what I need. To look awful.”

I gave myself a parting look in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car. Everything Ting Ting had done to me the previous night had swelled, ripened, and deepened into the palette of colors that signal biological distress: grays with red beneath them, a hemoglobin purple like the blood that’s pulled to the skin by a really energetic hickey, and a kind of nameless yellowish darkness like the glass a water-colorist has been dipping his brush into for days. My nose was twice its usual width, and my lips were fat enough to cushion a bumper car.

What with its grand name, the First Church of the Eternal Redeemer was a bit of a letdown. Decades ago a Los Angeles bakery called Vandekamp’s built itself a chain of stores, white stucco buildings that were distinguished by having at one end a Dutch windmill, often with the blades outlined in neon. Today these buildings are architectural fossils, usually with the windmill long gone but the towers still pointing heavenward, and the First Church of the Eternal Redeemer had repurposed the tower by putting a cross on it, giving the impression of a church that baked its own communion wafers.

One story high except for the holy windmill, with a painted-over display window, the building stood in a somewhat weedy lot at the center of what, thirty or forty years ago, had been a
medium-level mini-mall. The stores immediately on either side had been bulldozed and cleared away, making the church stand out like a lonely tooth, but the structures at both ends of the mall were still standing: a donut shop, a Mexican restaurant specializing in menudo, an Army-Navy surplus store, and a shuttered, dusty shop front with the word
ADULT
fading from the stucco above the window.

The Redeeming, such as it was, was being done where Pacoima shaded indistinguishibly into Sylmar, the northernmost town in greater Los Angeles. The “mar” in Sylmar is Spanish for
sea
, suggesting that the town fathers were bad judges of distance, since the Pacific is at least thirty miles away and on the other side of the hill, but geography has never been allowed to get in the way of land values in Southern California.

I hurt in places where I couldn’t even remember getting hit, so I was walking clumsily, but that wasn’t why I turned my ankle the moment I got out of the car. The parking lot was rippled and torn from beneath by the roots of the big ficus trees that lined the street. The roots had broken right through the asphalt in places. The entire mall, the church included, had the depressive air of a property developer’s tax write-off, a loss allowed to fester on some spreadsheet by way of balancing the picture for the IRS.

I was limping toward the church on my newly turned ankle when a man came out of the Mexican restaurant with a large foil tray of take-out that was almost buckling beneath the weight of the food, and made the right that put him directly in my path. He was dark-haired and buzz-cut, slight and skittery looking, a natural lightweight without an extra ounce on him and the bright, deep-set eyes that often announce the furnace-like metabolism of someone who could live on donuts and not gain an ounce. This characteristic is common, I’ve noticed, in preachers. Since I’m an instinctive atheist, I always wonder whether they mistake
their elevated internal processes for some sort of divine energy. For all I know, high metabolic processes are responsible for religion itself: the persistence of easily-available ecstasy and all that obsession with
food
—what you can and can’t eat, when you can and can’t eat it, the demonization of gluttony, all those starving sojourns in the desert, all that fasting to rattle up all those visions, all those holiday feasts. The man stopped, looked back to the church as though to verify that I was on a course for it, and said, “Yes?”