Odyssey (8 page)

“I don’t believe he did it.”

“Because if you did,” Solar said, as if his son had not spoken, “I will tell the FBI in a minute. No son or sons of mine will humiliate me like that.”

“I plan to get a job and go to college,” Sovereign replied.

“I hope you don’t expect me to help you. Why, the money I give might go to harboring a bank robber.”

“That’s stupid.”

“What did you say to me?”

“I said that it’s stupid if you think Drum-Eddie would need money if you also think that he robbed a bank. If he robbed a bank what would he need with your little paycheck?”

“Get your ass outta my house.”

Those were the last words exchanged between father and son. His mother had written. His sister had not. Eight years later Winifred called to tell him that his father had died of a heart attack. That was the first year of his new job at Techno-Sym, then called Binatics Inc. Sovereign told his mother that he couldn’t take the time off, that they’d let him go, but this was when the company was just starting and he’d lose the chance to make something of himself in the corporate system.

“Okay,” Winifred had said.

“You fucking bastard,” Zenith told him fifteen minutes later on a separate call.

It was again two thirty-seven in the morning. Sovereign marveled at the perfect synchronicity of his sleeplessness.

“Please say a city and state,” the automated operator of the phone system said.

“New York, New York,” Sovereign James said.

“Private listing or business?” the soulless voice inquired.

“Private.”

“State the first and last name of the person you’re trying to reach.”

“Toni Loam.”

The lifeless intelligence seemed bemused or maybe bewildered.

After a few moments of silence it said, “Please hold for an operator.”

Sovereign almost hung up then. He was about to move the phone from his head when a man’s voice asked, “T-o-n-y L-o-m-e?”

“I’m not sure. It could be T-o-n-i because it’s a woman. And I don’t know the spelling of the last name.”

“Checking … checking. No T-o-n-i L-o-m-e.”

“Try L-o-a-m,” Sovereign said on a hunch.

“Oh. Yeah. There it is. Hold on.” The human operator disengaged.

The automated voice then gave the number and said, “I will connect you at no extra cost.”

Darkness pulsed behind Sovereign’s lying eyes. He could feel his heart beating and the room beyond his body throbbing with electric machinery. He could hear water flowing through the plumbing embedded in the walls. Some insomniac had probably flushed a toilet on an upper floor.

The phone rang.

Zenith came to mind. She was tall and really quite lovely, especially when she was at her father’s side. Her eyes were cutting; she wore almost no makeup, and needed none. Sovereign realized, while the phone rang, that he loved his sister and had always felt bad that she did not return his feeling.

The phone rang.

The FBI had visited Sovereign three times in New York, once each year for the first years he was living there.

“Your father told us that your brother always wanted to live in New York,” Agent DeGris told Sovereign during their second interview.

“And that I was here and I was probably in cahoots with him?” James replied.

“Are you?”

“I don’t even believe he robbed a bank.”

The phone rang.

During the third interview he was living with a Senegalese foreign exchange student named Koyo. She was beautiful and said that she was devoted to him, but she moved out after the FBI had come. She told him that she couldn’t afford to be in the house of someone being investigated by federal authorities. Two weeks later she moved in with a premed student named Charles Riley. There were six calls on Sovereign’s phone bill to Riley’s number made weeks before the FBI’s visit.

“Hello?” a young woman said in his ear.

“Toni?” Sovereign said. “Toni Loam?”

“Yes?” There was sleep in her voice. This made the blind man smile.

“Hi. My name is Sovereign James.”

“So? It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

“Sorry about that. I mean … I just … I’m the man you helped today, the one that guy mugged.”

“Oh.”

“I was so upset that the police arrested you. I told them that you were just trying to help me. I hope they treated you better after I told them that.”

“Not really,” she said in a muted Brooklyn accent. “They told me that they thought I was up to somethin’ in that neighborhood and that I didn’t have no
business bein’ there.”

“Lucky for me that you were.”

“That’s what I said.”

The image of Koyo was still in Sovereign’s head. Her eyes were both flat and deep, and when they made love she hummed as if there were something inside the cave of her being that was moaning in anticipation of freedom.

“Why you call me?” Toni asked.

“To thank you,” he said, and then on a whim, “and to offer you a reward.”

“What kinda reward?”

“I know I can’t pay for something heroic—I mean, heroism comes naturally—but I wanted to give you five hundred dollars for coming to my aid. If you hadn’t screamed that man might have killed me.”

“Really? Five hundred?”

“Yes. Certainly. I’ll send you a check.”

“Um. I don’t have no account and them check-cashin’ places take up to half a’ what you give ’em.”

“I don’t like the idea of sending cash in the mail.”

“Especially not to my house,” she agreed. “You know even the rats around here got P.O. boxes.”

There was a spate of silence.

“Is your head all right?” Toni asked.

“It hurts a little. Were you wearing an ochre dress?”

“What’s that?”

“Like a dark yellow.”

“I thought you was blind?”

“I am. I mean, I think I am. But when that guy hit me the second time, for just a few seconds I could see. That’s why I know the color of your dress.”

“I knew you was lookin’ right at me. I thought so.”

“That’s why I’m calling so late,” Sovereign said. “I’m actually happy.”

“Happy about what?”

“I only went blind recently and I thought that I’d never see again. I’m almost thankful that that man hit me.”

“You shouldn’t be. That was terrible what he did. Hittin’ a blind man like that.”

“But I got to see your lovely face.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um … I could come by and pick up that money if you still wanna give it to me. Do you live in that neighborhood?”

“That would be great. Yes. I live in the building where I got attacked. The entrance is on the Washington Street side.”

“I could come at noon tomorrow.”

“That’s a problem. How about four?”

“Okay.”

“Just tell the doorman Sovereign James. My apartment is nine-F.”

“You have a doorman? Really?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I never knew nobody with a doorman before.”

Sovereign didn’t sleep that night. He thought about the young woman’s voice and the color of the dress that he’d glimpsed through a blind man’s eyes. He pressed the bandage on the side of his head and grinned at the pain.

“Where were you yesterday, Mr. James?” Dr. Seth Offeran asked at the beginning of the next day’s session.

Up until that moment Sovereign had not realized that he’d missed a day.

“I was attacked.”

“That’s the reason for the bandage?”

“A mugger hit me and stole my wallet.”

“That’s terrible. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I didn’t get much sleep last night, but, you know, being blind is like sleepin’ twenty-four hours a day while you’re wide-awake.”

“You feel that blindness is a form of unconsciousness.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“We’re closer to our unconscious mind in the sleep state.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Sovereign said. “Maybe so. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I was attacked by a man and saved by a woman, a young woman. He hit me in the head with a blackjack or something and she screamed bloody murder.”

“He ran away?”

“Like a rat with the cheese.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

A smile broadened across Sovereign’s face. He didn’t mean to show so much emotion, but the joy of his experience was overwhelming.

“The ambulance took me to the hospital. The doctors wanted me to stay the night, but I didn’t need that mess. I forgot about you, though, didn’t even remember till just this minute.”

“You’re smiling, Mr. James.”

“Am I?”

“Are you happy to have skipped a day?”

“You get paid anyway … right?”

“The question is about how you feel, not if I get paid or not.”

“I could see clearly for ten seconds and not so much so for another eleven.”

“When?”

“Right after that motherfucker hit me upside the head, that’s when.”

“The blow returned your sight?”

“For half a minute, a little less than that. I saw the girl clear as my sister. And I got a quick glimpse of the dude’s face too.”

“Any glimmers since then?”

“No,” Sovereign James said. “No. I called the girl near about two thirty this morning.”

“Pretty early, isn’t it?”

“That’s when my day’s been starting lately. Wake up in the dark and stay that way and time begins to have less meaning.”

When you get old enough
, Eagle James had told his grandson,
the rules that once was just don’t seem to matter no more. Old man says what he wants to do, and who’s gonna tell him no when I keep a pistol under the blanket in my wheelchair?

Sovereign pushed Eagle’s wheelchair wherever the old man wanted to go. The eighty-year-old Kansan was heavy and so was the steel chair, but the boy loved his grandfather and didn’t want anybody else to ferry him around.

Not that anyone else wanted to.

They cruised the block, went shopping for his mother, and made secret excursions to the liquor store, where Eagle would buy P&M whiskey by the half pint. On weekends they went on longer expeditions.

“What are you thinking about, Mr. James?” Seth Offeran asked.

“That ochre dress that Toni Loam was wearing. She’s a young woman, maybe ten pounds less than she should be. Plain at first look but in hindsight there was a prettiness to her cheeks and eyes.”

“Are you going to see her?”

“That’s a funny question, Doctor. I’d like to see her. I’d give everything I have just to see that yellow dress again. But I’ll have to make do with a hello and a handshake.”

“I think it might be good for you to spend some time with this woman,” the psychiatrist offered. “She’s the only thing you’ve seen since your sight shut off.”

“You make it sound like a faucet.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Like I turned it off on purpose.”

“Have you ever seen anything so horrendous that it made you shut your eyes so hard you thought that they might never open again?”

“No, can’t say that I have.”