The Losers (8 page)

“Thanks, Damon.”

“Are you going to be coming back to school when you get out of here?” Flood asked, a curiously intent look in his dark eyes.

“I haven’t decided yet. I think I’ll wait a semester or so—get things together first.”

“Probably not a bad idea. Tackle one thing at a time.” Flood walked to the window and stood looking out at the rain.

“How’s ‘Bel?” Raphael asked, crossing that unspoken boundary.

“Fine—as far as I know, anyway. I haven’t been going down

there much. ‘Bel gets a little tiresome after a while, and I’ve been studying pretty hard.”

“You?” Raphael laughed. “I didn’t think you knew how.”

Flood turned back from the window, grinning. “I’m not much of a scholar,” he admitted, “but I didn’t think it’d look good to flunk out altogether. Old J.D.’d like nothing better than to find an excuse to cut off my allowance.”

“Look,” Raphael said uncomfortably, “I really ran my mouth that night at ‘Bel’s place. If you happen to see her, tell her I apologize, okay?”

“What the hell? You were drunk. Nobody takes offense at anything you say when you’re drunk. Besides, you were probably right about her. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

“All the same,” Raphael insisted, “tell her I apologize.”

“Sure”—Flood shrugged—“if I see her. You need anything?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I’d better get going then. I’ve got a plane to catch.” “Going home for Christmas?”

“It’s expected. Scenic Grosse Pointe for the holidays. Hot spit. At least it’ll pacify the old man—keep those checks coming.” He looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to get cranked up. I’ll look you up when I get back, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Take care, Gabriel,” Flood said softly, and then he left. They did not shake hands, and the inadvertent slip passed almost unnoticed.

The hospital became intolerable now that his body was mending. Raphael wanted out—away—anyplace but in the hospital. He became even more irritable, and the nurses pampered him, mistakenly believing that he was disappointed because he could not go home for Christmas. It was not the holiday, however. He simply wanted out.

Shimpsie was going to be a problem, however. On several occasions she had held her power to withhold her approval for his discharge over his head. Raphael considered it in that private place in his mind and made a decision that cost him a great deal in sacrificed pride. The next day he got “saved.” He went through the entire revolting process. Once he even broke down and cried for her. Shimpsie, her eyes filled with compassion and with the thrill of victory, comforted him, taking him in her arms as he feigned racking sobs. Shimpsie’s deodorant had failed her sometime earlier that day, and being comforted by her was not a particularly pleasant experience.

She began to talk brightly about “preparation for independent living.” She was so happy about it that Raphael almost began to feel ashamed of himself. Almost.

He was fully ambulatory now, and so one day she drove him to one of those halfway houses. In the world of social workers,
everything
had a halfway house. Ex-convicts, ex-junkies, ex-sex offenders—all of them had a halfway house—a kind of purgatory midway between hell and freedom. Shimpsie
really
wanted the state of Oregon to pick up Raphael’s tab, but he firmly overrode that. He was running a scam—a subterfuge—and he wanted to pay for it himself, buying, as it were, his own freedom. He paid the deposit and the first month’s rent for a seedy, rather run-down room in an old house on a quiet back street, and Shimpsie drove him back to the hospital. She fervently promised to look in on him as soon as he got settled in. Then, just before she hurried off to one of her meetings, she hugged him, a little misty-eyed.

“It’s all right, Joanie,” he said consolingly. “We’ll be seeing each other again.” That had been one of the marks of his rehabilitation. He had stopped calling her “Shimpsie” and used “Joanie” instead. He cringed inwardly each time he did it.

She nodded and went off down the hall, exuding her smug sense of victory.

“So long, Shimpsie,” Raphael murmured under his breath. “I’m really going to miss you.” The funny thing was that he almost meant it. He turned and crutched his way toward the gym. He wanted to say good-bye to Quillian.

“I see you’re leaving,” Quillian said, his voice harsh as always. Raphael nodded. “I stopped by to say thanks.” “It’s all part of the job.”

“Don’t be a shithead. I’m not trying to embarrass you, and I’m not talking about showing me how to use these.” He waved one of his crutches.

“All right. Did you finally quit feeling sorry for yourself?” “No. Did you?”

Quillian laughed suddenly. “No, by God, I never did. You’re going to be okay, Taylor. Be honest with yourself, and don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself, and you’ll be okay. Watch out for booze and drugs when you get out there, though,” he added seriously. “It’s an easy way out, and a lot of us slip into that. It’d be particularly easy for
you.
All you’d have to do is shamble into any doctor’s office in the country and walk out fifteen minutes later with a pocketful of prescriptions. You’ve got the perfect excuse, and Dr. Feelgood is just waiting for you.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Quillian looked at him for a moment. “Be careful out there, Taylor. The world isn’t set up for people like us. Don’t fall down—not in front of strangers.”

“We all fall down once in a while.”

“Sure,” Quillian admitted, “but those bastards out there’ll just walk around you, and you can’t get up again without help.”

“I’ll remember that, too. Take care, Quillian, and thanks again.”

“Get the hell out of here, Taylor. I’m busy. I’ve got people around here who still need me.” They shook hands, and Raphael left the therapy room for the last time.

He stored most of his things at the hospital, taking only two suitcases.

The pasty-faced man from the halfway house was waiting for him outside the main entrance, but Raphael had planned his escape very carefully. He already had his reservation at a good downtown hotel, and he had called a cab, telling the dispatcher very firmly that

he wanted to be picked up at the
side
door. As his cab drove him away from the hospital, he began to laugh.

“Something funny?” the driver asked him.

“Very, very funny, old buddy,” Raphael said, “but it’s one of those inside kind of jokes.”

He spent the first few nights in the hotel. It was a good one, and there were bellhops and elevators to make things easier. He began to refer to it in his mind as his own private halfway house. He had his meals sent up to his room, and he bathed
fairly
often, feeling a certain satisfaction at being able to manage getting in and out of the tub without help. After he had been in the hotel for two days, he bathed again and then lay on the bed to consider the future.

There was no reason to remain in Portland. He was not going back to Reed—not yet certainly—probably never. There were too many painful associations there. He also knew that if he stayed, sooner or later people would begin to come around—to look him up. In his mind he left it at that—“people”—even though what he really meant was Isabel and Marilyn. It was absolutely essential that he have no further contact with either of them.

He called the desk and made arrangements to have the hotel pick up the rest of his belongings from the hospital and ship them to his uncle in Port Angeles. He could send for them later, after he got settled. The sense of resolve, of having made a decision, was quite satisfying; and since it had been a big day, he slept well that night.

The next morning he called Greyhound. A plane would be faster certainly, but airlines keep records, and he could not really be sure just how far Shimpsie might go to track him down. Shimpsie had full access to the resources of the Portland Police Department, if she really wanted to push it, and Shimpsie would probably want to push it as far as it would go. Hell, as they say, hath no fury like a social worker scorned, and Raphael had not merely scorned Shimpsie, he had tricked her, deceived her, and generally made a fool of her. Right now Shimpsie would probably walk through fire to get him so that she could tear his heart out with her bare hands.

It was difficult to explain things over the phone to the man at Greyhound. It was really against policy for an interstate bus to make an unscheduled stop at a downtown street corner. Raphael waved the missing leg at him and finally got around that.

Then there was the question of destination. Raphael quickly calculated the amount of time it would take for a messenger to reach the depot with the money and return with a ticket. He concentrated more on that
time
than upon any given destination. He wanted to be gone from Portland. He wanted to go
anyplace
as long as it wasn’t Portland.

Finally the man on the phone, puzzled and more than a little suspicious, ventured the information that there were still seats available on the bus that would leave for Spokane in two hours, and that the bus would actually pass Raphael’s hotel. That was a good sign. Raphael had not had any good luck for so long that he had almost forgotten what it felt like. “Good,” he said. “Hold one of those seats for me. I’ll be outside the front door of the hotel.”

“Are you sure you want to go to Spokane?” the man at Greyhound asked dubiously.

“Spokane will do just fine,” Raphael said. “Everything I’ve always wanted is in Spokane.”

i

It was snowing when they reached Spokane, a swirling snowfall of tiny crystalline flakes that glittered in the streetlights and muffled the upper floors of the buildings. The traffic on the white-covered streets was sparse, and dark, ill-defined automobiles loomed, bulky and ominous, out of the swirling white with headlights like smeared eyes.

The bus pulled under the broad roof that sheltered the loading gates at the terminal and stopped. “Spokane,” the driver announced, and opened the door of the bus.

The trip had been exhausting, and toward the end had become a kind of tedious nightmare under a darkening, lead-gray sky that had spat snow at them for the last hundred miles. Raphael waited until the bus emptied before attempting to rise. By the time he had struggled down the steps and reached the safety of the ground, most of the other passengers had already joined family or friends, reclaimed their luggage, and left.

The air was crisp, but not bitterly cold, and the Muzak inside the depot came faintly through the doors.

There was another sound as well. At first Raphael thought it might be a radio or a television set left playing too loudly. A man was giving an address of some kind. His words seemed to come in little spurts and snatches as the swirling wind and intermittent traffic first blurred and then disclosed what he said.

“If chance is defined as an outcome of random influence produced by no sequence of causes,” he was saying in an oratorical manner, “I am sure that there is no such thing as chance, and I consider that it is but an empty word.”

Then Raphael saw the speaker, a tall, skinny man wearing a shabby overcoat of some kind of military origin. He was bald and unshaven, and he stood on the sidewalk at the front of the bus station talking quite loudly to the empty street, ignoring the snow that piled up on his shoulders and melted on his head and face. “For what place can be left for anything to happen at random so long as God controls everything in order? It is a true saying that nothing can come out of nothing.” The speaker paused to allow his unseen audience to grasp that point.

“These your bags?” a young man in blue jeans and a heavy jacket who had been unloading suitcases from the bus asked, pointing at Raphael’s luggage sitting alone on a baggage cart.

“Right,” Raphael said. “What’s with the prophet of God there?” He pointed at the skinny man on the sidewalk.

“He’s crazy,” the young man replied quite calmly. “You see him all over town makin’ speeches like that.”

“Why don’t they pick him up?”

“He’s harmless. You want me to put your bags in the station for

you?”

“If you would, please. Is there a good hotel fairly close?” “You might try the Ridpath,” the young man suggested, picking up Raphael’s suitcases. “It’s not too far.” “Can I get a cab?”

“Right out front.” The young man shouldered his way into the station and held the door open as Raphael crutched along behind him.

“If anything arises from no causes, it will appear to have arisen out of nothing,” the man on the sidewalk continued. “But if this is impossible, then chance also cannot—”

The door swung shut behind Raphael, cutting off the sound of that loud voice. Somehow he wished that it had not. He wished that he might have followed the insane prophet’s reasoning to its conclusion. Chance, luck—good or bad—if you will, had been on Raphael’s mind a great deal of late, and he really wanted to hear a discussion of the subject from the other side of sanity. His thoughts, centering, as they had, on a long series of “what-if s,” were growing tedious.

A few people sat in the bus station, isolated from each other for the most part. Some of them slept, but most stared at the walls with vacant-eyed disinterest.

“I’ll set these over by the front door for you,” the young man with the suitcases said.

“Thanks.”

The Ridpath is one of the best hotels in Spokane, and Raphael stayed there for four days. On the first morning he was there he took a cab to a local bank with branches in all parts of the city and opened a checking account with the cashier’s check he had purchased in Portland. He kept a couple hundred dollars for incidentals and then returned to his hotel. He did not venture out after that, since the snowy streets would have been too hazardous. He spent a great deal of time at the window of his room, looking out at the city. While he was there he had all of his pants taken to a tailor to have the left legs removed. The flapping cloth bothered him, and the business of pinning the leg up each time he dressed was a nuisance. It was much better with the leg removed and a neat seam where it had been.