Cadillac Orpheus by Solon Timothy Woodward

Author:Solon Timothy Woodward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ashley and Sarah did little to betray their presence behind the house door to the garage but it didn’t take much. A protracted whimper here, then a snuffle, a click of nails across the linoleum, sighs—these were the sounds Medgar’s clients would try to piece together staring at the door.

With the abrupt departure of Adam Finchem, Medgar found himself wearing hats of both therapist and insurance examiner. Something he swore he wouldn’t do but now he didn’t appear to have a choice. Jesmond sat across the room in the half-dark.

“Who that?” It was a young man in a wheelchair, trying to point at Jesmond.

“My apprentice.”

“What’s that? What does an apprentice do?” the young man asked, now studying the door. Medgar’s pinchers.

“It means he must work with me for years and years in order to master his craft. Even then he might not cut it. He might not have the necessary skill of empathy combined with constrained detachment, for example.” Medgar removed his glasses and began polishing them on a Popeyes Chicken paper napkin. He then, reflexively, swiped his lips with the napkin. Liver-colored. For the first time Jesmond noticed how Medgar’s lips were liver colored and cracked. “But enough about me and what I do—how did you like my health lecture series at the public library?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Just a joke. Why did you end up in the wheelchair?”

The young man pulled up in his chair, wobbling in his oversized tracksuit like a wind-bounced flower. He then adjusted his legs.

He was one of two brothers, both in wheelchairs. Kevin was the young man across the desk from Medgar; Kelvin was the sib back home. The brothers lived in a stucco ranch-style house with their mother—a house similar to the Medgars’, though their mother’s home had black wrought-iron bars on the windows and doors of her house, and on the northwest corner of the roof a tin rooster would flicker and spin windward during a thunderstorm. With her two sons wheelchair bound, the city had provided her with a plywood ramp for the front steps and lift bars in one of the bathrooms. Kevin was the first to come to a wheelchair; his brother followed three years later.

They all had guns. At the end of nearly every Saturday night on the street in front of their mother’s house, when most of the revelers from the He Ain’t Here and other clubs and parties had disappeared into their respective homes, and the knots of young thugs eventually diminished in their floating from street to street to the five or so remaining—the five or so who were powerless in bringing the night to a close, standing there in front of their house (or if cold, in their garage); when everyone remaining at some point fell into the stupor of the evening, drifting (high or melancholic) in reveries of acts without consequence, or submerged in the dark hour of some radio’s voice; when every proposed deed fell into a dispute or silence—then one of toughs would cuff another, provoking words and vengeance.

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