Queen of the Silver Dollar by Edward Hower

Author:Edward Hower
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023443
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

EIGHT

March 8

That’s all I got to write last night. I was too tired to stay up any later.

We were both gazing down at Jack in full flower, or full mushroom, when suddenly we heard a loud thump beside the bed, and the whole room shuddered. Then crash!—a picture slid off the wall and hit the floor. Jack held me around the shoulders. I grabbed his arm.

Silence. “Was that good for you, too?” I whispered.

He pushed his nose into my hair. “It’s getting to be a madhouse around here.”

Thud! The door shook on its hinges. We heard shouting, and scrambled into our clothes. Out in the corridor, Saul was struggling to get past two large nurses. His suit was rumpled, his grey hair mussed, and his face was one big crimson scream of rage. He was glaring at Cal, who stood with his hands raised in front of him, palms out, like a pair of stop signs.

“Stay back, man!” Cal gritted his teeth. A vein in his temple looked about to explode.

“You fucker!—” Saul tried to lunge between the nurses. Jack blocked his way. Saul got an arm free. Jack pushed him back as he charged. The nurses grabbed both his arms again and hauled him back. They looked like women who’d handled men like Saul before.

A maintenance man in overalls stood in front of Cal, whose pajama shirt was ripped open to reveal a dark chest glistening with sweat. He wore a hair net, which would have looked comical on anyone who wasn’t six and a half feet of solid muscle and held-back rage.

“I don’t even know your wife’s number!” Cal shouted.

“You know it! You’ve been phoning her!” Saul screamed back.

Jack pushed him backwards as the nurses pulled him by the arms. Saul made snorting sounds, his forehead down as he kept staring at Cal, but he didn’t try to get past Jack. The nurses pulled him around the corner and into his room.

For days, I recalled, Saul had been complaining that his wife had a new lover who was a black man. Sometimes it was a student in a class she taught, sometimes it was one of the deans of her college. We’d all been trying to talk Saul out of this idea, reminding him that his wife visited him every Saturday. Tonight he’d taken a poke at Cal—obviously thinking he’d been after his wife. Cal could have decked him with one punch, but he hadn’t, he’d just slammed him against some walls to try to calm him down.

It was Saul people were taking care of—another nurse went into his room carrying a thermos bottle. I figured that somebody ought to stay with Cal, so I took him into the living room, where we sat on a couch. Jack joined us.

“That guy’s had it in for me, Babe,” Cal told me, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. I’d never seen anyone tremble so hard—the whole couch shook. The muscles in his neck were stretched to the breaking point.

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