Nobody's Angel (17 page)

Hagarty and Casper were on the street, a sergeant told me. He took my name and number and a few minutes later the phone rang. "Eddie, don't you ever sleep?" Hagarty asked.

"Pretty soon," I said. "Look, I was down on North Avenue a while ago and there was this van down there, you know, talking to one of the girls."

"You get the plate number?"

"See, that's the thing," I explained, "I didn't get anything. I didn't really realize what I saw till a few blocks later, and then when I went back they were gone."

"You're sure it was the same van?"

"Not really," I had to admit.

"What'd the driver look like?"

"I never saw him."

"Eddie, you been drinking?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Have a couple more and call me tomorrow."

I sat there sipping my drink, looking out the window. It was a grey, misty morning. The day people were waiting down at the bus stop, a line of ghosts trying to escape on the CTA.

Betty knocked on her way out, but I just sat at the window and watched as she joined the crowd.

I sat there for hours, sipping whiskey. Long after Betty's bus had come and gone it began to rain. Lenny's funeral was at ten, but the hour came and went and I was still watching traffic pass.

Sometime later I picked up the phone and dialed. My ex would be at work, my daughter still at school. I was expecting a recorded message but not the one I got.

"The number you are calling has been disconnected," a mechanical voice said, and repeated the number I'd been dialing for years. "No further information is available about " The voice repeated the number again.

In my dreams I worked without a cab, carrying passengers on my shoulders. My daughter flagged me. She was still a little girl. She had many suitcases and I kept trying to

rearrange them so I could carry them all. Then it wasn't my daughter. It was Relita. No. It was the girl who had done the dance on North Avenue. She smiled as I unzipped her jacket. Her breasts were small and chocolate brown, the nipples a bright, strawberry red.

I lifted her up, breast to my mouth. "I give good head," she whispered in my ear.

"This is all I want," I said, and I tried to hold on but she pulled away and her mouth began to move down my chest.

No vehicle licensed by the City of Chicago shall be operated to solicit or accept passengers unless it is in a clean condition. Minimum standards of cleanliness include, but are not limited to:

i. The interior of the vehicle (including the trunk) shall be kept free from all waste paper, cans, garbage, or any other item not intrinsic to the vehicle or to the conduct of operating a public passenger vehicle;

ii. The interior of the vehicle (including the trunk) shall be kept free from all dirt, grease, oil, adhesive resin, or any other item which can be transferred onto the person, clothing or possessions of a passenger by incidental contact;

           iii. The interior of the vehicle shall be kept free of any material which a reasonable person would find noxious or unpleasant.

City of Chicago, Department of Consumer Services, Public Vehicle Operations Division

I was downstairs waiting when my dayman Irv pulled up about ten minutes after six. He was almost seventy years old. His face had lost most of its color and his eyes seemed to recede more each day, but his hair was still a thick, wavy brown, and he still managed to drive six days a week. He took every Sunday off and I kept the cab straight through from Saturday night until Monday morning.

"Sorry I'm late," he said as I slid into the back seat.

"No problem," I said. The rain was still falling, the sky grey. "How's business?"

"Nothing but money," he said, "but Jesus, traffic's a bitch." He turned right on Montrose into a sea of red brake-lights.

"I think I'll go hide," I said.

"Eddie, you've got to get it while it's hot."

"I hate driving in the rain," I said.

"You hear about the blockade?" he asked.

"What blockade?"

"Bunch of dot-heads blocked LaSalle in front of City Hall. Fucked up the whole Loop."

"You're kidding."

He shook his head. "They had to pick a Friday."

"What was it this time?"

"Bulletproof shields. What else?"

I didn't say anything for a while, then I blurted it out. "I wonder what Lenny would say."

He put his arm up on the back of the seat. "Look, Eddie, I know the Polack was your friend but that doesn't change a fucking thing. A shield's only gonna protect you from somebody you shouldn't have picked up in the first place."

"I guess you're right," I said.

"Hell, I know I am," Irv said. "Remember I drove with one for five years. Worst years I ever had and I got robbed twice."

I grunted. I'd heard the stories before.

"It just changes the game around. They try to con you out of the cab. You never saw so many people lugging those cheap cardboard suitcases around."

"I've been having a bad week," I confessed.

"Yeah, I noticed," Irv agreed as he turned down his own block. "You forgot the ashtrays this morning."

"Sorry," I said.

He double-parked and grabbed his bag. "Don't let 'em get you down," he said, and sprinted for home.

I got behind the wheel, slid my chauffeur's license into the holder, the mace into the ashtray.

I made a left at Irving Park and joined the traffic waiting for the light at Ashland.

There was a van about ten cars up with a chrome ladder on the back door. I fashioned a third lane a couple inches off the parked cars and crept forward.

The van was too dark, I saw as I got closer. There was a bumper sticker on the back but it was on the wrong door and backed in white. IF THIS VAN'S A ROCKIN', it read, DON'T COME A KNOCKIN'.

Even in the grey rain, St. Lucy's looked like some city of the future. Gleaming glass-and-steel walkways linked the various buildings a few stories above street level.

I parked at the back of an empty cab stand, walked up a ramp and pushed through a revolving door.

ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN, a sign read. I leaned on a counter and waited until an older woman with frosted blue hair got off the phone. A name tag identified her as a volunteer. "May I help you?" she asked.

"I want to visit Relita Brown."

"Do you know the room number?"

"She's supposed to be in Intensive Care."

The woman flipped through a file. "Well, here's some good news," she said. "It looks like your friend's gotten better. She's been transferred to a regular floor." She started through another file, handed me a cardboard Visitor Pass, and pointed the way to the elevators.

Upstairs, I walked past the nurse's station, then stuck my head in the second door on the right. There was a woman sitting in a chair reading a book. She looked to be about thirty, slim and very black. She was wearing a pink robe and matching slippers. After a moment she looked up.

"I must have the wrong room," I said. She was the only one around.

"Who are you looking for?"

"Relita Brown."

The woman raised a finger into the air. "Leta," she called.

Now I saw that there was a second bed beyond a long white curtain. I could see the foot of the bed just where the curtain stopped.

The woman walked to the curtain. "Leta," she said again. I didn't hear any answer but after a moment she waved me over. "It's okay," she said.

I walked past her to the foot of the bed. Relita was lying on her side, facing a window that looked out on the city. She was wearing a thin white hospital gown and was curled up on top of tangled sheets. She looked even smaller than she had in the alley.

The top of the gown opened down the back and I could see thick white bandages against dark brown skin. Everything in the room was white except her skin and a small yellow radio lying next to her on the bed. A set of headphones dangled from it and I could hear music; a pounding beat, muted and far away.

"Hi," I said. But she didn't answer or turn my way.

I walked around the bed to the window side. She didn't look up. The side of her face was bruised and swollen. Her head lay on a pillow. Both hands were tucked up under her chin, her wrists crossed.

She didn't look anything like the girl I'd seen on North Avenue last night, the girl with the pigtails, the girl of my dreams. There wasn't an ounce of sexiness about Relita and it was hard to imagine that anyone had ever paid for her company. She was just an injured animal waiting to die. A small, dark animal that someone had dressed as a gag.

"Hi," I said. "It's Eddie Miles. Remember me?"

"Eddie," she said softly. She tilted her head my way but her eyes didn't quite make the trip. They were off somewhere, hidden behind bleak clouds.

A hand reached out, balled into a tiny fist. I took it, closed my hands around it and the fist disappeared inside.

I looked up and the roommate was standing just beyond the curtain. She didn't have any problem making eye contact. She nodded her head, as if I'd just confirmed her darkest thoughts, turned and walked away.

"How're you doing?" I asked after a moment.

"Okay." Her voice was so far away, so tired, that I could never imagine her lifting her head off the pillow.

"I was in the neighborhood," I said, "so I thought, what the heck."

"Relita's angel," she whispered.

"The police told me you were here," I said.

"Don't be talking 'bout no police," she said with some force.

Nobody said anything for a while. Her eyes shifted around but never settled. They were off to one side or the other, up or down, but never dead ahead. "Maybe we mets a different way," she said after several minutes had gone by.

"Sure," I said, willing to play along. "How?"

"Slide the chair," she said.

There was a chair near the foot of the bed. I released her hand and then moved the chair alongside and sat down.

Both hands came out now and I took them and closed them up in my own. "You be my angel," she whispered.

"Sure," I said.

We sat like that for several minutes. Neither one of us said a word. Her eyes continued to shift but they never seemed to focus. They might as well have belonged to some blind man begging on a street corner. They might as well have been closed.

She was just a kid. It was hard to believe she was seventeen. She wasn't any bigger than my daughter had been the last time I'd seen her, and my daughter had only been eight years old. At the most, Relita weighed eighty pounds.

She must have grown up on a diet of potato chips and junk food, drugs and late hours, cigarettes and booze, and high-volume street sex, night after night after night.