Black Fridays (22 page)

FALL ARRIVED
that evening, with a bitter wind and a light fog, making me wish for that near-impossible New York City luxury—a working fireplace.

The cold mist didn’t seem to affect the Kid at all. He was busy skipping, a previously impossible feat of coordination, which he had just mastered in school that day. I had called Skeli to brag and make sure we were still speaking after the debacle of our dinner on Monday. She was too busy with school to join us, but we talked for a few minutes. Somehow she understood the monumental importance I placed on the Kid’s being able to skip. Every tiny milestone of development for any other child was for him a hurdle on an infinite obstacle course. We agreed to meet for dinner—and possibly more—the next night.

So the Kid and I celebrated alone together, with a trip to Barnes & Noble. It was late; we had taken an hour to choose our purchases—
Detroit’s 50 Biggest Losers
for the Kid;
There’s a Boy in Here
, another of Heather’s recommendations; and something called
The Stinky Cheese Man
, which Skeli had insisted the Kid and I would both like.

Broadway was nearly empty, the early-evening crowds having dissipated with the sudden turn in the weather. Gusts of wind, funneled up the concrete canyons, had stripped the first brown leaves from the trees, and the sidewalk was a slick minefield of them. I wanted to tell the Kid to be careful, but I knew he had no concept of what the words meant.

I turned up my collar and pulled my jacket tight around my throat, like a character in a Humphrey Bogart movie, and wished I had a hat. A fedora? I didn’t think I knew what a fedora was, but I was sure it would keep the rain off my face.

The Kid was a half-block ahead—his limit—but the next cross street was only a skip or two in front of him. I refrained from calling him back, and congratulated myself on acting like an indulgent, confident dad.

He reached the curb, stopped, and turned to face me. Almost immediately, he began to moan and flap his arms. His mouth formed a big O and he closed his eyes. I had no idea what was setting him off, but he was already oblivious to the traffic behind him. I cursed myself for letting him get so far ahead and ran.

But I had only traveled two steps, when a large something—someone—slammed into me from behind. My feet scurried for purchase on the bed of slick leaves and I almost recovered my balance. I turned my head to see my attacker. A mistake. I had offered him a better target. In the instant before his fist connected with my left eye, I had a quick, blurred view of a tall man with a long reach.

The back of my head bounced off the concrete wall of the Duane Reade drugstore and I slid to the sidewalk. I was still conscious when I felt the first kick to my stomach. The Kid was screaming, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

—

SOMEONE KEPT YELLING
my name. I wished they would shut up. It didn’t hurt where I was, and if they insisted on my going where they were, I knew it was going to hurt. A lot.

“Jason Stafford!” Time twisted back on itself. First, my eyes flew open. Then I heard my name. Then I smelled the amyl nitrate. My heart raced and for a split second I had the strength of ten. Then my head started to hurt and the world started spinning again.

“Stay with me, Jason!” the annoying man yelled. He pulled at my eyelid and a blinding white light stabbed my pupil. There was a kaleidoscopic explosion of whirling pinwheels and multicolored sparks.

“Definitely concussed.” The man was speaking to someone else. He probably thought he was helping, but I wished he would just fuck off.

“Can he tawk?” A second voice. Another stranger. Older.

I told him that I was quite capable of speech, but the only sound that came out was a throaty growl.

“Wha’d he say?”

The pain in my head was different from the pain in my side. Pain was no longer a universal constant—it had flavors and textures, time and place. I was returning to my own dimension. I remembered everything.

“Where’s my son?” My voice sounded like a wooden spoon stuck down the garbage disposal.

“He’s trying to talk.” The guy with the light.

Why the hell wouldn’t they just answer me?

“Is the Kid all right? Where is he? Kid! Kid! Are you there?” Only it didn’t sound like that. I had to find him.

“Hold him down! Christ!”

Pain took charge. It crescendoed in a magnificent, soaring coda. Pain could bend steel, lance through cement-block walls, and grind bones to dust. I loved my pain. As long as I had it, I was alive. As long as it was there, I had no responsibilities, no duties. Then the pain started to go away. I tried to follow. I went somewhere else instead.

—

AN ANGRY WOMAN
stood over me, wearing a white coat over a gray Yale sweatshirt. She had large, strong features, bushy eyebrows, and a big, square jaw.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” She sounded like she was already fed up with my malingering and wanted me out of her ER. STAT.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Are you in pain?” She was speaking very loudly as though I were deaf or foreign.

I did an inventory. The back of my head throbbed. My ribs ached—they were going to hurt a lot more as soon as I moved. I tried squinting my eye. It hurt.

“Yes,” I answered.

“That’s to be expected,” she yelled.

“Where’s my son?” I yelled back.

“You’ve had a concussion. You were in a fight.”

“It wasn’t a fight,” I said. I was attacked. Mugged. Assaulted. I was not
in a fight
!

She gave a brief skeptical smile.

“Where’s my son?!?” I sat up. The merry-go-round started up, complete with the shower-ball lights and wailing calliope. “Aw, shit.” I fell back.

—

AT MY NEXT
awakening, a Mayan-featured woman in a green uniform was taking my blood pressure. She smiled when she saw that I was awake.

“Chubedda?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks. Much better.” I was. The line dividing pain and discomfort was much easier to identify. I had a lot of discomfort.

I was still in the ER, but no longer on the stretcher. They had moved me to a full gurney and I was surrounded by beeping monitors.

“What’s the verdict?” I nodded toward the blood pressure machine.

She stripped off the armband. “One-twenty over eighty. You’ll live.”

“I think that doctor wants me out of here. You must be short on beds.”

She rolled her eyes. “Dr. Glen should’ve been a vet.” She pushed aside the curtain to leave.

“Just a sec. Is there someone I can talk to? I think my son is missing. I need to know what’s going on.”

“The police. They still here, waiting to talk wichu. I send them in.”

I was still wearing my watch. It was just after midnight. Almost four hours. I tried to convince myself that the Kid was fine. The police had him. He was in the waiting room, reading his new car book or fast asleep. Or they’d already taken him home. Because if they hadn’t, then where the hell was he?!

A heavyset nurse came around the curtain and opened a cabinet across the room.

“Nurse? Excuse me. Nurse?”

She ripped apart a sealed plastic bag of sterilized towels and removed one. Two more fell out of the bag and landed on the floor.

“Nurse? Can you help me? I need to find out about my son.”

She picked up the two towels, stuffed them back in the bag, and jammed the whole thing back in the cabinet.

“Nurse? Helloooo!”

She left with her clean towel.

“Mr. Staffud?” A tired-looking policeman appeared from around the curtain. “This a good time to tawk?” The older voice from earlier.

“Do you know where my son is?” I tried to make myself sound under control. My blood pressure was probably already up to two hundred over, and the little blinking light on the monitor for my pulse was flashing like a strobe.

“The boy is fine,” he said. “He was a little scared and he ran.” The cop laughed. “But, boy, you got him trained good. He wouldn’t cross the street by himself, so he just kept running around the block until we got there.”

I swallowed a few times, while I found my voice again. “Thank you. When can I see him?”

The cop shrugged. “Let me do my thing, awright? Then we’ll see if they’re gonna let you go home.”

He was good, he asked all the right questions three times over. But there wasn’t much I could tell him. It made no sense. I had my watch and wallet, so it wasn’t a mugging. There were plenty of people who didn’t like me, but precious few who would attack me on the street four blocks from Lincoln Center.

“Anything about the way he carried himself, the way he moved, maybe?”

“I barely saw him.” Then I did think of something. “I don’t know, maybe I imagined it, but, when he was kicking me . . .”

“Yeah?”

“It was strange. I was curled in a ball and not looking, but I think he was favoring one leg. As though he had a limp, maybe.”

“Hmm.” He looked unconvinced, but he made a note. “That’s it?”

“Afraid so.”

He put his notebook away. “You’re gonna hear from the detectives at some point. Somebody’ll get assigned and they’ll have to ask the same questions and make a report. Sorry. That’s the way we do it.”

“So? My son? You guys have him? Is he here?”

“No. Sorry. His mother took him home.”

“His mother?” His mother was a thousand miles away. My next thought was of Skeli. Highly unlikely.

“She showed up while we were waiting for the EMTs.”

One of the monitors was emitting an annoying beep. I tore the wires off my chest and tossed the plastic clip on my index finger across the room.

“No. Impossible. Who was this? Did she give you a name? What did she look like?” I tried sitting up. It worked better than the first time—I didn’t pass out.

“Take it easy.” He flipped through a small notebook. “Blond. Five-eight. A looker. Here it is. Evangeline Oubre,” he read. “Her license showed an address downtown. The boy knew her—went right to her.”

I screamed. It’s a good way to get immediate attention in an ER, but that wasn’t why I did it. I screamed because I couldn’t do anything else.

“OOOOhhhhhhhh, faaaack. How the fuck could you?”

The nice nurse arrived first, followed by an orderly and the butch doctor. In varying tones and volume they all gave me the same orders—lie back, try to relax, and let them help me. They couldn’t help me.

“The bitch stole my Kid!”

It took another few minutes for me to explain the situation in language they could understand.

The two cops conferred and called in the detectives, which in turn led to another hour of questions, explanations, and delay. Details of my failed marriage and my recent incarceration were openly discussed as though we were on a midafternoon talk show, as hordes of the medical staff floated in and out of the room—an audience tag team that, no doubt, kept the flow of gossip running smoothly. No matter how hard I tried to spin it, I still managed to come off sounding like a schmuck. Possibly dangerous. Definitely dishonest.

Impossible. But it was Angie. No doubt. The two cops who had seen her further revealed that the woman had one arm in a cast, and that she was wearing cowboy boots—and the younger cop also offered up that she had been wearing “very tight” jeans.

The mention of cowboy boots set off another iota of memory. “The guy who was kicking me was wearing pointed boots,” I said. “Probably her husband. You should be looking for a big silver pickup truck with Louisiana plates.”

Depending on which route they had taken, the truck might have already been passing through Martinsburg, West Virginia, or Baltimore, Maryland.

A brown-suited detective with a Wyatt Earp mustache had taken charge. “Maybe they flew. We’ll check the airlines.”

He didn’t know my son. Anyone who had flown with him once would much prefer to drive halfway across country and back rather than repeat the experience.

“This makes it kidnapping, right? Parental kidnapping. You can call for a whatsit—a Yellow Alert. You can stop them.” I was practically jumping up and down on the gurney. “Look, I will cooperate any way I can, but if you don’t start the ball rolling, they’ll be back in Louisiana by Friday and that crazy bitch will have the boy locked up again, if her nutcase husband doesn’t beat the crap out of both of them first.”

The detective shot his cuffs, like he was getting ready for his big scene at the O.K. Corral. “I’m sorry, Jason. May I call you Jason?”

He didn’t wait for me to say no.

“We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot, here. I can see you’re upset, and hurt.” His voice hardened. “But I don’t work for you. Right now the only witness is you, and, if you’ll excuse my saying so, you are not prime material. But”—he held up a hand to stop me from interrupting—“but, I am going to investigate your claims, despite the fact that this sounds a lot like a domestic dispute that got out of hand. Maybe you want to get some rest and rethink things in the morning. Meanwhile, me and my partner will make some calls. We will get back to you. But in the meantime, we have to assume that your son is safe with his mother.”