CAL STEVENS, ESQ.
The nurse they assign to accompany Coop Johnson through the prison hospital is about forty, thick, angry and uninformed as to the identity of her charge.
Coop Johnson takes it in stride as they pass through several segments of the complex with doors that open with a pop and close with a suck. They walk through wards past rows of beds with bad boys wearing nylon skull caps, down corridors of cinder block painted GSA green. The nurse looks back to make sure the man in the expensive top coat is following, prepared to scold him if he isn’t, when Coop gives her the look he’s used over the years, not to display his anger or frustration, but to let a person know he’s got a fuse, it’s not long and there’s power in the explosion.
The nurse picks up on it. It’s instinct more than brains, and she knows to the centimeter just how far she can go with her attitude, so she softens some as she escorts Coop through an empty ward before he enters the last ward where the gravely ill sleep away their last days.
“Last bed on the left,” the nurse says.
“Thank you,” Coop says, overly formal, codifying the space between those who tell others what to do and those who do what they’re told.
“And nurse,” Coop says.
“Yes?”
“When I’m ready to leave, how do I notify you or whomever?”
“There’s a call button by his bed. Just push that and wait. They’ll send somebody.”
Coop crosses the room to where Cal Stevens, barely recognizable, under covers, with his head back, his throat exercised and bare, breathes shallow breaths.
“Cal,” Coop whispers, and he waits as Cal’s eyes catch up with the brain that tells him to look to the side of the bed.
“Who is it?” Cal asks, not because he’s blind, but because he doesn’t have the will or the energy to remember anything.
“It’s Coop.”
“Coop,” Cal says, tasting the name with a languor that accompanies unspeakable humiliation, wanting to be extinguished when every impression offers up a catastrophic reminder that it’s not so easy to depart this world.
Cal drops his head to his chest, turns slightly and watches Coop take a seat in a metal chair.
“We’re going to get you out of here and into a hospital that’ll do you some good.”
“No,” Cal says. “Don’t.”
“I’ve talked to the judge, Cal. I’ve taken care of the bond.”
“Get your money back, then,” Cal says. “I’m not leaving till I leave for good.”
“Don’t say that, Cal. I’ve got my lawyers on it now, and they’re working with Mickey Trumble, you know him, out of Bridgeport. That’s a guy who takes care of things.”
Cal raises his hand and flicks his wrist, a semi-rhetorical flourish of disdain, as if Mickey Trumble were capable of anything when fate writes large the destiny of doomed men.
“I loved her, Coop. You know that.”
“Of course, I know it, Cal. We both did.”
“She was never the same after that summer. Something happened that summer.”
“What summer?”
“Years ago,” Cal says, and he coughs with a wheeze and hiccup before he covers his mouth with the back of his hand.
“That’s ancient history, Cal.”
“But it changed her.”
“We’ve got more important things to attend to. Now, c’mon, friend. I don’t want you slipping away on me.”
“I don’t believe some alcoholic Mick …,” Cal begins and coughs again, the cough stretching then compressing the muscles of his chest as he appears to rise and bend at the waist. “I say,” he begins again, “no Mick-Sullivan was going to get his hands on her money, not after he killed her.”
“We don’t know that, Cal. I never liked the guy, either, but that doesn’t mean he killed anybody.”
Cal looks down the length of the bed. He says: “I did what I did, because I know he killed her. As well as I know anything, so, please do not,” he coughs, “do not disabuse me of this final satisfaction.”
“What satisfaction?”
“That I did for Emma what any lover would have done, I avenged her, Coop.”
“Listen Cal, let’s cut through this, alright? What you did is – you fucked up. You let this whole Emma Kost thing grow inside of you for so long that you didn’t know which end was up anymore. God only knows where you got the gun and what you were doing at her house, in the first place, kneeling by her bed, asking forgiveness, not for killing Sullivan, but for having failed to kill him before he killed Emma. Jesus, Cal!”
Cal begins to raise his head, coughs, falls back and stops.
“No, Cal, you screwed the pooch, and now you’re going to listen to me: I’ve paid the bond, and I’ve got a room for you at St. Francis, and we’re going to nurse you back to health and then take care of this nonsense with you and Bobby Sullivan.”
“Leave me alone, Coop.”
“And I’ll do that, too, but we’ve business to attend to.”
“I said leave me alone.”
“Do you want Emma’s foundation to fall apart. Do you want the one thing she cherished, her Chairtable Trust – do you want that to dissolve because you lost your head?”
“No, I …”
“Then I want you to sign this.”
“Leave me alone Coop, I don’t have more than – if I could I’d have willed myself gone by now.”
“Just make a mark here,” Coop says, and he takes his Mont Blanc and places it between Cal’s fingers, setting the paper on his chest.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a resolution of the Board appointing me Trustee.”
“What the …?”
“I want you to appoint me Trustee of Emma’s foundation. You of all people don’t want her fortune to go down the drain for lack of attention.”
“What? No, Coop, I think I signed this.”
“Not from me, you didn’t, what you signed was your paralegal’s appointment.”
“Ann Dillon?”
“That’s right. She must have had you looking the other way when she shoved her papers in front of you, probably hid it with correspondence and blue backs.”
“I appointed Ann?”
“You did, Cal, and now I want you to appoint me. Emma deserves nothing less.
She would have wanted professionals like ourselves to take care of that legacy.”
Cal picks up the document, squints and strains to read the heading. His wire rimmed glasses are folded and resting on a side table near a glass of old water, stagnant with bubbles.
“Where?” He says, unable to see, unable to move. The pen hangs between the tips of his fingers.
“Jesus Christ,” Coop says, fed up with Cal’s absolute refusal to live, to engage, to take breath and responsibility for the time he’s got left. “Here,” he says, and he takes Cal’s hand with the pen and forces it across the bottom of the page with a black slash over the signatory line next to the pre-notarized seal.
“Then take it all,” Cal says, and Coop looks down, reaches out and touches Cal’s shoulder.
“We’ll be by tonight to pick you up,” Coop says, but Cal doesn’t respond, knowing in the way the nearly dead take on the talents of seers that he’ll never leave this ward.
“I won’t be here, Coop.”
“Oh, really. And where will you be, then?”
“I loved her,” Cal says, as Coop folds the document, places it in his suit pocket, presses the call button, pulls his coat tight and buttons it more for protection than for warmth against the fetid air and ill humors blowing through the place.
“Good bye, Cal,” he says, and Cal doesn’t answer, only to blink his eyes and keep them shut against everything that resides outside himself, nurturing, for a time, the self-sustaining notion that his love for Emma Kost, unrequited, sad, polite, proper, had afforded his life the architecture of something like meaning, a framework for something that almost rose to the level of purpose.