Burial of the Dead

SEASONAL COLDS - Cal Stevens, Esq.

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.