The Waiting Room
THE WAITING ROOM
By T. M. Wright – Writing as F. W. Armstrong
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by T. M. Wright
Cover Design by David Dodd – Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione
Cover image courtesy of: Emma Louise - http://prolific-stock.deviantart.com
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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T. M. Wright:
NOVELS:
STRANGE SEEDS
BOUNDARIES
THE CHANGING
THE DEVOURING
NON FICTION:
THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL
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With love and thanks to my mom
MARIEANNE AUBIN
Acknowledgments
For her much-needed letter of encouragement, my thanks to Stacy Horn. for his continued support, my thanks to Jeff Zaleski. And, as always, my gratitude to my editor, Harriet P. McDougal.
And one person deserves acknowledgment merely for being the marvelous woman that she is—Barbara Doherty.
Part One
At the Edge
ONE
My name is Sam Feary. I have a friend named Abner W. Cray. Sometimes people call him "Abner Doubleday," either because they think it's funny or because they're hard of hearing and they really believe that's what he's called. He hates it, though.
Abner and I have known each other since we were kids in Bangor, Maine. I'm a year and a half older, probably fifty I.Q. points smarter, and I'm not nearly as clumsy as he is with women. Take that stupidity with his cousin Stacy, for instance, and the unholy mess he made of things with Phyllis Pellaprat, which, of course, he couldn't have helped—when the love bug bites Abner, it bites him hard, right through the skin and into the blood. It happened more than once in Bangor, when we were in high school together.
~ * ~
I came to Manhattan, and I stayed here, because I like it. I like people—all kinds of people. Everyone's interesting as far as I'm concerned, everyone's got some great story to tell, even if he's not aware of it. So I came to Manhattan, I got myself a job with a construction company, set myself up in a small apartment on Second Avenue, near 1lth Street, bought myself a pet boa constrictor—which has since gone the way of the carrier pigeon—met a woman named Leslie, whom I rapidly fell in love with, and started to live.
I like living. I get a kick out of touching and tasting, out of going into an Italian deli---there's one not far from here—and taking a giant whiff of whatever gritty aroma wafts my way. And I like to dance, though I'm the first to admit that I've got three left feet and fifteen big toes. And except for country western, I like music, too—pop, rock, classical (if it's not too sleepy). If it's got a beat, I'll listen to it and enjoy it. There's very little in this world that I don't like, in fact. Except the New York Post, and the memory of Idi Amin and Joe Stalin and Richard Nixon (because he got me into so much damn trouble in Viet Nam), and commercials for Charmin toilet paper, and a lone fly buzzing me while I'm trying to eat, and two radios playing different stations at the same time, and the smell of peanut butter sandwiches mixed up with the smell of ironing.
I had to grow up with that. In Bangor. I had to come home from school at lunchtime, because the school I went to had no lunch program, and invariably I'd get fed peanut butter sandwiches and milk while my mother finished up her morning's ironing. I didn't think much about it while it was happening. I think I may even have enjoyed it—those two smells mixed up together. I started hating it later, in Nam, I think. I'm not sure why. Maybe I had a thing for my mother, I don't know. Maybe I had a thing for peanut butter sandwiches, or fresh ironing, I don't know. I'll probably never know, because what I've learned about myself over the years is this: There's a stranger living inside me, and sometimes he's a damned ignorant bastard.
~ * ~
I had no idea Abner was here, in Manhattan, when I got here. The last time I'd seen him, I was two days away from catching a Greyhound bus to Parris Island, in South Carolina, where some asshole D.I. was going to try and "mold" me into a Marine. Abner was drooling over his cousin Stacy then; he was going on and on about her "incredible body," and I remember saying to him, "Christ, Abner, she's practically your sister, and here you are talking about putting it to her."
"Putting it to her?" he asked. I didn't know then that Abner was a virgin. I thought that anyone older than fourteen had a constant hard-on and was lying in wait for whoever happened to back into it. "Put what to her, Sam?"
"Your thing," I answered. "Your little ding-dong. You know—put it to her, have sex with her."
"With Stacy, Sam? Naw. She's too smart for that. She's smarter than I am, for sure."
Abner was fifteen then, maybe sixteen. And it wasn't that he was homely, or smelly, or stupid. He was just plain scared of girls. Especially girls like Stacy. This was 1965, remember, a full ten or fifteen years before people finally figured out that, male or female, everyone likes to get it on. In 1965 all of us guys knew that only men liked to get it on, and that it was the full-time job of women either to prevent it or to grin and bear it. So there was Abner, fifteen or sixteen, horny, and scared. And there was Stacy, fifteen or sixteen, smart, stacked, and enticing, which, as far as poor Abner was concerned, added up to obscene intimidation.
~ * ~
Abner and I broke into a mausoleum once, when we were kids, shortly before I got called up and shipped away to Viet Nam. Breaking into the mausoleum was his bright idea right from the start. He said something about wanting "to see how the dead ticked," which, I told him, was just about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard anyone say. "The dead," I told him, "don't tick anymore, Abner."
He shook his head, squinted, pursed his lips, tried to look befuddled. It's a pose he uses quite a lot, especially when he realizes that something incredibly stupid has just come stumbling from his mouth. Then he explained, "Well, I guess 'tick' isn't the right word, is it, Sam? But it really would be a neat thing to do. I mean . . . you could bring that cat skull you've got—"
"It's not a toy, Abner. That cat was my friend."
"Sam, you dug her up, Jees—you dug her up—"
What could I say? The cat was named Flora, and I really did love her, if only because the original Flora was a girl I'd taken to a couple of horror movies and had fallen hopelessly in love with because of the way she clutched at me in panic. Then she moved from Bangor to Oshkosh or Hoboken or some such place, and I was devastated. The cat itself was pretty much just a cat; she was nothing special (and it comes to me that my father once pointed out that Flora was a male, which, because the cat had long, thick black fur was not something that was easy to spot, and since he had a soft, feminine face, I assumed that he was a she).
I said to Abner, "I dug her up only because we were close. If we do this thing, if we break into this mausoleum, Flora stays home. Okay?"
He shrugged.
But, at last, I did bring Flo
ra's skull, if only so Abner wouldn't sulk. And I brought some candles, too, and a dozen Mallo Cups, because I had something like a craving for them then, which has since vanished. I have no real cravings anymore. I have needs, and desires, and passions. I'm pretty much like anyone else.
~ * ~
We all grow up. We lose our craving for Mallo Cups, we stop being afraid of thunder, we turn out the night-light, we go down into the cellar to change a fuse, we peek into the attic, and we end up being proud of ourselves for it. We say we're adult and rational, we say there's really nothing to be afraid of anymore besides IRS audits, slippery roads, and canned vichyssoise. But I know one thing about that damned ignorant bastard living inside me: I know that he's about ready to piss in his boots every time the fuses blow, and that if he's got to move around with me on some dark street, then he'd just as soon curl up and go to sleep.
Even now.
Even after all this time with my friend Abner W. Cray.
Even after so much black water has passed under the bridge.
~ * ~
Right up front, let me tell you a little of what this story is about, so you won't come back later and say I'm perverse or mixed up or that I've got a memory like a sieve. This story is about people, it's about love, it's about friendship. That's what it's mostly about.
But it's about traffic flow, too. The same kind of traffic flow you'll find on I-490 or Route 66 or on the New Jersey Turnpike. Traffic flow. Getting people from one place to another without too much hassle and delay. No one's got it down to an exact science. Sometimes it works, but most times it doesn't. And you know why, of course. It doesn't work because of people. On the expressways and the turnpikes it would work just fine if none of those cars had people in them, if each car were programmed to go exactly where it should go. But those cars do have people in them, people with brains and souls and aches and pains and likes and dislikes and habits, et cetera, et cetera. So when everything is moving along beautifully, one of those people decides he's going to go rent a videotape before heading home. But the video rental place is in Weehawken, and Weehawken is off that exit there, coming up at fifty-five miles per hour, and only one hundred feet away. And he thinks, Hell, there's still time. So he jams on the brakes and swings into the exit lane like Mario Andretti. And behind him, the poor slob who's been following a bit too close has fishtailed and been hit broadside by a semi. The traffic flow didn't work. People screwed it up.
TWO
Iworked in construction for two months, in January and February this year. I never actually built anything, because buildings usually don't get built in the winter. I dug some trenches for sewer pipes, I operated a forklift, I hauled bags of cement from one place to another. And I helped demolish an ancient red brick apartment building on East 80th Street.
It was an ugly building, old and rotting, the red brick was a streaky dark brown, most of the windows were gone. Raised letters in the cement over the front doors read "THE MILFORD," though the F and the 0 had weathered away nearly to nothing, so the guys I worked with started calling it "The Mill Road," which they clearly thought was interesting and catchy.
We had to stop work after the second day when a man they sent through the building to look for transients found a body in an eighth-floor apartment. No one got upset about it. The body had been there, we were told, for quite a long time. It was mummified, in fact, because the apartment was dry and cool and faced north, so sunlight never touched it. One of the guys I worked with, a fat man named Lenny who had a red tattoo on his left arm which read "RASPUTIN EATS IT" ("I don't know how it got there," he told me. "I was in this whorehouse in Louisiana, and when I woke up, there it was—I never did find out who this Rasputin guy is.") said that they were always finding bodies in old buildings. "Usually they're winos, you know. Your bums and your basic trash. Sometimes they ain't. Sometimes they're guys the mob's gotten to, and sometimes they're these old farts who keep on living in a place even when the rats have run off."
The body they found was the body of a young black woman who was dressed in a long black silk dress and white mink cape, as if she'd been planning an evening on the town. She was sitting in a kitchen corner, knees up, head down, left hand in front of her knees, clutching her right wrist. She was holding a purse that turned out to have a couple of hundred dollars in it. She had the purse in a strong death grip in her right hand. ("I tried to take it from her, you know," said the guy who found her. "But I could tell—she didn't want me taking it, so I let her have it a little while longer. ")
"Junkie," Lenny said.
"Yeah?" said a guy named Allen, who was also fat, though not quite as fat as Lenny, and who wore sleeveless T-shirts no matter what the weather. "D'joo see her, Lenny? D'joo see her?"
Lenny confessed that he hadn't seen her, though he wished he had, and that's when the foreman came over and told us to go home, that he'd call us when we could start work again.
~ * ~
It was while I was on my way back to my apartment for a long, relaxing shower and a shave to get ready for my date with Leslie that I saw Abner. Leslie and I had a "talk-it-out" evening planned: dinner first, at a quiet Italian place on East 81st Street, then a long leisurely walk down Fifth Avenue, then back to my place. We were having some trouble then and we had agreed to try to get to the bottom of it. I was walking on Second Avenue near 38th Street; he was across the street, coming out of a little Greek restaurant, and was swiping at his chin with the back of his jacket sleeve. "Hey, Abner!" I called, because I recognized him right away. Hell, I hadn't seen him for nearly twenty years, but he had the same quick, stiff walk, the same I'm watching you over my shoulder look that he'd had then, when he was going on and on about his cousin Stacy. He's kind of an odd-looking guy; his brow is low and heavy, his hazel eyes deep-set, his nose long and straight, his lips large. And though he should, by all rights, look Neanderthal, he doesn't. His girlfriends in high school invariably described him as "poetic-looking" and "intense." I always thought "poetic-looking" and "intense" meant screwed up. I'd say that described him then, and describes him now, although, I'll admit, it's a vulnerable, lovable kind of screwed up. I think I've always felt protective of him, like he's some nerdish little brother whose ideas of the world around him are naive at best and self-destructive at worst.
He looked in my direction when I called to him. He stopped walking, his mouth fell open, and he stared wide-eyed at me.
"Abner, it's me," I called. "It's Sam Feary!"
He ran off, east, toward 39th Street. I watched him, flabbergasted, and when he was out of sight, I whispered, "Christ, same to you, fella," because, of course, I had no idea of the mess he'd gotten himself into.
~ * ~
Lenny told me, when we were called back to the building on East 80th Street, that the black woman they'd found huddled in an eighth-floor kitchen had been there for years, that when they'd lifted her up off the floor she'd started to fall apart, "first her arms, you know, 'cuz they tried to pick her up by her arms, and then her legs, 'cuz they tried those, and then they'd got her by the back and didn't hold her head up so it fell off . . ."
"Gimme a break, Lenny," I said.
"No," he protested, "it's true. Course, I'm not saying that her arms and legs and head fell right off, plop, onto the floor, but they were hanging there pretty loose, you know—"
"Name your sources," Allen cut in. He reads lots of newspapers.
It took Lenny a couple of seconds to figure out what Allen meant. Then he said simply, "Cops, two cops."
"Which two cops?"
Lenny shrugged. "Cops got names?" he asked. "Two cops I heard talking, that's all."
Allen grimaced. "It's pretty disgusting," he said, which surprised me because he looked like the type who'd find nothing at all disgusting. Then the foreman came over and told us we could start earning our pay again.
~ * ~
We were sent up to the eighth floor. It was the foreman's idea of a joke because the building was going to be blaste
d, which meant that practically all the work had to be done in the basement, on the foundation.
"Gotta rip out the wiring up there," the foreman said with a wide, shit-eating grin.
"What the hell for?" Lenny asked.
"'Cuz the city says so," the foreman answered. "Gotta rip out the fuse boxes in all those apartments up there and save 'em--" He stopped; he could barely keep himself from breaking into a laughing fit. He went on, "Comes straight from the mayor's office, boys."
So we tromped up to the eighth floor, which I thought was okay—ripping out fuse boxes was lots easier work than hammering away at cement foundations. And of the three of us who got sent up there—Lenny, Allen, and me—only Lenny let on that he'd rather be somewhere else.
"Yeah," Allen said, "like on the moon, Lenny?"
"Florida," Lenny said. It was late February and very cold, and Lenny talked often about going to Florida.
When we got to the eighth floor, Allen asked, "You guys know which one it was?"
Lenny nodded sullenly to the right. "Must be that one down there," he said.
An apartment door was standing open at the end of the hallway. Around it, on the floor, plaster dust and chunks of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling—it littered the hallway everywhere else—had been swept into several neat piles.
Allen said, starting for it, "Dat must be da place," and Lenny, staying put, said:
"No reason we got to start there. No reason we got to go in there at all, Al."
"Allen," said Allen, "not 'Al'!"
Lenny ignored him. "No reason we got to be up here, either, you ask me. That limp-dick foreman wants some fuse boxes, we can get 'em on the seventh floor, no reason we got to be up here."