“All right. You sure?”
“Huddie, of course I’m sure. I’m the one who drives him. I’ll drop him off at around one, run a few errands, and meet you at two. I’ll go pick him up at three-thirty. Okay?”
Huddie listened closely at the door and heard nothing from inside. Elizabeth wasn’t back yet. The apartment was as he imagined, like his dad’s place, more or less. Old-man smell, bathroom nastiness, a little lingering cigarette smoke and Old Grand-Dad, which made it very much like his father’s house. Huddie was standing next to a musty, overloaded coat tree, one of Max’s hats falling toward him, when he heard a gluey, rumbling cough that was not Elizabeth’s.
“Sweetheart? Could you come here?”
Between his impulse to laugh aloud at the farce his life was turning into and his jacket’s entanglement with the coat tree, Huddie froze in the middle of the front hall.
“Liz? I don’t—”
Max leaned through the bedroom doorway, losing his grip on his unzipped pants. Huddie remembered a stronger and bearded face from junior high school and looked away from the shining white ball of Mr. Stone’s belly.
“Mr. Stone? Max? I’m a friend of Elizabeth’s. She invited me over for a cup of coffee …”
“And gave you the key?”
“She thought she might be a little late, from taking you to the uh.” Huddie couldn’t remember, for the life of him, where Elizabeth had been taking Max.
Max slid down to the floor.
“Could you get me the blue pillbox, from my nightstand? And the water?”
Huddie brought Max his nitroglycerine and pressed Max’s hand to the glass.
“Okay now. Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure. I had this pain before.” Max put his fist to the middle of his chest, a gesture that would ensure him immediate examination in the emergency room. “And I took a nitro and it was better. And now it’s back. And a few minutes ago my jaw and my elbows ached. But they’re not hurting now, so that’s good.”
“That is good. Did you eat something spicy? You know, heartburn?”
“Chinese food.” Max was embarrassed to talk about eating with his belly resting on his thighs, in front of this well-built boy.
“Golden Chopsticks?” It was the place nearest Max’s apartment, the place Huddie would go for Empress Chicken, given his choice.
“Yeah. Ahh. It’s not better.”
“Let me call your doctor.”
“If it’s an infarction, he’ll want me to go to the ER.”
“I’ll take you.”
“You?”
“Horace Lester. Let’s go.”
Huddie left Elizabeth a note and put an overcoat on Max, who insisted on slowly buttoning his shirt and zipping his pants to hide his nearly tearful longing for his blue sweatpants and his soft, mothering sweatshirt.
Everything in the emergency room happened quickly and efficiently. Huddie decided to say he was Stone’s son-in-law, which could be, and that way they’d let him take care of him, or sit with him, until they did whatever they did. He apologized mentally to June and her father.
There wasn’t five minutes of sitting, and the triage nurse didn’t give a fuck who Huddie was. Max slapped down an insurance card, put his fist to his chest again, and in ten minutes Huddie was cooling his heels in the waiting room, Max had an IV dripping into his veins, and they’d hooked two monitors to his chest. Two white doctors bumped into each other behind a pale green curtain, and after the EKG one of them stuck his head out and nodded to Huddie.
Finally, the fat doctor said, “Let’s play it safe. It’s not an emergency, you’re okay.” He raised his voice to reach the nurse back at the desk. “Let’s just say a soft romey and follow up tomorrow.”
The nurse nodded, typing slowly onto pink paper.
A tear ran from Max’s eye into his ear.
“What’s a soft romey?” Huddie asked, as any good son-in-law would.
“Sorry. It’s just ‘Rule out myocardial infarction.’ I notified his doctor. We’ll get him to his room in a little bit, as soon as we get things calmed down again.”
A white, limp girl was carried in, blood streaming down her forearms, and Max and Huddie watched, slightly ashamed of their relieved curiosity, like people with a flat observing the eighteen-wheeler flipping over in front of them.
They leafed through magazines until the nurse, whose white uniform was now lightly red-speckled, came over with a pair of orderlies.
Huddie rose as they put Max on the stretcher.
“Subacute c.c.u. Room 146,” the nurse said.
In the elevator, the black orderly and the white orderly checked out Huddie and Max. Their relationship is not obvious. They might be old white employer, young black employee. Possibly, the black man’s the boss and the old white guy’s been working for him for years, but the old man doesn’t look like he’s been able to work for years. They don’t look like friends, like poker buddies. It does not occur to the orderlies that the men might be lovers, or family. Neither of them would like those possibilities.
Max saw the grey elevator walls, the distorted reflections in the dented steel ceiling, the green sheet, Horace’s hand, his fingernails smooth honey-colored ovals, longer than Max’s, and Max wondered if all black men wore their nails long; he’d never looked at any man’s nails before. He put his hand on Huddie’s wrist and squeezed it. The orderlies took this in too, looking at each other sideways and then straight ahead.
The nurse hung a long grey rectangle around Max’s neck on a cheap cloth band and stuck two new wires into the tabs on his chest. She smiled at the doctor walking in, and he gave back a small smile beneath his big moustache, showing that it was a serious business — don’t even hope otherwise — but they were in good, even excellent, hands. He was visibly intelligent, arrogant, not unkind, taller than average. Max and Huddie thought only one thing: black. Max thought, Good. It will make Horace Lester feel good, and furthermore, he’s not a young man, he probably had to be smarter than everyone else to go to medical school and become a cardiologist back then.
Huddie knew it was stupid to be pleased, but he was, and inside he’s six and the Alabama kitchenware Aunt Les brought with her flies past him as she calls out, after each pot, lid, and saucepan hits the back door, “Lift up the race, child! Lift up the race.” She lived with them for only three years, his Great-aunt Lessie, and moved back home, saying Gus was doing fine, Huddie was doing fine, and the cold was killing her. She prayed conversationally and constantly: instructing, cajoling, informing, and flirting with the Lord. She prayed for Huddie to learn to wipe his feet, she prayed for justice for her people, she prayed for Gus’s loan to come through, she prayed for Gus to find a wife to mother the boy, she prayed that God would see fit to change Gus’s ways so that the woman’s life would not be Hell on earth. She smoked a corncob pipe at night and made Huddie hold up her big silver-backed mirror on Sundays so she could pluck two grey hairs from her chin, dress her long hair, and take him to church. On the occasional Sunday, he’s found himself sitting behind an old woman smelling of woodsmoke and Dixie Peach and felt time collapse like a paper tunnel.