Gino
Larry shuffled the deck of cards. He was in his robe and slippers and wearing a beaded cap, and his brows were falling, fine filaments upon his lids and cheeks and drifting to the table, and he was blinking. Gino sat at the window, his arm resting on a folded towel on the radiator, and John was tamping a cigarette against the can wired to his wheelchair. Shadows of early evening fell across their legs, and Gino turned in the shadows and looked out into the meadow, then turned back again.
“This Peter Blue guy,” said John.
“That’s right,” said Larry. “He just fell down on the floor, right in front of me. A good crack on the head. But it’s more the other one’s the corker.”
“The little guy,” said Gino, tamping his pipe again.
“Just about your size,” said Frank. “I’d call that little.”
But Gino didn’t respond, and Frank looked blankly at the others.
“Not much of a chance to talk to him,” said Larry. “Just briefly.”
“One crazy coincidence,” said John.
“Then there’s Kelly.”
It was Gino, his words muffled around the stem and left behind him as he turned away. He could see the house clearly, now that the rain was gone. The evening sun lit up the meadow as it sunk, and for a few moments there was a line of red like fire along the metal gutters. Then the sun fell down completely in the west, and the lights blinked at the barricades.
“What’s going on?” Frank said.
“I don’t know. A timer? Maybe they’re light sensitive.”
“Is there anyone out there?”
“No. They won’t be,” Gino said. “Not at night.”
He could see the metal horses on the meadow road, skeletons of the wooden ones bathed in a sick yellow glow across the gravel drive a hundred feet beyond the porch. There were no lights in the house, and it was drifting toward those layers of silhouette as the moon came up beyond it over the sea.
“The moon,” Gino said.
“The fucking moon,” said Larry, blinking the hair away.
Then they heard a coughing in the distance and the rattle of the metal cart.
“Early a-fucking-gain,” said Frank. “He just can’t seem to get it right.”
Then John was turning in his wheelchair, and Larry lowered the cards, and they all watched Mark roll in the dinner cart and stand aside as steam billowed from the open doors. He was thin and blond, his white slacks and jumper stiffly pressed in the way Carolyn did her dress, and he looked like Carolyn and smiled at them, benignly, in the same way.
The trays were passed, and John stubbed out his cigarette in his can, and Mark pushed the cart to the room’s side and left, his shoes squeaking like Carolyn’s, the sound fading as he headed down the ward.
“Don’t he look like Carolyn,” Larry said, working at a piece of chicken.
“He ain’t Kelly though,” said Frank. “Too early with the fucking food.”
“How long?” John said. He’d pushed the chicken to the side and was rolling the carrots around, looking for the good ones.
“Two weeks,” said Gino, without hesitation.
“How the fuck do you know?” Frank said.
“Carolyn. We had a little talk.”
“It was a surprise to me,” said Larry.
“And that’s not all you missed,” said Frank.
“What else?”
“They’re showing the fucking place.”
“Are you serious?”
“And they weren’t pleased at our behavior,” John said.
“We drove the fuckers off,” said Gino. “A few young punks in suits.”
“How did you do that?”
“Filthy language.”
“Can you imagine the gall?” Frank said. “Trying to sell it in our face like that? The promise of a closing when the old bastards are dead?”
“A comment upon the business of medicine, ethics of the culture,” Gino said. “I thought it was interesting.”
The government had come, a man in uniform and two in suits, and Gino had seen them talking to Kelly out on the ambulance dock. He spoke to Carolyn that night, and she told him Kelly was going on vacation, and the next evening Mark was there. They knew little else, but they had seen the barricades go up, and Gino had been watching closely ever since and growing a little moody.
They ate what they could manage, and Larry could manage nothing but a cookie and water, and once Mark had taken the trays away and they’d lit cigarettes and Gino had lit his pipe, Larry stubbed his cigarette after a few puffs and worked himself out of his chair and headed down the ward to bed.
“It’s the fucking chemo,” Gino whispered at the window when he was gone.
It was only nine, and they were getting through the laziness of their digestion, energy coming back again, and Frank proposed a game of chess, and he and Gino sat across the table from each other, bickering quietly over the board. John smoked and read the Boston Globe, and sparks burned tiny holes in the paper, and he shook it free of ashes as he turned the pages.
There was moonlight in the room and a small lamp over the chessboard. John had rigged a shaded bulb that hung from an IV stand beside his chair, and they could hear the intermittent whir of the suction machine, and each thought of the ghostly man in coma there and of Larry and the chemo, but only in brief moments, then moved back to their activities, in which they could lose themselves in ideas of the common mind.
Then it was a little later, and Larry was standing in the doorway, tying his robe and adjusting it. He no longer wore his beaded cap, and his hair hung to the sides from a central part, a stripe of baldness running down to his forehead.
“Couldn’t sleep?” asked Frank.
They’d finished their game and Frank had proposed another, but Gino had declined and now sat at the window again. He was looking out, but turned when he heard Frank, and then saw Larry.
“The fucking chemo,” he said softly.
“I think you’re right,” said Larry. “That’s the end of that shit for me.”
He crossed to his chair and sat down and took up the deck of cards, and they heard that hushed shushing of fabric they all knew.
“Must be eleven,” said Frank.
Carolyn came into the room then like a paper doll. Her hair was gathered in a bun this time, strands falling along her cheeks, forming a delicate basket around her face. She paused and the shushing stopped and she leaned over and placed the tray of cookies and milk on Larry’s table, then stood up straight again in her starched white uniform and looked at them expectantly. Larry looked at Frank, then over at Gino, who had turned back to the window. Then he looked up at her and smiled.
“I guess we’re all set,” he said, and she smiled at him and Frank too, and smiled quizzically at Gino’s back, then pirouetted and shushed out through the doorway to the ward, and when she was gone the two looked toward the window.
“Gino?” Frank said.
But he didn’t turn. His elbows rested on the towel on the radiator, his chin in his hands, and they could see the curls of fine grey hair at his smooth neck. His robe hung loosely from his shoulders, his body somewhere under it, and he wore black oxfords and black socks and they could see the pattern of veins running to blotches of dark scar tissue on his white calves above them. Then he did turn, lifting the chair up under him and turning it too, and then leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, his arms crossed over his chest.