Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) - William Kennedy [87]
Francis found he was bleeding from the cheek and he went to the river and soaked his handkerchief and rinsed off the blood. He drank deeply of the river, which was icy and shocking and sweet. He blotted the wound, found it still bleeding, and pressed it with the handkerchief to stanch it.
“Who were they?” Rudy asked when he returned.
“They’re the guys on the other team,” Francis said. “They don’t like us filthy bums.”
“You ain’t filthy,” Rudy said hoarsely. “You got a new suit.”
“Never mirnd my suit, how’s your head?”
“I don’t know. Like nothin’ I ever felt before.” Francis touched the back of Rudy’s skull. It wasn’t bleeding but there was one hell of a lump there.
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. Where’s Old Shoes and his car?”
“Gone, I guess. I think that car is hot. I think he stole it. He used to do that for a livin’. That and peddle his ass.”
Francis helped Rudy to his feet, but Rudy could not stand alone, nor could he put one foot in front of the other. Francis lifted him back on his shoulder and headed south. He had Memorial Hospital in mind, the old Homeopathic Hospital on North Pearl Street, downtown. It was a long way, but there wasn’t no other place in the middle of the damn night. And walking was the only way. You wait for a damn bus or a trolley at this hour, Rudy’d be dead in the gutter.
Francis carried him first on one shoulder, then on the other, and finally piggyback when he found Rudy had some use of both arms and could hold on. He carried him along the river road to stay away from cruising police cars, and then down along the tracks and up to Broadway and then Pearl. He carried him up the hospital steps and into the emergency room, which was small and bright and clean and empty of patients. A nurse wheeled a stretcher away from one wall when she saw him coming, and helped Rudy to slide off Francis’s back and stretch out.
“He got hit in the head,” Francis said. “He can’t walk.”
“What happened?” the nurse asked, inspecting Rudy’s eyes.
“Some guy down on Madison Avenue went nuts and hit him with a brick. You got a doctor can help him?”
“We’ll get a doctor. He’s been drinking.”
“That ain’t his problem. He’s got a stomach cancer too, but what ails him right now is his head. He got rocked all to hell, I’m tellin’ you, and it wasn’t none of his fault.”
The nurse went to the phone and dialed and talked softly.
“How you makin’ it, pal?” Francis asked.
Rudy smiled and gave Francis a glazed look and said nothing. Francis patted him on the shoulder and sat down on a chair beside him to rest. He saw his own image in the mirror door of a cabinet against the wall. His bow tie was all cockeyed and his shirt and coat were spattered with blood where he had dripped before he knew he was cut. His face was smudged and his clothes were covered with dirt. He straightened the tie and brushed off a bit of the dirt.
After a second phone call and a conversation that Francis was about to interrupt to tell her to get goddamn busy with Rudy, the nurse came back. She took Rudy’s pulse, went for a stethoscope, and listened to his heart. Then she told Francis Rudy was dead. Francis stood up and looked at his friend’s face and saw the smile still there. Where the wind don’t blow.
“What was his name?” the nurse asked. She picked up a pencil and a hospital form on a clipboard.
Francis could only stare into Rudy’s glassy-eyed smile. Isaac Newton of the apple was born of two midwives.
“Sir, what was his name?” the nurse said.
“Name was Rudy.”
“Rudy what?”
“Rudy Newton,” Francis said. “He knew where the Milky Way was.”
o o o
It would be three-fifteen by the clock