Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [62]
The doctors’ prognosis was that Danny would never again awaken, that the forever of his wheelchair had become the forever of his sleep. Detective Sanabria stood up from his chair, walked over to the bed, and stood over the boy. He kissed Daniel “Danny” Cruz Jr. on the forehead, and then painted an invisible cross there with his thumb, a gesture the detective’s own Mexican mother annoyingly repeated each time they parted.
“God, I hate this fucking hospital,” he said, and left.
Two weeks later, Danny was awakened by a distant, highpitched wail, and saw a fuzzy object at the foot of his bed, a human-like figure that persisted in its unfocused, blurry state, until he blinked several times and it began to take form: First he saw Sandra, her face bloated and paler than he remembered, and then the infant she cradled in her arms, a baby girl with an even chunkier face and a broad, flat nose. “What’s going on?” he said abruptly, causing Sandra to startle and look up at him, and the baby to stop crying and look at him too.
“You’re awake!” Sandra called out, as the baby began to gnaw at her own wrist with toothless gums, sucking with a cracking sound that was like bubble gum popping. For a moment, Danny was hypnotized by the sight of the baby, by the two pink barrettes attached to her thin black hair, the way her jaws moved as she chewed, and by the flower-bud mouth that was revealed when her wrist fell away.
Suddenly, he felt the urge to sit up, to lift his back off the bed. He grabbed hold of the aluminum bars at his side, rose up, and felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes beginning a slow roll backwards, until he shook out the dizziness. Without saying a word, Sandra passed the child to him and he held her, feeling her tiny chest rise and fall against his shoulder. He listened to the fast, desperate pant of her breathing, and felt the warm flow of baby drool as it soaked through his hospital smock and dripped down his chest, past the wounds near his ribs.
Danny raised a finger and gently tapped her nose. For a moment, he worried he might hurt her, that the needles in his wrists might stick her, but the fear passed. Time ticked forward with no other sound than the occasional trumpetblaring of Sandra blowing her nose, and he noticed that the frame of the hospital room window was being filled, quickly, with the tangerine hue of a disappearing California afternoon. Danny saw his daughter’s future unfolding, the yellow march of many suns across the heavens, and the slow, slow progress of the months and years they would live together in the waking world, an epoch of quiet never broken by the sound of gunfire.
Sandra wiped her nose and got up from the chair, then looked at the baby and broke into a bright, childlike smile of wonder. “She fell asleep in your arms!”
Danny listened to his daughter’s breathing grow steady, and felt rhythmic puffs of wind beating softly against his chest. He kept very still.
PART III
EAST OF LA CIENEGA
THE GOLDEN GOPHER
BY SUSAN STRAIGHT
Downtown
Nobody walked from Echo Park to Downtown. Only a walkin fool.
But in the fifteen years I’d lived in L.A., I’d only met a few walkin fools. L.A. people weren’t cut out for ambulation, as my friend Sidney would have said if he were here. But the people of my childhood weren’t here. They were all back in Rio Seco.
The only walkin fools here were homeless people, and they walked to pass the time or collect the cans or find the church people serving food, or to erase the demons momentarily. They needed air passing their ears like sharks needed water passing their gills to survive.
But me—I’d been a walkin fool since I was sixteen and walked twenty-two miles