The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [100]
The old woman kept shaking Annie’s arm. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s fine,” Annie told her. “Are you all right?”
The woman gave her a look of scorn. “He doesn’t look ‘fine.’”
“Fine? Fine?” whispered the man, still not moving. “There is no conclusive evidence that I’m fine.” He added in his soft Hispanic accent. “Things are broken.”
“What things?” Annie asked. “Leg, arm?”
“I think both,” he replied.
“Can you move them?”
“Can? Should? Categorically different. Something’s indisputably broken. But do not,” he turned to the older woman, “let us have any acrimony.” He tried to move and moaned. “We could avoid the hospital, a pleasure for everyone.” Pain spasmed through him loosely. “Three hundred dollars? I am not a greedy man. A trip to a Rite-Aid, a few braces, something for the pain.”
“Aha!” The elderly driver gasped, reaching on the curb for a big blue-beaded pocketbook. “I’m calling the police!” She poured the contents to the pavement, found a large cell phone in the pile. “I know you! You pulled this same stunt on my friend Louise right here at Golden Days. Four hundred and fifty dollars, she paid you.” The woman punched in 911.
“Hang up,” the man said, groaning. He grabbed the phone. “We don’t need the police.” He began lifting one arm, then the other, one leg, then the other; his limbs seemed to move without his volition, like a puppet whose strings were tugged. “I’m feeling much better.”
The old woman looked earnestly at Annie. “I don’t use this phone when I drive. I watch the road. I’m Mrs. Joyce Weimar. I swear before God, he walked right in front of me like a sleepwalker. I was thinking, is he blind? But where’s his dog? Here’s my license, Mrs. Joyce Weimar, just renewed. He’s a crook.”
Annie nodded at Mrs. Weimar reassuringly. She told the victim, “She’s right, you walked right in front of her car.”
“I am wounded she impugns my integrity.”
There was something very familiar to Annie about this man’s soft husky voice and polysyllabic speech. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
The slender man stared at her; an intense look brightened in his immense eyes. He sat straight up in the middle of the street.
Mrs. Weimar squeezed his shoulder. “Just in case, sit still!”
“Lady, really, it was an accident. I don’t want you to worry. Here, help me.” He reached for Annie. His legs were rubbery, his head wobbled, his pants had ripped open and were sliding down his hips, but he made it to his feet while the two women held him up. He kept staring with a peculiar expression at Annie. Then, pressing his heart above the flamingos painted on his shirt, he turned to the white-haired Mrs. Weimar. “This was not an accident.”
“You just said it was!”
He gestured gracefully with his hand, pointing at Annie. “I mean her. She is not an accident. She is, if you ask me, a personalized version, say an allegorical, of fate. I am only His sparrow. His eye is upon the big, we might call it, picture.”
The man’s remarks were making Mrs. Weimar uneasy. “You’ve had a concussion,” she theorized.
“I am taking a lesson from this experience,” the slender man told the two women. “Call it what you will—your sign, your karma, or, if you’re like my mother, Christ our Savior, night and day. But in my opinion, as well as that of the Bard, who nailed it with perfection well before our time, destiny definitely shapes our ends.”
“Oh my God,” said Annie. “Rafael Rook?”
Chapter 30
The Wiser Sex
“Truth is indisputably stranger.” The slender man shook his head so enthusiastically that his hair, glossy black and long, flew out of the string of leather that held it.
“He’s delirious,” Mrs. Weimar said. “Does he make any sense to you?”
“A little,” Annie told her.
Rook held