Behind the desk on the fourth floor of Mount Sinai Hospital there’s a terminal with patient information—patient ID numbers, room numbers, patient names, physicians. All color coded like an airport monitor. It should say Estimated Time of Recovery, Hawk thinks, or Estimated Time of Death. His heart pounds with something strange. His back is soaked with sweat. Is old Sammy really headed for Graceland, as he always calls it? The message on Hawk’s answering machine said the old man had a heart attack, was operated on, and is recovering. He might need follow-up procedures.
Hawk had come back to the loft, just past midnight, after winning two bills in the small stud game at the IHOB, thinking he’d get some sleep before the drive the next day, get out his maps from his van-driving days, and plot a route. There were three messages on his machine. The first was a friendly reminder from Armand that another two grand would be due in a week and giving a time when he would be by the loft to collect. The second, from Carla, said she’d borrowed a cooler from Carlos for the drive. Hawk could pick up a couple of six-packs and sandwiches and potato chips and Cheez Doodles and gummy bears for Zoey. She’d be out front of her apartment at eight o’clock. The third message was about Sammy. Visiting hours weren’t until the next morning or Hawk would have cabbed there right then.
Hawk enters Sammy’s shared hospital room quietly, passes a nurse putting roses in a vase, a medic in a shower cap, and stops when he hears Sammy talking to Harold, not wanting to interrupt. He can hear Flo humming one of her songs from the corner of the room, but can’t see her. He imagines her sitting there doing a word-search puzzle and picking her teeth with fork ends:
You worry when the weather’s cold
You worry when it’s hot
You worry when you’re making dough
You worry when you’re not
It’s worry worry all the time …
Hawk realizes he’s standing at the foot of another hospital bed, a potted plant in his hand with brown-edged leaves, and he turns to see an old man asleep with patches on his eyes and tubes rising from his arm to a suspended bottle. The room is filled with odors of sweat, urine, medicine, and Clorox. Hawk hears buzzers and pagers at varying distances.
Why wouldn’t Sammy get a private room? Was the old man, even here, doing his usual geometry on costs? Or did he still have to worry about money? Staying in hospitals, heart surgery, it had to be expensive and maybe Sammy, like just about everyone Hawk ever associated with, didn’t have a health plan. Still, since he’d probably been unconscious when they brought him in he couldn’t have been the one haggling and shopping for the cheapest surgeon. It would have been Harold’s call. Or maybe Hotel Hospital was all booked up and didn’t have any single suites available.
Hawk looks around, seeing the showerlike drape behind which Sammy must be lying, Harold attentive at his side, leaning toward him. He tries to arrange a hopeful look, and waits for the conversation to break to make his entrance. He looks down at the plant he bought on the street outside the hospital from a woman who told him that with a little water and care the leaves would go green again.
“These doctors don’t know you, Sammy,” Harold says.
“Maybe one of these doctors got his degree off a matchbox cover,” Sammy says. “He attaches your tubes wrong. In some of these places your injuries start healing themselves before they get around to you.”
“Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the best,” Flo says.
“Harold. If something goes wrong, I have a few things I want you should handle for me. You’d do that?”
“I would.”
“In the Sucrets box in my desk there’s a key. Anything happens to me, there’s a box behind the Barnum poster over the TV, you know which one. In the box there’s some envelopes with instructions and some cash. The envelopes explain everything.”
“I thought your will was with Abe?”
“Abe deals with our Uncle Sam and my ex and my kids and their kids. These are a few other matters I choose to keep private from our government.”
“God forbid, Sammy, I’ll do it.”
“You are a loyal person, Harold.”
They discuss a few other matters and then it’s silent and Hawk gives a sort of cough and shuffle and steps up to the curtain and around.
“Hey, Sammy. How you doing?” he says.
“Nice to see you Hawk, dahling,” Flo says, and sings:
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself
It’s later than you think
Another birthday’s here and gone
You turned another page
And suddenly you realize
That you reached middle age.
Just think of all the time you’ve missed
Has made you kind of sad
It’s better to have had your wish
Than to have wished you never had!
“I never knew you were a singer,” Hawk says.
“I’m singing for Sammy,” Flo tells Hawk, taking a bite from a jelly doughnut. “It’s music from another era.”
“It’s nice,” Hawk says.
“I offered him super sex,” Flo says. “But he said he’d take the soup. Hawk, you want a jelly doughnut?”
Sammy hasn’t turned to look at him yet.
“Talk slow and loud or he won’t understand,” Harold says.
“Hey, Sammy,” Hawk says, voice raised.
Sammy says something incoherent, then cackles faintly.
“Put your teeth back in, Sammy. You’ve got company,” Harold says in a raised voice. And then to Hawk, “Since the operation he’s been mainly speaking in Yiddish.”
“Hey kid,” Sammy says, finally, holding up his hand to shake. There’s an ID on his wrist like he’s been shipped here Federal Express. “I didn’t hear you come in. Everyone wears paper slippers in this place.”
“I got you some flowers,” Hawk says. “And a cigar for when you get back on your feet. It’s a real Cuban.”
Sammy opens the Ziploc and runs the cigar by his nose, though he probably can’t smell anything, what with all the tubes through his nostrils like tribal nosewear.
“Okay,” Hawk says. “Okay, look. I don’t know if it’s Cuban. The place said ‘real Cuban cigars rolled on the spot.’ They’re a couple of guys fresh off the boat from Havana. If a Cuban rolls a cigar, ain’t it a Cuban cigar?”
Sammy hands Harold the cigar, who smells it, frowns.
“That’s too philosophical for me, kid,” Sammy says.
“Get me my boots. It’s getting deep in here,” Harold says.
“I’m going to blow my nose,” Flo says to no one. “Now I need a Kleenex. I’ll just go into the bathroom for a paper towel.”
Hawk pulls a seat up next to Sammy and stares at the old man. He’s never seen him looking this tired, voice crusty.
“One hour until visiting hours are over,” the nurse says to Harold and Hawk.
The phone rings and Flo says, “I’ll get it. If it’s important I’ll let you know.”
“Pull up a chair,” Sammy says to Hawk.
“They giving you good dope?” Hawk asks.
“They’re making a junkie out of me. Sit down, kid. I was thinking about you before Harold came to visit.”
“I came when I heard. We were just about to go to the country today. Take a drive around Jersey. Maybe go down to Six Flags with her kid. See some rocks and birds and trees and stuff. Carla, me, and her kid.”
“What country? They got rocks and trees and squirrels in Central Park.”
“Not to speak of pigeons,” Flo says.
“I couldn’t believe it when I got Harold’s message,” Hawk says. “You were dancing up a storm at the Broadway show just the other day.”
“I’m ready to dance right now, kid. I got my eye on one of those oriental nurses.”
Sammy grasps the triangular hand rest hanging over the bed that looks like some device you’d find in an S and M shop.
“That broad you were with, outside of Zabars the other day with the girl. That’s the one you’re going driving with?”
“Yeah, we’ll do it another day.”
“That’s a nice-looking filly,” Sammy says, something like fondness in his eyes.
His hair seems grayer and wispier. His laugh is an exertion, and then he’s coughing.
“Take it easy, Sammy,” Hawk says, and offers the old man a roll of LifeSavers. “Take one of these if the pain gets too great.”
“You’re a good kid, Hawk. I always thought that.”
All these years and it’s as close as Sammy’s ever gotten to expressing a feeling directly and Hawk turns his head so the old man won’t see the tears in his eyes.
“Three-to-one you’re back on your feet in a week.”
“You getting a lift ’cross town from Harold?”
“I can’t afford it,” Hawk says. “He put a meter in the van.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Bye, Hawk,” Flo says, and kisses Sammy on the forehead. “You’ll want to talk. I’m going for a walk down to the corner. You want the papers and some doughnuts, Sammy? I would do that for you. The jelly in these doughnuts isn’t fresh. You want anything from the coffee shop on Ninety-seventh? Their coffee cake is ambrosia.”