“I think he means it,” Manny said to the ceiling. “Hell.”
He turned and went to sit in the chair.
“How’s it feel?” I asked.
“Not bad.” Eyes shut, he felt his whole body sink down into his seat. “A man could get used.”
At the door I looked back at his smallness frozen in so much bigness.
“You still hate me?” he asked, eyes shut.
“Yes,” I said. “You me?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I went out and shut the door.
75
I walked across the street from the tenement, Henry paced me, guided by the sound of my footsteps and the jolting of his valise in my hand.
“We got everything, Henry?” I said.
“My whole life in one suitcase? Sure.”
At the curb on the far side we turned.
Someone, somewhere fired an invisible and soundless cannon. Half of the tenement, gunshot, fell.
“Sounds like the Venice pier being torn down,” said Henry.
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like the roller-coaster coming apart.”
“Yeah.”
“Or the day they tore up the big red train trolley-car tracks.”
“Yeah.”
The rest of the tenement fell.
“C’mon, Henry,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
“Home,” Blind Henry said and nodded, pleased. “I never had one of those. Sounds nice.”
76
I had Crumley and Roy and Fritz and Maggie and Constance over for a last go-round before Henry’s relatives arrived to take him back to New Orleans.
The music was loud, the beer was copious, blind Henry was officiating at the discovery of the empty tomb for the fourteenth time, and Constance, half loaded and half-undressed, was biting my ear when the door to my small house burst wide.
A voice cried: “I got an early flight! Traffic was awful. There you are! And I know you, you, and you.”
Peg stood in the door pointing.
“But who,” she shouted, “is that half-naked woman!?”