Gay Hendricks - The First Rule of Ten

The steady beeping of mechanical pumps and dispensers told me Freda’s body could no longer function without technological help. How much inner life was still there, I did not know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and tried to reach her heart with mine. I felt no corresponding warmth. I did the next best thing, surrounding her with a peaceful light. If she was meant to recover, I hoped it would speed her healing. If not, maybe it would help create more ease for her passage to the next realm.

I left her, and went to the visitor’s lounge to wait. Wesley soon joined me. He looked a decade older than the last time I saw him.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said. He nodded, and his eyes filled. He sat down next to me, and hunched over. His raw pain was palpable.

I reached back to my time in the monastery, all those hours of sitting, practicing loving-kindness toward myself and others. I closed my eyes, and located a powerful droplet of condensed compassion, lodged deep in my chest. I invited the caring to expand, fill my body, spill over. May you enjoy happiness…. It spread like bittersweet syrup. May you be free from suffering. … I tried to direct it to the source of Wesley’s grief, coat it with comfort, or at least leach away some of the soreness . May you rejoice in the well-being of others…. May you live in peace, free from anger, hatred, and attachment …

Wesley lifted his head from his hands.

“She didn’t want to keep me up,” he said. “She started coughing, it was the middle of the night, and she didn’t want to keep me up.”

He turned to me.

“Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed with me?”

The story spilled out of him now, how she’d been fighting the remnants of the flu for weeks. How last night she ran out of cough drops, couldn’t stop coughing, and finally put on her robe and went to the kitchen, to make a hot toddy.

How he woke up with a start several hours later and stumbled out of the bedroom and found her lying on the living room floor. “I thought she was asleep,” he said. “Her cheeks were so rosy and pink.”

He turned to me, his eyes haggard. “They say her lungs are full of fluid. That her heart is failing. That her … her brain is … that she may never come back.” His voice cracked. “Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed?”

“Wesley, listen to me,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It may not be anybody’s, but it’s definitely not yours.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean by that?”

I decided to give him the truth.

“Look, I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s something odd going on, something related to Florio. At least two other people he signed contracts with have died under suspicious circumstances. This may be related.”

Wesley shook his head, as if trying to wake himself up. “You saying this isn’t the flu?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying,” I admitted, “but things aren’t adding up here. Freda may have been the victim of foul play.”

Wesley’s face darkened as he absorbed this new information. He grabbed my wrist, his grip strong.

“You find out anything more, you tell me, understand? Bastards!”

“I will,” I said.

He stood. “I’ve got to get back to Freda.” His body swayed. I jumped up and took his arm to steady him.

“Mr. Norbu, thank you for telling me this,” he said. “I was carrying more weight than I knew.”

I walked him back to the ICU and left him there, holding Freda’s hand. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I was glad to at least bring him some small relief from his unfounded guilt.

I saw Bill had phoned. No message. I called him back from the parking lot.

“Yo,” he answered. “I got something for you.”

“You up for some lunch?”

“As long as pastrami’s involved.”

I arrived at Langer’s a few minutes early and grabbed a booth by the window. My favorite waitress, Jean, came at me like a heat-seeking missile. She filled my coffee cup without asking.

“Ten-zing,” she sang, in her distinctive Arizona drawl. “I’ve missed you!”

“Likewise,” I said, bowing and kissing her hand. Jean is in her 60s, tall and thin, with a quirky, if careworn, beauty and a bobbed haircut straight out of the roaring ’20s. She’s been waiting on cops at Langer’s for over two decades, with the brashness and bunions to prove it.

“I hear you quit the force,” she said. “Good for you. I wish I could quit.”

“What’s stopping you?” I said.

“I still owe the Scientologists a hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

We shared a laugh. Jean had, in fact, been a devoted member of the Church of Scientology for 16 years, signing up with them in her early 20s. She was one of the few people who quit and lived to tell the tale: “They told me I was totally clear. I told them, ‘I’m not totally clear, I’m totally broke, thanks to you guys, so fuck you very much, and good-bye.’”

Jean gave me a stern glare over her coffeepot. “You look tired, Ten-zing. Are you all right?”

I admitted I was working pretty hard, for an un-employed person.

“And how’s the bad news doing?”

“Ruling the household, as always.”

Jean has called Tank “the bad news” ever since the time she harangued me about my lack of a love life. I told her she was wrong, I had all the intimacy a man could want.

“The good news is, I’ve been in a long-term, committed relationship for four years,” I’d said.

“What’s the bad news?”

“It’s with a cat.”

Bill slid into the booth across from me, and Jean jotted down our orders: pastrami and Swiss for him, a grilled cheese sandwich and a side of slaw for me.

I took in Bill’s coat and tie, and shifted a little in my seat. I was still in the rumpled jeans and T-shirt I’d pulled on in the dark this morning.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Bill answered. He reached under his coat and pulled out a manila envelope.

“You wanted to know the autopsy results from the woman who got killed over your way.”

“Barbara Maxey.”

“Right, Maxey. Well.” He pushed the envelope across the wood.

I slid out the report and found myself staring down at the photograph of Barbara’s ashen cadaver. Her warm smile flashed in front of me, then was gone. I skimmed over the details: “petechial hemorrhaging” and “laryngeal abrasions,” cold, clinical terms, belying the violence of her death.

Then my breath caught.

“Did you see this?” I asked, pointing to the bottom of the last page.

“I saw it,” he said, his voice grim.

“Her voice box was crushed after she was strangled to death?”

“Yep. Looks like somebody was making a point.”

Don’t talk , I thought.

Jean delivered our plates. Bill leaned over and inhaled the aroma. “Mmm-mmm. I’m telling you, Ten, you have no idea what you’re missing.”

Jean, still hovering, snorted. “Shame on you, Bill. He can’t eat cows on account of they’re sacred to him. Right, Ten-zing?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that would be the Hindus. As Jean zoomed off to another table, I slipped the autopsy report back in the envelope and set it aside.

Don’t talk . But about what? What had Barbara known that demanded such a brutal message?

Bill, being a working man, had to eat and run. I sat in the parking lot for a few moments, digesting, and testing my emotional insides. They were tender, sensitive to my mental prodding, like a canker sore. Reading the details of Barbara’s autopsy had walloped me, delivered a brutal gut-blow matching the fist-smash to her own jugular. What was I doing to help her? I had no money coming in, and was no closer to figuring this stuff out than I was to earning a salary.