Bloody River Blues

able to walk, won’t I? The thing is, my job, I’m a cop . I have to walk.” He lifted his palms as if he were embarrassed to be explaining something so simple.
    “Uhn, Donnie,” the doctor said slowly, “your prognosis is essentially nonambulatory.”
    Nonambulatory.
    “What does? . . .” Buffett’s throat closed down and he was unable to complete his question. Because he knew exactly what it meant.
    “Your spinal cord was almost completely severed,” Gould said. Buffett was looking directly into his eyes but did not see any of the intense sympathy that was pouring from them. “With the state of the art at the present time I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it. You won’t walk, no.”
    “Oh. Well. I see.”
    “Officer, you’re very lucky. You could easily have been killed. Or it might have been a quadriplegic situation.”
    Sure, that’s true.
    Gould stood up. The chart got replaced on the bed, the doctor’s nifty pen went back into his shirt.“Dr. Weiser is much more competent to talk about your injury than I am. You couldn’t ask for a better expert. A nurse will be coming by to schedule an appointment later.” He smiled, shook Buffett’s hand. “We’ll do everything we can for you, Officer. Don’t worry about a thing.”
    It was several minutes later that Donnie Buffett said, “No. I won’t,” and only then realized that the doctor was no longer in the room.
    PHILIP LOMBRO HAD this habit. He would polish his shoes at least twice a day. He kept a big horsehair brush in his desk at work and a smaller pig-bristle brush in his attaché case, along with chamois squares. Sometimes he would polish the shoes three, four, five times in a single day. He used Kiwi a lot. His favorite, though, was Meltonian. Crème à chaussures.
    He had no obsession over the shoes themselves—he owned only seven pairs—and he did not have a foot fetish. (He was not even sure what a foot fetish was or what somebody with a foot fetish did.) What he liked was shiny shoes and the process of getting them that way. Putting your feet into newly polished shoes was a regal feeling.
    This morning he sat in the office of Lombro & Associates in downtown Maddox and absently ran the brush over his oxblood wing tips.
    The office was in the shadow of a huge redbrick building that had started life as Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company and had become, through the generations, Maddox Electric Automobile Company, then the Maddox Clutch Company, and recently the Maddox Machinery Division of Fujitomo Limited.
    Several stiff brush bristles became dislodged from the brush and fell to the floor. Lombro bent down and picked them up, then flicked them into the waste-basket. He wiped his fingers with a spit-moistened Kleenex. Outside the window, a piece of newspaper floated past and vanished. Lombro stared at the sides of the Maddox Omnibus Building. Lombro remembered, from ten years ago, the Reporter photo of a young man who killed himself by jumping off one of the factory’s huge smokestacks. Wearing a suit, he had died crumpled in the roof of a delivery truck. It enfolded him like a blanket.
    This was what the Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company Building signified for him: death. And this thought, in turn, led to Ralph Bales.
    Lombro had met Ralph Bales at the wedding of his sister’s daughter. Lombro, never married, regretted that he’d never been a father; nieces and nephews in the St. Louis area became surrogate children. He doted, he spoiled them, he took them on outings. He was more astonished than their parents to see them become adults. When his brother-in-law could not pick up the tab for the girl’s wedding Lombro himself paid for the function.
    One of the guests had been Ralph Bales and what caught Lombro’s attention was that Ralph Bales had brought a gun to the wedding.
    Late in the evening, Lombro, standing at the urinal in the men’s john of Orsini’s restaurant, was aware of someone entering behind him and going into a stall. He then heard a clunk of something falling and glanced under the door. A hand was quickly retrieving a pistol. Lombro washed his hands quickly and leftthe men’s room. He waited outside, hiding behind a plant, to catch a look at the intruder. A few minutes later Ralph Bales emerged, slicking back his thinning hair with damp hands. Lombro didn’t know what to do. A friend of a friend on the groom’s side, Ralph Bales had been invited, true, so he probably was not a robber.