Crusader's Cross Read Online Free PDF Page B

Zerelda. Years ago, at age thirty-five, she had looked sixty. I couldn’t even imagine what she probably looked like today. “He wants to see you. Can you drive up this afternoon?” she said.
    “He doesn’t have a telephone?” I said.
    “He’s at Baptist Hospital. As far as I’m concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?” she said.
    Evidently Troy’s denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Café — an overweight, big-boned country girl whose mouth was painted bright red, her hair shampooed and blow-dried for her first day on the job. She was eager to please and thought of her new situation as an opportunity to be a cashier or a hostess, a big jump up from her old job at the Wal-Mart. When Troy came in for his breakfast he lit up a cigarette in the nonsmoking section, sent his coffee back because it was not hot enough, and told the waitress there were dishwater spots on his silverware. When his food was served, he complained his steak was pink in the middle, his eggs runny, and he had been given whole wheat rather than rye toast.
    When the girl spilled his water, he asked if she was an outpatient at the epileptic rehabilitation center. By the end of his meal she was a nervous wreck. While she was bent over his table, clearing his dishes, he told others a loud joke about a big-breasted woman and a farm equipment salesman who sold milking machines. The girl’s face burned like a red lightbulb.
    Then one of those moments occurred that no one in a small town ever expects. The owner of the restaurant was a hard-packed, rotund Lebanese man who attended the Assembly of God Church and whose taciturn manner seldom drew attention to him. Without saying a word, he picked up a Silex of scalding hot coffee and poured it over the crown of Troy Bordelon’s head.
    After Troy stopped screaming, he attacked the owner with his fists and the fight cascaded through the dining area into the kitchen. It should have ended there, with two over-the-hill men walking away in shame and embarrassment at their behavior. Instead, when they had stopped fighting and a peacemaker asked both men to apologize, Troy gathered the blood and spittle in his mouth and spat it in the owner’s face. The owner responded by plunging a razor-edged butcher knife four times through Troy’s chest.
    It was dusk when I arrived at the hospital in the little town where Troy had spent most of his life. It was a beautiful evening, the summer light high in the sky, the moon rising over red cotton land and a long bank of green trees on the western horizon. The air smelled of chemical fertilizer, distant rain, night-blooming flowers, and the fecund odor of the ponds on a catfish farm. I didn’t want to go into the hospital. I was never good at deathbed visits, nor at funerals, and now, with age, I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying lay on the quick.
    Troy was spread out on his bed in the intensive-care unit like a pregnant whale that had been dropped from a high altitude, his blond hair still cut in a 1950s flattop, now stiff with burn ointment. What his wife had referred to as his life-support system was a tangle of translucent tubes, oxygen bottles, IV sacs, a catheter, and electronic monitors that, upon first glance, made me think that perhaps technology might give Troy another season to run.
    Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.
    He had vomited into his oxygen mask, and a nurse was wiping off his face and throat. He wrapped a meaty hand around mine, squeezing with a power and strength I didn’t think him capable of.
    “Sir, you’ll need to lean down to hear your friend,” the nurse said.
    I put my ear close to Troy’s mouth. His breath rose against my skin like a puff of gas from a sewer grate. ” ‘Member that colored … that black kid, the one we played the