Final Stroke Read Online Free PDF

evenings, when he and Jan had been on their way in from the car, they’d hear one of the elephants, a trumpet being practiced in the distance by someone learn ing to play. Whenever this happened, Jan would make a comment about the elephant sounding the way he sounded when they made love. And he would say he sounded that way because, before he met her, he used to climb the fence at night and have his way with many of the creatures in the zoo. And then she would say something to the effect that she knew this and his hairiness was part of the reason she married him. And he would tell her a joke from grade school about an elephant meeting up with a naked man and saying, “It’s cute, but how do you breathe through that little thing?”
    It wasn’t all coming back, but bits and pieces were. Except, why these memories? Why recall the sound of an elephant’s call and his and Jan’s playful comments? Because these were the truly important memories?
    Learning. Relearning. That was something Jan said he would have to do. She had been there from the start. The moment he opened his eyes in the hospital and didn’t know who the hell he was or who the hell she was, she had been there. The moment he opened his eyes to this world with its dubious past, she had been there. He was able to remember some of the things Jan told him. Like the elephants in the zoo, or like that morning she was in bed beneath the blankets and he came riding down the hallway and into the bedroom on her bicycle wearing nothing but her riding helmet. That was before they were married, and before they’d become so-called middle-aged citizens.
    He’d still been in the hospital when Jan told the story. He remem bered her sitting in the chair beside his hospital bed holding his hand. He remembered her eyes and her beautiful hair that had not gone gray but remained the same sandy brown it had been when they met. Al though at the time he did not think he could recall the incident in which he rode naked on her bicycle into the bedroom, Jan’s words had made the night come alive.
    She awoke from a dream in which she’d been riding her bike down a long hill. The road wound through a wood. Cool, calm, al ways downhill, the rear sprocket on her bike click-click-clicking as she coasted.
    She opened her eyes. The room was dark. She reached out.
    Gone. He was gone. Yet another one-night stand …
    But wait, a noise. Was he just leaving? A light on in the hallway, a shadow. A clicking like …
    Then he appeared, his hand at the light switch as the light came on. He coasted awkwardly into the room. He was naked and smil ing, wearing only her bicycle helmet. He coasted around to the far side of the bed, the front wheel jerking back and forth as he struggled to maintain balance. He got off the bike and leaned it against the dresser, his back to her.
    When she stopped laughing, she noticed red marks on his back where she had held him during the night, where she had scratched him. Then she saw redder marks on his buttocks. The marks caused by shrapnel when the window glass in his office had been blown in by a tossed bomb.
    “You’re a detective, Steve. You were a detective ten years ago when I hired you to find out who killed my first husband Frank. When we met, you’d just come off a case that got you in trouble with Miami hoods who came to Chicago and threw a bomb through your office window. Abortion clinics had been bombed and your investigation of a Miami bomb maker, who apparently did work for the mob down there, was not appreciated. Do you remember? After you started the case I was picked up by those men in the van who threatened me. They took off the police guard because that detective named Al Car roll didn’t believe me. You stayed with me that night. You’d picked up dinner at Szabo’s Hungarian restaurant. We fell in love that night.”
    Jan told the bicycle story again and again at the hospital, and again and again here at Hell in the Woods. She also told the