Free The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead Page B

time they fell to sleep.
    As each of the next few days went by she seemed less and less afraid at his morning departures. At work, he could not convince Paul it was okay to break at midmorning and take another break at noon for lunch, so he’d go down the stairs alone to the park across the street and wouldn’t even be hungry but would sit in the sunlight and watch Paul in the empty windows across the street.
    Paul’s whole body would be framed in the big windows as he wetted the glass and stretched out his arms with rags in both hands and washed the windows and it would be as if he were washing the air itself as his hands swam before him. Henry would think of Mercy and wonder what he’d find when he climbed the stairs. She could rock back and forth for hours staring off to nowhere for long periods of time. He wondered sometimes if she’d even be there, or maybe she would be stolen away as she feared. And he missed Clemmie and felt a growing shame for leaving her.
    One day at lunchtime, as Henry was occupying his bench, he could see where Paul had moved up a floor. Paul waved down to him and he waved back. Paul wetted the window with cleaning solution, and as if blessing the sky he began his white-handed circling, and then in the easiest way imaginable the window was coming out of the wall and he was coming with it. Four stories down, a tree fractured the diving sheet of glass and his fall broke through the branches and he lay there on the sidewalk like an upturned turtle, feebly waving his arms in the air as more glass rained down on him. His body was broken and blood was oozing from his mouth and the concrete around him sparkled with shards of shattered glass and shreds of green leaves.
    For some reason Henry did not cross the street and he did not wait around. It wasn’t such a hard thing to tell when someone is dead or about to be dead. He hurried away and back to the Quarter and climbed the stairs. The stairwell was dark and the lights would not work. He groped blindly through the upper hall and found their door. He dug up the key, let himself in, and locked the door behind him before he struck a match to find a candle.
    Henry called out to Mercy, but she did not answer. She was gone and in her place he felt there to be another presence in the dark room, and at first he could not tell who it was and then he could. It was Randall standing in the shadows. He looked at Henry and then hit him over the head with a flat iron. Henry’s vision exploded and blackened and he realized he may have gotten himself killed.
    “It is over and you are not forgiven. Not now. Not ever.”
    The man’s words seemed to be crossing a great distance on their way to Henry and were thick and slow.
    “Jesus God, just don’t hit me again,” he cried. He could feel the cool wet of his own blood beginning to soak his hair.
    “I don’t want any of your back sass,” Randall said, and he hit Henry again. Henry’s vision blackened and then a noose dropped over his neck and a hand cinched it tight at his throat and from behind he was dragged onto his knees.
    “It pays to be afraid,” another voice said. The man’s breath was hot and sour with tobacco. A stick match flared to light a cigar and then dropped to the floor where it slowly burned out.
    “Go away,” the voice said. “Don’t ever come back.”
    Then he was alone. He lay on the floor, paralyzed in the shadowed light. His head was burning up with a pain it could not fully embrace and so it vined into his neck and shoulders and down into his chest. So great was the pain, he could not move to the bed. He touched at his head to feel wetness and came away with a slick of blood in his palm and leaking down his wrist.
    Inside was a deep song he could not quite hear. Then there was the swashing of the blood in his heart and the hiss of air in his lungs and he knew that he was not dead. He held to the frayed end of the rope draped over his shoulder until he realized he was choking