Free The Holy Terror by Wayne Allen Sallee Page A

the detail the papers will have in this day and age,” she said, pushing at the aspirator with a bent finger, prodding Surfer into getting the cleaning over with.
    “I stopped watching the news, on the television, you know.”
    “I know, Gramma.”

    Wilma, who had for all true purposes except for the mail system had given up her last name in the late seventies, was a white seventy-five year old with hair the color of the haze you sometimes see around a winter’s moon. She had never told anyone, confided in anyone, why she was confined to a wheelchair. She was one of only two women currently living at the Marclinn. Katrina “call me Cat” Townsend was also white and about twenty years Wilma’s junior. Cat still wore black toreador pants most every day of the week, her white (with a milky transparency) shin braces clamped over them just below the knees.
    “Sad thing when anybody dies,” she said, looking down at the glass on the table beside them -- a twelve-ounce tumbler with Walter Payton grinning on the front. The back of the glass listed ten achievements or records that the running back had set while on the Chicago Bears.
    She took a sip of the ginand tonic—her “eye opener”—within, and the level of the drink dropped to 4. Most 100-yard games—77.
    Mike Surfer looked up, perhaps still thinking about Givens.
    “Never met the man, though it be say in the paper that he was some kinda crook once,” he said, absently running a heavily-calloused hand over the right wheel of his chair. His skin was almost a greyish-brown in the area below his little finger, from years of gripping the wheel. “I ax you though, Gramma, it not right for that to happen to a guy.”
    The two could have been lovers on a park bench; Wilma’s’ chair nearly touching Surfer’s, the wheels turned slightly to accommodate the fact. There was a sticker of the Honky Tonk Man, a character in one of her beloved wrestling programs, on the arm of her chair. She had gotten the sticker from a box of Crispy Critters, which she still ate even though the wheaty animal crackers got caught in her dentures. Her son Herbert had loved the cereal as a kid on Monticello, back before the Puerto Ricans moved in.
    “I think it would be quite simple for someone to come along and put a blowtorch to anyone of us!” The harshness of her words were not the by-product of her morning drink. “And clean out your windpipe now, young man!” She waved a hand at him as if he were a waiter who had brought food that was distasteful to her, table at The Drake.
    Surfer uncapped the shunt, it popped free of his throat, and he plugged in the plastic tube to a cylinder in the box. He looked over at Wilma, hoping for gratification, and saw that her stare had gone blank. She was thinking about the bad things again.
    In fact, Wilma Jerrickson’s mind was, at this moment, a rush of images. A whirlwind of defeat that she’d always seemed to stay several running steps ahead of. But she couldn’t run these days, these years. She hid in the shadow of pale hope here at the Marclinn, with visits to her nephew every month.
    Surfer, and the others—Etch, Karl, Willie, Slappy—all of them, even Cat, kept her from thinking about a son none of them knew about, a son stabbed in the neck on the Ravenswood El in 1974. From years of bed sores and food that always tasted of Dentu-Grip and Feen-A-Mint laxative, from sick minds and sick hearts and really very little love at all. No love at all except for the kinship of those like her at the Rainey Marclinn Home for the Physically Disabled.
    Actually, those almost like her. For, the reason she had self-exiled herself into confinement in this wheelchair since 1974 was frightening in its simplicity; a clinical reason, though one not having anything to do with disease.
    By staying in the wheelchair, bundled up in her bright red and orange afghan, it became that much harder to string up a noose and hang herself from whatever light fixture was