Free Edsel by Loren D. Estleman Page B

shaker on its way down to the boy.
    He leaned his body against mine. I smelled beer as strongly as if from an open keg. He was sweating pure Schlitz. “Hey, Gramps, I asked for the pepper.”
    “Grow up, son. Get a job. Find a wife. Have kids. Grow old and die.” I slid off the stool and took Agnes’ elbow.
    Toothless grasped my arm, squeezing the bicep. I let go of Agnes and splayed a hand against his chest. That was where I went wrong, if you discount catching the pepper shaker. It should have been his chin, and instead of my hand it should have been the stool.
    I remember the first blow and the second. After that I lost count. I remember being on the floor and something hard and sharp hitting me in the side that turned out to be the pointed toe of a motorcycle boot. I remember Agnes shrieking obscenities, being surprised at how many she knew, and I had a flash of her hitting Toothless with her purse—holding it like a sap, not swinging it by its strap like an old lady—and Red grabbing her from behind and trying to claw her face with ragged nails. I have no recollection of seeing counter help or any other store personnel, although I was told later a security man broke it up with a hammerlock and his service revolver. I passed into and out of this world in the back of an ambulance in need of shock absorbers, banging and rocking over dips and breaks in the pavement, with Agnes looking down at me through tendrils of hair hanging loose in front of her face. Stutters of light from passing street lamps found most of the cracks in her makeup, which still depressed me.
    Somewhere in there I dreamed a memory, of lunch at Carl’s Chop House on Howard with Janet Sherman after our tour of Rouge. She spoke sketchily of her childhood and schooling in Toledo, followed by her first employment at Ford as a secretary-typist, while delicately trimming scraps of lettuce from the edge of a tuna sandwich with her fingers. Finding the sandwich too big to handle, she had stopped to cut it in half. The operation forced her to lean a way over in order to brace the fork with her short arm, an awkward maneuver that she somehow made appear graceful. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman who had obviously spent hundreds of hours practicing such activities with the object of de-emphasizing them and distracting attention from her deformity. She was intelligent as well and spoke knowledgeably of things related to the history of the company she worked for that she could only have learned secondhand. If, as I assumed, her physical imperfection explained the lack of a ring on her left hand, she had made the best of that situation with interest, abandoning the typing pool in less than two years for a position as executive secretary to Henry II’s least-dispensable Whiz Kid. And I was pleased to learn that this far on the wrong side of middle age I could still be aroused by admirable attractive women. Funny what you think of when you’re bleeding.
    In movies and on the clothes-closet sets of television, injured characters are always awakening to the sight of some concerned-looking doctor. In real life it’s more often to the slack weary face of a bored cop. Mine, looming over me in the harsh white light of the emergency room at Henry Ford Hospital, had on the same uniform that had been handed him when he’d finished training a dozen or so years before. Far from having grown into its tired folds and gathers, he had come to resemble them. His face looked as if he could turn around inside it without disturbing any of its pockets or creases. Even his eyes were set so far back behind the bunting of their lids I couldn’t find them. I might have caught him in mid-turn.
    “Mr. Meaner, I’m Officer Kozlowski. Think you’re up to telling me what happened back there at Woolworth’s?”
    I had to maneuver my lips out of the way of my words. They felt so swollen I was surprised I couldn’t see them. “If you know where it happened, I guess you know