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  Danny lifted his head and looked over at Louis. “You think so?”

  Louis frowned. “Frankly no. I mean, I’m not in the delusion-selling business but it couldn’t hurt to get yourself together. Right? So you go from impossible to highly unlikely. I’d take that chance.”

  Danny smiled a little and shook his head. In another life, he wouldn’t have minded sharing a beer with this guy. “OK.”

  Slapping a file down, Louis went right to work, opening it on a typed list of skinflint employers offering shitty jobs for no money. Still, Danny nodded as Louis printed out two addresses for him to pursue.

  As Louis was giving him directions to one of the job sites, Danny stopped him. “Why do you give a shit? After what I did, they were never going to let me out of there.”

  “I read your case,” Louis said matter-of-factly. “Young, stupid, reckless, and a good man was killed. But I disagree with the judge’s decision. I should be talking to a guy pushing forty, not sixty.”

  True to his word, Louis found Danny a small but clean, furnished studio apartment on a marginal street closer to the office he shared with two other case workers but several blocks away from Sonya’s brownstone building. Danny also suspected the restaurant owner, who hired him on the spot to bus tables and wash dishes, had spoken to Louis. He could tell the owner thought him too old for the job but nevertheless Danny was given an eight hour shift and a five day work week. He was starting to amass debts of obligation even though he was sure Louis would never collect.

  For the first few days, Danny found it difficult to keep up with the loads of heavy porcelain dishes, thick drinking glasses and bent flatware that passed through the scalding hot water and steam of the dishwashing machine. Danny almost fainted a couple of times with the owner worriedly asking, ‘Are you all right, old timer?’ as he shook him off.

  On the bus ride back to his apartment building at night, Danny had idle time to think and his thoughts always returned to Sonya and the baby. The first paycheck he received from the diner represented the beginning of a cumulative stake he would have in Sonya’s life. Once he had proved his determination and sacrifice, Danny was sure Sonya would come around. Their love had been so deep, at least her love for him had been so. It was inconceivable to Danny that she could deny those feelings if he were given a true second chance.

  Danny followed Louis’ advice and purchased some nice clothes with a small allowance he gave himself. He got a haircut and took extra-long hot showers, trying to reinvigorate the muscles and skin of his aged body. There was free use of the gym equipment at the YMCA on Thursday nights which he took full advantage of. He spent an inordinate amount of time in front of his bathroom mirror, trying to trim and groom every advantage on his face. By the time he received his third bi-weekly paycheck, Danny was ready to try again. During a break on his Monday shift, he asked to borrow the cell phone of a waiter named Sean. At first reluctant, Sean took heart when Danny made his desperation known.

  “Hello, Sonya,” Danny said after three rings.

  “Who’s this?” came the guarded reply.

  “Sonya, it’s me—Danny.” Danny was expecting the silence that followed but it was nevertheless painful to endure. “How’s Phillip?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Sonya. Please talk to me.”

  “What is it you want, Danny?”

  “I’d like to see you. Maybe take you out to dinner. I have a job now and a decent place. I look a lot better than when you last saw me.”

  “Where are you working?”

  Danny knew it was important to qualify his response. “Henry’s Diner over near DeKalb. I’m just there temporarily. I’ve got an interview for a better position coming up.”

  “No, Danny.”

  “Sonya, please.”

  “Don’t call me again.” Sonya hung up, leaving Danny shaken. Ten minutes later, Sean the waiter had to remind Danny about returning his phone and looked annoyed that he had to do so. Danny did not even remember slipping it into his own pocket.

  The pain in Danny’s stomach began shortly after he was released. It started like a pinch in his belly and in Chicago, he was convinced the Hennessy had knocked it out. But as the days passed in Brooklyn, Danny could not deny its growing intensity and its persistence. Louis had seen him flinch in his office and asked if anything was wrong. Danny put on his macho and blew it off as indigestion but at night, after work, sometimes he sat on the edge of his bed bent over, waiting for several minutes for the pain to subside.

  The next time Danny was in Louis’ office, the sweat on his forehead was profuse and instead of asking, Louis handed Danny the address of Hodge Memorial Hospital and the direct phone number to Dr. Kelty. Louis had been advised to monitor any abnormal physical ailments and refer any of his processee cases to Kelty, who was on the Premium Sentencing outpatient medical staff.

  “It’ll pass,” Danny said. “It always does.”

  “Danny, go,” Louis said. “Honest to God, you look like shit. Go see Kelty. And don’t worry about the bill. The program picks it up.”

  “I’ll probably show up and they’ll put me in a fucking hospice program.”

  Louis made a gesture as if he were knocking on Danny’s empty wooden head. “Dude, don’t be stupid. OK?”

  “OK,” Danny said.

  When he got back to his apartment, Danny put the slip with Dr. Kelty’s number onto a pile of store receipts, coupons and unopened junk mail. He sat down at his small dining table and poured himself a short glass from a new bottle of Hennessy. The cognac had a smooth burn which Danny made himself believe to be medicinal in nature.

  It had been a week and a half since Danny had made the call with Sean’s cell phone. He told himself he would give Sonya a few more days to get over any anger that might be left over from their last exchange. The dishwasher job was physically grueling but in a strange way, Danny felt like he was going through a proper penance for some of his sins. The steam from the dishwashing machine made him sweat everything from the inside out and there was a strange sense of cleansing, a purging of the toxins from his body, stemming from a lifetime of bad choices and rotten breaks.

  The sweat dried on Danny’s skin as the evening breeze met him each night and when it all got washed down the drain after a hot shower, the cyclical routine became ritual, one that culminated his day in a strangely coherent manner.

  Tuesday was his day off and Danny started this particular day at The Diamond Bar where he found out, with not a little disappointment, that George was out on some family errand. The first time George saw Danny back in the bar, he had studied his face and spoke without caution. “Danny, it’s good to see you again. That was a bad break. I’m glad you’re out.” There was not much else to say. Danny was too old to do any more jacking and he didn’t ask about it and George looked grateful for it. Now when Danny saw him, George would give him an extra inch in his glass and he would push any tips back, saying “Come on, Danny. For old times’ sake.”

  Danny took his usual place at the bar and looked around the time-worn establishment. It was past lunchtime and the place was sparse with customers. Suddenly, a girl propped herself up a few stools down from him. She was sexy—billowy silk blouse, short skirt, kick-ass brown leather boots. Danny looked at her face and recognized her immediately. He never forgot the face of an attractive girl. In the past, his recall often rewarded him with unexpected company and a night of inevitable pleasure. He kept his indulgent indiscretions away from Sonya but he often suspected that she knew. Sonya had a lot of girlfriends with big mouths who saw things from a distance and reported their surveillance to her with relish.

  Danny recalled this self-aware street princess and even the phone number she had mouthed to him that fateful night.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Danny asked.

  The girl looked up from her phone with a smile which dropped the second she laid eyes on her gray-haired admirer.

  “I can buy my own drinks, gramps,” she said, lo
oking back at her phone.

  Danny swallowed hard but he desperately wanted to play the entire hand. “Cassandra, isn’t it?”

  And this time, the girl gave Danny a look that had a halting threat to it. “Old timer, I don’t know how you know my name, but you don’t have enough Viagra. Now fuck off.” Deciding this wasn’t enough of a deterrent, she hollered over to the bartender. “Nick, this old geezer’s trying to hit on me. Get him out of here!”

  Nick came over but by then Danny had fallen off his seat, clutching his belly as if his guts were on fire. Even Cassandra looked surprised.

  After she took a snapshot of the writhing body on the ground with her phone, Cassandra said to Nick, “Jesus, is he going to die right here?”

  Before Nick could call for an ambulance, Danny got himself together and pushed out his outstretched hand signaling to the amassing crowd that he was OK. Cassandra made a face as Danny shuffled out of the bar. And to think, she would tell her girlfriends later, this old geezer who was trying to hit on her nearly died in front of her. It was enough to make her sick—

  Danny fumbled about for his wallet and found the address to Hodge Memorial Hospital where Dr. Kelty had his office. He was glad now that Louis had forced the information on him. Outside, Danny found a blade-nicked bench where he could sit down. Hodge Memorial was about twelve blocks away and he had the change for the bus but at this stage, Danny was into proving things to himself and one thing he needed to prove was that he wasn’t so feeble that he couldn’t make twelve measly blocks on foot.

  About four blocks from the hospital the street forked off into two paths, one clearly leading to Hodge Memorial Hospital but the other was a small side street that ran smack into a row of mostly abandoned industrial structures—small factories, printing shops, storage warehouses. There were service alleys and makeshift pathways that had once seen plenty of trucks picking up and delivering loads, now settled with the silt of disuse.

  His stomach still stabbing him periodically with pain, Danny distractedly walked several steps down the wrong pathway and saw a young man approach him. The day was dark and cloudy and for a moment, he could not tell if there was a threat written on the young man’s face.

  “Is this the way to Hodge Memorial?”

  The young man smiled. “No, man. You were supposed to go left back there.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said, turning on his heel. He stopped at the young man’s next words.

  “I’d say you were twenty-eight. No, more like twenty-four.”

  Danny turned to face the young man. He could see small cuts on his face and his neck was collared with tattoo ink. “What do you want?”

  The young man laughed a little. “That’s my question. What do you want? Do you want some?”

  “Some what?”

  “Some youth,” he said.

  Danny’s eyes followed the young man’s hand as it reached into his pocket and retrieved a small vial of clear liquid.

  “I’ll give you the first one for twenty,” he smiled. “Introductory offer.”

  Danny felt the stabbing pain in his stomach, causing his eyes to twitch.

  The young man recognized the symptom immediately. “My name is Pete. It’s OK. Think it over.”

  Danny lurched away from the young man who slipped the vial back into his pocket. For some reason he could not define, Danny was disturbed by the encounter, as if his pain would lead him back to Pete again, or maybe someone a whole lot worse.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dr. Kelty looked like a small town country doctor but when he spoke there was a big city bite to it. “The referral was dated the eighteenth. Eleven days ago. Mr. Castillo noted that you were going through severe pains for weeks. What are you, some kind of smart guy?”

  “No,” Danny said.

  “Big macho man, doesn’t run to a doctor even if he’s in crippling pain? Is that it?”

  “I’ve been busy. I work,” Danny explained.

  “Nonsense. Even dishwashers get a day off,” Kelty said.

  Danny looked at the laptop the good Doctor was referencing. I guess his whole damn life wasn’t his own anymore. He was some kind of specimen under glass, to be conferred upon by a whole legion of smartass specialists, Danny thought.

  “Well, I’m here now,” Danny said.

  Kelty had already checked his vital signs, had his assistant take blood samples and ordered an EKG readout. Danny watched Kelty’s body language for clues and finally, he received some bad news.

  “I can give you a prescription for the pain,” Kelty said. “I’ll leave it open-ended so you can fill it as you need it.”

  As was his tendency of late, when Danny was frustrated, he got shrill. “What are you saying? I’m going to go through this pain for the rest of my life?”

  Kelty nodded quietly as if he had had to deal with similar outbursts. “Well, at least until someone discovers a permanent treatment. When they came up with Premium Sentencing, with its acceleration of the aging process, there were bound to be some complications.”

  As Danny walked away from Hodge Memorial moments later, he could hear Kelty’s voice taunting him, though when he said the words, they were spoken with the opposite intention. “You’re a fifty-five year old man, Mr. Fierro. Start acting like one.”

  The pain was still there, muted now but still fisted, the rude reminder of how his body had been wrecked. Danny looked down at his hand holding the prescription, shaking a little—not from pain, or anger, but from the insatiable onslaught of creeping age.

  Danny heard sounds that he would have been attuned to as a young man, of other young men, bored, anxious to dominate the world around them, to express their disregard with bravado and violence. The group of young men numbered five. They were three years out of high school and they were laughing too hard and swearing like it had real currency. Danny sized them up as gang members, perhaps more vicious and hardened than he originally gave them credit for.

  They were congregated at the end of the block and Danny was distanced with plenty of time to cross over to the other side of the street. The young men dominated the corner, pushing the flow of foot traffic to roundabout pathways around their sphere of influence. Danny stopped on the sidewalk, looking at the easy path out.

  “You’re a fifty-five year old man, Mr. Fierro. Start acting like one.”

  Danny took deliberate steps forward, the unsettling laughter of the gang pitching louder as he approached. When he reached the group, the gang members became silent, and as Danny forged ahead between the members, the young men closed ranks.

  “Hey old man, got any money?”

  Danny slowly trudged forward.

  Another voice, more menacing. “Whatsa matter—you deaf?”

  Danny looked up into the face of his questioner, a scowling young man with high cheek bones and a scar through his eyebrow. Danny swallowed and then stared down the youth in front of him, like a fearless young man of twenty-five. He had forgotten what the fire felt like. The fear—he embraced it, like it was a part of his soul.

  “Yeah, I got money,” Danny said, “but you aint getting it.”

  The scowling young man turned his head toward his friends and laughed raucously. The others laughed as well, the malevolent chorus. Then the youth let loose a cannon shot to Danny’s unprotected stomach. Danny doubled over like he had been creased in half.

  The gang’s leader, a well-fed character with baby cheeks and a black fedora, pretended to be the voice of reason. “You’d better give up the money, old man.”

  Danny grunted, then straightened himself with effort, making a motion to the youth who had taken the shot, and leaned forward so he could whisper something into his ear. The youth smiled, playing along in the mysterious game, and pretended to be ready to receive Danny’s message.

  “Suck my dick,” Danny whispered.

  The youth and his surrounding mates looked shocked for a moment but the moment did not last long as Danny was grabbed around his collar by the youth’s lef
t fist, as tight as a tourniquet, and punched straight on into his face with the right. Blood gushed from Danny’s nose where the youth’s studded rings smashed into the soft cartilage. Danny fell to the ground as if he had been shot by a rifle, his head lolling into the gutter.

  Two of the other gang members, although there in solidarity, performed more as an appreciative audience, howling with each connected punch. The leader touched his fedora, curious, almost impressed by the older man’s defiance.

  The enraged youth preened. “I don’t want your money anymore, old man. I want to turn you into Cripple of the Year.” The youth, blind with blood rage, pulled his prey to his feet again, not noticing the empty beer bottle Danny had grasped from the curb. Danny smashed the glass bottle over the youth’s head while swinging his leg up to crush his heel into his attacker’s unprotected groin.

  The other members reflexively took a step back and yelled ‘Whoa!’ as the assaulted youth crumpled uselessly to the ground, screaming out in excruciating pain.

  Danny held up the broken end of the bottle and called out to the other stunned young men, perhaps overplaying his moment of triumph. “Come on!” he screamed, “I didn’t forget how to wipe my ass with pussy motherfuckers like you!”

  The air was silent, the stunned gang members momentarily losing their voice—recalibrating, refiguring the situation. Only the moaning one on the ground made a sound.

  Danny started to breathe again. It felt glorious to feel his power restored, that is until the leader stepped forward and spoke in a calm, frightening voice. “Old man, I tip my hat to you. That was quite a show. Quite a show. But it aint gonna save you. No, sir. It surely won’t.” The young man pinched the brim of his fedora as if it helped him focus his darkening thoughts.