The Long Fall

“My whole childhood I dreamed about living in a house like this,” I replied.

“What do you think now?”

The parrot cried out and flew over our heads just then and we both laughed.

Hannah took a step forward and knocked on the ritualistic portal.

One of the maids from the kitchen opened the door a crack and stared out nervously.

“This is Mr. McGill, Rosa. He’s here to see my grandfather.”

“I don’t know, Miss Hannah,” Rosa said with very little accent. “Your grandfather is resting.”

“Who is it?” a man’s voice bellowed from beyond the olive-and-gold-skinned woman.

“Miss Hannah,” Rosa said, turning her head back to the room.

“What she want?”

“She brought a man to see you.”

“Show him in, then, girl,” the unpleasant and very masculine voice commanded.

I became aware of recorded piano music. The composition had no style to it. It wasn’t jazz or classical or even elevator covers of pop tunes—just notes strung together in tight mathematical patterns with no heart.

Rosa stepped away, giving me the room to enter. At the same moment, Hannah took a step backward.

I looked at my young friend with the question on my face.

“I never go into Grandpa’s room,” she said.

I’ve gotten less information out of month-long investigations.

IT WAS DIM and hot in Roman Hull’s cavernous room. There was a cloying sweet smell in the humid air, accompanied by that relentless, soulless music. When the door shut behind me an irrational flash of panic pulsed in my chest. I saw no windows. The space was set up like a studio apartment cut into quarters. The area to my immediate right was a hot-plate kitchen with shelves and a small table set for one. To the left was an office with an oak desk and a plush red chair. Deeper in, there was a den or library on the left and a sleeping space on the right.

Only the makeshift bedroom was inhabited. There before the bed sat an old man in an ornate electric wheelchair. He would have been tall if he stood up. His face was cadaverous and sunken. He might have once been a white man but now he was gray with all the inferences that came with that color.

Next to him, sitting in a pine folding chair, was a small hard-eyed woman definitely from below Mexico. She wore clothes that were neither made nor sold on this continent, fruit blues and blood reds made from coarse cloth and a purple scarf that wrapped around her head and chin. Her Indian blood had not yet been conquered by the Spanish invaders, and if you had asked me what she was doing there I would have said, without hesitation, “Waiting for death.”

Golden-hued Rosa stood behind his chair.

“You here to see Bryant?” the gray man asked.

He wore bright-yellow pajamas that reminded me of the wild bird shitting in the hallway, and fat Toolie sweating in prison. There was a maroon blanket across his lap.

“No,” I said, covering the seven steps that separated us. “I came to see you.”

“What business could a Negro in a bad suit have with a man like me?” he asked. He squinted and smiled when he spoke. His teeth were gray also.

Regardless of these facial expressions, the only life left in Roman’s body was in his eyes. They were a standard brown with a feral, hateful light burning brightly from behind. If I was a superstitious man I’d have thought I was in the presence of Beelzebub’s consigliere.

“Timothy Moore,” I answered, now standing over him. “My name is Leonid McGill.”

I expected at least a little fear behind those satanic eyes. But Roman wasn’t going to crumple that easily.

“Rosa, Margarita,” he said while staring up at me, “give me and Mr. McGill a few minutes alone.”

The women moved without hesitation or complaint. Fifteen seconds after his request they were gone, leaving the menfolk behind to play their ridiculous games.

“Sit, Mr. McGill,” Roman said, gesturing toward the chair that Margarita had vacated. “That was the right word, right?”

“Sit?”

“Negro. You people still call yourselves that sometimes, don’t you?”

“I’m here about your interest in my well-being,” I said, “not terminology.”

“Oh? Educated, are you? No pullin’ the wool over your woolly eyes.”

If we were in Missouri sometime before 1980 he might have riled me some.

I smiled.

“Why did you ask Timothy to kill me?”

“I used to know a man named Timmy but not any Moore, Moor,” he said›€€div and then laughed.

“It’s not funny, Roman. It’s not funny and it takes more than bad puns to make me angry. What makes me mad is a man trying to kill me and I don’t even know why.”

The octogenarian shook his head and smiled.

“I can’t help you, Moor,” he said. “I never leave this floor.”

I understood then. Roman was dying and he knew it. His life had been limited to that room, with strangers looking after him. His own granddaughter wouldn’t come to visit him even when she lived under the same roof. My presence there represented a lifeline.

I shrugged and stood up.

“Where you going?” he asked.

I turned my back to him and took a couple of steps toward the door.

“Don’t you want to know about Timothy Moore?” he called after me.