In This Life Read online

  One thing he knew for sure, he was going to be charged with murder or at least as an accessory. It would take two years just to get to trial. Hell, he had plans worth millions, but first he needed to get out of the hospital. His mind began to plot as the doctor muttered something.

  “You’re an amazing young man. Once again you are regaining your health ahead of schedule. Son, someone, somewhere, is praying for you. I don’t know if it’s fate or some strange phenomenon that placed you twice in my care.” He added, “But somehow each time, you unexpectedly defy seemingly insurmountable odds. At sixteen years of age, you have an abnormally large body frame. It’s almost as if you were designed by a god of another time. I hate to say this, but in my country, there once was a great warrior who went by the name of Mandingo…”

  “Doc, I don’t mean to cut you off, but I need to talk to you.”

  “By all means, go right ahead.”

  “I…I’m in big trouble this time…” Freddy’s words emerged languidly, searching for a connection. “Those men are going to come back to arrest me for a crime that I didn’t commit. In two days at the most, they’re coming back to get me. You once said that in your native country, you had dealt with police before.”

  The doctor nodded silently in agreement.

  “Doc, I can’t stay much longer. I need for you to take me off this machine and all these other contraptions.”

  “The last time you were here, you asked me to do the same exact thing, and when I refused, that night you were gone.”

  “But this is an emergency!”

  “You said that last time.”

  “It was…” Nurse Jones walked in right then, all smiles and humming as the soapy water sloshed in the bath pan. Furtively, Freddy danced his eyebrows at her and then at the door. The doctor caught the hint and turned and asked the nurse if he could have a minute alone with the patient. She held the pan in her hands, looking like she had been slapped. She rolled her eyes, turned and wiggled out of the room, slamming the door behind her. The doctor made a mental note to have a word with her.

  “Okay, what’s on your mind?” The doctor asked.

  “Doc, has there ever been something in your life for which you were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, something that you were willing to die for, something so dear to you that you wouldn’t let nothing stand in its way…the love of your own flesh and blood, a commitment in blood?” Agitated, Freddy threw his hands up and the I.V. bag connected to his arm almost fell over. With quick agility, the doctor grabbed it.

  “I understand you and your cause better than you think I do. However, that won’t change your prognosis. Your early departure from here this time could very well cause your death. I know where we are going with this conversation."” The doctor looked tired as he glanced at his watch and began to rub his eyes. "You are scheduled to be taken off the oxygen and have your catheter removed. The staples and sutures will have to stay in a while longer.”

  “You think I’m going to stay here and wait for them to come and arrest me? I plan on leaving here as soon as possible,” Freddy said as he turned his head from side to side, looking as if he might try leaving right then.

  “It saddens me…you so-called American Negroes. Y’all continue to fight an invisible force that you can’t see, which leads you to lash out at the closest thing to you, your own brothers and sisters. You fight only against yourself.” He shook his head at the young patient. “Your power lies within. Everyone knows your history but you. You have to learn thy self.” He came closer and lowered his voice. “Remember this…a man who seeks to learn the whole universe may never learn a thing, but a man who seeks to learn himself will learn the whole universe.”

  This all sounded like a Chinese fortune cookie to Freddy. The last thing he wanted was to be preached to. “Doc, what are you talking about?” Freddy asked, agitated. “I have to go…”

  “What I’m talking about is, you’re going to have to go inside yourself, inside your mind and listen to your soul. You are fighting against yourself. In my country, there was a time when all young males had to go through what is called a ‘rite of passage.’ Even the art of lovemaking was taught, along with hunting skills, and not just a hunter of animals, but also a hunter of the divine knowledge, which is the essence of Man. At your maturity, you would have been raised as a prince. You would have had a harem of beautiful women as your wives.”

  The last statement caught his attention…girls. As the doctor continued, Freddy imagined himself in the dense jungle of Africa, a slayer of men and lions. He would have his loyal servants tie Detective Fermen’s sorry ass to a stick and roast him over fire, watching as all his beautiful wives fed him grapes…

  “…if you don’t learn to bridle and control what is a special gift, one day it may cause you great harm, perhaps even…”

  “Death,” Freddy thought, the familiar word disturbing his daydream.

  “I will tell you this, in dealing with your particular medical situation, my intention is not to abet you. But since I know what’s on your mind, I can at least try to educate you, if you had the right facilities in terms of antisepsis, a clean setting, and an environment where you could get the appropriate care you will do fine.

  The doctor glanced at his watch. “Excuse me, but I have to make my rounds. I’ll be back to check on your later.”

  Nurse Jones walked in as soon as he left. She looked as if she might have been waiting right outside the door. Tight-lipped, her brown eyes seemed to glint with malice as she neared him, water splashing from the bath pan. She set the pan on the nightstand. “Are you ready for your bath now?” She said with a bent wrist and pointing finger, the way a woman with an attitude does. She chewed gum on one side of her delicate mouth, occasionally making a popping sound as she twisted her mouth sideways.

  At 23 years of age, and barely four months out of the Illinois School of Nursing, she had received a grant from the welfare agency as part of a program to help minorities find jobs. She used her earnings to get her and her mother out of the Cobriney Green Projects.

  Bathing the handsome Freddy Thugstin the past two weeks or so had been one of the duties of her new job that she appreciated most. He had been her first real patient. At school they would use baby dolls. Freddy was a far cry from a baby doll. She found herself very much attracted to him from the very first day he had come into the emergency room near death and she had helped nurse him back to health.

  Recently, the past few days, he had been spying on her butt. She had once written her phone number down, but never had the nerve to give it to him. She told herself that she would just invite him to her church, and maybe that would keep the other thoughts out of her mind and him out of her panties.

  “Yes, I’m ready for my bath.” Freddy pulled the sheets back, proudly displaying his nudity. She ignored his ostentatious behavior, dipped a sponge into the soapy solution and sloshed it on his chest.

  “Hey, that’s cold water!”

  “It wouldn’t have been cold if you and the doctor hadn’t had me standing in the damn hallway while y’all ran your mouths like two old ladies.”

  Freddy just stared up at her feeling something in him stir. She gently rubbed the sponge over his chest and midriff. He thought about what the doctor had told him about the African prince and the many wives. Her soft hands held his testicles and he started to respond in her hands. It took everything in her not to smile, as now she was intentionally playing with him.

  Freddy had the most serious face, the kind that passion gives when it is being teased. She couldn’t help it, she was torturing the hell out his young ass. She burst into laughter, bringing Freddy back to his senses.

  “Boy, what is wrong with you?” She giggled in innocence.

  Embarrassed, he looked down at his Johnson. He had a full erection standing straight up in a salute to Nurse Jones and her dexterous hands. “Child, I hope you ain’t goin’ to have an accident. Maybe I should get it some ice.” Playfully, she nudged it wi
th the sponge, making it spring back and forth.

  “What are you thinking about honey?” She asked sweetly. Freddy covered himself with both his hands, but it didn’t help much. “It must have been something very arousing,” she said as she moved his hands away. “You need to be thinking about what happened in that operating room.”

  “What happened?” Freddy asked quizzically.

  “Yeah! Shoot, for a moment I was about to run up outta there and leave you right there with your chest cavity wide open.”

  “What happened?” His voice raised at her.

  “Negro, don’t make me have to get ignorant in here. Don’t be raising your voice at me!”

  “Oh, God, please tell me what happened.” He threw his hands up in frustration.

  She laughed at his antics, the kind of laughter that you share with old friends. “Okay, okay,” she smiled, as she pulled the sheets back. She opened a package of gauze to rebandage his wounds, she spoke barely whispering. “While the doctor was trying to drain the blood out your chest, your heart stopped beating three times, and the last time we had all pretty much given up. All the while we couldn’t find where you were exactly hemorrhaging from, and you had lost a considerable amount of blood. It got so hectic that I swear I saw the doctor with tears in his eyes as he cursed at you, frantically trying to bring you back to life. In the chaos of all the commotion, you woke up like some kind of damn zombie!” She clasped her hands together melodramatically, as if in prayer. “I-was-soo-scared-lawd-haf-mercy! I peed in my panties and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. We were all bent over you, laboring to bring life back into you. We attempted to resuscitate your heart because clinically, whenever your heart stops beating, you’re dead, and you were, even the heart monitor flatlined. Suddenly, you just woke up, eyes bulging out your head. Scared the hell outta all of us.” She placed her hand over her heart for emphasis.

  Even as she spoke, Freddy could tell that she was reliving the scene in her mind. “In an eerily commanding voice,” she continued, “you grabbed hold of the doctor’s hand while he held the scalpel inside your opened chest cavity, and told him, ‘Hurry! Hurry! I gotta go!’ That was around the time I peed down my leg. Then I heard footsteps as someone ran out the door. I turned and saw it was the anesthesiologist. He did what we all wanted to do, haul ass outta there.” She cut her pretty brown eyes at him as if she had a second thought. “Afterwards, the doctor asked all of us not to say a word concerning what we had witnessed.”

  Visibly he was shaking and disturbed. She leaned closer, her face inches from his, he could see down her cleavage. Her lacy, pink bra strap, her scent of Juicy Fruit, and a titillating sweet perfume all seemed to be a part of her aura.

  “The anesthesiologist who was responsible for sedating you quit. The rumor around here has it that he was fired because of what happened with you.”

  The room suddenly became disturbingly quiet, other than the muffled sounds from the hallway and the tranquility of water being rung from the sponge. Freddy felt strange, his mind awkward, the feeling of knowing that in some ways, he was different. Now, he realized what the doctor was trying to tell him. He must have spooked him too, just like he did his mother when he was four years old. He now remembered that day vividly.

  His mother had just buckled his seatbelt in the car when he had another premonition. They were always the same. It felt like déjà vu, like he had done something before, as if he had already experienced life at another time. Only in his mind, sometimes when it came, if he listened, or strained his mind real hard, he would be given a glimpse of what was about to happen.

  On that morning, he could recall his momma putting him in the car and buckling him up and wetting her fingers to wipe his nose. He also envisioned that the house was going to catch on fire with his father asleep in it, and that was when he started kicking and screaming, “No mummy! No mummy! No mummy! I want my daddy!”

  L’il Freddy threw a temper tantrum and mommy spanked him right there in the car. Her rule was, wherever you show your ass is where you get your ass tore up. Still, L’il Freddy would not stop crying and pleading with her about his daddy and the fire. Concerned for her child’s mental state, she marched him right up the stairs and assured him once inside she was going to make sure that his daddy whipped his ass good for giving her a hard time and making her late for work.

  As soon as she turned the key in the lock, to her horror, she could smell it all throughout the apartment, the perilous odor of gas fumes. The stove was leaking gas and the toxic fumes had already placed her husband into a deep sleep. She could not wake him up. An emergency rescue team took him to the hospital. The entire block had to be evacuated. Afterwards, mom took L’il Freddy to the ice cream parlor and let him eat all the ice cream he wanted.

  “You’re a handsome fellow,” Nurse Jones said, snapping him out of his reverie, her smile bright on her face. “Why don’t you try going to church?” She smoothed the wrinkles out her uniform with her hands. The motion seemed to highlight her small waistline and make the back of uniform rise up, due to bump of her behind. “How old are you?” She coyly asked.

  “Twenty-one,” he lied

  “Age ain’t nothin’ but a number.” She then winked at him coquettishly and wiggled toward the door, showing off her best stuff. She turned and added, “You need to seriously think about going to church, accept Jesus into your life. You never know, you might end up with a nurse in your life too. A good old fashion Christian girl could teach you a thing or two.”

  “Why do we have to wait for church? You could teach a brother right now.”

  She walked back towards him and took a small piece of paper out of her pocket and placed it in her hands. She picked up the bath pan. “I also work part-time at the Joliet State Prison, so call me either late at night or early in the morning before six.”

  An hour later Freddy received his first real meal in two weeks: backed chicken, corn-on-the-cob, mashed potatoes, collard greens, and a large slice of apple pie. It was hospital food, but to him it tasted like a gourmet meal. After he finished eating, it felt as if the stitches in his stomach were going to burst. He rolled onto his side, placed the pillow on his stomach, and went to sleep watching the Price Is Right game show. Bob Barker was being mauled by a big, fat lady with gigantic breast. She had just won a toaster.

  Chapter Four

  Seconds, minutes, hours, days…? Freddy woke with a start, not knowing just how long he had been asleep. “Danger! Danger!” echoed insistently in his mind. The same warning he always received when something was wrong. He felt the hair stand on the nape of his neck and an overpowering fear that threatened to consume his body, a jingling alert to death’s approach. With his eyes wide open, he groped the darkness. He found himself staring at the phosphorus silhouette of an approaching man wearing a long, black trench coat and a wide brimmed hat pulled down partially over the eyes to conceal his identity.

  Freddy recognized him. “No, it can’t be!” was the scream in his mind as he frantically reached for the nurses’ station button on the nightstand. A grip like a vise seized his hand, bending two of his fingers all the way back to his wrist until they snapped. He shrieked in agony as he withered in pain. A deep voice began to speak slow and deliberately.

  “Did you think that I was just going to let you get away, huh?” The voice spoke through its teeth as the assailant ground the bones and marrow of his broken fingers.

  “What do we have here? A nice cozy torture chamber.” In the gloom of darkness the voice chuckled, a lupine scowl appeared on the face. Freddy moaned from the pressure being applied to his hand. Sweat trickled from his brow.

  “Here, I got a gift for you.” The figure looked around as if expecting someone to come through the door at any minute, digging his hand deep into the pocket of his coat. He pulled it out, threw it. It landed wetly on Freddy’s chest. It took a second for Freddy to recognize what it was. Hair, long and matted, sanguineously crusted in blood, Sasha’s blood.

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sp; “Noooooo…” Freddy wailed at the top of his lungs, snatching his mangled hand free. A fist violently smashed his chest, driving the air out of his lungs. His body weakly searched for the escaped oxygen as body fluids spilled from the freshly gaping wound, burst stitches hanging loose. A whizzing sound issued from his mouth as he sipped for air like he was sucking through a straw.

  In a whisper that sounded like dry ice scratching a wooden floor, J.J. said, “You’re taking all the fun out our little torture game. Pleeze don’t go out on me now…I promise to go slow.” He laughed as he moved his hand and caressed the catheter connected to Freddy’s penis. He pulled the covers up and teased, “Is that your wee-wee connected to this tube? If I, like, pull on this tube thingamajig, could you do me a favor and try not to scream too loud? We wouldn’t want security to come runnin’ in here and ruin our game, now would we?”

  Freddy pleaded plaintively with his eyes. He was unable to speak, his voice lost in the abyss of his pain.

  J.J. yanked the tube with all his might, almost falling as his trench coat flew into the air with the force of his momentum. Freddy writhed in pain. It felt as if a hot blowtorch was burning inside of him. With his left hand, he reached for partially severed penis. Urine had splattered the walls and fixtures.

  J.J. looked disappointed as he lamented, “That’s no fair! There’s no blood on this tube, only piss!” He threw the tube down in disgust and then scratched his nappy head as if contemplating a new idea. “Let’s see, we still got two more tubes left.” He rubbed his hands anxiously together. “See, I told you this was going to be fun. Just don’t die on me, okay player?” J.J. began chanting a lullaby as he chose which tube he was going to pull next. “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, catch a nigga by his toe, if he holler let him go.” His hand stopped on the nose tube.