LAMONT GADSDEN AND MY COUSIN PETRA. IT WAS HARD to imagine two people with less in common: an old buddy of Hammer Merton’s from Chicago’s South Side, a Millennium Gen text messager from an upscale Kansas City suburb. If it hadn’t been for me, and some terrible luck, their lives would never have collided.
Petra being my cousin, it wasn’t surprising that she looked for me when she showed up in Chicago at the start of the summer, a fresh-minted college graduate with an internship in her daddy’s hometown.
It was sheer luck, the bad kind, that I agreed to look for Lamont Gadsden. Sometimes when I want someone to blame, someone outside my family, I snarl unfairly at a homeless guy named Elton Grainger.
Elton was the unwitting deus ex machina who led me into the Gadsden morass. Elton had been working my street off and on for several years. I knew him to say “Hey” to. I bought Streetwise from him, bought coffee or sandwiches for him from time to time. Once, during a blizzard, I’d offered him shelter in my office, but he turned me down. Then, one golden June afternoon, he collapsed in front of my office.
If I’d let him lie, maybe Petra would never have vanished, maybe Sister Frankie would still be alive. There’s a lesson in that about the fate that awaits the Good Samaritan.
It happened as I was tapping in the code to my office building.
“Vic, where you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks! You’re looking good.” He flourished a copy of Streetwise. “New issue today.”
“I’ve been in Italy.” I fumbled in my wallet for the U.S. money that still looked weird to me. “My first true vacation in fifteen years. It’s hard to be back.”
“Foreign travel. I got all that out of my system at nineteen when Uncle Sam paid my airfare to Saigon.”
I pulled out a five, and Elton fell to the sidewalk. I dropped keys and papers and knelt next to him. He’d hit his head as he went down and was bleeding in an ugly way, but he was breathing, and I could feel his pulse in an irregular, feathery beat, like some fragile ballerina dancing against the music.