Page 102 of Hanging and Burning

“Fine. What you doin’ here, Arman?”

“Joe,” my grandmother chastised, “Mr. Babylon is my guest.”

I pulled a chair up to the small table.

There were a few moments of awkward silence, then Arman said, “I needed to talk to somebody, Mr. Oliver, and your grandmother is the smartest person in the whole hospital.”

“That’s right, Joe,” B said. “And don’t you forget it.”

“Did he tell you about how he betrayed his lifelong friend?” I asked, feeling completely justified speaking truth in a place where almost everyone expected to die soon.

“He did.”

I turned to what Plato might have considered the Grandmother, in perfect form. She had that look, the one that said she got the better of me there.

“I’m not proud of what I did,” Arman said. “But I had a life, and Paulie told me that I had to fight shoulder to shoulder with him in a battle both of us knew we couldn’t win. What would you have done?”

It was a good question. I wanted to say that I would have killed him myself, but I couldn’t see how that would be better.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Arman explained. “It broke his wife’s heart, and she laid it all on Junior. But I had a wife and a child too. I had a life too.”

My grandmother would have said that his heart was filled with grief.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

It was Ilsa Lund, Arman’s love-interest nurse.

“Hey, Ilsa,” the old man said. “Time to go for my treatment?”

“Yes,” the hard-looking and beautiful caregiver said. “They called.”

I was surprised when Arman stood up from his chair. For some reason I’d assumed that he had to be ferried around in a wheelchair.

“This thing Babylon got me in is a bitch, B.” Alone in her hospital suite, I felt even better able to express myself.

“I told you that you could quit anytime,” she riposted.

“Too many people involved. I’m so deep in his shit that the only way out is to move deeper in.”

Grandma B smiled and nodded.

“That’s the way it is for poor people,” she said. “You make choices that’s bound to backlash on ya, but what else could you do? Baby always needs a new pair’a shoes.”

That was B’s gambling wisdom. She’d always told me that vices in the hands and minds of poor people were more like therapy. You had to take chances every morning and then deal with them that night.

Playin’ cards with the rent money and then drinkin’ liquor to dull the pain. That’s what Grandma B thought when she looked at men like Arman.

“Yeah,” I said. “You right.”

“Is that what you here for, boy?” she wondered.

“Nah. I mean, yeah, but I got to talk to Arman too.”

“His treatment’s a hour long. Why don’t you and me and Rags play a game’a hearts to while the time?”

After Brenda beat me and my cousin twice, I went down a few floors to Arman’s room. Ilsa answered the door and even though she was still sour, the object of her spite was now somewhere outside the confines of the hospital.

This was a smaller suite, set up like a shotgun house. There was an entry room complete with a spartan-like sofa with two-inch-thick pale gray padding, and two chairs with the same kind of subpar cushions. The next room was a pantry, part kitchen and dinette. Finally, we got to the bedroom, which was furnished with a California king bed and a small table with four chairs set up next to a window that looked eastward, over West Hollywood.