Page 14 of Hanging and Burning

“And your name?”

“Joe Oliver.”

The rounded woman picked up the phone receiver. After a moment or two she said, “There’s a Mr. Oliver here to ask Paulie something about Mr. Babylon,” and then placed the handset back in its cradle.

“You can have a seat, Mr. Oliver.”

This time her smile was friendly and respectful.

There were three ultramodern pink chairs across the way from the reception desk. I sat on the center seat, my body erect—also my mind and my heart. The one thing I needed to do was calm down. There was too much happening. Too much.

So I took out my cell phone, located a name under Contacts, and then touched it.

Three rings later Aja-Denise, my daughter, answered, “Hi, Daddy,” and the frenetic energy that was trying to take me over subsided.

“Hi, baby,” I said to my daughter, the only person in life, next to my grandmother, who had never abandoned me.

“What’s goin’ on?” she asked in her typically matter-of-fact manner.

“Not much. What are you doing?” I wanted to know, I really did. Anything to distract me from the possibility of love. Maybe it was something simple like one of her boyfriend’s doing right, or a school assignment from the low-residency Detroit school Beckton University.

“I’m in the office,” she said, “trying to organize your old notes. What about you?”

“I’m waiting to meet with a guy that a friend of your grandmother knows.”

“You sound a little nutty,” she said with no criticism.

“Leaf’s back on the East Coast.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry, Daddy. You two was born for each other. That’s a fact.”

“Mr. Oliver,” a man’s voice said.

“Gotta go, honey.”

“Remember not to shoot anybody.”

I disconnected the call, looked up, and got to my feet.

The man standing there was slovenly in top-shelf clothing, strong but somehow out of shape, having wise eyes combined with all the dangerous immaturity of a swollen boy.

“Paulie?”

“You here about Baba?”

“That short for Arman Babylon?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I just came from him.”

“He dead?”

“No.”