Final Stroke by Michael Beres Page A

about the son not known by the father. A word that had turned off Marjorie’s laughter. A word Georgiana had used to describe a happy son-of-a-bitch stroke victim. Gay .
    Back in the hallway. Rolling silently toward the nurses’ station where a nurse faced the other direction staring at a computer screen. Non-glare screen, he hoped. Not like in a movie directed by a fat man who said, “Good evening,” in a deep voice before his television show, a movie in which the hero, trying to sneak along a balcony, is seen by the housekeeper in the reflection on the screen.
    A nurses’ aide arrived—subtle difference in uniform color—and both nurse and aide stared at the computer screen. He rolled closer and lowered his head. The counter at the nurses’ station was about four feet high and he rolled to it sveltely like a clever gunman in an old western hiding behind a convenient boulder. The entrance to the station was on the far side and as long as neither nurse nor aide crossed over to this side he’d be safe. They spoke.
    “Bill thinks he’s being overmedicated again.”
    “Did you show him the chart?”
    “He ignores it. Says the same thing that got Marjorie’ll get him.”
    “And what is that?”
    “Says she was overmedicated and didn’t know what she was doing. Says she probably slipped in her own pee.”
    “I doubt it. Marjorie was too straitlaced. Most likely she was walking in her sleep.”
    “What about the puddle?”
    “Someone else from earlier, after last activities. Lasix kicked in too far from the john and nobody noticed to clean it up.”
    “Beverly’s up late telling her joke to the wall again.”
    “Which joke is it tonight? She has several.”
    “The one about bananas.”
    “Haven’t heard it.”
    “She says, ‘I might be old, but physically I’m doing just fine. Of course I don’t keep green bananas on my windowsill anymore.’”
    “Oh yeah, I did hear it.”
    “You just wanted to hear me repeat it like an idiot.”
    “Right.”
    He held his left hand over his mouth. The laugh, from deep down inside, threatened to encircle his neck and choke him. I don’t keep green bananas on my windowsill anymore. He held his breath, took his hand from his mouth, pushed his chair along the counter. He had to take a chance, get the hell out of there and find a place where he could laugh, where he could breathe.
    As he pushed off down the hallway toward the far end of the wing he could only hope the two at the station would not see him. He heard them laughing at something else behind him and this made the pres sure to laugh even greater, like that time shortly after he arrived at Hell in the Woods when he stopped in at a chapel service and laughed out loud when Marjorie winked toward him after the priest asked God’s forgiveness for everyone’s sins.
    He pushed the chair faster, jerking his body to the side to keep the chair from turning each time he gave it a shove with his good hand. When the chair almost spun around on him he glanced back and saw that the two in the station had their heads down, apparently studying something one of them held. Finally, where the hall turned toward the activity room and he was no longer in line-of-sight with the station, he let out the stale air of the laugh and took a deep breath. Green ba nanas. Very funny.
    And so, here he was again at the scene of the crime. The phrase “scene of the crime” like yet another joke, making him laugh. Crazy bastard. A woman dies and he laughs like an idiot.
    But maybe there was more to it. Maybe when he came closer to being who he’d once been, to doing what he’d once done, his brain got confused in its elation. The Laughing Detective. Damn. Jan said there’s a story with that title. But the detective he always identified with never laughed. The detective he identified with was Sergeant Joe Friday.
    The theme music pounding, Dum-da-dum-dum as Joe’s badge is magnified to monstrous size on the black and white screen. The