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4
Virgil stood in Lucas’s living room, yellow legal pad on top of the baby grand, rereading parts of the Sand file, making notes on interviews with Margaret Cooper.
Lucas was up and down in twenty minutes, shaven, wearing a lightweight gray wool suit, a French-blue shirt worn open at the neck, square-toed leather shoes, carrying a black half-length raincoat and a cane with a horn handle.
“I knew you must have a fashion cane somewhere,” Virgil said, as he closed the legal pad. “Is there a sword in this one? Or a flask?”
“Fuck you.”
“Yet another example of your flashing wit,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got twenty minutes. About right. Since you’re no longer crippled, do you want to drive?”
Lucas did. As they walked out to the garage, he said, “About that crippled thing... You’ve always been a flower child, concerned about oppressed people. I haven’t been, so much.”
“I’ve noticed that,” Virgil said.
Lucas unplugged the car and as they settled into the Cayenne, he said. “I might have changed my views. I’m not passing out any flower blossoms, but, you know...”
“What are we talking about?”
As he backed the car out to the street, and dropped the garage door, Lucas said, “When I was back on my feet for a couple of weeks, I went downtown. I wanted to get up to the Skyways. I went in this bank building and the elevators were down because there was a power outage. I couldn’t get up the stairs. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I made it to the first landing and I had to turn around and go back down. That wasn’t the only time I had a problem, either. Weather and I’d go out for dinner, and I had to take the handicapped ramp at a couple of restaurants. I couldn’t get up the steps without... ah, hell, never mind.”
“No, I’m interested,” Virgil said. “How’d you get up to your bedroom?”
“Funny you should ask.”
“Not funny, huh?”
“No. I’d sit on the second step, pull my good leg up to the first, and then push myself up two more steps,” Lucas said. “Scooch my way to the top. I did that for... three weeks? Something like that. I refused to sleep in the study.”
“You’re saying you’re a better man for the struggle?”
“I’m saying that I might hold a door for a crippled guy,” Lucassaid. “You know, if he looks like a decent guy who pays his taxes and he’s crippled enough.”
Virgil laughed. “Okay, some improvement. I wouldn’t say a vast amount. I’m uncertain about the current social acceptability of the word ‘crippled.’ ”
“ ‘Crippled’ is okay. In my opinion. A long time ago I read this baseball autobiography by Bill Veeck,” Lucas said. “You know who he is?”
“Ran the White Sox.”
“Right. He lost a leg in World War II. He said he wasn’t handicapped, he was just a cripple. Losing a leg didn’t keep him from doing what he wanted to do, so he didn’t consider himself handicapped.”
“Strong worldview,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. Crippled is better than handicapped. Being temporarily crippled taught me some things.”
—
They crossed theMississippi at the Ford Bridge, threaded their way through south Minneapolis to Edina, a prosperous inner-ring suburb. The town was the subject of a limerick that began, “There was a young girl from Edina, who had a gold-plated vagina,” universally known by Twin Cities poetasters.
Lucas recited the first two lines, said he could never remember the rest, and Virgil asked, “You know the avian one?”
“I do not.”
“Same girl, rhymes ‘vagina’ with ‘mynah.’ As in mynah bird.”
“Of course it does,” Lucas said. “What’s the rest of it?”
“I’d have to think about it,” Virgil said. He pointed out the windshield. “Russo said it was a blue house; that must be it.”
