Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

meeting immovable inanimate objects stand as legendary. In 1936, a mob lawyer named Marvin Prudhomme—according to the lore, at least 250 pounds buck naked—plunged to his death from the rooftop of the Ambassador Hotel. Whether he was pushed or committed the act in a pique of depression, we may never know. But what is certain, and to this day survives in the historical record, is the fact that Mr. Prudhomme’s flailing figure landed squarely on the rooftop of an International Harvester garbage truck, penetrating three inches of tempered steel and eleven feet of miscellaneous refuse—including an old bunk bed, three railroad ties, a broken bird bath, and a half a ton of empty cartons and table scraps—exiting through the bottom of the vehicle and smashing down through a manhole cover embedded in South State Street, landing in three feet of brackish sewage with a splash that would have shamed a cliff-diver off the coast of Borneo.

That night, as the muzzle flashes inside that hurling BMW, Oswald Means will not come anywhere near surpassing Mr. Prudhomme’s dubious record. But Oswald does slam into a bike stand at the corner of North and Narragansett at the precise moment of the blast, mangling a Schwinn ten-speed and throwing the gun’s aim off just enough to exempt Oswald from a fatal head-shot. A piece of shrapnel grazes his temple as he is thrown from the speeding car.

He tumbles across a half-acre of pavement, insensate and flailing, splashing through the gutter water, as the Beamer fishtails into the night.

The impact that follows—while nowhere near as epochal as the Plunging Lawyer of 1936—will ultimately cause numerous heads to be scratched later that evening among the investigative team. Oswald’s entire three hundred pounds—including his steel-toed Wolverine boots and his back pockets full of nearly five pounds of spare ammunition—collides with a rust-pocked old VW bus parked at the corner of Narragansett and Montrose. The collision caves in half the rear quarter panel of the bus, shatters the back window, and knocks the bumper free, sending it skidding under the vehicle.

Just before passing out, Oswald finds himself wedged under the greasy enclosure of the chassis, a trickle of blood running into his eyes.

He tries to blink it away, tries to move, but he’s caught up in the manifolds and pipes lining the underside of the bus. He coughs, choking on the thick, acrid odors of gasoline and grit, and he hears a melodic sort of ringing in his ears. He thinks of a musical saw being played with a bow by a man in a tuxedo on the old Ed Sullivan show. He thinks of those vintage cartoons where a character gets hit on the head, and little birds circle his cranium.

The birds circling him are the last things that occur to him before the darkness presses in.

7.

“WHOA!”

He jerks awake in the back of the S-10, en route to somewhere in a hurry.

At first it takes him a moment to simply register the fact that he’s lying supine on the cold corrugated steel of the truck’s rear cargo bed, wedged between the road case and the bulwark, numb and sticky with blood, his skin on fire, the pickup rattling around a corner at Grand and State. His hair hangs in his face, matted with blood, and his temples throb unmercifully. He still has one boot on. Passing streetlights swim by him and blur in his vision.

“Easy there, Tonto!”

The voice comes from somewhere nearby, and when Oswald cranes his neck around to see its source, he gets an eyeful of Gerbil inside the truck cab, behind the wheel, her eyes wild, her char-black dyed hair flying every which way as she leans out the open driver’s side window. Oswald yells back at her: “The fuck are you doing?”

“The fuck you think I’m doing?!” she calls through the window with an exasperated tone that pierces the slipstream. “I’m taking you to the fucking hospital!”

“Negative! Negative!” Oswald manages to sit up, then manages to scoot backward on his ass until he’s able to rest his tailbone against the rear wall of the cab, the wind tossing his hair, the blood stinging his eyes. He fights the dizziness and nausea and disorientation that are threatening to take him back down into the darkness. In his bleary vision he notices the passing storefronts of North State Street, all dark and gated up, the sidewalks deserted. “I’m fine!” he yells, loud enough to penetrate the wind.

“You’re not fine, Ozzie!”

“No hospitals!”

“Jesus Christ, man, you got tagged in the head!”

“I got grazed!”

“Bullshit!”

“No big deal!”

Gerbil yanks the wheel, and the pickup keens around another street corner, the tires squealing. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart looks up at the passing ruckus like it’s an alien spacecraft, as Gerbil yells out her window: “You were out cold back there, Oz, bleeding like a stuck pig—!”

“No doctors!”

“You were, like, mumbling and giggling and slobbering on yourself like a fucking skel!”

The S-10 hits a pothole, and Oswald bounces, the pain shooting through his skull with the force of a ballpeen hammer. He has to hold onto the bulwark to avoid bouncing out of the truck. His head is wrapped in a makeshift bandage that Gerbil fashioned out of a rag: a jury-rigged Indian headdress. “How long did I black out back there?” he calls out. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost 2 o’clock!” replies the shrill voice through the open cab window.

Oswald grips the side of the truck as they hit another bump. He thinks about it for a second, does the math: He was unconscious for nearly an hour. A bolt of electric pain zips down his side, probably from a broken rib. He cringes. “Doctors file reports, Gerbil!”

She leans out and yells: “We’ll get in and get out!”

“They gotta call in the Man! You know that as well as I do!”

“You’re not gonna die on me, asshole!”

“Gerbil, listen to me. I have to go home. Matilda’s the one dying. And I’ve