Chapter 4: Open Doors

Gloria had a ring of keys the size of a dinner plate.

She'd been collecting them for thirty-one years, one for every door anyone had ever forgotten to give back.

At noon she walked the ground floor of Patterson General with the ring in one hand and a peppermint in her cheek.

At every outside door she put her palm flat on the glass and said, "Shut."

The band on her wrist flared, and the lock went in.

A crab hit the lobby doors at one o'clock and bounced off.

"Gatekeeper," Gloria said, reading her wrist. "I've been buzzing people in for thirty-one years. Figures."

"Leave me the bay," I said.

"Hon, I wasn't going to shut your bay. You'd have opened it with your teeth."

By then the turned-away had started walking up Eastern Avenue.

They came from the harbor in ones and twos, then in bunches.

A man pushed his wife in a shopping cart.

A teenage girl carried her grandfather's oxygen tank.

Whole families had bounced off the line and walked a mile and a half to the only building with its lights on.

I stood at the bay doors and read every one of them as they came in.

I sent reds to the bays, yellows to the hall and greens to the cafeteria with a job.

Nobody got turned around.

A little boy with a burned hand looked up at the brick front of the hospital.

He asked his mother if this was the Green.

"No, baby," she said. "This is where the red people go."

By dark everybody was calling it the Red.

Calvin made nine runs that afternoon.

On the tenth, he came through the bay doors at a jog with an old man on his stretcher.

The man had been under a car.

He was black all over, and the dark came from everywhere at once.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Surgeon Got a Blade and I Got a Clipboard, So I Decided Who Lives from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.