"You've heard."
"Of course I've heard. This bloody, scandalous deed is really just something to be... savored, isn't it?" He sipped his brandy. "No?"
Will didn't reply. The fellow was spooking him a little, truth to tell.
"Have I offended you?" he asked Will.
"No.
"You are a professional bartender, am I right?"
"I own this place," Will said.
"All the better. You see a man like yourself is in a very influential position. This is a place where people congregate, and when people congregate, what do they do?"
Will shrugged.
"they tell tales," came the reply.
"I really don't-2'
"Please, Mr.-"
"Hamrick."
"Mr. Hamrick, I've been in bars in cities across the world-Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Constantinople-and the great bars, the ones that become legendary, they have one thing in common, and it isn't the perfect vodka martini. It's a fellow like you. A disseminator."
"A what?"
"One who sows seeds."
"You got me wrong, mister," Will said with a little gfin "You want Doug Kenny at Farm Supplies."
The brandy drinker didn't bother to laugh. "Personally," he said, "I hope Morton Cobb dies. It'll make a much better story." Will pursed his lips. "Go on, admit it," the man said, leaning forward, "if Morton Cobb dies of a fork wound to the chest will it not be a far better story for you to tell?" "Well... " Will said, "I guess maybe it would."
"There. That wasn't so difficult was it?" The drinker drained his glass. "How much do I owe you?"
"Nine bucks."
The man brought out an alligator-skin wallet, and from it drew not one but two crisp ten-dollar bills. He laid them down on the counter. "Keep the change," he said. "I may pop back in, to see if you've got any juicy details about the Cobb affair. The depth of the wound, the size of the lover's apparatus-that sort of thing." The brandy drinker smirked. "Now don't tell me it didn't cross your mind. If there's one thing a good disseminator knows it's that every detail counts. Especially the ones nobody'll confess they're interested in., Tell them shameful stuff and they'll love you for it." Now he laughed, and his laughter was as musical as his voice. "I speak," he said, "as a man who has been well-loved."
And with that he was gone, leaving Will to stare down at the twenty bucks not certain whether he should be grateful for the man's generosity or burning the bills in the nearest ashtray.
Phoebe stared at the face on the pillow and thought: Morton's got more bristles than a hog. Bristles from his nose; bristles from his ears; bristles erupting from his eyebrows and from under his chin where he'd missed them shaving.
Did I love him before the bristles? she asked herself. Then: Did I ever love him?
Her musings were curiously detached, which fact she put down to the tranquilizers she'd been given a couple of hours before. Without them, she doubted she would have gotten through the humiliations and interrogations without collapsing. She'd had her body examined (her breasts were bruised and her face puffy, but there was no serious damage); she'd had Jed Gilholly, Everville's police chief, asking her questions about her relationship with Joe (who he was; why she'd done it); she'd been ferried back from the hospital in Silverton to the apartment, and quizzed about what, precisely, had happened where. And finally, having told all she'd could tell, she was brought back to the bedside where she now sat, to sit and meditate on the mystery of Morton's bristles.
Though the doctor had pronounced his condition stable, he knew the patient's vices by rote. He smoked, he drank, ate too much red meat and too many fried eggs. His body, all its bulk, was not strong. When he got the flu-which he did most winters-he'd be sick for weeks. But he had to live. She hated him down to every last wiry bristle, but he had to live.
Jed Gilholly came by a little before five, and called her out into the hallway. He and his family (two girls, now both in their early teens) were all patients of Dr. Powell's, and while his wife and children were pretty healthy, Jed himself was severely dyspeptic, and-if memory served-had the first mumbling of a prostate problem. It made him rather less forbidding, knowing these little things.
"I got some news," he said to her. "About your... er... boyfriend."
They've caught him, she thought.
"He's a felon, Phoebe."
No, maybe they hadn't. "He was involved in a wounding incident in Kentucky, four or five years ago. Got probation. If you know where he is...
they hadn't got him, thank the Lord.
"I suggest you tell me right now, 'cause this whole mess is looking pretty bad for him."
"I told you," she said, "Morton was the one started it."
"And Morton's also the one lying in there," Jed replied. "He could have died, Phoebe."
"It was an accident. I was the one stuck the fork in him, not Joe. If you're going to arrest anybody, it should be me."
"I saw what he did to you," Jed said, a little embarrassed, "knocking you around like that. I reckon what we got here is some wife beating, some assault, and," he looked Phoebe in the eyes, "a man who's been in trouble with the law before, and who's maybe a danger to the community."
"That's ridiculous."
"I'll be the judge of what's ridiculous and what's not," Jed said. "Now I'm asking you again: do you know where Flicker is?"
"And I'm telling you straight," Phoebe replied, "no I don't."
Jed nodded, his true feelings unreadable. "I'm going to tell you something, Phoebe, that I wouldn't maybe say if I didn't know you."
"Yes?"
"It's simple really. I don't know what the story was between you and this guy Flicker. I do know Morton isn't the friendliest of guys the way he beat you around this afternoon," he shook his head, "that's a crime all of its own. But I have to consider your boyfriend dangerous, and if there's a choice between his safety and the safety of my officers-2' "He's not going to hurt anybody."
"That's what I'm telling you, Phoebe. He isn't going to get the chance."
Without a vehicle, Joe had been presented with a limited number of options. He could steal a car and drive somewhere isolated then come back for Phoebe after dark. He could find somewhere to hide within the city limits, and bide his time there. Or he could climb.
He chose the latter. The stealing of a vehicle would only add to his sum of crimes, and the city was too small and too white for him to pass unnoticed in its streets. Up the mountain he would go, he decided; at least far enough to be safe from pursuers.
He'd left the apartment with the barest minimum of supplies: some food, a jacket for later on, and, most important, given the condition he was in, the first-aid box. He'd only had time for a perfunctory self-examination Oust enough to check that he wasn't going to bleed to death) before making his escape, but the pain was excruciating, and he only got as far as the creek before he had to stop. There, he slithered down into the ditch where the creek ran, and, out of sight of all but the fishes, washed his bruised and bloodied groin as tenderly as he could. It was a slow, agonizing business. He could barely suppress his cries when the icy water ran over his lacerated flesh, and several times had to stop completely before the pain made him pass out. At last, against his better judgment, he resorted to chewing two painkillers he'd stored with the kit, the last (but one) of ten odan he'd been prescribed for a back injury. It was powrful stuff; and had induced in him a kind of blissful stupor which was not to his present advantage. But without it he doubted he'd be able to get much further than the creek. He sat on the bank for a while and waited for them to kick in before he finished with his ministrations, his trousers and blood-crusted underwear around his ankles. The blaze of the day was over, but the sun still found its way through the ferns and gilded the sliding water. He watched it go while the pain subsided. If this was what death was like, he thoughtpain receding, languor spreading-it would be worth the wait.
After a few minutes, with his thoughts fuzzier than they'd been and his fingers more clumsy, he returned to washing his wounds. His balls had ballooned to twice their normal size in the last half-hour, the sac purplish in places and raw-red in others. He felt the testicles gently, rolling them in between his fingers. Even through the haze of Percodan they were painful, but he felt nothing separated or clotted. He might yet have children, one of these distant days. As to his cock, it was badly torn in three places, where Morton had ground his heel upon it.
Joe finished cleaning the cuts with creek water and then applied liberal dollops of antiseptic cream.
Once, during this delicate procedure, a wave of nausea rose up in him-less at the sight of his wounds than at the memory of how he'd come by them-and he had no choice but to stop and watch the sun on the water until the feeling subsided. His mind wandered as he waited. Twenty-nine years on the planet (thirty in a month's time) and he had nothing to show for it but this pitiful condition. That would have to change if he was to get through another twenty-nine. His body had taken enough punishment for one lifetime. From now on, he would chart his course, instead of letting circumstances take him where they would. He'd put the past behind him, not by denying it but by allowing it to be part of him, pain and all. He was lucky, wasn't he? Love had found him, in the form of a woman who would have died for him this afternoon. Most people never had that in their lives. they lived with compromise where love was concerned; with a mate who was better than nothing but less than everything. Phoebe was so much more than that.
She wasn't the first woman to have said she loved him, nor even the first he'd replied to in kind. But she was the first he was afraid to lose, the first he knew his life would be empty without; the first he thought he might love after the fierce heat was gone, after the time when she'd cared to spread her cunt for him, or he to see it spread.
A sharp pain in his groin reminded him of his present state, and he looked down to see that all was not lost. His cock had risen to respectable erection while he'd pictured, Phoebe's display, and he had to concentrate on counting flies until it had subsided. Then he finished putting on ointment, and bandaged himself up, albeit roughly. It was time to move on, before the search spread as far as the creek; and before the effect of the painkillers wore off.
He pulled up his pants, buried the litter from his salvings, and wandering a little way up the bank found a place where the creek was narrow enough to be crossed in a hobbled leap. Then he clambered up the opposite bank and headed off up the slope between the trees.
At six-seventeen, while Phoebe was at the hot drink machine getting a cup of coffee, Morton opened his eyes. When she got back to the room, he was babbling to the nurse about how he'd been on a boat, and fallen overboard.
"I coulda drowned," he kept saying, clutching at the sheets as though they were lifelines. "I coulda. I coulda drowned."
"No, Mr. Cobb. You're in a hospital-"
"Hospital?" he said, raising his head off the pillow an inch or two, though the nurse did her best to restrain him. "I was floating-"
"You were dreaming, Morton," Phoebe said, stepping into his line of vision.
At the sight of her the memory of what had brought him here seemed to come back. "Oh Christ," he said through clenched teeth, "Christ in Heaven," and sank back onto the pillow. "You bitch," he muttered now.
"You fucking bitch."
"Calm down, Mr. Cobb," the nurse insisted, but fueled a sudden spurt of rage, Morton sat bolt upright, tearing at e drip tube in his arm as he did so. "I knew!" he screamed, jabbing his finger in Phoebe's direction.
"Do as the nurse says, Morton."
"Please, give me a hand, Mrs. Cobb," the beleaguered woman said.
Phoebe put down her coffee and went to assist, but the proximity of his wife threw Morton into a frenzy.
"Don't you fucking touch me! Don't you-"
He stopped in mid-sentence, and uttered a tiny sound, almost like a hiccup. Then all the venom went out of him at once-his arms dropped to his sides, his knotted face slackened and went blank-and the nurse, unable to support the weight of his upper body, had no choice but to let him sink back onto the pillow. It did not end there. Even as the nurse raced to the door calling for help, Morton began to draw a series of agonizing breaths, each more panicked and desperate than the one before.
She couldn't watch him suffer without trying to do something to calm him.
"It's all right," she said, going back to the bedside and laying her hand on his cold brow. "Morton. Listen to me. It's all right."
His eyes were roving back and forth behind his lids. His gasps were horrible. "Hold on, Morton," she said, as his suffering continued to mount. "You'll bust something."
If he heard her, he didn't listen. But then when had he ever listened? He went on gasping, until his body was out of power. Then he simply stopped.
"Morton," she murmured to him. "Don't you dare-"
There were nurses back at the bedside now, and a doctor spewing agitated orders, but Phoebe registered none of them. Her focus was upon Morton's stricken face. There were flecks of spittle on his chin, and his eyes were still wide open. He looked the way he'd looked at the bathroom doorraging; raging even as the sea he'd been dreaming about closed over his head. One of the nurses took hold of her hand and now gently escorted her away from the bed.
"I'm afraid his heart's given out," she murmured consolingly. But Phoebe knew better. The damn fool had drowned.
There was always a moment at the close of day when the blue gloom of dusk had settled on the city, but the sun was, still in glory on Harmon's Heights. The effect was to make Everville seem like a ghost town, sitting in the shadow of a living mountain. What had seemed unequivocal a minute ago had now become ethereal. Folks who'd been able to read their neighbors' smiles across the street could no longer do so; children who'd known for certain there was nothing darting behind the fence, or snaking between the garbage cans, were no longer secure in their belief.