Half World: A Novel (28 page)

22

The lock on the door to his flophouse room was gone. The Zelinsky books, his pills, his cash. The Sons
had taken it all before they’d caught him, or a neighbor at the hotel had taken it. Dickie wasn’t sure it mattered. He wanted to lie down but he couldn’t lie down. Someone would find him. The room was empty, but its smell was still there, maybe his smell, what he’d smelled like before. Something familiar. He wanted to stay in the room. This room was the last safe place he’d been.

He walked past an all-night newsstand and tried to stop himself from looking at the headlines. He didn’t want to see a name, a face. It was there, though. He looked and it was there. The white, aged face that had looked up from the floor of the bank, the guard lifting his hands, feebly, shaking them at the wrists, trying to erase something. Walter standing over him in the mask, with the gun.

Walter had insisted Dickie take a pistol with him, ammunition. Dickie found a paper bag on the street and shoved the weapon inside, dug a hole under a freeway overpass, hands pulling at the dirt, burying his treasure.

At a bar on Highland Avenue he sidled up to an old woman sitting alone, talked with her so she’d buy him drinks. He could feel the alcohol filling the space the Antabuse had left behind. When the woman got up
to use the bathroom, he reached into her purse, took the cash folded within, left the bar and found another, began drinking again.

An hour before dawn, he made his way out onto the street, the phone booth at the corner. The glass was smeared with handprints, streaks of bodily fluids. A sepia carpet of cigarette butts covered the floor. He smoked while he dialed the number, adding his own ash to the layers below.

There was a teenager waiting for the light to change on the opposite curb, a black kid in a hooded sweatshirt, a skateboard under his arm, bobbing his head to some interior sound track. Sliding his feet, turning them at the ankles and scuffling across the sidewalk, one pace, two, then standing, then dancing again to something only he could hear.

“Bill.”

“Dickie? Where the hell have you been?”

“I need to know if a name means anything to you.”

“What?”

“I need to give you a name.”

“Dickie, you sound drunk.”

“Henry March,” Dickie said.

“Dickie—”

“Did you hear me?”

“Henry March,” Bill said.

The light changed and the dancing kid crossed the empty street, walking normally, then bobbing and shuffling in quick bursts.

Bill said, “I don’t know who that is.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“About any of this?”

“Dickie, you don’t sound well.”

The kid hopped up onto the curb as the light changed back. Bobbing, his eyes closed, listening, then his eyes open, locked on Dickie for a second before he shuffled away.

We have eyes, Walter had said. We have as many eyes as they do.

Dickie could barely hear his own whisper in the receiver.

“Bill, I am not well.”

He could hear another voice on Bill’s end of the call, muffled, distant. Someone else in Bill’s office, or a cross connection, another listener somewhere, a ghost in the line.

“We know about the robbery in Irvine,” Bill said. “The robbery and the murder. They’re looking for four suspects.”

Dickie let the last of his cigarette fall from his fingers, explode into powder on the floor.

Bill said, “How many of them are there in this group?”

Dickie licked his lips, nauseous, dizzy. He looked at the handprints on the phone booth glass, waited for that kid to pop out at any second, bobbing, shuffling, watching.

Bill said, “Dickie, there used to be three.”

*   *   *

He uses the last of his change to get on a bus, heading north, then east across the city, the morning sun topping the hills, throwing light across the dry yellow slopes, the gray freeways cutting between. He rides longer than he needs to, changing buses, sitting with his head against the window, keeping an eye on everyone who gets aboard.

He couldn’t find the Cutlass. Either the Cutlass was stolen or towed or the Sons took the Cutlass or he just can’t remember where he’d parked it.

He has an address on the northeast side of the city. He has a photograph of a woman about his own age. She’s tall, thin. Her face is partially concealed by a camera as she takes a picture of a couple of runaways smoking against the outside wall of a post office.

He gets off on a long boulevard just shy of Pasadena, an east–west storefront strip crammed with liquor stores, clothing shops, Mexican restaurants. Late morning, the sun high and bright. His eyes and mouth are dry. He reaffixes his sunglasses. He needs a drink.

The address is a building kitty-corner from where he’s standing, what looks like a small gymnasium, maybe, a green concrete box with a high domed roof. He has no plan. He did not spend the previous night getting
a new name into his mouth, a new history into his head. He does not currently have that capacity, despite what he told Walter.

He could still run. He is out in the world and maybe they are watching him but he could still try to run, screaming in the daylight. But that would mean leaving this woman. It would mean letting the Sons take this woman, knowing what they will do to her.

Dickie touches the edge of the photo with a lit match, watches it curl and burn, the flame licking down to the tips of his fingers.

He needs a drink. If he has a drink, or two, he can pull himself together. There’s a bar across the street. There’s always a bar. Looks like a Mexican pool hall. There’s always a bar and there’s always someone inside to talk to, to flatter and charm, someone whose desperation for company matches his own desperation for a drink. An even exchange, maybe. Almost even.

He steps into the crosswalk. He sees the car but there is nothing he can do. He is hungover and lumbering and single-mindedly eyeing that bar. The car swings around the corner, nailing Dickie in the hip, spinning him, then hitting his opposite knee for good measure. Dickie rolls up onto the hood and then off the side, dropping hard to the asphalt, the car slowing, briefly, then speeding off down the boulevard, burning rubber as it goes.

Traffic stops. Dickie is curled on the street, rolling a little with the pain and shock. There’s a man standing over him, speaking in Spanish. Dickie hears
hospital
and
ambulancia
and tries to shake his head but the pain in his neck stops that effort, so he croaks out a few words,
No hospital,
shit, Jesus, that’s the last thing he needs. He really just wants to lie here, on the street, in the sun. Feels like he could sleep, actually. But then the man grabs him under the arms and someone else has his ankles and they lift him with considerable effort, carrying him across the street and depositing him on a bus-stop bench.

Dickie curls up, sucking air at the pain in his ribs, then grimacing at the pain caused by sucking air. His knee is throbbing, feels volleyball size. The high green wall of the gym, March’s daughter’s place, looms over the back of the bench. The man who was speaking has his hand on
Dickie’s shoulder, and Dickie nods, letting him off the hook, free to go about the rest of his day.

He’s alone again on the bench, eyes closed. He can hear people come and go, waiting for the bus. Can hear traffic on the boulevard, engines idling at the light, radios through open windows. He keeps his eyes shut tight, his body curled as closely as he can. He sleeps, finally, submits to sleep, fearful of what he will find there, but unable to keep his eyes open any longer.

PART THREE

Gerontion

1

There’s no such thing as a quick piss anymore. A painless piss. Instead, there’s a broken, lurching stream that strikes the water in the bowl, the rim of the toilet, the surrounding tile floor. Instead, there’s a rising burn in the space just behind his balls, the
perineum,
a word he learned from his urologist, radiating into his ass and down his legs, hardening to a serious ache, weakening his knees. Just enough time to shake and flush and wipe up the splattered piss before he has to steady himself by holding the edge of the vanity, fingertips pushing into the marble in time with the dull throb in the lower half of his body.

He used to take grim satisfaction at the urinals of the golf club, the line of men making similar groans, the pitiful sound of their familiar Morse-code streams. He could feel that he was part of a natural aging process, humiliating but unavoidable, the depreciation of equipment. There was comfort there, but now he has passed them all, he is so far beyond, leaning against the sink in his own bathroom, breathing hard, sweating from the top of his head, hot pokers in his balls, his ass, his perineum.

He won’t go back to his doctor. He knows what the offered steps will be, the course of treatment. He is familiar with the course of treatment, what it did to Elaine. He’s unwilling to go down that road again.

There’s an old man in the mirror, creased and pink and bald. It’s three o’clock on Saturday and his eyes are already red-rimmed with booze. He
steadies himself with both hands on the vanity, knuckles white with wispy hair. He feels like the mountains in which the house sits. He has gone white and hard like them, old and still.

The house is quiet. Just the sound of the TV in the living room. Normally he would hear Jayne moving through the rooms, gathering laundry, vacuuming, humming a hymn from last Sunday’s service. But she’s gone for the week, down to Savannah, shopping and sightseeing with some girlfriends, so he is alone in the house.

The game has started again, flashing hot across the big screen in the living room. He bites his lip and settles back onto the edge of the leather chair. He forgot to refill his bourbon. His glass is nothing but ice and piss-yellow water. The team is down by six. The coaches and bench players mill on the sidelines, looking mystified. They’ve lost the thread. They took their eyes from the field for a moment and it was a different game when they looked back. It can happen so quickly, he knows this, and it’s nothing more than sloppy coaching, poor leadership. You can never take your eyes off the field.

The TV was a concession on Jayne’s part when they built the house. An incongruous mass, squatting fat and loud in the living room among the clean, spare lines, the bright color screen pushing against the lean austerity of the rest of the house, the white walls and exposed beams, Jayne’s gray paintings of Shaker women at work. She knew she could have whatever she wanted when it came to designing the house, the checkbook would be open, the criticism would be muted, as long as he had something to watch college football on Saturday afternoons.

The night before, he’d sat out on the back porch with some men from the club, not friends, necessarily, men from the club, retired business execs and town councilmen, fellow golfers. Drinking, flinging bullshit, a few getting drunk quickly and then getting loud, roaring into the night. He’d joined in at times, laughing when appropriate, but mostly he’d sat in Jayne’s rocking chair watching the town in the valley far below, listening to the wind. The last men left late, almost two in the morning by the clock on the stove, and he’d emptied the ashtrays and dishes of mixed nuts, washed the tumblers, poured himself a final bourbon, walk
ing through the empty house, touching railings, replacing chairs at the dining room table, straightening the pictures on the walls.

He doesn’t sleep well when Jayne is gone. He reads until his eyes burn, a maritime novel set during the Spanish-American War, and then he turns out the light and lies in bed in the dark and listens to the wind rushing through the gap in the mountains. The sound of fast water, the sound of trains. He looks out the window, the small lights of the town below, and he feels what he knows is fear, what would be fear if he submitted to it, if he softened or loosened, a wild, shrieking thing that would consume him long before morning. So he does not soften, he does not relent, he lies in the dark with his teeth clenched until sleep overtakes him or he labors out of bed and pours another drink, walking through the house in the moonlight, in the light of the little bulbs Jayne installed in some of the lower outlets so they could find their way through the house in the dark.

He’d risen with the sun. It was a clear, bright day, cold for this early in the season. He took the dog for a walk, a great hairy beast of a golden retriever, cross-eyed and overbred, Jayne’s dog from her previous marriage, living here like some kind of stepchild, his responsibility during the Savannah week. The dog shat and pissed, a great enviable stream against the dead leaves at the side of the road. The house smelled like booze when they returned, secret spills from the night before, some of those assholes dribbling covertly on the upholstery, on the rugs, not saying a goddamn word about it. Not their house or their wife, not their problem. He opened a few windows, let some air in. The mist was climbing the mountain. The dog collapsed in a heap in a corner of the kitchen, waiting for Jayne to return so it could be underfoot, its favorite place to be.

The doorbell rings. When they built the house, he’d had the contractors install an ultrasound sensor at the top of the driveway so the bell would ring whenever someone was on their way down to the house. An expensive toy. Tripped by wild turkeys, mostly, an occasional bear. The sound of the bell stirs the dog from its fitful sleep but it settles back quickly enough, twitching and shimmying.

The fog is climbing, has reached the railing of the back porch. He can
feel the damp chill it brings, the stillness. It straddles the roof, descends again, covering the windows.

Another time-out, another piss, this one jerkier than the last, stop-start, stop-start, and burning twice as hot. He can picture it, a glowing white mass in his perineum, an ancient thing, dumb and primal, something he’s carried for years that has finally grown to maturity. The same creature they found in Elaine’s stomach, in her colon, the same spreading child, rabid and pure, that devoured his first wife, ten years ago now. It feels strange to think of her at times like this, to miss her so intensely while he’s leaning over the toilet, but that is what he thinks about, Elaine coughing sputum in a dry hospital room. He remarried, they all remarried, but nothing would ever be the same, he knew that, something was lost for good, and now, finally, the thing has returned to take him.

The doorbell rings. A small clutch of turkeys, four brown waddlers working their way down the driveway through the mist. The dog pushes its nose to the window and barks, fogging the glass. He claps his hands to move the dog away, to stop the stupid animal from putting its face through the window. The turkeys couldn’t care less, they continue down the driveway and around the side of the garage, out of sight.

The second quarter of the game peters out, the players standing on the field in loose configurations, watching the clock dribble down to zero. They’re just waiting to lose now, waiting to board the bus or the plane or whatever they ride these days and go back to their dorms and girlfriends and keg parties. They’ve given up on the crowd, the viewing audience at home, and he knows now what he has sensed for a few seasons, that this is not his team, this is not the team he’s been following since his retirement, the years in the mountains. These are just kids in familiar uniforms going through the motions. His team disappeared some time ago, left the field when he wasn’t looking, faded into the Carolina countryside.

He opens the door to the garage, flips on the light. He had planned to wait until the end of the game, but now there seems to be no point. He has already written the letters. Two sealed envelopes sit on the dashboard of the car. One for his son, one for Jayne. He’d written them last
night, after the golfers had gone, after his slow tour of the house, nightcap in hand. He’d composed the letter to his son first, sealed it, addressed it. They’d had their differences, their estrangements, but he was proud of the man Steven had become, whether Steven knew it or not. A good husband, a good father. He knew Elaine would have been proud. He didn’t know if Steven would understand, but he owed his son a letter, an explanation. What Steven did with it would be up to him.

To Jayne, he owed apologies. He’d written half a page of them before he realized that he’d started off writing to Elaine, a slip of the pen, the bourbon addling his addled mind. He tore the letter up and flushed it down the toilet. He didn’t want Jayne to find the pieces after the fact, didn’t want to add another needless injury to the decade’s worth he’d already heaped on her. He started again, careful this time,
Dear Jayne
.

He pushes the dog into the house, steps back into the garage, closing the door behind him. Here is the rubber tubing, here are the pills, here is the shotgun. It is important to have options. Here is the CB radio he will use to call the police. It will take them a while to get up the mountain, just enough time for the pills or the tubing, more than enough for the shotgun. He fiddles with the dials and holds the microphone, listens to the crackling static moving down the airwaves.

Someone answers and he says, “I have reason to believe that my neighbor is dead in his garage.” He gives the address and turns off the mic. No need for Jayne to find his mess.

Earlier in the morning he’d thought he’d settled on the pills, quiet and cowardly, but now he is feeling the pressure of the call to the police, can imagine sirens already screaming up the mountain, cops and paramedics on a brisk Saturday afternoon trying to beat their personal best response times. The shotgun. He sits in the front seat of the car, places the stock between his knees. The fog pushes gently at the windows of the garage door, drifting in and away, making little visible clearings on the driveway. Last night he’d backed the car in so that today he could look out the garage-door windows while he sat with whatever choice he’d made, pharmaceuticals, exhaust, twelve gauge. A turkey wanders through a clearing in the fog. Fitting last sight.

He places the barrel on his mouth, taste of metal and oil, not entirely unpleasant. He yawns for some absurd reason. Tired old man. The doorbell rings again. He remembers the TV in the living room, still on. Leave it, something to keep the dog company until the police arrive. He imagines sirens climbing the hill, taking the curves, getting closer by the second. Do it, already. He pictures the mess, quickly, how many times has he seen it before, brains and blood, but that’s somebody’s job, it’s covered in the homeowners’ insurance, he’s already checked. Money earmarked for cremation, ashes to be spread near Elaine’s grave, one final selfish wish, no way of knowing if Jayne will honor it.

Enough already. Do it, old man. He turns the key in the ignition. The engine thunders to life, unbelievably loud in the sealed garage. It’s not enough. He flips on the radio, an orchestra wailing now, full volume, any noise to fill the space, to give him the balls to do what needs to be done. The fog clearing here and there through the windows, blowing around the driveway. Enough, already. Be sorry one final time and then do it.

The fog swings away from the windows to reveal a man standing in the driveway. The man is not a cop, not a paramedic. He looks like a door-to-door salesman, gray hat and trench coat, and he’s peering into the garage, gloves cupping his face so he can see through the glass. Their eyes meet and the man smiles, a quick flash of teeth. The man disappears from sight and then the garage door lifts and the man steps inside, stomping his shoes on the cement floor.

“Jimmy Dorn,” the man yells, loud enough to be heard with the car windows up and the radio on. He smiles even wider. “Jesus Christ. Looks like I almost missed you.”

*   *   *

They sit in the living room in front of the muted TV. The dog ambles in, lies down. Jimmy had poured himself another drink, bourbon and new ice, something to steady his shaking hands, and when he turned the man was standing there holding out the telephone. Jimmy calls the police and tells them he’d made a mistake, he’d forgotten to take his medication and had called in his own death, premature, but now he’s taken his
pills and a friend is over, everything’s under control. They know him in town, he and Jayne, he gives money to the cops every year, the Police Benevolent Fund. Harmless old man.

He hangs up the phone and they sit across from each other in the living room, the third quarter beginning silently on the TV between them.

“You must be the new-model asshole,” he says.

The man smiles. He’s sitting on the couch, self-satisfied, happy with the circumstances of his arrival. “This is some place,” the man says. “Isolated.”

“We like it that way.”

“So quiet my ears are ringing.”

“They should have sent someone I could talk to.”

“We would have sent one of your contemporaries, but they’re all dead. Either that or wasting away in homes, diapered and drooling. You’re it, Jimmy. The last of the Mohicans.”

“They give you names anymore?”

“Bud. Bud Squires.” The man looks like he’s withholding massive laughter, like he could erupt at any moment. “That’s some hill. My rental car almost gave up the ghost on the climb.”

“I should have built further up.”

“It’s just nice to be away from the office. I rarely venture out. I’m a systems man, plans and planning.”

“What does that mean?”

“Numbers, mostly,” Squires says. “Budgets. I add things up and move them around, launch equations into the ether. Six months later I read about the end result in the newspaper. Page twelve or thirteen, second section. Wire report, no byline. The kind of story that’s designed to be skimmed over on your way to the comics. The kind that makes you say, ‘Where the fuck is that country, anyway? Does that place even exist?’”