Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard) (31 page)

B
y the time we got to the hospital I was weaving in and out, and as the folks came out with the stretcher and loaded me onto it, they began to do something to my stomach—apply pressure, I guess. I couldn’t really feel much by then. The pain had gone away. I realized I wasn’t wearing a shirt anymore because I felt the cool October wind. I wasn’t wearing a bayonet, either.

As we entered the hospital hallway and Leonard raced alongside me, I saw an odd thing on his shirt. I couldn’t figure what it was at first. Some kind of sea creature, maybe. It had a small, bulbous body and lots of bloody tentacles. I was studying on that when we went through some swinging doors, and one of the ladies pushing the stretcher said, “You’ll have to leave, now, sir.”

And I heard Leonard say, “Screw you. I’m here to stay.”

“We’ll call security,” said the nurse.

“Tell them to bring a couple days’ rations. They’re going to be here awhile,” Leonard said.

I realized then what was stuck on Leonard’s shirt. It was Number Eight’s eyeball. That clawing and ripping motion he had made, he had tore it right out of that bastard’s head.

The lights came and went, and I closed my eyes and felt weaker and more tired than I had ever been. When I opened my eyes I was in a big white room, not unlike the one Lilly Buckner had been in, and by my bedside were Leonard, Brett, and Chance. The only one missing was Buffy, and I’m sure she would have liked to come.

I might have laughed at that thought. It’s hard to be sure.

And then I blinked, or it seemed that way, and the only one in the room was Leonard. He was in a chair pulled up close to the bed and he had my hand in his and his head was dipped, and I knew he had fallen asleep. I tried to speak to him, but the effort of it sent me spiraling again, down into blackness, around and around, and I came out I knew not where. But sometime down in that place of no recognition, I heard a voice I didn’t know, a nurse, maybe, a doctor, say, “He probably won’t make it past another night.”

I went away again, and there was a tunnel of light, but I went backwards, away from it, and when I came out of the unknown place with its tunnel of white light, I was glad to be back, not thinking that long, white tunnel was any goddamn path to heaven, knowing full well it was merely my brain trying to die, my focus narrowing, the kind of tunnel vision beginners get in a fight. I told myself that I was no beginner, and I would not go gently into that good night.

I fought hard, and I came back, and I was glad to be back. I rose up from the darkness like a ship on the peak of a wave, and when I did, there were Leonard and Chance and Brett, all by my side, and I think I said, “It’s okay. Doesn’t matter anymore,” but maybe I just thought it.

I looked at them and loved them, and I thought, there stands my brother, who ripped a man’s eye out of his head for me, and I love him as if he were my own blood. It was him I hated to leave the most, the way you think you’d like to keep both legs, because in that instant I knew I was leaving. The tunnel of white light was beckoning. I felt my ship on its wave starting to go down on the other side, my timbers squeaking with stress, my sail folding with pain.

I heard Leonard say, “You’re just getting even cause last time it was me in the hospital. Let’s just call it even.”

He smiled when he said it, but he couldn’t hold the smile, and I heard him say, “Goddamn it,” and I continued to sail away on those dark waters, and then I felt calm, as if I had made it to the dock. I felt good. It was a strange kind of good. Free of all pain except regret. And then I felt those dark waters stir again, and my ship slipped loose of its moorings, sailed away from the pier toward what could have been the rising or the dying of the sun.

I looked up and saw Brett’s face again, crying, then Chance, trembling, and finally Leonard. He was bawling like a child. My hand couldn’t feel his hand anymore, but I knew he was holding it.

Then my ship sailed out farther into deep, dark water, toward that great light. I was having trouble breathing. I heard Leonard yell like he was trying to get my attention from across a great distance.

The bright sky beyond the black sea went as dark as the waters that were carrying me away, and I wasn’t sure I could make it back.

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