An even longer time later, the blackness was gone and there was murky light and I was no longer in Fitzgerald country — I was awake, dream fragments clinging to my mind like cobwebs, but more or less lucid. Lucid enough to wish I wasn’t.
Morning. The light came through a crack in the Levolor blinds, falling across my eyes and hurting them when I pried the lids open. Another hangover, a ripsnorter this time. But the pain I felt wasn’t only booze-induced; I’d managed to bang up the Kent corpus somehow. I tried to remember. Too soon: The cobwebs clung stickily. Fah down, go boom? Oh yes, yes indeed. And not only that, I’d gone pukey-pukey all over somebody’s carpet before passing out. Mine? I rolled over, gingerly, and with an almost superhuman effort Kent sat up and focused on his surroundings. Mine, all right. My carpet, my apartment. Home sweet home. That was one thing about the Kents, pere et fils: No matter how wasted they got of a long, dark night, they generally managed to lurch homeward and somehow arrive more or less in one piece.
My left knee throbbed. Pants leg ripped, blood on the cloth and blood scabbed on the skin underneath. I hunted for other tears, other wounds, and found two — left elbow, right shin. Fah down, go boom all over the place. Hell of a night, eh, Dougie? The old bag of sticks was heavier than usual this A.M., and all thanks to dear Storm.
Where had I gone after she threw me out of her life? Gunderson’s, for a while, until the usually reliable Mike refused to serve me anymore. Then off to Mom and Pop’s Saloon down by the boatyard. Loud voices, shitkicker music (wail it, Waylon, you old sumbitch), watered-down gin served with a Spanish olive. Abomination! A frigging Spanish olive! Harsh words, a few choice obscenities, and somebody’s hands on my back and arse, hustling me out the door. And then... blank. The dream about driving somewhere? Alcoholic delusion. I seldom drove nowadays, and never when I was out gathering sticks and applying salve in preparation for another visit to Nightmareland.
This is your life, Douglas Kent. And a low one it is. Ten feet lower than a mole’s ass and still digging, as the pater used to say.
I needed a drink.
Bad.
I managed to stand up, stay up, and waddle into the kitchen without falling on my face again. Gin? No gin. The only hooch I had left in the place was vodka. Two long, bitter swallows — gurgle, gurgle. The salve stayed down as unsteadily as I stayed up. I leaned on the counter and waited for the shakes to abate. Took three minutes or so for the medicine to straighten me up, literally. I treated myself to another swallow and then floated into the bathroom and peed lustily, always a good sign. After which I shed my torn, reeking, and bloody rags and climbed under the shower and stood it icy for as long as I could, then lukewarm, then hot. By the time I’d toweled off I decided I would probably live through another day.
I doctored my battle scars, brushed my teeth, scraped off stubble (nicking myself only twice, I noted with some pride), donned clean clothes, and had another squint at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Ah, but no bigger a pile than usual. And that, in the Kent household on any Saturday morning, let alone one after being Storm-lashed and cast away, was a major achievement.
Maybe not, though, I thought as I returned to the kitchen to drink the rest of my breakfast. Maybe shit, like water, simply seeks its own level. Interesting theory. I’d have to pursue it sometime when my head wasn’t quite so stuffed with spider silk.
I was in the living room, puffing on my first weed of the day and making a halfhearted attempt to clean my barf off the rug, when somebody clumped up onto the front stoop and pounded on the door and began calling my name, both much louder than was tolerable. The pounding and yelling were the same as in my dream, which I deduced meant I hadn’t dreamed them after all. I recognized the voice too: Jay Dietrich, the Advocate’s talentless cub and wanna-be.
I went and opened the door, reluctantly. Dietrich, with his horse face and walnut-sized Adam’s apple and Pollyannaish exuberance, is never a pleasant sight. On a morning when Kent was suffering more than usual, Jaydee was positively repellent.
“What’s the idea?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken to moonlighting as a town crier?”
“What? Oh. I’m sorry, Mr. Kent, but I didn’t know if you were here or not. Or if you were maybe... well, you know, sleeping. I didn’t get any answer when I was here before, and then I couldn’t find you anywhere else and things got so hectic—”
“Stop babbling. My head hurts enough as it is. When were you here before?”
“Around midnight. I came over as soon as I—”
“Midnight? Why in sweet Christ’s name were you banging on my door and crying my name at midnight?”
“I’d just heard the news and I didn’t know if you were—”
“News? What’re you talking about?”
“Mrs. Carey. Storm Carey.”
A sudden coldness formed in a knot under my sternum. A darkness, too, like an incipient black hole. “What about Mrs. Carey?”
“You don’t know, then,” Dietrich said, and his big Adam’s apple bobbed and bobbed again. “She’s dead. Murdered last night at her house. Bludgeoned with a paperweight, compound skull fracture.”
The black hole grew and spread; I could feel the chill pull of it, like a vortex. But that was all I felt. Numb. She’s dead. Murdered last night at her house. Just words — no reality to it yet. Cold and black and numb.
“That stranger,” Dietrich said, “the one you wrote the editorial about, he did it. Faith. Chief Novak caught him up there right afterward. He broke the Chief’s nose and then Mr. Novak shot him when he tried to escape and he jumped into the lake. Faith did. They think he’s dead, drowned, but they still haven’t found the body—”
“Where is she? Where’d they take her?”
“Mrs. Carey? Porno General. I talked to Dr. Johanssen—”
“Take me there. Right now.”
“Sure, Mr. Kent. But like I said, I already talked—”
“Now, damn you. Now!”
Audrey Sixkiller
When I first heard about it, from Joan Garcia, an Elem nurse at the hospital, I didn’t know what to do or think. My first impulse was to rush down there, but I didn’t give in to it. Dick wouldn’t want or need me, and there was nothing I could do for him anyway. Later, when feelings weren’t running quite so high and things were more settled — that was the time to make myself available to him.
I lay in bed with the lights on, prepared to endure another long, sleepless night. Instead, exhaustion dragged me under almost immediately. My dreams were unsettling. I dreamed of blood, which the old-time Indians believed was a sign of the deviclass="underline" Blood spilled in a place poisoned it forever after. And I dreamed that I was one of the bear people, rushing through the night in my hides and feathers, and that I came upon Storm Carey and there was a terrible battle — two witches in a clash of magical powers that left her dead and me weeping as if my heart would break. Guilt, of course. I’d yearned for her to be gone from Dick’s life, but I had never once wished her dead.