With the despair came Jimmy. That was the way it always was. When he felt blue, when he felt that life was a disease and not worth the effort of drawing the next contaminated breath, Jimmy was there. Seven years, six months, and fourteen days old, sticks for legs, his head too big for his body and his hair like something you’d scour pans with. Jimmy. His son. The boy who grew up teething on a catcher’s mitt and was already the fastest kid in the second grade. Walt had been at school the day he was killed, spotting for the gymnastics club as they went through their paces on the parallel bars. Somebody said there was smoke up the street — the paint store was on fire, the whole block going up, maybe even the bank — and the vaulted cathedral of the gym went silent. Then they smelled the smoke, musty and sharp at the same time, and then they heard the sirens. By the time Walt got out to the street, his gymnasts leading the way in a blur of flying heels, the fire engine was skewed across the sidewalk in the oddest way, three blocks at least from the fire, and he remembered thinking they must have been drunk or blind, one or the other. When he got there, to where the fire company was, smoke crowding the sky in the distance and the taste of it, acid and bitter, on his tongue, he asked the first person he saw — Ed Bakey, the assistant principal — what was the matter. “One of the kids,” Ed said, and he was shaking so badly he could hardly get the words out, “one of the kids got hit by the truck.”
He drifted off again, mercifully, and when he came to this time the sun was playing peekaboo with the crown of the pepper tree, and the field of shade, healing redemptive shade, spread almost to his feet. What time was it, anyway? Three, at least. Maybe four. And where the hell was Eunice? Inside, that’s where she was, where time was meaningless, a series of half-hour slices carved out of the program guide, day melding into night, breakfast into dinner, the bright electrons dancing eternally across the screen. He dug his elbows into the lawn then, both of them, and yes, he could feel his left side all of a sudden and that was something, and he flexed every muscle in his body, pecs, delts, biceps, the long striated cords of his back and the lump of nothing that was his left leg, but he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t so much as put an inch between him and the flattened grass. That frustrated him. Made him angry. And he cried out again, the driest, faintest bleat of rage and bewilderment from the desert throat of a man who’d never asked anybody for anything.
She called him for lunch, went to the foot of the stairs and called out his name twice, but it was next to impossible to wake him once he went off, soundest sleeper in the world — you’d need a marching band just to get him to blink his eyes — so she heated the tomato soup, cleared a place at the table, and ate by herself. The soup was good, really hit the spot, but they put too much salt in it, they all did, didn’t matter which brand you bought. It made her thirsty, all that salt, and she got up to make herself a fresh vodka and soda — there was no sense in traipsing round the house looking for the other glass, which, as she knew from experience, could be anywhere. She couldn’t count the hours she’d spent shuffling through the bathroom, kitchen and living room on her feet that felt as if they’d been crimped in a vise, looking for one melted-down watery drink or another. So she took a fresh glass, and she poured, and she drank. Walt was up in the bedroom, that’s where he was, napping, and no other possibility crossed her mind, because there was none.
There was the usual ebb and flow of afternoon programming, the stupid fat people lined up on a stage bickering about their stupid fat lives and too stupid to know the whole country was laughing at them, the game shows and teenage dance shows and the Mexican shows stocked with people as fat and stupid as the Americans, only bickering in Spanish instead of English. Then it was evening. Then it was dusk. She was watching a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland picture on the classic movie channel when a dog began barking on the screen, and she was fooled, just for a second, into thinking it was Booters. That was when she noticed that Booters was gone. And Walt: whatever could he be doing all this time?
She went up the stairs, though each step seemed to rise up insidiously to snatch at her just as she lifted her foot, and saw that the bedroom was empty and that neither dog nor man was in the upstairs bathroom enjoying the monotonous drip-drip-drip of the faucet that never seemed to want to shut itself off. Twice more she went round the house, utterly bewildered, and she even looked in the pantry and the broom closet and the cabinet under the sink. It was nearly dark, the ice cubes of her latest vodka and soda tinkling like chimes in her hand, when she thought to look out back.
“Walt?” she called, thrusting her head out the door. “Booters?”
The frail bleating echo of her own voice came back to her, and then, slipping in underneath it, the faintest whisper of a sound, no louder than the hum of a mosquito’s wings or the muffled cry of a bird strangled in the dark. “Help!” she heard, or thought she heard, a sound so weak and constrained it barely registered.
“Walt?” she tried again.
And then: “Eunice, goddamnit, over here!”
She was so startled she dropped her drink, the glass exploding on the flagstones at her feet and anointing her ankles with vodka. The light was fading, and she didn’t see very well anymore, not without her glasses, anyway, and she was puzzled, truly puzzled, to hear her husband’s voice coming out of nowhere. “Walt?” she murmured, moving across the darkened lawn as through a minefield, and when she tripped, and fell, it wasn’t over a sprinkler head or gopher’s mound or a sudden rise in the lawn, it was over the long, attenuated shadow of her husband’s still and recumbent form.
Eunice cried out when she went down, a sharp rising exhalation of surprise, followed by an aquiescent grunt and the almost inevitable elision of some essential bone or joint giving way. He’d heard that sound before, too many times to count, on the football field, the baseball diamond, the basketball court, and he knew right away it was trouble. Or more trouble, if that was possible. “Eunice,” he croaked, and his face was cooked right down to the bone, “are you hurt?”
She was right there, right there beside him, one of her legs thrust awkwardly over his, her face all but planted in the turf. She was trying to move, to turn over, to right herself — all that he could feel, though he couldn’t for the life of him swivel his head to see — but she wasn’t having much success. When finally, after a protracted effort, she managed to drag her living leg across his dead one, she took what seemed like an hour to gulp at the air before her lips, tongue and mouth could form a response. “Walt,” she gasped, or moaned actually, that’s what it was, moaning, “my … I think … oh, oh, it hurts …”
He heard a car race up the street, the swift progress of life, places to go, people to meet. Somewhere a voice called out and a door slammed.
“My hip, I think it’s my hip—”
It was all he could do to keep from cursing, but he didn’t have the strength to curse, and there was no use in it, not now. He gritted his teeth. “Listen, I can’t move,” he said. “And I’ve been laying here all day waiting for somebody to notice, but do you think anybody’d even poke their damn head out the door to see if their husband was dead yet and fried up in the sun like a damn pork rind?”