It so happened I knew it, because my mother used to sing it to my sister when she was just a baby. Over and over until Cathy went to sleep.
I couldn’t sing for shit, but I sang. ‘If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today—’
‘Better go in disguise,’ Jamieson finished. Still croaking.
‘Fucking right you better,’ Pill said, and sang: ‘For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain …’
The man with the bandage around his head joined in. He had a lovely strong baritone. ‘Because today’s the day the teddy bears have their piiiic-nic!’
‘Give it to me, Lieutenant Colonel,’ Pill said, still kneeling beside him. ‘Because today’s the day …’
‘The teddy bears have their piiic-nic.’ Jamieson said most of it but sang the first syllable of picnic the way the man with the bandage on his head had sung it, drawing it out long, and Johnny Capps dropped the morphine tabs into his mouth, bombs away.
Pill turned his head to look at the rest of the Hot Nine. He was like a fucked-up bandleader encouraging audience participation. ‘If you go down to the woods today … come on, everybody!’
So the members of the Hot Nine sang the first verse of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ to Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson, most of them just faking it until about the third time around. By then they had the words. The two wounded men joined in. The corpsmen joined in. On the fourth repetition, Jamieson sang it right through with sweat pouring down his face. People were running toward the tent to see what was going on.
‘Pain’s less,’ Jamieson gasped.
‘Morphine’s kicking in,’ Albie Stark said.
‘Not that,’ Jamieson said. ‘Again. Please. Again.’
‘One more time,’ Pill said, ‘and put some feeling into it. It’s a picnic, not a fucking funeral.’
So we sang: If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise!
The jarheads who’d come to see what was going on also joined in. By the time Jamieson passed out, there must have been four dozen of us singing that foolish fucking song at the top of our lungs and we didn’t hear the Black Hawk coming in to take Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson uprange until it was swopping up dirt and practically on top of us. I never forgot
10
‘What are you doing?’
Billy looks around, startled out of this dream, and sees Alice Maxwell standing in the bedroom door. Her bruises are stark against her white skin. Her left eye is puffed half-shut, making him think of the l-c, lying in that hot tent where the fans did jack shit even running at top speed. Her hair is all bed head.
‘Nothing. Playing a video game.’ He hits save, then turns off the laptop and shuts the lid.
‘That was a lot of typing for a video game.’
‘Do you want something to eat?’
She considers the idea. ‘Do you have any soup? I’m hungry, but I don’t want to eat anything too chewy. I think I bit the inside of my cheek. It must have been while I was blacked out, because I don’t remember doing it.’
‘Tomato or chicken noodle?’
‘Chicken noodle, please.’
That’s a good call, because he has two cans of chicken noodle soup in the pantry nook and only one of tomato. He heats the soup and ladles out a bowl for each of them. She asks for seconds, and maybe a piece of buttered bread? She sops it in the chicken broth, and when she sees him looking at her over his own empty bowl, she offers a guilty smile. ‘I’m a pig when I’m hungry. My mother always said so.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘Thank God. She’d call me crazy. I probably am crazy. She told me I’d get in trouble if I went away and she was right. First I date a rapist, now I’m in an apartment with a …’
‘Go on, you can say it.’
But she doesn’t. ‘She wanted me to stay in Kingston and go to hairdressing school, like my sister. Gerry makes good money, she said I could, too.’
‘Why did you want to go to business school here? I don’t get that.’
‘It was the cheapest that was still good. Are you done?’
‘Yes.’
She takes their bowls and spoons to the sink, self-consciously pulling the T-shirt away from her bottom as soon as her hands are free. He can tell by the way she walks that she’s still in a fair amount of pain. He thinks he should get her to sing the first verse of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic.’ Or they could sing it together, a duet.
‘What are you smiling about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s how I look, isn’t it? Like I was in a prize fight.’
‘No, just something I remembered from when I was in the service. Your clothes might be dry now.’
‘Probably.’ But she sits down again as she is. ‘Did someone pay you to shoot that man? They did, didn’t they?’
Billy thinks of the half a million – minus his walking-around money – that’s safe in an offshore bank. Then he thinks of the million and a half that hasn’t been paid. ‘It’s complicated.’
Alice offers a thin smile: tight lips and no teeth. ‘What isn’t?’
11
She flicks through the cable channels on his TV, working her way up. She stops for a bit on TCM, where Fred Astaire is dancing with Ginger Rogers, then moves on. She watches an infomercial for beauty products for a little while, then turns it off.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
Waiting, Billy thinks. Nothing else to do. He can’t work on his story with her in the room. He’d feel self-conscious, and besides, she’d want to know what he was writing. He thinks that of all the strange events in his life – there have been quite a few – this time on Pearson Street may be the strangest.
‘What’s out back?’
‘A little yard, then a drainage ditch with some scrappy trees growing around it, then some buildings that might be storage sheds. Maybe from when the trains still stopped over there.’ He gestures to the periscope window, now curtained. The rain is coming down in buckets again and there’s nothing to see out there. ‘The sheds are abandoned now, I think.’
She sighs. ‘This has got to be the deadest neighborhood in the whole city.’
Billy thinks of telling her that dead, like unique, is a word that cannot, by its nature, be modified. He doesn’t because she’s right.
She stares at the blank TV. ‘I don’t suppose you have Netflix?’
As a matter of fact he does, on one of his cheapie laptops, but then he realizes there’s something better. ‘The Jensens do. The people upstairs? And there’s popcorn, unless they ate it all. I bought it myself.’
‘Let me see if my skirt is dry.’
She goes in the bathroom and shuts the door. He hears the lock turn, which tells Billy that he is still very much on probation. When she comes out she’s wearing the denim skirt and the Black Keys tee. They go upstairs. While he figures out how to find Netflix on the Jensens’ television, which is four times as big as the one Billy has downstairs, Alice peers out their bedroom window at the backyard.
‘There’s a barbecue,’ she says, coming back. ‘It’s uncovered and sitting in a puddle. The whole backyard is a puddle.’
Billy gives her the controller. She spends a few minutes spinning through the choices, then asks Billy if he likes The Blacklist.
‘Never seen it.’
‘Then we’ll start at the beginning.’
The premise of the show is ridiculous, but Billy gets into it because the main character, Red Reddington, is amusing and resourceful. Always one step ahead, as Billy wishes he were. They watch three episodes while the rain pelts down outside. Billy makes popcorn in the Jensens’ microwave and they both pig out on it. Alice washes the bowl and puts it in the drainer.
‘I can’t watch any more or I’ll get a headache,’ she says. ‘You can if you want to. I think I’ll go back downstairs.’