He fiddled with it and said, “Jammed in there.”
“That’s how come I got shot, Deputy.”
“You carry this around on your person?”
“No sir. I’d have to have a permit to do that. I keep it in the car or on the boat. What happened, I had it in the car, and I wanted to get that clip out. I thought it would be safer to empty it first. So I drove off the Trail down a little road, away from any houses, and fired it until it seemed empty. I didn’t count the shots. Then, let me take it a minute, I sat down on the door sill of the car where I could see by the dome light what I was doing. Like a darn fool I held it this way to get the slide back. My hand was sweaty, and I guess there was a misfire on the last one in the chamber. But it fired when it got a second chance. Next thing I knew, I woke up on the ground beside the car. When I felt able, I decided the best thing to do was try to crawl back to the main highway. It numbed my whole right side. But that’s going away now. You see, Deputy, my friend here was making a long distance call from a roadside phone booth. He was having trouble getting it through. I got bored. I thought I’d just get off the highway, empty the pistol and get the clip out of it. It had been on my mind. I told him I’d be back in a few minutes. When I didn’t come back, he thought I’d gone down a side road and got stuck in the mud. He looked and looked, after he got through phoning. I guess it was the third road where he found me, almost all the way back out to the highway.”
“Third road,” Arthur said. “So I walked in and got the car and brought him right here. I thought he was dying.”
“He don’t look dead. But them kids out there do.” He bounced the pistol on his broad tough hand, handed it to Arthur and said, “See he gets it fixed, mister.” He left.
I slid off the stretcher. Arthur started toward me to help me and I waved him back. In cautious balance I plodded slowly around the little room. I had to pivot and swing my hip to get that leaden leg forward, but with the knee locked it took my weight.
My light-weight jacket was a ruin, dirt, rips and grass stain, slacks not quite as bad, but bad enough. I balanced and took the jacket off, checked the pockets, tossed it to Arthur and pointed to a porcelain can with a lid worked by a foot pedal. He balled it up and stuffed it in. A blank doorway led, as I hoped, into a little wash room. With the dull clumsy help of the reluctant right hand and arm, I got the mud off my face and hands, the dark scabs of dried blood on the left side and the back of my neck. I used a damp towel to scrub down the right side of my slacks, the side I had dragged. I studied myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a disaster case. I looked as if I had been rolled in a waterfront alley. The dressing was too conspicuous.
“They’ll clean you up when they put you to bed.”
“Hat,” I said. “Go right when you go out this door and find another way out of here. I tossed the hat on the shelf behind the back seat of the car. And get back to me with it the same way you get out. And fast.”
“Listen, I won’t do it! You can’t leave. It’s dangerous!”
“So are home-canned vegetables. Get the hat.” I sat on a white stool and waited. Merry McGee, the valiant quipster, with a hole in his head and the horrid conviction it was bleeding in there. My precious, valuable, irreplaceable head. Under the bullet groove would be some little white needles of splintered bone, sticking down into the gray jelly where everything was stored, all those memories unique to me.
A fat nurse opened the door and said, “Mr. McGee? Come along.”
“I was told to wait here until they check something out.”
“Tests can be taken in the ward, sir.”
“Something about radiology.”
She frowned. “Seems odd. I better go find out what’s up.”
She bustled away. When I saw Arthur in the doorway I heaved myself up and got out of there in my curious hitching gait, putting the baseball cap on as I went down the hall. I did my very best walking as we passed a woman at a desk near the main entrance. I waited in shadow by the curb, leaning against a tree. Arthur brought the car around, something he should have thought to do when he got the hat. I didn’t remark on it. He was managing better than I could have hoped.
“Clematis Drive,” I said as he got behind the wheel.
“But how can you…”
“Arthur, my friend, you will be orderly and agreeable and stop twitching. I want you near me. I want you to stay near me. Because I am highly nervous. And if I stop making sense, or my speech goes bad, or my leg and arm get worse again, you hurry me back there so they can saw a little round hole in my head. Otherwise, just take on trust the strange idea I might know what I’m doing, because I’m too pooped to argue. Just drive. And pray my hunch is wrong. What time is it?”
“Five something. Chook will be…”
“She’ll sweat it out.”
As we turned onto Clematis, I looked over and saw the first paleness in the east. The dark trees and houses had begun to acquire third dimensions as the first candlepower of Wednesday touched them. The Watts’ house was lighted up again, almost completely. The big white convertible was gone.
“Turn into the drive… No, keep going, and put it in the driveway of the next house. Hurricane shutters are on. It’s empty for the summer. Turn out the lights before you turn in.”
As we started back down the sidewalk, I said, “if anything comes, car or bike or pedestrian, either way, help me hustle into the brush and flatten out.”
“Okay Trav. Sure.”
Nothing came. We went around the side of the house. Waxwell had taken off with typical flair, wheels digging deep gouges in the soft lawn.
I tried the outside screen door of the cage. It was latched on the inside. As I wondered whether it was worth trying to call her I smelled, adrift in the predawn stillness, a faint stench of fecal matter. I turned to Arthur and said, “When we’re in the house, don’t touch a thing unless I tell you. Stay away from the windows in the front of the house. Squat low if you hear a car.”
Bracing myself against the frame, I put a knee through the screen, ripping it. I reached through, unlatched it, and, when we were inside, smeared the metal handle where I had touched it, with the palm of my hand. The odor was stronger in the living room. The television set emitted a constant cold light, the random snow pattern after broadcasting is over. The odor was much stronger. Crane Watts had slid down between chair and hassock, half sitting, head canted back on the chair seat. His face was unnaturally fat, his eyes bugging wide, pushed out by pressure behind them. It was a moment or two before I found the point of entry, the charred ear hole. And I knew, I knew exactly what else I would find in the silence of that house. The husband had slept through too much. Too many empty evenings slack in the chair, while the wife’s heart grew more hopeless. But when Boo came in, came at her, she would have cried out to the husband. Many times, perhaps, before she knew it was too late, and he was too far gone and would sleep through every endless lift and stroke, every new and demanding invasion, every cuff and slap, every jolly instruction, every rough boosting and shifting of her into new postures for his pleasure. So, having slept, husband, sleep longer yet. Forever. I wondered if she remembered who had said a nonsense thing about a pistol barrel in the ear. And, accustomed only to the antiseptic violence of television and the movies, I imagined that the sudden ugliness had shocked her. After such a small tug at the trigger. The huge terminal spasm had flounced him off the chair, opened his bowels. And hydrostatic pressure had bloated his face to an unrecognizable idiocy. I even knew what she would instinctively cry at such ghastliness. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” It would end her auto-hypnosis, the trance state of the amateur murderer, and leave her no choice at all but to do what I knew I would find.