Katharine, beside me as she struggled with the sleeves of Boyd’s jacket and shirt, was wide-eyed with shock; her breath rasped in her throat almost as badly as Boyd’s himself. I continued to hold Boyd’s legs, uselessly, and watched as Laura filled the syringe from one of the small bottles, found the vein in Boyd’s arm, and gave him a brisk injection. And chatted away all the time: “You might as well have done this at the table, much more convenient and I never did like that place anyway. Come to think of it, I’ve always had something against ginmills called Tick Tock. All that hurry hurry hurry, clock watching, efficiency experts. What was that song in Pajama Game? Oh, Boyd, you remember, Mimi sang it that time when Sammy played the piano. Tempus fugit? Oh, I suppose it’s just as well my memory’s so bad, or that’s what you’d say.”
Meantime, Boyd was indeed trying to say something. The injection had had an immediate effect, relaxing his rigid muscles, making it possible for him to breathe again, in great gulping raspy painful-sounding gasps, through which — with that wooden stick in his mouth — he was trying to speak. Vague thoughts of last words floated in my mind as I leaned forward over his supine body, saying, “What? Boyd?”
“Somebody—” Breath rattled in his chest, his eyes still bulged, it was obviously a terrible strain to speak at all. His hand very shakily crawled up over his chest to his face, and clumsily removed the wooden stick. “Somebody,” he told me, showing me the stick, “stole my Popsicle.”
“Oh, Boyd,” Laura said, in the amused long-suffering tone of the indulgent mother, “you just never take anything seriously at all. I just don’t know what to do with you.” She was efficiently repacking the medicine kit, having shaken two white capsules from one of the little bottles into her palm. “Here,” she said, extending these capsules negligently toward him. “Sit up like a good boy and take your pills. Wash them down with some martini.”
He was so weak, so filled with pain, that great hobnails of perspiration stood out on his forehead and a rank odor of sick sweat rose up from his body, but he struggled with utter determination to sit up. I helped him, and he got into a normal seated position, propping himself with both forearms on the steering wheel. “Depraved woman,” he gasped, blinking straight ahead. “Capsules with martini? Have you no white wine?”
“You’ll just have to rough it, my dear.”
“I might have married Theodora Lind,” he said. “She was soft.”
“Mostly in the head, sweetheart. Here, take your pills, we have bars to go before we sleep.”
“For mercy’s sake, don’t repeat it.”
“Bars to go before we sleep,” she said, with a wicked smile, and watched him fondly as he swallowed the two white capsules with a long swig from the silver flask.
Katharine, the tremor in her voice belying her attempt at casualness, said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t think Tom and I do have bars to go before we sleep. Are we anywhere near the Holiday Inn?”
Boyd looked at us, eyes glazed and face puffy but expression benign. “Oh, don’t be quitters,” he said. “The night’s a pup.”
“Then I’m a fire hydrant,” I said. “It’s been a wonderful evening, but Katharine and I are both pretty worn out by now, and we have a lot of driving to do tomorrow.”
“Miles to go after we sleep,” Katharine said.
Boyd looked at her in mock horror. “Are you going to repeat that?”
“Are you going to take us home?”
“I tell you what,” Laura said. “There’s a lovely hoochery right on our way. We’ll just stop there for a quick good night drink, and then it’s off to the Holiday Inn. All right?”
That was the best deal we were going to get. “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.” Then I frowned at Boyd. “Are you all right to drive?”
He reared up with comic dignity; most of the effects of the attack had worn off by now, though he was till sweaty and shaky. “Do you mean to suggest,” he demanded, “that I might be a bit the worse for drink?”
That had not been at all what I’d meant to suggest, and he knew it as well as I did. “You know best,” I said, and held the door for Katharine to re-enter the car.
34
The final forty minutes with the Chasens were the strangest of all. Never for a second did their characterizations slip, did their play-acting lapse; what had happened had not happened, nothing had changed, there were no clouds in their sky, there was nothing but frivolousness and nonchalance. They were merely amused by one another, and not terribly involved together emotionally at all.
Our job was to agree with this view, to play along, and we did it to the hilt. We were probably brighter and more bubbly in that final bar, Katharine and I, than we’d been all evening. The strain was severe, but if Laura and Boyd could take it, by God, so would we.
Laura, in that last bar, wrote their names and address and phone number on the backs of two beer-label coasters, writing in a clear tiny firm hand with black ink, then presenting one coaster to each of us as though they were door prizes. I promised faithfully to get in touch on my return trip, and I wondered if I would. Katharine promised just as faithfully to call if and when her work ever brought her back to this part of the world.
I don’t know if they realized how difficult we found it to go on playing the game, but they put up only token resistance when we refused a second drink in that last bar and insisted we absolutely had to return to the motel. Still as cheerful as ever, they drove us to the Holiday Inn, where as we got out Boyd said, “I want to thank you both for helping me protect my wife from her baser impulses. You can see it isn’t easy.”
“Our pleasure,” I assured him.
“Boyd won’t be content,” Laura said comfortably, “until I’m walled up in a convent somewhere. Thank you both for bringing a little color into my tragic life.”
The Rolls drove off, and we stood in the parking lot to wave after it until it turned onto the highway and the red taillights disappeared. Then our hands lowered to our sides. “Good God,” Katharine said.
I didn’t feel like saying anything at all. We went up to our rooms and Katharine stopped at her door, saying, “Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Do you know what’s the most terrible thing of all?” she asked.
I had walked on, toward my own room. I looked back. “What?”
“They love each other,” she said.
35
It had been a long exhausting night. I left no call, and didn’t wake up till nearly ten o’clock. My first act was to phone Smith’s Svce, where Dave Smith answered with his usual greeting: “More trouble.”
“No, the same old trouble, actually,” I told him. “This is Tom Fletcher, the cabby.”
“The ex-cabby.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “My stomach just dropped.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a line on a Marathon starter, over in Limon. It’s probably gonna be a little different from yours, but maybe we can cobble them together, come up with some cockamamie thing. At least get you off my hands and over the county line.”
“That sounds good.”
“Give me a call about one o’clock,” he suggested.
I said, “Checkout here is twelve noon.”
“Tell them a sob story.”
“It just happens I have one, as a matter of fact.”
He chuckled, and we stopped talking to one another, and I phoned Katharine’s room, thus learning what she sounded like when first awake; warm and nice, but brain-damaged. “Wo,” she said. “Zat?”
“It’s the morning after.”