“I have to go now,” Jerome repeated.
Raymer was visited by a sudden intuition. “Jerome? Are you drunk?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Charice told me about last night…”
“ ’Bout me slipping my moorings?” he said. “It’s true. Came straight unglued, ole buddy. Guess why.”
“Sure, Jerome. Because I keyed your car. Except I didn’t, okay? That’s what I’m trying to explain, if you’d just listen. It was this asshole Roy Purdy. He’s a racist dickhead, okay? He probably saw us go into Gert’s and—”
“I have to go now.”
“Look, how about I come over? I’ll bring a six-pack of one of those microswills you like. We can talk this through.”
“No,” he said. “Definitely not.”
“What if I promise not to use your bathroom,” Raymer said, recalling what Charice had told him about that.
There came a muffled, whimpering sound. Could Jerome actually be crying?
“Or we could go out someplace,” Raymer offered. “We could go to that wine bar in Schuyler. Adfinitum.”
“ ’Finity,” Jerome blubbered.
“Right. Would you like that? I can be there in twenty. Jerome?”
But the line was so utterly lifeless that Raymer wondered if he’d hallucinated the whole conversation. Because, Jesus, he really was burning up. Putting the receiver back in its cradle, he realized that in the last few minutes Gert’s had taken on a phantasmagoric quality, with hulking, grotesque shapes moving through the tavern’s almost liquid twilight, laughter too loud and not quite in sync with the mouths it issued from. Was he drunk? Was that even possible on one beer? Okay, two beers, he realized when he slid back into the wet booth, because the second bottle of Twelve Horse in his hand was somehow empty, too. Had he drunk the whole thing during his short conversation with Jerome? Suddenly he was frightened, though not of anything he could name. Some kind of slippage, things going too fast, then all of a sudden too slow, tectonic plates sliding along a fault line and giving him vertigo. Placing some bills — it was too dark and he was too messed up to worry about denominations — under the empty bottles, he scooted back out of the booth and stood up, so light-headed he had to grab on to the side of the booth to keep from falling.
Dougie, he thought with odd satisfaction, was a weak stick. Couldn’t handle his booze worth a lick.
—
PULLING UP in front of Jerome’s town house twenty minutes later, Raymer feared, now that he was here, that maybe coming was a mistake. Earlier, when he’d mentioned to Charice that he might swing by to cheer Jerome up, she’d told him without hesitation that it was a bad idea. What if she was right? What if he didn’t want to be cheered up? What if Raymer was exactly the wrong man for the job? If Jerome was determined to believe he’d keyed the ’Stang, how could he convince him otherwise?
He’d just about decided to return to Bath — his injured hand pulsing to the rhythm of his respiration, his fever still raging — when the garage door rolled up unexpectedly. A green minivan sat in the bay, and Raymer waited for it to back into the street. When it didn’t, he got out and walked up the driveway wondering who the minivan belonged to, then realizing that of course Jerome, suddenly without wheels, must’ve rented it. But a minivan? Jerome? Wasn’t that the automotive equivalent of Twelve Horse ale?
It was dark inside the garage, and the vehicle’s windows were tinted, so at first Raymer didn’t realize Jerome was slumped forward onto the steering wheel. Dead, was Raymer’s first thought. Jerome is dead. Had it been a heart attack just as he was about to back out? Was that possible? How could he be alive one moment and not the next, though when you thought about it, this was true of every human being who’d ever lived. At some point you are, until you aren’t. “Jerome?” he said, his face close to the driver’s window. “You okay?”
No response. The man’s forehead still slumped on top of the steering wheel. Alive, though, yeah? Raymer couldn’t be sure in such poor light, but his chest did appear to be gently rising and falling. “Jerome?” Raymer said, louder this time, and when he again didn’t stir, he rapped sharply on the glass with his knuckles, and Jerome bolted upright, his eyes wide with panic, his arms straight out before him with his hands perfectly positioned at ten and two on the wheel, his body braced for impact. The shriek he let loose was high and keening and unguarded, the sound of abject terror. It took Raymer a moment to realize what must be happening, that Jerome, jolted awake in the driver’s seat, had concluded the vehicle was in motion, that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and was at that very instant about to crash into the wall right in front of him. When that didn’t happen, the screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun, but only for a moment, because then he saw Raymer peering in at him and let loose again, this second screech even more bloodcurdling than the first.
Raymer waited patiently until he stopped screaming, then opened the door. A bottle of single-malt scotch, a scant two fingers left in the bottom, fell out and shattered on the concrete floor, though his friend didn’t seem to notice.
“What the hell?” Raymer said.
Jerome leaned away from him as far as he could — not very, being belted in — as if from someone with exceptionally bad breath. “What?” he muttered.
“Everything’s all right. You’re in your own garage. You’re safe. Okay?”
Jerome sat up straighter, though he seemed reluctant to take his eyes off Raymer, like he suspected he was lying to him. Finally, though, he began to take in his surroundings. Yes, it did look like his garage. His vehicle didn’t appear to be moving. He relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, then let his hands fall. “Whoa,” he said, blinking. “I must’ve—”
Passed out, Raymer thought, though there was no reason to complete the sentence. “You scared me,” he said. “I was afraid you were…”
He let his own thought trail off, because for some reason the garage door was descending. Turning, Raymer expected to see someone standing in the doorway that led into the kitchen and pressing the button, but nobody was there. Again his knees jellied — the same vertigo that had hit him at Gert’s. Looking back at Jerome, he saw his eyes were streaming, his shoulders shaking.
“How could you?” was what he wanted Raymer to explain.
“I didn’t,” Raymer said, getting annoyed. How many times did he have to tell him it was Roy Purdy? And come on. Wasn’t the ’Stang really just another fucking car? It was people’s lives, not automobiles, that got fucked up beyond repair. He was about to tell Jerome to get a goddamn grip, but now that his eyes had fully adjusted to the cavelike dark, something caught his attention. The rental’s rear seats were down, and the entire vehicle was crammed with cardboard boxes and suitcases and stereo equipment and mounds of clothes. “You going somewhere, Jerome?”
He stifled a sob and nodded resentfully.
“Where?”
“Away.”
Again the garage door lurched into motion, this time lumbering upward.
“To where?”
“Away from you,” Jerome said. His gaze was fixed on that bloody hand, as if the wound there was so disgusting, like a ruptured goiter, that he couldn’t bear to be anywhere near it. Raymer, embarrassed, hid it behind his back.
“Because really,” Jerome was saying, still going on about the fucking ’Stang, “it’s hard to believe anybody could be so cruel…”
From outside came the sound of a car racing up the quiet, residential street at unsafe speed. Raymer turned away from Jerome just in time to see Charice’s car rock to a halt at the curb. She’d tried to raise him on the radio several times while he drove to Jerome’s, pleading with him to tell her where he was, but he’d ignored her. Now here she was, leaping out of the car and sprinting toward them as if the building was on fire. Never mind. He didn’t care why she was here. He was just insanely happy to see her. In fact, his heart did a somersault, which could only mean one thing — that even without meaning to he’d moved on from Becka, the only other woman who’d ever made his heart behave like that. Was it even remotely possible that the sight of him might someday inspire in Charice, or any woman, such profound joy?