When there was no response, he took out Will’s stopwatch and depressed its tiny stem. “You got one minute!”
Fine, then, he thought when the minute hand had completed its revolution. He’d drive into town, report the vehicle’s location and let Raymer and his crew handle it. Noticing that one of the beater’s rear tires was missing its rubber valve cap, he used the edge of the tire iron to let the air out.
“The cops’ll be along shortly,” he called when the tire was completely flat. “And that’s for true.”
By the time he returned to Upper Main Street, though, the fist in his chest had become an anvil on top of it, and he knew he’d never make it down to the station. He’d have to call instead from Peter’s flat. If he could make it that far.
Pulling up at the curb in front of Miss Beryl’s, he turned off the engine, but then, unable to catch his breath, he just sat there. Two years, but probably one? Two hours, but probably one, was more like it. The truth he’d been unwilling to face all day was simplicity itself: he was finished. Back at the Horse he’d somehow managed to convince himself that his choice was between keeping his promise to Janey and helping Carl out of his jam, though he now realized this was an illusion, a fiction. The anvil sitting on his chest was the only reality.
Get out of the truck, old man, he told himself when he was able to draw at least a little oxygen into his lungs. You can manage that much. After that, the short walk up the drive and then three small steps onto the back porch. Make one call to the station, then another to 911 for an ambulance. Not because it would save him, but so nobody he cared about would have to find him. He thought about Rub, who’d need to be let out of the trailer soon. After the 911 call, if he had strength and breath enough, he’d telephone the Horse and get Carl to do that.
Move, he told himself, because he was still in the truck, still thinking about what needed to be done instead of doing it. Perhaps for the first time in his life thinking was easier, less painful, than doing. One more reason to believe the end was near.
He’d made it halfway up the drive when Miss Beryl’s long-ago question popped into his head, unbidden as always. Does it ever trouble you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you? Even now he couldn’t say for sure. Was it supposed to? Had he been wrong to take such pleasure in always doing things the hard way? And to banish self-doubt and regret before they could take root? Had it been selfish of him to make sure that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who, like himself, had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise?
Not often, he’d told Miss Beryl. Now and then.
She’d immediately registered the change in him when he returned from overseas, no doubt sensing that his newfound ability to distance Sully from Sully would become his great skill in life. He’d always been bullheaded, of course, but the war had taught him to move forward, and as he saw it this meant putting one foot in front of the other, to keep going when other men stopped, to grind it out.
Except that now, almost to the back door of his son’s flat, everything tilted, and he was on his knees on the hard ground, and a moment later there was gravel under his chin.
So, he thought. This was how it ended, how it had to end. The day had finally come when putting one foot in front of the other was simply fucking impossible, when the forward motion he’d depended on his entire life failed him and he it. On your feet, Soldier, he commanded himself, but his body was all done taking orders. The entire world, it seemed, was now reduced to silence and pain, the latter intense, the former unendurable. With the last of his strength he took out his grandson’s stopwatch. The ticking, when he depressed the stem, was loud and strong, a comfort, though it was also, he realized, the sound of time running out.
Footsteps approached, but Sully didn’t hear them.
Normal
BY THE TIME he finished the last of the hospital’s paperwork, signing all the necessary documents left-handed, with an untalented child’s scrawl, it was going on midnight. Thanks to a megadose of antibiotics, Raymer’s rationality, or what remained of it, had returned, and with it his normal depression. Hard to believe, but six short hours earlier, at Gert’s, he hadn’t had a care in the world, didn’t give a tiny little shit about anything. He might need to have his right hand amputated? So what? Even Jerome — wild eyed and completely off the rails — pointing that gun at him had failed to focus his mind. The idea that he might actually pull the trigger, sending both Raymer and vile, sneaky, manipulative Dougie into oblivion, had felt more liberating than terrifying. Freed from reason, he’d been free of cares, whereas now, reason restored, item number one on his agenda was putting the town of Bath and its myriad humiliations in his rearview mirror.
Before he could do that, however, he had to rent a truck and a hitch for his car, buy cardboard boxes and packing materials, clear out his office at the station, then pack up his few possessions at the Arms. Could all that be accomplished in a single day? Was packing and taping boxes even a job he could manage with one hand? The wound of his ruined one, cleaned and freshly wrapped with gauze, throbbing mercilessly despite the prescription painkillers, now resembled a club. Would he be able to hire help on such short notice? Apart from his determination not to spend another night in the Morrison Arms, there was no real hurry about leaving. It wasn’t like he’d be heading anywhere in particular. Where were fools supposed to go? Was there someplace known for welcoming them, where he might blend in with others of his ilk? A place inhabited by middle-aged men who found it impossible to put their deceased wives’ infidelities behind them? Who fell in love again in the manner of teenage boys, too self-conscious and clueless to figure out whether their affections were returned? Was there such a place anywhere in the world?
When he was finally discharged, a woman was waiting for him in the hallway. She looked to be in her fifties, had short brown hair and was dressed in slacks and a tweed jacket. “I was hoping I might catch you before you left,” she said. “We can talk in my office.” Her nameplate read DR. PAMELA QADRY.
“Do we know each other?” he said, taking the chair she offered.
“No,” she said, “but Jerome Bond is my patient.”
“Oh,” he said. So a shrink, then.
Poor Jerome. Raymer knew from Charice, of course, that he was prone to panic attacks, though he never would’ve believed that a functioning human being could come as completely unglued as Jerome had done over the last twenty-four hours. Since the keying of the ’Stang he’d become all but unrecognizable. In the ambulance he’d curled up into a fetal position and refused to look at Raymer, preferring to talk to the EMTs. “Do you even know what it’s like to love somebody?” he blubbered to the one trying to take his vital signs. “I mean really love somebody? Do you even know what love is?”
Raymer, barely coherent himself, his fever raging, the pain in his hand so intense that it bordered on a religious experience, had been assigned his own EMT, a no-nonsense young woman who kept snapping her fingers in front of his face and saying, “Eyes on me, Mr. Man. None of that over there is our business.”
Which had given Raymer a fit of the giggles. “Actually, it is,” he whispered. “That’s my wife he’s talking about.”