Rub normally didn’t have much trouble with his R’s, but he did now. Embarrassed by his stammer, Jennifer quickly turned her attention to the other Rub. “Oh, look!” she squealed. “A puppy! Isn’t he cute?”
“Would you like to have him?” Sully said.
Jennifer seemed to regard this as a joke. “What’s his name?”
“Rub,” Sully said, causing her to blink at the man she’d just met. Had there been some misunderstanding? He and the dog had the same name? If she asked the name of the tall man in the pharmacist’s smock, would it, too, be Rub? What kind of place was this?
When Rub, excited to hear his name, stood up and wagged his whole hind end, Jennifer took a quick step back, visibly alarmed by his bloody erection. “What’s wrong with Rub’s penis?” she wanted to know, causing the other Rub to blush deeply.
“He chews on it,” Sully explained.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Nights like this,” said Jocko as they filed into the back room, “I feel the need of a one-legged lawyer.” Sully had been thinking the same thing, and together they raised their glasses in the direction of Wirf’s prosthesis, which since his death had occupied the place of honor on the mantel. They took their seats around the poker table, Rub careful as always to sit next to Sully. Jocko located the chips and assumed the role of banker, Carl being too dishonest, Sully too careless. The dog circled around several times, sighed, curled up at the base of his master’s chair and returned to gnawing.
“How would you like to own half a construction company?” Carl asked Sully.
“That would depend on who owns the other half.”
“Assume it’s your best friend in the world.”
Sully elbowed Rub, who’d gone back to staring at Jennifer’s boobs. “Hey, Dummy. Do you own a construction company?”
Carl ignored this while Rub beamed. “Assume this best friend isn’t going to be able to make payroll next week. Assume that wall collapsing this afternoon was the last fucking nail in his coffin. Assume he’s about to be sued by everyone from the mill’s investors to the town of Bath to the asshole ex-con who happened to be driving by at the exact wrong moment.”
Carl of course was always claiming imminent financial ruin, but could it possibly be true this time, Sully wondered. “Let’s assume instead,” he suggested, “that everybody but you saw this day coming for a long time. Assume the friend you now want to be your partner has been warning you about it for the last fucking decade.”
“Assume,” Carl replied, “that this friend’s an asshole for picking this particular moment to say I told you so.”
“Assume this same friend’s a fucking prince for not bringing up the fact that you’re six months behind on your rent.”
Jennifer was taking all this in with growing alarm. “Are you two having a fight?”
“Not really,” Sully told her. “I am going to take his last hundred bucks, though.”
“He would, too, if I’d let him,” Carl agreed.
“High card deals,” said Jocko, setting the deck down in the middle of the table.
“That would be me,” Sully said, leaning forward to turn over the ace of spades.
Carl sighed. “Fuck me,” he said.
And Sully, feeling as you sometimes do when the world aligns in your favor, proceeded to do just that.
A Sundering
RAYMER STARTED UP the Jetta and, just in case Miller was watching in his rearview, put the car in reverse so his taillights would pulse. When the cruiser pulled out onto the two-lane blacktop and headed back toward town, he put his car back in park and turned the engine off. Rummaging around in the glove box, he located the flashlight he kept there, but naturally the batteries were dead. A sign, if ever there was one, to cease and desist, to put a merciful end to this bloody, god-awful day. Tomorrow would arrive soon enough and with it numerous opportunities for further lunacy. Hadn’t he already crammed a good hundred pounds’ worth of shit into today’s fifty-pound sack? Go home, he told himself.
Except what did that even mean? Home, at least until he could make other arrangements, was still the Morrison Arms and officially off-limits. If he ignored his own yellow tape and climbed into his own bed, his sleep would likely be haunted by phantoms of the escaped cobra. His other alternatives were nearly as unattractive. He could return to the couch in his office, but he’d be discovered there bright and early by Charice, and given the evening’s events he couldn’t really face that. Like the other residents of the Arms, he had a voucher for a motel room, but so late, with this a holiday weekend, he’d surely be greeted by a NO VACANCY sign.
As Raymer made his way into Dale on foot, there was renewed rumbling to the south, the low clouds reflecting distant lightning strikes. The air was again full of electricity, the hair on his forearms standing up, just as it had on Charice’s porch (before he destroyed it). With nothing but sporadic lightning to navigate by, he stuck to the path as best he could but managed to stray anyway. The Dale grave markers, set flat to the ground, jutted up just enough to trip him, and twice he went down, the second time hard. Rising slick with mud, he was grateful for the dark. Between the charcoal ash from the Weber and the fresh coat of mud, he could easily imagine what he must look like. It put him in mind of that book Miss Beryl had assigned in eighth grade, the one where a boy comes upon an escaped convict on the marsh. The old woman had made a special point of telling him he would identify with the boy in the story, but after reading that first chapter he’d put the book away and refused to pick it up again. When he failed the test, Miss Beryl, puzzled, had asked him if he’d found the book too difficult. He lied and said yes, because the truth was even more embarrassing. He’d quit because the scene on the marsh had terrified him, and even though the chapter ended with the convict being led away in chains, Raymer had been afraid he would return. It was a long book, one that would take weeks to read, and he knew he’d spend the whole time worried sick. For some reason he related this story as a lighthearted anecdote to Becka on their honeymoon, though she’d appeared genuinely stricken. “Don’t you see?” she explained. “You cheated yourself.” And maybe she was right, but really, was that such a terrible thing? Didn’t people cheat themselves all the time, over more important things than eighth-grade reading assignments? “Was I right?” he asked her, because clearly she knew the book in question. “Did the convict come back?”
“Of course he did,” she admitted. She seemed about to say more but thought better of it, which was a shame because in describing the poor kid’s predicament — whether or not to rat the man out — Raymer discovered that he actually did want to know how the story turned out. (Miss Beryl was right — he had identified with that lonely, friendless boy.) Becka’s refusal to satisfy his belated curiosity suggested that even now, so many years later, he didn’t deserve to know. More troubling still was the possibility that this had been her first inkling that their marriage was doomed, that a cowardly boy had grown up to be a cowardly man.
These were his thoughts as he trudged through marshlike Dale, his shoes ruined, his socks squishy. He wasn’t even certain he was headed in the right direction until the sky lit up obligingly and he saw the old judge’s grave, its fresh mound shrunk considerably by the earlier deluge. Was it really just this morning that he’d stood here listening to that idiot preacher? It felt like last week. Pitch dark descended again, but he had his bearings now, and he had a pretty good sense of where the yellow backhoe had sat and also, a few rows off to the right, where someone had placed that bouquet of red roses.