“I’d be very honored to have the pin and wear it, Cal.”
The tension went out of his shoulders. “I’ll see you get one. What my squad captain, did, he checked you out with Blaylock, and he got a good reading. Hey, here she comes. I guess things aren’t so great.”
Mits came slowly toward us. Though she was expressionless, tears were running down her brown cheeks. She was in jeans and a blue work shirt, both too big for her. Her helmet was slung on the machine, next to Cal’s.
She acknowledged my presence with a nod, went to Cal, held his forearm in her two hands, and rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “In’t gonna make it,” she said in a muffled voice. “Din’t hardly know me at first. Then he came back, like from far off, like from being dead.”
She took a deep breath and let it out, and then turned to me and said, “Other things are going bad. Inside. Like he knew they would sooner or later. But, damn it, this is sooner. It isn’t fair.”
“Can we get going now?” Cal asked.
“I can see him another five minutes at six o’clock. I think I better stay here.”
“Maybe I can get back. I don’t know, Mits. I’ll have to get off work.”
“I’ll stick around and run her home, Cal.”
She looked at me dubiously. “Sure you wouldn’t be too much put out?”
“Sure.”
Cal handed her her helmet, swung aboard, cranked up, and went droning out of the shade and into the road and away.
She looked around and saw a bus bench in the shade and headed toward it. I followed her. She took cigarettes out of her shoulder bag, offered me one which I refused, and then lit up, sucked the smoke deep, huffed it out to be pulled away by the late-afternoon breeze.
“They said I should expect him to die tonight or tomorrow.”
“Soon.”
“Everything has gone bad. They say he had to be in pain for a long time, saying nothing about it. I knew he hurt. He’d make a sniffy sound if I lifted him wrong. How old do you think I am?”
The question startled me. “Nineteen? Twenty?”
“Hah! I’m twenty-eight, man. Half Seminole. A skinny Seminole, you can’t tell the age. With the fat ones you can tell. Okay, except for my little brothers when I was growing up, nobody in my whole life has ever really needed me except Ted. I mean really. He turned that place into home for me. So now what? I have to make some kind of plans, get some kind of work. But I can’t even think about it.”
“Don’t try. There’ll be time to think about it.”
“McGee? What was he like when he was young?”
“I knew him in the service.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“He was a good officer. He didn’t showboat and draw fire. When stupid orders came down, he’d drag his feet until they were out of date. He tried to make sure everybody got shelter and rations and transport. He didn’t mind the kind of goofing off that didn’t matter, but if anybody didn’t do their job when it did matter, he’d chew them out good. He was an okay officer, and he was down in a little ravine helping a medic slide a wounded man onto a litter when he got a mortar fragment in the back, right through the spinal cord.”
“Did he ever laugh, joke, smile?”
“As much as anybody”
“Did he have a girl?”
“I don’t recall hearing anything about her if he did.”
“It’s been a lot of work taking care of him. It makes a long day and into the night seven days a week.”
“Must have been very hard.”
“I would have done it if it was twice as hard. Oh, I asked him if there was something I should tell you. It doesn’t make sense to me. I hope it does to you. His mind seemed to be kind of wandering. Here is exactly what he said: ‘Tell Sarge there is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ Mean anything?”
“Not right off.”
“I think his head has gone all weird. I held his hand. It was like ice.”
“Say it again?”
“‘There is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ He made me say it twice too.”
I found that interesting. It meant the message was significant in the shape and form it was told. “Could those be biker names, Mits?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve heard about Dirty Bob, but I don’t know where or when. And when they take a long hard ride, they do it on uppers and coffee. Night and day, they really go. And it’s safer there’s two at night, riding side by side, with the two headlights showing, the two tail-lights in back.”
“Fifty hours would be how many miles?”
“All the way acrosst. I knew a cat went from Toronto to Mexico City without sleep. A while back, there was kind of a thing about setting records. But it’s dumb. People got killed. You can lose your best troops that way.” She picked up my wrist and looked at my watch. “I think I’ll head back in there. I’ll stay as long as they let me. You sure you don’t mind?”
“You go ahead. I’ll wait. Good luck.”
“There isn’t any more of that left. But thanks.” She came back at ten after six, dry-eyed. “Look, you want to take off, it’s okay. They’re going to let me set with him. They got curtains around the bed. He doesn’t know me any more, or know anything, I guess. But everybody has to be somewhere, and I might as well be here.”
“You going to get anything to eat?”
“I couldn’t eat.”
I gave her my number again. “You call me when you want to leave. It will take me fifteen or twenty minutes to get here. Is that all right?”
“I hate to have you doing this for me.”
“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t.”
There was a nod and a fleeting smile and she turned and went back to the hospital.
The phone woke me a little after three in the morning. She was waiting by the bench where we had sat. She climbed up into the Rolls, chunked the door shut, and said, “He died at a quarter to three. He stopped breathing and then tried to kind of rise up and fell back with his eyes half shut and his mouth open. I got his stuff here in my bag they took from him. The watch and ring and wallet and keys.”
“I’m sorry, Mits.”
“F.T.W.”
“What? Oh. Right.”
“I signed a couple of things there. I signed them Marilyn O. Blaylock. They didn’t ask for any ID. I always liked the name Marilyn. I think what they do, maybe, they get to collect from the VA somehow.”
“Probably. Did he have any living relatives?”
“I never heard of any at all.”
“What will happen to the place out there?” I asked as I started up, heading north.
“He said he had it all worked out, but he never said how. His lawyer has the papers on it, he said. Man name of Grudd up in West Palm.”
We rode in silence. She sighed heavily. “Oh, God, somebody’s got to go through all his stuff and decide what should happen to it.”
“Maybe Mr. Grudd has instructions. Better contact him first.”
“First thing.”
“Hungry?”
“Like some kind of wolf.”
So I pulled into 24 HOUR CHICKEN and she ate one of the big breast baskets all by herself, with fries and a chocolate shake. I told her I was going to be given a kind of associate-type pin that put me under the protection of the Fantasies, that Cal was going to get it for me.
She studied me for long moments as she sucked up the shake, cheeks hollowed by the effort. “What could save your life and save your ass, you shouldn’t try to be funny about, okay?”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“There isn’t anything funny about that Knucks. He is genuine through and through crazy. Someday they are going to put him away.”