In the commotion, Sully had forgotten about the boy. He thought about him alone in the house, trying not to panic. Maybe he’d already panicked. Sully felt a small measure of the boy’s fear in his own stomach and considered the implications of the fact that he’d forgotten his grandson again. It was one of the things that Vera and Ruth both held against him, his ability to lose sight of important things. “How can you do that?” they’d both asked him at various times during their relationship. “How can you just forget people?” It was a rhetorical question, he understood, and so he’d never answered. Had he been required to answer, he’d have given the same response he’d just given Ralph when he’d wondered how Sully could swallow a pill dry. He didn’t know how. He just could.
Another fifteen minutes found Sully seated by himself at the end of the bar at The Horse, halfway through the first of what would almost certainly be many bottles of beer, waiting for Jocko’s pill to kick in and considering a second pill just to make sure (one strategy) and a shot of Jack Daniel’s to jump start the first pill (another strategy) and relying on faith (a third) that he had positioned himself correctly at the end of the bar to encounter a distraction or two. The sight of his ex-wife gone over the edge, her heartfelt expression of contempt for himself, seeing her packed into an ambulance and taken to the hospital to be sedated, had penetrated Sully’s durable, time-tested defenses, and the blood that was now pounding in his knee hammered so incessantly that the pain was threatening to reach some new crescendo of rhythmic musical agony, the whole orchestra strumming and thrumming and blowing and whacking away at their instruments, awaiting only the crash of cymbals that would, Sully felt sure, allow him to pass out. He could feel the son of a bitch of a cymbal player getting to his feet in the back row, cymbal in each hand, grinning, ready to unload. It was his father, naturally, that one-note musician, percussive and vengeful, who had a cymbal in each hand and was grinning at him, get ready you bastard, ’cause here it comes. Big Jim raised them high above his head for maximum torque. You call this music? That’s what Sully would like to ask him. “Do I call what music?” Wirf said, sliding onto the bar stool next to him.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sully told him.
Wirf studied him a moment. “You look like you’re about to cash in.”
“I just took a pill,” Sully told him. “As soon as it kicks in, I’ll be fine.”
Wirf slid off his stool. “I gotta pee. Order me a club soda with a squeeze of lime,” he said.
“Okay.”
“And when it arrives, pay for it.” “Okay.”
“And an egg. I haven’t eaten today. I see the loyal opposition’s here,” Wirf observed, indicating the large table in the corner, a party of eight that included Satch Henry and Ollie Quinn.
Sully had barely noticed.
“I haven’t been invited to join them,” Sully said.
“Me, either,” Wirf conceded. “I bet they’re afraid we’d snub them.”
Sully nodded. “One of us might.”
“Look who else is back,” Wirf said, indicating Jeff, who was tending bar again.
Sully nodded. “He’s already bought my first beer.”
“I’ll hurry back,” Wirf said.
On the way to the men’s room Wirf passed Carl Roebuck, who was on the way in. On Carl’s arm was a young woman who looked to be in her late twenties. Beautywise, she wasn’t in Toby Roebuck’s league, but she wasn’t Texas league either. She wore her hair long, and when Carl Roebuck offered to hang her coat on the rack near the door with the others, she said no, she was cold. Something about the way she hugged the coat to her chest suggested to Sully that she might have nothing on underneath. Or maybe it was just that she was with Carl Roebuck.
“Here’s somebody you’ll want to steer clear of,” Carl told her when they joined Sully at the end of the bar. “Didi, meet Sully. Sully, the lovely Deirdre.”
The girl looked Sully over with what seemed to him genuine interest. “I’ve heard all about you,” she said, which seemed to surprise Carl Roebuck until he thought about it. “Oh, right,” he said.
Jocko’s pill was kicking in, Sully concluded. The conversation seemed just beyond his grasp.
Still examining Sully, the girl nuzzled into Carl’s shoulder, whispering something sweet into his ear.
“Right by where we came in,” Carl directed her.
“Come with?”
Carl snorted and returned her nuzzling. He was drunk, Sully realized. “You want me to come with you to the girl’s room?”
“Women’s room, you pig,” she said without a trace of seriousness. “You might enjoy yourself.”
“I need to talk to this man,” Carl told her. “He’s my confessor.”
“Okay,” she said, little-girl voice, then to Sully, “He’s got a lot to confess.”
They watched her head in the direction of the rest rooms. When she disappeared into the one labeled “Setters,” Carl Roebuck swung on his bar stool to face Sully. “You know that I have some experience in these matters,” he confided, bleary-eyed.
“What matters?”
“Sexual matters,” Carl explained. “You might say I have considerable experience.”
“You might,” Sully agreed.
“And that I’m not prone to hyperbole,” Carl continued.
“I might say that if I knew what hyperbole meant,” Sully said.
“Exaggeration,” Carl explained. “Overstatement. Didn’t you ever go to school?”
“Blow me,” Sully suggested.
Carl rapped the bar enthusiastically. “That’s my point!” he said gleefully. “This girl gives the best head on the East Coast. She could suck the cork out of a champagne bottle. She could suck the lug nuts off a tractor. She could probably bring you to climax, Sully.”
Sully ignored the insult. “You want to know what I find hard to believe?”
“What? Tell me. Ask me any fucking thing. I’m the answer man.”
“Okay,” Sully said. “We’ll start with an easy one. Why are you drunk at”—he consulted the clock on the wall—“one o’clock in the afternoon?”
“Because I’m in pain,” Carl said, apparently serious. “You’re right. That was easy. Next question.”
Sully shook his head. “You’re in pain?”
“I’m … in … pain,” Carl repeated. “What? You think you’ve got a lock on pain? You think you’ve got the pain market cornered in this burg?”
Sully took out his vial of pills and set them on the bar between them. “Eat one of these,” he suggested. In fact, the throbbing in his own knee had begun to level off, though he could not be sure that this was because of the pill or because the distraction he’d hoped for had arrived.
Carl waved the pills off. “Do they cure heartache?”
“Do blow jobs?”
“For their duration, they do indeed,” Carl said. “That was another easy question. Ask me a hard one.”
“Okay,” Sully said. “What became of all that happy horseshit you were feeding everybody last week? About how you were turning over a new leaf? About how you weren’t even horny any more now that you were going to be a father?”
Carl Roebuck was grinning at him now and pretending astonishment, index fingers of both hands pointing at his temples, as if he were receiving telepathic messages. “I knew you were going to ask that!” he exclaimed. “In fact, that’s the question you were thinking when I walked in here with the queen of the headers. Admit it. That’s your idea of a tough question, isn’t it?”