“The river’s not anywhere around here. It’s more north. Guess what? You’ll never get me on a Harley.”
“Yeah?”
“Helmet or not. What good is a helmet?”
“The Feather fucking River,” Luntz said.
Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly.
He dropped the receiver and let it dangle a few seconds. He shook his head and wiped both hands across the thighs of his slacks. He jabbed at the one again as he put the phone to his head. Some woman said, “Palo County Sheriff’s Department. What is your emergency?”
“A guy. This guy,” he said. “A guy’s been shot.”
“What is your name and location, sir?”
“Well, we’re at this rest stop north of the Tastee-Freez on Seventy, somewhere past Ortonville. Way past Ortonville.”
“Sir. Do you mean Oroville?”
“On the nose,” he said. He searched with his free hand for a cigarette.
“Do you see a milepost marker, sir?”
“No. There’s these big pines right by the road. Kind of behind there.”
“The rest stop north of the Tastee-Freez and north of Oroville. What’s his condition, can you tell me?”
Luntz said, “He got shot in the leg. How do you make a tourniquet?”
“Just apply direct pressure to the wound. Is he conscious?”
“He’s fine, honey. But the blood’s just pouring.”
“Apply pressure. Put a clean cloth down and press hard on the wound with the palm of your hand.”
“I’ll do that, yeah, but I mean — can you get here pretty quick?”
She started talking again, and he hung up.
He found his lighter and got his Camel going. Took several deep puffs, threw it aside.
He went across the rest stop under the evergreens to where Gambol sat propped against the left rear wheel of his Cadillac, looking very pale. Very large. He’d removed his white golfing hat. What a head. A huge head. His entire right pants leg was soaked black with blood. The white hat lay beside him.
Luntz bent from his waist and unbuckled Gambol’s belt, and Gambol opened his big foreign-looking eyes.
Luntz said, “I need your belt for a tourniquet.”
He put his foot between the man’s big legs and dragged the belt free through the loops around his fat middle. “Look, brother,” he said to Gambol, “I hope you understand.”
Gambol breathed deep a couple times but didn’t seem able to speak.
Luntz said, “Am I supposed to sit around and wait for you to break my arm? When was the last time you got a broken bone?”
Gambol huffed and puffed. He felt for his hat beside him, brought it to his chest, and held it there. “Guess what?” he managed to say. “I got a busted thigh bone right this minute.”
“I called 911, so just hang on.”
With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness.
Luntz dropped the belt in Gambol’s bloody lap. He parted the lapels of Gambol’s camel-hair sports coat and reached inside for Gambol’s wallet and pocketed it.
He hiked his slacks and squatted and felt under the car where the old gun had ended up, found the thing, and stood up straight, gripping the gun with both hands. He placed the muzzle against Gambol’s forehead and rested one thumb on the hammer.
Gambol seemed oblivious. His hands lay open either side of his outstretched legs, and his belly went up and down.
Luntz took his thumb from the hammer and let out his breath and lowered the gun. “Fuck. Put that around your leg. The belt, man. Wake up, man.” Gambol’s face was like a stupid child’s as he grasped an end of the belt with each hand to drag it up under his bloody leg. “Through the buckle there, the buckle,” Luntz said. “It’s a tourniquet,” he said as he got in the car.
He settled himself into the Caddy’s white leather. He turned the key. He lowered the window and called out, “You better move, Gambol, because this Caddy’s about to roll.”
He yanked the stick into drive and floored it out of the parking lot and, at the highway’s entrance, slammed the brake hard.
They’d be coming from the south, he guessed, from the hospital in Ortonville, Oroville, wherever. He turned north.
After he passed a highway patrol car heading toward him fast, lights whirling, he simply couldn’t drive any farther and hooked into a café’s parking lot on the outskirts of a town.
He put the Caddy behind the building and wiped his face with his sleeve. Sweat soaked his shirt and vest. He touched the dials of the climate control tenderly, stupidly, couldn’t make sense of them. Got out and removed the jacket and tie and vest and stood in the breeze, grabbed the doorframe, and bent double and vomited sour green liquid between his black shoes.
In the men’s room Luntz stood at the urinal a full minute, but nothing came out of him. He flushed anyway.
He put his hands on the sink and bowed his head and breathed several times in and out before raising his eyes to the mirror.
Around 11:00 a.m. Anita Desilvera went to the movies with a half pint of Popov vodka in her purse. As she approached the building she caught a glimpse of the poster for this epic:
The Last Real Champ
.
She bought a ticket from the stone-faced man in the box and went inside. She purchased a large pink lemonade, and on her way into the auditorium she dumped half of it into the drinking fountain with a clatter of ice cubes. Made her way down the aisle in the dark to one of the front rows. She sat down leaving her coat on and bowed her face against the seat in front of her for several seconds, then raised it up weeping.
Opened the bottle and poured the vodka into her drink, kicked the empty under the next seat.
This movie appeared to be about prizefighters. Gigantic boxing gloves plowed great globs of sweat from foreheads and jowls in extreme close-up. A man alone two rows ahead of her jerked and grunted as he followed the action: “Huh! Hah! Hoh!”
While men on the screen beat each other’s faces to pieces she sat in the dark and got thirty percent drunk and found a kerchief in the pocket of her overcoat and buried
her face in it and wept with greater abandon. There was really no other place for the wife of the Palo County prosecutor to gulp down booze and grieve. She didn’t even have a key to her own house. They’d taken everything but the car.
When her watch said ten minutes till noon she made her way to the washroom and got her face back together and ran a brush through her hair and went out to the glaring street.
The Packard Room lay two blocks from the theater. She walked briskly and breathed deeply. Outside the place she smoothed her gray skirt and straightened her coat, and as she entered the cool light of the greenhouse dining room she kept her shoulders back and made sure to smile with her entire face.
Hank Desilvera sat over in the corner looking rich. He smiled back at her like the Prince of All Tomorrow while dipping to get papers from his briefcase.
By the time she’d draped her coat on the empty chair and sat herself down, the meanest meal of her life lay at her place: The plea agreement. The letter of resignation. The waiver. Three copies of each.
She picked up the pen and signed. Flushing her life away took forty-five seconds.
Hank just laughed and put the stuff back in his briefcase beside his chair. He shrugged. He managed to make all this seem like a tough loss for her in what was sure to be an otherwise glorious season.