The car started up. I tried to open my eyes but it took too much effort and I let them stay closed.
You can stay dead only so long. Where first there was nothing, the pieces all come drifting back together like a movie of an exploding shell run in reverse. The fragments come back slowly, grating together as they seek a matching part and painfully jar into place. You’re whole again, finally, but the scars and the worn places are all there to remind you that once you were dead. There’s life once more and, with it, a dull pain that pulsates at regular intervals, a light that’s too bright to look into and sound that’s more than you can stand. The flesh is weak and crawly, slack from the disuse that is the death, sensitive with the agonizing fire that is life. There’s memory that makes you want to crawl back into the void but the life is too vital to let you go.
The terrible shattered feeling was inside me, the pieces having a hard time trying to come together. My throat was still raw and cottony; constricted, somehow, from the tensed-up muscles at the back of my neck.
When I looked up Pat was holding out his cigarettes to me. “Smoke?”
I shook my head.
His voice had a callous edge to it when he said, “You quit?”
“Yeah.”
I felt his shrug. “When?”
“When I ran out of loot. Now knock it off.”
“You had loot enough to drink with.” His voice had a real dirty tone now.
There are times when you can’t take anything at all, no jokes, no rubs—nothing. Like the man said, you want nothing from nobody never. I propped my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed myself to my feet. The inside of my thighs quivered with the effort.
“Pat—I don’t know what the hell you’re pulling. I don’t give a damn either. Whatever it is, I don’t appreciate it. Just keep off my back, old buddy.”
A flat expression drifted across his face before the hardness came back. “We stopped being buddies a long time ago, Mike.”
“Good. Let’s keep it like that. Now where the hell’s my clothes?”
He spit a stream of smoke at my face and if I didn’t have to hold the back of the chair to stand up I would have belted him one. “In the garbage,” he said. “It’s where you belong too but this time you’re lucky.”
“You son of a bitch.”
I got another faceful of smoke and choked on it.
“You used to look a lot bigger to me, Mike. Once I couldn’t have taken you. But now you call me things like that and I’ll belt you silly.”
“You son of a bitch,” I said.
I saw it coming but couldn’t move, a blurred white open-handed smash that took me right off my feet into the chair that turned over and left me in a sprawled lump against the wall. There was no pain to it, just a taut sickness in the belly that turned into a wrenching dry heave that tasted of blood from the cut inside my mouth. I could feel myself twitching spasmodically with every contraction of my stomach and when it was over I lay there with relief so great I thought I was dead.
He let me get up by myself and half fall into the chair. When I could focus again, I said, “Thanks, buddy. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Pat shrugged noncommittally and held out a glass. “Water. It’ll settle your stomach.”
“Drop dead.”
He put the glass down on an end table as the bell rang. When he came back he threw a box down on the sofa and pointed to it. “New clothes. Get dressed.”
“I don’t have any new clothes.”
“You have now. You can pay me later.”
“I’ll pay you up the guzukus later.”
He walked over, seemingly balancing on the balls of his feet. Very quietly he said, “You can get yourself another belt in the kisser without trying hard, mister.”
I couldn’t let it go. I tried to swing coming up out of the chair and like the last time I could see it coming but couldn’t get out of the way. All I heard was a meaty smash that had a familiar sound to it and my stomach tried to heave again but it was too late. The beautiful black had come again.
My jaws hurt. My neck hurt. My whole side felt like it was coming out. But most of all my jaws hurt. Each tooth was an independent source of silent agony while the pain in my head seemed to center just behind each ear. My tongue was too thick to talk and when I got my eyes open I had to squint them shut again to make out the checkerboard pattern of the ceiling.
When the fuzziness went away I sat up, trying to remember what happened. I was on the couch this time, dressed in a navy blue suit. The shirt was clean and white, the top button open and the black knitted tie hanging down loose. Even the shoes were new and in the open part of my mind it was like the simple wonder of a child discovering the new and strange world of the ants when he turns over a rock.
“You awake?”
I looked up and Pat was standing in the archway, another guy behind him carrying a small black bag.
When I didn’t answer Pat said, “Take a look at him, Larry.”
The one he spoke to pulled a stethoscope from his pocket and hung it around his neck. Then everything started coming back again. I said, “I’m all right. You don’t hit that hard.”
“I wasn’t half trying, wise guy.”
“Then why the medic?”
“General principles. This is Larry Snyder. He’s a friend of mine.”
“So what?” The doc had the stethoscope against my chest but I couldn’t stop him even if I had wanted to. The examination was quick, but pretty thorough. When he finished he stood up and pulled out a prescription pad.
Pat asked, “Well?”
“He’s been around. Fairly well marked out. Fist fights, couple of bullet scars—”
“He’s had them.”
“Fist marks are recent. Other bruises made by some blunt instrument. One rib—”
“Shoes,” I interrupted. “I got stomped.”
“Typical alcoholic condition,” he continued. “From all external signs I’d say he isn’t too far from total. You know how they are.”
“Damn it,” I said, “quit talking about me in the third person.”
Pat grunted something under his breath and turned to Larry. “Any suggestions?”
“What can you do with them?” the doctor laughed. “They hit the road again as soon as you let them out of your sight. Like him—you buy him new clothes and as soon as he’s near a swap shop he’ll turn them in on rags with cash to boot and pitch a big one. They go back harder than ever once they’re off awhile.”
“Meanwhile I can cool him for a day.”
“Sure. He’s okay now. Depends upon personal supervision.”
Pat let out a terse laugh. “I don’t care what he does when I let him loose. I want him sober for one hour. I need him.”
When I glanced up I saw the doctor looking at Pat strangely, then me. “Wait a minute. This is that guy you were telling me about one time?”
Pat nodded. “That’s right.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“We were at one time, but nobody’s friends with a damn drunken bum. He’s nothing but a lousy lush and I’d as soon throw his can in the tank as I would any other lush. Being friends once doesn’t mean anything to me. Friends can wear out pretty fast sometimes. He wore out. Now he’s part of a job. For old times’ sake I throw in a few favors on the side but they’re strictly for old times’ sake and only happen once. Just once. After that he stays bum and I stay cop. I catch him out of line and he’s had it.”
Larry laughed gently and patted him on the shoulder. Pat’s face was all tight in a mean grimace and it was a way I had never seen him before. “Relax,” Larry told him. “Don’t you get wound up.”
“So I hate slobs,” he said.
“You want a prescription too? There are economy-sized bottles of tranquilizers nowadays.”