Everville

To the end of her days, Phoebe would never be exactly sure what happened next. She went after Morton to hold him back, or at least delay him long enough for Joe to get to the front door—that much was sure—but as she grabbed his shoulder, Joe stepped or slipped into his path. Perhaps he struck Morton; perhaps Morton stumbled, weak from blood loss; perhaps her weight was enough to topple him. Whichever it was, he fell forward, reaching to snatch hold of Joe even as he did so. As he struck the ground there was a snapping sound, followed by something like a sob from Morton. He didn’t get up. His legs twitched for a moment. Then he lay still.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God . . . ” Joe said, and turning from Phoebe started to vomit violently.

  Still afraid Morton could get up again, she approached him cautiously. There was blood seeping from beneath his chest. The fork! She’d forgotten the fork!

  She started to roll him over. He was still breathing, but his breaths were like spasms, shaking him from head to toe. As for the fork, it had snapped halfway down its length. The rest, maybe three inches of it, was buried in his chest.

  Joe was getting to his feet now, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Gotta get a doctor here,” he said, and disappeared into the living room.

  Phoebe went after him. “Wait, wait,” she said. “What are we going to say?”

  “Tell ’em the truth,” he said. He pulled the phone out of the debris. It had been dragged out of the wall. Grimacing with every move he made, he stopped to plug it back in, while Phoebe pulled on her underwear. “They’re going to put me away for this, baby.”

  “It was an accident,” she said.

  He shook his head. “That’s not the way it works,” he went on. “I’ve had trouble before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’ve got a record,” he said. “I would’ve told you—”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  “Well, you should,” he snapped, “because that screws everything.” He had found the end of the phone line, but it ended in sheared wires. “It’s no good,” he said, tossing the phone down amid the trashed furniture. Then he got to his feet, tears filling his eyes. “I’m so sorry . . . ” he said, “I’m so . . . sorry.”

  “You’d better go,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I can take care of Morton. You just go.” She’d pulled on her skirt, and was buttoning up her blouse. “I’ll explain everything, he’ll be looked after, then we’ll just get out together.” There was faulty logic here, she knew, but it was the best she could do. “I mean it,” she said. “Get dressed and go!”

  She went back to the door. Morton was muttering now, which was an improvement on the spasms: obscenities mingled with nonsense, like baby talk, except that there was blood coming from between his lips instead of milk and spit.

  “He’s going to be all right,” she said to Joe, who was still standing in the middle of the wrecked room looking desolate. “Will you please go? I’ll be fine.”

  Then she was out into the sunlight, and down the stairs. The kids had stopped playing in the street, and were watching from the opposite sidewalk.

  “What are you looking at?” she said to them in the tone she took to latecomers at the surgery. The group dispersed in seconds, and she hurried along to the phone at the corner of the street, not daring to look back for fear she’d see Joe slipping away.

  NINE

  I

  I bet you thought this was a quiet little town, right?” Will Hamrick said, sliding another glass of brandy the way of his sober-suited customer.

  “Is it not?” the fellow said.

  He had the look of money about him, Will thought; an ease that only came when people had dollars in their pocket. Hopefully, he’d spend a few of them on brandies before he moved on.

  “There’s been some kind of bloodshed across town this afternoon.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A guy comes in all the time, Morton Cobb, sits at the table by the wall there,” Will pointed to it, “been carted off to the hospital with a fork in his heart.”

  “A fork?” said the man, plucking at his perfect moustaches.

  “That’s what I said, I said a fork, just like that, a fork, I said. Big man too.”

  “Hmm,” said the man, pushing the glass back in Will’s direction.

  “Another?”

  “Why not? We should celebrate.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “How about bloodshed?” the fellow replied. This struck Will as tasteless, which fact must have registered on his long, dolorous features, because the drinker said, “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. Is this fellow Cobb a friend of yours?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So this attempt upon his life, by the wife, or her lover, her black lover—”

  “You’ve heard.”

  “Of course I’ve heard. This bloody, scandalous deed is really just something to be . . . savored, isn’t it?” He sipped his brandy. “No?”

  Will didn’t reply. The fellow was spooking him a little, truth to tell.

  “Have I offended you?” he asked Will.

  “No.”

  “You are a professional bartender, am I right?”

  “I own this place,” Will said.

  “All the better. You see a man like yourself is in a very influential position. This is a place where people congregate, and when people congregate, what do they do?”

  Will shrugged.

  “They tell tales,” came the reply.

  “I really don’t—”

  “Please, Mr.—”

  “Hamrick.”

  “Mr. Hamrick, I’ve been in bars in cities across the world—Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Constantinople—and the great bars, the ones that become legendary, they have one thing in common, and it isn’t the perfect vodka martini. It’s a fellow like you. A disseminator.”

  “A what?”

  “One who sows seeds.”

  “You got me wrong, mister,” Will said with a little grin. “You want Doug Kenny at Farm Supplies.”

  The brandy drinker didn’t bother to laugh. “Personally,” he said, “I hope Morton Cobb dies. It’ll make a much better story.” Will pursed his lips. “Go on, admit it,” the man said, leaning forward, “if Morton Cobb dies of a fork wound to the chest will it not be a far better story for you to tell?”

  “Well . . . ” Will said, “I guess maybe it would.”

  “There. That wasn’t so difficult was it?” The drinker drained his glass. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Nine bucks.”

  The man brought out an alligator-skin wallet, and from it drew not one but two crisp ten-dollar bills. He laid them down on the counter. “Keep the change,” he said. “I may pop back in, to see if you’ve got any juicy details about the Cobb affair. The depth of the wound, the size of the lover’s apparatus—that sort of thing.” The brandy drinker smirked. “Now don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind. If there’s one thing a good disseminator knows it’s that every detail counts. Especially the ones nobody’ll confess they’re interested in. Tell them shameful stuff and they’ll love you for it.” Now he laughed, and his laughter was as musical as his voice. “I speak,” he said, “as a man who has been well-loved.”

  And with that he was gone, leaving Will to stare down at the twenty bucks not certain whether he should be grateful for the man’s generosity or burning the bills in the nearest ashtray.

  * * *

  II

  Phoebe stared at the face on the pillow and thought: Morton’s got more bristles than a hog. Bristles from his nose; bristles from his ears; bristles erupting from his eyebrows and from under his chin where he’d missed them shaving.

  Did I love him before the bristles? she asked herself. Then: Did I ever love him?

  Her musings were curiously detached, which fact she put down to the tranquilizers she’d been given a couple of hours before. Without them, she doubted she would have gotten through t
he humiliations and interrogations without collapsing. She’d had her body examined (her breasts were bruised and her face puffy, but there was no serious damage); she’d had Jed Gilholly, Everville’s police chief, asking her questions about her relationship with Joe (who he was; why she’d done it); she’d been ferried back from the hospital in Silverton to the apartment, and quizzed about what, precisely, had happened where. And finally, having told all she’d could tell, she was brought back to the bedside where she now sat, to sit and meditate on the mystery of Morton’s bristles.

  Though the doctor had pronounced his condition stable, she knew the patient’s vices by rote. He smoked, he drank, he ate too much red meat and too many fried eggs. His body, for all its bulk, was not strong. When he got the flu—which he did most winters—he’d be sick for weeks. But he had to live. She hated him down to every last wiry bristle, but he had to live.

  Jed Gilholly came by a little before five, and called her out into the hallway. He and his family (two girls, now both in their early teens) were all patients of Dr. Powell’s, and while his wife and children were pretty healthy, Jed himself was severely dyspeptic, and—if memory served—had the first mumbling of a prostate problem. It made him rather less forbidding, knowing these little things.

  “I got some news,” he said to her. “About your . . . er . . . boyfriend.”

  They’ve caught him, she thought.

  “He’s a felon, Phoebe.”

  No, maybe they hadn’t.

  “He was involved in a wounding incident in Kentucky, four or five years ago. Got probation. If you know where he is . . . ”

  They hadn’t got him, thank the Lord.

  “I suggest you tell me right now, ’cause this whole mess is looking pretty bad for him.”

  “I told you,” she said, “Morton was the one started it.”

  “And Morton’s also the one lying in there,” Jed replied. “He could have died, Phoebe.”

  “It was an accident. I was the one stuck the fork in him, not Joe. If you’re going to arrest anybody, it should be me.”

  “I saw what he did to you,” Jed said, a little embarrassed, “knocking you around like that. I reckon what we got here is some wife beating, some assault, and,” he looked Phoebe in the eyes, “a man who’s been in trouble with the law before, and who’s maybe a danger to the community.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what’s ridiculous and what’s not,” Jed said. “Now I’m asking you again: do you know where Flicker is?”

  “And I’m telling you straight,” Phoebe replied, “no I don’t.”

  Jed nodded, his true feelings unreadable. “I’m going to tell you something, Phoebe, that I wouldn’t maybe say if I didn’t know you.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s simple really. I don’t know what the story was between you and this guy Flicker. I do know Morton isn’t the friendliest of guys the way he beat you around this afternoon,” he shook his head, “that’s a crime all of its own. But I have to consider your boyfriend dangerous, and if there’s a choice between his safety and the safety of my officers—”

  “He’s not going to hurt anybody.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Phoebe. He isn’t going to get the chance.”

  * * *

  III

  Without a vehicle, Joe had been presented with a limited number of options. He could steal a car and drive somewhere isolated then come back for Phoebe after dark. He could find somewhere to hide within the city limits, and bide his time there. Or he could climb.

  He chose the latter. The stealing of a vehicle would only add to his sum of crimes, and the city was too small and too white for him to pass unnoticed in its streets. Up the mountain he would go, he decided; at least far enough to be safe from pursuers.

  He’d left the apartment with the barest minimum of supplies: some food, a jacket for later on, and, most important, given the condition he was in, the first-aid box. He’d only had time for a perfunctory self-examination (just enough to check that he wasn’t going to bleed to death) before making his escape, but the pain was excruciating, and he only got as far as the creek before he had to stop. There, he slithered down into the ditch where the creek ran, and, out of sight of all but the fishes, washed his bruised and bloodied groin as tenderly as he could. It was a slow, agonizing business. He could barely suppress his cries when the icy water ran over his lacerated flesh, and several times had to stop completely before the pain made him pass out. At last, against his better judgment, he resorted to chewing two painkillers he’d stored with the kit, the last (but one) of ten Percodan he’d been prescribed for a back injury. It was powerful stuff; and had induced in him a kind of blissful stupor which was not to his present advantage. But without it he doubted he’d be able to get much further than the creek.

  He sat on the bank for a while and waited for them to kick in before he finished with his ministrations, his trousers and blood-crusted underwear around his ankles. The blaze of the day was over, but the sun still found its way through the ferns and gilded the sliding water. He watched it go while the pain subsided. If this was what death was like, he thought—pain receding, languor spreading—it would be worth the wait.

  After a few minutes, with his thoughts fuzzier than they’d been and his fingers more clumsy, he returned to washing his wounds. His balls had ballooned to twice their normal size in the last half-hour, the sac purplish in places and raw-red in others. He felt the testicles gently, rolling them in between his fingers. Even through the haze of Percodan they were painful, but he felt nothing separated or clotted. He might yet have children, one of these distant days. As to his cock, it was badly torn in three places, where Morton had ground his heel upon it. Joe finished cleaning the cuts with creek water and then applied liberal dollops of antiseptic cream.

  Once, during this delicate procedure, a wave of nausea rose up in him—less at the sight of his wounds than at the memory of how he’d come by them—and he had no choice but to stop and watch the sun on the water until the feeling subsided. His mind wandered as he waited. Twenty-nine years on the planet (thirty in a month’s time) and he had nothing to show for it but this pitiful condition. That would have to change if he was to get through another twenty-nine. His body had taken enough punishment for one lifetime. From now on, he would chart his course, instead of letting circumstances take him where they would. He’d put the past behind him, not by denying it but by allowing it to be part of him, pain and all. He was lucky, wasn’t he? Love had found him, in the form of a woman who would have died for him this afternoon. Most people never had that in their lives. They lived with compromise where love was concerned; with a mate who was better than nothing but less than everything. Phoebe was so much more than that.

  She wasn’t the first woman to have said she loved him, nor even the first he’d replied to in kind. But she was the first he was afraid to lose, the first he knew his life would be empty without; the first he thought he might love after the fierce heat was gone, after the time when she’d cared to spread her cunt for him, or he to see it spread.

  A sharp pain in his groin reminded him of his present state, and he looked down to see that all was not lost. His cock had risen to respectable erection while he’d pictured Phoebe’s display, and he had to concentrate on counting flies until it had subsided. Then he finished putting on ointment, and bandaged himself up, albeit roughly. It was time to move on, before the search spread as far as the creek; and before the effect of the painkillers wore off.

  He pulled up his pants, buried the litter from his salvings, and wandering a little way up the bank found a place where the creek was narrow enough to be crossed in a hobbled leap. Then he clambered up the opposite bank and headed off up the slope between the trees.

  * * *

  IV

  At six-seventeen, while Phoebe was at the hot drink machine getting a cup of coffee, Morton opened his eyes. When she got back to the room, he was babbling to t
he nurse about how he’d been on a boat, and fallen overboard.

  “I coulda drowned,” he kept saying, clutching at the sheets as though they were lifelines. “I coulda. I coulda drowned.”

  “No, Mr. Cobb. You’re in a hospital—”

  “Hospital?” he said, raising his head off the pillow an inch or two, though the nurse did her best to restrain him. “I was floating—”

  “You were dreaming, Morton,” Phoebe said, stepping into his line of vision.

  At the sight of her the memory of what had brought him here seemed to come back. “Oh Christ,” he said through clenched teeth, “Christ in Heaven,” and sank back onto the pillow. “You bitch,” he muttered now. “You fucking bitch.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Cobb,” the nurse insisted, but fueled by a sudden spurt of rage, Morton sat bolt upright, tearing at the drip tube in his arm as he did so.

  “I knew!” he screamed, jabbing his finger in Phoebe’s direction.

  “Do as the nurse says, Morton.”

  “Please, give me a hand, Mrs. Cobb,” the beleaguered woman said.

  Phoebe put down her coffee and went to assist, but the proximity of his wife threw Morton into a frenzy.

  “Don’t you fucking touch me! Don’t you—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence, and uttered a tiny sound, almost like a hiccup. Then all the venom went out of him at once—his arms dropped to his sides, his knotted face slackened and went blank—and the nurse, unable to support the weight of his upper body, had no choice but to let him sink back onto the pillow. It did not end there. Even as the nurse raced to the door calling for help, Morton began to draw a series of agonizing breaths, each more panicked and desperate than the one before.

  She couldn’t watch him suffer without trying to do something to calm him.

  “It’s all right,” she said, going back to the bedside and laying her hand on his cold brow. “Morton. Listen to me. It’s all right.”

  His eyes were roving back and forth behind his lids. His gasps were horrible.