Pigeon Blood

  **********

  Blair imagined himself back in his old dorm room with a can of beer in his hand. He looked up from what he was working on at his desk and then over his shoulder. Vinnie was stretched out on his bed, his face a most stupendous shade of green.

  “Are you all right?” Blair asked him, just as he did five years ago. It was easy to think of what to say, since he’d already said it before.

  Vinnie laughed for no reason, lifting himself up to a sitting position. Blair was sober enough to tell that Vinnie was drunk.

  “Man, I feel like jumping out that window,” Vinnie said, nodding toward the single, double-paned window above his desk.

  “It’s a long way down,” Blair said just as unsympathetically as he had then.

  “Do you think four floors would kill me?”

  “Are you taking bets?”

  “Nawww,” Vinnie said, running his fingers through his dingy red hair and making it stand up more than before he’d messed with it. “I think Cynthia’s seeing somebody else.”

  “What?” Blair said, holding the beer can tighter in his hand until the aluminum started crackling from the pressure. Blair and Cynthia had only slept together three times, and he thought that they’d been more than discreet. They had taken severe precautions, the kinds people take when one or both paramours were married or otherwise betrothed to other people.

  “Cynthia’s cheating on me!” Vinnie said, getting up and standing next to the window. His shoulders slouched as he rested the palms of his hands against the sill. Slowly he bowed his head.

  “Who with?”

  When Vinnie turned to Blair, his beady, brown eyes seemed all-knowing and most judgmental. “I’m not sure,” he said, turning to sit down on top of his desk. “I want to marry her, you know? But how can I do that if I can’t trust her?”

  As Vinnie raised his hands for emphasis, he knocked over a bottle of sleeping pills. Carefully he picked them up and read the label. “Temazepam, thirty milligrams. Take at bedtime. Do not mix with alcohol.”

  “Sounds like good advice to me,” Blair told him.

  Vinnie looked up from the bottle and smiled. “Yeah, but I need to get some sleep tonight.”

  Although he thought about getting up and ripping those pills out of Vinnie’s hand, Blair did not. As a matter-of-fact, he was hoping that Vinnie would take them. Blair even felt like opening one of windows wide enough for Vinnie to slide through in case the mood to jump should hit him again. Getting Vinnie out of the way was becoming his first order of business.

  Vinnie stared at him with a grin; it was almost as if he could read Blair’s mind! That wide nose of his could sniff out any emotion, and those ears could probably hear sweat popping out of a pore. His intelligence inspired him to watch every move Blair made, and even with a glint of suspicion.

  **********

  A howling off in the distance jolted Blair awake again. He was aware enough to realize that he wasn’t on the sofa anymore but was lying on the floor behind it. Lifting his head, he tried to pull himself up but instead of rising, he only drifted off to sleep again.