Billy Summers

CHAPTER 24

1

It’s November 21, 2019, a week from Thanksgiving, but the occupants of the house at the end of Edgewood Mountain Drive aren’t in a Thanksgiving frame of mind. It’s cold outside – colder than a welldigger’s belt-buckle, Bucky says – and snow is on the way. He has lit a fire in the kitchen stove and sits in one of his rocking chairs dragged in from the porch with his sock feet up on the fender. He’s got an open laptop, rather scratched and battered, balanced on his thighs. A door opens behind him and footsteps approach. Alice comes into the kitchen and sits at the table. She’s pale and at least ten pounds lighter than the first time Bucky saw her. Her cheeks are hollowed out, giving her the look of a half-starved fashion model.

‘Finished, or still reading?’

‘Finished. Just looking at the end again. That part doesn’t make much sense.’

Alice says nothing.

‘Because if he left you the thumb drive, the part about him walking down the road and throwing away the guns couldn’t be on it.’

Alice says nothing. Since she arrived at Bucky’s place, she has said very little, and Bucky hasn’t pushed her. What she’s done, mostly, is sleep and write on the laptop Bucky now closes and holds up.

‘MacBook Pro. Nice gadget, but this one has been around the block a few times.’

‘Yes,’ Alice says. ‘I guess that’s true.’

‘So in the story Billy took his laptop with him, but here it is. Add the stuff that couldn’t be on the thumb drive and it’s kind of a science fiction – type story.’

The young woman sitting at the kitchen table says nothing.

‘Still, there’s no reason it shouldn’t hold together. No reason for people who read it to think he didn’t just walk away and is living out west somewhere. Or in Australia, he always talked about that. Maybe writing a book. Another one. He always talked about that too, but I never thought it would come to anything.’

He looks at her. Alice looks back. Outside a cold wind is blowing and it looks like snow, but it’s warm here in the kitchen. A knot pops in the stove.

At last Bucky says, ‘Will people read it, Alice?’

‘I don’t know … I’d have to change the names …’

He shakes his head. ‘Klerke’s murder was world-wide news. Still …’ He sees her disappointment and shrugs. ‘They’d maybe think it was a roman à clef. That’s French. I learned it from him. He said it while I was reading this old paperback I picked up at the Strand. Valley of the Dolls, it was called.’ He shrugs again. ‘Just as long as you keep me out of it, I don’t care. Call me Trevor Wheatley or something and put me up in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. As for Nick Majarian, that motherfucker can take care of himself.’

‘Is it any good, do you think?’

He puts the laptop – Billy’s old standby – on the kitchen table. ‘I think so, but I’m no literary critic.’

‘Does it sound like him?’

Bucky laughs. ‘Sweetheart, I never read anything he wrote, so I can’t say for sure, but it sure sounds like his voice. And the voice stays the same all the way through. Put it this way, I can’t tell for sure where you took over.’

Smiles have been in short supply since Alice came back, but she gives him one now. ‘That’s good. I think it’s the most important part.’

‘Did you make that up about me being a bad man, too?’

She doesn’t drop her eyes. ‘No. He said it.’

‘You wrote what you wished had happened,’ Bucky says. ‘The hero of the story walks away into the future toting his suitcase. Now tell me what really did happen.’

So she does.

2

They drive back to Riverhead, stopping on the way for Band-Aids, a roll of gauze, tape, hydrogen peroxide, and Betadine ointment. Alice goes into the Walgreens while Billy waits in the car. At the hotel they enter by the side door. Once they’re in his room, she helps him off with the bomber jacket. There’s a hole in it, and another in his shirt. Not a rip but a hole, and not in the side, as he told her. Farther in.

‘Oh my God,’ Alice says. Her voice is muffled because her hand is over her mouth. ‘That’s not a graze, that’s your stomach.’

‘I guess it is. Or maybe a little lower?’ He sounds bemused.

‘In the bathroom,’ Alice says. ‘If you don’t want to leave a lot of blood around.’

But once they’re in there and she helps him get his shirt off, she sees there is almost no blood coming from the red-black hole. She’s able to cover it with one of the Band-Aids after she’s used the hydrogen peroxide and a little Betadine.

She has to help him back to the bed. He’s walking slowly and listing to the right. His face is sheened with sweat. ‘Marge,’ he says. ‘Fucking Marge.’

He sits down but gasps when his body bends. Alice asks him how bad it hurts.

‘Not too bad.’

‘Are you lying?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Well, a little.’

She touches his stomach to the right of the hole and he gasps again. ‘Don’t.’

‘We have to get you to a hos.’ She stops. ‘We can’t, can we? It’s a gunshot wound and they have to report those.’

‘You’re turning outlaw on me,’ he says, and grins. ‘You really are.’

Alice shakes her head. ‘I just watch too much television.’

‘I’ll be okay. I saw worse in Iraq and guys were back clearing blocks the next day.’

Alice shakes her head. ‘You’re bleeding inside. Aren’t you? And the bullet’s still in there.’

Billy doesn’t reply. She stares at the Band-Aid. It looks stupid. Like something you’d put on a scrape.

‘Try to lie still tonight. On your back. Do you want Tylenol? I’ve got some in my purse.’

‘If Tylenol’s what you’ve got, I’ll take it.’

She gives him two and helps him to sit up so he can take them with water. He coughs, cupping his hand over his mouth. She grabs the hand and looks at it. There’s no blood in the palm. Maybe that’s good. Maybe it isn’t. She doesn’t know.

‘Thank you.’

‘No thanks needed. I’d do anything for you, Billy.’

He presses his lips together. ‘We need to get out of here in the morning. Early.’

‘Billy, we can’t—’

‘What we can’t do is stay here.’

‘I’ll call Bucky. He’s got connections. One of them might be a doctor in New York who can treat a gunshot wound.’

Billy shakes his head. ‘That could happen in a TV show. Not in real life. Bucky’s not that kind of fixer. But if we make it back to Sidewinder, to gun country, he’ll be able to find somebody.’

‘That’s almost two thousand miles! I googled it!’

Billy nods. ‘You’ll have to do some of the driving, maybe even most of it, and we need to make it as fast as we can. If there’s a snowstorm, God help us.’

‘Two thousand miles!’ It feels like a weight on her shoulders.

‘There might be a way to speed the plow.’

‘Speed the—’

‘It’s the name of a play. Never mind.’ Grimacing, he reaches into his back pocket, brings out his wallet, and hands it to her. ‘Find my ATM card. There’s a machine on the mezzanine level. My passcode in, 1055. Can you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘The machine will let you take four hundred dollars. Tomorrow morning, before we leave, you can get another four hundred.’

‘Why so much?’

‘Never mind now. What I’m thinking of may not work anyway, but let’s be optimists. Find the card.’

She thumbs through his wallet and finds it. The embossed name is Dalton Curtis Smith. She holds it up, eyebrows raised.

‘Go, girl.’

The girl goes. The mezzanine level is deserted. Muzak plays softly. Alice puts in the plastic and punches the code. She half expects the machine to eat the card, maybe even start sounding an alarm, but it pops back out and the money does, too. All twenties, fresh and uncreased. She folds them and puts the wad in her purse. When she comes back to Billy’s room, he’s lying down.

‘How is it?’ she asks.

‘Not terrible. I was able to go to the bathroom and take a leak. No blood. Maybe the bullet being in there is good. It might be stopping up the bleeding.’

This sounds unlikely to Alice, like her grandmother saying a little cigarette smoke blown into an aching ear would quiet the pain, but she doesn’t say so. She roots in her purse instead and comes out with her bottle of Tylenol. ‘How about another one of these?’

‘God, yes.’

She gets him a glass of water in the bathroom and when she comes back he’s sitting up with his hand pressed to his side. He takes the pill and lies down again, wincing.

‘I’m going to stay with you. Don’t even think about arguing with me.’

He doesn’t. ‘I’d like to be out of here by six. Seven at the latest. So get some sleep.’

3

‘And did you?’ Bucky asks. ‘Get some sleep?’

‘A little. Not much. I doubt if he got any. I didn’t know how bad it was, how deep the bullet went in.’

‘I’m guessing it perforated his intestines. Maybe his stomach.’

‘Could you have found him a doctor? If I’d called you?’

Bucky thinks it over. ‘No, but I could have reached out to someone who might have been able to reach out to someone else on short notice. Someone of a medical persuasion.’

‘Would Billy have known that?’

Bucky shrugs. ‘He knows I have a lot of connections in different fields.’

‘Then why wouldn’t he at least have let me try it?’

‘Maybe he didn’t want to,’ Bucky says. ‘Maybe, Alice, he just wanted to get you here and be done.’

4

They leave the hotel at six-thirty. Billy is able to walk to the car unassisted. He says that with a couple more of Alice’s Tylenol onboard, the pain is pretty manageable. Alice wants to believe it and can’t. He’s walking with a limp, hand pressed to his left side. He gets into the passenger seat with the slow, almost glassy care of an old man with arthritic hips. She starts the engine and gets the heater going against the morning chill, then hurries back inside to get another four hundred dollars from the ATM. She snags a trolley for their luggage and trundles it out to the car.

‘Let’s roll,’ he says, trying to buckle his seatbelt. ‘Fuck, I can’t get this.’

She does it for him, and then they roll.

It’s Route 27 to the Long Island Expressway and the LIE to I-95. The traffic gets progressively heavier on the Expressway, and Alice drives sitting bolt upright, hands clutching the wheel at ten and two, nervous about the river of cars passing on both her left and right. She’s only had a driver’s license for slightly over three years and she’s never driven in traffic like this. In her mind she sees half a dozen accidents waiting to happen because of her inexperience. In the worst, they are killed instantly in a four-car pile-up. In the second-worst, they survive but the responding police discover that her companion has a bullet in his gut.

‘Take the next exit,’ Billy says. ‘We’ll switch. I’m going to drive us through the metro area, then across New Jersey. Once we’re in PA, you can take over. You’ll be fine.’

‘Can you?’

‘Absolutely.’ The strained grin she doesn’t like appears. His face is damp again, sweat running in little rivulets, and his cheeks are flushed. Can he have a fever-induced infection already? Alice doesn’t know, but she knows Tylenol won’t stop it if he does. ‘If we’re lucky, I may even be able to do it in relative comfort.’

Alice changes lanes to line up with the exit. Someone honks and she jumps. Her heart skips in her chest. The traffic is insane.

‘That was their bad,’ Billy says. ‘Tailgating son of a bitch. Probably a Yankee fan. There – see that sign? That’s what we want.’

The sign shows a hand-waving truck driver jumping back and forth over a sixteen-wheeler outlined in pink neon. Below it, also in pink neon: HAPPY JACK’S TRUCK STOP.

‘Saw it on our way out. On a better day, before Marge perforated me.’

‘We have almost a full tank of gas, Billy.’

‘Gas isn’t what we want. Pull around back. And put this in your purse.’ From under the seat he takes Marge’s Smith & Wesson ACP.

‘I don’t want it.’ This is absolutely true. She never wants to touch another gun in her life.

‘I get that but take it anyway. It’s not loaded. The chances that you even have to show it are about one in a hundred.’

She takes it, drops it in her purse, and drives around to where she sees dozens of ranked long-haul trucks, most of them grumbling quietly.

‘No lot lizards. They must be sleeping in.’

‘What are lot lizards? Whores? Truck-stop whores?’

‘Yes.’

‘Charming.’

‘You need to stroll around those trucks, kind of like you were shopping back at those malls where you bought your clothes. Because shopping is what you’re doing.’

‘Won’t they think I’m a lizard?’

This time it’s not the grin but the smile she’s come to love. He scans her blue jeans, her parka, and most of all her face, which is innocent of makeup. ‘Not a chance. I want you to hunt for a truck with the visor turned down. There’ll be something green on it, like a piece of paper or celluloid. Or maybe some ribbon on the doorhandle. If the trucker is in the cab, you step up and knock on his window. With me?’

‘Yes.’

‘If the driver doesn’t just wave you off, if he rolls down his window, you say that you’re on a long trip, like coast to coast long, and your boyfriend is having back spasms. Tell him you’re doing most of the driving and you were hoping to find some pain med stronger than aspirin or Tylenol for him and some stimulants stronger than coffee or Monster Energy for you. Got it?’

Now she understands the two visits to the ATM.

‘I’m hoping for OxyContin but Percs or Vikes would be okay. If it’s Oxy, tell him you’ll pay ten for tens or eighty for eighties.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Ten bucks for ten milligram tablets, eighty for eighty milligrams – the greenies. If he tries to jack you up to double that …’ Billy shifts in his seat and grimaces. ‘Tell him to take a hike. Speed for you. Adderall is good, Provigil maybe even better. Got it?’

Alice nods. ‘I need to go inside and pee first. I’m pretty nervous.’

Billy nods and closes his eyes. ‘Lock up, right? I’m in no shape to fight off a carjacker.’

She pees, picks up some snacks and drinks in the store, then goes out and starts walking around the trucks out back. Someone wolf-whistles after her. She ignores it. She’s looking for a turned-down visor with something green on it, or a ribbon blowing from a doorhandle. What she finds, just as she’s about to give up, is a rumbling Peterbilt with a green Jesus stuck to the dashboard. She’s scared, thinks the man behind the wheel will probably either laugh at her or give her a you’re crazy look, but Billy is in pain and she’ll do anything for him.

She steps up and knocks. The window rolls down. It’s a Scandahoovian-looking dude with straw-blond hair and a big old jelly-belly. His eyes are ice blue. He looks at her with no expression. ‘If you’re looking for help, honey, call Triple-A.’

She tells him about the back spasms and the long drive and says she can pay if it’s not too much.

‘How do I know you’re not a cop?’

The question is so unexpected she laughs, and that’s the convincer. They dicker. She ends up parting with five hundred of the eight hundred dollars for ten ten-milligram Oxys, one eighty (what Billy called a greenie), and a dozen orange Adderall tabs. She’s pretty sure he jacked her up most righteously, but Alice doesn’t care. She runs back to the Mitsubishi with a smile. Part of it is relief. Part of it is a sense of accomplishment: her first drug deal. Maybe she really is turning outlaw.

Billy’s dozing with his head back and his chin pointing at the windshield. His face has thinned out. Some of the stubble on his cheeks is gray. He opens his eyes when she knocks on the window and leans over to unlock the doors, wincing as he does it. He has to push on the steering wheel to get straight in his seat again and she thinks he won’t be able to drive them two miles, let alone across New York and New Jersey in heavy traffic.

‘Did you score?’ he asks as she slides in behind the wheel.

She opens the handkerchief into which she folded the pills. He looks and says it’s good, she did well. It makes her happy.

‘Did you have to show the gun?’

She shakes her head.

‘Didn’t think you would.’ He takes the greenie. ‘I’ll save the rest for later.’

‘Won’t that knock you out?’

‘No. People who use it to get high get sleepy. I’m not using it for that.’

‘Will you actually be able to drive? Because I can try—’

‘Give me ten minutes, then we’ll see.’

It’s fifteen. Then he opens the passenger door and says, ‘Switch places with me.’

He walks around the car without limping too much and gets behind the wheel without wincing at all. ‘Johnny Capps was right, the stuff is magic. Of course that’s what makes it so dangerous.’

‘You’re okay?’

‘Good to go,’ Billy says. ‘For awhile, anyway.’

He swings out of the back lot where the big trucks sleep and merges smoothly onto the LIE, slotting neatly behind a pickup hauling a boat trailer and ahead of a dump truck. Alice thinks she would have hesitated for minutes with exit traffic backing up behind her, honking like crazy, and when she finally pulled out she would have gotten slammed from behind. Soon they’re up to sixty-five, Billy moving in and out of slower traffic with no hesitation. She waits for the drug to start messing with his timing. It doesn’t happen.

‘Get some news on the radio,’ he says. ‘Try 1010 WINS on the AM.’

She finds WINS. There’s a story about a pipeline leak in North Dakota, a plane crash in Texas, and a school shooting in Santa Clara. There’s nothing about the murder of a media mogul at his estate on Montauk Point.

‘That’s good,’ Billy says. ‘We need all the running room we can get.’

Outlaws for sure, she thinks.

By the time the New York skyline is on the horizon, he’s sweating again, but his driving remains firm and confident. They take the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey. With Alice calling out directions from her GPS, Billy gets to 1-80. He doesn’t make it all the way to the Pennsylvania state line but pulls off at a tiny rest area in Netcong Borough.

‘All I can do,’ he says. ‘Your turn. Take an Adderall now, and probably another two around four o’clock, when you start to fade. Then keep driving as long as you can. Try to make it until ten o’clock. By then we’ll have put almost eight hundred miles behind us.’

Alice looks at the orange pill. ‘What’s it going to do to me?’

Billy smiles. ‘You’ll be fine. Trust me.’

She swallows the pill. Billy slides slowly from behind the wheel, makes it halfway around the hood of the Mitsubishi, then staggers and has to hold on. Alice gets out in a hurry and steadies him.

‘How bad?’

‘Not bad,’ he says, but her eyes are on him and he says, ‘Actually pretty bad. I’m going to get in back and stretch out as much as I can. Give me two of those ten-milligram Oxys. Maybe I can sleep.’

She supports him to the back door as best she can and helps him in. She wants to pull up his shirt and look at the area around the Band-Aid, but he won’t let her and she doesn’t press him, partly because she knows he wants her to get going and partly because she knows she wouldn’t like what she’d see.

The pill is working. At first she thinks it’s her imagination, but the way her heartbeat is ramping up isn’t imagination, and neither is the way her vision seems to be clarifying. There’s grass around the rest area’s little brick comfort station and she can see the shadow thrown by each blade. A fluttering potato chip bag looks, there’s no other word for it, delicious. She discovers that she wants to drive now, wants to watch as the Mitsubishi swallows up the miles.

Billy either reads her mind or knows from experience how the Adderall is hitting a girl who’s never taken a stimulant stronger than her morning coffee. ‘Sixty-five,’ he says. ‘Seventy if you have to pass a semi. We don’t want any flashing blue lights, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Let’s roll.’

5

‘We rolled, all right,’ Alice says. ‘My mouth got dry and I finished both my Diet Coke and his Sprite, but I didn’t have to pee for the longest time. It was like I left my bladder at Happy Jack’s Truck Stop.’

‘Speed does that,’ Bucky says. ‘You probably didn’t want to eat, either.’

‘I didn’t, but knew I had to. I stopped around three o’clock for sandwiches. Billy stayed in back. He was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him.’

Bucky doubts very much if Billy was sleeping, not with internal bleeding and a spreading infection, but he keeps quiet on that score.

‘I took two more of the pills and kept driving. We stopped for the night at a no-tell motel – our specialty – outside Gary, Indiana. Billy was awake by then, but he made me check in. I had to help him to the room. He could barely walk. I told him to take more of the OxyContin and he said he had to save them for tomorrow. I got him on the bed and looked at the wound. He didn’t want me to, but by then he was too weak to stop me.’

Alice’s voice remains steady through all of this, but she wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater again and again.

‘Was it turning black?’ Bucky asks. ‘Necrotic?’

Alice nods. ‘Yes, and swollen. I said we had to get him help and he said no. I said I was going to get him a doctor and he couldn’t stop me. He said that was true, but if I did, there was a good chance I’d spend thirty or forty years in jail. By then it was on the news. About Klerke. Do you think he was just trying to scare me?’

Bucky shakes his head. ‘He was trying to take care of you. If the cops – and the Feebs, they’d be involved – could connect you to what went down at Klerke’s place, you’d go away for a very long time. And once the cops put you with Billy at that Hyatt, you’d be connected.’

‘You’re saying that to make me feel better.’

Bucky gives her an impatient look. ‘Of course I am, but it happens to be the truth.’ He pauses. ‘When did he die, Alice?’

6

Neither of them sleep worth a damn, Billy because he’s in pain that must be excruciating, Alice because she’s still feeling the remnants of speed-up pills her system has never encountered before. Around four-thirty in the morning, long before first light, he tells her they need to get going. He says she’ll have to help him to the car, and he’d like that to happen before the world wakes up.

He takes four of the remaining Oxy tens and uses the bathroom. She goes in after him. He’s flushed away the worst of the blood, but there’s still some on the rim of the toilet and on the tiles. She wipes it up and takes the plastic trash bag with them: outlaw mentality.

By then the pain pills are working, but it still takes almost ten minutes to get him to the car because he has to rest after every two or three steps. He’s leaning heavily on her and gasping like a man who’s just finished a marathon. His breath is rank. She’s terrified that he’ll faint and she’ll have to drag him (because she can’t carry him), but they make it all right.

Slowly, with a series of little whimpering cries she hates to hear, he manages to crawl into the back seat. But when he’s in as well as he can be, with his head pillowed on one arm, he manages a remarkably sunny smile.

‘Fucking Marge. If she’d hit just half an inch further to the left, we could have avoided all this mishegas.’

‘Fucking Marge,’ she agrees.

‘Keep it at sixty-five except to pass. Seventy-five once we get to Iowa and Nebraska. We don’t want to see any flashing blue lights.’

‘No flashing lights, roger that,’ she says, and gives him a salute.

He smiles. ‘I love you, Alice.’

Alice takes two of the Adderall. She considers and adds a third. Then she gets going.

The traffic south of Chicago is horrible, six or eight lanes in either direction, but with the Adderall on board Alice navigates through it fearlessly. West of the metro area the traffic thins out some and the towns roll by: LaSalle, Princeton, Sheffield, Annawan. Her heart beats in her chest nice and tight. She’s locked in, got the hammer down like a trucker in a country song. Every now and then her eyes flick to the rearview and to the prone shape folded into the back seat. And as they leave Davenport behind and enter the wide flat spaces of Iowa, its fields now gray and still, waiting for winter, he begins to talk. It makes no sense; it makes all the sense in the world. He’s in the dark, she thinks. He is in the dark and in pain and looking for the way out. Oh Billy, I am so, so sorry.

There’s a lot about Cathy. He tells her not to bake the cookies, to wait until Ma comes home to help her. He tells Cathy someone hurt Bob Raines and he’s going to come home mean. He says Corinne stuck up for him, the only one who did. He talks about Shan. There’s something about a shooting gallery. He talks about someone named Derek and someone named Danny. He tells these phantoms that he won’t take it easy on them just because he’s a grownup. Alice thinks he’s talking about Monopoly because he says to hurry up and shake the dice and the railroads are a good buy but the utilities aren’t. Once he shouts, making her jump and swerve. Don’t go in there, Johnny, he says, there’s a muj behind the door, throw in a flash-bang first and get him out of there. He talks about Peggy Pye, the girl from the foster home where he stayed after his mother lost custody. He says paint is the only thing holding the goddam house together. He talks about the girl he had a crush on, sometimes calling her Ronnie and sometimes calling her Robin, which Alice knows was her real name. He says something about a Mustang convertible and something about a jukebox (‘It would play all night if you hit it in just the right place, Tac, remember?’), he talks about the toe that was partly lost and the baby shoe that was entirely lost and Bucky and Alice and someone named Thérèse Raquin. He returns again and again to his sister and to the policeman who took him away to the House of Everlasting Paint. He talks about thousands of cars with their windshields shining in the sun. He says they were smashed beauty. He is unpacking his life in the back seat of this stolen car and her heart breaks.

Finally he falls silent and at first she thinks he’s gone to sleep, but the third or fourth time she looks in the rearview and sees him lying there so still with his knees pulled up she thinks he’s dead.

They’re in Nebraska now. She pulls off at the exit for Hemingford Home and onto two-lane county blacktop running straight as a string between walls of corn that’s finished for another year. The day is almost over. She goes a mile and comes to a dirt road and pulls onto it, driving in far enough to be hidden from the blacktop road. She gets out and opens the back door and is at first relieved to see him looking at her, next terrified by the thought that he’s died with his eyes open. Then he blinks.

‘Why’d we stop?’

‘I needed to stretch my legs. How are you, Billy?’

Stupid question, but what else is there to ask? Do you know who I am or do you think I’m your dead sister? Are you going to be in your right mind for awhile? And by the way, is it too late? Alice thinks she knows the answer to that one.

‘Help me sit up.’

‘I don’t know if that’s a good—’

‘Help me sit up, Alice.’

So he knows. And he’s with her, at least for now. She takes his hands and helps him sit up with his feet on an unnamed dirt road in a town called Hemingford Home. In the mountains of Colorado it will already be almost dark. Here in the flatlands the afternoon has stretched into evening even though it’s November. Here the evening redness of the west spills over corn that rustles and sighs in a light breeze. His hands are hot and his face is burning. There are fever blisters on his lips.

‘I’m pretty well done.’

‘No, Billy. No. You need to hold on. I’ll give you two of the Oxys and there are a couple of those speed pills left. I’ll drive all night.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘I can do it, Billy. I really can.’

He’s shaking his head. She’s still holding his hands. She thinks if she let go he’d flop back onto the seat and his shirt would pull up and she’d see his belly, now blackish-gray with red tendrils of infection reaching up to his chest. To his heart.

‘Listen to me now. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘I rescued you after those men dumped you, all right? Now I’m rescuing you again. Trying to, anyway. Bucky told me you’d follow me as long as I let you, and if I let you I’d ruin you. He was right.’

‘You didn’t ruin me, you saved me.’

‘Hush. You’re not ruined yet, that’s the important thing. You’re okay. I know because when I asked you how you were doing with Klerke, you said you were trying. I knew what you meant, I know that you are, and in time you’ll be able to put it behind you. Except in dreams.’

The red light, shining and shining. Painting the corn. It is so silent here and his hands are burning in hers.

‘Klerke screamed, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘He screamed that it hurt.’

‘Stop, Billy, it’s horrible and we have to get back on the turnpi—’

‘Maybe he deserved to be hurt, but when you give pain it leaves a scar. It scars your mind. It scars your spirit. And it should, because hurting someone, killing someone, is no little thing. Take it from someone who knows.’

Blood is trickling from the corner of his mouth. No, from both corners. She gives up trying to stop him from talking. She knows what this is, it’s a dying declaration, and her job is to listen as long as he’s able to speak. She says nothing even when he tells her he’s a bad man. She doesn’t believe it but this is no time to argue.

‘Go to Bucky, but don’t stay with him. He cares for you and he’ll be kind to you, but he’s a bad man, too.’ He coughs and blood flies from his mouth. ‘He’ll help you start a new life as Elizabeth Anderson, if that’s what you want. There’s money, quite a lot of it. Some is in the account of a paper man named Edward Woodley. There’s also money in the Bank of Bimini, in the name of James Lincoln. Can you remember that?’

‘Yes. Edward Woodley. James Lincoln.’

‘Bucky has the passwords and all the account information. He’ll tell you how to manage the flow of money into your own bank account so you don’t attract attention from the IRS. That’s important, because that’s how they’re most apt to catch you. Unreported income is a trapdoor. Do you …’

More coughing. More blood.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Billy.’

‘Some of the money goes to Bucky. The rest is yours. Enough to go to college and a start in life after that. He’ll treat you fair. Okay?’

‘Okay. Maybe you should lie back now.’

‘I’m going to, but if you try to drive all night you’ll be an accident waiting to happen. Check your phone for the next town big enough to have a Walmart. Park where the RVs are. Sleep. You’ll be fresh in the morning and back at Bucky’s by late afternoon. Up in the mountains. You like the mountains, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise me.’

‘I promise to stop for the night.’

‘All that corn,’ he says, looking over her shoulder. ‘And the sun. Ever read Cormac McCarthy?’

‘No, Billy.’

‘You should. Blood Meridian.’ He smiles at her. ‘Fucking Marge, huh?’

‘That’s right,’ Alice says. ‘Fucking Marge.’

‘I wrote the password to my laptop on a piece of paper and stuck it in your purse.’

That said, he lets go of her hands and falls back. She lifts his calves and manages to get his legs into the car. If it hurts him, he gives no sign. He’s looking at her.

‘Where are we?’

‘Nebraska, Billy.’

‘How did we get here?’

‘Never mind. Close your eyes. Rest up.’

He frowns. ‘Robin? Is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I love you, Robin.’

‘I love you, too, Billy.’

‘Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.’

7

Another knot pops in the woodstove. Alice gets up, walks to the refrigerator, and gets a beer. She twists off the cap and drinks half of it.

‘That was the last thing he said to me. When I parked with the RVs at the Kearney Walmart, he was still alive. I know, because I could hear him breathing. Rasping. When I woke up the next morning at five, he was dead. Do you want a beer?’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

Alice brings him a beer and sits down. She looks tired. ‘“Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.” Maybe talking to Robin, or to his friend Gad. Not much of an exit line. Life would be better if Shakespeare wrote it, that’s what I think. Although … when you think about Romeo and Juliet …’ She drinks the rest of her beer and some color comes into her cheeks. Bucky thinks she looks a little better.

‘I waited until the Walmart opened, then went inside and bought some stuff – blankets, pillows, I think a sleeping bag.’

‘Yes,’ Bucky says. ‘There was a sleeping bag.’

‘I covered him up and got back on the highway. Keeping no more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, just like he told me. Once a Colorado State Patrol car came up behind with its flashers going and I thought I was cooked but it went by and on down the road, lickety-split. I got here. And we buried him, along with most of his things. There wasn’t much.’ She pauses. ‘But not too near the summerhouse cabin. He didn’t like it. He worked there but he said he never liked it.’

‘He told me he thought it was haunted,’ Bucky says. ‘What comes next for you, darlin?’

‘Sleep. I just can’t seem to get enough. I thought it would be better when I finished writing his story, but …’ She shrugs, then stands up. ‘I’ll figure it out later. You know what Scarlett O’Hara said, don’t you?’

Bucky Hanson grins. ‘“I’ll think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.”’

‘That’s right.’ Alice starts toward the bedroom where she has spent most of her time since coming back here, writing and sleeping, then turns back. She’s smiling. ‘I bet Billy would have hated that line.’

‘You could be right.’

Alice sighs. ‘I can never publish it, can I? His book. Not even as a roman à clef. Not five years from now, not ten. No sense fooling myself.’

‘Probably not,’ Bucky agrees. ‘It’d be like D.B. Cooper writing his autobiography and calling it Here’s How I Did It.’

‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘No one does, that’s the point. Guy hijacked a plane, got a bunch of money, jumped out with a parachute, was never seen again. Kind of like Billy in your version of his story.’

‘Do you think he’d be glad that I did it? That I let him live?’

‘He’d fucking love it, Alice.’

‘I think so, too. If I could publish it, you know what I’d call it? Billy Summers: The Story of a Lost Man. What do you think?’

‘I think it sounds about right.’

8

There’s snow in the night, just an inch or two, and it’s stopped by the time Alice gets up at seven, the morning sky so clear it’s almost transparent. Bucky is still asleep; she can hear him snoring even through the bedroom door. She puts on the coffee, gets wood from the pile beside the house, and builds up the fire in the stove. By then the coffee is hot and she drinks a cup before putting on her coat, boots, and a wooly hat that covers her ears.

She goes into the room set aside for her use, touches Billy’s laptop, then picks up the paperback lying beside it and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans. She lets herself out and walks up the path. There are deer tracks in the fresh snow, lots of them, and the weird hand-shaped tracks of a raccoon or two, but the snow in front of the summerhouse is conspicuously unmarked. The deer and coons have steered clear of the place. Alice does, too.

There’s an old cottonwood with a split trunk not too far from where the path ends. It’s her marker. Alice turns into the woods and starts walking, counting the steps off under her breath. It was two hundred and ten on the day they brought Billy here, but because the going is a trifle slippery this morning she’s up to two hundred and forty before she comes to the little clearing. She has to clamber over a fallen lodgepole pine to get into it. In the center of the clearing there’s a square of brown earth upon which they have scattered a mixture of pine needles and fallen leaves. Even with the light fall of snow added to the needles and leaves, it’s pretty clear it’s a grave. Time will take care of that, Bucky has assured her. He says that by next November a random hiker could walk over that patch with no idea of what lay beneath.

‘Not that there’ll be any. This is my land, and I keep it posted. Maybe when I wasn’t here people took advantage, probably used the path to stare across to where the Overlook used to be, but now I’m here, and I plan to stay. Thanks to Billy, I’m retired. Just another old mountain man. There are thousands of them between here and the Western Slope, growing their hair down to their asses and listening to their old Steppenwolf records.’

Now Alice stands at the foot of the grave and says, ‘Hey, Billy.’ It feels natural to talk to him, natural enough. She wasn’t sure it would. ‘I finished your story. Gave it a different ending. Bucky says you wouldn’t have minded. It’s on the same thumb drive you were using when you started in that office building. Once I get to Fort Collins, I’ll rent a safe deposit box and put it inside with my Alice Maxwell ID.’

She goes back to the fallen lodgepole pine and sits down on it, first taking the paperback out of her pocket and putting it in her lap. It’s good to be here. It’s a peaceful place. Before wrapping the body in a tarpaulin, Bucky did something to it. He wouldn’t tell her what, but he said there wouldn’t be much smell when the hot weather came back, if any. The animals wouldn’t disturb him. Bucky said it was the way such things were done in the old days of wagon trains and silver mines.

9

‘Fort Collins is where I’ve decided to go to school. Colorado State University. I’ve seen the pictures and it’s beautiful there. Remember when you asked me what I wanted to study? I said maybe history, maybe sociology, maybe even theater arts. I was too shy to tell you what I really wanted to do, but I bet you can guess. Maybe you even guessed then. I thought about it sometimes when I was in high school because English was always my best class, but finishing your story made it seem possible.’

She stops, because the rest of it is hard to say out loud even when she’s alone. It sounds pretentious. Her mother would say she was getting above herself. But she needs to say it, she owes him.

‘I’d like to write stories of my own.’

She stops again and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. It’s cold out here. But the stillness is exquisite. This early even the crows are asleep.

‘When I was doing it, when I was …’ She hesitates. Why is the word so hard to say? Why should it be? ‘When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn’t know that could happen. I could pretend we were in the Bide-A-Wee Motel outside of Davenport, Iowa. Only it wasn’t like pretending, even though there’s no such place. I could see the fake wood walls and the blue bedspread and the bathroom glass in its plastic bag with writing on it that said SANITIZED FOR YOUR HEALTH. But that wasn’t the most important part.’

She wipes her eyes, she wipes her nose, she watches the white clouds of vapor from her exhalations drift away.

‘I could pretend that Marge – fucking Marge – only creased you, after all.’ She shakes her head as if to clear it. ‘Only that’s not right. You were only creased. You did write me that note and put it under my door when I was sleeping. You walked to the truck stop up the road even though the truck stop was back in New York and you went on from there. Are going on. Did you know that could happen? Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn’t last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it’s awesome. It’s everything. Because you can have things the way you want and I want you to still be alive and in the story you are and always will be.’

She stands and goes over to the square of earth she and Bucky dug together. In the real world he’s under there. She takes a knee and puts the book on the grave. Maybe the snow will cover it. Maybe the wind will blow it away. It doesn’t matter. In her mind it will stay here. The book is Thérèse Raquin, by Émile Zola.

‘Now I know who you were talking about,’ she says.

10

Alice walks up to where the path ends at the knife-cut valley and looks across to the flat ground where the old hotel used to stand – the reputedly haunted hotel, according to Bucky. Once she thought she actually saw it, no doubt a hallucination caused by being unused to the thin air up here. Today she sees nothing.

But I could make it be there, she thinks. I could make it be there just as I was able to make the Bide-A-Wee be there, complete with all the details I didn’t put in, like the bagged glass in the bathroom or the stain, sort of like the shape of Texas, on the rug. I could make it be there. I could even fill it with ghosts, if I wanted to.

She stands looking across the gulf of cold air between this side and that, hands in her pockets, thinking she could create worlds. Billy gave her that chance. She is here. She is found.

June 12, 2019–July 3, 2020

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