Lights Out

21

A woman said, “One-twenty over eighty.”

Eddie opened his eyes, looked up into a blue-white glare. He saw a white ceiling with powerful lights hanging from it. He tried to turn his head to see more but couldn’t. He couldn’t move his head, couldn’t move any part of his body. He started to say something stupid, like “What the hell?” but found he couldn’t open his mouth. Something was clamped tight under his chin. All he could do was make an angry noise in his throat. He made it.

Soothing music played in the background. Massed violins. The woman’s face came into view. She wore a surgical mask. Her eyes looked into his. There was something familiar about her.

“Pulse-eighty-two,” she said.

“Remove the gown,” said a man he couldn’t see.

Eddie recognized the speaker: Senor Paz.

The woman’s face withdrew, and Eddie found himself looking again into the blue-white glare. He felt a draft around his groin. Then something sharp and silver came gleaming into view: a scalpel. It came close to his eyes. The hand holding it was pink and plump, with manicured nails.

Eddie tried to get up, tried to move, tried to struggle against whatever bound him. He couldn’t even squirm. He made a noise in his throat, a raw noise, as loud as he could. The soothing music played on. The scalpel turned, inches from his eyes. Even as it did, he recognized the tune: “Malaguena.”

The scalpel moved away, down across his chest and out of sight. After a few moments, he heard Paz say, “Right there.”

Eddie tried to make a noise in his throat. Now he couldn’t even do that, although nothing was stopping him. Time passed. He didn’t feel anything, didn’t see anything but blue-white glare, didn’t hear anything but “Malaguena” played soothingly on countless strings; yet he sensed work going on around him.

He heard Paz grunt. Then the pink, plump hand swung up into his view; the pink, plump hand now spattered with blood. In the manicured fingers dangled a little pouchlike object Eddie couldn’t identify at first. And then he did: it was a severed scrotum, with testicles still inside.

Something stung his arm. Everything went white, then black.

Eddie awoke in a pleasant room. There were books, soft lights, pictures on the walls. The curtains were drawn. It might have been any time at all, but it felt like night.

He lay on a hospital bed. He couldn’t move his arms or his legs, but he could raise his head. He raised it, looked down at his body. He was naked except for the bandages wrapped around him from just below the rib cage to midthigh. His wrists and ankles were bound to the safety bars along the sides with hard rubber restraints. He felt no pain, but he remembered everything. He lost control of his face. It began to crumple, like the face of a baby about to bawl.

The door opened. Senor Paz came in, glancing at his watch. “How’s the patient?”

Without thinking, Eddie tried to burst up off the table. He didn’t budge. At least he got control of his face.

“Quite pointless,” said Paz.

Eddie spat at him, a gob of spit that landed far short.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Paz. “Apart from the vulgarity, it’s unhygienic.”

Eddie tried again to burst free, tried even harder. Again, he got nowhere with the restraints; but he felt the end of one of the safety bars, the end near his right hand, giving slightly. Be smart. He stopped struggling. He couldn’t possibly free himself while Paz was watching.

“That’s better,” said Paz. “It won’t do any good, you know.”

Be smart, Eddie told himself, but he couldn’t stop his voice. “I’m going to kill you,” it said. “And the nurse and anyone else I can find.”

Paz nodded. “Understandable. The pity is you brought it all on yourself. You didn’t factor in the sort of people you were playing your little tricks on. I find that strange, considering that you must be some kind of survivor, given your history.”

“What are you talking about?”

Paz sucked impatiently on his teeth. “I can’t believe you still want games. I’m talking about the C-note, of course.”

Eddie’s voice took off again, up and out of control. “I gave it to you, you stupid fuck.”

Paz shook his head. “You gave us one hundred dollars. But it wasn’t the right bill. How did you imagine you’d get away with that?”

It wasn’t the right bill? What did that mean? He’d had two of them, of course, the first rolled in El Rojo’s cigarette, the second won from Bobby Falardeau.

“It wasn’t the right bill?”

“Don’t pretend you haven’t known that all along,” said Paz. “It was never a question of the money. We wanted the bill itself. As I’m sure you know.”

Eddie’s voice rose once more. “You…” He couldn’t say it, couldn’t make it real with words. “You did that to me because I mixed up two bills?”

“Mix-up?” said Paz. “I don’t think so. Now, to prevent additional… procedures, why don’t you tell me where to find the C-note Senor Cruz gave you?”

Eddie felt a laugh, wild and insane, building inside him. He didn’t let it out because he was afraid of the pain that might come. He squeezed all that wildness and insanity into contempt, and said: “I used it.”

Paz came closer. His hands curled around the safety bar.

“A lie, and not particularly inventive.”

Eddie was silent. Paz slapped him across the face with the back of his hand; the way Jack had long ago at Galleon Beach. Then he took a deep breath, as though trying to compose himself. “More games,” he said. “You used the money. Where?”

Eddie remembered where: at the restaurant in Connecticut where he’d eaten with Karen. He even remembered the name: Au Vieux Marron, although he didn’t know what it meant. But why tell Paz the truth? Why give him a chance to recover the bill? He wasn’t going to let Eddie out alive, no matter what happened.

“Suppose,” said Paz, “you really did spend the money. If you tell us where, you can leave.”

Eddie let some time pass, as though he were making up his mind. Then he said: “Do I have your word on it?”

“I give you my word.”

The insane laugh rose again. Eddie stuffed it back down and said: “Grand Central Station.”

Paz grasped the safety bar. A vein pulsed in his forehead, jagged, like a lightning bolt. “Grand Central Station?”

“At the newsstand.”

“You’re lying. You don’t believe I’ll keep my word.”

“I know goddamned well you won’t. Because if you do I’ll come back and kill you, and the nurse, and whoever else I can find.”

Paz smiled. “I don’t think you’ll want to do that.”

“Are you crazy?”

Paz leaned closer. Eddie could smell his breath: it smelled like meat going bad. “Just for the sake of argument, what did you buy?”

“Cigarettes.”

“With a hundred-dollar bill?”

“It didn’t bother them.”

“What kind of cigarettes?”

“Camels.”

Without another word, Paz left the room. Eddie knew what he was doing: searching through his clothes for corroborating evidence. It was there: the half-full pack left in the pocket of Jack’s corduroy pants.

Paz returned in less than a minute with the cigarettes. He shook them out of the pack; some fell on Eddie’s chest. He even peered inside, as though the bank note might be there. Then he studied the writing on the outside of the pack. Eddie foresaw the direction Paz’s thoughts would take. If he could prove that the cigarettes came from the newsstand at Grand Central, then Eddie was probably telling the truth and the C-note was gone, back in circulation. If he could prove that the cigarettes hadn’t come from there, then Eddie was lying and he probably still had it. There was also the possibility that he couldn’t prove it either way.

Eddie reached that point a half second before Paz. Paz frowned, slipped the empty pack inside his jacket, and said: “We shall see.” He went out.

Eddie lay still for a few moments. Then he threw up all over himself.

Rage began to grow inside him, so fast and strong he felt his chest would split. He wanted to release some huge sound but couldn’t, not without bringing Paz. Control, Nails, control. That’s how you got Louie and the Ozark brothers, that’s how you’ll get him. Nails. Yes. Now there was no escaping that identity. The future was clear: red and short.

Eddie pushed against the safety bar with his right arm, pushed as hard as he could. Something slipped a little inside the joint where the bar met the bed frame. He pulled back the other way, suddenly and with all his might. That brought the sound of shearing metal and then a clink, as though a bolt had fallen down a hollow tube. Eddie jerked against the safety bar. The end sprang out of the bed frame.

He slid the restraint off the bar, reached across to the restraint on his left arm and unbuckled it. A few seconds later he was free.

Eddie sat up and put his feet on the floor, but he didn’t get up right away. He was afraid of igniting the pain. Move, Nails. Slowly, pushing off with his hands like an invalid, Eddie rose. He felt no pain at all. The painkillers were still working.

He used the sheets to clean himself, glancing down at his bandages as he did. The sight of them made him light-headed; he had to bend down, hands on knees, to keep from fainting.

Eddie went to the door, listened, heard nothing. He opened it and looked out. He was at one end of a corridor. There were several doors leading off it; at the other end, stairs. He stepped silently into the corridor. Paz. Then the nurse. Then anyone he could find.

The first door on the right was open. Eddie looked in, saw a simple room with no one in it. It had a bed with a bare mattress; wheeled up beside it was a metal device that resembled a dentist’s x-ray machine. On a radiator in the corner lay the clothes he’d borrowed from Jack; the corduroy pants had slid to the floor.

Eddie moved toward the radiator. On the way he passed the metal device, saw that there was no x-ray tube suspended from it, but a metal helmet with a chin clamp at the bottom. He stopped, examined it. Then he swung the helmet around and stuck his head inside. It fit him perfectly.

First there was only blackness and silence. Then a woman spoke. “One-twenty over eighty,” she said. After that came a blue-white glare. Through the glare he saw a white ceiling with powerful lights hanging from it. Music played: “Malaguena.” He saw a woman’s face. She wore a surgical mask, but he recognized her: the mermaid-waitress from Brainy’s.

“Pulse-eighty-two.” Her voice sounded in his ears.

“Remove the gown,” said Paz, somewhere out of sight.

Then came the blue-white glare again, the scalpel, the pink and plump hands with the manicured nails. The scalpel rotated, giving him a good look at it, then disappeared from view.

Paz again: “Right there.”

Pregnant pause.

Blue-white glare.

“Malaguena.”

Paz grunted. A nice touch. Then up came the pink, plump hand, red with blood or dye number two, with the dangling pouch in the manicured fingers.

A prop, or a cadaver’s pouch, or a live one, but not his. Eddie ripped off the helmet, tore at the bandages. Not mine, not mine, not mine. Eddie’s mind repeated those words, but he couldn’t be sure, wasn’t sure, until the bandages fell in a heap and he saw himself, intact.

Intact. Relief flooded through him like the best drug on earth. Intact.

Eddie got dressed. He went into the corridor, walked to the end. All the doors were open, all the rooms empty. Eddie went down six flights of stairs, all the way to the bottom. He found himself in a big basement; naked bulbs spread pools of yellow light. There was a steel door at the far end. He went toward it, passing mounds of sand, stacks of plush divans, Persian rugs, papier-mache date palms, and a disassembled minaret made of whitewashed plywood.

Eddie opened the steel door. It led to a short set of cement steps, smelling of stale beer. At the top was a bulkhead door, locked from the inside with a bolt. Eddie slid it back, pushed open the door, and climbed out onto the street.

He’d been wrong about the time. It was day. A cloudy day, dreary and dark, probably, but bright enough to make him blink. Eddie let the bulkhead door fall shut and started to move away. A woman on a mountain bike screamed, “You fucking idiot,” and almost ran him down.

22

“Bonjour, monsieur,” said the maitre d’ of Au Vieux Marron. “C’ est ferme jusque a cinq et demi.”

“Knock it off,” said Eddie.

“Pardon?”

They stood in the doorway of the restaurant, Eddie outside in the cold rain, the maitre d’ inside, warm and dry. It was about three o’clock and the restaurant was empty. The maitre d’ hadn’t yet put on his jacket and tie. He wore a white shirt, black pants, black vest, and a puzzled smile.

“Is it part of your job, speaking French all the time?”

The maitre d’s smile changed to an expression that reminded Eddie of Charles de Gaulle. “I am in the food business, monsieur. French is the language of food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then may I ask to what we owe this visit?”

“I was here last night,” Eddie said, thinking that the maitre d’ spoke better English than he did.

“Armagnac, avec et sans glacons,” said the maitre d’, recovering his smile; a knowing one.

“That’s me,” said Eddie. “I want my C-note back.”

“Pardon?”

“C-note. It means-”

“I know the meaning of C-note. What was your complaint?”

“No complaints,” said Eddie. “I don’t want the actual money. Just the C-note.” Eddie produced the $350 roll and peeled off two fifties. “Here.”

The maitre d’ eyed the money but made no move to take it. “It’s a rare bill, perhaps?”

“No. Call it a lucky charm.”

The knowing expression grew stronger. The maitre d’ began to resemble Claude Rains. “The tables?” he said. “Or the horses?”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“I am something of a gambler myself,” said the maitre d’. “Have you been to Atlantic City?”

“Not yet.”

The maitre d’ was shocked. “Not yet! And so nearby!” He shook his head. “Atlantic City, quel…” Words failed him in two languages.

The maitre d’ led Eddie past the kitchen, into the office. A framed autographed photo of Julia Child hung on the wall. The maitre d’ removed it, revealing a small safe. He glanced at Eddie, smiled again, then turned to block his view as he spun the dial. On the desk lay a half-eaten hot dog with ketchup and relish.

The maitre d’ took out a cash box, carried it to the desk, opened it. Inside were checks, credit-card slips, money. The maitre d’ fingered through it. He picked out a hundred-dollar bill. Then another. And another. He laid the three of them on the desk, Benjamin Franklin side up, flipped them over, then over again.

“Which is the lucky charm?”

Eddie studied the bills. There had to be a reason why Paz wanted the bill, had to be a reason why El Rojo had tried to smuggle it to him; something that made it different from the other bills. Invisible ink? Should he take all three, examine them under ultraviolet light? Eddie doubted that El Rojo had that kind of writing material in his cell.

One of the bills was crisp and unwrinkled; as though fresh from the mint. Eddie concentrated on the other two, holding each up to the light. He looked for clues in Franklin’s prosperous image, in the leafy scene on the back, in the clock tower of Independence Hall, where the time appeared to be 1:25. He checked the margins and the other open spaces for handwriting, but found none. None, unless you counted the tiny numbers inked here and there on the more wrinkled of the two bills.

Eddie had another look. He located the numbers one through fourteen, all on the Franklin side, inscribed in black ink. Some of them were written under individual digits of the serial number, B41081554G. The one, for example, appeared under the four. Other numbers were elsewhere: ten in the borders of the S in “ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.”

“This is it,” Eddie said.

“How do you know?” asked the maitre d’, peering over his shoulder.

“By the cigarette smell.”

The maitre d’ sniffed the air. “You have a good nose, monsieur.”

“Armagnac lovers. We’re all like that.” Eddie handed over the two fifties.

The maitre d’ looked at them doubtfully, tried snapping one of them between his fingers.

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Eddie said. He’d known a few counterfeiters.

Eddie took the bus back to New York. On a pad of paper he realigned the printed letters and numbers on the bill according to the order suggested by the inked-in numbers, one through fourteen. That produced the following sequence: 4650571914THST

Meaningless. Eddie knew nothing about codes. He made the obvious move, assigning a letter value to each number, governed by its place in the alphabet: four becoming D, six becoming F, and so on. The only problem was the zero. He decided to substitute the letter O for now, and change it later if needed. Soon he had a line of fourteen letters: DFEOEGAI-ADTHST

He played with those letters all the way to the city. The best he could manage was this: DIE SAD THEFT AGO

Eddie stared again at the original line: 4650571914THST. He began at the letter end. ST. TH. TH was short for Thursday. It also made the sound th. ST could be short for Saturday. It was also short for saint and street. Thursday Saturday. Thursday Saint. Thursday Street. Was there a Thursday Street? He hadn’t heard of one. He had read and half understood a yellowed paperback called The Man Who Was Thursday, but he recalled no Thursday Street. TH ST. TH Street. His gaze slid back into the numbers. 14 TH ST.

14th Street.

Fourteenth Street.

There were certainly 14th streets. Were there 914th streets as well? Probably not. So stick with fourteenth.

Eddie went back to the beginning. He now had this: 46505719 14THST

Was it an address? 9 14th Street? 19 14th Street? 719 14th Street? 5719 14th Street? And if so, in what city? It suddenly occurred to him to check what Federal Reserve Bank the bill had come from.

B. New York.

He dropped 5719 because he didn’t think street numbers went that high in New York; high street numbers meant out west. So, it was 9, 19, or 719. Then what were 46505 all about? He tried to fit them into some form of address and couldn’t.

A voice spoke, “Let’s go bud. Haven’t got all day.”

The bus driver was standing over him. They were in the station and the bus was empty. Eddie rose, but slowly, the driver’s words lingering in his mind.

“What’s the date?”

“The sixth. All day.”

“Of April?”

“Yeah. Where you been?”

Eddie got off the bus. April 6. 4/6. 4/6 505 719 14th St. 4/6 5:05 719 14th St. 5:05.

5:05. A.M. or P.M.?

Eddie checked the clock in the terminal: 4:15.

He went outside, stuck up his hand at a passing cab. It passed, as did several others. Then one stopped, but a woman with a shopping bag jumped in ahead of him. When the next one stopped, Eddie jumped in ahead of someone else.

Eddie gave the driver the address and asked, “Is it far?”

“No far.”

“Can you get me there by five?”

“Fi dollar?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Eas’ or wes’?”

“What?”

“Eas’ or wes’ fourteen?”

Eddie didn’t know. They tried west, but found no 719. There was a 719 East Fourteenth. The driver dropped Eddie outside it at ten to five, by the clock hanging in the window of Kwik ’n Brite Dry Cleaners next door. It was impossible to see into 719 itself. The windows had been painted red to eye level. The neon sign said: “Adult Books, Mags, Videos, Peeps.” A secondary, hand-lettered sign added: “Male-Female, Female-Female, Male-Male, More.”

Eddie went inside. There were two men in the store. One wore a ponytail and a Harvard sweat shirt. He stood behind the counter, inhaling nasal spray. The other wore a stone face and a suit. He browsed in the all-amateur section of the video department. Neither looked at Eddie.

He left the store, crossed the street, waited with his back to a florist’s shop. The rain had softened to a light drizzle. It glistened on the flowers in their bins outside: tulips, roses, others Eddie couldn’t name. He smelled their smells and kept his eyes on “Adult Books, Mags, Videos, Peeps.”

The browser came out, a plastic shopping bag in his hand. A woman in a black sombrero walked quickly past. A young man, not much older than the bookstore boy, went by the door of 719, turned, passed the other way, glanced around, saw Eddie, checked his watch as though he were on a schedule, and slinked inside the store. Then came a woman with a leashed mongrel that pissed against the wall of the store, a bare-chested man on roller blades, and an unleashed mongrel that sniffed the wall and raised its leg in the already pissed-on place.

At 5:04, by the clock in the Kwik ’n Brite window, a taxi stopped in front of 719 and a man got out. He wore a trench coat and a hat, the kind of hat men wore in old movies-a fedora maybe, Eddie didn’t know much about the names of hats. He had fat cheeks reddened by the sun, curly graying hair, a trim gray beard: a potential department-store Santa. Eddie couldn’t name him at first. That was partly because of the coat and hat, mostly because the man was so far out of context. But Eddie knew him, all right. How could he forget a man who had taken a gram of muscle from his forearm with a big square-ended instrument for some drug company, who had labeled him an inadequate personality, who had predicted that Eddie would be back in prison soon? It was Floyd K. Messer, M.D., Ph.D., Director of Treatment.

The taxi drove off. Messer stood on the sidewalk. He glanced around, his gaze passing over Eddie, not ten yards away, with no sign of recognition. Eddie ducked into the florist’s, watched Messer through the window.

Messer looked behind at 719, saw the sign, and moved in front of Kwik ’n Brite. He checked his watch. Cars went by. Messer eyed every one.

“Can I help you?”

Eddie turned and saw a little Asian girl-Korean, he supposed: hadn’t he read somewhere about the coming of Korean shopkeepers? — gazing up at him. He remembered the olive-skinned girl in the dancing shoes at the bus station down south; and the water snakes: “O happy living things.”

“I’m just looking,” Eddie said.

“We’ve got some nice iris.” She brandished purple petals at him. “Special-five dollars a dozen.” An old woman watched from behind the cash register.

“I’ll take a dozen,” said Eddie.

The girl withdrew. Eddie looked out the window. Messer was pacing now. The Kwik ’n Brite clock read 5:11. The woman with the leashed mongrel came by, going the other way. The dog sniffed the still-damp stain on the wall, pissed again. The girl returned with a bouquet.

“How about these?”

“Fine.”

She left, busied herself with wrapping paper. The door of 719 opened and the young man came out, red-faced, with a plastic shopping bag. The unleashed mongrel appeared, sniffed, pissed. Messer checked his watch. The Kwik ’n Brite clock read 5:20. Messer kept pacing.

Rain fell harder. The old Korean woman went outside, began bringing in the flowers. The girl left her wrapping to help. A passing car splashed Messer’s shoes. Messer said, “Shit.” Eddie couldn’t hear him, but he could read his lips.

At 5:29 the Korean girl said, “Here you go, mister,” and handed Eddie the bouquet wrapped in green paper. As he took it, Eddie saw an empty taxi come up the street. Messer saw it too. It was almost past him when his arm shot up. The taxi stopped. Messer got in. The taxi drove off. Eddie ran into the street. The old Korean woman ran after him.

“Fi dollar,” she cried. “Fi dollar.”

23

One door down from the Korean flower shop stood the Cafe Bucharest. The table in its front window commanded a good view of Kwik ’n Brite Dry Cleaners and 719: Adult Books, Mags, Videos, Peeps. Eddie sat at the window table, checking out the posters on the walls of the Cafe Bucharest-rugged mountains, green valleys, crumbling castles, Bela Lugosi as Dracula-and drinking a steaming cup of espresso. His first espresso; Eddie didn’t like it much. He kept his eye on 719 and resisted the urge to buy cigarettes.

Night fell. The rain slanted down out of the darkness, shimmered through the yellow cones of street light, disappeared. Not a good night for the pornography business. In an hour, three customers-all of them male, all of them alone-entered 719. One came out with a plastic shopping bag, the others empty-handed.

Eddie ate a thick sandwich of roast beef on black bread, served with a strange orange pickle, and imagined he was getting the feeling of Bucharest. A cigarette, unfiltered, Turkish, would make it perfect. Brightly colored packs of them all with foreign names, were displayed beside the cash register. Eddie ordered another cup of espresso instead.

“Some strudel?”

“No, thanks.” Desiccated pastries posing under that name were served in the cafeteria shared by E and F-Blocks every Sunday night.

Eddie began to like espresso. He was taking his last sip when a truck, rusty and dented, bearing the words “Simon Poultry Farms” on the side, parked in front of 719. The store’s neon sign flashed off, glowing dully for a few moments, then fading to darkness. Eddie rose, laid some money on the table.

The ponytailed man in the Harvard sweatshirt came out, rolled down a steel door that covered the entire front of the store, locked it in place. Then he climbed into the truck on the passenger side and started arguing with the driver. Eddie left the Cafe Bucharest.

The truck pulled into traffic, headed down Fourteenth Street. Eddie followed, first walking on the sidewalk, then running on the road, as though connected to the truck by an unseen force. The truck picked up speed. It had an unroofed cargo space, surrounded by slatted wooden sections about five feet high. Running at full speed, Eddie caught up to it and leaped, grabbing the top of one of the wooden sections.

He hauled himself up. A slat cracked under his weight. Eddie got his feet on the edge of the steel platform and vaulted over. The slat snapped. He lost his balance and landed hard on stacks of wire cages, knocking some loose. Chickens began squawking all around him.

The truck swerved to the side of the road, skidded to a halt. Eddie crawled over the cages, dropped into a small space against the back of the cab. He lay down in it. A chicken pecked his hand through the wire.

Eddie heard one of the doors of the cab open. Then came a grunt of effort, followed by the sight of the ponytailed man leaning over the side, squinting into the back of the truck. If he had glanced straight down, he might have seen Eddie, but he did not.

Eddie heard the driver call, “Que pasa?”

“The fucking pollos,” replied the ponytailed man.

At that moment there was a tremendous burst of rain. “Fuck the fucking pollos, Julio,” yelled the driver.

Julio ducked out of sight. The door slammed shut. The truck jerked back out into the street.

Rain lashed down on Eddie and the chickens. The chickens went quiet. Eddie felt around for a tarpaulin. Wasn’t there always a tarpaulin in the back of a truck? Not in this one. He sat huddled between the cab and the cages. Rain swept down, cold and hard. Eddie bounced around on wet steel. None of that bothered him. The espresso was still warm inside him, and if he tilted his head back he had a wonderful view of skyscrapers rising into the night. It reminded him of a line from his reading: “Alps on Alps arise.” That was the city of Karen de Vere, champagne and Armagnac. He lost his enthusiasm for the view.

The rain stopped abruptly; the skyscrapers vanished. They were in a tunnel. The chickens shifted nervously. Newspaper rustled on the floors of their cages. Eddie made a clicking sound. It failed to soothe the chickens. He was struck with the mad idea of opening the cages and letting them all out.

Then he was back in the rain. The truck swung onto a ramp, halted soon after at a toll booth, then sped off on a turnpike under sodium-orange skies. The rain stung. Eddie got his back against the cab, hunching below the window; the chickens tucked their heads under their wings and endured. They all did it, even though the only ones getting wet were in the top row.

The truck seemed to be heading south. Eddie confronted the possibility that while there had to be a connection between Dr. Messer, Senor Paz, El Rojo, and the hundred-dollar bill, the ponytailed man might have nothing to do with it. Why would he, especially since Messer hadn’t even entered 719? Maybe it was only the outside of 719 that mattered. Julio could be on his way home to the wife and kids, or to a bowling alley, or, more probably, to a second job at a meat packer’s. A beer can flew out of the cab, and then another.

Eddie was soaked and shivering by the time the truck left the turnpike. They followed a two-lane road, going more slowly now. The sky lost its orange glow, went black. The only light came from headlight beams that flashed from time to time across the cages. Eddie caught glimpses of the chickens; they appeared headless, as they soon might be. More beer cans flew by, faint whizzing shadows in the night.

Time passed, how much time Eddie didn’t know. His watch was on Prof’s wrist, locked up in F-Block. Eddie was wet, cold, unsure; but free, and therefore happy, right?

The truck slowed, down to a speed where Eddie could have jumped off safely. He considered it, and was still considering it when they turned onto a dirt road and bumped through a wooded flatland. The trees stretched overhead, catching some of the rain. Under their shelter, the chickens came to life, shifting around in their cages, nervous again. Just like inmates: catatonic when things were at their worst; agitation always following slight improvements.

They were alone on the dirt road. Five or six miles passed before the truck came to a stop. Eddie rose, peered over the side. The headlights shone on a fence, not especially high but made of barbed wire, stretching out of sight in both directions; a closed gate on which hung a sign-“Simon Poultry Farms”; a gatehouse with a motorcycle parked inside; and a man standing in the road with an automatic weapon over his shoulder and a shotgun in his hands. He approached the truck.

The man spoke in Spanish. “Late,” he said.

“You drive in this piss,” the driver told him.

“Try standing in it all fucking night,” answered the man with the guns. He opened the gate, backed into the shadows. The truck rolled through.

The truck mounted a long, low rise, turned right off the main road, came down in a clearing. In the changing angles of the headlights, Eddie picked out an old two-story farmhouse, a barn, outbuildings. The truck passed the barn, turned toward the house, slowed. The door of the house opened, framing a short, round man in a yellow rectangle of light. Eddie hopped off the truck, slipped on wet grass, came up running. A fruit tree, gnarled and bare, grew between the house and the barn. Eddie crouched behind it.

The short, round man unfurled an umbrella and walked to the truck. Julio and the driver got out. The driver was a big man, perhaps six and a half feet tall. The short, round man went as close to him as the umbrella would allow.

“You’re late,” he said. He spoke Spanish, but Eddie recognized his voice: Senor Paz.

“It’s the weather.”

“And you’ve been drinking.”

“Just one beer on the way.”

Paz reached up from under the umbrella and slapped the driver’s face with the back of his hand, the way he’d slapped Eddie.

“Sorry,” said the driver.

Paz wasn’t listening. He had moved in front of Julio. “You too,” he said. “I can smell it.”

“Not me.”

Paz spoke to the driver. “Hit him.”

The driver threw a punch at the ponytailed man’s head, knocking him down.

Paz said, “Now get busy,” walked back into the house, leaving the door open.

The driver helped Julio to his feet. “Did it have to be that hard?” asked Julio.

“Just doing my job,” the driver replied.

The driver went around to the back of the truck, climbed up, began hoisting off the rear slatted sections and stacking them to the side. Julio went into the house, returned with an empty cardboard box. The driver opened one of the cages, tossed the chicken and the newspaper flooring onto the ground, picked up the cage and dumped it out into the cardboard box. The chicken skittered across the grass and into the barn.

The driver opened another cage and went through the same routine, tossing out the chicken and the newspaper, dumping what was left into the cardboard box. He kept doing that until Julio said, “Enough,” and carried the box into the house. He came back with an empty one, and they did it all again.

And twice more. The last time the driver followed Julio into the house and closed the door. Eddie came out of the shadows.

He made a wide circle around the house, approached it from the back. Lights shone through the windows on both floors. Eddie dropped to the wet ground and crawled to the nearest one, raised his head above the sill.

He looked into a big kitchen, saw a cozy rural scene. Julio and the driver sat in front of a stone fireplace, roasting marsh-mallows over a snapping four- or five-log fire. A glossy German shepherd lay beside them, staring into the flames. At one end of the long table in the center of the room sat Paz, reading a newspaper and eating vanilla ice cream; pure white against his olive skin, his red tongue. Three old women in kerchiefs and shawls sat along the far side of the table, facing Eddie, chatting to themselves.

While they talked, the old women busied themselves with the cardboard boxes Julio had brought in. The first two emptied them, spilling paper money across the table. Then they sorted it into piles by denomination, banded the bills in stacks, dropped the stacks into a canvas bag. The third woman made entries on a laptop and called to Julio when the bag was full. He got up from the fire and added the bags to a mound of others near the door. The women filled three canvas bags while Eddie watched; their knobby hands never stopped, working together like giant inhabitants of an insect colony.

Suddenly, the dog’s ears rose. Eddie sank down, listened, heard nothing. He crept along to the next window, looked in.

A bedroom. The only light came from a TV on a corner desk. On the screen a hideous man with four-inch nails was tiptoeing toward a car parked in a lovers’ lane. The only viewer was a dark-haired boy of about ten or eleven lying on the bed, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the show. He was more interested in the gun in his hand.

It might have been a toy, but to Eddie it looked just like the nine-millimeters worn by the C.O.s in the towers. The boy spun it around on his index finger like a quick-draw artist, jabbed it at the man with four-inch nails, at a teddy bear against the wall, at the window where Eddie watched.

Eddie dropped to the ground. He was quick, surely too quick for the boy to have seen him. But the next moment came an explosion, and the window blew out over Eddie’s head. He scrambled away, dove among the nearest trees.

Voices rose from the house. Shadows made wild gestures in the blue light of the boy’s window. Then Paz poked his head out, peered around. Rain fell steadily and the night was quiet, except for the beating of Eddie’s heart against the earth.

“It’s just his imagination,” said Paz in Spanish, holding his ice-cream spoon. “All that TV.”

“That’s not the point,” said one of the old women in the room behind him. “He shouldn’t be playing with guns.”

Then came the high voice of the boy. “It’s mine,” he said. “And I saw someone out there, whether you believe me or not.”

“What kind of someone?” asked Paz, turning back to the room.

“All white. Like a ghost.”

Paz sighed. “Bedtime,” he said. He glanced outside again, picked a shard of glass out of the frame, withdrew. “Back to work,” Eddie heard him say. “And one of you get this fixed.”

The shadows moved out of the blue light. Eddie stayed still. The boy’s head appeared in the window. Eddie recognized him from the photograph on the wall of El Rojo’s cell. Simon Cruz, known as “Gaucho”-a fine boy and a dead shot, according to his proud papa.

Gaucho aimed his gun at the forest and said, “Pow, pow.”

Julio taped a piece of cardboard over the window. The farmhouse grew quiet, the lights went out. Rain began again, just a drizzle at first, then harder. It dripped down off the leafless branches onto Eddie. He circled the house, crawled under the truck and waited, listening to the rain.

It was still dark when he heard the door of the farmhouse open. Eddie rolled over, saw the glare of a flashlight, its beam zigzagging over the ground on an unsteady path toward the truck. For a moment it rested on Julio, carrying canvas bags over his shoulder.

“When is this rain going to stop?” he said in Spanish.

“All you do is complain,” answered the other man; Eddie recognized the voice of the driver.

“I hate this country.”

“So go home.”

Julio snorted.

The driver pointed his light at the truck. Eddie stayed still. With a grunt, Julio slung the canvas bags over the side, into the cargo space.

“I mean it,” he said. “What’s so good about this country?”

“The women,” replied the driver. They started back toward the house.

“The women? Are you joking?”

“They fuck like crazy.”

“So?” said Julio. “They hate men. At least our women like men. The women here piss me off. Sometimes I feel like just taking one, you know? One of those cool ones.”

They went into the house, came out with more canvas bags, tossed them into the truck. Then they climbed into the cab. The doors closed, the engine started, the truck vibrated above Eddie. He slid out from under, got a grip on the edge of the platform, and climbed up and over the side just as the truck drove away.

They mounted the rise, turned right on the main road, away from the gate. Eddie sat on the canvas bags. After a mile or two they took a narrow track, followed it through the woods. Eddie couldn’t see much but knew they came to a stream because he heard water flowing, knew they crossed a wooden bridge because he heard it creak. Not long after, they came to a clearing, a charcoal-colored opening in the night. The truck slowed. It hadn’t quite stopped when Eddie vaulted over the side, landed on all fours on hard-packed dirt, ran low into the woods. The driver cut the engine; headlights and brake lights flashed out.

They waited, Julio and the driver warm and dry in the cab, Eddie cold and wet in the trees. Eddie didn’t know what they were waiting for; he was waiting for Floyd K. Messer, although he couldn’t have given a logical reason why.

The night lost its blackness. Shadows firmed into solid shapes-the trees, the truck, the driver standing beside it, pissing against the wheel, a small car parked nearby. The eastern sky turned silver for a moment, then settled on dark gray. In the growing light, Eddie saw that the truck was parked at one end of a long, narrow dirt strip cut through the woods.

The driver, on his way back to the cab, went still, his head tilted up. Then Eddie heard it too, a plane coming from the south. Julio climbed from the cab into the cargo space, tossed the canvas bags onto the ground.

A white plane with green trim burst out of the clouds, very low, buzzed over the truck and landed not far away. It rolled down the strip, slowed, turned, rolled back. Eddie could see no one inside but the pilot, and he looked nothing like Messer. The pilot was wearing sunglasses. Maybe the sun was shining somewhere high above.

The plane halted beside the truck. The driver ran to it, swung open a compartment near the tail. Julio threw the canvas bags inside. The plane was already moving again by the time the driver closed the compartment. No one said a word.

The plane sped down the runway, lifted off, rose into the clouds, went silent, vanished.

“What a prick,” Julio said in English.

“They’re all like that,” the driver replied.

“Monday?” said Julio.

“Monday.”

The driver got into the truck, Julio into the car. They drove away.