The Company Man

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Garvey used anything he could to bandage the wound. His shirt and strips from his pants and a nearby newspaper, all wadded up. Still the blood seeped through. The man’s crotch was a mass of dark red and Garvey’s arms were smeared and crackling up to the elbows. Occasionally he would stop and listen to the man’s chest, as his pulse was now too weak to feel. Each time he’d hear the organs within slacken and fade a little more. Once when he lifted his head away he saw he had left a pattern upon the man’s shirt in mud and gore and sweat. His own molten face impressed there, mute and panicked. Then he turned and shouted for help once more.

After a while he was unable to tell if the man was dead or not. He suspected he was. The pulse had been too faint for a long time and he could not tell if any breath still went through the man. But the blood still came. Drooling out of the edges of the sodden bandage.

Garvey picked up his service revolver and opened the cylinder and took out each of the rounds. He lined them up on the cement next to him, copper points toward the morning sky, the last one’s nose open and smelling of sulfur. Then he laid the gun before them and sat on his knees. He was not sure why he did it. It was some ritual he had never known before, or perhaps had never yet existed. Some urban rite for those who died in these cement passageways, unshriven and unmourned.

They took their time to come. He was not surprised. The response time in these neighborhoods was terrible. As dawn came the end of the alleyway lit up with a half-dozen beams of light and he saw the glint of little shields and buttons behind them like sparks. Someone shouted at him to put his hands up.

He held up his badge. The beams stayed on him for a moment and then drooped as though disappointed. Then they walked to him and someone said his name and they all stood in the alley and looked at the man on the gore-streaked ground.