The Killing Hour

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Lying in bed, in bed, and it’s comfortable and warm, but his stomach hurts and his head hurts, and it’s light outside, but he doesn’t want to go into the light because it’ll hurt too. He stays in bed because he’s tired, because he’s been up all night, and his wife has fallen asleep in front of the TV in her bedroom and it’s been a long time since they shared a bed together.

When he got home last night, he broke into the morphine stash that he has for his wife, the stash he always promised himself he would never touch, only to find he’d already been at it. Sometimes she’s in so much pain that he has to give her some. She can’t describe the pain to him, but he knows it’s bad, she screams and cries and the muscles in her neck become so tight he’s always afraid they’ll snap. She hasn’t had one of those attacks in over two years now, but he keeps the morphine for her just the same.

Just the same.

Only now it’s his.

The duct tape around his stomach is only going to help him for so long. He wishes he could put more tape around his head to keep his thoughts together too. The drugs are getting to him. Last night he was clearheaded. It’s as though the crazy, fucked-up personality he was using on Sunday night got stabbed into him, and drugs are making it stay. He hates thinking this way. He hates the pain more. He can’t get the balance right.

When this is done, he’s sure his brother-in-law can help him out. He must know a doctor who can stitch stuff together. Soon he’ll be as good as new. And richer. So far the money angle hasn’t worked out. That lawyer bastard screwed him.

That gets him thinking about the revenge, and how sweet it tasted, and how killing Charlie Feldman will taste even sweeter. He’s sure of it. It’s a horrible world when you can’t trust anybody, a horrible world when people don’t pay you for the job you have done. He can’t for the life of him figure out why McClory would have done that to him. What was he thinking? And then to deny it when he got there to confront him? What the hell was up with that? Did McClory think he was an idiot? Tearing McClory out of the world might have tasted sweet, but he’d rather have had the money. There are still medical bills that he’s struggling to cover, and he’s hoping to save up enough money to take Macy away-there are other treatments in other countries more advanced than New Zealand, and he’d pay or do anything to give those treatments a shot.

He shakes his head, not just out of his disbelief over last night’s affairs, but also to check to see how light-headed the morphine has made him. He can hear the cartoons playing from his wife’s bedroom. If she were awake, she would be laughing at them. Sometimes he watches them with her. Sometimes he thinks he’s only one thirty-minute episode away from blowing out his brains.

He closes his eyes. He can feel the morphine rushing through his system. He thinks of the hundred-dollar note he stuffed into Frank’s mouth and he can’t remember if McClory was alive at that point. He has no idea what Frank was thinking when he wrote that note, no idea where a guy like McClory got the balls to try and end their relationship with a threat, then realizes he was having these same thoughts only a minute ago. How many times has he gone over this? He didn’t bother searching the house for the money because there never had been any money. He had just let himself in, done what he went there to do, and then let himself back out. The problem was all that exertion last night opened up the wound in his stomach.

He drifts in and out of sleep and the green numbers on the clock radio tick over quicker than they should. He’s sweating, and the room spins, and he wonders if this is the most relaxed he will ever feel. His wife laughs a little, and he thinks she calls out to him, but he can’t be sure. He drifts a little more. His wife doesn’t laugh anymore. The cartoons are still playing, the DVD player looping one into the other and the other. He needs to do something about his wound before it becomes infected, though of course it probably already is. He can feel the badness from the cut slowly seeping through him. Infecting him. Changing the way he acts and feels and thinks.

He throws back the sheets. They’re damp and he contemplates whether he should write a note to remind himself to wash them, but he forgets about the note even as he forgets about the sheets. He gets to his feet, but he’s still drifting. He thinks he took something earlier. He seems to think it was morphine, but it couldn’t have been, because the only morphine here is for his wife and he wouldn’t use that. Maybe he got some more of the good shit from his brother-in-law. He should give him a call when this is over. Maybe he can help with the stomach wound.

He heads into the bathroom and draws himself a bath. He doesn’t know if lying in hot water is going to be a good thing because it would soon become hot water full of the dirt and bacteria from his body, so he pulls out the plug and decides to have a shower instead. He stands beneath it for twenty minutes, letting the water soak into the tape. He gently teases the edges as it does so. It’s a battle, but one he’s determined to win. Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he feels like putting his fist through the wall. In the end the tape comes away, and blood, about a quarter of a glass of dark blood, falls onto the floor in one large splash, hitting the tub like a wet bloody-nose blow. The bleeding slows to a trickle, but doesn’t stop. He uses a flannel to wipe away the flakes of dirt and a few tiny leaves along with the gunk left by the tape.

For a few seconds the world sways. He grabs hold of the showerhead and then the wall until things settle. He looks down and can’t see how dark blood can be good. The water makes it disappear. It makes him think that something inside his stomach has been damaged. Isn’t there a kidney there somewhere? Or a liver? What about his actual stomach? He realizes he’s eaten very little over the last few days, and when he does his stomach burns. Why is that? He studies the skin with his fingers, pulling and poking. It is black in areas, white in others, hard all over, and he isn’t sure which color represents the infection. He lets the hot water wash over it.

He gets out of the shower and sits on the bathroom floor with his back against the bathtub and his towel beneath him. He swabs the wound with disinfectant and it stings like a bitch. He places some medical gauze over the wound, some padding over the gauze, and wraps bandaging around his torso to hold everything in place. He’s going to be moving around some more later, so he wraps some duct tape around it all too, just to be sure. When he gets up he doesn’t feel like the new man he was hoping for, but it’s sure as shit better than seeing dark blood fall out of him.

He wraps the towel around him and goes and checks on his wife. She’s awake. She’s staring at the TV, but not really looking at it. He’s seen her do this before.

“Hey, babe,” he says, and the words feel numb, they sound like they’re not coming from him.

“Where’s Ba-e?” she asks.

She’s referring to Billy. Billy was her cat when she was a child. She told him about Billy years ago. Billy has been dead for thirty years. “He’s sitting out in the sun,” he says.

“Ba-e,” she says, and she smiles.

“Are you. .” he says, then another trip on the morphine wave, and he has to grab hold of the wall to stay balanced. Shit.

“Side-Russ and Ba-e sitting in a tree,” she says. “K-I. . I. . I forget.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I dot mean to forget.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her, and he sits down on the side of the bed and strokes her hair. Something on the TV makes her smile. She forgets all about being sad that she forgets things.

He moves to his bedroom. He runs his hands over the dressing on his stomach. The wound is clean and patched and the pain seems to be just a shadow of what it was earlier. A packet of aspirin sits on the nightstand along with a packet of sleeping pills. Both are nearly empty. He doesn’t think he’ll need them. He sets the alarm clock. He has a meeting tonight, but right now he can’t think exactly what for. He climbs onto the bed. The sheets are damp and he thinks about making a note to wash them, but before he can make one and after he forgets what the note would be for anyway, he falls asleep.