In the end it all becomes too much for him. The window is open and the curtains are moving slightly on the breeze, brushing against the windowsills. He turns on the light. His pajama bottoms are soaked in sweat and there is blood on the right-hand side. He tugs them off. The bandage has gotten loose and saggy. It’s across his thigh, about equal distance between his knee and hip. He holds on to it as he walks outside so it doesn’t slip down his leg. He doesn’t know what the temperature is, but it’s still warm. He knows it’s after midnight but not by much. Much warmer than usual for this time of night he suspects-not that he’s normally outside at this time of night. Back at the Grove he was locked in his room, which was always hard if you needed to use the bathroom, because you had to wait. At the halfway house the only reason you’d step out the doors after dark was if you wanted to commit a crime or be a victim of one.
He lowers the bandage. He scratches at his leg. More blood and more pain and something yellow oozes out, but relief from the itch for those few seconds as his fingers scrape over it. He could try to get Cooper’s mother to help him again, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t going to want to do that no matter how hard he tries. Anyway, he’s angry at her for not believing him. Her son was the one covered in blood, he was the one who put the knife into that girl, and yet he looks like the good guy. It annoys him. He didn’t think Cooper would do that to him. They were meant to be friends, weren’t they?
He wishes he could work on the wound himself. It needs to be cleaned, he knows that. It may get infected. Sometimes infected limbs have to be cut off. He knows that too.
He can’t help himself. He begins crying at the thought. He turns and sobs into the pillow, for the moment not caring about the last person who laid on it, only thinking of a future with one leg, pacing the room and struggling to end on an even number when you have an odd amount of limbs to begin with. When the sobbing dies down, he limps to the bathroom and goes through the medicine cabinet. There’s a lot in here, but on closer look he sees dates with exp in front of them. They must be explanation dates; the dates explaining when the medication is no longer any good. Many of the things in here went bad a few years ago. He doesn’t know if bad medicine just means it won’t work, or won’t work as well, or make him even worse. There is an antiseptic cream that was good up until two months ago, surely that’s okay. The painkillers all went bad a few years ago. The bandages must stay good forever. And there’s some kind of medical padding that looks like it’ll help. Some sharp scissors for cutting things to fit. A safety pin for securing the bandage. He closes the cabinet and stares at the mirror. His face is flushed and there’s a slight rash starting around the edge of his hairline, which he hopes is from the heat and not from some infection climbing through his body. He doesn’t want to die. Not now when life is so good.
He holds the back of his hand up to his forehead like he’s seen people do and his forehead feels warm. A fever? Or just the result of stress and a very, very hot day? He cups his hands under the tap and fills them with water and splashes his face. He immediately feels better, but without his fingers pinching the bandage on his leg tight it slides down to around his foot. His tears become lost in the water on his face. He wishes his mother was here. Either one.
He turns on the shower. He steps inside and lets the water run over his leg. He can feel the infection being washed away from the surface, but at the same time he can feel it inching its way through his body. He doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there. He scrubs at the wound with a facecloth. The gash is about the length of his finger and about as deep and as wide, a long furrow that an inch to the left would have had the bullet missing completely and an inch to the right have had it buried deep into his leg, severing one of those thick veins in there that would cause him to bleed out. It’s not bleeding as much as earlier, even with all the scrubbing, but it is still bleeding. The shower feels good. He has the water temperature set so it’s cool but not too cold. He spends enough time in there for the pads of his fingers to wrinkle, then he climbs out and dries himself down. The itch has faded, but he still needs to do something with the wound.
He doesn’t want to lose the leg.
Doesn’t want to die.
Can’t go to hospital.
Doesn’t want to lie down in the same bed as one of the Twins because the infection would only become more infected.
He goes outside and holds a clean medical pad over the wound, carrying Cooper’s manuscript with him. He sits on the porch. There’s a wooden swing chair that would fit two people, he rocks it slowly back and forth and it relaxes him. It’s too dark to read yet, and he can’t be bothered going back inside to turn on the porch light. The fields around him look pale blue from the moon. In four or five hours the sky will start to lighten. He’s never seen that happen before, and suddenly he is desperate to watch his first sunrise, liking the idea that one day he and Cooper may sit out here on the porch enjoying it together.
chapter fifty-one
I hit the same string of drag racers. They’re going just as slowly, flashing their lights and tooting their horns and I have to drive alongside them at an intersection that I can’t get through because they’ve blocked it. I get boxed in and flick on my sirens, but it only makes things worse because then they purposely keep me trapped. It takes me fifteen minutes to get past them. The police radio spits out more news, mainly that there are now over two thousand drag racers on the roads, so far six arrests have been made and six cars impounded, and one pedestrian run over and in the hospital with minor wounds. Drag racers are outnumbering the police, outnumbering all the gangs in the country, they’re an epidemic for which there is no solution.
I park outside the halfway house wishing I was armed. There aren’t any gang members walking any dogs up the street so I take my chances and step out. It’s still at least seventy degrees and the armpits of my shirt are soaking wet.
Buttons is sitting on the porch out front with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It’s almost one-thirty. He’s still wearing the same fedora and shirt and looks the same amount of out-of-place as he did when he answered the door for me earlier today.
“You’re up late,” I tell him.
“I don’t sleep much. Never have. I knew you were going to be coming back,” he says. “Ritchie is upstairs in his bedroom, most likely fast asleep. He doesn’t know much, you know.”
“I’m not here to talk to him,” I say.
“Yeah? You after the Preacher? He’s inside somewhere.”
I shake my head. “I’m here to talk to you. Jesse Cartman said you’d know about the Twins.”
“Jesse Cartman said that now, did he?” he asks, then takes a long drink. “What else did he say?”
“He called you Buttons,” I say, looking at the inside of his arm where all the cigarette burns are lined up in a row, each about the size and shape of a button. “What’s your name?” I ask him. “Your real name?”
“Henry,” he says. “Henry Taub,” he says, and doesn’t offer me his hand.
“You were at Grover Hills?”
“For nearly thirty years, son,” he says.
“Preacher didn’t mention it,” I tell him.
“He wouldn’t have,” Henry says. “He’s good like that.”
“So you know everything that went on out there.”
He smiles meekly. “Almost. You want to know about the Twins, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“I always knew somebody would want to know. What did Cart-man tell you, son?”
“That they were letting people die down in the Scream Room.”
“You believe that?”