My last thought was, Shouldn’t have bluffed the fucker…
Chapter Eight
Somebody was asking me a question.
A woman. A girl. Some kind of female…
I couldn’t make it out, but I felt hands on me, small, struggling to get hold of me, trying to lift me, but I just wanted to sleep.
“Come on… come on…get to your feet. They might come back…”
As those words came into aural focus, so did the pain, starting with a blinding headache. I opened my eyes, saw a blur, and shut them again. I was on my side, on something hard, but moving only made it worse. My instinct was to stay put.
“Get up…”
The hands pulled on me, and I found myself standing, through no real effort of my own, a broken puppet whose improbable limbs went in every direction but the right ones, operated by an unseen puppeteer, and the headache eased just a little to let in the pools of pain that were throbbing in seemingly random regions around what had once been my body.
“You have to help…They’re coming back…”
That was when I remembered where I was, if not who I was, and what had happened before I took my nap on a brick bed, specifically that I’d been beaten bloody, and not long ago, because the blood was still warm and wet in my mouth and on my face.
I willed my feet to support me and my legs went along with it and my eyes focused enough to tell my savior was the little blonde stripper I’d done the favor for. She was in a black silk baseball-type jacket and her makeup was off and her hair was ponytailed back and she looked about twelve. She also looked scared shitless.
“You have a car?” she asked.
What the fuck was this, small talk?
But I nodded.
“Parked close?”
She was on my right, helping my legs hold me up. With my left hand, my wrist limper than Paul Lynde’s, I gestured toward the street.
“Ponty,” I said.
She was walking down the alley toward daylight and the street. “Pontiac?”
“Boo,” I said. Not trying to scare her: trying to say…
“Blue?”
She paused at the mouth of the alley where daylight blinded me. A few moments, and I could see, sort of. Nobody on the street. Not a car moving. Not a pedestrian. I willed my neck to turn two inches to the right and said, “There…”
“Two-tone blue?”
“Yeah.”
We were close to it. She only had to drunk-walk me twenty feet before leaning me against the side of the Sunbird. She looked all around her, like a frightened bird, while one of her little hands dug in my front pants pocket, digging, searching. Not as much fun as it sounds.
I heard the jangle of the car keys as she drew them out and she unlocked the door on the rider’s side, and stuffed me in, shut me in, and came around and got in on the driver’s side.
“I don’t take my car to work,” she said.
I had no comment.
The Sunbird was moving.
“I’m only a few blocks away. Usually walk it. But I can’t walk you that far.”
Interesting information, but again, I let it pass. I was busy waiting to see if my head would come apart in pieces like a barrel with the rungs removed.
“Stay awake,” she said. “Stay awake till we get there.”
The unpaved side street she pulled onto made for a rough ride. I understood how a pinball machine must have felt when a ball was running around loose inside it and smacking into things. But it kept me awake.
She pulled up at a mobile home, yellow and white, not very big. A red Mustang circa 1969 was parked out at the curb, where rust was eating it. No sidewalk, no trees. A row of mobile homes, maybe six, but who was counting?
“Candy,” I said. I was not requesting food.
She was struggling to get me pried out of the rider’s side and onto my feet. “What?”
“Your name.”
“You don’t miss much, do you, Jack?”
She remembered my name, too.
She was walking me past the Mustang onto and across a tiny front yard where crab grass was trying to grow and failing. Like a bad hair transplant.
The hardest part was her getting me up the three wooden steps, and not having me fall back down them while she held onto me with one hand and tried to unlock the door with the other. She couldn’t quite get the key in the slot and finally just pounded a tiny fist on the wood and yelled, “ Honey? Are you up?”
She waited, and then the door opened. A little kid, maybe three-and-half feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, blank, in Star Wars pajamas, opened it. He didn’t seem surprised to see his mother lugging a strange man with blood on him. It was that kind of town.
The kid didn’t pitch in after that, except to shut the door behind us. He returned to the floor in front of the little TV on a stand where he was eating a Pop Tart and Sesame Street puppets were doing a better job of staying upright than I was.
The trick after that was her navigating me around and through an elaborate wooden train track that took up a lot of the midget living room’s threadbare green carpet.
She moved me down a little hallway, sideways because there wasn’t room for two abreast, and then guided me into a small bedroom, putting me on my back on top of a sunflower bedspread.
I passed out.
Some minutes later, I woke up and was wearing nothing except my jockey shorts. The bruises weren’t showing much yet, but she was checking me over, and had a little bowl of warm water and a washcloth she was using to clean the blood off my face.
“I don’t think you have any broken bones,” she said.
“Ribs are sore.”
“Could have a broken rib. There’s an emergency room in River Bluff, if that’s what you want.”
I shook my head, which was a mistake.
“Shit,” I said, as the blinding headache knifed across the back of my eyes.
“Your nose isn’t broken,” she said.
“Should be.”
She wasn’t in the baseball jacket now. She had on a B-52’s t-shirt and denim cut-offs. Did I say she looked about twelve? Without her makeup.
“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My lips felt thick. My tongue felt thicker.
“No. Better.”
She got up and I admired her ass as she receded down the hall. This did not mean I was feeling better. Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy in car accident who lost a foot and made a pass at the nurse in the ambulance. Difference between men and women.
I took the two pills she brought me and swallowed some water. “What was that?”
“Percodan.”
“…Thank you.”
I passed out, or went to sleep.
Take your pick.
When I woke up, I realized the little bedroom had blackout curtains. I felt stiff, and I felt sore, and I had a dull headache, but not throbbing. I wondered how many hours I’d been out. Sunlight was peeking in around the edge of the dark curtains, so it couldn’t have been too very long.
She heard me stirring, and came in to check on me. She had a different t-shirt on, a pink Cyndi Lauper one, but the denim cut-offs looked familiar.
I asked her, “What time is it?”
“It’s about ten.”
Ten a.m., huh? I was a resilient motherfucker-a couple hours sleep, and good as new. Not bad for thirty-five.
“Friday,” she added.
“No. This is…Thursday, right?”
“No. You slept round the clock. Except for twice when I woke you up, led you to the bathroom, then fed you Percodan.”
“Fuck. No wonder I feel like somebody emptied me out and filled me with molasses. I don’t remember you doing that at all.”
“You weren’t very talkative.” She perched on the edge of the bed. “You look better. You don’t have a black eye or anything.”
I flipped the covers back. The deep blue bruising crawled in amoeba-like blotches over half a dozen places. I was breathing deep and the ribs weren’t hurting, though. Small miracle I hadn’t busted one. That is, had one busted for me.