cut a couple of pieces of skin off his ass and used them to make a little flap that they sewed across the wet part of the slice.
'It's healing well,' the nurse said.
'When do the stitches come out?' Rick asked, his cheek still hurting.
'Two weeks. No sooner than that. There are a lot of dissolving stitches inside, too.'
'There's nothing else that happens here, right?'
She looked at him, not unkindly. 'They have new prosthetic arms that respond to the nerve impulses in the stump,' she said. 'That requires some physical therapy to-'
'No, no,' Rick muttered. 'I'm just asking if it's all set to go.'
She understood. 'The doctors fixed the artery so that the blood turns around and goes back,' she explained. 'Once they do that, the tissue normalizes pretty quickly. It's the nerves that take a while.' She pulled off the mesh booty they'd put on his left foot and inspected the small dark scabs left from the drill. The flesh around the punctures remained puffy and sensitive, but there'd been no infection. The ankle and foot would need bone surgery, of course. The doctors and nurses had asked him how he'd been injured, but he explained that it'd be better if he didn't explain. Should we call the police? No, he'd said.
After the nurse left, he reached over to the table next to the bed with his right hand, opened the drawer, and pulled out the Bible. It seemed heavy enough. He whacked the stump a couple of times just to see how it felt. Not too bad. He hit it hard a few times more, at different angles. It hurt, but no bleeding.
By ten o'clock, he had checked out of the hospital and reached his truck. There he found they'd spent a few minutes tearing up the seats and glove compartment looking for Easter Bunny gifts and Cracker Jack prizes. The money and traveler's checks were gone, as he expected. He slipped in the key, wondering if they'd fucked with the engine. Started right up. He drove to Macy's, where his mother used to take him each fall before school began. He used his brother's American Express card to buy shoes, socks, underwear, a dress shirt, a suit, and a tie. He put on all these things in the Macy's dressing room, hobbling on his sore foot. The saleslady who was helping him was very nice, stared at his bandage but didn't ask. Wearing the new clothes, he walked gingerly up Broadway through the New Jersey shoppers and black kids from Harlem looking for action. I need cash, he thought. Or something I can trade, no questions asked. He stepped into an electronics store run by some Iranians. They noticed his good clothes and called him 'my friend.' He told them his father had just retired and he, Rick, wanted to give him something special, something that would last forever. How much are you looking to spend? they asked, rubbing the chests of their silky European shirts. Rick said he didn't care about the cost, he just wanted the best. Nothing but the best for my father. They started him off on a three-thousand-dollar wide-screen television, and he announced that he wanted only the best, and they said, I strongly agree, my friend. Very good television, the best. I'll pay Paul back later somehow, he told himself. He spent ten minutes pretending to choose between the eight-thousand-dollar television and the eleven-thousand-dollar television. Both excellent price, my friend. For you we make very good price, first time you buy with us. You are happy, you come back. This we know. My family, they have been selling for two hundred years. He chose the eleven-thousand-dollar television and asked them if they thought it was a good choice. Very good. They carried it to the truck for him. You have very good taste, they said.
By noon, he was sitting in a bar in Queens, where he exchanged the television for lunch, three thousand dollars in cash, a Ruger. 22 pistol, a 12-gauge Winchester pump shotgun, and a box of shells for each gun. Then he purchased several other items: a stylish long winter coat, a pair of leather gloves, a stapler, an electric razor, an AC/DC adapter that ran off his truck's cigarette lighter, a box of cotton wadding, a roll of duct tape, a Swiss Army knife, and a hacksaw. Sitting in his truck under the FDR, not far from a man throwing bags of construction debris into the East River, he measured the shotgun carefully against his stump. Then he opened the door of the truck, wedged the gun under his boot, and cut about a foot off the barrel. Then he put the gun in the left arm of the coat, stuffing it with the wadding, and stapled the left glove, also stuffed, to the cuff. Using the knife, he slit the arm of the coat, so that he could reach it with his right hand. Last, he awkwardly taped the butt of the gun to the end of his stump and pulled the coat on over it. The gun was hidden. Using his right hand, he set the stuffed gun-arm into the deep left pocket. He loaded the pistol and put it in the right. Rick Bocca, he whispered, botta-bing, botta- boom.
Next he tilted the rearview mirror toward himself and shaved his head and beard, being careful around the gouge in his cheek, the hair falling on his shirt and pants. Just like the old days, before a bodybuilding contest. It took longer than he expected. No hair, one arm-he looked like a fucking old man. He'd go find Paul and Paul would help him with the next move. He punched the stump again to test the pain. It was all right. So they had cut off his fucking arm. All right. They should have killed me, he thought, they really should have done that.
He left the truck in yet another parking garage and boarded the ferry to Staten Island. On the boat he stood at the rail thinking about Mary, Paul's wife. She was a good woman, a good mother of two sons. She probably knew what Paulie did. How could she not? One of those women who'd made their deals. The world was full of them, and sometimes things worked out fine. The shopping and the birthday parties and the underwear folded in Paul's drawer. The dog food, the lunch boxes, the bags of groceries. The particular kind of beer in the refrigerator. The stack of household bills on the little table next to the television so Paul could pay them while he watched football on Monday nights. She did this, she did everything.
Thinking of Mary made him think of Christina, who had insisted that she would never get married, that she could never be faithful to one man indefinitely, not even Rick. He'd had enough sense just to nod appreciatively. A lot of women had said this to him, just so he wouldn't make any assumptions. They wanted to be sure he didn't think he had power over them. So, no assumptions. That was fine. You assumed that women could leave you at any time. If you remembered that, you paid attention. And maybe they left you anyway. Like his mother. He had adored her and she'd died.
On Staten Island, he had the taxi drop him a few blocks from Paul's house. The shotgun stuffed in the arm of his coat felt heavier than he expected, either that or his left shoulder was weaker now, and he walked awkwardly. He covered the distance slowly, a man in no hurry, stopped in front of Paul's tall hedge, which looked trimmed five minutes prior, and turned to see if anyone might notice him slip down the driveway. A bicycle lay on the asphalt. He eased around the corner of the garage and looked in the window. No Town Car; Paul wasn't home yet. He pissed in the bushes, then inspected the garage window for security system contacts and noticed a tiny set on the inside middle pane, one for movement of the window itself, the other for breakage of the glass. A good system, the kind Paul would have.
Just then, the interior door from the kitchen to the garage opened, and ten-year-old Paul Jr., already home from school, appeared. He slapped a button next to the kitchen door, making the garage door rumble up. He dragged the bicycle into the garage.
Mary's head appeared in the kitchen doorway. 'If you leave it there, Dad'll hit it with the car.'
'No, he won't.'
'He could easily run over it.'
'Dad is a good driver,' the boy protested.
'Dad is a very good driver, but he's tired at the end of the day and he expects that the bike will be against the inside of the garage, not thrown in the middle of it.'
The kitchen door closed. The kid moved the bike as instructed and hit the garage door button. The door clunked downward. Inside the garage, as Rick watched through the window, the boy picked up a garden hoe and swung it like a baseball bat. 'McGwire drives it… into
… the second deck!' He took a cut through the air, admiring his own strength. Then he spied an unopened thirty-pound bag of peat moss and swung the hoe viciously, sinking its blade into the plastic packaging. A puff of dried moss smoked up at the impact. This simulacrum of violence thrilled the boy, and he abandoned himself to a series of deadly swings of the garden hoe into the peat moss, gutting the bag so that it bled dried brown moss from half a dozen wounds.
'Paulie!' came his mother's exasperated voice.
'All right, all right!' The boy took one last cut at the bag, missing, instead clanging the hoe off the lawn mower. He threw the tool into the corner of the garage and dashed into the kitchen.
Paul, Rick thought, smiling to himself, would pull in and see the peat moss all over the floor, and there'd be hell to pay. That was just who Paul was, maybe because of the chaos of their family growing up. Two mothers
