surgery, radiation and the chemotherapy, and at least do my best to get better,' or else he would have to get out. 'They said she couldn't take it, watching me die, without at least tryin' to get better.'
He snorted. 'Which is never gonna happen, me get better, matter what I do, or don't.' Talking made him wheeze. 'Everybody knows it; nobody ever does. Doesn't matter what the hell I do to myself or let someone else do to me better I'm not gonna get.
But that's the choice my family gives me. Get better or out of their lives.'
He told Merrion that he'd asked for time. 'I've seen what all that medical business does to a guy. It slows the dying down, I guess, lets him live a little longer. I don't argue with none of that. But what they do to you guarantees you're not gonna enjoy any life you get afterwards. If they'd drug you enough — morphine, maybe some of that heroin the cops've got in their evidence locker make you happy no matter how shitty you felt or how much of you's even left, well then, that'd be a whole different thing. Something like that I might go for.
But this other shit? I don't want it. When I go, what goes will be me. Me, pissin' and moanin' like always, not some dim bulb that finally burned out. That's all I was asking them for, time to die my own way.'
Describing the outrage to Merrion had made Lane indignant again, and therefore very emphatic. 'Not more time to live, you understand. I wasn't asking for that. Not looking for miracles here. Not from that bunch, at least, fuckin' damned ingrates they are. Just some time to think. Seemed reasonable to me. After all, I've supported the whole fuckin' raft of 'em,' Larry had eight children, 'all of these fuckin' years. Roof over their heads; warm dry place to sleep; pretty good food, by and large. Didn't cook it, no, but I paid for it oughta get some credit for that. Court's indulgence, as we say? Couple of days, over the weekend, decide which life I'd like better, little short one I've got left. I needed some time to think. 'Sunday night be all right, say? After the Celtics game? I'll give you my answer then.'
'They were pissed off. 'In other words, Dad, you're gonna drink your way through another weekend, right? Just like you always've done. And then come Sunday night, when you're totally shit-faced, will've been for two whole days, that's when you make up your mind? Like your head'll be clearer then?'
'They actually had that much fucking nerve. 'You bastards,' I thought.
'You bastards,' I said, 'you fuckin' bastards. So this then is what it comes down to. Forty-two fuckin' years I've been working, counting the service and all, and now I finally retire, don't have to work anymore.
And what do I find out that makes me? Your prisoner. I gotta do what you say.
What an honor. Takes my breath away. Gimme the whiskey instead.'
'Then I stomp out and go back down the courthouse. Gonna change my pension plan. None of them get any of it, all my years of damned hard work. Started six years before any of them came along. Eight of 'em didn't even exist. I created my own enemies. Am I feelin' sorry for myself, at this point? You bet cher your ass I am, Amby.
'Now this stuff in here,' he'd gestured around, his one-bedroom apartment number 11 at the rear, on the second floor, with its dreary-brown, early-winter view of Ransom's Brook flowing down the cement trench 'this is what I've got left. But it's pretty grand, don't you think?'
Larry was beginning slyly to explain. The wind eddied groaning around the already-pitting aluminum sashes of the cheap double-glazed windows, ill-fitted into the brickwork, from the maker of the windows in the almost-new courthouse, the lower corners of the double glass already fogged in white crescent shapes with moisture condensed from vapor penetrating the thin rubber sealant. Merrion'd tried to look favorably impressed, but he wasn't. He thought it didn't look like much.
Larry hadn't been fooled. He'd grinned like a Doberman. 'Yeah, right, I know. It isn't. It's cheap shit, built to a price, all right?
Building-to-price's the way you make money on an investment property like this. Cheap buildings bring in a real profit, even if they do look ten years old from the day when you first turn the key. It's a fat little pot fulla gold at the end of a rainbow; every month it gets fuller.'
'They don't know,' Larry said to Merrion. 'Not one of my family's got a clue. Never told Richie either. Decided a long time ago I don't like the guy. Chassy appointed him, favor to Roy Carnes, but Chassy never made me think I oughta trust the guy, or that he did, either. And anyway, the fewer people that know what you're really up to, better off everyone is.
'You get a family yourself some day? This dame of yours ever gets her thinking straight, two of you settle down an' have kids? Beautiful, good for you. Good health and prosperity; may there be many days in their lives, and the sun shine on every damned one. I hope they treat you lots better'n mine treated me. But the same advice holds, either way. Tell 'em nothin' beyond what they need to know, case tomorrow you're hit by a bus. The rest let 'em find out after you're dead, you're still on speaking terms then.
'That's what I always did. They didn't know what the stakes really were, how much they had riding on me. What keeping me happy was actually worth. How much effort they oughta put in. That's why they thought they could get so high and mighty with me. They had no idea what it'd really cost 'em, what they'd be losing, if they went and got me pissed off. The pension was all they knew about, see? Well, all of my kids now, they've done pretty well thanks of course to the way that I brought them up, but you're not gonna hear that from them. They can take care of my wife, if they have to, without even breathing hard, right? So my pension for Ginny they're willing to risk, I guess, if they've even thought about that.
'So as a result, after what those pricks did to me, I'm on my way back down the office. The minute that I get there, the first thing I am gonna do is change that fuckin' pension. What they bet, they lost.
Gonna screw them right out of it. Just like they all screwed me out of the rest of my life, right to die in my own fuckin' house, when they put me out in the street.
'But by the time I get down there, I've changed my mind. 'Fuck 'em 's what I've now decided. What'll I care, my wife gets the pension? I'll be dead and buried, six feet under 'fore they find out what I did to her, got even. And then they'll go out and start bad-mouthin' me. Make me look like shit, all over town: my poor widow, she ain't got a dime.
What a bastard I was; I left her destitute, all the rest of that crap.
Right here, in my very own town, which I've lived in all my life. And I wont be around to fight back. Tell all the people what they did to me, treatin' me like a sack-ah brown shit, I had the nerve to get sick.
What good is that gonna do me? ''No, better like this.' That was what I decided. Better if they never know, the rotten bastards, about all the other stuff there was, they never dreamed of. The big boodle. That's where the real revenge is. Not takin' it with me, no, still can't do that, but I can keep it away from them. That's as good as you can do, at least. Almost as good in the end, Slick, wouldn't you say? Almost as good in the end.'
It'd taken Larry longer than his doctors and he had expected, dying at the pace set by the cancer, but doing it his way. He hadn't finished up until just before Columbus Day in 1972, twenty-one slow, hard months later. Merrion had visited him at least once during each of eighty-two of those eighty-seven weeks that Larry Lane lived at 1692 Ike.
During the first week of March in '72 Merrion had been pretty much recovered from the flu that had sent him to bed during four days of the last week of February, but still feared he might infect Larry. Each year he had taken the same nine days of vacation that he'd started taking in 1962, the first year he'd been on actual salary with Danny the last week of June and the first week of July, combining vacation days with the holiday for the Fourth. Beginning in '66 he attended the annual clerks' conventions during his time away each June. The first week in July was his one-quarter share of the month's rental of the two-bedroom cottage he rented with Dan and Marcia Hilliard at Swift's Beach in Wareham, and he spent it there fucking Sunny Keller, when she came home on leave from the Air Force to him as the summer herself, even the July it rained.
Over twenty years later he still missed Sunny Keller, and every so often late at night in the card room at Grey Hills when he had had enough to drink, he would shake his head and say it again, right out hud but softly, that he still didn't see why she felt she had to volunteer to go and take a chance on getting herself killed, and then actually get killed, and then he would say 'fucking war,' even though it hadn't really been the war that killed her just a heavy rain in Hawaii that could've fallen anywhere. But without the war it wouldn't've fallen onto her. One night Dan Hilliard'd had a few drinks too, and he'd begun to feel sad himself. 'You think, you silly bastard,' Danny had said, 'you think you were the only one.'
'You son of a bitch, I do not,' Merrion had said. '1 know very much better'n that, god damn it. I know she fucked other guys. Sunny always fucked other guys. But I couldn't help that, you know. There was nothin' I could do about that.'
