I’m lying here stranded, starving, mortified beyond belief.”
“That’s okay,” he said, “as long as you’re not indulging in self-pity.”
From the bed, she shot him a glance and half a smile. She said, “I’ll bet you’ve even had breakfast.”
“On the plane to Chicago,” he said. “A coffee and muffin.”
“Coffee and muffin!” she scoffed. “What kind of a muffin?”
“Blueberry.”
“Call that breakfast?”
“Actually, no,” Fletch answered. “What I might call breakfast would be, let me see, a half a fresh, chilled grape fruit, eggs scrambled with cream cheese, a steak, medium rare, a few sticks of crisp bacon, home-fried potatoes, maybe just a slice or two of summer sausage with fresh lemon juice—”
“Shut up.”
“—buttered toast with, let’s see, strawberry preserves would be nice—”
Crystal’s eyes were full on him. “You eat all that stuff? For breakfast?”
“Are you going to get off that bed?”
“I can’t! Can’t you see?”
“I can see an enormously fat person, lying on a bed in a fraudulent medical facility rapidly being closed by the authorities, whose sheets, blankets, reading lamp and tissue box have been taken from her, who hints to me she is hungry, but who isn’t doing anything about her situation. Are you going to die there, Crystal? One thing I absolutely will not do for you is serve as your pallbearer. We’ll have to plant you with a crane.”
“I have done something about it.”
“What have you done? Send out for Chinese?”
“You’re killing me.”
“You’re killing yourself. What have you done to save yourself?”
“There’s an ambulance coming for me.”
“You sent for it?”
“No.”
“An ambulance to take you where?”
“To the public hospital.”
“Crystal, the public cannot afford you. Not you and schools and the police and fire departments, too.”
“They’ll probably put me in the psychiatric ward.” She sniffed.
Her head was turned toward the window. “I can’t afford myself.”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t need you.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t need you. I don’t need Jack. I don’t need anybody.”
Fletch sighed. “Crystal, when I left here Sunday, I said I’d be back. I’m back. If I leave here again, I won’t be back.”
“Go.”
“I’ll never enter this room again.”
“So go.”
Fletch said, “Okay.” He left.
•
“Mortimer.”
“Hi, Mister Mortimer. This is Fletch.”
“Who?”
“I. M. Fletcher.”
“Oh, no.”
“Did I call you at a bad time?”
“Yeah. I am not dead yet.”
“How have you been otherwise?” Fletch was using the phone in the handicap van. He had not left the front driveway of Blythe Spirit.
“Well enough to hang up on you.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I might have something interesting to say.”
“You always do. That’s why I’m hanging up. I’m too old to be interested in anything you have to say.”
“Come on, now.”
“Last time I listened to you is how I got so old. I was a young man, until then, with a full head of hair, a straight back, and friends. I listened to you and my hair grayed and fell out, my gums sank, my back stooped, my skin wrinkled, I lost my way of making a living, I lost all my friends—all in the three months I listened to you. I should listen to you again?”
“This time you might find it rejuvenating.”
“Sure. This time I’ll end up wearing incontinence pads.”
“Hey, I—”
“No ‘Hey, I—’ nothing, Fletcher! You talked me into turning state’s evidence. Everybody else, all my friends in the business went to jail. I was sent to Wyoming, for my own protection, ha! I’d rather be in jail. I would have known what I was doing in jail. What am I doing in Wyoming? There would have been more people I know in jail. We would have had a lot to talk about. I don’t know anybody in Wyoming. All the people here talk about is something they call beef cattle and the twelve deadly sins.”
“Seven.”
“Seven what?”
“I think it’s considered there are only seven deadly sins.”
“In Wyoming, they got twelve.”
“It is a big state.”
“I can’t figure out whether Wyoming is big or just empty.”
“Mister Mortimer, you turned state’s evidence after your best crack at a world middleweight championship got impaled on an iron railing in Gramercy Park.”
“I did take that hard, yes. I loved that boy.”
“You can write letters to your friends you put in jail.”
“I do. A few of them. The good guys, you know? Those crooks who say, ‘No hard feelings for ruining my family and sending me to jail for the rest of my life.’ Those I trust not to send a hit man after me. With those I correspond weekly. Tell them all about my great life spent watching the mountains in Wyoming not move.”
“So what’s so bad about semiretiring to the beautiful state of Wyoming? You’re seventy two.”
“Seventy four. Thanks to you. If I never met you, I’d still be forty seven, probably.”
“Not likely. Jake Burger tells me you’re training two new contenders.”
“Beef cattle. Two legged beef cattle. That’s all they have out here: beef cattle. Four legged beef cattle, two legged beef cattle.”
“If you don’t have hope for them, you wouldn’t be training them.”
“Beef cattle marked U.S.D.A. In this case, U.S.D.A. means You Should see how Dumb they Are.”
“Maybe they’ll win at the county fair.”
“Not even in their weight class.”
“How old are they? Twenty?”
“Sixteen. Eighteen. I won’t live long enough to see either of them snooze on the canvas for the count of ten.”
“I’ll bet they’re good.”
“The older one, the eighteen year old, Haja, he calls himself, thinks gettin’ mad at himself is the point of the game. He’d knock himself out, if I ever showed him how. The other one, the sixteen year old, Ricky, actually thinks his muscles are pretty, if you’d believe it.”
“Doesn’t every sixteen year old?”
