when his wife left, well, unlike the other, he'd seen that coming.
Hollis and he went way back, to grade school. He'd been the geeky kid back then, good grades, scrawny, out of step, always reading. Hollis was anything but, but he'd stepped in one day when the top bully, guy looked like a pug dog, had been beating on him. Not because Hollis had any feelings for him, mind you, or any sense of its being wrong, but because Hollis'd had his eye on this bully, figuring he was the one to take down. And here was his chance. Teachers came, it looked like Hollis was a hero, taking up for him. Not finessed-but sometimes finesse just happens, you know?
Anyway, that changed things for him. Year later, he was linebacker on the team. Still not fitting in, but he was good enough that they moved over to make room for him. Meanwhile Hollis went on getting into trouble, tiptoeing around this huge crater, shouting down into it. He was getting bigger, Hollis was shrinking. Took to cigarettes, got behind some serious drinking. Didn't see much of each Other for a long time then, but he heard things from time to time: Hollis was boosting cars, was on the run, was doing time.
Not long after he lost his job, they met up again, neighborhood bar on Atlantic that he liked because they had no music or TV and, late morning, early afternoon, there'd be a lot of women coming through, usually in groups. They didn't recognize each other at first. Guy on the next stool looked up like him to watch three young women in gym clothes enter and said, 'Lesbo bar is what I'm thinking.' They took a closer look at each other then and realized.
Wasn't much catching up done, not a lot of talking either, after the first hour or two, but it was good to have a friend, someone to sit with, drink a few beers, someone with free time like him. And yeah, he had been wondering what Hollis did to get by, what gave him all that free time, but it's not the kind of thing you ask, once the first hints get ignored, right?
They got pretty tight over the next month or six weeks.
One afternoon, almost night really, they'd had five, six beers by then, he guessed, and the after-work crowd had started drifting in, Hollis's phone went off. He laughed at all of them reaching for their phones, then realized it was his and skipped outside to answer. Came back in time to buy the next round, and along about the third sip maybe, Hollis asked if by any chance he might be free the next couple days and up to picking up a nice chunk of change. Naturally he asked for doing what. His man had just canceled on him, Hollis said. He had a pickup to make, and sure could use the company. Nothing to it. And it paid three hundred clear.
So he said yes and found himself in this godforsaken place, no offense intended.
Things started going wrong from the first. Their flight was delayed, the woman across the aisle puked in her plastic tray of beef tips, some kid kept kicking the back of his seat. The first rental car stalled out two miles from the airport in Memphis. They had to call, wait over an hour, then take whatever was available, which turned out to be this clunky van that pulled hard to the right.
He didn't know what Hollis's intentions were, he was looking for someone, he knew that-then for something he couldn't find. By the time they got to the first house, where the old lady was, he was getting crazy, tearing up everything, hitting her-just once, but it didn't take much. It was like you could see that kid on the playground coming out of him all over again, you know? And it kept on getting worse. At the second place, he watched the woman while Hollis went through the house getting angrier all the time. It was when he realized Hollis planned on taking the woman that he got… not scared, but… sick. Physically ill. Heart pounding, skin crawling. Like he was going out of his body, leaving it behind.
He was in the backseat and he kept asking Hollis to stop this, take her back, this was just flat-out crazy, and Hollis kept telling him to shut up. At one point, scooting forward in the seat, he kicked the woman's purse, which was on the floor by him. Something heavy in there. He took it out, told Hollis to stop the car, and when Hollis laughed, he shot him.
He figured there had to be a farmhouse or something somewhere, he'd carry him there and get help if he was still alive, but there wasn't. And he couldn't. He was going to call, get help for the woman too, but when Hollis died, he just got scared, really scared.
Hollis had made him memorize that phone number and name, in case anything happened to him. To Hollis, that is. He was just supposed to call, say where they were, nothing more.
And that was it. He stopped talking and sat looking down at the table, lost in thoughts of Brooklyn and the past, maybe thinking how far away that past seemed now, or maybe just used up, empty. I stopped the tape. The light outside was muted, tentative. I could hear wind coming down Main Street, the shake of roofs, the shudder of doors and windows. I smelled dust, and rain. And I felt all about me the sadness of endings.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Much of the rest of the story, we got from Milly two days later up in Memphis, what she'd pieced together from Troy's and Hollis's jagged conversation. She was propped up in bed, leg in traction, tubes running out of her chest into a Pleurovac, right arm in a cast. One or another caretaker, a nurse, an aide, had brushed her hair on the right, the left side having been shaved and stitched, and (at Milly's request?) put on blush and lipstick, unsettling against the bruises and wormy scars. She looked half little girl's doll, half ghoul.
It was all about something Billy'd got messed up in. Something he'd stolen, or found, or was holding, she still didn't know. Didn't know where either, if it was here before he left, or up in Hazelwood, but she thought Hazelwood.
The driver kept saying he had a job to do and his ass was dirt if he didn't get it done and these hicks were getting seriously in his way and on his nerves. First time he said that, she thought he said 'ticks.' The other one kept patting her on the shoulder, telling her it was going to be all right, and asking the driver, What are you going to do with the woman, Hollis, she can't help you. Telling him to pull over, stop. She remembered the driver laughing and not much after that.
Someone had been in the house, she was sure of that when she got home. Just didn't feel right. She never drank Cokes, and if she did she would never leave a can on the sink but there was one there, that had probably been in the icebox since Billy left. He was the Coke drinker. Then she noticed a few other things. Kitchen drawers weren't pushed shut, the door to the basement had been opened-you could tell because it was right next to the water heater and the paint kind of half-melted so the door stuck in the frame, then tore loose when it was opened. Things like that. She didn't know why, she hadn't even thought about the gun, all but forgot it was there, but before she knew it she'd gone in the bedroom and got it, shoved it in her purse. Then she kept the purse with her as she went through the house turning on lights. They were standing outside, behind the house, when she snapped on the lights back there. And she just stood there as they came in.
'One of them's dead,' she said. 'A nurse told me that.' Her eyes were fixed not on mine but on the wall over my shoulder. When I took a step closer, she looked away.
'And we have the other one.'
She reached up to readjust the NG tube, nostril reddened and crusty around it. 'He tried to help me.'
'Yes.'
'His friend's dead.'
I nodded.
'I was almost dead,' she said.
'You're going to be okay.'
'And Billy's dead.'
'Yes. Yes, he is.'
Before leaving we spoke with Milly's doctor, a thin, gangly woman of indeterminate nationality wearing a black T-shirt, scrub pants, and cheap white sneakers without socks. Physically, she said, there was every expectation that Milly would make a full recovery. She was showing signs of traumatic amnesia, remembering things then forgetting them, but with luck, and obviously she was due some, that should pass as well. It's similar to a short circuit, Dr. Paul said. The spark gets sent, there's power in the wires, sometimes the bulb lights, sometimes it doesn't. Or it flickers and goes out.
Lonnie was silent most of the way back to town, looking out the side window. Many fields remained partially under water; trees and the occasional power or telephone line were down. Here and there, blackbirds and crows
