Louis comforted her, held her and comforted her. He felt her tears on his collar, the press of her br**sts against him. She wanted to know where Rachel was, and Louis told her that Rachel was resting. Missy promised to go see her and that she would sit with Ellie anytime, for as long as they needed her. Louis thanked her.
She had started away, still sniffing, her eyes redder than ever above her black handkerchief. She was moving toward the coffin when Louis called her back. The funeral director, whose name Louis could not even remember, had told him to have them sign the book, and damned if he wasn't going to have them do it.
Mystery guest, sign in please, he thought and came very close to going off into cackles of bright, hysterical laughter.
It was Missy's woeful, heartbroken eyes that drove the laughter away.
"Missy, would you sign the book?" he asked her, and because something else seemed to be needed, he added, "For Rachel."
"Of course," she said. "Poor Louis and poor Rachel." And suddenly Louis knew what she was going to say next, and for some reason he dreaded it; yet it was coming, unavoidable, like a black bullet of a large caliber from a killer's gun, and he knew that he would be struck over and over by this bullet in the next interminable ninety minutes, and then again in the afternoon, while the wounds of the morning were still trickling blood: "Thank God he didn't suffer, Louis. At least it was quick."
Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her-ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that's why the coffin's closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers' house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers' barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.
Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.
"Louis?" Missy's voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.
"Louis?" Closer now. Alarmed.
The world swam back into focus.
"You all right?"
He smiled. "Fine," he said. "I'm okay, Missy."
She signed for herself and her husband-Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge-in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address-Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road-and then raised her eyes to Louis's and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.
"Be well, Louis," she whispered.
David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam's apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.
Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood-that sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn't suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he's with the angels now, a total of twelve times.