3
If the Vegas bookies had given odds on those likely to survive the Visitors Day catastrophe, those on Sam Verdreaux would have been a thousand to one. But longer odds have been beaten - it's what keeps bringing people back to the tables - and Sam was the figure Julia had spotted laboring along Black Ridge Road shortly before the expatriates ran for the vehicles at the farmhouse.
Sloppy Sam the Canned Heat Man lived for the same reason Ollie did: he had oxygen.
Four years ago, he had gone to see Dr Haskell (The Wiz - you remember him). When Sam said he couldn't seem to catch his breath just lately, Dr Haskell listened to the old rumpot's wheezing respiration and asked him how much he smoked.
'Well,' Sam had said, 'I used to go through as much as four packs a day when I was in the woods, but now that I'm on disability and sociable security, I've cut back some.'
Dr Haskell asked him what that meant in terms of actual consumption. Sam said he guessed he was down to two packs a day. American Iggles. 'I used to smoke Chesterfoggies, but now they only come with the filter,' he explained. 'Also, they're expensive. Iggles is cheap, and you can pick the filter off before you light up. Easy as pie.'Then he began to cough.
Dr Haskell found no lung cancer (something of a surprise), but the X-rays seemed to show a damned fine case of emphysema, and he told Sam that he'd probably be using oxygen for the rest of his life. It was a bad diagnosis, but give the guy a break. As the doctors say, when you hear hoofbeats, you don't think zebras. Also, folks have a tendency to see what they're looking for, don't they? And although Dr Haskell died what might be called a hero's death, no one, including Rusty Everett, ever mistook him for Gregory House. What Sam actually had was bronchitis, and it cleared up not too long after The Wiz made his diagnosis.
By then, however, Sam was signed up for oxygen deliveries every week from Castles in the Air (a company based in Castle Rock, of course), and he never canceled the service. Why would he? Like his hypertension medicine, the oxygen was covered by what he referred to as THE MEDICAL. Sam didn't really understand THE MEDICAL, but he understood that the oxygen cost him nothing out of pocket. He also discovered that huffing pure oxygen had a way of cheering a body up.
Sometimes, however, weeks would pass before it crossed Sam's mind to visit the scurgy little shed he thought of as 'the oxygen bar.' Then, when the guys from Castles in the Air came to retrieve the empties (a thing they were often lax about), Sam would go out to his oxygen bar, open the valves, run the tanks dry, pile them in his son's old red wagon, and trundle them out to the bright blue truck with the air-bubbles on it.
If he had still lived out on Little Bitch road, site of the old Verdreaux home place, Sam would have burned to a crisp (as Marta Edmunds did) in the minutes after the initial explosion. But the home place and the woodlots which had once surrounded it had been taken for unpaid taxes long since (and purchased back in '08 by one of several Jim Rennie dummy corporations... at bargain-basement rates). His baby sis owned a little patch of land out on God Creek, however, and that was where Sam was residing on the day the world blew up. The shack wasn't much, and he had to do his business in an outhouse (the only running water was supplied by an old hand-pump in the kitchen), but by gorry the taxes were paid, little sis saw to that... and he had THE MEDICAL.
Sam was not proud of his part in instigating the Food City riot. He had drunk many shots and beers with Georgia Roux's father over the years, and felt bad about hitting the man's daughter in the face with a rock. He kept thinking about the sound that piece of quartz had made when it connected, and how Georgia's broken jaw had sagged, making her look like a ventriloquist's dummy with a busted mouth. He could have killed her, by the living Jesus. Was probably a miracle that he hadn't... not that she had lasted long. And then an even sadder idea had occurred to him: if he'd left her alone, she wouldn't have been in the hospital. And if she hadn't been in the hospital, she'd probably still be alive.
If you looked at it that way, he had killed her.
The explosion at the radio station caused him to sit bolt upright out of a drunken sleep, clutching his chest and staring around wildly. The window above his bed had blown out. In fact, every window in the place had blown out, and his shack's west-facing front door had been torn clean off its hinges.
He stepped over it and stood frozen in his weedy and tire-strewn front yard, staring west, where the whole world appeared to be on fire.