He managed to stand and to stumble forward out of the bedroom and into the hall and then into the bathroom, his head throbbing in concert with his hand. He was able to unzip his pants and to urinate one-handed but then could not further operate the zipper and finally gave up and came into the living room holding his pants up with his only functional hand, the other held tight to his chest.
There he is, Rick said from the couch as he entered the room.
I can’t zip up my pants.
Shit. Rick stood and grabbed Nat’s pants and snapped them closed and then pulled the zipper up. The things I do for you, he said.
No kidding.
How you feeling?
Pretty miserable, he said. And I missed work.
Susan called us both in sick.
Oh thank god, Nat said. I thought I was screwed.
You still might be. You look awful.
He was still sweating and had begun shivering now. She went home? he said.
To work, Rick said. Jesus, man, I can hear your teeth chattering. I think I should take you to see a doctor.
I can’t afford that.
So don’t pay the bill when it comes. What’s your finger feel like?
A little better. Hurts but it’s also kinda numb.
I think I’d better unwrap it.
No way, Nat said.
Yes way, Rick said.
He stood there for what seemed a long time, his balance seeming to shift in all directions at once. Then he slid down next to Rick on the sofa. A rerun of M*A*S*H on Channel 2. Hawkeye speaking in a dim quiet slur. Canned laughter following the punch lines.
Rick unwrapped the toilet paper slowly and while Nat had been sure it would drive him into an agony of pain there was almost no sensation at all. When the last piece came off, the broken pencil stub that Susan had used as a brace fell into his lap and they both sat looking at the finger: a pale, bent, swollen thing that looked more like a ruined sausage than any part of his hand. Through its center, where the break was, a dark bruise mottled his tight swollen skin.
That doesn’t look good, Rick said.
Dang, Nat said. It made him sick to look at it.
We’re definitely going to the doctor, Rick said. Maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll give you some Percocet or something.
He nodded but did not move. Neither of them did. I don’t know what I’m gonna to do, he said after a time. He was still looking at his swollen and discolored finger. What am I gonna do?
We’ll figure something out, Rick said. We always do.
It’s serious, Nat said.
I know it is, buddy. I’ve got some weed to sell. That oughta help some.
What about your mom?
Well, like I said, we’ll figure something out.
From the television came Milt Wells’s voice and they both looked toward it in unison. Milt stood in his characteristic Western shirt and bolo tie before a row of gleaming cars and trucks. That’s right, he called out to them. Five hundred dollars cash back on any new car or truck. Five hundred dollars cash back. The man on the screen fanned a stack of bills in his hands as if they were playing cards.
And there’s all the money we need, Nat said wistfully.
Yeah maybe we should start a car dealership, Rick said.
Nat did not respond now, only sitting there, staring as the commercial ended and the next began.
I tell you one thing, Rick said. If I see that motherfucker Mike or Johnny fucking Aguirre I’ll knock his fucking head in.
Don’t do that, Nat said. That’ll make it really bad.
We’ll see, Rick said.
Nat could feel a sharp twisting inside him, like a short thin blade was rotating through his intestines. The geography of the continent seemed to stretch out under his feet, the desert elongating so that the arrowed points between where he was and everywhere he was not fled from each other across that vast and unending plain of sage and cheatgrass and dry dead earth.
11
HE TOLD HER EVERYTHING, BEGINNING WITH THE NIGHT AT the car dealership and then trying to explain the gambling and Johnny Aguirre and fumbling through what had happened when Rick had been in prison for those thirteen months and he had been left alone in Reno, knowing that none of it really made any sense, not to him and certainly not to Grace, listening to his own story and knowing it was true but feeling, all the while, as if it were the story of a stranger, something he had overheard somewhere and was repeating, like the plot of a movie. When she told him to start over he began in Battle Mountain, his brother with the disassembled bicycle, and the new kid who rented the trailer next to the one he shared with his brother and mother, the sagebrush rolling out in all directions and the flat top of the Sheep Creek Range looming above the bridge under which he would find frogs in the summer and where the teenagers would swim and smoke stolen cigarettes, the two of them—he and Rick—wandering everywhere across that landscape, and, when they were teenagers, stealing into silent empty homes in the midafternoon, taking souvenirs and sometimes selling them at the pawnshop in Winnemucca. How they would talk about taking care of your people. How that had been a kind of credo, something to live by.
Then his brother’s death. That terrible moment and the funeral that followed. He told her that it felt like there was a hole inside his chest that would never be filled, and when she asked him his brother’s name, he could only tell her that he needed to give her the whole story first and she looked confused but mumbled, OK, and he continued, from Battle Mountain to Reno to the moment they both occupied, he and Grace, in her bedroom, the only illumination the pools of yellow light from the nightstands and a faint blur of snow falling beyond the window.
My god, she said when he was silent at last. That’s all true?
It’s all true.
You did that stuff? The robbery and the gambling and … all of it?
Yep.
My god, she said again.
I didn’t want to tell you.
Apparently not, she said.
They were quiet then. The snow was coming heavy outside the window. He thought for a moment of the animals. They would be awake and moving in their enclosures, the snow a source of excitement, sending signals, sending messages of the winter to come.
Is that everything?
No, he said. There’s one more thing.
God, Bill, she said, this is a lot to take in.
I know it is. There’s just one more thing.
OK, let’s hear it. Her voice was devoid of emotion: flat, lifeless.