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  “Where’s Kelly?” he asked Marvin, giving his tie one last tug into place.

  Marvin’s bronzed cheeks puffed out in a distraught sigh. He looked genuinely shaken. “His wife took him to the hospital last night.”

  Jason’s heart skipped a beat, then tried to compensate. “The hospital? What’s wrong?” He remembered Kelly hadn’t been feeling the greatest yesterday, and hadn’t improved as the day wore on. He had a fever, a cough was developing, his groin and underarms had been painful and tender, and Kelly said he thought they might be swollen. He’d dismissed it as a case of summer flu, which wasn’t going to drive him out of his store.

  “She didn’t really know,” Marvin said with a helpless gesture. “You were around him yesterday, you know about as much as I do. She said he just got worse and worse, weaker and weaker.” He twisted at his collection of rings.

  Jason leaned heavily against the counter, tapped his fingertips against his thigh. Kelly, in the hospital? That had always seemed so remote. If anybody in town was destined to steer clear of the hospital, it was Kelly. He was like a playful bear, an overgrown cub, too feisty and mean to come down sick.

  Jason swore and trudged toward the back office for a cup of Mr. Coffee’s offering for the day.

  Thursdays didn’t start out much more rotten than this.

  * *

  He’d never thought much one way or another about hospitals until his parents had died. After that he hoped he’d never have to set foot in one again. He knew this made no sense—they hadn’t lingered in twin beds, putrefying into limp bags of bones. They’d gone quickly. But now he realized that hospitals were places of death, and he wanted no part of it. People went there to heal, yes. But they also went there to die, human elephants heading for that final burial ground. Except the hospital charged you to get the job done.

  Jason grimaced and tugged at his tie as he neared the main desk in the hospital’s lobby. Sweat broke out, and he hooked a finger into his collar.

  “John Kelly’s room, please,” he told the duty clerk. His stomach then made one of those embarrassingly loud noises that sound like a cross between a newly released spring and mutated human speech. He cleared his throat in case it spoke up again. He was spending his lunch break here, and knew he wouldn’t feel like eating again until this evening. If then, even.

  The clerk found Kelly’s card, pursed her lips while scanning it. She looked up at Jason. “Are you a member of the immediate family?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I’m sorry, but he’s not allowed any visitors outside his immediate family.”

  Jason felt his stomach drop away with such rapidity it was dizzying. “What’s wrong with him?”

  She shook her head, a practiced gesture she looked almost bored with. “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  He sighed heavily, tapping the counter for a moment. “Okay, how about this: He’s been like a father to me the past year, and I’ve been the closest thing to a son he’s had for even longer.” He smiled hopefully.

  It didn’t wash. She was terribly sorry, but…

  And his smile wilted away. He left in defeat and, in the back of his mind, thought how busy the hospital lobby seemed. Was it always this crowded? Or did it pick up during the noon hour? Or was business just booming in general these days?

  * *

  Jason watched as the shadows gradually lengthened across the lawns, the sidewalks, the street. It was evening, pleasant for mid-July, and as he sat on a lawn chair on his balcony sipping a Coors, he knew he should be feeling well at ease with the world. The just rewards of a long day and a hard run. Instead he felt about like he had in the week or so after Lora had left him last spring.

  Kelly in the hospital. He’d tried calling his wife at home, got no answer. His calls to the hospital were terminated at the switchboard. He wondered if they were this inconsiderate of everybody these days, or if there was something special about Kelly’s case.

  It had been two weeks since Kelly had sent him to St. Louis to pick up that shipment, a trip that had seen him fall prey to his first mugger. It had left him feeling agitated at the time—how about a warning the next time you send me into a combat zone. Of course it hadn’t been Kelly’s fault, but nobody likes to lose a wallet, forty-six dollars, a driver’s license, an American Express card, pride, dignity, and blood, all in one fell swoop.

  Right now, though, Jason believed he’d gladly crawl through as much broken glass as it would take to get Kelly discharged with a clean bill of health.

  Jason remembered the mugging, not bitter anymore, and he remembered the little mutt that had come trotting along to pick up his spirits. He wondered where the dog had come from, who she’d belonged to, why she’d been forced out on her own. He remembered her with a fond little smile on his lips.

  Jason would’ve regarded her with something close to awe if he’d known that, above all, the dog had saved his life.

  * *

  The call from Kelly’s wife came the next afternoon, while he was still at the store. Marvin, powdered and perfumed and bronzed and wrapped in one of his many three-piece pinstriped suits, took over Jason’s task of fitting a fellow in a tux for an August wedding.

  His mouth went dry when Maude Kelly introduced herself. There was no hesitation in him when she told him that Kelly wanted to see him…now. At their home.

  During the first half of the drive, Jason’s spirits lifted. He must be doing better now, right? Out of the hospital and all, back in his own bed, watching his own TV. Then his spirits took a nosedive. If Kelly was really doing better, why wouldn’t he have made the call himself?

  Maude answered the door a minute after Jason rapped the brass knocker. Before she did, though, he had a flash of Ebenezer Scrooge and the knocker on his own door, transforming into the face of Jacob Marley. My partner, seven years dead this very night. It felt like a bad omen.

  Maude’s eyes were listless, glassy orbs in pools of darkened skin. Her makeup was old and smeary, and her hair, usually so carefully coiffed, looked more like a fright wig. If she’d gotten two hours’ sleep out of the last forty-eight, Jason would’ve been surprised.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said, clutching him by the arm. “He started asking for you late this morning.”

  Jason felt a rush of undeserved guilt. “I tried to visit him at the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me go up. They wouldn’t even send a phone call through.”

  She nodded wearily.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jason asked. “Please tell me.”

  “I only wish I knew, dear,” she said, looking him straight on, strong and dignified despite the smudges of mascara around her eyes. “Nobody knows what to call it.”

  “How come he got sent home, then?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t discharge him. I sneaked him out to the car overnight and drove him back here myself. That’s what he wanted. And I bet if you’d been a patient up there in that hospital, that’s the way you’d’ve wanted it too.”

  Jason’s brow creased and he was about to ask her to explain when she pointed toward the rear of the house. “You know the way.”

  With as much trepidation as he could ever recall feeling, Jason slowly walked that gauntlet toward the bedroom. He first noticed the smell, getting stronger with each step, the thick phlegmy odor of a warehoused human being that they try so hard to mask in nursing homes. The smell of illness, and beneath it, death on the wing. In the bedroom, the shades had been drawn, plunging the room into a perpetual dusk. Kelly lay on the bed, seeming little more than a lump beneath the covers. The brittle rasp of Kelly’s breath filled the air.

  Movement…was the figure on the bed nodding? “Come here. I want to see you.”

  Jason moved from the doorway over to the bed, looked down at him, fearing what he might see. But the dim ligh
t was merciful. It made it easier to pretend that the purple-black lesions on Kelly’s face were shadows.

  Jason felt a tear creep into the corner of one eye and hang suspended. “We need you at the store, you know. We, uh…” His voice wavered, threatened to crack. “You’re one indispensable guy.”

  “Get used to it.” His voice wasn’t that bad, was it? Weak, yes, but speaking didn’t seem to take much effort. Surely he’d get better.

  “Come on. In a week this’ll all be a memory.”

  In the dim light, Kelly grinned, the grin of a man at the brink of a secret, who knows more than he should. “Know what? I bet in a month this whole town will be a memory.”

  He’s losing it, Jason thought. And a tiny dark part within him hoped that’s what prompted such a revelation.

  “Maudie tell you she sprung me from the hospital last night?”

  Jason nodded, feeling that single tear fall because more were coming behind it.

  “She did me right on that count. Did she ever show some nerve on that. Jason, put that wet washcloth on my forehead. Lord in Heaven, I’m burning up.”

  Jason lifted the cloth from a pan on a table overrun with bottles of aspirin, sleeping pills, boxes of Kleenex, water glasses…and a small pan that looked as if it were filled with raspberry syrup. A moment later Jason realized with horror that Kelly had been spitting into it. He averted his eyes and draped the cloth across Kelly’s forehead.

  “Ohhh, better,” Kelly whispered. “Not much, but…better.” He sniffed, then heaved a retching cough and spat into the pan. Jason felt his stomach turn inside out.

  “John,” he said, and now the tears were starting down slow but steady, for he already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. But please let me be wrong, please. “John, why did you want me here to…to see this?”

  Kelly sighed. From within his chest came the papery rattling of reeds whispering in the wind. “I wanted to say goodbye, Jay. I think you know that.”

  Jason bit his lower lip so hard he feared he might draw blood.

  “I’m not gonna last the night, I know that.” Kelly trembled as he fought back another coughing spasm. “I’ve seen so many others go, I know what my chances are. And at least I got my wits about me. More’n I can say about a lot of them. Guess I’m luckier than most. At least I get to make some goodbyes.”

  “What are you talking about? Back at the hospital?”

  Kelly nodded. “That place is full to bursting, Jay. Most all of us had this. No such thing as private rooms anymore. They’re all wards. And they got security a lot tighter on that place now. It’s a wonder Maudie got me out at all. She had to bribe a night nurse five hundred dollars. You believe that? But I want to die at home.” He coughed again, spat. “Feels like my frigging lungs’ve torn loose.”

  Jason began to feel soft creeping fingers of fear tickling at his insides. “Why haven’t we heard anything about this? There’s nothing in the paper, nothing on the news.”

  “I expect it will be before too long. It’ll get too big to hush up. But haven’t you noticed anything around town?”

  Jason shook his head.

  “’Course not, you’re such a loner and all.” He grunted a laugh. “But I did. Maybe a week ago, maybe more…maybe less. I dunno. Business started dropping off. Just a little. More each day. Sidewalks got less crowded. Less traffic. Not so’s just anyone’d notice. But someone observant, who takes notice. Like me.” A sluggish hand reached up to wipe his face with the washcloth. “And in the hospital I tried hard to keep my ears open, pick up what I could. You hear lots of things at night, when it’s quieter. A lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how bad St. Louis is getting. They think it started around there, I forget the name of the town. Some little pissant burg. And I heard tell of these special doctors from Atlanta running all over trying to figure out what this is.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “Not that I heard. Ah, hell, they come around and jab us in the ass and in the arms, and give us pills, and none of it helps.” He grunted another laugh. “All I got to show for their trouble is a sore ass.” He rumbled more laughter, and it threw him into another violent bout of coughing. “I say hell with ’em. These Atlanta doctors, they’re from someplace everybody was calling the CDC.”

  “Centers for Disease Control,” Jason said. He’d once watched a documentary about their involvement in the Legionnaire’s Disease case.

  “I figure if they can’t puzzle it out in time, just let me die in peace. Let me go out with a little dignity, without some nurse young enough to be my daughter trying to stick another thermometer up my ass.”

  Jason grinned a little, through the tears. Because a part of the old Kelly had resurfaced for a moment. Then loomed a question so obvious he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. “John, if this is so bad, why did you call me here and expose me to it?”

  Kelly smiled grimly. “If you’re gonna catch it, son, you’re gonna do it sooner or later.”

  That makes sense. It really does. The question of his own mortality still didn’t seem real yet, that it was now as chancy as the toss of a coin. But if such was his fate, to fall before this onslaught that was laying a secret siege to the town, he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather catch it from than Kelly.

  “But maybe you won’t,” Kelly said, a note of hope creeping into his voice. “And if you haven’t by now, then you never will.”

  An ugly future stretched ahead in Jason’s imagination, bleak and lonely and desolate. And harsh. Providing he actually lived that long. The big IF. “John, what do I do now?” he whispered.

  Kelly drew a deep, rattling breath. “If you see that things are looking worse and worse in the next few days…”

  You mean if I’m still alive and kicking.

  “…get out of town. Get off in the country. I know you can handle that.” He smiled. “Remember last summer, after your folks and all, how we used to stay up nights talking? You used to tell me about how your dad would take you on those hunting trips. You remember?”

  Jason nodded, couldn’t talk. Apparently it wasn’t enough that his father had to die so prematurely. Now he had to listen to the only other father figure in his life reminisce about it from his deathbed.

  “You can do it again. Solo, this time. Take a shotgun, some fishing gear. Stock up on Spam, Beanee Weenees, all that good canned stuff. Come back in a while and see what’s left.”

  Jason found one of Kelly’s hands and clasped it. He had the feeling he’d never get much of a chance again.

  “I got this funny notion that…that things are gonna get ugly, Jay. Real ugly.” For the first time since Jason’s arrival, Kelly winced with genuine pain, trembled, relaxed. His eyes reopened. “Know what I heard once? That the very old and the very young sometimes know things nobody else does. ’Cause they’re both closer to whatever’s beyond life. Only nobody believes them ’cause they’re just little kids or they’re half-senile.” He smiled again, that smile of secret knowledge. “Remember what I said: real ugly.”

  He clutched Kelly’s hand harder. “I will.”

  “And if you gotta get ugly yourself to hang in there, well, you just go on ahead and do that. You understand?”

  Jason nodded, eyes blurry and snot on his upper lip.

  “Yeah…I thought you would.” Kelly’s face rolled to the right, so he could peer directly up at Jason. His eyes were bright, almost childlike, but they were also sad. The eyes of a man sending his only son off to college. Or to war. But unlike Jason’s, they were dry. “I think you better leave now. I…I got things I’m about to do.”

  Their hands locked again, painfully for both. But no matter; the moment would have to last them each a lifetime. After a few seconds they relaxed, and Jason bent down to lightly kiss Kelly’s glistening forehead. The skin beneath his li
ps felt hot, feverish, radiant with its intensity. He straightened.

  “Bald old fart,” Jason said.

  Kelly grinned, and now his teeth were slimed with the same stuff that was in the pan. “Sheepdog.”

  There was so much more to say, reams and volumes dammed up inside both. Advice from a substitute father to a surrogate son. Appreciation from son to father. But time had run out. So it all had to pass without words, in a lingering glance, a set of the mouth, a tilt of the head. It wasn’t enough. It never is. But it has to do.

  Jason held his head high as he passed through the hall back to the living room, trying to remind himself that Kelly was bowing out the way he’d wanted all along. Earlier than he would’ve liked, but at least the way he wanted. In familiar surroundings, his mind intact, and most of all, with enough love to carry him through to the other side.

  Jason almost smiled for him.

  He paused in the living room to hold Maude’s hand. Her dark-ringed eyes were soft and gentle as a doe’s. And not unlike her husband’s—she knew something too.

  “Take care of yourself, Jason,” she said. “Whatever happens.”

  “I’ll try.” For some reason, he’d never looked upon her as a substitute for the mother he’d lost, but in that last moment thought he’d been missing out on something all along. How sad to finally realize these things so late.

  “I think I’ll be joining him now,” she said. And she dabbed at her mouth with a well-used tissue.

  It was stained red.

  13

  They were holding him without bail.

  Travis was in for five, count ’em, five counts of murder in the first degree. And the judge had decided that in no way would Travis be allowed to walk the streets again for any amount of money. Smart thinking, Travis had to admit. His mind had been whirring ever since the police had led him away from home on Monday in handcuffs, working on a plan in case a miracle occurred and he was able to post bond. Mexico, he’d decided. Scrape up whatever money he could, maybe secure some loans from a few of the guys he worked and drank beer with, pop a handful of NoDoz and set off on one long marathon drive south of the border. It wouldn’t be any picnic, but in some bizarre way he thought he just might thrive down there, given the heat and the dust and the opportunities awaiting a man unafraid to make his way along by his muscles and his wits.