Chapter 25 #7
He glanced at his watch, as if to confirm this. It was big and clunky, probably a Rolex.
“I try to see where you live when you come in to collect, but you hold your thumb over your address. That’s okay.
Lotta guys do that. I decide I’m gonna let it go.
I should send some boys down the street to beat the shit out of you, maybe even kill you so that Eddie G’s mind—what’s left of it—can be at rest?
Because some guy took shit odds and beat me out of twelve hundred?
Fuck that, what Eddie G don’t know won’t hurt him.
Besides, with you out of the way, he’d just start thinking about something else.
Maybe that Henry Ford was the Annie Christ or sumshit.
Carmo, he’s not listening again and that pisses me off. ”
Carmo swung the pipe at my midsection. It struck me below the ribs with paralyzing force. There was pain, first jagged, then swallowed in a growing explosion of heat, like a fireball.
“Hurts, don’t it?” Carmo said. “Gets you right in the old kazeenie.”
“I think you ruptured something,” I said. I heard a hoarse steam-engine sound and realized that was me, panting.
“I hope he fucking did,” Roth said. “I let you go, you dumbbell! I fucking let you go! I forgot about you! Then you turn up at Frank’s in Fort Worth to bet the goddam Case-Tiger fight.
Exact same MO—big bet on the underdog and all the odds you can get.
This time you predict the exact fucking round.
So here’s what’s going to happen, my friend: you’re going to tell me how you knew.
If you do that, I take some pictures of you like you are now and Eddie G’s satisfied.
He knows he can’t have you dead, because Carlos told him no, and Carlos is the one guy he listens to, even now.
But if he sees you fucked up… aw, but you ain’t fucked up enough quite yet.
Fuck him up some more, Carmo. Do the face. ”
So Carmo hammered my face while the other two held me.
He broke my nose, closed my left eye, knocked out a few teeth, and tore open my left cheek.
I kept thinking, I’ll pass out or they’ll kill me, either way the pain will stop.
But I didn’t pass out, and at some point Carmo quit.
He was breathing hard, and there were red splotches on his yellow rawhide gloves.
Sunshine came in through the kitchen windows and made cheery oblongs on the faded linoleum.
“That’s better,” Roth said. “Get the Polaroid out of the truck, Carmo. Hustle, now. I want to finish up here.”
Before leaving, Carmo stripped off his gloves and put them on the table next to the lead pipe. Some of the felt strips had come loose. They were soaked with blood. My face was throbbing, but my abdomen was worse. There, the heat continued to spread. Something was very wrong down there.
“One more time, Amberson. How’d you know the fix was in? Who told you? The truth.”
“It was just a guess.” I tried to tell myself I sounded like a man with a bad cold, but I didn’t. I sounded like a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of him.
He picked up the pipe and tapped it against one pudgy hand. “Who told you, fuckface?”
“Nobody. Gutierrez was right. I’m a devil, and devils can see the future.”
“You’re running out of chances.”
“Wanda’s too tall for you, Roth. And too skinny. When you’re on top of her, you must look like a toad trying to fuck a log. Or maybe—”
His placid face wrinkled into rage. It was a complete transformation, and it happened in less than a second. He swung the pipe at my head. I got my left arm up and heard it crack like a birch-branch overloaded with ice. This time when I sagged, the goons let me drop to the floor.
“Fuckin wiseass, how I hate a fuckin wiseass.” This seemed to come from a great distance.
Or a great height. Or both. I was finally getting ready to pass out, and ever so grateful to go.
But I had enough vision left to see Carmo when he came back in with a Polaroid camera.
It was big and bulky, the kind where the lens comes out on a kind of accordion.
“Turn im over,” Roth said. “Let’s get his good side.” As the goons did so, Carmo handed Roth the camera, and Roth handed Carmo the pipe. Then Roth raised the camera to his face and said, “Watch the birdie, you fuckin spunkbucket. Here’s one for Eddie G…”
Flash.
“… and one for my own personal collection, which I don’t actually have but which I may now start…”
Flash.
“… and here’s one for you. To remember that when serious people ask you questions, you should answer.”
Flash.
He yanked the third shot out of the camera and threw it in my direction. It landed in front of my left hand… which he then stepped on. Bones crunched. I whimpered and drew my hurt hand back to my chest. He had broken at least one finger, maybe as many as three.
“You want to remember to strip that in sixty seconds, or it’ll get all overcooked. If you’re awake, that is.”
“You want to ask im some more now that he’s tenderized?” Carmo asked.
“You kiddin? Look at im. He don’t even know his own name anymore. Fuck him.” He started to turn away, then turned back. “Hey, asshat. Here’s one to grow on.”
That was when he kicked me in the side of the head with what felt like a steel-toed shoe. Skyrockets exploded across my vision. Then the back of my head connected with the baseboard, and I was gone.
16
I don’t think I was out for long, because the oblongs of sunlight on the linoleum didn’t appear to have moved.
My mouth tasted of wet copper. I spat half-congealed blood onto the floor, along with a fragment of tooth, and set about getting to my feet.
I needed to hold onto one of the kitchen chairs with my one working hand, then onto the table (which nearly fell over on top of me), but on the whole it was easier than I thought.
My left leg felt numb, and my pants were tight halfway down, where the knee was swelling as promised, but I thought it could have been a lot worse.
I looked out the window to make sure the panel truck was gone, then began a slow, limping journey into the bedroom.
My heart was taking big soft walloping beats in my chest. Each one throbbed in my broken nose and vibrated the swelling left side of my face, where the cheekbone just about had to be broken.
The back of my head throbbed, too. My neck was stiff.
Could have been worse, I reminded myself as I shuffled across the bedroom. You’re on your feet, aren’t you? Just get the damn gun, put it in the glove compartment, then drive yourself to the emergency room. You’re basically all right. Probably better than Dick Tiger is this morning.
I was able to go on telling myself that until I stretched my hand up to the closet shelf.
When I did that, something first pulled in my guts…
and then seemed to roll. The sullen heat centered on my left side flared like coals when you throw gasoline on them.
I got my fingertips on the butt of the gun, turned it, hooked a thumb into the trigger-guard, and pulled it off the shelf.
It hit the floor and bounced into the bedroom.
Probably not even loaded. I bent over to get it.
My left knee shrieked and gave way. I fell to the floor, and the pain in my guts whooshed up again.
I got the gun, though, and rolled the cylinder.
It was loaded after all. Every chamber. I put it in my pocket and tried to crawl back to the kitchen, but the knee was too painful.
And the headache was worse, spreading out dark tentacles from its little cave above the nape of my neck.
I made it to the bed on my belly, using a swimming motion. Once I was there I managed to haul myself up again, using my right arm and right leg. The left leg held me, but I was losing flexion in the knee. I had to get out of there, and right away.
I must have looked like Chester, the limping deputy from Gunsmoke, as I made my way out of the bedroom, across the kitchen, and to the front door, which hung open with splinters around the lock. I even remember thinking Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon, there’s trouble down at the Longbranch!
I crossed the porch, seized the railing in my right fist, and crabbed down to the walk.
There were only four steps, but my headache got worse each time I jolted down another one.
I seemed to be losing my peripheral vision, which couldn’t be good.
I tried to turn my head to see my Chevrolet, but my neck didn’t want to cooperate.
I managed a shuffling whole-body pivot instead, and when I had the car in my sights, I realized driving would be an impossibility.
Even opening the passenger side door and stowing the gun in the glove compartment would be an impossibility: bending would cause the pain and heat in my side to explode again.
I fumbled the .38 out of my pocket and returned to the porch. I held the stair-rail and underhanded the gun beneath the steps. It would have to do. I straightened up again and made my slow way down the walk to the street. Baby steps, I told myself. Little baby steps.
Two kids came sailing up on bikes. I tried to tell them I needed help, but the only thing to come out of my swollen mouth was a dry hhhahhhh sound. They glanced at each other, then pedaled faster and swerved around me.
I turned to the right (my swollen knee made going left seem like the world’s worst idea) and began to stagger down the sidewalk.
My vision continued to close in; now I seemed to be peering out of a gunslit, or from the mouth of a tunnel.
For a moment that made me think of the fallen smokestack at the Kitchener Ironworks, back in Derry.
Get to Haines Avenue, I told myself. There’ll be traffic on Haines Avenue. You have to get at least that far.
But was I going toward Haines, or away from it?
I couldn’t remember. The visible world was down to a single sharp circle about six inches in diameter.
My head was splitting; there was a forest fire in my guts.
When I fell, it seemed to be in slow motion, and the sidewalk felt as soft as a feather-pillow.
Before I could pass out, something prodded me. A hard, metallic something. A rusty voice eight or ten miles above me said, “You! You, boy! What’s wrong with you?”
I turned over. It took the last of my strength, but I managed.
Towering above me was the elderly woman who’d called me a coward when I refused to step in between Lee and Marina on The Day of the Zipper.
It might have been that day, because, August heat or no August heat, she was once more wearing the pink flannel nightgown and the quilted jacket.
Perhaps because I still had boxing on what remained of my mind, her upstanding hair today reminded me of Don King instead of Elsa Lanchester.
She had poked me with one of the front legs of her walker.
“Ohmydeargod,” she said. “Who has beaten you?”
That was a long story, and I couldn’t tell it. The dark was closing in, and I was glad because the pain in my head was killing me. Al got lung cancer, I thought. I got Akiva Roth. Either way, game over. Ozzie wins.
Not if I could help it.
Gathering all my strength, I spoke to the face far above me, the only bright thing left in the encroaching darkness. “Call… nine-one-one.”
“What’s that?”
Of course she didn’t know. Nine-one-one hadn’t been invented yet. I held on long enough to try one more time. “Ambulance.”
I think I might have repeated it, but I’m not sure. That was when the darkness swallowed me.
17
I have wondered since if it was kids who stole my car, or Roth’s goons. And when it happened. At any rate, the thieves didn’t trash it or crash it; Deke Simmons picked it up in the DPD impound lot a week later. It was in far better shape than I was.
Time-travel is full of ironies.