in a limp flap, the seat torn open to reveal badly bleeding buttocks) and one white
sock. He stared up at the blue sky, eyes wide. And began to scream. He had screamed
himself almost hoarse before he realized he was screaming actual words: I’m alive!
I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive!
Twenty minutes later, he got to his feet and limped to the defunct construction trailer sitting on its concrete blocks, a large puddle from yesterday’s shower hiding in its
shadow. The door was locked, but there were more blocks lying to one side of the raw
wooden steps. One was cracked in two pieces. Curtis picked up the smaller chunk and
bashed it against the lock until the door shuddered open, letting out a puff of hot, stale air.
He turned before going in and for a moment surveyed the toilets on the other side of
the road, where pothole puddles flashed back the bright blue sky like shards of a dirty mirror. Five Port-O-Sans, three standing, two lying face-down in the ditch. He had
almost died in the one on the left. And although he was standing here in nothing but a pair of tattered underpants and one sock, shit-streaked and bleeding in what felt like a hundred places, that idea already seemed unreal. A bad dream.
The office was partially empty—or partially ransacked, probably only a day or two
ahead of the final project shutdown. There were no partitions; it was one long room
with a desk, two chairs, and a discount-store couch in the front half. In the back half there was a stack of cartons filled with papers, a dusty adding machine sitting on the floor, a small unplugged fridge, a radio, and a swivel chair with a note taped to the
back. SAVE FOR JIMMY, the note said.
There was also a closet door standing ajar, but before checking it, Curtis opened the
little fridge. Inside were four bottles of Zephyr spring water, one of them opened and three-quarters empty. Curtis seized one of the full bottles and drank the entire thing down. It was warm, but it tasted like the kind of water that might flow in the rivers of heaven. When it was gone, his stomach clenched. He rushed to the door, hung out by
the jamb, and vomited the water back up to one side of the steps.
“Look, Ma, no gagging necessary!” he cried, with tears running down his filthy face.
He supposed he could have vomited the water right onto the deserted trailer’s floor,
but he didn’t want to be in the same room with his own waste. Not after what had
happened.
In fact, I intend never to take another dump, he thought. From now on I’m going to empty myself the religious way: immaculate evacuation.
He drank the second bottle of water more slowly, and it stayed down. While he sipped,
he looked into the closet. There were two pairs of dirty pants and some equally dirty
shirts piled in one corner. Curtis guessed that at one point there might have been a
washer-dryer back there, where the cartons were stacked. Or maybe there had been
another trailer, one that had been hitched up and hauled away. He didn’t care. What
he cared about was the two pair of discount-store overalls, one on a wire hanger, the
other dangling from a wall hook. The pair on the hook looked much too big, but the
one on the hanger might fit. And did, more or less. He had to roll the cuffs up two
turns, and he supposed he looked more like Farmer John after slopping the hogs than
a successful stock trader, but they would serve.
He could call the police, but he felt he had a right to more satisfaction than that after what he had been through. Quite a lot more.
“Witches don’t call the police,” he said. “Especially not us gay ones.”
His motor scooter was still out there, but he had no intention of riding back just yet.
For one thing, too many people would see the mud-man on the red Vespa
Granturismo. He didn’t think anyone would call the cops…but they’d laugh. Curtis