“What? What now?” That nagging, shrewish voice with the little tremor in it… was that really his?
Beaver pointed. The door to the bathroom where they’d put Rick McCarthy-Jonesy’s room-stood open. The door to the bathroom, which they had left open so McCarthy could not possibly miss his way if nature called, was now closed.
Beaver turned his somber, beard-speckled face to Jonesy’s. “Do you smell it?”
Jonesy did, in spite of the cold fresh air coming in through the door. Ether or ethyl alcohol, yes, there was still that, but now it was mixed with other stuff. Feces for sure. Something that could have been blood. And something else, something like mine-gas trapped a million years and finally let free. Not the kind of fart-smells kids giggled over on camping trips, in other words. This was something richer and far more awful. You could only compare it to farts because there was nothing else even close. At bottom, Jonesy thought, it was the smell of something contaminated and dying badly.
“And look there.” Beaver pointed at the hardwood floor. There was blood on it, a trail of bright droplets running from the open door to the closed one. As if McCarthy had dashed with a nosebleed.Only Jonesy didn’t think it was his nose that had been bleeding.
3
Of all the things in his life he hadn’t wanted to do-calling his brother Mike to tell him Ma had died of a heart attack, telling Carla she had to do something about the booze and all the prescriptions or he was going to leave her, telling Big Lou, his cabin counselor at Camp Agawam, that he had wet his bed-crossing the big central room at Hole in the Wall to that closed bathroom door was the hardest. It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.
In bad dreams you never got to where you’re going, but they made it to the other side of the room and so Jonesy supposed it wasn’t a dream after all. They stood looking down at the splatters of blood. They weren’t very big, the largest the size of a dime.
“He must have lost another tooth,” Jonesy said, still whispering. “That’s probably it.”
The Beav looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Then he went to the bedroom door and looked in. After a moment he turned to Jonesy and curled his finger in a beckoning gesture. Jonesy went to where Beaver stood in a kind of sidle, not wanting to lose sight of the closed bathroom door.
In the bedroom the covers had been thrown all the way back onto the floor, as if McCarthy had risen suddenly, urgently. The shape of his head was still in the middle of the pillow and the
shape of his body still lay printed on the sheet. Also printed on the sheet, about halfway down, was a large bloody blotch. Soaking into the blue sheet, it looked purple.
“Funny place to lose a tooth from,” Beaver whispered. He bit down on the toothpick in his mouth and the ragged front half of it fell on the doorsill. “Maybe he was hoping for a quarter from the Ass Fairy.”
Jonesy didn’t respond. He pointed to the left of the doorway, instead. There, in a tangle, were the bottoms of McCarthy’s longjohns and the jockey briefs he’d been wearing beneath them. Both were matted with blood. The jockeys had caught the worst of it; if not for the waistband and the cotton high up on the front, you might have thought they were a racy, jaunty red, the kind of shorts a devotee of the Penthouse Forum might put on if he was expecting to get laid when the date was over.
“Go look in the chamber pot,” Beaver whispered.
“Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?”
“Because I want to know what to fucking expect,” Beaver replied in a vehement whisper. He patted his chest, then spit out the ragged remains of his latest toothpick. “Man, my ticker’s goin nuts.”
Jonesy’s own heart was racing, and he could feel sweat running down his face. Nevertheless he stepped into the room. The cold fresh air coming in the back door had cleaned out the main room pretty well, but the stench in here was foul-shit and mine-gas and ether. Jonesy felt the little bit of food he’d eaten take an uneasy lurch in his stomach and willed it to stay where it was. He approached the chamber pot and at first couldn’t make himself look in. Half a dozen horror-movie images of what he might see danced in his head. Organs floating in blood soup. Teeth. A severed head.
“Go on!” Beaver whispered.
Jonesy squeezed his eyes shut, bent his head, held his breath, then opened his eyes again. There was nothing but clean china gleaming in the glow thrown by the overhead light. The chamber pot was empty. He released his breath in a sigh through his clenched teeth, then walked back to the Beav, avoiding the splashes of blood on the floor.
Nothing,” he said. “Now come on, let’s stop screwing around.” They walked past the closed door of the linen closet and regarded the closed pine-paneled door to the john. Beaver looked at Jonesy. Jonesy shook his head. “It’s your turn,” he whispered. “I looked in the thunderjug.”
“You found him,” Beaver whispered back. His jaw was set stubbornly. “You do it.”
Now Jonesy was hearing something else-hearing it without hearing it, exactly, partly because this sound was more familiar, mostly because he was so fiercely fixed on McCarthy, the man he had almost shot. A whup-whup-whup sound, faint but growing louder. Coming this way.
“Well fuck this,” Jonesy said, and although he only spoke in a normal tone of voice, it was loud enough to make them both jump a little. He rapped a knuckle on the door. “Mr McCarthy! Pick! Are you all right in there?”
He won’t answer, Jonesy thought. He won’t answer because he’s dead. Dead and sitting on the throne, just like Elvis.
But McCarthy wasn’t dead. He groaned, then said: “I’m a little sick, fellows. I need to move my bowels. If I can move my bowels, I’ll be-” There was another groan, then another fart. This one was low, almost liquid. The sound made Jonesy grimace. “-I’ll be all right,” McCarthy finished. To Jonesy, the man didn’t sound on the same continent with all right. He sounded out of breath and in pain. As if to underline this, McCarthy groaned again, louder. There was another of those liquid ripping sounds, and then McCarthy cried out.
“McCarthy!” Beaver tried the doorknob but it wouldn’t turn. McCarthy, their little gift from the woods, had locked it from the inside. “Rick!” The Beav rattled the knob. “Open up, man!” Beaver was trying to sound lighthearted, as if the whole thing was a big joke, a camp prank, which only made him sound more scared.
“I’m okay,” McCarthy said. He was panting now. “I just… fellows, I just need to make a little room.” There came the sound of more flatulence. It was ridiculous to think of what they were hearing as “passing gas” or “breaking wind”-those were airy phrases, light as meringue. The sounds coming from behind the closed door were brutal and meaty, like ripping flesh.
“McCarthy!” Jonesy said. He knocked. “Let us in!” But did he want to go in? He did not. He wished McCarthy had stayed lost or been found by someone else. Worse, the amygdala in the base of his brain, that unapologetic reptile, wished he had shot McCarthy to begin with. “Keep it simple, stupid,” as they said in Carla’s N.A. program. “McCarthy!”
“Go away!” McCarthy called with weak vehemence. “Can’t you go away and let a fellow let a fellow… make a little number two? Gosh!”
Whup-whup-whup: louder and closer now.
“Rick!” Now it was the Beav. Holding onto the light tone with a kind of desperation, like a climber in trouble holding onto his rope. “Where you bleedin from, buddy?”
“Bleeding?” McCarthy sounded honestly puzzled. “I’m not bleeding.”
Jonesy and Beaver exchanged a scared glance.
WHUP-WHUP-WHUP!
The sound had finally gotten Jonesy’s full attention, and what he felt was enormous relief “That’s a helicopter,” he said. “Bet they’re looking for him.”
“You think so?” Beaver wore the expression of a man hearing something too good to be true.
“Yeah.” Jonesy supposed the people in the chopper could be chasing the footlights in the sky or trying to figure out what the animals were up to, but he didn’t want to think about those things, didn’t care about those things. What he cared about was getting Rick McCarthy off the hopper, off his hands, and into a hospital in Machias or Derry. “Go on out there and flag them down.”