“Clack-clack-clack, those tiny grunts and sobs of effort, and after every word that pallid ink- and dirt-streaked fist would come out between the B and the N and hammer down on the space bar. I don’t know exactly how long it went on. Seven minutes, maybe. Maybe ten. Or maybe forever.
“Finally the clacks stopped, and I realized I couldn’t hear him breathing anymore. Maybe he fainted…
maybe he just gave up and went away… or maybe he died. Had a heart attack or something. All I really know for sure is that the message was not finished. It read, completely in lowercase: rackne is dying its the little boy jimmy thorpe doesn’t know tell thorpe rackne is dying the little boy jimmy is killing rackne bel… and that was
all.
“I found the strength to get to my feet then, and I left the room. I walked in great big tippy-toe steps, as if I thought it had gone to sleep and if I made any of those flat echoey noises on the bare wood it would wake up and the typing would start again… and I thought if it did, the first clack would start me screaming. And then I would just go on until my heart or my head burst.
“My Chevy was in the parking lot down the street, all gassed and loaded and ready to go. I got in behind the wheel and remembered the bottle in my topcoat pocket. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped it, but it landed on the seat and didn’t break.
“I remembered the blackouts, and, my friends, right then a blackout was exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got. I remember taking the first drink from the neck of the bottle, and the second. I remember turning the key over to accessory and getting Frank Sinatra on the radio singing “That Old Black Magic,’ which seemed fitting enough. Under the circumstances. So to speak. I remember singing along, and having a few more drinks. I was in the back row of the lot, and I could see the traffic light on the corner going through its paces. I kept thinking of those flat clacking sounds in the empty room, and the fading red light in the den. I kept thinking of those puffing sounds, as if some body-building elf had hung fishing sinkers on the ends of a Q-Tip and was doing bench presses inside my old typewriter. I kept seeing the pebbly surface on the back side of that torn scrap of wallpaper. My mind kept wanting to examine what must have gone on before I came back to the apartment… kept wanting to see it — him — Bellis — jumping up, grabbing the loose edge of the wallpaper by the door to the bedroom because it was the only thing left in the room approximating paper — hanging on —
finally tearing it loose and carrying it back to the typewriter on its — on his — head like the leaf of a nipa palm. I kept trying to imagine how he — it — could ever have run it into the typewriter. And none of that was blacking out so I kept drinking and Frank Sinatra stopped and there was an ad for Crazy Eddie’s and. then Sarah Vaughan came on singing ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ and that was something else I could relate to since I’d done just that recently or at least I’d thought I had up until tonight when something happened to give me cause to rethink my position on that matter so to speak and I sang along with good old Sarah Soul and right about then I must have achieved escape velocity because in the middle of the second chorus with no lag at all I was puking my guts out while somebody first thumped my back with his palms and then lifted my elbows behind me and put them down and then thumped my back with his palms again. That was the trucker. Every time he thumped I’d feel a great clot of liquid rise up in my throat and get ready to go back down except then.he’d lift my elbows and every time he lifted my elbows I’d puke again, and most of it wasn’t even Black Velvet but river water. When I was able to lift my head enough to look around it was six o’clock in the evening three days later and I was lying on the bank of the Jackson River in western Pennsylvania, about sixty miles north of Pittsburgh. My Chevy was sticking out of the river, rear end up. I could still read the McCarthy sticker on the bumper.