“Sir, your party does not answer.”
“I know it,” I said, and grimaced when I heard Lee’s pet phrase coming out of my mouth.
My quarters clattered into the coin return when I hung up. I started to put them back in, then reconsidered. What good would it do to call Miz Ellie? I was in Miz Ellie’s bad books now. Deke’s too, probably. They’d tell me to go peddle my papers.
When I walked back to the bar, Walter Cronkite was showing U-2 photos of the Soviet missile bases that were under construction. He said that many members of Congress were urging Kennedy to initiate bombing missions or launch a full-scale invasion immediately. American missile bases and the Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.
“American B-52 bombers will soon be circling just outside the Soviet Union’s borders,” Cronkite was saying in that deep, portentous voice of his. “And—this is obvious to all of us who’ve covered the last seven years of this ever more frightening cold war—the chances for a mistake, a potentiallydisastrousmistake, grow with each new escalation of—”
“Don’t wait!”a man standing by the pool table shouted.“Bomb the living shit out of those commie cocksuckers right now!”
There were a few cries of protest at this bloodthirsty sentiment, but they were mostly drowned in a wave of applause. I left the Ivy Room and jogged back to Neely Street. When I got there, I jumped into my Sunliner and rolled wheels for Jodie.
8
My car radio, now working again, broadcast nothing but a heaping dish of doom as I chased my headlights down Highway 77. Even the DJs had caught Nuclear Flu, saying things like “God bless America” and “Keep your powder dry.” When the K-Life jock played Johnny Horton caterwauling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I snapped it off. It was too much like the day after 9/11.
I kept the pedal to the metal in spite of the Sunliner’s increasingly distressed engine and the way the needle on the ENGINE TEMP dial kept creeping towardH. The roads were all but deserted, and I turned into Sadie’s driveway at just a little past twelve-thirty on the morning of the twenty-third. Her yellow VW Beetle was parked in front of the closed garage doors, and the lights were on downstairs, but there was no answer when I rang the doorbell. I went around back and hammered on the kitchen door, also to no effect. I liked it less and less.
She kept a spare key under the back step. I fished it out and let myself in. The unmistakable aroma of whiskey hit my nose, and the stale smell of cigarettes.
“Sadie?”
Nothing. I crossed the kitchen to the living room. There was an overflowing ashtray on the low table in front of the couch, and liquid soaking into theLifeandLookmagazines spread out there. I put my fingers into it, then raised them to my nose. Scotch. Fuck.
“Sadie?”
Now I could smell something else that I remembered well from Christy’s binges: the sharp aroma of vomit.
I ran down the short hall on the other side of the living room. There were two doors facing each other, one giving on her bedroom and the other leading to an office-study. The doors were shut, but the bathroom door at the end of the hall was open. The harsh fluorescent light showed vomit splattered on the ring of thetoilet bowl. There was more on the pink tile floor and the rim of the bathtub. There was a bottle of pills standing beside the soapdish on the sink. The cap was off. I ran to the bedroom.
She was lying crosswise on the mussed coverlet, wearing a slip and one suede moccasin. The other had dropped off onto the floor. Her skin was the color of old candle wax, and she did not appear to be breathing. Then she took a huge snoring gasp and wheezed it back out. Her chest remained flat for a terrifying four seconds, then she jerked in another rattle of breath. There was another overflowing ashtray on the night table. A crumpled Winston pack, charred at one end by an imperfectly stubbed-out cigarette, lay on top of the dead soldiers. Beside the ashtray were a half-empty glass and a bottle of Glenlivet. Not much of the Scotch was gone—thank God for small favors—but it wasn’t really the Scotch I was worried about. It was the pills. There was also a brown manila envelope on the table with what looked like photographs spilling out of it, but I didn’t glance at them. Not then.
I got my arms around her and tried to pull her into a sitting position. The slip was silk and slithered through my hands. She thumped back onto the bed and took another of those rasping, labored breaths. Her hair flopped across one closed eye.
“Sadie, wake up!”
Nothing. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her against the head of the bed. It thumped and shivered.
“Lea me lone.” Slurry and weak, but better than nothing.
“Wake up, Sadie! You have to wake up!”
I began to slap lightly at her cheeks. Her eyes remained shut, but her hands came up and tried—weakly—to fend me off.
“Wake up! Wake up, dammit!”
Her eyes opened, looked at me without recognition, then shut again. But she was breathing more normally. Now that she was sitting, that terrifying rasp was gone.
I went back to the bathroom, dumped her toothbrush out of the pink plastic glass, and turned on the cold tap. While I filled the glass, I looked at the label on the pill bottle. Nembutal. There wereten or a dozen capsules left, so it hadn’t been a suicide attempt. At least not an overt one. I spilled them into the toilet, then ran back to the bedroom. She was sliding down from the sitting position I’d left her in, and with her head cocked forward and her chin down against her breastbone, her respiration had turned raspy again.
I put the glass of water on the nightstand, and froze for a second as I got a look at one of the photographs sticking out of the envelope. It could have been a woman—what remained of the hair was long—but it was hard to tell for sure. Where the face should have been, there was only raw meat with a hole near the bottom. The hole appeared to be screaming.
I hauled Sadie up, grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled her head back. She moaned something that might have beenDon’t, that hurts.Then I threw the glass of water in her face. She jerked and her eyes flew open.
“Jor? Wha you doon here, Jor? Why-my wet?”
“Wake up. Wake up, Sadie.” I began to slap her face again, but more gently now, almost patting. It wasn’t good enough. Her eyes started to slip closed.
