We drove out to Fig’s place to see about Holiday, who owed Vaughn some money, I guess. They were on the outs again, but Holiday was still crashing there. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
She greeted us at the top of the steps, the screen door propped open against her body. She held the baby on her hip, who was chewing on a spoon and had something wrong with it.
“What’s the story here?” she said.
“There isn’t one,” said Vaughn. “We came to talk to Holiday.”
“Well, he’s back in the back. He shot Bucket earlier, so you’re aware.”
“What’d he do that for?”
“Did he kill him?” I added.
Water could be heard boiling on the burner behind her in the kitchen. I myself was high on ketamine at this moment and felt a slight fever coming on.
We went in and found Holiday in the back room of the trailer. He sat cross-legged on a wicker rocker, his knees above the arm rests, rolling a spliff on a Styrofoam takeout box. Montana and Retard were over too, passed out on the floor in their work clothes.
Bucket sat upright against the wall, wearing new aviator sunglasses and a flannel shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front. He was pale everywhere, and blood leaked between his hands which he held tenderly to his abdomen.
“Can I get some water?” he said.
Vaughn cracked Holiday in the mouth. He hit him pretty hard. It sent him toppling sideways off the chair, the rolling materials falling this way and that.
“The fuck is this, Holiday?”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Holiday, rubbing his jaw. “I didn’t even think it was supposed to be loaded.”
I gathered up the revolver from the coffee table. A snub-nosed nine-millimeter, I think. All the commotion was enough to rouse Retard, who sat up slightly to examine things before going back to bed, adjusting himself. Retard was my cousin.
“I’m not even experiencing this, man,” Bucket said.
“Franklin, bring him some water, for Christ’s sake,” said Vaughn.
I went back to the kitchen. Fig was smoking a cigarette and trying to change the baby in the sink, but it wasn’t going so great. It kept squirming and, I don’t know, coughing. I took down an empty jar from a shelf and left the gun up there.
“Do you know what happened?” I said.
“No. I just heard it go off. I was outside.”
“They seem a little out of control today.”
“Yeah,” she said.
Two summers before Fig and I had tried to make love in the shower during a party she threw to celebrate Holiday’s graduation from the technical college, but we were both pretty messed up and had too much on our minds, to tell you the truth, and it left behind a sort of sadness.
I returned to the living room with the water. Vaughn sat beside Holiday on the sofa with his head in his hands. Perhaps he had lost his nerve a little.
Bucket tried to stand and sat back down.
“Everyone relax,” he said.
I handed him the water, but he just put it on the floor. I’d seen him plenty sick before, but this was different.
“Bucket isn’t looking very good,” I said.
“I’m fine,” said Bucket.
“Maybe we should take him to the hospital.”
“You’d have to carry him through the door yourself,” said Retard, appearing now to be awake in actuality. “Bucket lacks faith in the American medical establishment.”
“I think this really is quite serious,” I said.
“I just need to sit here a minute,” said Bucket.
“Is he going to die, man?” Holiday said. “Hey, Bucket, you know it was an accident, right?”
“Hey, it’s all good,” Bucket said.
“Fuck this,” Vaughn said. “You owe me almost six hundred dollars.”
“And I will get it for you. Hand to God.”
“Doctors put a plate in my head,” said Bucket, pointing. “Right in here, after the accident. How you like that?”
Montana sat up off the floor, looking around. I stood among them all, breathing in my clothes, certain I was somebody else.
Vaughn placed a big hand on Holiday’s shoulder and squeezed. “Come into town with Franklin Roosevelt and me. We’ll hit an ATM, yes? You’ll pay me what you can, and we’ll work it all out. We don’t need any more violence here.”
Bucket went on: “I get the Army channels now. I hear stuff you wouldn’t even know about.”
He was addressing his remarks to the blank area between him and us, the way a blind man might.
“We can’t go outside, man!” Holiday cried. “There’s too much happening out there!”
I knew what he meant, having been on some serious acid myself plenty of times, but I didn’t say anything.
Vaughn hauled Holiday up on his feet with both hands.
“We’re going,” he said.
“Did somebody shoot somebody?” Montana said, blinking.
*
The way to town was a long straight country road that plummeted through nothing, really, but dead brown fields and old farmhouses and trailers. Vaughn had a lip in and spat out the passenger window as I drove. Holiday sat wilted in the back, coming down a little off the drugs, smelling a good deal like human piss and filth.
I was twenty-four then. This would’ve been late winter of that year, end of February, probably, that gray, featureless time in New England when the light is gone from the sky and it all stops meaning anything. We drove past skeletal trees, withered cornstalks, a stave-roofed grain barn up on a hill. How do you explain it, this feeling you get that time isn’t passing but rather accumulating in you, in everything? I don’t know. You’d have to have known the country then.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” Holiday said.
“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” Vaughn said.
“I never thought, well,” Holiday said, “that my life, you know…” but what words can we say for this impossible anguish, for our wasted years that will never return?
We took a booth in the back of the Lizard. It was pretty much empty at that hour, except for a handful of old guys at the bar in their Veterans of Foreign Wars hats, watching a soccer game.
We ordered coffees and a pitcher of beer. Vaughn got the Rueben to share, but I had no interest. I was starting to feel quite sick, actually, like a machine assembled from old, misbegotten parts, and my sinuses were on fire.
All told, there’d only been about three hundred bucks in Holiday’s accounts, so he and Vaughn worked out a deal to cover the rest out of the fentanyl stash he was holding back at Fig’s. We drank down a few beers, I bumped a little more K in the bathroom, and we drove back out to the trailer, feeling pretty much like old friends.
When we got back, Bucket was gone. Montana sat by himself in the back room, playing Xbox with the sound down.
Holiday said, “Hey, where’d he go, man?”
“Who?”
“Jack Farrington. Bucket. The one who got shot.”
“I don’t know, he just took off.”
“When did this happen?”
“Well, not that long ago.”
“And you let him leave?”
“You want me to keep track of everything?”
We went out through the back door, me and Vaughn and Holiday, where the land sloped off gradually toward the shallow creek bed below. Figgy and Retard stood at the edge of the bank with their backs to us, holding hands.
I followed Holiday over to Bucket, who lay face down in a reedy patch of snow. We turned him over. One of the lenses had popped out of his glasses. He felt very heavy, and he was dead.
“Jesus,” Holiday said. He went off and sat down by himself.
I looked up at the bare tree limbs, spiderwebbed against a wide white sky, hoping to feel a presence diffusing about us. A spirit, maybe, or a ghost, or just the vaguest wrinkle of after-life floating from an organism crudely extinguished. But I didn’t feel anything.
“What do we do now?” I asked Vaughn.
“Fuck it,” he said. “We’re not even involved with this.”
Nothing felt right, so I went inside. Figgy was sitting on the Formica countertop, rocking the baby in a car seat with her foot. Retard sat on a stool. Neither gave the slightest acknowledgment I had entered the room. The baby was finally asleep.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, what’s the matter with you guys?”
*
Soon after that, my fever turned into the full-blown flu, and I was laid out for two weeks, laced with phlegm and heat and misery. My girlfriend was still cleaning rooms then at the Starlight on North Avenue, and she paid the night clerk fifty bucks to put me up under a false name through the worst of my sickness. By the end of it I was down eleven pounds and fiending so violently I could feel my brain moving.
Holiday didn’t stick around long after that. I’d check the Portland papers from time to time, but he never turned up. I didn’t see him for another five years or so, by which point everything was different.
Vaughn murdered Bill Montana with a cement garden statue behind a duplex outside Revere, Massachusetts. He did so to reclaim five hundred dollars he’d lost in a dice game. He’d committed a similar act before, out in Flagstaff, when he and a Native guy he knew from county jail tied a pharmaceutical narcotics dealer to a chair and whipped him with a bike chain. Vaughn disclosed this incident to me when we first started working together, but I’d just assumed things had gotten out of hand.
What I need you to see is he had good in him. In his heart he did. He just couldn’t keep track of himself, really. Whenever the light broke through, he’d cloud back over.
He was caring for his aunt or something during the short time I knew him. She would eat cat food from the can if left alone and was often making remarks that did not pertain. I met this woman a few times when I’d go over to Vaughn’s to buy heroin from him. You think you know someone till you’ve watched them love another soul when there’s no hope to it.