361 - Donald E. Westlake [4]
We went up the Henry Hudson Parkway and over the George Washington Bridge. We took the lower level and Dad said, “This is new.”
“This part of the bridge? It looks nutty.”
We went up 9 to 17, and then west on 17 toward Binghamton.
Thirty-eight miles outside New York City, when we had the road to ourselves, a tan-and-cream Chrysler pulled up next to us, and the guy on our side stuck his hand out with a gun in it and started shooting.
Dad looked at me, and his eyes were huge and terrified. He opened his mouth and said, “Cap,” in a high strange voice. Then blood gushed out of his mouth, like red vomit.
He fell staring in my lap, and the car swung off the road into a bridge support.
Two
I remember being moved. The doctor said that was impossible, it was a false memory, but I remember it. And a guy saying, “Look at the leg.”
Then there was a long gray time, and then a time when I knew I was in a hospital bed, but I didn’t care. Nurse rustlings, glass clinkings, paper cracklings, they all happened far away in some other world. The same with movement, white against white, people passing the foot of the bed.
Then I realized I wasn’t seeing with my right eye. All the layers of fuzzy white were in a plane, I didn’t have any depth perspective. When I closed just the left eye, it went away.
I made a sound, and it was awful. Then there was hurried rustling, and a balloon of flesh hung over me, with smudgy eyes. A woman’s voice asked, “Are we awake?”
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid to make that sound again. I blinked my left eye. I told my right eye to blink, but the message got lost someplace. I couldn’t feel anything around there at all.
The balloon went away. When it came back with a doctor, I was in better shape. Every time I blinked, the left eye worked better. I could make out the wall, and the iron tubing of the foot of the bed, and the high right angle of the door frame. The balloon came in, being a nurse, and then the doctor.
I was just reaching my hand up, slowly, to find out what was wrong with my right eye. The doctor shoved it down under the sheet again. “Now, now,” he said. “None of that. Let’s not overwork.”
“Eye,” I said. Then I thought he might misunderstand, might think I was talking about me, so I said, “See.” I was going through the alphabet.
“We’ll get to that,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“See,” I said.
“We don’t know yet. Are you in pain?”
I was. I hadn’t noticed till then, and all of a sudden I noticed. My legs hurt, like fury. Down by the ankles, and spreading up to above the knees. And the right side of my head, a dull ache like ocean waves.
“We’ll give you something,” he said.
I guess he did. I went back to sleep.
Every time I woke up, it was a little better. I woke up, went to sleep, five or six times, and then one time Bill came in. They wouldn’t let me sit up yet, and I felt like a little kid again, lying flat in the bed, my big brother standing there grinning at me. “They make us tough, Ray,” he said.
I said, “Dad?”
He stopped grinning, shook his head. “Shot,” he said.
But I knew it already. I could still see him, falling sideways toward me, his eyes painted pieces of plaster. He was dead then, before the car even left the road.
“How long’ve I been here?”
“A month. Five weeks tomorrow.”
“This is August?”
“Tuesday, the sixteenth.” His grin was a little weaker this time. “You had a rough time, boy. They didn’t know if you’d live.”
“Listen,” I said. “They won’t tell me. My eye, the right eye. It’s all bandaged.”
He went away, diagonally across the room to a chair with a green back. He brought it over, sat in it beside the bed. Our heads were on the same level. I was getting used to figuring out perspective with only the left eye. Two, three days before, he would have just gotten smaller, and then bigger again. Now, I could think of him going away and coming back.
Three years had changed him. His red hair was bushier, his face paler and the freckles fading, his cheeks jowlier. He looked tougher and more