361 - Donald E. Westlake [5]
He said, “They said I could tell you if you asked, but not otherwise. And only if I thought you could take it.”
“It’s gone?”
He nodded. “You went through the windshield. A piece of glass.”
“Good Jesus.” I lay there and thought about it. I was missing an eye, forever. Never again that eye, never again.
I’d always have to fake perspective.
It might have been both of them. Hell, it might have been the life. I was still around, I could still see.
What the hell did I look like these days?
I asked him. He said, “Like a turkey’s ass, plucked. But better every day. The doctor says you won’t have any scars that show. And I’ve already talked to a guy about a glass eye. He’ll fit you for it the minute the doctor says okay.”
“Jesus....The feet? They hurt like hell.” I knew they were still there. One time, I’d got my right hand up behind my head—that was before I could move the left hand too well—and pushed my head up so I could look down my length, and the feet were still there. I’d been worried about amputation. I’d heard of people whose legs hurt after they’d been cut off and they didn’t have any legs any more. Mine hurt, and I couldn’t move them, so I was worried they were gone. But they were there, fat tubular bulges under the sheet, encased in bandaging.
“Your ankles were broken,” Bill said. “Crushed between the car and the bridge support. They’ve been doing bone grafts on you.”
“And I’ll be okay?”
“Sure.” He grinned one-sided at me. “You’ll live to play the piano again,” he told me. “With your feet, like always.”
Then I asked him for a cigarette and he said no. So I got one from the cop who came in that evening. His name was Kirk, and he was State Police, CID, in civvies. He had me tell the story, and there wasn’t that much to tell. I hadn’t recognized either of the men in the Chrysler. I didn’t know what “Cap” meant. I didn’t know why two strangers would shoot my father.
When he left, Miss Benson, the thin one, grabbed the cigarette out of my mouth.
Bill came by every day, for about a week. Then one day he didn’t come around. I asked Miss Benson. She said, “He had to go back to Binghamton.”
“Why?”
She got evasive, and I kept asking her. So she told me, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kelly. His wife was hit by a car. She was killed.”
“Oh,” I said. “I never met her.”
Three
When I got out of the hospital, three days after Labor Day, I had two eyes, one of them working. With that one, I saw the guy get out of the Plymouth across the street from the hospital and come walking toward me. I slowed down, feeling naked. I still remembered the one who stuck his hand out the side window with a gun in it.
This one was different. Medium height, thin. He’d lost weight recently, and hadn’t been able to afford a new wardrobe. His jacket hung on him like a style that had never caught on. His hair was sandy; his scalp was probably sand. His face was sharp of nose and chin and eye and bone, but there was weak pulp behind it, peeking through.
He stopped in front of me, looking at the tie Miss Benson had picked out. She’d had to buy me some clothes. My two suitcases got burned in the car. I’d given her the money, some that Bill had sent me.
He acted as though he wanted to talk to me, but was afraid somebody might notice. I said, “Okay,” and sidestepped him and walked across the street to the Plymouth. I might have been afraid of him, but he was afraid of me. He came trotting after me, on shorter legs. I could hear him breathing.
I went around the Plymouth and got in the right side. He slid in behind the wheel, next to me. He looked very worried. He got out a pack of Philip Morris Commanders. On him, they were wishful thinking. He pawed one out with two fingers and thumb, and I took the pack away and got one for myself. We lit up in a leaden silence, with him trying to watch the whole outside world at once, and then, jerkily, he said, “I owe your old man a favor. I come to do it.”
“What sort of favor?”
“A long time back. It don’t make no difference now. You’re his son.