Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [112]
The stitch in his side hurts so much he isn’t sure he can make it, but there, at the end of the road, he can see the house, and there she is, outside hanging up her wash, and Alphonse needs the run to be over because his breath feels like sandpaper in his lungs, but he doesn’t want one single bit to have to tell Mrs. Beecher the terrible thing he has to tell her.
Honora
The wet sheet blows against her dress and sticks like a bit of newspaper flattened in a wind against the side of a building. She struggles with the sheet and lifts it onto the line and secures it with wooden clothespins. She glances up the road, a small movement catching her attention. A cricket hopping, a wheel rolling in the dust. She peers for a moment into the distance and then she moves a few steps closer to the road. A boy is running, his body and head bent forward, his hands slapping the air as if for purchase, the way sprinters swim at the air at the finish line. At first she can’t identify the boy, but then something in the shape of the head, the spindly body, causes her to realize that it is Alphonse. She looks quickly behind him to see if he is being chased.
She is holding a wet towel, stiff from the wringer, when he reaches her.
He bends, gasping for breath, unable to speak. She drops the towel and takes hold of his shoulders and puts her head close to his while he coughs and tries to speak. She gives him a fierce hug and tells him to come inside, and he says, “It’s Mr. Beecher.”
She says, “What?”
And he says, “He’s been shot, he’s hurt, and Ross said I should tell you and then go get Miss Burton and she should bring you to where he is because he is calling for you and won’t stop.”
“Where is he?” she asks.
“At my house,” Alphonse says. “On Rose Street.”
McDermott
“He shot a cop,” Ross is saying in the squalid kitchen. From the living room, McDermott hears Sexton Beecher grunting and then being quiet for a moment, and then yelling as if he weren’t quite right in the head.
“What happened?” McDermott asks.
“The asshole had a gun.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“He says he pawned a pair of earrings.”
“Jesus Christ,” McDermott says.
In the corner, a young girl is whimpering. The mother is in with Beecher. “I sent the kid’s brother for the quack,” Ross says. “Beecher’s lost a bathtub full of blood.”
There’s a smear of crimson along the wooden floor, as if someone had dragged a freshly killed deer through the kitchen and into the living room.
“Where were you?” Ross says.
“On our way back from Exeter,” McDermott says.
“I didn’t know a man had so much blood in him,” Ross says.
“Where was he shot?”
“In the leg. In the thigh. Isn’t there some great big artery there?”
“If it had hit an artery,” McDermott says, “he’d be dead by now.”
The screen door opens and slaps shut. Mironson and Tsomides enter the kitchen. The girl in the corner begins to cry louder, as if the men had come to shoot her in the leg too.
“I wish she’d shut the fuck up,” Ross says to McDermott. “She’s getting on my nerves.”
Mironson’s face is white, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He tugs off his tie and opens the first four buttons of his thin shirt as if he were asthmatic and short of air. “We need to get him out of here,” Mironson says. “He’s left a trail on the stairs a blind man could follow.”
“Where’s Alphonse?” McDermott asks, looking around.
“I sent him to