by Susan Perabo
“Get your shit together,” Ian said. “Come on, man, pull yourself together.”
“It’s all comin’ down.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m so dizzy.”
The fireman was cracking up. Jesus Christ. A whack on the head and hour upon hour of dark and now he’s a babbling dimwit chickenshit baby. If he’d only just go, just take that goddamn ax and go. This house had had it with them; it had given them every opportunity, given them a fighting chance, left them this safe space for all these hours, and it was sick of waiting. If Sonny didn’t drop dead from the wound on his head, surely the house would collapse anyway. Either way he was stuck, either way dead.
“Go,” Ian said. “Take the ax and go.”
“I can’t.”
And then, in the quiet, in the silence and the darkness and the chill of bad luck and bad decisions, the truth dawned on Ian slowly. It must have always been there, though, in the back of his mind, its whispering lost in the din of everything else. He’d been saving it for this moment, for the moment when all hope seemed lost. There was only one way he was getting out of here, only one way Sonny was getting out of here.
“Sonny, listen to me,” he said. “You listening?”
“What?”
“We can’t wait here any longer. You’re right, man. The house is coming down. So you’re gonna have to cut off my foot.”
Silence.
“You hear me?”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m not. It’s the only way.”
“The air bag,” Sonny mumbled.
“The air bag’s gone. You said so yourself.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it,” Sonny moaned. “This thing, it looks like a balloon. Or a little pillow, really, like those pillows they give you on airplanes. But this thing, this tiny little thing, can lift half a ton. Half a ton! All you do, you just slide it under —”
“That’s great!” Ian interrupted. “I’m really happy to hear about all the great fucking equipment we don’t have. Let’s see, we don’t have an air bag, we don’t have a flashlight, we don’t have a goddamn drop of water. So what do we have, Sonny? Huh? What we got left?”
“Nothing,” Sonny said.
“No, no. We got one thing. Right? We got an ax.”
“An ax,” Sonny echoed.
Would he die? How long could you live with your foot cut off, with the blood pouring out? Would he have enough time to find the window? Where the hell were those guys, those stupid firemen? Why couldn’t he hear anybody digging? How big a pile could a house make if it all fell down? Twenty feet? Forty feet?
“You’re gonna cut off my foot,” Ian said evenly. “You’re gonna go down there, and you’re just gonna hack it off, wham bam thank you ma’am. Shit, it’s probably half cut off already, right? Then you tie it up with your shirt or something, squeeze off the bleeding. And then we’re getting out of here together, you hear me? We’re going together.”
“He didn’t want me in the fire department,” Sonny murmured.
“Jesus, shut up!” Ian shouted, pounding his fists on the floor. “I don’t wanna hear any more about your goddamn father!” With great effort he turned, flipped himself onto his side and nearly onto his stomach, felt the thigh muscles in his left leg strain, pull taut. He felt around Sonny blindly, recklessly. It had to be around here somewhere, probably within his grasp, if Sonny had really had it in his hand when he fell. He reached above where Sonny lay, felt his way along the ragged boards, his already torn hands catching on shards and splinters as he grappled with the wood. Would he even know it if he felt it? He would . . . he did. His fingers closed around the foam rubber handle. Foam rubber — sure, it made sense. Sweaty hands, nervous hands, needed to keep a firm grip. The handle was thin, no bigger than the handle of a broom. The blade was snagged in a board above them. He shimmied it a few times until it squeaked free, then thrust it in the direction of Sonny’s hands.
“Take it. Come on, man. Get down there and cut my fucking foot off and then we’re going to find that window.”
He felt Sonny start to sit up.
“That’s right,” Ian said. “There you go.”
Sonny fell over on top of him, his face against his chest. He could feel Sonny’s lips moving. What was he babbling about now?
“Come on,” Ian said, pulling him up by his hair. “You’re not passing out on me, asshole. Not now.”
The way out? The window. But where? He tried to focus. The couch was to his left. The wall where the window was was behind that. Eight feet? Ten feet? And what between here and there? What if Sonny cut off his foot and they crawled forward six inches and ran into solid stone?
“Get up, Sonny.”
“Can’t,” Sonny mumbled. “Can’t do it.”
Ian fumbled in the dark, found Sonny’s hand, set the ax in it, bent his stiff fingers around the handle. “It’s your job,” he said. “It’s your job to do it, you chickenshit.” He pushed the heap that was Sonny down toward his leg.
“I can’t do it. I can’t.”
“Do it!” Ian shouted. He sat up and seized the hand with the ax in it, set it against his left shin, felt the press of it through his jeans. “I can’t even feel it, Sonny, I swear, I can’t feel a damn thing. Just one stroke, man.”
“It’s against the rules.”
Ian laughed out loud, part from the words themselves but mostly from the way the words were spoken. It was the first composed sentence to come out of Sonny’s mouth since he’d woken up, spoken with measured calm as if Ian had asked for two milks in the cafeteria line.
“Are you kidding me, you maniac? Against the rules? What rules are those? The rules that say you and me are supposed to sit here and wait until we’re dead?”
“You don’t understand. I’m not a surgeon. You need a surgeon. I don’t have the — I can’t just —”
“Give it here!”
Ian wrenched the ax from Sonny’s fingers, shoved him away, bent forward as far as he was able. His palm was slick with sweat, the beat of his pulse straining against the skin of his neck. He felt Sonny crawling around blindly, bumping into things, bawling again. He wiped his palm on his jeans and took a firm grip on the handle, set it on his shin directly above the ankle, an inch or two away from where the foot disappeared under the refrigerator. One quick stroke, he thought. One quick stroke and we’re on our way. No pain. No pain. Just dark. Dark, some advantages. Some advantages.
It was not the burst of agony that would remain with him, not the sensation of his leg falling free from the foot (distinctly opposed to the foot falling free from his leg) nor the warm splash of blood on his right wrist nor the first moment of shocking coldness and absence mid-shin. Instead, it would be years before he would execute that simple motion, raise his right arm in that particular way, and not recall vividly that fleeting instant when the ax reached its highest point and then, in less than a heartbeat, began its descent. He would never swat a mosquito or swing a hammer or toss a ball without thinking of that moment when the motion back suddenly ceased and reversed into motion forward, the brief instant when — too late to reconsider, yet his body still whole — the deed was both done and not done.
Ian gagged and vomited the last contents of his stomach onto his lap. The ax fell free from his trembling fingers and he fumbled to retrieve it. He pulled off his shirt, felt for the raw bone, tied the shirt tight around it. His temples and forehead throbbed, a hissing filled his ears, and as hard as he tried he couldn’t seem to close his mouth, couldn’t seem to work his jaw. Sonny was on the floor in a ball and Ian grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, flopped over on his belly and started lurching forward in the dark, dragging Sonny behind him. Lights were popping in his head like flashbulbs. He tore out at things blindly with the hand that held the ax. It was all madness for a few minutes, his stump oozing blood through the shirt and slithering behind him like some wet dying animal. Sonny was dead weight, worse than dead weight as he squirmed in Ian’s
grip. There was no way he could do this himself, blind and in a maze of plaster and wood, no way he could get across the floor dragging Sonny. He stopped.
“Help me, Sonny,” he gasped. “For Christsakes!”
“I can’t.” He was sobbing.
Ian’s leg was beating like a heart. He wondered what it looked like, imagined flesh flapping from the bone, stringy tendons curling like spider’s legs, his black T-shirt soaked and sticky. No, he told himself. Don’t wonder. Don’t wonder anything. The time for wondering is past.
“Tell me about your kid,” he said.
“Who?”
“Your kid. Your boy. What’s he like?”
Silence.
“Sonny?”
A sound, half sob, half laugh. “You should see that little bastard throw a football.”
“Yeah? He’s good?”
“He threw a football over our house last summer. Over the house. Eleven years old and he threw a football over the goddamn house.”
“Tell me,” Ian said. “Come on with me and tell me.”
And then Sonny was beside him, clawing too, burrowing with his hands, butting with his head, clearing a path.
“I was standing in the backyard,” Sonny whispered. “Listen, Ian. Listen . . .”
“I’m listening, man.”
“Standing in the backyard. He made me stand back there. He says to me, Dad, go stand in the backyard and catch it when I throw it over the house. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking there’s no goddamn way. But I go back there. I go back there and you know why? Because if it were my dad he woulda gotten one of the other guys to go stand behind the house. So I go back there and I’m standing in the backyard thinking it’s about time for the lawn to be mowed and he yells You ready? and I yell Ready and I hear this thunk and I know he’s thrown it against the house, probably didn’t even come near the roof. And he yells that his hand slipped. His hand slipped! And Laura, she comes to the back door. And she’s like what are you guys doing? Why is Paul throwing a football at the house? And I say Hush. Let him have his fun. And he yells Ready? and I say Ready and I look up and there it is — goddamn, there it is! — wobbling against the blue sky, perfect as some perfect bird, clearing the roof and coming down at me.”
Ian smiled. What, was he crazy, smiling? How far had they gone? Two feet? Four feet? “You catch it?”
“Hell no, I didn’t catch it.”
“I know there’s a window,” Ian said. “A few more feet and we’ll be at the window.”
“There’s no window,” Sonny said. “No window.” But he kept clawing.
It was like a dream. He lost all track of time. He lost all track of himself, forgot who he was, forgot everything but what lay in front of him, what he had to break through. He clawed at wood until his hands were numb and bloody, his fingernails ripped to the quick. He dug from instinct. He dug knowing that if he stopped digging he would die, and Sonny would die too. They would both die down here and it would be his fault.
He scooted forward another inch. Something gouged his bare chest and he cried out. Christ, how could he still feel pain? How was it possible? This was just a small thing, a prick; he rolled onto his side and touched the place on his chest that was pierced. What was it? A nail? He twisted it from his skin, plucked it free, turned it in his fingers. It was a shard of glass. Glass from the window? Maybe. Maybe.
“Hey, Sonny,” he whispered. “You still with me?”
Chapter Seven In his spacious room at the Beverly Hills Twin Crowns, Paul Tucker slept the sleep of the dead, a numb and dreamless sleep that knew nothing of the world that had created and now awaited him. Sleep. Thousands of years of man-made escape and diversion — drink and drug, the dark theater, the open road — none have managed to equal this gift that comes more naturally than any other. There is no deed nor lot that sleep cannot erase, and in their slumber all sleepers are joined together in one vast harbor of blissful ignorance. The bereaved sleep as the lovers sleep. The dying sleep as the infant sleeps. The raped sleeps as the rapist sleeps. Whatever waits for them waits in another world that is as far removed as dreams are from the waking.
When Paul finally opened his eyes, rolled over and looked at the clock beside his bed, he was relieved to see it was past ten. A blessing: his father would be gone, he and Ian both, so the suite was his for the rest of the day. He could lie on the puffy couch and watch reruns or talk shows or SportsCenter. He could sit on the balcony, his feet propped on the rail, and watch the river of strangers flow by beneath him. He could psych himself up the way he’d done on his ride out to the Neidermeyer house those months ago, picturing the scene in his mind so it wouldn’t take him by surprise, wouldn’t make him sick to his stomach. Yes, he would have time to prepare, to brace himself for the inevitable moment when his father came through the door late in the day and he’d have to look at him as if nothing had changed, as if today and tomorrow and the day after that could be the same as yesterday. But everything had changed. Paul’s joints ached from change, ached more than the morning-after of any football game he’d ever played, as if throughout the night he’d been sacked a thousand times.
He rolled out of bed and shuffled to the door. Emerging from his room he saw his father — shirtless, his hair wet from the shower — sitting on one of the stools at the bar, eating a bagel and sipping a cup of coffee. The film script was opened in front of him. He looked up, his forehead wrinkled with concern.
“It’s late. You sick or something?”
Paul looked at the floor, his heart thumping wildly. “How come you’re not at the studio?”
“They’re out working on the house. No shooting today. Remember?”
He hadn’t. He was lucky, at this point, to remember his own name. He’d never felt so disconnected from the world before; everything was foreign, suspect. He looked down at his feet; even they were unfamiliar — huge, his toes undefinably malformed — as if they belonged to some stranger.
“I’m going out there this afternoon,” Sonny said, lathering his bagel with cream cheese. “On-site. To work out some of the details.”
The details, Paul thought wryly. And which details would those be? The ones he’d concocted in his head, the ones he and Ian had cooked up that afternoon in the hospital? He pictured them there in that cold white room in ICU, conspiring in hushed tones, weaving the tangled web while he and his mother waited just on the other side of the door, ignorant, unsuspecting. Did his father even know what was real anymore? Or had he gotten his story so straight, so cleverly concealed all the evidence in his own mind, that he’d come to believe the lies that came from his lips? He remembered a fairy tale his mother had read to him (a million years ago?) in which a spell had been cast on a cruel and dishonest man so that whenever he spoke toads spilled from his mouth.
“You can come if you want,” his father said. “Bet it’ll be pretty cool.” And hop hop hop went the slimy toads across the bar. They tumbled onto the floor and looked around the room, bewildered.
“I don’t —” Paul started.
“What’re you standing over there for?” Hop hop. “You want some breakfast?”
“Nah,” Paul said. “Not hungry.” Still he looked at his bare feet, feeling a mixture of shame and anger and pity so intense that he knew his father would see it immediately were he to fix even a casual gaze upon him.
“You are sick, aren’t you? You got a bug or something?”
“No,” Paul said sharply. Now he met his father’s eyes. Still blue gray, still slightly pinched at the corners with the beginnings of crow’s feet. But now they were coward’s eyes, liar’s eyes. It would have been better, he thought, if his father had robbed a bank, stolen a car, even murdered someone. At least those things took some balls. At least those things weren’t so goddamn pathetic. He watched his father munch on his bagel in what now seemed an appalling display of gluttony, although it was the same way he’d always eaten a bagel — around and around in a circle, spiraling toward the hole — a
nd nothing had seemed wrong with it before. But before was over.
“You look like you lost your best friend,” Sonny said. “Something happen last night?”
“What time’d you get home?”
A dismissive shrug. “I don’t know. One-something. Why?”
“I didn’t go to bed till two-thirty. You weren’t here.”
Now Sonny set down his bagel and slid off the stool, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, quarterback, you got a bug up your butt,” he said. “That’s fine. You’re getting to be a big kid now and some days you’re just gonna wake up with that bug up your butt. It’s part of life. But now you gotta learn the most important bug-up-your-butt lesson. Just because you’ve got one doesn’t mean everybody does. So you keep it to yourself. You know what I’m saying?”
Paul scowled. “If you weren’t planning on spending any time with me why didn’t you just call last week and tell me not to come?”
His father’s cheeks reddened momentarily. He looked small, tiny even, behind the bar, looked like he might just disappear from view at any moment, ash back to the earth. The months off work — combined with a thousand bottles of beer and three greasy meals a day — had taken a toll; his biceps were no longer rock solid, his shoulders not so square. Even his face seemed heavier, bloated somehow. Before, in his smallness, he had been a bulldog; now, Paul thought, he was just another short man who had to wiggle into his jeans.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Sonny said. “Things are nuts out here. I didn’t know I was going to be so busy. But listen . . . on Sunday we got a whole free day. Why don’t we do something then, just the two of us? You wanna go somewhere? You haven’t gotten to Hard Rock yet. We could do that.”
“Hard Rock’s for suckers.”
Sonny frowned, then rebounded. “All right, then. How about Disneyland? Half hour away, tops.”
Paul shook his head. “I’m too old for Disney. It’s stupid.”
“Man . . .” Sonny said, exasperated. “You’re not gonna give me a break, are you?”