The photo he remembered taking in a drug house a year ago, a different shirt, a new haircut. Someone had been fighting in a bedroom upstairs as he had sat straight against the backdrop and looked the camera in the eye.
Maybe it hadn’t been much work to make. But Walter had made it. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Was it a reward? An invitation? Or was it a rope, tying him down to a spot on the ground? With Melanie and the Jackson girl clinging somewhere along the line?
He stared at his face for a while, till he felt sleepy. He concealed the license in a small crack behind the baseboard. He reached up and switched off the light.
At some hour in the dark, the thick, cloudy, pressing winter dark, he heard the front bolt scrape, the heavy door pop open. He tipped his box back. Soundlessly he rolled his body onto all fours and then uncoiled, balanced and erect.
With a quick twist he unscrewed a stout broomstick from the push broom and carried it before him, ready.
“Antoine?” came Marsha’s voice.
—
She was too shaky to drive herself. He helped her into one of Perry’s trucks and took the wheel. All that morning they kept vigil at the hospital, in a high room that looked down upon a snow-covered drainage pond. Perry lay sliced open, a network of tubes and lines crossing him like roads and wires on white countryside.
20.
His time at the range seemed to fall off the clock: the light came late, and even the short December day seemed to go on forever, across hours that hadn’t been numbered yet. The regulars stopped in to ask what East knew. They weren’t going to the hospital to see Perry, weren’t sure they were even allowed. But they missed Perry; they wanted to talk. They leaned on the heavy glass of the candy-shop counter. Some of them told East about their fathers’ heart attacks, some about their own. There was a little business going on in back but nothing that pulled East away from the counter. He rented time and guns and sold paints while the regulars loitered around him.
Some of these men had never said an extra word to East before. He hadn’t been among them a month’s time yet. What did it mean, that they came to him instead of Marsha, that they saw him as Perry’s friend, his confidant. They weren’t telling East about Perry—with Perry gone, they were telling him about themselves. “Wish him well,” they said. They left cards for East to take to the hospital, sometimes group-signed: GET WELL, they wrote in ballpoint pen, some neatly, some in childlike scrawl. SEE YOU SOON.
Soon. The time had crawled to this point. It stood still for him, poised like a cat at the top of its leap. He waited for it to begin to come down. He wondered at the future of Stone Cottage without Perry. He had come to think almost protectively of the town, though he had only just arrived.
On the third day she returned. She wore a brown sweater, corded and woolly: East imagined that once her hair had been brown like that. He asked how was Perry, and Marsha asked if he knew what a do-not-resuscitate order was.
“It means he’ll get what he wants,” she said dully. It meant they knew already that Perry would die tonight or tomorrow. Something seized in East’s throat, and he reached the broom handle and leaned until he could speak again.
This could be decided by a piece of paper a man had signed.
“Does he know?”
“Does he know what?”
“Does he know,” East said, betraying something like panic in his throat, “that he’s going to die now?”
She lifted her hand and bit it. She turned, seeming very small, and he waited for her at some distance.
Again he went with her to the hospital. She drove this time, in a long old white car he had never laid eyes on before, a Plymouth.
Perry was still alive in his junction of tubing and wires, the monitors, the cannula, the intravenous lines, an undressed mountain. His eyes were turned up. They were cloudy like the eyes of the fish East would see in the Spanish markets just east of The Boxes, eyes that he never let himself look into, for what they had seen he knew he’d see one day. He let Marsha go to Perry’s body; he stood waiting by the door. The nurses eyed him, this mysterious black boy: what did he mean? There were black nurses, young women he noticed in pale, flowery blue; there were black doctors and black men in hairnets pushing mop buckets along the floor. But this black boy with his bare head in this fat old white man’s room, trying quietly to comfort the widow-to-be, what was that? He did not hide from their eyes.
He let Marsha have her time, and when she left his side and went to go sit at the window, where she cried with a little chuffing sound, he approached Perry’s bedside.
“Have they given up on him?”
Marsha took a breath. “There isn’t much to give up, Antoine. All that wiring on him, it’s keeping him alive. When they take it off, then he dies. It’s that simple.”
“When they gonna do it?”