“Come on, partner, let’s get up,” I said, and wondered at my pretense toward friendship.
We stood him up between us, like a collapsing gargoyle, and walked him toward the staircase. His head hit the banister once, his knees knocked like wood into the steps, and I had to grab his belt and pull with all my weight to keep him from rolling backward down to the first floor.
As I got him over the last step onto the safety of the carpet, my lungs breathless and my good arm weak with strain, I had a quick lesson about the way we as sane and sober people treat the drunk and hopelessly deranged. Considering the amount of acid and booze in his system, and the pathetic behavior in front of his wife on the couch, I had believed that his brain, at that moment, was as soft as yesterday’s ice cream, and as a result I had helped drag him upstairs with the care and dignity that you would show a bag of dirty laundry. But when I stood up for a breath before the last haul into the bedroom, he fixed one dilated, bloodshot eye on me from the floor, the other closed in the angry squint of a prizefighter who has just received a murderous leathery shot, and said:
“You really go for the balls when you win, Zeno.”
I put him face down on the bed with his head slightly over the edge so the blood would stay in his brain and he wouldn’t become sick. Downstairs, a moment later, I heard him hit the floor.
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” Beth said.
“I’ll get him back on the bed.”
“If he wakes up, he’ll wake up fighting. I know Buddy when he’s like this. He chooses the people closest to him to help him destroy himself. Take a beer out of the icebox while I get the boys ready for bed.”
“I’d better go.”
“Stay. I want to talk with you.”
The boys came in from the backyard, their faces flushed with cold and play, and drank glasses of powdered milk at the kitchen table. Then they went up the stairs with their eyes fixed curiously on me.
“I bet you still don’t believe I used to pitch against Marty Marion,” I said.
“My daddy says you’re a guitar player that was in jail with him,” the younger boy said over the banister.
Learn one day not to try to con kids, Paret, I thought.
“Upstairs, and I don’t want to hear any feet walking around,” Beth said.
The boys trudged up to their room as though they were being sent to a firing squad.
“What’s this about Frank’s ba
rn?” Beth said.
“Somebody set fire to it this morning and burned it to the ground.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“We couldn’t get one of the Appaloosas out.” “Does Frank know who it was?”
“He might, but I don’t think he would tell anyone if he does. He seems to play a pretty solitary game.”
“Yes, and it’s the type that eventually damages everybody around him.”
“That hasn’t been my impression about him.”
“He draws an imaginary line that nobody else knows about, and when someone steps over it, you’d better watch out for Frank Riordan.”
“How long did you and Buddy live with him?”
I didn’t know that they had, but at this point I simply guessed it as an obvious fact.
“Long enough for Buddy to have to make choices between his own family and his father,” she said.
I avoided the flash in her eyes and looked blankly around at the worn furniture and wondered how I got into this subject. I could think of nothing to say.
“Why did he use dope today?” she asked.