The Odds (14 page)

Meg reaches into her pocket, searching for the pain pills she’s gathered. She swishes around the juice carton, but it’s empty. “You have to take these.” She hands him four pills. “I don’t have any liquid. Try to swallow anyway,” she says. “It isn’t aspirin, don’t worry. We know about aspirin and bleeding.”

He rolls the pills and looks at them. “What are they?”

“For pain.”

“Maybe four will kill me.”

“We looked up all kinds of things. He did.” She points to her brother. “You’re going to need those when we get to work on your leg. They’ll put you to sleep.”

He looks at them again. “Whiskey? How about a lot of whiskey?”

“We don’t have any more. We gave you what we had.”

His face is so … distraught. He wants to believe in them, but doesn’t quite. “What are you going to do now?”

Joel answers in that adult, old voice. “I’m going to clean the wound again, more thoroughly. Then check the bone and if it’s not right, reset it better, with something firmer and clean. If I can be sure it’s stable, you’ll be able to do about anything a person with a broken leg can do. Which isn’t much, but still, way better than where you are now. I’m not sure it will work, but I think I know what to do. You still want me to try?”

He nods. He takes the pills.

And then they start out, down the hill. They act as if it’s just a merry ride down the hill. Just a game. In case anyone asks, Meg is prepared to say, “Our uncle got drunk again.”

They use alleys. They search ahead and behind them. The pills are starting to work, and yet he tries to look around. He’s scared.

They keep a pace without ever running.

When they get to their own alley, they go in past their garage toward the back door. They get the cart up to the back door, and Laurie comes running outside, Susannah behind her, very sleepy.

“Susannah, hold the door open. Laurie. Lift a corner. Move him as little as possible.” The man groans. Laurie grabs a corner, and they get him inside, where they put him down gently on the kitchen floor.

“What’s happening?” he mumbles. He tries to look around, but he is already doped up. His eye lights for a moment on the sink. Things are lined up, ready to be used. Meg, trembling, puts one more pill on his tongue and gets it down. He sinks back and gives himself over to them; it reminds Meg of Susannah when she stops fighting to stay awake.

There is a second pot of water boiling on the stove in case they need it. That’s Laurie, thoughtful, always, about things like that.

Laurie’s eyes are almost shutting. Susannah is asleep on her feet.

“If you two could stay in the living room until we need you—”

The two younger kids hold on to each other as they leave the kitchen.

It’s still humid out, has been for a week, so the steam that’s coming from the boiling water is not very welcome. When Meg lifts Nick Banks’ hand, it falls back down, dead weight. “He’s out,” she says. Joel loosens the rags they used to wrap his leg. “Easy,” she whispers toward Nick. “Everything is all right.”

The hard part is cutting his pants off the rest of the way up to the waistband and through. At first he stirs and tries to complain, but he gives up. His near nakedness is unsettling at first, but then, surprisingly, it seems like nothing.

For a long time, Joel cleans his leg.

It’s almost two in the morning when they’re ready to do the hard part. Laurie has done everything they asked her to do. She’s made holes in the Styrofoam they gathered earlier, and she’s done it carefully, with a skewer.

“Air.” Joel explained when he gave instructions. “The wound has to have air.”

Meg wishes she could be like Laurie. So regular and competent. Or like Susannah. Trusting. Now her sisters are asleep on the couch.

Joel looks worried. “When we lift the leg, it’ll wake him up—”

“I know.”

Because of the way the bullet went in, Joel is able to do the first step of washing entrance and exit wounds without having to move Nick’s leg. Now he’s still using a magnifying glass, dipping tweezers in boiling water, searching for and removing what looks wrong. One thing he identifies as a small dot of cloth. Finally he nods. The two of them irrigate the areas one more time before they bandage the wounds, entrance, exit, both sides, with clean gauze. Then they have to face the job of lifting the leg to get the Styrofoam underneath it. Joel’s job is the engineering. “How?” she asks.

“My hands. I kind of wish we had the branches on again. It was pretty steady with them. It’s a shame to have to move him at all since the position looks good.”

“If he’s to have any mobility …”

“I know, I know. I just hope I get it right again. One picture I saw on the Net … showed a soldier whose leg healed with the bones every which way so that his one leg was shorter than the other. But it knitted anyway. And he walked.”

“Amazing.”

Joel grunts thoughtfully.

The murmur and hum of working together shifts into silence. They pause, almost freeze, before moving forward.

Then Joel lifts carefully, pressing from knee to ankle while she slides the foam splint underneath; Nick moans only a little. Does it mean Joel has kept the bones steady?

Meg begins the process of filling in the shell of foam with small pieces of crumpled newspaper, so it will be tight. Earlier she and Joel and Laurie went over and over what to use: rags would not be clean enough, and gauze—they didn’t have enough, couldn’t waste it. Newspaper. It had to be newspaper, because as Joel said, if people used it for birthing babies … Not perfect because it’s going to be uncomfortable when he sweats, but it might just make the Styrofoam pipe secure. When she has fitted the paper in tightly, she fits the top pipelike piece on. It will be lightweight, anyway. Joel holds the Styrofoam in place while she tapes. He adds a foot-piece to secure it—what he learned from the tree branches routine. The two of them tape everything carefully. “Good job,” she keeps telling him. “Way to go.”

Once the work on his leg is done, it seems wrong to leave him in the dirty bloody shirt. She and Joel prop him up and begin to take off the plaid shirt. He groans from deep within his stupor, trying to hold it on him, but eventually they get it off. The activity is waking him. While he is on the verge of half awake, Meg makes him swallow more antibiotics. She wants to fetch warm soapy water, give him a bath and a shave, but tomorrow, tomorrow is soon enough. She checks his upper body for wounds, wipes him quickly with alcohol, and puts a blanket over him.

Almost without words, they lift him and carry him to the living room where they have placed on the floor the cushion that belongs to their only good lawn chair, the one Alison always sat in. It makes a bed of sorts.

There are problems to solve. The only bathroom is on the second floor. They don’t yet have crutches.

The more immediate problem is that she has made him drink lots of water. By now his bladder must be full. What will happen if he wakes in the night, distressed and disoriented? What if he tries to stand up? She has to do something. Rattling around in the cupboards, she finds a large jar. “You have to help me wake him a little,” she tells Joel. She puts the blanket over Nick and begins to whisper to him to pull aside the flap on his briefs, use the jar. “It’s okay,” she keeps saying. She knows urine is sterile, so if he does have an accident, it won’t be a terrible thing, but he was clean-looking, well put together. She knows he won’t want to wake all wet.

“He isn’t going to do it,” Joel says. “Man, I’d hate to be in his shoes.”

Suddenly they both laugh. Shoes.

Meg keeps at Nick. “Go on, use the jar. That’s what it’s for.”

He is still mostly out, but the power of suggestion finally works. After a timid start, he fills the jar.

“Good, good,” she says.

Joel grimaces, looks around for a joke, gives up.

Meg asks, “Can you watch him for a minute?” She takes the jar, which is heavy and warm, and swiftly heads upstairs, where she dumps the contents into the toilet. He’ll need it again, so she takes it with her as she hurries back downstairs.

They cover him with two more blankets and stare at their work. What will tomorrow bring?

She wakes Laurie and Susannah then. It’s after three in the morning. They put on the television. The four of them sit on the couch with narrow columns of space between them.

Laurie asks, “Is he all right?”

“Better than he was before,” Meg says. She looks to Joel and feels the odd feeling of seeing him for the first time. “Joel did it. He’s going to be a good doctor.”

Nobody is looking at the TV. They’re watching Nick sleep. Susannah’s eyes close again.

“We have to get to bed,” Meg says.

But they don’t move for a while.

“He looks like Dad,” Laurie says.

   MARKO HAS BEEN SITTING outside Nick’s place for hours. He calls Petrucci, who has been waiting next to a phone all night, waiting for word. Markovic says levelly, “He hasn’t showed.”

Petrucci breathes into the line. Marko lights up another cigarette and waits him out. It’s after four, almost morning. He reaches for the bottle he keeps under the driver’s seat and takes a drink. It’s been a very long day. And tomorrow,
today
, he’s supposed to get the pizza shop going again and find more substitute runners for the North Side; and he somehow has to be rested enough in a little more than twelve hours to do the Sunday-night drive to Philly.

His fat cousins don’t think. They sit, stomachs hanging over their groins, legs spread. They look like brothers. Bald heads and girth. Working the phones is about all they do. They don’t do the hard stuff.

Petrucci says, “You brought Nick into this, you brought this on us.”

“I get it.”

“Because you were soft on Nick. All that rigmarole about the guy killed a man once, we can trust him—what was that all about?”

Marko had liked Nick. He had liked going to the shop and bellyaching to him and just sitting with him. He felt betrayed. That was bad enough without having it slammed to him.

“I hope you have your head together about this. Your mistake.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Go home. Sleep and get ready for later. Go home.”

   THE SUN SLANTING IN MAKES a pattern on the counter and the kitchen table. She opens the windows to the sounds of church bells. The others are sleeping and may not wake up until late. The brewing coffee, something she learned how to make at an early age for her father (and drank at times because it made her feel older), smells so good to her, she can hardly wait for it. She will have a little today. The aroma conjures a memory of her father coming up out of sleep; she wonders if the smell will awaken Nick Banks. She peeks. His chest rises and falls, his breath makes a noise going in and out, his hands clutch at the blanket.

She stands at the stairway to the upstairs. It provides the wall, the barrier between the kitchen with its eating area and the only other room downstairs. Considering him from that little distance, she tries to determine, does he look like her father? She’d thought more like someone in a photograph she’d seen. An actor. A ballplayer. A writer.

She tiptoes back to the kitchen where the sounds and smells of morning envelop her. Birds singing. Coffee.

They were in the middle of a crime—aiding and abetting it would be called if they were hauled in. Last night, as the four of them got themselves upstairs, Laurie asked her, “We know nothing about him, right?”

“Not facts, anyway.”

“Joel said he scared him at first.”

“I can’t make myself believe badly of him.” She didn’t mention the dead body up at the house. Joel hadn’t either. But it would come out sooner or later.

Last night she learned she was not afraid of the grit and dirt of nursing him, she was not squeamish. This surprised and pleased her. She had thought she would be.

She slips to the basement, where she has stashed the wool plaid shirt and the remains of his pants in a cardboard box inside a large plastic bag. The gun is wrapped in a towel for now. She has considered soaking the shirt—he might want it or need it—but if he wears it, he might be recognized. It would be easier to throw it all away, not give him the choice. Yet if he turns himself in eventually, or if he is caught, the gun, the clothes, are evidence. Blood, his and someone else’s mixed, could be crucial. If he’s telling the truth … For a moment she tilts with a real vertigo, uncertain. Her mind leaps to a garish image of water in a basin rusty from blood and swirling down the drain.

The thought of the dead man up at the house makes her grip the edge of the sink. If Nick Banks is lying … She gets a startling flash of the picture of the other man, whom she hardly looked at, but in her mind’s eye there keeps coming back an image of an odd man who, in death, looked like a sack of something bunched up, old scatter-rugs tangled in a pile.

She has seen only one dead person before, and that was her father, stiff, in a suit, “presentable” as Alison put it—the violence of the car crash wiped away.

She puts the gun, in its towel, in the box inside the bag and folds down the top of the garbage bag again, wondering what to do with it all. Finally she carries everything to a far corner of the basement. She will decide later.

If the splint Joel made works, and if they find crutches, Nick could be gone in a few days or a week. It will seem this whole episode has been a dream. Her mind creates a scene she will play years later—her telling all this and no one believing her. In her imagined scene, she says, “We never told anyone and we lived on our own for four years,” and everyone she tells is skeptical. “How?” they ask.

Because we were good at it.

She climbs the basement stairs, trembling, and looks into the living room once more; there he is, stomach rising and falling, still alive.

She sits in the kitchen, drinking coffee and trying to read another Dickens. The school she goes to is substandard. None of the other students do anything challenging. Nobody else has read anything one-tenth the length of
A Tale of Two Cities
. So her teacher told her, if she liked
A Tale of Two Cities
, she should read
Great Expectations
. And the teacher handed over a copy and promised to get her one of
Oliver Twist
. Meg didn’t tell the teacher they have these books at home because her father liked them.