Under the Dome: A Novel (29 page)

The heart monitor had joined in. Now it was a chorus.

“I know, Ginny. I’m not death.” He paused. “
Deaf,
I mean. Christ.”

For a moment he and Rusty looked at each other over the boy’s sheet-swaddled form. Haskell’s eyes were clear and with-it—this was not the same stethoscope-equipped time-server who had been plodding through the rooms and corridors of Cathy Russell for the last couple of years like a dull ghost—but he looked terribly old and frail.

“We tried,” Rusty said.

In truth, Haskell had done more than try; he’d reminded Rusty of one of those sports novels he’d loved as a kid, where the aging pitcher comes out of the bullpen for one more shot at glory in the seventh game of the World Series. But only Rusty and Ginny Tomlinson had been in the stands for this performance, and this time there would be no happy ending for the old warhorse.

Rusty had started the saline drip, adding mannitol to reduce brain swelling. Haskell had left the OR at an actual run to do the bloodwork in the lab down the hall, a complete CBC. It had to be Haskell; Rusty was unqualified and there were no lab techs. Catherine Russell was now hideously understaffed. Rusty thought the Dinsmore boy might be only a down payment on the price the town would eventually have to pay for that lack of personnel.

It got worse. The boy was A-negative, and they had none in their small blood supply. They did, however, have O-negative—the universal donor—and had given Rory four units, which left exactly nine more in supply. Giving it to the boy had probably been tantamount to pouring it down the scrub-room drain, but none of them had said so. While the blood ran into him, Haskell sent Ginny down to the closet-sized cubicle that served as the hospital’s library. She came back with a tattered copy of
On Neurosurgery: A Brief Overview.
Haskell operated with the book beside him, an otiscope laid across the pages to hold them down. Rusty thought he would never forget the whine of the saw, the smell of the bone dust in the unnaturally warm air, or the clot of jellied blood that oozed out after Haskell removed the bone plug.

For a few minutes, Rusty had actually allowed himself to hope. With the pressure of the hematoma relieved by the burr-hole, Rory’s vital signs had stabilized—or tried to. Then, while Haskell was attempting to determine if the bullet fragment was within his reach, everything had started going downhill again, and fast.

Rusty thought of the parents, waiting and hoping against hope. Now, instead of wheeling Rory to the left outside the OR—toward Cathy Russell’s ICU, where his folks might be allowed to creep in
and see him—it looked like Rory would be taking a right, toward the morgue.

“If this were an ordinary situation, I’d maintain life support and ask the parents about organ donation,” Haskell said. “But of course, if this were an ordinary situation, he wouldn’t be here. And even if he was, I wouldn’t be trying to operate on him using a … a goddam
Toyota
manual.” He picked up the otiscope and threw it across the OR. It struck the green tiles, chipped one, and fell to the floor.

“Do you want to administer epi, Doctor?” Ginny asked. Calm, cool, and collected … but she looked tired enough to drop in her tracks.

“Was I not clear? I won’t prolong this boy’s agony.” Haskell reached toward the red switch on the back of the respirator. Some wit—Twitch, perhaps—had put a small sticker there that read BOOYA! “Do you want to express a contrary opinion, Rusty?”

Rusty considered the question, then slowly shook his head. The Babinski test had been positive, indicating major brain damage, but the main thing was that there was just no chance. Never had been, really.

Haskell flipped the switch. Rory Dinsmore took one labored breath on his own, appeared to try for a second one, and then gave up.

“I make it …” Haskell looked at the big clock on the wall. “Five fifteen PM. Will you note that as the TOD, Ginny?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Haskell pulled down his mask, and Rusty noted with concern that the old man’s lips were blue. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “The heat is killing me.”

But it wasn’t the heat; his heart was doing that. He collapsed halfway down the corridor, on his way to give Alden and Shelley Dinsmore the bad news. Rusty got to administer epi after all, but it did no good. Neither did closed-chest massage. Or the paddles.

Time of death, five forty-nine PM. Ron Haskell outlived his last patient by exactly thirty-four minutes. Rusty sat down on the floor, his back against the wall. Ginny had given Rory’s parents the news; from where he sat with his face in his hands, Rusty could hear the
mother’s shrieks of grief and sorrow. They carried well in the nearly empty hospital. She sounded as if she would never stop.

9

Barbie thought that the Chief’s widow must once have been an extremely beautiful woman. Even now, with dark circles under her eyes and an indifferent choice of clothes (faded jeans and what he was pretty sure was a pajama top), Brenda Perkins was striking. He thought maybe smart people rarely lost their good looks—if they had good ones to begin with, that was—and he saw the clear light of intelligence in her eyes. Something else, too. She might be in mourning, but it hadn’t killed her curiosity. And right now, the object of her curiosity was him.

She looked over his shoulder at Julia’s car, backing down the driveway, and raised her hands to it:
Where you going?

Julia leaned out the window and called, “I have to make sure the paper gets out! I also have to go by Sweetbriar Rose and give Anson Wheeler the bad news—he’s on sandwich detail tonight! Don’t worry, Bren, Barbie’s safe!” And before Brenda could reply or remonstrate, Julia was off down Morin Street, a woman on a mission. Barbie wished he were with her, his only objective the creation of forty ham-and-cheese and forty tuna sandwiches.

With Julia gone, Brenda resumed her inspection. They were on opposite sides of the screen door. Barbie felt like a job applicant facing a tough interview.

“Are you?” Brenda asked.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

“Are you safe?”

Barbie considered it. Two days ago he would have said yes, of course he was, but on this afternoon he felt more like the soldier of Fallujah than the cook of Chester’s Mill. He settled for saying he was housebroken, which made her smile.

“Well, I’ll have to make my own judgment on that,” she said.
“Even though right now my judgment isn’t the best. I’ve suffered a loss.”

“I know, ma’am. I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you. He’s being buried tomorrow. Out of that cheesy little Bowie Funeral Home that continues to stagger along somehow, even though almost everyone in town uses Crosman’s in Castle Rock. Folks call Stewart Bowie’s establishment Bowie’s Buryin Barn. Stewart’s an idiot and his brother Fernald’s worse, but now they’re all we have. All
I
have.” She sighed like a woman confronting some vast chore.
And why not?
Barbie thought.
The death of a loved one may be many things, but work is certainly one of them.

She surprised him by stepping out onto the stoop with him. “Walk around back with me, Mr. Barbara. I may invite you in later on, but not until I’m sure of you. Ordinarily I’d take a character reference from Julia like a shot, but these are not ordinary times.” She was leading him along the side of the house, over nicely clipped grass raked clear of autumn leaves. On the right was a board fence separating the Perkins home from its next-door neighbor; on the left were nicely kept flowerbeds.

“The flowers were my husband’s bailiwick. I suppose you think that’s a strange hobby for a law enforcement officer.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“I never did, either. Which makes us in the minority. Small towns harbor small imaginations. Grace Metalious and Sherwood Anderson were right about that.

“Also,” she said as they rounded the rear corner of the house and entered a commodious backyard, “it will stay light out here longer. I have a generator, but it died this morning. Out of fuel, I believe. There’s a spare tank, but I don’t know how to change it. I used to nag Howie about the generator. He wanted to teach me how to maintain it. I refused to learn. Mostly out of spite.” A tear overspilled one eye and trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away absently. “I’d apologize to him now if I could. Admit he was right. But I can’t do that, can I?”

Barbie knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. “If it’s just the canister,” he said, “I can change it out.”

“Thank you,” she said, leading him to a patio table with an Igloo cooler sitting beside it. “I was going to ask Henry Morrison to do it, and I was going to get more canisters at Burpee’s, too, but by the time I got down to the high street this afternoon, Burpee’s was closed and Henry was out at Dinsmore’s field, along with everyone else. Do you think I’ll be able to get extra canisters tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Barbie said. In truth, he doubted it.

“I heard about the little boy,” she said. “Gina Buffalino from next door came over and told me. I’m terribly sorry. Will he live?”

“I don’t know.” And, because intuition told him honesty would be the most direct route to this woman’s trust (provisional though that might be), he added, “I don’t think so.”

“No.” She sighed and wiped at her eyes again. “No, it sounded very bad.” She opened the Igloo. “I have water and Diet Coke. That was the only soft drink I allowed Howie to have. Which do you prefer?”

“Water, ma’am.”

She opened two bottles of Poland Spring and they drank. She looked at him with her sadly curious eyes. “Julia told me you want a key to the Town Hall. I understand why you want it. I also understand why you don’t want Jim Rennie to know—”

“He may have to. The situation’s changed. You see—”

She held up her hand and shook her head. Barbie ceased.

“Before you tell me that, I want you to tell me about the trouble you had with Junior and his friends.”

“Ma’am, didn’t your husband—?”

“Howie rarely talked about his cases, but this one he
did
talk about. It troubled him, I think. I want to see if your story matches his. If it does, we can talk about other matters. If it doesn’t, I’ll invite you to leave, although you may take your bottle of water with you.”

Barbie pointed to the little red shed by the left corner of the house. “That your gennie?”

“Yes.”

“If I change out the canister while we talk, will you be able to hear me?”

“Yes.”

“And you want the whole deal, right?”

“Yes indeed. And if you call me ma’am again, I may have to brain you.”

The door of the little generator shed was held shut with a hook-and-eye of shiny brass. The man who had lived here until yesterday had taken care of his things … although it was a shame about that lone canister. Barbie decided that, no matter how this conversation went, he would take it upon himself to try and get her a few more tomorrow.

In the meantime,
he told himself,
tell her everything she wants to know about that night.
But it would be easier to tell with his back turned; he didn’t like saying the trouble had happened because Angie McCain had seen him as a slightly overage boy-toy.

Sunshine Rule,
he reminded himself, and told his tale.

10

What he remembered most clearly about last summer was the James McMurtry song that seemed to be playing everywhere—“Talkin’ at the Texaco,” it was called. And the line he remembered most clearly was the one about how in a small town “we all must know our place.” When Angie started standing too close to him while he was cooking, or pressing a breast against his arm while she reached for something he could have gotten for her, the line recurred. He knew who her boyfriend was, and he knew that Frankie DeLesseps was part of the town’s power structure, if only by virtue of his friendship with Big Jim Rennie’s son. Dale Barbara, on the other hand, was little more than a drifter. In the Chester’s Mill scheme of things, he
had
no place.

One evening she had reached around his hip and given his crotch
a light squeeze. He reacted, and he saw by her mischievous grin that she’d felt him react.

“You can have one back, if you want,” she said. They’d been in the kitchen, and she’d twitched the hem of her skirt, a short one, up a little, giving him a quick glimpse of frilly pink underwear. “Fair’s fair.”

“I’ll pass,” he said, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

He’d seen similar hijinks in half a dozen restaurant kitchens, had even played along from time to time. It might have amounted to no more than a young girl’s passing letch for an older and moderately good-looking co-worker. But then Angie and Frankie broke up, and one night when Barbie was dumping the swill in the Dumpster out back after closing, she’d put a serious move on him.

He turned around and she was there, slipping her arms around his shoulders and kissing him. At first he kissed her back. Angie unlocked one arm long enough to take his hand and put it on her left breast. That woke his brain up. It was good breast, young and firm. It was also trouble.
She
was trouble. He tried to pull back, and when she hung on one-handed (her nails now biting into the nape of his neck) and tried to thrust her hips against him, he pushed her away with a little more force than he had intended. She stumbled against the Dumpster, glared at him, touched the seat of her jeans, and glared harder.

“Thanks! Now I’ve got crap all over my pants!”

“You should know when to let go,” he said mildly.

“You liked it!”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I don’t like you.” And when he saw the hurt and anger deepen on her face, he added: “I mean I do, just not that way.” But of course people have a way of saying what they really mean when they’re shaken up.

Four nights later, in Dipper’s, someone poured a glass of beer down the back of his shirt. He turned and saw Frankie DeLesseps.

“Did you like that,
Baaarbie
? If you did, I can do it again—it’s two-buck pitcher night. Of course, if you didn’t, we can take it outside.”

“I don’t know what she told you, but it’s wrong,” Barbie said. The
jukebox had been playing—not the McMurtry song, but that was what he heard in his head:
We all must know our place.