Tom was crashing. He’d hit a wall. The meth was wearing off. The symptoms were entirely familiar from his past alcohol and cocaine addictions, but greatly exaggerated by the overwhelming realities that confronted him: He had killed a man, he had killed a man, and could not understand why time itself didn’t stop to force him to reckon with the enormity of that fact. A sacrament was required, but none presented itself. He was probably infected with a deadly disease by a dirty needle, another grave reality he couldn’t ignore. Worse, there was no compensation in the form of any deeper knowledge about what had happened to Ray Walker. He had nowhere to go, no friend to seek out for solace or advice, no more meth to keep himself amped, and he cursed his own hunger for it. He knew that more of the drug now would only mean a worse withdrawal later, but he craved it anyway. As bad as he felt, the moment was hyper-charged with the intensity of the present. He was like the protagonist in a modernist drama in which every puzzle piece imagined by the unseen playwright was perfectly wrought to fit tightly together and form a coherent pattern, but the author’s diabolical purpose was to keep him, the story’s hapless hero, suspended in a state of complete and utter confusion.
He drove out East Colfax Ave., Denver’s strip of cheap motels and all the unsavory trade they attract. He got a room and planned to sleep it off. But he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t shake the image of the blood spurting from Brubaker’s neck. He thrashed about on the sheets, experiencing a profound withdrawal even though he’d used meth just once. He hadn’t used meth, exactly, but had been assaulted by it. It didn’t matter. Damn, this shit was addictive, just as it was reputed to be; far more addictive than the drugs he’d abused in his past. If he could score just a little meth, just enough to get himself back home to Radium, he thought, he’d break the incipient habit then.
Don’t do it, he told himself: tough it out. And he thrashed about some more, sweating, his thirst so profound that he couldn’t drink enough water to quench it, moving ceaselessly from the bed to the tap for more water to the toilet to pee; acutely aware of the noise of traffic out on the street, to the life underway on the other side of the thin motel walls, to the sounds of people having sex, laughing and talking. Toilets flushing. Televisions left on. He heard a man shout and a woman cry.
Crashing from any high brings paranoia, Tom knew, but he wasn’t merely paranoid, he argued with himself. He had every reason to despair, even though only a few hours earlier he’d been exhilarated, and his sense of purpose then felt every bit as real as his current dread. Still, this acute isolation, this teeth-grinding, joint-rattling fear, this unquenchable thirst, this copious sweat, it was all as real as the ugly stains on the four walls that enclosed him.
He thrashed about and sweated some more. He saw faces, scornful, angry faces, in the pattern of the cottage cheese texture on the dingy ceiling. Nobody in the world knew where he was, or cared. A shiver moved from his tailbone to the base of his neck at the thought of his loneliness. Was there ever anyone more alone than he was at that moment? Then he indulged a worse thought: what if there were people who knew exactly where he was, and who were closing in on him? Who would they be? How would they know and why would they care? Someone could burst in the door and it might be a cop on the trail of Mark Brubaker’s killer. Or Brubaker himself, not dead after all, but merely wounded and enraged and seeking revenge. Or it could be Dick DeRichter. Or Albert DeRichter. The shiver reversed direction and moved from the base of his neck down to his tailbone and then to his toes. He remembered how it felt to be suicidal.
He gazed at himself in the mottled mirror in the motel room bathroom, harshly lit by green fluorescent light. Sometimes in the mirror he saw a face he might describe as handsome, or at least inoffensive: sandy hair, symmetrical features, a ready smile, dark brown eyes. Expensive orthodontics as a teenager had given him perfectly aligned teeth, a feature that all by itself distinguished him on the West End as not having been born there. Now the corners of his mouth were twitchy, his nose swollen from the wound Brubaker had inflicted; his expression was drawn, his eyes blank but bloodshot from lack of sleep. He looked dangerous, even to himself. He dressed and stepped out onto Colfax and started walking, just to walk, to move.
It was past midnight and there were hookers working the sidewalk and johns cruising past, and all other manner of insomniacs and tweakers, muggers and gangbangers and aimless youth. He passed a beat-up car parked in the shadows just down a side street in which a family, both parents and two small children, were trying to sleep, all of their belongings piled up around them. They looked familiar and Tom thought for a moment that they might have come to this place, like he had, from Radium. But they could as easily have come from Wyoming or Kansas. No doubt a cop would find them soon, shine a flashlight though the windows to wake them up, and make them move on. If the cop were kind, he would direct them to a homeless shelter.
Tom didn’t walk five minutes before he was hit up.
“I know what you need, baby.”
He eyed the tranny, all skanky 110 pounds of her, and shook his head. But she didn’t take no for an answer, and instead reached into her bag to show him a familiar looking blue plastic zip-lock baggie.
“How much?”
“$150”
He followed her to the dark edge of an empty parking lot, where someone had thoughtfully broken the bulb in a security light fixture, and he emptied his wallet to complete the transaction. The tranny pressed herself up against him, her knee brushing his crotch.
“C’mon honey,” she said, “Blow job’s included, no extra charge.” He could have agreed and he momentarily considered it – why not, after everything else he’d experienced in the last 24 hours? – but he felt a wave of nausea and pushed her away.
Though meth was something new, Tom was a connoisseur of addiction. Back in his motel room, he started out slow to test just how much of the drug he needed to snort to ease himself out of the darkest corner of the dark place he’d sunk to, and how much more it would take to fuel his drive back home to Radium.
It wasn’t so bad, really. He paced himself perfectly. By the time he got home the next morning, he’d been awake more than 48 hours. Then his body simply shut down, as if an internal timer had run out, and he fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow.
But this was a restless sleep. Tom’s dreams were filled with ringing, incessant, endless ringing, and shouting, cries of anguish, whimpers, and groans that sounded precisely like the last noise that emanated from Mark Brubaker. He was deep in the canyonlands, prospecting for uranium, or maybe searching for a missing man, he wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, the search was fruitless. He was lost in a labyrinth of canyons, sheer cliffs rising up high above him, hemming him in. There was no moon. “Helloo… helloo,” he called. But nobody answered.
What is that damned ringing? Brrrring. Brrrring. Brrrring. It’s inside him, the ringing, and he shakes his head violently side to side to knock it out, to dislodge it from his cranium.
He tries to climb out of the slot canyon he’s been wandering for days, up a seam in the rock to where he can make out a ledge, but his foot slips and he grabs on to a rock overhead to steady himself, but the rock breaks loose and falls on him and carries him back to the canyon floor and comes to rest on his arm below the elbow. The pain is excruciating, his arm crushed beneath a boulder that must weigh two tons, he’s pinned firmly to the ground. The word “excruciating,” he remembers, comes from crucifix, and it is apt: he is indeed pinned like Jesus on the cross. He screams but is answered only by an echo, “Hellooo,” and that damned ringing. Brrring. Brrrring.
“Helloo,” someone is shouting, or is it just his own voice coming back at him for a second or third time, echoing off the towering canyon walls? Then, not a quarter mile away, on a ridge, he sees his partner, his friend. Tom recognizes the young Dick DeRichter in a dusty hat, a World War II-vintage canteen slung across his back, in dungarees, suspenders over a plaid shirt, and brown leather combat boots, peering at him through a pair of binoculars. Tom struggles to wave his free arm, he shouts, “Helloooooo,” but Dick just stands there looking right at him and making no move toward him.
Tom grinds his teeth against the pain. His teeth feel loose and his jaw aches as much as his arm. The vision of Dick DeRichter watching him die must be a hallucination, because the figure on the ridge vanishes, dissolves into a rock outcropping, and then from the same rock the human figure reemerges: it is merely Tom’s, or Jim’s, fevered and vain hope for a rescue, for a miracle. He is weakening fast, delirious, his canteen empty now; he is thirsty, so thirsty, his mouth tastes of grit. The boulder is absolutely fixed, it won’t budge, and there is only one way Tom can see to save himself. He rips his shirt off and forms a tourniquet that he ties just above where he will make the cut. His crushed arm is so numb, so broken, that he probably won’t even feel it when he hacks it off with his pocketknife….
But he’s wrong about that. The pain is white hot, the worst pain a man can endure, and even worse than that because it is self-inflicted, and he screams with all his might – there is nobody to hear him, after all – as he forces the knife tip into the inside of his elbow in order to gain leverage against his own sinew and tendons and bones, working as quickly as possible to saw through his elbow joint and free himself. The makeshift tourniquet is no barrier to the blood that spurts from his torn arteries, he is clinically aware that his own heart is pumping his blood out of his body in steady but quickly diminishing spurts. In his agony there is a moment of release, literal release from the grip of the rock as the knife completes its work, and he stumbles to his feet, almost experiencing joy, having escaped his broken body, but he’s lost too much blood and he falls on the ground and rolls over to look heavenward and there, looming over him, is Dick DeRichter, who coldly watches him die.
“I’m sorry, Jim,” Dick says. “There was nothing I could do.”
“Water….” Tom says. More than the betrayal, more than the physical pain, he is most acutely aware of his dry, parched mouth and wants nothing more than a little moisture to ease his passage into the afterlife.
Brrring. Brrring.
Tom bolted awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs, in the Forum office. He was instantly aware it had been ringing for hours, but how many hours? It was four o’clock according to the clock by his bed, and it was not dark out, so it was late afternoon, but what day was it? His stomach was a knot of hunger and his arm ached – it had been pinned under his body while he slept, cutting off the flow of blood and numbing it – but he was even thirstier than that. He lurched into the bathroom, cupped his hand under the faucet, and drank deeply. He tried to shake his arm awake.
The phone started to ring again, and there were familiar voices and the sound of pounding on the door. They were forcing their way in.
“Tom? Tom?”
It was Dave Best calling.
“I’m here,” Tom shouted.
“We’re worried about you,” Dave called. “What happened to the paper?”
“Can we come in, Tom?”
Tom recognized the voice: It was Deputy Peterson on what the police blotter would term “a welfare check,” in response to a report that somebody might be in need of assistance.
“It’s Friday, man,” Dave said. “What happened to the paper?”
“Oh, shit,” Tom said, and thinking quickly he ran what little meth he had left down the drain. “I’ll be right down.”
“What the hell happened to you?” Dave said when Tom straggled down the stairs. “You look like shit.”
Dave and Billy were looking at him with expressions that mixed concern and, perhaps, disgust. Or was Tom just imagining that they now saw in him yet another formerly upstanding citizen of the West End undone by meth?
“I don’t know what happened,” Tom said. “I got sick and had a fever and passed out and didn’t realize how long I was asleep, I just lost track of the time.” He knew how unconvincing it sounded. It had to be obvious to his friends that he’d had some kind of breakdown, almost certainly related to drugs or alcohol or both. But he was safe in trusting that they couldn’t call him on it. This was, after all, the West End.
“I guess I’d better get the paper out.”
“I’m just glad to see you’re alive,” Dave said.