Coffey on the Mile

6

THAT WAS MY NIGHT OFF. I sat in the living room of our little house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, and watching the dark come up out of the ground to swallow the sky. Television is all right, I’ve nothing against it, but I don’t like how it turns you away from the rest of the world and toward nothing but its own glassy self. In that one way, at least, radio was better.

Janice came in, knelt beside the arm of my chair, and took my hand. For a little while neither of us said anything, just stayed that way, listening to Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge and watching the stars come out. It was all right with me.

“I’m so sorry I called you a coward,” she said. “I feel worse about that than anything I’ve ever said to you in our whole marriage.”

“Even the time when we went camping and you called me Old Stinky Sam?” I asked, and then we laughed and had a kiss or two and it was better again between us. She was so beautiful, my Janice, and I still dream of her. Old and tired of living as I am, I’ll dream that she walks into my room in this lonely, forgotten place where the hallways all smell of piss and old boiled cabbage, I dream she’s young and beautiful with her blue eyes and her fine high breasts that I couldn’t hardly keep my hands off of, and she’ll say, Why, honey, I wasn’t in that bus crash. You made a mistake, that’s all. Even now I dream that, and sometimes when I wake up and know it was a dream, I cry. I, who hardly ever cried at all when I was young.

“Does Hal know?” she asked at last.

“That John’s innocent? I don’t see how he can.”

“Can he help? Does he have any influence with Cribus?”

“Not a bit, honey.”

She nodded, as if she had expected this. “Then don’t tell him. If he can’t help, for God’s sake don’t tell him.”

“No.”

She looked up at me with steady eyes. “And you won’t call in sick that night. None of you will. You can’t.”

“No, we can’t. If we’re there, we can at least make it quick for him. We can do that much. It won’t be like Delacroix.” For a moment, mercifully brief, I saw the black silk mask burning away from Del’s face and revealing the cooked blobs of jelly which had been his eyes.

“There’s no way out for you, is there?” She took my hand, rubbed it down the soft velvet of her cheek. “Poor Paul. Poor old guy.”

I said nothing. Never before or after in my life did I feel so much like running from a thing. Just taking Jan with me, the two of us with a single packed carpetbag between us, running to anywhere.

“My poor old guy,” she repeated, and then: “Talk to him.”

“Who? John?”

“Yes. Talk to him. Find out what he wants.”

I thought about it, then nodded. She was right. She usually was.