A wonder, always, to watch Doc work. You'd swear he was giving things no more attention than tying a shoelace, but he was well and surely in there, and nothing got by him. By the time I'd crossed the street he had Billy out of the car, one hand clutching the back of his shirt, the other cradling his head. Man can barely stand, and here he is hauling someone out of a car. Had Billy on the sidewalk in no time flat, feeling for pulses, prodding and poking.
Donna and Sally Ann came out of the diner, Donna with half a BLT in her hand. Three steps past the door, a slice of pickle fell out and she looked down at it, vacantly, the way others stood staring at the hole in the wall plugged by Billy's Buick Regal. Country music, or what passes for country music these days, played on the radio. Someone reached into the car and turned it off.
"Pupils look okay," Doc said. "Not blown, anyway. You want to go on back in the office there and bring me out some tape, Turner? Any kind should do her, long as it's heavy. Duct tape be perfect. I assume," he said at the same volume, but to the gathering crowd, "that one of you has had sense enough to call Rory?"
"Mabel's tracking him down," Sally Ann told him. Mabel, who'd been at it long enough to have been (some said) ordained by Alexander Graham Bell himself, was our local telephone operator, unofficial historian, and town crier. "She's also trying to find Milly."
As I came out, Doc pulled a loose-leaf binder from the backseat of the car and slid it under Billy's head and shoulders. He tore off a length of tape and turned the ends in, so that it stuck to itself, to make a cradle for Billy's head. Then he started taping, back and forth, around and down, till head and notebook were a piece. That done, he splinted the left wrist, where a bone protruded, with tape and a paperback book also from the car. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him, picking glass out of Billy's face with finger and thumb, wiping them on his pants.
Everyone wanted to know where the mayor was, but Doc never batted an eye.
"Damn," he said afterward, as we waited, "that felt gooood," dropping a couple extra o's in there. "I'm of half a mind to kick that boy doctor out and take back my office." After a moment he added, "He's good, though. I made sure of that."
"You miss it, don't you?"
"Hell, Turner, my age, I miss damn near everything."
Heads turned as Rory's ambulance came up the middle of Main Street. Once a delivery van for the local builders' supply, the old Pontiac now doubled as hearse, and letters from the store's name still showed beneath new paint when light fell just right. Rory had taken time to pull back the curtains inside. He got out, wearing hip boots and the smell of the river, leaving the door open. Lonnie climbed out the other side, in knee boots, and stood looking down at his younger son without saying anything.
Doc's wrappings made it look as though a mummy's head had taken over Billy's body. Of course, in Lonnie's view something had taken over Billy long ago.
I remembered when I first met Billy, how I thought he might be the closest thing to an innocent human being I'd ever known. He was dressed all in black back then, with multiple piercings and no discernible sense of direction any of us could make out, parents included, just a sweet kid kind of happily adrift. He'd dropped out of school not long after, not dropped out so much as just, well, drifted out. Missed a few days, then a week, and never went back. Worked at the hardware store a while, but that didn't last either. Then he was playing drums with a band that worked a lot outside town in the bars along Old Highway, but for some reason, the way he looked, his quietness, he was a magnet for trouble. People kept stepping up to him and he wouldn't back down. Don Lee and I'd answered our share of call-outs only to find Billy at the other end. Bar brawls, traffic incidents, domestic disturbances. Then, a year ago, he'd got married, gone back to the hardware store, and things were looking good for him. Few months later, he disappeared. We found his truck out on the Hill Road Bypass where he'd pulled it over and flagged down the bus headed toward Little Rock. Milly, his wife, said she'd often go looking for him and find him sitting in the basement sawing wood up into smaller and smaller pieces.
I helped Rory load Billy into the ambulance, then went over and stood by Lonnie.
Two guys off fishing, looking forward to a quiet, easy day. Sandwiches, maybe a beer or two, bait bucket standing by, drowsy sun in the sky. Now this. Frangible, like Doc said. How brittle our lives are, how tentative, every day of them, every moment.
Once I'd been up at the camp while Isaiah Stillman was, as he put it, "doing laundry"-balancing the books on the family funds he managed. That evening he was cleaning out old folders and files, had them all lined up in the recycle bin. "We're never more than a keystroke away from oblivion, you know," he said, and hit the key to delete the contents.
So one minute Lonnie's off fishing, the next he's standing on Main Street looking down at his bloody, broken son.
Or you're together on the porch then suddenly she's gone and you have to start finding out how much music you can make with what you have left.
"You're not going to tell me everything's going to be okay, are you, Turner."
I shook my head.
"Or start with If there's anything I can do,' then trail off."
"No."
"Course you're not."
Lonnie stepped over to the Regal and shut the door. One of Billy's shoes was just outside it.
"You ever read a story called 'Thus I Refute Beelzy'?" Lonnie asked.
I said I hadn't.
"About a boy whose father forces him to admit that his imaginary friend isn't real. Kid holds out a long time, but he finally gives in. At the end of the story, all they find of the old man on the stairs is a shoe with the foot still in it."
He walked around to the car's rear. "That the right license plate, you think?"
"I'll run it." The nuts had the same grime as the plate itself. No signs of abrasion around them. "Doesn't look to have been changed, though."
"First thing we have to find out is whose car this is."
"Absolutely. I'll get right on it. Oh, and…"
"Yeah?"
"Good to have you back, Sheriff."