Billy Summers [en]

‘Is that why you saved me? Because of her?’

I saved you because if I’d left you in the street the cops would have eventually come here, he thinks. Except that’s probably not all the truth. Do we ever tell ourselves all of it?

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m so sorry that happened to you.’ Alice begins to cry. ‘I thought what happened to me was bad, but—’

‘What happened to you was bad.’

‘—but what happened to her is worse. Did you really shoot him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Good! And you got put in a home?’

‘Yes. You can stop if it’s upsetting you.’ But he doesn’t want her to stop and he’s not sorry for upsetting her. He’s glad. He reached her.

She grips the laptop as if afraid he might pull it away. ‘I want to read the rest.’ Then, almost accusingly: ‘Why haven’t you been doing this instead of watching a stupid TV show upstairs?’

‘Self-conscious.’

‘All right. I get that, I feel the same, so stop looking at me. Let me read.’

He wants to thank her for crying, but that would be weird. Instead he asks what her sizes are.

‘My sizes? Why?’

‘There’s a Goodwill store close to Harps. I could get you a couple of pairs of pants and some shirts. Maybe a pair of sneakers. You don’t want me to watch you reading and I don’t want to watch you do it. And you have to be tired of that skirt.’

She gives him an impish grin and it makes her pretty. Or would, if not for the bruises. ‘Not afraid to go out without the umbrella?’

‘I’ll take the car. Just remember if the cops come back instead of me, you were afraid to leave. I said I’d find you and hurt you.’

‘You’ll come back,’ Alice says, and writes down her sizes.

He takes his time in the Goodwill, wanting to give her time. He sees no one he knows, and no one pays particular attention to him. When he gets back, she’s finished. What took him months to write has taken her less than two hours to read. She has questions. None are about the spotter scope; they’re about the people, especially Ronnie and Glen and ‘that poor little one-eyed girl’ in the House of Everlasting Paint. She says she likes how he wrote like a kid when he was a kid but changed it up when he got older. She says he should keep writing. She says she’ll go upstairs while he does it, watch TV and then take a nap. ‘I’m tired all the time. It’s crazy.’

‘It’s not. Your body is still working to get over what those fucks did to it.’

Alice stands in the doorway. ‘Dalton?’ It’s what she calls him, even though she knows his real name. ‘Did your friend Taco die?’

‘A lot of people did before it was over.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and closes the door behind her.

10

He writes. Her reaction lifts him. He doesn’t spill many words on the slack time between April and November of 2004, when they were supposed to be winning hearts and minds and won neither. He gives it a few more paragraphs, then goes to the part that still hurts.

They were pulled back for a couple of days after Albie’s death because there was talk of a ceasefire, and when the Hot Nine (now the Hot Eight, each of them with ALBIE S. written on his helmet) got back to base, Billy looked everywhere for the baby shoe, thinking he might have left it there. The others also looked, but it was nowhere to be found and then they went back in, back to the job of clearing houses, and the first three were okay, two empty and one inhabited only by a boy of twelve or fourteen who raised his hands and screamed No gun Americans, no gun love New York Yankees no shoot!

The fourth house was the Funhouse.

Billy stops there for exercise. He thinks maybe he and Alice will stay on Pearson Street a little longer, maybe three more days. Until he finishes with the Funhouse and what happened there. He wants to write that losing the baby shoe made no difference one way or the other, of course it didn’t. He also wants to write that his heart still doesn’t believe it.

He does a few stretches before running up and down the stairs, because he can’t go to a walk-in clinic if he pops a hamstring. He hears no TV behind the Jensens’ door, so Alice is probably sleeping. And healing, he hopes, although Billy doubts that any woman ever heals completely after being raped. It leaves a scar and he guesses that on some days the scar aches. He guesses that even ten years later – twenty, thirty – it still aches. Maybe it’s like that, maybe it’s like something else. Maybe the only men who can know for sure are men who have been raped themselves.

As he runs the stairs, he thinks about the men who did it to her, and they are men. She said that Tripp Donovan is twenty-four, and Billy guesses Jack and Hank, Donovan’s rapin’ roomies, must be about the same age. Men, not boys. Bad ones.

He comes back into the basement apartment out of breath, but feeling loose and warm, ready to get back at it for another hour or maybe even two. Before he can get going, his laptop bings with a text message. It’s from Bucky Hanson, now hunkered down in the Great Wherever. No money has been transferred. Don’t think it’s going to happen. What are you going to do?