Second Chance (46 page)

Curly was still standing in the dim glow of the street light, his face tense. "Did you . . . do it?" he said. "I didn't hear a shot."

"I didn't shoot," Woody said, spitting away the bile that had come up with the words. "But he's dead."

Curly frowned. "What'd you . . . how'd you do it?"

"I stabbed him. I stabbed him to death. Now let's get this . . . piece of
shit
in the trunk. Then you drive. I'm tired."

They put Keith's body inside and slammed the trunk lid, then got in the car and drove out of
Colver
without speaking. But after a few miles, Curly said, "You were right."

"About what."

"Having to . . . kill the guy. I couldn't have done it. I'm . . . I'm glad you could."

Woody said nothing in reply. The ache in his groin was nothing compared to the other ache he felt, farther in.

Ten miles away from
Colver
, they approached a closed gas station where a telephone booth gleamed like a squat lighthouse in the ocean of night. "Pull over," Woody said. "We'll call them from here. The faster they all get to Iselin the better."

Eddie Phelps answered on the first ring. "We have him, Eddie," Woody said. "You and Dale come out as soon as you can. We'll be at the apartment in a few hours at most."

Eddie didn't answer right away. Then, "You have him? You found Keith?"

"Yeah."

"My God. This is really real, isn't it? I never thought you'd find him. I never thought it would come to this."

"Well, it has. So get out here as soon as you can.”

“Woody . . ."

"What?"

"Does Dale have to go back with us . . . when we . . .
if
we can take back Keith?"

"Yeah. Sure he does. There were eight before, Eddie, so there should be eight now. The more there are, the stronger our, what, I don't know,
aura
will be."

"I'm not going to leave him back there, Woody. I just want you to know that. I'm not leaving him there."

"Nobody's leaving anybody there, Eddie. Except for Keith. Now get your ass out here, okay?"

Frank McDonald was even more difficult to talk to. "Woody, Woody, Woody, this is crazy," he said, after Woody told him to fly up immediately. He sounded near tears.

"Listen to me, Frank. Everything else is crazy too. Your
wife
was crazy. The world is going crazy. Have you heard about the plague? Or don't you listen to TV or read the papers? Keith did it,
goddammit
, and I've gotten myself in so deep I can't get out unless we do this. But it's not just for me—it's for everybody. And it's for Judy too. You don't get out here right away, Judy rots in some mental home, if she and your kids and all of us don't die of this fucking virus first. You got me?"

Now he
was
crying. "All right
 
. . . all right
 
. . . I'll come. I'll leave now . . ."

Diane Franklin gave him no argument. She just said, "He's really there? It's Keith?" and then, when Woody told her that it was, she said, "I'm going to the airport now," and hung up.

Tracy was the last he called. "We have him."

"Keith?"

"Yes."

"Was it hard?"

"Harder than I can ever say. I don't know if it'll work, but there's no alternative. He's . . . dead."

"
Dead?
"

"He killed himself. But we have his body." He gave a shuddering sigh. "I don't know if it'll work. I don't know anything anymore, don't know myself . . . I had to kill somebody, Tracy. An old man."

"Woody . . ."

"If I hadn't, it would have been all over before we even got started. But I don't know
why
I killed him . . . he was hurting me, and I knew I had to do it,
had
to, but . . ." He trailed off, wishing that she was there to hold him or to hate him. Just that she was there would have been enough. "Will you come?"

"You know I will. I told Teresa I might have to leave quickly. I'll call her, have her come over right away. I'll be there as soon as I can. Oh, Woody," she said, "I love you. I don't care what you've had to do. I know that you
had
to do it. Take care of yourself, my darling, and I'll be with you very soon. As soon as I can."

"All right," he said, tears blinding him. "All right. I love you too. And . . . give my love to the kids. Please. Kiss them real hard for me.”

"I will. I promise I will."

Kiss them
, he thought as he hung up. A kiss from their father who loves them and may have to do something that makes it so they can never live,
have
never lived. Oh God, let them know how much I love them both. And let
her
know.

They arrived at the apartment just after midnight, parked the car by the door, and waited until the parking lot of
Parini's
was empty of late night drinkers. Then they opened the trunk and carried Keith
Aarons's
green plastic-wrapped body inside the door. Woody waited with it, while Curly moved the car into a less conspicuous parking place.

As he waited in the night with a dead man, Woody thought about how much the past few months seemed like a dream. It had started that way, after all, as a dream of a better time, a time when life tasted both sweet and sharp at once. A time that had died when the girl he loved had died, and he had wanted nothing more than to make that time live again.

He had succeeded. Oh God, how he had succeeded. The time had lived, and the girl had lived, and something else had lived too. He looked down at the corpse, and had to keep himself from kicking it in rage.

"Why didn't you stay there?" he asked it. "Why the hell didn't you stay dead?"

The door opened and Curly came in. Woody turned to look at him, and from
Curly's
startled expression, he knew that his own face must be awash with rage. He looked away, and wrung his hands together until his fingers hurt. It drained away some of the fury, and he knelt and slipped his hands beneath the stiffening arms and around Keith's chest. Curly took the legs, and they climbed the stairs.

Inside the apartment, Curly began to set the body down, but Woody grunted, "The kitchen," and they kept moving, setting Keith down just inside the kitchen door. Woody then opened the refrigerator and began removing the wire racks.

"You want to put him in
there
?" Curly asked.

Woody nodded. "Go down to the machine in back of
Parini's
and get some ice. Four, five bags."

Curly started to say something, but instead shook his head and left the apartment. Woody finished taking out the racks, then slid out the meat drawer from its bracket and set it on the floor next to the racks. Then he took the bags from Keith's body, and was surprised to find how quickly the joints had begun to stiffen, the flesh to turn a pasty yellow. Keith's pants were soiled with the wastes that had leaked out of him, but there was little blood, even on the newspaper that Woody left wrapped around the head.

He lifted the upper part of the body until the buttocks were resting on the solid bottom shelf, then pushed in the torso, bent the stiffening legs, turned the body to the side, and shoved the legs in under the bracket of the meat drawer so that Keith's left shoulder was against the back wall of the refrigerator. Then Woody closed the door and waited for Curly to return.

He brought back five ten-pound bags of ice, and was sweating despite the amount of cold he held in his arms. "This really gonna do any good?" he asked, coming into the kitchen. When he saw the refrigerator door was closed, he lowered the bags gently to the floor. “Jesus. You got him in there already?"

Woody nodded and opened the door. Curly looked and shook his head. "Oh man. I don't believe this."

"I don't know if it'll help," Woody said. "But maybe the closer to life he is the easier it'll be. Come on. Let's get the ice in."

Together they poured the cubes wherever they could get them to stay—in Keith's lap, behind his shoulders, around his legs. They loosened his clothing and poured cubes inside so that they were held against his flesh by his shirt and pants.

It was grim work, and Curly once tried to lighten it with a remark about sangria being a lot easier to keep cold, but Woody didn't laugh, and they finished in silence, Curly pushing the door slowly closed as Woody dribbled in the last of the cubes.

"All right," Woody said as he bunched up the plastic bags and threw them in the waste can. "We better get some sleep."

"I don't tend to sleep too well with a stiff in the fridge."

"We have to. We don't know when the others will start showing up, and we have to get some rest. There are no sheets on the bed, but they're soft. I'm exhausted and you are too."

Curly nodded reluctantly. "Yeah. You're right as usual."

Woody smiled without a trace of humor. "We'll see how right I am tomorrow night. When it's party time again."

~*~

Despite what Woody told Curly, he couldn't sleep. He lay on his back, listening to the sounds of night in the apartment, hearing the compressor of the refrigerator turning on and off at long intervals. Then he heard a voice, and jerked in his bed before he realized it was
Curly's
.

"You awake?" Curly had said softly.

"Yeah."

"Bitch to sleep, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is."

"I mean, why waste time sleeping when in a couple weeks we might both be taking the
big
sleep,
y'know
?" They lay in silence for a time. "Woody?"

"
Mmm
?"

"You afraid to die?"

"I guess so."

"You believe there's anything afterwards?"

"I don't know." It seemed, Woody thought, like the discussions he had had a hundred times in college, lying in the darkness with your roommates, talking about the things you couldn't learn in your classes the next day. "I guess I think there's more of a possibility now than I did before."

"Yeah. What's happened to us . . . isn't natural."

"No," Woody said, trying to think it through. "It is natural. Because it happened. We just don't understand how, that's all. So we call it supernatural. But if it happened, it's part of . . ." He looked for the word, but when he found it, it tasted sour in his mouth. ". . . part of reality."

"There's more than one reality, though," Curly said. "We've lived in two already, and we're trying to what, create a third one? So how many can there be? No end to them?"

"That's what scares me," said Woody. "What if there's really only supposed to be one? And we screwed it up?"

Curly had no answer to that, and soon Woody heard the deep, regular breathing of sleep coming from the other side of the room. But he couldn't follow his friend. So he got up and walked into the living room, and sat on the sofa, and imagined friends in the dark. He was there when dawn came, but the night and the room had taught him nothing more.

Chapter 46

When Curly woke up at seven, he and Woody locked the apartment carefully and went out for breakfast. When they returned, Curly took a pack of cards from his bag and they played gin. At one point Curly got up and started to put a record on the turntable, but Woody told him not to. "Save it for tonight," he said, and Curly glumly nodded.

Eddie Phelps and Dale
Collini
pulled into the parking lot just after one o'clock. Woody and Curly were there to meet them. "Where's the man?" asked Eddie as he climbed out of the car.

"He'll be there," said Woody.

Dale cocked his head. "You mean he's not really here?”

“Oh, he's here," Curly said. "Just not up to receiving visitors right now."

"What the
fuck
are you talking about?" Eddie said, and his eyes narrowed. "He has this flu, that's it, isn't it?"

"Eddie," said Woody, "you live in New York, and we've been with Keith. We
all
have this flu."

"But . . . the government . . . they say that—"

"Fuck the government. You think they're going to tell everybody that they're going to die?"

Dale bit his lip and looked down at the ground, but Eddie began to shake his head, slowly, then faster. "No, you've got to be kidding—you telling me that we've kept AIDS away only to buy the farm from some contagious plague our old college chum started?"

"Basically, yes. You've heard the news, you know how it's hitting New York. The authorities are scamming. It's only a matter of time before you . . . before we all start to show the symptoms. But we're here to try and make sure that doesn't happen, that none of this happens or
has
happened."

Eddie had stopped shaking his head, and now he leaned back against the car and shaded his eyes with his hand. "You live your whole life careful. You don't go to bathhouses, you don't go home with guys in bars, you wait for Mister Right, you live with him faithfully for years, and then you pick up something out of the air." He put an arm around Dale and looked up at Woody. "Don't seem right somehow, do it?"