Paradise County (47 page)

“Into the shower,” Joe said ruthlessly, grabbing his father by the arm and half-dragging, half-helping him from the bed. This, too, was part of the sober-up ritual.

“Jeez, no, I feel so bad—ah, Joe, can’t you just let me alone?”

With Cary swaying on his feet, Joe hoisted one of his father’s arms around his neck and force-marched him toward the bathroom. Once there, he helped him into the bathtub, where Cary, still in his under-shorts, sprawled with one arm hanging over the rim while he alternately berated his son and begged for mercy. Unmoved, Joe removed the handheld shower from its holder, turned on the cold water full blast, and held it over his father’s head.

Cary reacted like a fish suddenly flung onto dry land. He bucked and flopped and spit and spluttered, struggling to get up, yelling curses the whole while. Finally, when Joe judged he’d had enough, he reached into the tub, turned the water off, and hung the shower head back in its place.

With the cessation of the water, Cary lay there, shivering and spluttering, wiping the water from his face with both hands. Then he glared at his son.

“You’re a ruthless son-of-a-bitch, Joe.”

Joe tossed him a towel. Cary used it to wipe his face.

“Better?” Joe asked, unmoved.

“What the hell time is it?” Cary growled.

“Noon,” Joe lied unrepentantly. “Can you get up by yourself?”

“Hell, yes, I can get up by myself.” Cary grabbed hold of the edge of
the tub on one side and the grab bar set into the tile on the other and heaved himself up. Joe caught his arm to steady him, careful not to get too close unless he had to so he wouldn’t get all wet himself.

“I got it, I got it,” Cary said irritably as he stepped out of the tub. “Go on into the kitchen. I’ll meet you in there.”

“You go back to bed and I’ll haul your ass under the shower again,” Joe warned.

Cary waved him away, and Joe went. In the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of coffee, then poured another one for his father and got out two aspirin, which he set beside the coffee on the small round table.

A few minutes later, Cary came shuffling into the kitchen, wrapped in a shabby, ankle-length canary yellow bathrobe that Joe remembered from his childhood. An involuntary smile touched his mouth at the sight.
Big Bird—The Morning After
was what he and Carol had always dubbed scenes like this.

“Hell, boy, somebody better have died: it’s only seven-thirty,” Cary grumbled, having taken one look at the clock on the wall. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Sit down, Pop,” Joe said, and with another glare at him Cary did as he was told, taking the chair opposite Joe. He picked up the aspirin and popped them into his mouth, then took a gulp of the coffee, gagging and coughing again.

“This needs something,” he said, looking pointedly up at the cabinet where he kept the booze. When Joe failed to take the hint, Cary sighed, and took another swallow of coffee before looking his son in the eye.

“So what’s on your mind?” Just like always, when he felt guilty, there was a hint of bravado in his voice.

“How much do you remember about last night?” Joe asked levelly.

Cary thought. “You brought me home and put me to bed.”

That was such a safe guess that Joe didn’t alter by so much as one iota his belief that his father didn’t remember anything at all. Memory blackouts were part and parcel of the stage of alcoholism that Cary had reached.

“Yeah, I brought you home, Pop. Otherwise Tommy would have put you in jail. You punched him in the face because he took your car keys. You were so belligerent I had to hang on to you in the truck on the way home. Know who drove the truck, with you fighting and cursing and smelling like a damned brewery the whole way? Alex, that’s who.”

“Alex, huh? Now, there’s a looker. You could do worse for yourself, son.” Instead of inciting his father to shame, as Joe had hoped, this mention of Alex made Cary’s eyes brighten. “You tried your luck there yet? Yeah, of course you have. I didn’t raise no fool.”

“Pop …” Joe’s eyes narrowed warningly.

“Don’t waste your time denying it, Joey. Think I haven’t seen the way you look at her?”

“Pop, how I look or don’t look at Alex is not the point. The point is, you’re humiliating the family! Eli and Josh were there, and saw the whole thing. And their friends. And the whole town, practically, for that matter.”

Cary winced, and this time he did look a little abashed. “Jenny there?”

Joe met his gaze. He was tempted to lie, knowing that Jenny was the apple of her grandfather’s eye, but he didn’t want to humiliate his old man that much.

“No,” he said. “Just by pure luck is all, though.”

Cary looked relieved. “Okay, son. You’ve made your point. I’m sorry for it, and I won’t do it again. You have my word on it.”

Joe laughed. It was a harsh and bitter sound. “Pop, I had your word on it back in September, too. And in August before that. And on back as far as I can remember. I hate to tell you this, old man, but your word’s not worth a crap to me anymore.”

Cary stared at him, his eyes widening a little. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to your father, Joe.”

Joe met his gaze, his eyes suddenly hard. “I’m a father now, too, Pop, and when it comes right down to it I’ve got to protect my kids. I’m not going to let you put Eli and Josh and Jenny through what you put Carol and me through. And you’re setting them a bad example, too. I don’t drink a drop, have you noticed? But here you are, getting falling-down
drunk every two months, and they look up to you. Know what I caught Eli doing last night? Smoking pot. It’s hard to say to kids, no, you can’t get high, when the grandpa they love does it all the time. So here’s the deal: Either you check into a residential treatment program and get some help or you’re out of this house and out of our lives until you do.”

His father stared at him. “You can’t do that!”

“I own this house, Pop, and they’re my kids. I can.”

There was a moment of silence as the two exchanged measuring looks.

Cary shook his head sorrowfully. “That a son of mine could ever threaten me like that… .”

“Can it, Pop, I’ve passed way beyond guilt over this. I’m prepared to do what I have to do. So which is it? A treatment program or are you out of here?”

Cary frowned, and glanced around the kitchen before finally looking at Joe again. “I guess I could go into a program maybe sometime in the spring… .”

Joe shook his head. “Next Monday, Pop. I’ve been thinking about this since September. All I have to do is give your doctor a call, and it’s all arranged.”

“Joe, you’re my son, and I love you more than any other living person, and you know that. But you’ve got a cold streak in you a mile wide, and you always have had. What your mother would say if she could hear you trying to bully me like this… .”

Joe’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t even go there, Pop. I mean what I say.” He got to his feet.

“Okay. Okay, you stubborn … Okay. I’ll go into some fancy-shmancy treatment program if that’s what you want. But I need to wait until after the first of the year, at least.”

“There’s no waiting, Pop, I told you.” Joe started to turn away, ready to walk out of the room. “Monday or you’re out.”

“Son, there’s something I got to tell you.” Cary’s voice was suddenly so desperate that Joe, arrested, turned back to regard his father through suspicious eyes. “There’s a reason why I need to wait until after the first of the year.

“I entered Victory Dance in the Magna Futurity at Gulfstream Park.” The words came out all in a rush.

“What?”
Joe stared at his father. The Magna Futurity was run on the Florida track on the second Saturday in December. It was one of the most prestigious races in the game, with a half-million dollar purse and a fifty-thousand-dollar entry fee. No way could his father have …“Pop, you couldn’t have. You don’t even have your trainer’s license anymore. And we sure don’t have fifty thousand dollars to spend on something like that.”

His father chewed his lower lip and glanced away. “I used yours.”

“What?”

“I said I used yours. I used your license, and I took an advance out on your equity line to pay the entry fee. I did it through the mail, and I signed your name to all the papers, too.”

Joe was so flabbergasted that all he could do was stare at his father. Surely the old man was lying… . But he wasn’t. Joe knew his father well enough that he could tell just by looking at him.

“That’s god-damned forgery!” Joe let loose with a string of curses that put to shame Cary’s diatribe of the night before. When at last he ran out of steam and stopped, Cary was looking a little more cheerful.

“You shouldn’t oughta curse like that, boy,” he said reprovingly. That nearly set Joe off again. Instead he glared at his father.

“If you were one of my kids, instead of the other way around …”

Cary cut him off. “I’ve been in the horse business my whole life, Joe. I’m telling you, this is the one. He can win. I know what I’m talking about. Let me train this horse, Joey. Please. Let me train him, and then I’ll go into treatment, I swear.”

“Jesus, Pop,” Joe groaned. Visions of losing fifty thousand dollars danced in his head. Right when he needed to scrape together all the money he could, too.

“He can win,” Cary repeated.

Joe saw the entreaty in his father’s eyes and cursed himself for a fool even as he gave in. “Damn it, Pop. All right, train him, then.”

Forty-five

E
li wasn’t dead, but he was hurt bad. Shot, Neely thought. The hole in his chest was no bigger than a pencil eraser, she saw when the monster was finally gone and she picked up the flashlight he’d left behind and pulled up Eli’s shirt to check for the source of all that blood. But the blood oozing from the wound bubbled and the wound itself seemed to kind of suck in when he breathed. She thought that must mean that his lung was punctured. Vaguely she remembered hearing something about sucking wounds in a first-aid course she had taken at school.

His skin was cold to the touch, as if he were already dead. Neely shivered at the thought. He was lying on his side, curled into a fetal position. His wrists were chained behind his back. Another chain bound his ankles.

She had the key. The small silver key she had used on the chain around the door should work on this lock, too. It did, she discovered to her relief, and she removed the chains from his wrists and ankles, then rolled him onto his back, all the while glancing fearfully over her shoulder in case the monster should return.

“Eli! Eli!” She shook his shoulder, called him. He didn’t respond, didn’t
moan or blink. Shock. Could he be going into shock? She had learned about shock, too, at school, but she didn’t remember much about it other than that it could kill. She hadn’t been paying attention, as usual.

Now she frantically searched her brain, trying to remember every scrap of first-aid information she could.

The first thing to do, of course, was stop the bleeding. But there was nothing to use, no sheets to tear up, nothing like that. Socks—her own were thin, flimsy trouser socks, but Eli was wearing thick white athletic socks, she saw when she pulled off his boots to check. She stripped them off his feet, then wadded them into a pad and pressed the pad over the hole in his chest with the heel of her hand. In a few minutes blood was soaking through the pad.

He was wearing a black sweatshirt with
Rockets
on the front, over a white T-shirt and sweats. The sweatshirt and T-shirt were pretty much soaked with blood, so she pulled off her own turtleneck—a little reluctantly, because when the monster came back she didn’t want to be caught wearing just her bra; the thought creeped her out. Shivering now, whether from cold or fear, she wadded that up, too, and pressed it to the wound.

This time the blood didn’t soak through. Eventually she felt confident enough to remove her hand. She tied the makeshift bandage in place with the arms of the turtleneck, then pulled his T-shirt and sweatshirt back down as the only warmth she had to offer him. It was cold in here, freezing really, and she was shivering.

Or maybe she was shivering from fear.

The floor was cold, so cold that her feet were numb even though she had what slight protection her socks afforded. Eli should not be lying on the floor, she realized. He needed to be kept warm—fat chance of that in here. She glanced at the bed. If she could get him on the bed …

But she was afraid to move him more than she had to, and anyway she didn’t think she could lift him. Eli was thin, but he was tall and, deadweight, he would be beyond her strength.

She pulled the mattress off the bed instead, positioning it awkwardly beside him—the room was tiny, maybe eight by ten feet, so there wasn’t
much room to maneuver—then rolling him onto it. By the time she had done that, she was sweating. Eli had moaned once, and his eyelids had fluttered, but that was it, even when she had tried to rouse him by calling his name and rubbing his hands and cheeks.

Finally, because she could think of nothing else to do, she settled down on the mattress beside him, pressed up against his back and put an arm around him, hoping the warmth of her body might help him. Then, reluctantly, to conserve the batteries, she’d switched the flashlight off.